by Daisy Waugh
‘Well that’s too bad.’
‘Mother, I just told you,’ interrupted Ecgbert, ‘I can do it. Why does nobody have any faith in me around here? It’s outrageous. And by the way, in case you’d forgotten, I am in fact the oldest.’
‘No you’re not,’ said Nicola.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Obviously, I mean the oldest son. Don’t be stupid Nicola. I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation.’
Just then Mrs Carfizzi came in to clear the cottage pie, and despite all the emotion around the table, their lifetime of good training kicked in. They fell silent. Lady Tode, as Mrs Carfizzi lifted her plate, smiled politely and said, ‘That was delicious, Mrs Carfizzi, as usual! Thank you so much.’ Esmé said, ‘Nothing like good old home cooking, Mrs Carfizzi. I’m going to miss you back in Aussie!’ Ecgbert said, ‘Scrumptious as ever!’
Nicola was the only one to say nothing. Mrs Carfizzi had never acknowledged a single one of her dietary stances. (She was a vegan currently, but had been all sorts of things over the years: she had a bad relationship with food.) And so, though she always gobbled the food when she was home, Nicola refused to acknowledge either Mrs Carfizzi or her cooking. They hadn’t exchanged a word since Nicola was seventeen.
Mrs Carfizzi replied to the others, something smiley but incomprehensible, and left the room. The moment she closed the door, the family struck up again.
‘Well I’m willing to step up,’ Nicola said. ‘I don’t know why you don’t ask me. I’d do a brilliant job. And as the eldest, I think—’
Lady Tode said: ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
She said she wasn’t being silly.
Her mother said: ‘But you don’t have any experience – not of anything, really, darling. Which isn’t to say you’re not a terrific artist. You’re a wonderful artist…’
She was a lousy artist. Had barely picked up a pencil since she finished her foundation course back in 1987. It wasn’t the point. Nicola took the moment to remind her family, in an angry monotone (she’d said it many times before) that ‘salaried work’ wasn’t the only measure of a person’s value, and that she happened to spend a lot of time working with underprivileged kids, also offering counselling at an LBGTQ beauty care through arts-and-crafts support group in one of the poorest parts of Edinburgh, the sort of place her family probably couldn’t even imagine existed, and that if she could do that, which they couldn’t, she could certainly organise…
But by then everyone had stopped listening. Esmé was on his feet again, shouting about his love of Australia. Ecgbert was close to tears, lamenting his mother’s lack of love for him. Which was, in fact, his perennial cry. None of the children felt loved by her, and never had, but only Mad Ecgbert seemed to sense the lack of it. Or at least he was the only one who ever voiced his feelings on the matter. ‘You may not love me, Ma,’ he was saying. ‘I can’t force you to love me. But I can force you to hand over what is rightfully mine!’ It was a matter of family honour, he said. He was the oldest son. He was the 12th Baronet. He was Tode Hall. It was his to inherit.
All in all, the conversation was going even less smoothly than Lady Tode had imagined it would. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Ecgbert could ever have imagined he might be fit to inherit: or that Nicola, who despised everything her family was and stood for, would suddenly decide to throw her (silly) hat in the ring. Above all, it hadn’t occurred to her that Esmé would be so violently averse to coming home and doing his duty. Even if he hadn’t been expecting the move to be so imminent, he must have known that at some point he was going to be called upon… She was taken aback.
A silence fell. Lady Tode, at the head of the table, gazed implacably at her three unruly children, and they gazed angrily back. It was a stalemate. Except that Lady Tode had no intention whatever of sticking around. If the worst came to the worst, she would leave it all to Oliver Mellors. (She’d always had a very soft spot for Oliver Mellors.) In any case, one way or another a solution would have to be found.
‘Are we ready for pudding?’ she said.
They were.
It was chocolate mousse. Mad Ecgbert’s favourite. When Mrs Carfizzi carried it in Ecgbert, still emotional, stood up and gave her a hug.
‘I wish you were my mother, Mrs Carfizzi,’ he said.
Mrs Carfizzi told him not to be silly. But she had no children of her own, and a husband who gave every impression he loved the Todes of Tode Hall far more than he had ever loved his wife. So she took the compliment, buried it deep in her broad bosom, to be basked in and gloated over when the dinner was done.
CHAPTER 6
A week later, Lady Tode had booked herself onto a train to London. Esmé was back with his family in Sydney, Nicola was back doing good works in Edinburgh, happily reunited with her gender non-specified lover, Bone, and Ecgbert had returned to his computer game, his model army, and the long-suffering care of his keepers at Todeister House, where he lived with a small collection of similarly well-born loose cannons, out of harm’s way and without credit cards. The family had parted company without referring to the inheritance row again. This was to be expected. It was a long-held family convention never to resolve an argument, but to sweep it under the massive Tode Hall carpets, and move on.
What the Tode children hoped – assumed even, inasmuch as they considered it at all – was that life would continue as before, amen. They failed to notice the unusual strength of their mother’s feelings on the matter.
They couldn’t know it, because in all her years of duty and delight, she had never let it slip, never once lifted the mask. But Emma Tode had been looking forward to leaving Tode Hall since her wedding day, fifty-four years, three months and one week ago. Sir Ecgbert (11th) had been old when they married. He might have done her the service of popping his clogs at any point, but he’d taken until he was ninety-three. And this, despite there having been encouraging signs of decrepitude from about seventy. It had been a long wait. Lady Tode could not – would not – wait any longer.
So, having taken note of Esmé’s disgraceful refusal to do his duty, she had turned her attention to her nephew by marriage, the young Egbert Tode. Egbert, NB, without the ‘c’. Lady Tode hardly knew him. The last time she’d seen him was at his christening, thirty-five years ago. He was the only son of the late Hon. Esmé Tode who was the younger brother (and only sibling) of her dead husband.
Her children had never laid eyes on their only first cousin. Their father had fallen out with his father, over the spelling of Egbert’s name. By deliberately dropping the ‘c’, the late Hon. Esmé had turned his back on centuries of family tradition. To his older brother, Ecgbert (11th) this seemed to be an act of the most grotesque betrayal. He never confronted Esmé about it, but he never forgave him either. After Egbert’s christening, the two brothers never spoke again. Which may offer a clue as to why Ecgbert (11th) was so little mourned at his own funeral. He was an awful man. His wife had more than earned her time in Capri.
In any case, Sir Ecgbert was dead at last, and Tode Hall needed a custodian, preferably with the family name. It wasn’t hard for Lady Tode to track Egbert down. He was working at the Wandsworth branch of Savills estate agent, and had recently been promoted to Lettings Manager.
When she rang to ask for a meeting, he was polite but wary. Egbert’s mother-in-law, (Lady) Mary Percy, had read in The Times that his uncle Ecgbert (11th) was dead. So he was aware of it, and he remarked to Lady Tode that he was sorry for her loss, which could not possibly have been the case. He also told her, by way of conversation, that he had two small children, named Ludo, four, and Passion, three; and a wife called India. (Actually Lady Tode knew this. She had once been friends with India’s aunt, Beatrice Percy, and knew several people who knew India’s mother.)
Egbert wondered why Lady Tode was calling him, but he was too polite to ask. So they chatted about this and that for several minutes. Esmé was in Australia, she told Egbert, ‘doing awfully well’, and (Mad) Ecgbert was ‘rea
lly, really happy, just tootling about’ at Todeister House, outside Todeister. And Nicola meanwhile was ‘doing marvellous things with her art, living in a sweet little flat in Edinburgh’.
‘Good, good!’ said Egbert, while mouthing apologetically at a colleague to start the meeting without him. ‘That’s terrific news. I’m so pleased everyone’s doing so well.’
‘We’re very lucky,’ agreed Lady Tode. ‘Obviously the death of their papa was a bit of a shock. But they’ve all taken it terribly well. And it was such a lovely service. I’m sorry you couldn’t have been there.’
‘Next time!’ said Egbert. He wasn’t concentrating. He needed to be at the meeting, and she wasn’t getting to the point.
‘Well but Egbert…’ she said, a little confused. ‘I don’t think there’ll be a “next time”.’
‘Of course not. I’m so sorry… Anyway – it really is so lovely to catch up…’
Finally she told him why she was calling. She ‘happened to be’ in London, she said, and she needed very much to have a word with him and his wife, India. Could she drop round for a drink this evening? It was important.
He told her the address and got her off the line as quickly as possible. It was only after he hung up that it occurred to him to wonder what, after all these years, she could possibly have to talk to him about. He felt, as he said to India later, ‘a tingle of serious excitement’ for the rest of the afternoon.
CHAPTER 7
Egbert and India’s house in Wandsworth was an estate agent’s dream: the sort of house that is snapped up by buyers even in dismal markets. Egbert sometimes wished his clients could take a leaf out of his prudent book: present their houses as smartly as he and India presented theirs. It was modern, tasteful, luxurious, pastel and mostly open-plan. They had bought it five years earlier, soon after they married, just before India got pregnant with Ludo. As her belly grew, India, who’d spent a short time, before she was married, answering the phone at her godmother’s interior design office just off Sloane Street, dedicated her expertise to its lavish refurbishment. They’d spent a fortune remodelling the kitchen, especially. There was a ‘chiller cabinet’ with a glass door, for storing champagne and wine. There was a coffee machine built into the wall, and two little extra taps beside the sink; one for filtered water, the other for water kept permanently at boiling point, thereby eliminating the need for a kettle. There was also a kettle. There were pull out, pull in recycling bins, and cupboards that slid and shelves that popped, and every space was sleek and designated, and every little object had a designated space.
‘I got a teeny bit obsessed!’ India would generally chortle, when showing it off to her friends. ‘Couldn’t help myself! Preggers brain!’
India could blame ‘preggers brain’ as much as she liked – but the truth is there had never been a time when she could ‘help herself’, pregnant or not. India Tode (as Lady Tode was about to discover) may have looked like a conventional, wholesome, amenable, well-born beauty. She looked ideal. But – as her parents used to say – somewhere along the line, there had always been ‘a bit of a chink missing’. India lived, for better or worse, by instinct and whim. She and Lady Tode may have been born of similar stock but temperamentally they couldn’t have been further apart.
In the meantime… the kitchen looked like a tasteful oak’n’chrome spaceship. It had cost the young Todes £375,000 to install.
Lady Tode thought it was a bit common: but of course she didn’t say so. In any case pretty much every square inch of Tode Hall was Grade 1 listed. They wouldn’t be allowed to turn the place into a space station, whether they liked to or not.
‘What a stunning house!’ she said. ‘And what an incredible kitchen! Goodness, you young people are inventive! All these funny drawers and clever lights! What fun!’
* * *
India and the au pair were putting the children to bed when Lady Tode arrived. This was a mammoth operation, often taking well over two hours, the tail end of which usually also required Egbert who, on his return from work, would help with the final push. This evening, however, he was on small talk and drink-mixing duty. He took Lady Tode into the sitting room; a padded cell, or so it felt to Lady Tode, of thick carpet and thickly interlined curtain. On the shelves, where books might otherwise have been, there were dozens of photographs of India in bridal wear, Egbert in sportswear, Ludo and Passion, in various states of undress.
Lady Tode gasped at the loveliness. And there really was plenty of loveliness to gasp at. The children looked cuddlesome and golden in their nakedness; and India was a blonde, shiny-toothed angel. Outrageously pretty. An English rose with a sporty Californian edge. There were pictures of her not only in bridal wear, but arm-in-arm with Egbert, in matching biking Lycra, their healthy, grinning faces spattered in English mud.
‘What a beautiful family!’ exclaimed Lady Tode. ‘What a lucky man you are, Egbert!’
Egbert wasn’t so bad looking himself, to be fair. He looked rather like her own Esmé, Lady Tode realised – except taller: dark and solid, with broad shoulders and a manly jaw. (Mad Ecgbert was handsome in a completely different way. He was very tall, like his father: six foot three at least. And there was nothing broad or solid about him. He looked lanky and chiselled, delicate and poetic. Of her two sons, Emma Tode much preferred him.)
Egbert and Emma talked about nothing much until India arrived. Emma asked about their wedding, and Egbert sipped his lager and told her that it had been a special day. The best day of his life. She asked him about the property business in south-west London, and he said it had been sticky for a while, what with the raised stamp tax and then of course Brexit.
‘Yes Brexit,’ said Lady Tode. They nodded solemnly, neither offering an opinion.
‘But you know,’ he said, ‘things are really picking up now. Especially in Wandsworth. It’s such a great area for families. And that is something which is literally never going to change. Plus we have amazing schools down here, independent and state. And they really do seem to be getting on top of the transport situation. It’s definitely improving. Whereas eighteen months ago…’ Lady Tode zoned out. She was good at it. Egbert would never have guessed.
And then, at last, the beautiful, charming, warm, unpredictable India whooshed in.
CHAPTER 8
‘Sorry I took so long,’ she said, wrapping the widow, Lady Tode, in a lovely cashmere hug. ‘Ludo’s been playing up like mad. I think he’s got a bit of a tummy bug tbh, because it’s so unlike him. And now of course naughty little Passion thinks he’s terribly funny, so she’s saying, “Mummy, Mummy, I’ve got a tummy bug”, and then literally…’ – Lady Tode zoned out again – ‘… creasing up with little giggly laughter. She’s such a monkey! Is that a G&T, I see there, Egg, darling?’ India interrupted herself. She was peering into Lady Tode’s glass. ‘Yes please! Lots of ice for me! And lots of gin!’
She collapsed onto the big white sofa, a flurry of sunlight and flowery smells. She leaned in towards Lady Tode and said: ‘We meet at last! How intriguing! You didn’t tell Egg what you wanted to see us about, did you?’
Lady Tode didn’t like her. Not that she realised it herself, and not that it really mattered at this point. But the thing about Lady Tode; she didn’t like any women. She especially didn’t like women who were beautiful and confident and carefree and cheerful and young. They did something to her insides, similar to the effect of salt on slug skin. She smiled her sphinx-like smile: ‘I haven’t told Egbert anything yet, no, India. I thought—’
India giggled. ‘I’m going to take a wild guess.’
‘Are you really?’ said Lady Tode, with the smile still on her face.
‘Well it hardly takes Einstein to work it out,’ replied India. ‘… Gosh I wish Egg’d hurry with my drink! It’s been a long day, Lady Tode – Emma. I can call you Emma, can’t I?’
‘I should think you must be exhausted,’ agreed Lady Tode (deftly ignoring the question). ‘I remember when my children were small, t
hey—’
‘I’m pretty sure you want Egbert and me to take over at Tode Hall. Am I right?’
Lady Tode said: ‘… I…’
India grinned, her theory confirmed: ‘You’re probably ready to move on, aren’t you? I know I would be. After fifty years, or however long you’ve been there. I’d be longing for the next adventure. And from what I’ve read in the Daily Mail about Egg’s cousins, I get the impression your wonderful amazing kids just don’t feel that passionate about taking up the reins, am I right? Which means, short of selling the place, or worse case, handing it over to the National Trust—’
Lady Tode shuddered.
‘Which absolutely nobody wants,’ India agreed. ‘You should have seen what they did to my Great Uncle Siegfried’s house… before they burned it to the ground.’
‘Yes. I was so sorry about that.’
India waved it aside. ‘So if the options are A) selling up to some crazy oligarch or B) surrendering everything to the boneheaded National Trust – well then, my darling husband is probably the best – the only possible choice! Am I right Emma?’
India saw the look of astonishment on Lady Tode’s face, and chortled with pleasure at her own cleverness. She gave a little bounce on her fatly upholstered sofa. ‘I knew it! I knew it, I knew it! Ha ha ha – Egg! EGG!’ she shouted through to him. ‘I told you! I was right!’
‘Well, look—’ Lady Tode sensed the conversation slipping out of her control. Not a sense she ever enjoyed. ‘We mustn’t jump the gun, India… I was simply wondering…’
Egbert appeared, still in his work suit, carrying a small bowl of olives and a perfect gin and tonic for his wife. There were tiny spots of colour on his cheekbones.
