‘So,’ says Stephanie brightly, maintaining the performance even though her mother has gone. ‘What are we going to do?’ He explains, as he explained yesterday, that he has to work until six or thereabouts. ‘OK,’ she says with a shrug, as if overcoming disappointment, but he knows she had not forgotten what he’d told her. He offers to make her breakfast. Toast, plain toasted bread, is all she’d like, and a glass of orange juice. He takes her to the lounge, where he leaves her while he goes to the kitchen. When he returns, she is looking around the room as if she were waiting to be called in for an interview.
‘Unusual, aren’t they?’ he says, indicating the tiled panels as he puts the tray in front of her.
She picks up a slice and looks dutifully at the croquet game, the archery contest, the tennis match. ‘Hm,’ she concurs, biting into the toast.
‘They’re earthenware. Glazed earthenware. Very rare.’
‘Hm,’ she says, looking now, with equal indifference, at the portrait behind him.
When she has finished eating the first slice he begins again. ‘Well,’ he says, rubbing his hands together, ‘last night was interesting, wasn’t it?’
‘Yep,’ she says, still examining the picture.
‘Not the easiest of evenings.’
She tastes the orange juice, then takes a mouthful. ‘This is good,’ she says, and she raises the glass to eye level, as if savouring the lustre of a fine wine. ‘This is in fact terrific.’
‘Good,’ he says. He waits until, at last, she looks at him. ‘We were a bit on edge. All of us, don’t you think?’
‘One way of putting it,’ she says.
‘And how would you put it?’
‘She never gets off my case. That’s how I’d put it.’
‘You were rather sharp with her.’
‘She started it.’
‘I don’t think it’s –’
‘I was going to be on best behaviour, but she just won’t give it a rest.’
‘That’s not quite how it seemed, I have to say.’
‘That’s how it was, I’m afraid. You weren’t in the car.’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ he concedes.
She moves to lift her glass, sees that it’s empty, and takes the second slice of toast instead. ‘We don’t like each other,’ she says, with no animosity. ‘It happens. It’s no big deal.’ She glances at the portrait, at the ceiling, at the glass. ‘Can I have another?’ she asks, flicking the rim.
‘In a minute. Let’s just deal with this. It’s simply not the case that your mother doesn’t like you. You mustn’t think that. She’s concerned about you.’
‘Oh, please,’ she moans, her face sagging at the banality of what he has just said.
‘She concerned about you,’ he repeats.
‘No. No no. She’s concerned about what I do. Not the same thing. She’s pissed off because I’m not like her. It’s about time she got used to the idea.’
‘Stephanie.’
‘What?’
‘You’re too hard on her.’
‘You’re really not in a position –’
‘Far too hard. Of course she’s upset by you. You’re right. She doesn’t understand why you’ve taken against her like this. But she is worried about you, for you. She’s worried you’re not making the most of yourself. I know this is what parents do. It sounds like nagging, I know –’
‘You’re right there.’
‘But –’
‘Look. You want to know why I don’t like my mother?’ she asks, with icy politeness. ‘You don’t understand?’
‘No.’
‘Why I don’t like my mother, in a word?’
‘In as many words as it takes.’
‘Money,’ she whispers, unfurling her hands like a magician’s assistant at the climax of a trick, smiling in expectation of applause. ‘Simple: money.’
‘You’ll have to explain.’
‘Because all she cares about is money. Getting it, spending it, saving it, making a display of it.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘You wouldn’t know,’ she responds, almost patronising him.
‘Yes I would. I married her.’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Not that long. If money was all she cared about she wouldn’t have married me. If she cared about it much at all she wouldn’t have married me.’
‘You split up.’
‘Not because of money.’
‘So why then?’
‘Various reasons. There’s never just one reason.’
‘Because of me?’
‘No,’ he tells her. Leaning back, she regards him suspiciously. ‘No,’ he says again, looking into her eyes until she seems to accept his word. ‘Is that what she says?’ he asks.
Momentarily pensive, she draws a finger along a scratch in the varnish of the table, then smiles. ‘Still, I bet you didn’t earn enough. Not as much as a dentist, say. For the sake of argument.’
‘But Robert wasn’t well-off when they got together. The money came later. When I used to drop you off, there wasn’t a Mercedes parked outside. A clapped-out old Volvo, as I recall.’
‘Not a long shot, though, is it?’ she laughs, but not maliciously, as if it were a hypothetical relationship they were discussing. ‘I mean, it’s odds-on you’ve picked a winner if you go for a dentist, isn’t it? Financially speaking. If he was a train driver, then I’d take your point, but someone who charges a hundred quid for giving your teeth a scrape? Do me a favour.’
‘Stephanie, I’m sure she loved Robert. I may not know why, you may not know why, but I’m sure she did. Does.’
‘The mystery of love, eh?’
‘Quite.’
Then, bluntly, like a reporter making sure she has the facts of the story straight, she asks: ‘And you loved her, did you?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
Settling back in her chair, she looks at him directly, and as she looks at him he seems to see a dwindling of the hostility in her eyes. ‘And now you don’t know why,’ she proposes, with a grimace of wry sympathy. ‘That’s what you’ve been thinking, isn’t it?’
‘No. I know why.’
‘Go on, then,’ she responds, opening her arms to receive the blow of his reply and he sees anger rise again into her face. ‘See, you don’t. You can’t answer.’
‘I can. It doesn’t seem appropriate, that’s all.’
‘I want to know. She’s my mother. I think that makes it appropriate.’
‘OK. Well, she was sparky –’
‘Sparky?’
‘Unpredictable, lively.’
‘And not bad-looking, which always helps.’
‘Yes, there was that. But there were other pretty girls around. That wasn’t what made her stand out. There was something about her that made her stand out from the other girls. A restlessness. A sort of impatience that was very attractive. To me, anyway. And not only to me.’
‘Lively and unpredictable and restless,’ she muses, scratching her cheek in parodic puzzlement.
‘It sounds silly, when you make a list.’
‘Formerly the sparky babe of Saltburn, now Mrs Bourgeois Nightmare. How the fuck did that happen, do you think?’
‘Stephanie, I wish –’
Raising a finger to make a point of order, she stops him. ‘Before you tell me to mind my language, can I just say one thing?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t like Stephanie.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The name Stephanie. I’m sorry, but I really don’t like it. If you’re called Stephanie you should have a pet pony. I don’t have a pet pony. I shall never have a pet pony. I have problems with the name.’
‘I see. So what do your friends call you?’
‘Step.’
‘Step? As in doorstep? Stepladder?’
‘Step.’
‘I am not calling you Step. Absolutely out of the question. I apologise for lumbering you with a name you don’t like,
but Stephanie is how I know you.’ She chews a corner of her mouth, to prevent herself from saying something facetious. ‘Step is not possible,’ he tells her. ‘How about a compromise? How about Steph?’
‘No better. Pongs of the paddock.’
‘So what would you suggest?’
‘I suggest we drop Stephanie.’
‘I’ll try my best.’
‘Thanks,’ she says, and straight away, having settled the matter, she points over his shoulder and asks: ‘Who’s he?’
His immediate reaction is to refuse this diversionary tactic, but he has no inclination to resume the trial of Kate. After a pause in which a degree of annoyance is conveyed, he twists round to examine the picture. ‘Walter Davenport Croombe,’ he says.
‘Who he?’
‘He used to own the hotel.’
‘Looks pleased with himself.’
‘He had a lot to be pleased about.’
‘Explain?’ she requests, and from her smile it is plain that she knows he understands what she is doing and is willing to be diverted.
He begins to tell her the story of the Oak, ‘or the Angel as it was in the beginning. An exquisite little spa, with high prices to keep the middle classes at bay. The type of riff-raff who were using the new railway. Their custom might have saved the Angel from bankruptcy. In the event it went bust, and was sold for a pittance to Walter Davenport Croombe, the son of a Bristol merchant, Davenport Joshua Croombe, who was an acquaintance of Brunel. Isambard Kingdom Brunel? The Clifton suspension bridge? The Great Western?’ She nods non-committally and tells him to keep going.
‘The younger Croombe, being a merchant’s son, had no qualms about running a proper business. Prices came down, rooms were renovated, a carriage was sent to meet the London train, with a liveried footman on board. The footman wore a mauve jacket – a small detail but a meaningful one, because mauve, the world’s first synthetic dye, had been patented very recently, so the footman’s mauve jacket was a symbol of the Oak’s modernity. You see?’ he says, pointing out, in the background of the portrait of Croombe, a swatch of mauve silk draped over the back of a chair. ‘Always improving, always something new, that was the secret. He was a visionary, you could say,’ he tells her, and he lists, counting on his fingers, the novelties and improvements introduced by Croombe: beds with springs, a bathroom for every bedroom, a tennis court where the stables had been, an archery ground, telephones, electricity, the swimming pool, the murals in the Randall Room. ‘Every year he would spend a month on the Continent, doing his research at Europe’s best hotels. After one trip he had the wallpaper stripped from the bathrooms, convinced that paint was more hygienic. After another trip he had cork laid under the carpets, for insulation and soundproofing. See the picture behind his head? That’s the lake at Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. His European tour always took him to Switzerland, usually to Neuchâtel. I’ve been there as well, to the same hotel, but before I’d ever heard of Croombe. A coincidence, no? We missed each other by just a hundred years. A close shave.’ Beginning to be bored, she smiles wanly.
‘Come on, I’ll show you something,’ he says, picking up her plate and glass, and he leads her, via the kitchen, through the Randall Room and down the steps to the garden. He beckons her towards a break in the rhododendrons, from where the path with a pale violet tinge winds away, past the cherry trees, to the hornbeam hedge. ‘Isn’t that beautiful, the tint in the path?’ he says, bending down. ‘Look closely and you’ll see why it looks like that,’ he urges her. ‘You see?’ he says, hopping a finger on the flecks of purple and red and ivory. ‘Shells. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of shell. When the company that owns the hotel – the company that’s selling it – when they bought the Oak they did a lot of work to freshen the place up, and they found all these crushed shells, inches deep, between the joists of some of the bedrooms. It turned out that they were poured under the floors during Croombe’s time, for fireproofing. Rather than waste them, the architect had them mixed into the concrete for this path, to complement the colour of the cherry blossom. Nice effect, isn’t it?’ he suggests, standing up. ‘See where it swerves? That’s where the oak used to be, the original oak of the Oak. The eponymous oak,’ he says, but she doesn’t ask him about it. ‘There’s a bench near the end of the path that stays in the sun all morning. A nice spot to sunbathe or read.’ She nods, then glimpses the roll of his wrist as he takes a look at his watch. It is almost eleven o’clock. ‘I have to get to work,’ he apologises.
‘No problem.’
‘You’ll be OK?’
‘What could happen to me?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m fine. It’s a nice day.’
‘Look, it’s later than I thought. I might not –’
‘It’s fine. Off you go,’ she orders, sitting down on the path.
‘Yes, but I might not be able to stop at lunchtime. Perhaps a quick bite –’
‘Sure. Whatever. I won’t go mad without company.’
‘I’ll order something for you, OK? Just come and find me. You can find my office?’
‘Yes, I can find your office. This isn’t the palace of Versailles. I’m not going to get lost.’
‘OK. See you later, then.’
‘Yes, OK. Go. Duty calls,’ she says without expression, wafting him away with both hands.
As he approaches the steps he straightens his cuffs. He will look back, she bets with herself, and he duly pauses in the doorway of the glass wall to give her a hapless kind of smile, like someone whose boss is shouting at him to get back to work. Given the wave he requires, he steps into the painted room. She sits on the path, lies down on it. Her limbs feel so heavy, her head feels so heavy, she could fall asleep here. She turns her cheek onto the warm concrete, bringing her right eye to the level of an ant that is racing over the shell fragments, up and down the slopes of ribbed shells and glassy shells, none of which are violet, that she can see, so it’s strange that the path should be the colour it is, a colour like diluted methylated spirit. She closes her eyes, and then it is ten minutes later, only ten minutes, and there are seven hours to get through.
At the end of the path she sees the bench, drenched in sunlight, shining against the darkness of a small-leafed bush, which in places has grown through the slats. She sits on the bench, her eyes closed against the sun, her fingers resting on the protruding leaves, pressing on the spiky stems. Drunk with lethargy, she gets up and wanders across the grass, going to fetch the book from her bag. In the hall her father, talking to a man who must be a guest, makes the beginning of a bow as she passes, as if she were another guest. Her door is open, and inside the room a chambermaid – a small jumpy woman with black eyes and straight black brows and badly cut black hair – is smacking the pillows. ‘Hello,’ she says, when the smacking has stopped, and the chambermaid looks at her as if she’d been caught rifling through her belongings and scuttles out of the room, saying ‘Thank you’ as she closes the door.
She takes the book from the bag and goes back downstairs. Outside the Randall Room she turns round, because her father is in there, talking to an old couple about the paintings. Finding nobody in the billiards room, she closes the door. Seated sideways in one of the big leather chairs, with her legs hanging over the thickly padded arms, she reads for twenty minutes. She takes the snooker balls from the rack beneath the table and bowls them across the baize in threes and fours. She keeps them moving, ricocheting and colliding, plummeting into the pockets one by one, until she is left with the single blue ball, which hurtles in zigzags up and down the table, missing every hole. Hearing her father’s voice in the corridor, she seizes the ball and thrusts it away. She pretends to be fascinated by the montage of postcards hanging on the wall, but he does not come in. There are eighty-seven postcards. She counts them, and examines every one: every waterfall and statue, every museum and church, every block of skyscrapers, every quaint village square, every daft local festival.
Now the Randall Room is
empty. From the centre of the ceiling the grotesque chandelier hangs on its chain like a gigantic jellyfish dangling dead on a line. Around the spine of fluted glass, flowers of insipid pink and watery yellow and baby blue curl outward, their petals all furred with dust. To her left the wedding party processes across the wall. Listlessly she surveys the entire company, moving methodically from face to face, from the procession to the bystanders, from the bystanders to the servants preparing the feast at the table. It’s like a medieval soap opera, with everyone overacting. Here are the winsome bride and the impatient groom, and here are the proud parents. Here’s the gluttonous priest, the pious widow, the boozy uncle, the envious girl, the sentimental old woman, who dabs a tear away. So much work has gone into the old woman’s weeping eye and her warts and her moles, but just as much care has been given to the shining buckles and plush velvets, the gleaming silver jugs and the rough earthenware pots, the priest’s soft leather shoes and the dozen hues of red in the apples on the table. Everything has been depicted with meticulous attention, whether it’s an incidental detail or a central event. The scene is varied yet monotonous, vivid yet lifeless, except for one small part of the mural, in the corner by the door, where a curly-haired boy, about ten years old, shoeless and with his shirt unlaced, slouches against the trunk of an oak tree, hidden from the others by high grass. He is chewing on a straw and his smile suggests he is thinking of something that has nothing to do with the wedding party. His face is pretty, and he has been painted less fussily than the principal players, with dashes for eyebrows and sketchy folds in the fabric of his shirt. Something about the boy is having an effect on her, raising a vague memory, a memory of happiness. She stares at the boy, as though interrogating him about the source of the emotion that is flitting through her brain. He is sweet, but there is nothing familiar in his face. She takes a step back. She turns away from him, then looks at him again. And suddenly she knows the explanation: it is the space around him, and the grass in front of him. It’s the dense low wall of grass, drooping under its own weight and gilded by the sunlight. It’s the colour of the grass and its wild lushness, and the privateness of the spot it encloses, that’s what has moved her, and the reason it has moved her, she realises, is that it made her think of the grass around the abandoned workshop where she used to go with Katie and Sasha.
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