‘We did have some of the creatures once, but they do have the most unmelodious screech, so—’ he shrugged.
‘What did you do, eat them?’
‘No,’ he smiled down at me, ‘People only eat peacocks in India – except in areas where they’re held to be sacred, of course.’ Then he turned abruptly away and flicked the feather into the fire – where, of course, it smelt horribly as it burnt. ‘We persuaded Aunt Dorothea to take them on – she likes having something to complain about. What shall we do after supper, Eve?’
Chapter Fifty One
Monty smiled. ‘I think you should be the one who chooses what we do tonight, since it’s your last evening.’
Because tomorrow… No, don’t think, Eve – live for the evening, this evening. And then I remembered that other ridiculous exhortation Apa used to spur me on with when the going got rough: Play up and play the game.
Turning to Monty I announced, ‘I’d like to play games – that cupboard’s full of them.’ He laughed, ‘Good idea – a brisk battle waged over the backgammon board will be just the ticket.’
I told him, confiding now, ‘Apa and I used to play games on Sunday evenings. Even on tour, we always took our School Prize Compendium Box with us – Apa won it as a prize – when he was still at school.’ My voice dropped. ‘I don’t know what happened to it, some things got lost when—’
I broke off altogether and Monty said quickly, ‘Not to worry puss cat, we’ve got plenty to choose from up here. But supper first – I’ll telephone down for it.’
As we ate our ham and pressed tongue – with beetroot, pickles and bread and butter, and cold rice mould to follow – we talked. Well, mostly I talked. About Aunt Ethel, Helspie, the famous tin cupboard, Mistress McNiven’s training, and how I learnt her book by heart – I even told him about my porridge drawer – And he listened, and laughed at all my jokes, so that my jokes seemed to get better and better, and my confidence grew into that warm, confident confidence that you feel when you’re with a person who really likes you and enjoys your company. Live for the evening, Eve. Enjoy this time, now – no-one can take this away from you.
I cleared the table, he carried the tray, I loaded the dumb waiter and he sent it rattling down into the depths – then we were rushing back up the stairs to join the dogs and open the games cupboard. Boxes of pieces, boards, playing cards for Snap and Beggar My Neighbour – even an old lidless tin containing Sophie’s jacks and Bym’s marbles – that cupboard was a treasure trove! ‘Which shall we start with, Monty?’ I was already loading up with boxes and transporting them over to the table. When I had a respectable pile I smiled up at him and offered, ‘I’ll let you choose the first one.’
He looked down at them thoughtfully, then back up at me. ‘Now, Eve, before we begin let’s get one rule established. Cheating or no cheating, which is it to be?’
With just a hint of righteous indignation in my voice I challenged, ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t cheat if you were playing with Sophie, would you?’
‘Good Lord, no.’
I modified my tone to include rather more than a hint of hurt, now, ‘Then surely you shouldn’t even consider cheating with me, as your substitute sister?’
He whickered, softly. ‘Nice try, Eve.’ Then he drew his hand out of his pocket and tossed a single shining green marble Spinning up into the air. Catching it neatly he smiled his tiger smile and said, ‘But I’m not playing with Sophie, am I? So, which is it to be, cheating, or no cheating?’
I exclaimed, ‘No cheating!’
He raised one eyebrow. ‘Feel like a change this evening, do you?’
I retorted, ‘Why, don’t you?’ And he brayed.
Backgammon and Go Bang, Dominoes and Draughts, Spillikins and Solitaire, Nine Men’s Morris, Fox and Goose, Snakes and Ladders – we played and played. Make the most of it, Eve, enjoy every single minute – and I did, I did.
I slid down a final snake and lost to him. ‘Hard luck, puss cat.’ He swept the counters off the board and picked up the dice. ‘One last game, Eve, and then I’ll go down and raid the larder for some milk, and you can make us both a cup of cocoa on the nursery gas ring.’
I came back with the tray to discover that he’d drawn up two armchairs, so we sat either side of the fire, sipping our cocoa, dunking our biscuits and toasting our toes – his toes by now clad in some extremely handsome crimson velvet slippers. I wriggled my own to admire Elsie’s darns – I’d kicked my shoes off long ago – and then, smiling almost shyly to him I said, ‘I have enjoyed this evening, Monty – in fact, I’ve enjoyed the whole weekend.’
He said, ‘Good, so have I’, as if he really meant it. And then he began to talk to me, talking in that same low, soothing voice he’d used when speaking to his horses, but now he was using it to me – telling me what a clever girl I was, how quick-witted, and intelligent, and with such an obvious talent for languages Praising me until my cheeks glowed with a pleasure as warm as the coals glowing in the schoolroom grate.
So that when he said what a shame it was I’d left Wick without taking any exams, I agreed with him. You see, there was no hint of blame in his voice, but rather a shared complicity, as he confessed, ‘I was a shade impulsive myself, at your age.’ Then he excused me with, ‘And, of course, in your case it was quite understandable, since your father had allowed you really rather too much freedom.’
And the cock must already have been stirring on his perch, getting ready to wake up and announce the dawn – but I didn’t hear him lifting his head from beneath his wing, so lulled was I by that low, deep voice of Monty’s.
Instead I asked – as I daresay he expected me to – ‘What sort of impulsive things did you do, then?’
He laughed. ‘You’ll have to ask Ted about that – he was involved in much the same japes as I was at school.’
‘Didn’t you say yesterday you were at school with Mr Parton, too? I could ask him.’
He deflected me with such a light hand on the rein that I didn’t even feel the bit. ‘Yes, but Fred was always much better behaved than Ted and myself. And then, Ted and I were in the Army Class together – and in the same batch at the Shop, too.’
And next he told me some of the things they’d got up to together there, making me laugh – and naturally I remembered Apa’s stories about the Shop, too – but when I mentioned him Monty spoke instead of my grandfather, and what a good friend he’d been to the cadets and young officers at Woolwich: ‘Despite his age he was an extremely advanced thinker – far more up-to-date than most of the men in charge! Ted and I often say that we learnt a lot more from him than we did from those who were supposed to be teaching us. And then, General Courtney always had the knack of making you think for yourself.’
I told him, ‘Apa was just the same.’
There was a small silence before Monty said, ‘Was he?’ And I think if I’d listened I would have heard that cockerel ruffling his feathers and shuffling around on its perch. But I didn’t listen, I listened only to Monty’s soothing voice as he told me how this Ted had been much closer than he, Monty, had been to my grandfather – because Ted’s own father had died while Ted was still at school. ‘So your grandfather to some extent supplied the lack.’
And this time I did hear the cock clearing his throat – but I didn’t say, ‘Yet he rejected his own son.’ I didn’t say it. Forgive me, Apa.
Instead I listened as Monty told me how he and Ted sailed to South Africa together, ‘Though we fought in different campaigns out there.’ I shifted uneasily in my seat and Monty reassured me that Ted, like himself, had sent in his papers when he inherited – and moved smoothly on to Ted and Eunice falling in love. Eunice was Monty’s cousin, ‘Almost an extra sister, since there’s only a year or so difference between us in age, and my mother and Aunt Constance were very close. With Aunt Constance being the baby of the family, Mama had made quite a pet of her in the nursery. So Eunice and I saw a lot of each other as youngsters.’
He went on to tell me
a tale about how one afternoon he and Eunice had objected to being dressed up to meet some visitors they didn’t care for much, so they’d gone and rolled in the coal hole together and then appeared in the drawing room to meet those unwanted guests blackened from head to foot with coal-dust! ‘We were in disgrace over that, as you can imagine! Still, it was worth it – just to see Aunt Dorothea’s facel’ I laughed, but my laugh was tainted with jealousy – until I remembered that this Cousin Eunice belonged to Ted now, not Monty.
Though Monty was godfather to her elder son, and would become joint guardian with Eunice of her children in the event of anything happening to Ted – ‘God forbid’ – and Ted had taken the same fall-back role in Monty’s will, with regard to Sophie and Bym. Obviously Monty had been Sophie’s guardian until she married, and was still Bym’s, but, he said, he’d always been glad to know Ted was there, just in case. ‘A splendid fellow – I’d trust Ted with my life.’ And since I’d already understood the significance of all Monty’s-talk about his having been Sophie’s guardian, I asked myself now – am I prepared to trust Monty with the next three years of my life? No, four years, because you actually only counted as being fully twenty-one on the day before your twenty-second birthday – I’d read that in “Cassell’s Lawyer”…
But Monty was talking about Ted again. ‘A very steady chap – he hasn’t racketed around like I have,’ he laughed, ‘Even if he’d wanted to, Eunice wouldn’t let him!’ Then Monty told me he was sure I’d recognise Eunice when I saw her, because she and her younger sister were very alike – and I’d met her younger sister, Lilias, already, since she was Lady Lydham, of Wenlock Court.
As it happened I hadn’t actually ‘met’ her, since Fourth Housemaids didn’t – but she’d always looked quite pleasant – and I thought how much I would like to be part of a great family web like that. And I have to admit that my envy of Eunice and her sister, who were part of that web, was liberally laced with self-pity.
And as if he knew just what I was thinking Monty said, oh – so sympathetically – ‘It’s been very hard for you these past years, hasn’t it, puss cat?’ His hand reached across to cover mine for a moment before he continued, ‘I remember vividly that remark you made to me the other evening, about your not having any incentive to toe the line because you had no-one to be responsible to.’ That wasn’t quite what I’d said, but I was too soothed by his sympathy to correct him – ‘I was very struck by your saying that, you know. So much so that I repeated it to Ted and Eunice when I lunched With them on Friday.’ He’d talked to them about me! I looked up at him in gratitude, but he didn’t meet my eye, instead he continued, ‘And Ted was most concerned, too. So we three put our heads together and hatched a plan for your future.’ I was floating now, lapped by his care – he cared for me, for my future…
‘Just between ourselves, Eve, we were none of us very impressed by Henderson’s handling of you.’
By now I felt so warm and looked after that I was willing to admit, ‘I don’t think I was very easy to handle.’
‘There are ways and ways of handling,’ and his own hand covered mine again, but this time my fingers began to twine around his… He took his quickly away, saying, ‘But we did feel, to be fair to Henderson, that his own hands were tied by the way the money was left. I’m not criticizing your grandfather at all – in the natural course of events he expected to pre-decease your father – as indeed he did – so there was only so much he could do.’
So whom was he criticizing? And I knew, of course I knew – but like St. Peter I lay low – and heard the cock crow. I heard it! But I did not listen – I listened only to Monty’s low, seductive voice soothing me with, ‘And I daresay it never occurred to your father that there were friends of General Courtney in England who’d gladly act as your guardians…’
And then he began to talk about what it meant to have a guardian – though he talked about the social side rather than the legal. But then, that was what I was interested in too – though I was surprised when he said it was not so very different from the Scots curator system – but then he continued, ‘Only with a much more personal element’ – and for a moment I dwelt on the personal elements of having Monty as my guardian, and oh, I was tempted! So when he commented, ‘I know you were very unclear about the Scottish curator business, Eve,’ and followed up with, ‘So I wonder whether you happened to know anything at all about English guardianship?’ I opened my mouth only to close it again – because I didn’t want to spar with him, not tonight.
And besides, I was so tempted. What he was about to offer me was an even riper and glossier fruit than that apple which offered knowlege of good and evil – and for a moment I heard Apa’s voice saying, ‘Scholars suspect that the fruit in Eden wasn’t an apple, Eve, it doesn’t say so in the Bible – that idea probably originated from the story of the golden apple Paris gave to Aphrodite, after she offered him the gift of love—’ But I didn’t listen – though thinking of Apa must have made me just a little quicker-witted, because when Monty went on to explain that it was possible even now for me to apply on my own behalf to be given a guardian, since my grandfather had owned some small amount of property in England, I did wonder how Monty knew that latter point. But when he moved on to how Mr Henderson would make a formal request on my behalf, ‘All you have to do is sign the document, Eve’, knowing the details of the procedure already, as I did from reading Cassell, I yawned. Sometimes it’s easier to yawn than to think.
Monty laughed. ‘I’d better speed up – you’re getting tired.’ But then he started going on about Ted again. ‘As I told you just now, Ted was much closer to your grandfather than I was – it was Ted who tried to discover your whereabouts after your grandfather’s death. Ted was stationed in India himself at the time, but he was down in the south, so he didn’t hear of your father’s accident until some time after the event. When he did hear he wrote to Henderson to enquire, and was informed that you were by then settled in Scotland with Miss Gunn.
‘He passed that news on to me, so we were both reassured about you – mistakenly, as we now realise, given her considerable age. But I’m afraid we did assume, erroneously as it transpired, that you had other Gunn relatives. However, since we knew you had nobody on the Courtney side of the family we were remiss there, Eve. I think – I know – Ted had intended to make more detailed enquiries when he returned to England, but Eunice’s health had broken down in India, and he’d inherited unexpectedly from a rather eccentric cousin who’d left a pretty pickle behind him – a decent little property but it needed a lot of attention. And I was very tied up with affairs of my own – so we didn’t pursue the matter any further. We didn’t even known of Ethel Gunn’s death until you told me. Presumably you didn’t put a notice in “The Times”?’ Hardly. ‘And although Ted knew the Gunn croft was in Caithness he didn’t realise you were living there all the year round – and, even more importantly, he didn’t happen to mention that crucial piece of information to me. So after I ran into you myself I didn’t put two and two together until almost too late. Sorry, puss cat.’
I reassured him. ‘Gunn is a pretty common name in Caithness.’
He smiled briefly. ‘Thank you, Eve. Anyway, we’re now most anxious to make amends to you, and try in some measure to repay our considerable debt to your grandfather. So we’ve decided,’ he’d reached the end of his cigarette – he’d been smoking all through his discourse on guardianship – and now he looked round for an ashtray. I half rose to fetch the one on the mantelpiece, but he waved me down and stood up himself, ‘No, I’ll use it up there.’ Which meant that he had his back to me as he said, ‘So the three of us have decided that in future you will have someone who is both responsible for you, and for you to be responsible to – Ted.’
‘Ted?’
‘Yes, Ted has offered to be your guardian, Eve, and we all think it’s a simply splendid idea.’ He bent over the ashtray and stubbed out his cigarette – and my whole shining evening with it.
&nb
sp; Chapter Fifty Two
He spent quite some time extinguishing that cigarette butt, which gave me time to rearrange my face – though I still didn’t quite believe I’d heard aright. So I said, trying to keep my voice level, ‘But it I’m your substitute sister, and you were Sophie’s guardian, wouldn’t it be more—’ I couldn’t keep going – but my voice had already risen to a question before that pause.
He didn’t look at me as he said, patting his pockets in search of his cigarette case, ‘That substitute sister scheme – surely we agreed it was just a device to keep the chaperons happy about this particular weekend? But, obviously, when it comes to the long-term my – er – commitments – would scarcely allow me to play any real role in your life. Whereas Ted and Eunice are mostly based in Town these days.’
I thought desperately, so where was Chelsea, if it wasn’t in Town? That ‘obviously’ of his echoed in my head – because the only thing that was obvious to me was that he didn’t want anything more to do with me. There was only the one thing he’d wanted from Eve Gunn – so now there was nothing Evelyn Courtney could offer him.
As he continued his search for his cigarette case he informed me, ‘I daresay we’ll run into each other occasionally – I do drop in on Eunice for tea sometimes, and if you should happen to be staying there in your holidays – she’s hoping you’ll spend part of your school holidays with them.’ I was too stunned even to reply as he told me that Eunice was making enquiries about good girls’ boarding schools. Cheltenham Ladies’ College was highly regarded, but she thought Wycombe Abbey might be more forward looking – both had excellent academic reputations, and would ensure I had the requisite qualifications for entering university. ‘Ted thinks that’s the path you should take – he’s got very up-to-date ideas, has Ted – but Eunice says if she were you she’d rather be presented at Court, and make her debut in the usual fashion. She feels a girl’s chances of making a good marriage are so much better if she mixes with the right people at the right age. And when I mentioned what an excellent dancer you were, she said she was sure you’d just love all the fun and excitement of being a debutante. She’s promised that between the three of them she and Lilias and Aunt Constance will provide you with all the chaperonage you need to have a really good time, and meet lots of eligible young men! ‘But in any case, you don’t have to decide on that yet, because we’re all agreed that after you’ve finished school a year abroad will be the ideal for you – with your obvious talent for languages it would be a crying shame not to go. Lilias and Eunice both spent a year on the Continent themselves – Eunice loved Dresden and Lilias thoroughly enjoyed Paris – so they wondered if you might like to learn a new modern language – Italian, say? Ted said that since you’ll have been doing Latin—’