The House at Riverton aka The Shifting Fog

by Kate Morton

  She wondered who these people were. ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘We could go somewhere else, away from here, away from everyone we know. Don’t you want to?’

  ‘You know I do,’ said Hannah.

  ‘With the new law you only have to prove adultery.’

  Hannah nodded. ‘But Teddy hasn’t been adulterous.’

  ‘Surely,’ Robbie said, ‘in all this time that we’ve…’

  ‘It isn’t his way.’

  ‘But when you said that you and he weren’t… I presumed…’

  ‘It isn’t something he thinks about,’ said Hannah. ‘He’s never been particularly interested.’ She ran a finger over his lips. ‘Not even when we were first married. It wasn’t until I met you that I realised…’ She paused, leaned to kiss him. ‘That I realised.’

  ‘He’s a fool,’ said Robbie. He looked at her intensely and ran his hand lightly down her side, from shoulder to wrist. ‘Leave him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t go to Riverton,’ he said. He was sitting now, had hold of her wrists. God he was beautiful. ‘Run away with me.’

  ‘You’re not being serious,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You’re teasing.’

  ‘I’ve never been more serious.’

  ‘Just disappear?’

  ‘Just disappear.’

  She was silent for a minute, thinking.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Why?’ He released her wrists roughly, left the bed and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Lots of reasons…’ She thought about it. ‘Emmeline-’

  ‘Fuck Emmeline.’

  Hannah flinched. ‘She needs me.’

  ‘I need you.’

  And he did. She knew he did. A need both terrifying and intoxicating.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ said Robbie. ‘She’s tougher than you think.’

  Hannah sighed. ‘It’s not so simple. She’s my responsibility.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘David, Pa…’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just something I know.’

  He was sitting at the table now, smoking. He looked thinner than she remembered. He was thinner. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘Teddy would find me,’ she said. ‘His family would. They have long memories.’ She shivered.

  ‘I wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘You don’t know them.’

  ‘We’d go somewhere they wouldn’t think to look. The world’s a big place.’

  He looked so fragile sitting there. Alone. She was all he had. She stood by him, cradled him in her arms so that his head rested against her stomach.

  ‘I can’t live without you,’ he said. ‘I’d rather die.’ He said it so plainly she shivered, disgusted herself by deriving some pleasure from his statement.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she said.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘You’re trying to upset me.’

  ‘I need to be with you,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll die without you.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ said Hannah. She had learned that when Robbie got like this it was best to go along with him.

  And so, she let him plan it. Their great escape. He’d stopped writing poetry; his notebook only ever pulled out now to sketch escape ideas. She even helped sometimes. It was a game, she told herself, just like the others they’d always played. It made him happy, and besides, she often got swept up in the planning herself. Which faraway places they could live in, what they might see, the adventures they might have. A game. Their own game in their own secret world.

  She didn’t know, couldn’t know, where it would all lead.

  If she had, she told me later, she’d have kissed him one last time, turned and run as fast and as far as she could.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  I have said it before: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known. Hannah and Robbie managed to keep theirs long enough: from the end of 1922, right through the following year, and into the beginning of 1924. But, as with all impossible love affairs, it was destined to end.

  Downstairs, the servants had started to talk. It was the new housemaid, Caroline, who lit the match. She was a snoopy little miss, come from serving at the house of the infamous Lady Penthrop (rumoured to have tangled with half the eligible lords in London). She’d been let go with a glowing recommendation, extracted, alongside a pretty sum, after catching her mistress in one too many compromising positions. Ironically, she needn’t have bothered: she didn’t need the reference when she came to us. Her reputation preceded her and it was her snooping rather than her cleaning that inclined Deborah to employ her.

  There are always signs if one knows where to look, and know where to look she did. Scraps of paper with strange addresses plucked from the fire before they burned, imprints of ardent notes left on writing blocks, shopping bags that contained little more than old ticket stubs. And it wasn’t difficult to get the other servants talking. Once she invoked the spectre of Divorce, reminded them that if scandal broke they’d likely find themselves without employment, they were pretty forthcoming.

  She knew better than to ask me, but in the end she didn’t need to. She learned Hannah’s secret well enough. I blame myself for that: I should have been more alert. If I hadn’t had my mind on other things, I would have noticed what Caroline was up to, I could have warned Hannah. But I’m afraid at that time I was not a good lady’s maid, was sadly remiss in my responsibilities to Hannah. I was distracted, you see; I’d suffered a disappointment of my own. From Riverton had come news of Alfred.

  Thus, the first either of us knew, was the evening of the opera, when Deborah came to Hannah’s bedroom. I’d dressed Hannah in a slip of pale French silk, neither white nor pink, and was just fixing her hair into curls about her face when there came the knock at the door.

  ‘Almost ready, Teddy,’ said Hannah, rolling her eyes at my reflection. Teddy was religiously punctual. I drove a hairpin into a particularly errant curl.

  The door opened and Deborah swanned into the room, dramatic in a red dress with butterfly-wing sleeves. She sat on the end of Hannah’s bed and crossed one leg over the other, a flurry of red silk.

  Hannah’s eyes met mine. A visit from Deborah was unusual. ‘Looking forward to Tosca?’ said Hannah.

  ‘Immensely,’ said Deborah. ‘I adore Puccini.’ She withdrew a makeup compact from her purse and flicked it open, arranged her lips so they made a figure eight and stabbed at the corners for lipstick smears. ‘So sad, though, lovers torn apart like that.’

  ‘There aren’t many happy endings in opera,’ said Hannah.

  ‘No,’ said Deborah. ‘Nor in life, I fear.’

  Hannah pressed her lips together. Waited.

  ‘You realise, don’t you,’ said Deborah, smoothing her brows in the little mirror, ‘that I don’t give a damn who you’re sleeping with when my fool of a brother has his back turned.’

  Hannah’s eyes met mine. Shock made me fumble the hairpin, drop it on the floor.

  ‘It’s my father’s business I care about.’

  ‘I didn’t realise the business had anything to do with me,’ said Hannah. Despite her casual voice, I could hear her breaths grown shallow and quick.

  ‘Don’t play dumb,’ Deborah said, snapping her compact closed. ‘You know your part in all of this. People invest with us because we represent the best of both worlds. New technology and business approaches, with the old-fashioned assurance of your family heritage. Progress and tradition, side by side.’

  ‘Progressive tradition? I always suspected Teddy and I made rather an oxymoronic match,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Don’t be smart,’ Deborah said. ‘You and yours benefit from the union of our families just as much as we do. After the mess your father made of his inheritance-’

  ‘My father did his best.’ Hannah’s cheeks flushed hotly.

  Deborah raised her brows. ‘Is that what you call it? Running his business into the ground?�
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  ‘Pa lost his business because it burned down. It was an accident.’

  ‘Of course,’ Deborah said quickly, ‘an unfortunate accident. Left him with little choice though, didn’t it? Little choice but to sell his daughter to the highest bidder.’ She laughed lightly, came to stand behind Hannah, forcing me aside. She leaned over Hannah’s shoulder and addressed her reflection. ‘It’s no secret he didn’t want you to marry Teddy. Did you know he came to see my father one night? Oh, yes. Told him he knew what he was up to and he could forget about it, that you’d never consent.’ She straightened, smiled with subtle triumph as Hannah looked away. ‘But you did. Because you’re a smart girl. Broke your poor father’s heart, but you knew as well as he that you had little other choice. And you were right. Where would you be now if you hadn’t married my brother?’ She paused, cocked an overplucked brow. ‘With that poet of yours?’

  Standing against the wardrobe, unable to cross to the door, I wished to be anywhere else. Hannah, I saw, had lost her flush. Her body had taken on the stiffness of one preparing to receive a blow but with little idea from where.

  ‘And what of your sister?’ said Deborah. ‘What of little Emmeline?’

  ‘Emmeline has nothing to do with this,’ said Hannah, voice catching.

  ‘I beg to differ,’ said Deborah. ‘Where would she be if it weren’t for my family? A little orphan whose daddy lost the family’s fortune. Whose sister is carrying on with one of her boyfriends. Why, it could only be worse if those nasty little films were to resurface!’

  Hannah’s back stiffened.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Deborah. ‘I know all about them. You didn’t think my brother kept secrets from me, did you?’ She smiled and her nostrils flared. ‘He knows better than that. We’re family. Not to mention he couldn’t make half the decisions he makes if it weren’t for my counsel.’

  ‘What do you want, Deborah?’

  Deborah smiled thinly. ‘I just wanted you to see, to understand how much we all have to lose from even the whiff of scandal. Why it has to stop.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  Deborah sighed, collected Hannah’s purse from the end of the bed. ‘If you won’t stop seeing him of your own accord, I’ll make certain that you can’t.’ She snapped the purse shut and handed it to Hannah. ‘Men like him-war-damaged, artistic-disappear all the time, poor things. No one thinks anything of it.’ She straightened her dress and started for the door. ‘You get rid of him. Or I will.’

  Hannah met Robbie for the last time that winter in the Egyptian room at the British Museum. I was sent with the letter. He was taken aback to see me in Hannah’s stead, and none too pleased. He took it warily, peered into the hall to check I was alone, then leaned against the doorframe, reading. His hair was dishevelled and he hadn’t shaved. His cheeks were shadowed, as was the skin around his smooth lips, which were moving softly, speaking Hannah’s words. He smelled unwashed.

  I had never seen a man in such a natural state, didn’t quite know where to look. I concentrated instead on the hallway wall beside him. When he got to the end his eyes met mine and I saw how dark they were, and how desperate. I blinked, looked away, left as soon as he said he’d be there.

  So it was, on a rainy morning in March 1924, I pretended to read news articles about Howard Carter, while Hannah and Robbie sat at opposite ends of a bench before the Tutankhamen display, looking for all the world like strangers who shared nothing more than an interest in Egyptology.

  A few days later, at Hannah’s behest, I was helping Emmeline pack for her move to Fanny’s house. Emmeline had spread across two rooms while at number seventeen, and there was little doubt that without help she had no hope of being ready in time. Thus, I was plucking Emmeline’s winter accessories from the shelves of soft toys given her by admirers, when Hannah came to check our progress.

  ‘You’re supposed to be helping, Emmeline,’ said Hannah. ‘Not leaving Grace to do everything.’

  Hannah’s tone was strained, had been that way since the day in the British Museum, but Emmeline didn’t notice. She was too busy flicking through her journal. She’d been at it all afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the floor, poring over old ticket stubs and sketches, photographs and ebullient youthful scrawlings. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, ‘from Harry. Do come to Desmond’s else it’ll be just we three fellows: Dessy, yours truly and Clarissa. Isn’t he a scream? Poor Clarissa, she really shouldn’t have bobbed her hair.’

  Hannah sat on the end of the bed. ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Emmeline, smoothing a crinkled page of her journal. ‘But you do understand I can’t come to Riverton with you all. I’d simply die of boredom.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Not that it will be boring for you, darling,’ Emmeline said suddenly, realising she may have caused offence. ‘You know I don’t mean that.’ She smiled. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, the way things turn out?’

  Hannah raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I mean, when we were girls, you were always the one who longed to get away. Remember you even talked about becoming an office girl?’ Emmeline laughed. ‘I forget, did you ever go so far as to ask Pa’s permission?’

  Hannah shook her head.

  ‘I wonder what he would have said,’ said Emmeline. ‘Poor old Pa. I seem to remember being awfully angry when you married Teddy and left me with him. I can’t quite remember why.’ She sighed happily. ‘Things have turned out, haven’t they?’

  Hannah pressed her lips together, searched for the right words. ‘You’re happy in London, aren’t you?’

  ‘Do you need to ask?’ said Emmeline. ‘It’s bliss.’

  ‘Good.’ Hannah stood to leave then hesitated, sat again. ‘And you know that if anything should happen to me-’

  ‘Abduction by Martians from the red planet?’ said Emmeline.

  ‘I’m not fooling, Emme.’

  Emmeline cast her eyes skyward. ‘Don’t I know it. You’ve been a sourpuss all week.’

  ‘Lady Clementine and Fanny would always help. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Emmeline. ‘You’ve said it all before.’

  ‘I know. It’s just, leaving you alone in London-’

  ‘You’re not leaving me,’ said Emmeline. ‘I’m staying. And I’m not going to be alone, I’ll be living with Fanny.’ She flourished her hand. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hannah. Her eyes met mine, she pulled them away quickly. ‘I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’

  Hannah was almost at the door when Emmeline said, ‘I haven’t seen Robbie lately.’

  Hannah stiffened, but she didn’t look back. ‘No?’ she said. ‘No, now that you mention it, he hasn’t been around in days.’

  ‘Deborah said he’d gone away.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Hannah, back rigid. ‘Where did she say he’d gone?’

  ‘She didn’t.’ Emmeline frowned. ‘She said you might know.’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Hannah, turning. She avoided my eyes.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Emmeline. ‘Why would Robbie tell you and not me?’ She shook her head. ‘Why would he go at all, and without saying anything?’

  Hannah lifted her shoulders. Dropped them again. ‘He was like that, don’t you think? Unpredictable. Unreliable.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to find him,’ said Emmeline determinedly. ‘I have before.’

  ‘Oh no, Emmeline,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘Don’t go looking for him.’

  ‘But I have to,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘Why?’

  Emmeline smiled at her, rolled her big blue eyes. ‘Because I love him, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Emme, no,’ said Hannah softly. ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘I do,’ said Emmeline. ‘I always have. Ever since he first came to Riverton and he bandaged my arm for me.’

  ‘You were eleven,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Of course, and it was just a childhood crush then,’ sa
id Emmeline. ‘But it was the beginning. I’ve compared every man I’ve met since to Robbie.’

  Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘What about the film-maker? What about Harry Bentley, or the half-dozen other young men you’ve been in love with this year alone? You’ve been engaged to at least two of them.’

  ‘Robbie’s different,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘And how does he feel?’ Hannah said, not daring to look at Emmeline. ‘Has he ever given you reason to believe he might feel the same way?’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ Emmeline said. ‘He’s never once missed an opportunity to come out with me. I know it’s not because he likes my friends. He’s made no secret of the fact he thinks they’re a bunch of spoiled and idle kids.’ She nodded resolutely. ‘I’m sure he does and I’m going to find him.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Hannah with a firmness that took Emmeline by surprise. ‘He’s not for you.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Emmeline. ‘You barely know him.’

  ‘I know his type,’ said Hannah. ‘Blame the war. It took perfectly normal young men and returned them changed. Broken.’ I thought of Alfred, the night on the stairs at Riverton when his ghosts had come for him, then I forced him from my mind.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Emmeline stubbornly. ‘I think it’s romantic. I should like to look after him. Fix him.’

  ‘Men like Robbie are dangerous,’ said Hannah. ‘They can’t be fixed. They are as they are.’ She exhaled, frustrated. ‘You have so many other suitors. Can’t you find it in your heart to love one of them?’

  Emmeline shook her head stubbornly.

  ‘I know you can. Promise you’ll try?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You must.’

  Emmeline looked away from Hannah then, and I saw something new in her expression: something harder, more immovable. ‘It’s really no concern of yours, Hannah,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m twenty. I don’t need you to help make my decisions. You were married at my age and Lord knows you didn’t consult anyone on that decision.’

  ‘It’s hardly the same thing-’

  ‘I don’t need a big sister watching over everything I do. Not any more.’ Emmeline exhaled and turned again to face Hannah. Her voice was lighter. ‘Let’s agree, shall we, that from this point on we’ll let one another live the life she chooses? What do you say?’