The Antique Dealer's Daughter

by Lorna Gray

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ I said. ‘But thank you for drawing attention to my unnecessarily complicated view of things. I think what you’re actually meant to do here is reassure me by observing that everyone likes things to be safe and kind and nice, and naturally finds it really challenging when they’re not; and that I mustn’t be ashamed of taking things excessively to heart. But never mind.’

  He glanced sharply left, only to catch my grin and smile a little himself – why on earth I’d thought this man would be bland – before easing the car off the lane that ran high on the opposing ridgetop and into the darkness beneath a group of vast chestnuts. Sunlight flickered and then we were free again and rolling gently along a rough trackway between cattle fields. The Manor stood a few miles away on the opposing valley hillside, a yellow beacon and just slightly aloof from its neighbouring cluster of cottages and barns. The part of the valley bottom that was shelter to my cousin’s cottage was a long way below and screened by trees.

  I was nervous without knowing what I was nervous of and yet exhilarated, as though I had unexpectedly been gifted a pleasure trip. Even the rotten stone walls in this little slice of countryside were the stuff of picturesque postcards. I felt the Captain’s glance graze my face again.

  He remarked, ‘You’ve found yourself to be utterly underprepared for what’s happened here, haven’t you?’ There was a pause as he negotiated a steep turn down into a walled farmyard. Eddington had the same air of history and abandonment as the Manor farmyard. The Captain told me, ‘That’s good. Because you’re meant to.’

  Now it was my turn to smile, but incredulously. The car drew to a halt. He added, ‘It’s easy to get the impression that the recent conflict ought to have turned all of us into experts at handling any crisis and to feel belittled when you get caught on the hind foot. But it’s right that the sort of unpleasantness you encountered yesterday and then again today as a person who is being drawn in from the periphery isn’t the norm for you. It gives me hope because it means that such things remain so rare and so unpredictable that it’s impossible to prepare for them. And with that in mind, speaking as one with a certain degree of experience, please, for the sake of your happiness, don’t even try. It really can’t be done and in this instance, when war is irrelevant and you’re dealing with something plainly criminal, toughening up just means denying all proper feelings, which doesn’t do any of us any good.’

  Then he climbed out and came round to open my door. I noted that he called it ‘unpleasantness’ rather than anything more severe. And also that he dubbed my presence in these scenes peripheral. I thought his choice of words was deliberate. He meant me to understand that I really ought to rank all this small and unworrying, and it occurred to me to wonder if he meant that I was permitted to relax into the part of innocent bystander solely because his experience made him think he had to take responsibility for whatever this was. I also wondered what form his experience took if he could measure preparedness against happiness in those sorts of terms, but he didn’t give me room to ask.

  Mrs Abbey’s house was the next surprise here. I had been expecting it to match her person – a strong personality and well presented. But instead it was the brittle energy that had run as an uncertain undertone through her gossiping last night that was nakedly displayed today. The lady who opened the battered front door was unkempt and tired and not remotely pleased to see us. She also had children. Three wild-looking boys aged roughly seven, five and three. No wonder she’d been determined to get back last night. And no wonder that the Colonel allowed her a little grace with her rent. This whole crumbling place reeked of the loss of her husband.

  Mrs Abbey met us in her doorway with an impression of the shabby defensiveness I remembered from the depressed mothers in the slums. Her eldest boy too was standing glaring before she grew impatient and sent him dashing away through the grimy passage that ran between the house and the barn to the tall boundary wall. Then she turned her attention to me.

  Specifically me. She had no particular reason to recognise the Captain if she’d only encountered him through his letters as the Colonel’s current deputy since the other son’s death, but even if she didn’t know the Captain, she clearly knew this big black car and I thought it very peculiar that she should ignore him for the sake of making a show of pretending that all along I’d been in disguise and concealing a career as the old man’s agent. She told me crossly, ‘It’s no use to me that you’ve come today to pry into the squire’s business. Why didn’t you tell me you were his vanguard last night instead of coming here in all this state now? I mean, you can say this for the young Master. He was the man in charge of collecting the squire’s rents, but he was also practically a friend to me and if he’d been here, we’d have had plain dealing and someone with the clout to see to the repairs that need doing.’

  I thought she was making the point that she was unused to visitors, she didn’t know the Captain and she didn’t feel like she needed to try to know me. And she certainly didn’t want last night’s drama calling personally at her door now that our nervous kinship had been burnt away by the normality of a morning’s chores.

  If I really had been the Colonel’s agent, I might have observed that amongst all that it was clear she hadn’t yet discovered gratitude for her landlord’s patience with regards to her arrears. But I wasn’t. I was just me and now we were meeting here and her present home consisted only of a square yard within a high boundary wall with a barn and the house set against it in a yellowish stone that was crumbling like dry cheese; and I was finding that, rather than blaming Mrs Abbey for her rudeness about the Colonel, I was suddenly wondering how she came to be paying rent to live here at all.

  Presumably following a similar train of thought, the Captain asked her as we were led in through a narrow hallway, ‘When did you move here?’

  His manner of speaking showed curiosity rather than offence. He didn’t seem to mind that she’d left her landlord’s son no room to introduce himself before she invited us in. Inside, the Eddington farmhouse was dark but better furnished. The right-hand room was a living room and every one of the chairs and tables was an original from its era. I imagined they must be her own. The house was set with its rear against the easternmost wall of the yard and no windows pierced this rear face, just dampness from stonework that was spongy even at the height of this roaring summer.

  Mrs Abbey’s temper must have eased as she reached the better backdrop of her private possessions. She was ready to at least acknowledge the Captain now and by the time she answered his question she was confident enough to worry about the state of her hair. She was tidying it in the reflection of a weighty mirror set on the wall between tasteful but faded watercolour paintings as she told him, ‘We moved here three years ago. My marital home was Gloucester. You can imagine the boys’ delight when we exchanged urban conveniences for this scene of rural luxury where the nearest shop lies at the other end of a stiff two-mile walk.’

  She patted one last section smooth and turned. Her attention to her looks ought to have seemed mannered and designed purely for the interest of the gentleman, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t courting him. This wasn’t a saucy play for power. She was already sure of her control. She’d established her dominion here just as soon as she’d relegated him to the status of my driver on her front step. Instead, I felt again the faintly humbling authority of a woman whose capabilities must rival my cousin’s, although admittedly I now knew this woman had no real connection to the formidable heroines of the propaganda photographs. Mrs Abbey must have been a young mother early in the war, so she wouldn’t have actually been required to contribute any more than I had. I thought, in fact, that Mrs Abbey’s air of competence came from that far harder school of education; the sheer hardship of bringing up three children in this rotten place on her own.

  ‘Sit,’ she told the Captain. ‘I’ll make tea. Miss Sutton? Will you help me in the kitchen?’

  The Captain didn’t sit. He moved to the mantelpiece
to entertain himself with her display of family photographs while I followed her curiously across the narrow passage past the cluttered base of the stairs. I wasn’t expecting my arrival in the kitchen to be greeted by a Mrs Abbey who was clutching the kettle and buoyant and utterly my friend.

  She leaned in to confide with a lively whisper, ‘I know who he is. And I can guess that he’s here to soothe the malcontents on his father’s estate because the Colonel’s come home. It wouldn’t do, I know, for us to meet the old man without receiving a little bit of coaching about our due humility from the son first. So I thought it would do him some good to have a little set-down.’

  I couldn’t help casting a wide-eyed glance back across the gap of the stairwell, but the man she was speaking about was absorbed by his examination of an ornament on her mantelpiece.

  Mrs Abbey was laughing at me. There was a clatter as she placed the kettle on the stove. Her cooking conditions were even worse than my cousin’s. Her stove was set against the wall opposite the door and it was rusting, with a ridiculously small drop hole for the fuel. It had been designed for coal when Mrs Abbey only had wood. She turned there, tipped her head at the void of the hallway and told me, smirking, ‘It’s been a long time since that man in there abandoned the business of running this place to his brother, and I’d be willing to lay money on the fact he’s only paying lip service to picking up this business now. But,’ she added on a suddenly cool note, ‘what I’d really like to know is why you’re here. I thought you were catching a bus. Did something happen?’

  Playfulness died like it was on a switch. Her manner meant to imply concern, I believe, but it fell far short of it. I thought her sharply blazing impatience as she waited for my answer more interrogative. She looked worn in the diffused light of her kitchen. That strain was here still; the energy that had run like a nervous current through her departure from my cousin’s cottage last night.

  I found myself reaching a hand across the tabletop towards her to ask in a voice that found urgency and forgot to whisper, ‘Mrs Abbey, did you get home without mishap last night?’

  In my mind was that rustle of the undergrowth and the vivid sense of the mile or so of dense thorny woodland that I now knew straddled the hillside between her home and mine.

  She didn’t pale, though, and reveal her distress. Nor did she confess that all this jumping about from rudeness to friendship and back again was merely a result of the fact that the arrival of the Captain’s car had presented her with guests that she did not want.

  She shook off the demanding stare and crept closer. She treated my question as of all things a sly deflection from a truth that might have been betrayed if I had answered hers. She was very close. Her mouth dipped teasingly as she leaned to give a daring whisper into my ear. ‘A word to the wise, Emily dear. They’re all thieves one way or another and the whole estate is mortgaged to the hilt.’

  I was utterly, completely, taken aback. So much so I collided clumsily with her kitchen table. It was large and cumbersome and the kitchen was tiny and there was a boy there too – the smallest child with angelic fair hair and blue eyes who was clattering about with a toy in the corner where the cooler end of the rusting cooking range met the heavy stone sink. I steadied myself and, in doing so, took a small step back and managed to say, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She straightened. Then she confided in a rather more ordinary voice, ‘Master John Langton was, I can tell you with some confidence, a thief of hearts as well as the illicitly acquired contents of other people’s houses.’

  I was supposed to be shocked, but at that moment, suddenly, I barely cared about her hint about the womanising. I was too busy discovering the awfulness of my reference to the looting I’d witnessed in London. No wonder the Captain had jumped as though I’d struck him. He must have thought for a moment that I’d been attributing personal blame. Now I was feeling like I was straying horribly close to the sort of prying I’d declared I wouldn’t do when I couldn’t help asking her, ‘John Langton was a thief?’

  ‘They say that when he died some paintings came to light that had been lost from a house during an air raid. Despicable if it’s true, isn’t it?’

  My slur upon looters got worse.

  And yet, the worst part was actually the way she added her next. She lowered her voice to a whisper again and added, ‘The squire always seemed to hope that a respectable marriage would set poor young Master John on the straight and narrow, but although he was perpetually the toast of elegant young ladies, he could never quite get away from giddy dreamers. Now I’d be fascinated to know how that man there does these days, wouldn’t you?’

  There was a tilt of her head towards the open doorway. She confided darkly, ‘I imagine our Captain Langton is pretty down on his luck since young Master John ensured the family name became synonymous with mud and everyone knows the country house belongs to the bank. Perhaps that’s why he persists in acting the part of the determined soldier. Perhaps he hopes the part of the poor wounded war hero’ll remedy the damage done to his reputation, if you know what I mean.’

  The suddenness of the change in her from nervousness to this hard relish left me flabbergasted. It felt like I’d been walked into a trap. This had been the motive behind her sudden desire to form a womanly enclave in the kitchen. Her hands were moving, sweeping back the curls of hair from her face in a manner that seemed at last designed to emphasise her womanly beauty, like a star of the silver screen cast by age into playing out the final dramatic scenes of a brilliant but jilted villainess when she firmly believed that by rights she ought to have still ranked as the heroine. I had to wonder suddenly, with a sharp pang of doubt, if her turn of phrase had been deliberate when she had implied that she had reason to know John Langton’s history.

  Perhaps it had been designed to lend weight to her other insinuation. She meant to imply that the same Langton blood ran in the elder brother too, but since bankruptcy and dishonour had come into the frame, it was likely that he would have a considerably longer wait until a usefully affluent marriage came along. Frustration would be his main bedfellow now. And perhaps foolish young women who took to travelling about the countryside with him in his car.

  Awfully, my revulsion must have been written plainly upon my face. It gave her the excuse to belatedly put out that hand across the table to press mine. ‘Take care, Emily dear. You’re probably just about pretty enough for the Langtons. Perhaps, after all, you should have taken that bus home?’

  I was snatching my hand back. I was retreating towards the door. I didn’t know where this commentary on the Captain’s romantic ambitions had come from, and the compliments to my person were absurd. The assault on my sympathies was matched by the expression in her eyes, like the desperate triumph of a woman who wasn’t actually in control of herself at all. This was the mania of a woman who was so busy thinking of something else entirely that anything might be said.

  I was at the doorway. The middle child was there on the bottom step of the stairs, sullenly picking at some damp plaster with a pencil. I believe I was retreating towards the Captain, not because I in any way wanted him to hear this, but because I needed the reassurance of a comparison between rational conversation and the scene I’d just left to prove to myself that something really was awry here. There was, after all, every possibility that the woman was just an obnoxious gossip and I was merely a timid prude. Mrs Abbey was following me with a tray of tea things. I’d have said she was scuttling in pursuit of me except it was even more absurd than all the rest.

  The Captain was still at the mantelpiece. He watched my hurried return and then Mrs Abbey as she set her tea tray down behind me on the sideboard with a suppressed clack. His eyes, when they swept over my face and onwards to Mrs Abbey’s, were utterly calm. So much so that I had the sudden horrible task of debating inwardly whether or not this carefully observed patience in a man who had a long list of things to do – but finding himself first being ignored then left waiting while Mrs Abbey proved her lit
tle bit of power by keeping me gossiping – was only being polite at all because he wished to hide the fact that he had heard. And yet, I was sure Mrs Abbey’s insinuations could not have travelled the gap of the hallway. Her voice had been too deliberately staged as a private whisper and it had been done for my ears rather than his.

  I dithered helplessly just inside the doorway at the back of a rather worn Queen Anne chair while he stood there at the mantelpiece looking, well, indecipherable and then he spoke across the room to Mrs Abbey. ‘Has Miss Sutton told you that my father has called a meeting with his tenants tomorrow at midday? In the Manor farmyard, if you can manage to get there for that time?’

  I wished he hadn’t mentioned my name. Apart from the fact that I couldn’t have possibly passed on the Colonel’s message since this was the first I’d heard of it, I felt as if this sudden choice of addressing me formally actually emphasised the ease with which he usually dispensed with social distinctions to call me merely by my first name. Irrationally, since Mrs Abbey couldn’t possibly know this, I was certain that she too must feel the change. I felt myself straighten beneath the touch of her glance before she turned to test the condition of the tea.

  The Captain was cocking his head at the run of photographs on the shelf by his elbow. ‘Is that man Mr Abbey?’

  The question jerked Mrs Abbey’s eyes to the only picture in the row that contained a youngish man as though the thought stung. The rest of the gilded frames contained either the children or older people who were, presumably, the grandparents. After that first jolt of surprise, I saw Mrs Abbey only gaze at the photograph in question for a moment before abruptly collecting herself. She gave the Captain a surprisingly brave smile. ‘Taken on holiday at Weston-super-Mare.’

  The man in the photograph was well groomed with smoothly creamed hair, which, judging by the shade of sepia, must have been a mid-brown. His eyes were set in comfortably fleshy cheeks that spoke of office work. Most significantly of all, he bore absolutely no resemblance to either the man I had seen on Bertie Winstone’s garden path or the man who had made off with my luggage and, if the Captain had listened at all to anything I had said, he must have known this. I thought that this photograph was proof of the principle that like attracts like because there was something faintly effeminate in the curl about this man’s mouth that was mirrored on our hostess’s lips as she stepped around my chair with a teacup in her hand and added huskily, ‘Happier times.’