‘No one will operate. They would be struck off,’ said Thomas. ‘But I sympathise with the poor fellow. Abandoned by science, you might say. Like me. Would you like me to talk to him?’
‘Not yet. I will let you know. Let’s talk about happier things. Your house is looking nice.’
‘Yes. Kitty has done a wonderful job. Bayswater is not where we would have chosen. I suppose we might have preferred . . . What was the name of that place you lived with Mr Whatsit? Your first husband?’
‘Mayfair.’
‘Yes. Exactly. Anyway, I still can’t get the funds out of Carinthia. I shall manage one day, I am sure. Bernthaler is working at it for me. Did I tell you, Kitty has taken a job? She has become a schoolmistress!’
‘Where?’
‘In a girls’ academy near Regent’s Park. She studied for a diploma at night school and now she teaches them German and French. She had to do it, poor girl. I make a little in private practice, but it has been difficult to pick up a clientèle at my age, starting from nothing. And I am still paying for the girls’ lodging in Chelsea until they can afford it themselves. So Kitty rolled her sleeves up.’
‘I bet she is good at it.’
‘Are you suggesting my wife is bossy, Sonia?’
‘On the contrary, it was always she, I felt, who thought I was rather a dragon.’
‘No, she doesn’t. She loves you. How long are you staying in London?’
‘We go back to Paris on Friday.’
‘I would love to come and see your new apartment one day. I suppose it is very grand.’
Sonia smiled. ‘It is like any other Parisian apartment in those big streets that Haussmann built. Large rooms, a little gloomy, long shutters, pleasant wooden floors. It is still a wonderful city.’
‘I don’t suppose I shall go again.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Thomas. ‘I get tired very easily. I lose my way.’
‘Don’t be absurd! You talk as though you are an old man. You are only just sixty. That is no age at all.’
Thomas looked down into his lap and said nothing.
Sonia looked at him curiously. She said, ‘One of the conditions on which I agreed to move back to Paris with Jacques was that I should spend holidays in England. Now do you think that at Easter you and I could invite ourselves and our families up to Torrington?’
‘Oh, Queenie, I should love that. A big family party. I shall write at once to Edgar and . . . And . . . Dear God, I can’t remember what his little wife is called.’
‘Lucy.’
‘Lucy. Of course. I shall write tomorrow.’
‘I must be off now, Thomas. I am meeting Jacques at six.’
‘Will you write from Paris?’
‘Of course. I always do.’
‘Let me show you out. Here we are. I can’t see the blasted key.’
‘It’s here. In the lock.’
‘Goodbye.’
Sonia held her brother’s hands between her own, then kissed him on the cheek and squeezed him hard.
In March, Thomas received a letter from Pierre Valade, asking if he might come and visit him in London. He replied that he would shortly be taking his family to Lincolnshire for the Easter holiday, but that he would be happy to entertain Valade at Torrington if Edgar had no objection. He foresaw none, since Edgar had in fact been receptive to Sonia’s request that there should be a large family reunion at Easter.
Guests began to arrive on the preceding Tuesday. The first was Edgar and Lucy’s daughter Emily with her sardonic husband Charles, who worked for a newspaper in London and affected to be at a loss in what he referred to as ‘the provinces’. He helped himself to whisky from the butler’s pantry (still unused by any butler), smoked cigarettes, yawned a good deal in company and disappeared for long periods to his bedroom. At the age of forty, Emily was herself the mother of three children whose ages ran from five to fifteen, the eldest being a moody boy called Stephen, and the younger two a pair of shy, round-faced girls. Emily’s twin sister Lydia arrived on Wednesday with her four children and her husband John, a farmer from Northumberland, where they had lived since their marriage fifteen years earlier. He complained of the flatness of Lincolnshire, but made himself pleasant to his hosts and brought offerings of northern delicacies – Harrogate toffees, fine woollen shawls, cured fish from Whitby – for Lucy, who thanked him kindly and set them aside for the church fête.
Lucy instructed May to make sure the bedrooms were all well aired and the fires laid; there were often late frosts at this time of year and she did not want her guests to be cold in their rooms.
‘Quite right,’ said Edgar. ‘Otherwise they’ll be under our feet in the library the whole day.’
‘Edgar, you promised me that—’
‘I know. I shall be the soul of hospitality. Have we had all the replies for Saturday?’
‘Yes. Not a single refusal, I am happy to say.’
On Wednesday came Sonia with her French mad-doctor, who, as Edgar remarked to Lucy that night in bed, looked more and more like a lunatic himself these days with his white beard and shaggy locks.
‘Are he and Thomas speaking to one another? I can never remember,’ said Edgar.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘Sonia told me it is all quite forgiven. They are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They have fought to a standstill and now they cannot quite remember what the argument was about.’
‘Is that what Sonia told you?’
‘No. It is my interpretation. Sonia said that Thomas wrote a letter when Daniel died and Jacques’s heart was melted by it.’
‘Well, he was always good with words, my little brother. If nothing else.’
On Thursday, a day ahead of schedule, Pierre Valade arrived. Sonia detained him with a short tour of the garden while Lucy sent the new maid running up and down the landing with clean sheets and blankets to make up the old blue room at the back.
Valade was enthusiastic about England, which he had never visited before. He had asked for a case of St Julien to be sent up by Berry Brothers of St James’s, anxious that his hosts would be unfamiliar with the fruit of the vine, and was astonished to find himself served with a passable burgundy at dinner. Jacques related to him the story of his first visit and of how he must not rise from dinner when his hostess stood up; he explained that there would be meat at breakfast, horses to ride and, if the weather held, a game of lawn-tennis.
‘Mercifully, I have brought a sketch book and intend to do some drawings of the house,’ said Valade. ‘Now tell me, where is this butler’s pantry where one finds the Scottish whisky?’
Jacques gave him directions.
‘I see. And who is the supercilious fellow with the cigarette in his mouth at all times? Am I obliged to be polite to him?’
‘I fear so. He is Edgar’s son-in-law. He is married to Emily.’
‘Ah yes. The dark one I sat next to at dinner. She was most interested in my work. Clearly a woman of resounding intelligence.’
On Friday morning Herr and Frau Hans Eckert arrived from Nottingham, where they lived, bringing their son Paul and their friend Mary with them. Lucy was nervous about having a blind person in the house in case she should injure herself or fall into one of the many open fires.
Sonia was on hand to welcome them and to reassure Lucy that Mary was capable of looking after herself.
‘I shall just show her round a little bit myself until she has the feel of it,’ said Sonia. ‘Daisy, you come too. Hans does not speak very good English yet, Lucy, so you may have to ask Jacques to translate.’
Daisy looked about her in astonishment, both at the house and the number of people coming and going in it. Her mouth fell open, as it had done when the long corridor of the lunatic asylum first opened up to take her in.
‘It’s ever so nice, Maisie,’ she whispered in Mary’s ear. ‘It’s a little bit like the old schloss, but more English like.’ Mary held on tight.
Then in the eve
ning, about seven, the double doors burst open and Charlotte and Martha came rushing in – tall, fair-haired women of twenty-three, still young enough to be euphoric at the release from their long journey. They had already found their aunts Sonia and Lucy, their many cousins at various removes, and were well into an account of their life in a Chelsea bed-sitting room by the time their parents finally stepped through the front door.
Edgar embraced Kitty with the tactile enthusiasm he had always shown towards her, clasping her to him a moment longer than necessary; Lucy offered Thomas her cheek.
Friday night was an informal occasion. Lucy was concerned that her guests should not think her irreligious and had made sure that only fish was served at supper, a late meal at which all were invited to help themselves from the long table in the dining room.
At midday on Saturday, a large number of local people came to lunch. Among them was young Meadowes, the doctor, a man in his sixties still known as ‘young’ even though his father, cantankerous old Meadowes, was long dead. Afterwards, the family guests dispersed about the house and garden, the children playing tennis noisily, most of the older ones retreating to their bedrooms. Tea was on offer at five, but Lucy had made it clear that she did not expect to reappear before seven in the library. At six o’clock her son and heir Henry arrived from Lincoln with his wife and two sons – more males, Edgar had been pleased to note, to secure the family’s name and fortune.
Sonia and Jacques had been put in her old bedroom at the front of the house. As she went up to change in the evening, Sonia stood for a moment looking through the leaded lights of the window towards the church and the village pond.
She was pleased to be back at Torrington, to be ‘home’, as she could not stop calling it; yet the visit felt like a ritual with little meaning. It was possible, she thought, to have too much access to the past. Although she had very much responded to that part of Thomas’s lecture at the schloss which talked of our yearning to be reunited with a lost world, glimpsed imperfectly through time and the limits of our perception, there were perhaps places, people or experiences which really ought to remain behind us, she thought. If their intangibility was frustrating or raised a yearning that could not be satisfied, then so be it. The angle of a brick arch or corridor, the sensation of smell or taste that released a state of being; or here, the very floorboard on which her bare feet had stood on the morning that Mr Prendergast was due – surely these things should no longer be habitable. It did not feel quite healthy that she could stand here now, an old woman who did not feel old – stand here as though nothing had happened, as though there were no such thing as time.
She put on her dressing gown and prepared for the cold walk to the bathroom. The last twenty years of her life, since the birth of Daniel, had passed so quickly she had not had time to catch them. When she was a child, each year had been distinct, the long days of seven quite different from the slow weeks of eight; but recently, she had barely had time to pack away the Christmas decorations before the summer was on them, then past, and the leaves were yellow in the trees again.
In the bathroom, she pushed back the window on its hinge and the very motion as the wooden frame caught on the creeper seemed to open up the rush of overpowering love she had felt for that beautiful and somehow unhappy man, her brother’s friend, who walked that summer evening in the garden. She had relived this moment so often, on the heights of the Wilhelmskogel, on the floor of the bathroom of the schloss when she clasped the vanished life of her son in the bloody towels between her legs – and still it had the power of association, still the opening window opened up her heart. Yet was it possible, she now thought, that at each physical revisitation something of the numinous was lost?
She smiled at her fancies; it was enough to be alive and in good health with one’s family and their friends. Soon they would all be gathered downstairs among the candles at the table she herself had decorated. What more could anyone of her age ask? Why were the rims of her eyes starting to turn fiery with the coming tears?
Thomas went to see that his daughters were settled. They had been put in his old room on the top floor and were arguing about which one of them should have the bed and which the blankets on the couch.
‘Why don’t you both get in the bed?’ said Thomas. ‘It’s big enough for two.’
‘Charlotte snores.’
‘Martha makes funny licking noises.’
‘Oh dear, what a dilemma for you both. What a test of your altruism and negotiating skills. A veritable League of Nations with—’
‘Daddy, don’t be sarcastic.’
‘It is something about being in my old room,’ said Thomas, going over to the window. ‘It brings back the callow youth I was. Good heavens,’ he said, bending down to the long fitted shelf, ‘they still have all my old books here. History of the Conquest of Peru by William Prescott. My goodness, how I loved that. And the History of the Conquest of Mexico.’
‘I can hardly wait to read it,’ said Charlotte, stifling a laugh.
‘No, no, bags me first with Peru,’ said Martha.
‘Oh, look,’ said Martha. ‘Hind’s Algebra and Trigonometry.’
‘I have heard it’s a very exciting story,’ said Charlotte.
‘And it looks as though we’d be the first people to read it.’
‘Daddy, you never even opened it.’
‘I never cared much for trigonometry.’
‘Look, Charlotte, here’s another penny dreadful. Personal Narrative of Travels in South America by Alexander von Humboldt.’
‘Oh, Martha, you naughty girl. It looks far too racy for you. It’s positively blue!’
‘Tell you what, Charlotte,’ said Martha, ‘you can have the bed, because then I can sit up all night under this light and read Essays on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Thomas, ‘that is one of the most important books of the last century. Without it, Darwin—’
‘After you, darling. But I shan’t be letting go of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation without a struggle.’
‘Who is it by? Ethel M. Dell?’
‘It appears to be anonymous.’
‘Perhaps it was too racy.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Thomas again, ‘that, too, was a very important book in the history of the theory of natural selection. It turned out to have been written by Robert—’
‘Daddy, was this also a very important work of the last century?’ She handed him a blue notebook with his old Cambridge college crest on it.
‘For social historians it may be like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is my accounts book. “To Buttery, one and sixpence (claret and dried fruit)”.’
‘Let me have a look.’
‘You seem to have given up in January.’
‘It wasn’t a very thrilling volume. Not like this one. Shakespeare. Do your pupils study Shakespeare, Martha?’
‘Daddy, they are only seven years old.’
‘Ah yes, I had forgotten.’
Martha and Charlotte retreated to the bed so that they could study his accounts book more closely. As their laughter came to his ears, Thomas looked across his old bedroom at them, their fair heads bent over the pages. They were so like their mother that he sometimes wondered if any of his ‘genes’ had passed to them at all.
When you came to think of it, had not life given him everything he could have hoped for? Not one, but three such women. He shook his head and wondered how much longer he could hold on to them.
In the kitchen, May was putting the finishing touches to an enormous roast turkey. She loved to see Sonia and Thomas again, the friends of her youth – her childhood really, because, though a stout mother of two grown daughters and soon to be a grandmother, she had been a girl of thirteen when she first went into service.
‘Jane, you take the gravy boats out now and warm them up,’ she said to the new maid. ‘They’re in the dresser there.’
‘I don’t know how we’r
e going to manage with all these people. Them Frenchies and all,’ said Jane. ‘He’s a funny one that Mr Whatsit.’
‘Don’t be silly, Jane. We’ve sat down more than this. And if we can’t manage, Miss Sonia will always come and help. When she was little she used to come out here to escape. She’d come and talk to me and old Miss Brigstocke so she could get away from the grown-ups. And she’d talk to Dido and Amelia.’
‘And Mr Thomas. He seems nice, but he’s a bit funny too.’
‘The trouble with Mr Thomas,’ said May, ‘is that he’s wore himself out with thinking.’
At a quarter to eight, as instructed by Lucy, they took the soup through to the dining room and the dinner began. The table had had two extra leaves inserted, but still some of the children were jammed close together at one end. There were small decorations of spring flowers at intervals among the thronged and polished glasses.
Through the shifting candlelight, Thomas could make out the face of Hans, smiling nervously, though he had been placed compassionately close to Daisy. Kitty was far away, but looked up at that moment and her silver-rimmed glasses caught the light as she smiled up the table at him. There was Jacques, sitting next to Martha, who had always secretly adored him; and there was Valade pontificating to blind Mary about oil painting. Almost everyone who had meant something to him in his life was gathered there, it occurred to him – all except Faverill, whose short obituary notice he had read in the newspaper a few days earlier. ‘A distinguished asylum superintendent,’ the paper called him, ‘who had a strong sense of the direction he wanted psychological medicine to take as the new century approached.’ ‘Sense of direction’: he would have laughed at that, thought Thomas, the chartless helmsman steering by the stars . . .
Who else was there in the shifting light? Charlotte doing her best with that man who smoked cigarettes. Dear Daisy, and Mary. And his niece Lydia. And her many children whose names he could not remember. And then through the shadow there, the flicker and glow caught the chin of someone else he did not know. A man a little older than he was, though not unlike himself, now he came to think of it, in features: he seemed very familiar with Lucy and he had a rather proprietorial air; he kept passing the decanter round, urging people to drink, then ordering the maids to clear as though he owned the place . . .