The Storms of War (3 page)

‘Not once seen you do it.’

‘And since when did you know it all?’ She hopped over to the other side of the ornamental canal, hoping she sounded brave, hoping he would not dare her to go to the kitchens and show him.

‘True. Never.’ He nodded, and then stepped back so that she could walk up the path first. ‘Looking good, the Hall,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ Celia looked up at the back of the house.

‘Your father had the roof done again while you were away. He redid the windows and the guttering. It must have cost him a fortune.’

She gazed at the windows and they did look shinier. ‘I suppose it was to impress Sir Hugh. I wish Father would stop building.’ As soon as they had moved in, Rudolf had set about what he called modernising the house. He had repainted it, put up new wallpaper and even installed electric lights in the parlour, the dining room and the front hall. Verena, however, tended to decline to turn them on, and the staff were afraid of them – Smithson told Celia that they had heard that an electric light in a house near Winchester had burst and cast yellow stuff all over the entire company under it, and they were burnt quite to a cinder. Rudolf had also recently installed a telephone in a special small booth in the hall, even though no one had yet used it and Verena complained bitterly about the expense. Celia sometimes crept to look at it when nobody else was around. She would pick up the receiver and speak into it. ‘Hello,’ she whispered. ‘Is there anyone there?’ The line crackled and fizzed; no one spoke.

‘I think the place looks better for all his work. If you’ve got the money, why not spend it, I say?’

Something caught her heart then, and she could not help herself. She pulled his hand. ‘Tom.’ She could almost feel urgency flooding between her lips. ‘You will never leave. Promise me you won’t leave.’

He looked up at the sky, away from her. ‘I won’t. I don’t have anywhere to go. You will, though. You’ll go somewhere else.’

‘No. Say it to me, promise me. If we leave, we go together.’ She stared at the grime on the back of his hand, begging him to answer.

‘Life is different for me.’

‘What makes you so sure? Please, Tom. Promise me you won’t leave.’

He shifted on to the other foot. ‘I promise. Things will always stay the same.’

That was enough. She pulled her hand free and took three steps away. ‘Race you first!’ she cried at him, waving, and then gathered her dress in her hand and began running, hurtling headlong to Stoneythorpe.

Thompson was coming towards them, dragging his bad leg behind him, his souvenir from the Boer War, he said. The rest of the family were no longer sitting at the back of the house. Tom and Celia were running so fast they almost crashed into him.

‘Hello, miss,’ he said. ‘I was looking for you. Your father asked me to tell you. There has been a change. They have returned inside and they are not taking tea.’ He looked at Tom. ‘He asked me to convey his apologies.’

‘What do you mean, there is no tea?’

‘That is the case, miss.’

She was about to protest again, but Tom put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t, Miss Celia. There is no space for me when Sir Hugh might be near, that is all. It is not Mr Thompson’s fault.’ His voice was calm but his face was red with fury.

‘Why did my father not wait to explain?’ Celia demanded. ‘It’s unfair. He should be here to tell us.’

Tom squeezed her arm harder. ‘I’m going back now. Good day, miss. Wishing you a pleasant evening.’ She heard the sarcasm in his voice as he turned. She stood next to Thompson and watched Tom run across the lawn to the side exit in the hedge.
I hate Sir Hugh Bradshaw!
she wanted to cry, so loud that the noise bounced around the fountain, echoed as far as the back of the garden.

‘What was that you said, miss?’ Thompson asked.

‘Nothing. You go inside. I will come in one minute.’ The windows at the back glittered hard, shining out over the ivy that was already creeping past.

‘I have an announcement,’ Rudolf had declared. They had been eating fish in puffed pastry around the heavy table in their Hampstead dining room, five years previously. Celia had been allowed to stay up late to dinner, even though she was only ten. ‘I have found us a Jacobean house in Hampshire. In fact, I have told the owner, Lady Lenley, that I wish to buy it.’

Verena dropped her fork. Emmeline shrieked.

‘Stoneythorpe Hall is in a beautiful … spot,’ Rudolf continued, his words faltering in his excitement. ‘It is the house I have always dreamed of. We will be lords and ladies of the manor.’

‘I don’t want to leave London!’ said Emmeline, her handsome face pale in the fog of the table light.

‘You will once you see it, dear. I promise.’

‘We will never be lords of the manor,’ said Arthur from the corner. ‘We’ll never be anything other than meat sellers.’

‘Better a meat seller than a gambling wastrel.’ Rudolf patted his stomach. ‘People like that can no longer afford such a house.’

‘I thought these houses never came on the market. I thought you said you were never going to succeed!’ said Emmeline, casting an angry glance at Verena. Rudolf had been searching for a manor house for nearly three years. He had contacted agents in Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire and Kent, but they always declared they had nothing to sell.

‘Stoneythorpe is different. Lady Lenley, the widow of the lord, has no children – and there are none in the extended family who could inherit. The sale will be a quiet one as she does not wish to attract publicity. She desires to meet us first, to decide if she feels able to accept my offer.’

‘But—’ Verena began.

‘I have invited Lady Lenley to tea,’ said Rudolf, firmly. ‘Three o’clock. I expect us all to be there.’

Lady Lenley did not look to Celia like a lady at all. She was small and bent, dressed in black, her nervous eyes sunk deep into her face. She huddled in the chair and clutched the cup of tea proffered by Violet, the parlourmaid. Rudolf asked her about her journey and she answered in a quavering whisper, as if the very act of speech caused her pain. Rudolf had told Michael and Emmeline to remain silent, and Celia was too young to speak at any visit. Arthur had refused to attend, lolloped out, thin and long-legged, to see a friend from school. Rudolf conducted the conversation; Verena sat beside him, her face stoically composed.

‘Do you often come to London?’ asked Rudolf.

Lady Lenley’s face creased with terror. She shook her head.

‘You prefer to stay in Hampshire?’

She nodded and looked at her hands, folded in her lap.

‘I thought it a most handsome village. The houses are most excellently kept.’

Lady Lenley looked up and blinked a little, then dropped her gaze.

‘The church must be very old,’ he tried once more.

She nodded. Silence descended. Violet offered biscuits. Lady Lenley fiddled with her skirt. Michael made a comment about stained glass. No one answered. Verena offered a few words about the village school. Celia watched her father’s face redden as he continued to attempt to make conversation, and every attempt failed. Finally, when it seemed to Celia as if there could be nothing more to say, Lady Lenley looked up at Rudolf. ‘I am very fond of the garden,’ she whispered. ‘I have always loved it.’

‘But of course, Lady Lenley,’ said Rudolf. ‘My wife is very fond of gardening too. Are you not, Verena? You direct our current gardeners with great skill.’

Verena gave a frosty smile. ‘Very fond.’

Lady Lenley stared at Rudolf and then returned her glance to her hands. ‘I would not wish my roses to die.’

Rudolf looked at the window, smiled.

Within a few days of Lady Lenley’s visit, the house was a riot of packing. The housekeeper, Mrs Dew, and the butler, Mr Gregory, hurried between the rooms. Verena shut herself in the parlour and emerged only for meals. Mr Gregory and Mrs Mount, the cook, had refused to leave their families in London, and all the lower maids and footmen would never wish to go so far. Verena burst into tears at tea with the strain. ‘A whole new staff to be appointed!’ she wept on to Emmeline’s shoulder. Celia walked downstairs one morning and saw a line of men waiting to be interviewed as their new butler. Letters piled up on the hall table with recommendations of cooks. ‘Tom’s mother could work for us,’ Celia suggested one day. Mrs Cotton had been a parlourmaid for the family but had left before Celia was born, because she was ill, Rudolf had said. Verena turned, her pen poised and directed towards Celia. ‘I don’t think so, dear.’ She shook her head and that was that.

Celia stood at her bedroom window, pretending to dress for Sir Hugh. Just under the ledge, she knew, ivy was creeping thickly over the walls. Every spring, after the house clean, Rudolf would send for twelve men from the village to put up ladders and scramble over the front, trying to cut it back and pull it down. Otherwise, he said, the leaves would work their way into the gaps between the stone, pinching their way into the hollows and forcing the stones loose. For two weeks men tugged and cut and shouted out to each other, throwing great strips of stems on to piles at their feet. The leaves lay confused and browning, ants and spiders clambering through the maze, before the men took the piles to the back of the garden at the end of the day, set them alight and let the flames blaze. After they had finished, for a month or so the pale front of the upper part of the house shone out to the road. The stone looked so painfully naked, with only a few wisps of stems
left unbattered by rain, that Celia almost felt she had to avert her eyes coming home. Its clean bareness felt like a challenge: who are you, to live here?

‘Stoneythorpe is ours now,’ Rudolf had said, when they had drawn up in the car for the first time. ‘And when I am dead, it will come to Arthur.’ Teams of men had arrived from Winchester to knock out the walls to widen the rooms, install a new kitchen in the basement with a working oven, put in new bathrooms on every floor, and paint and paper over the damp and mould of the walls. Celia stood at her window and watched the carters take away Lady Lenley’s Victorian furniture to be burned. The drawing room was covered in silk hangings from London, the dining room decorated with antiques bought from a shop in St James’s. Verena instructed workmen to pull down the back wall and replace it with glass doors, so that they could throw them open after parties, she said. Rudolf had even tried to paint the front of the house, but the stone would not take the colour. Now, after five years, he declared himself nearly satisfied.

Celia drew a circle in the mist on the window. She opened the lacquer box on the windowsill, her box of leaves. Every year she had saved a piece of ivy from the cutting-down. She let the leaves dry on her windowsill and then stored them in the box, which Michael had bought her in a market in London. She touched the top one, thinking of how they were like pieces of skin a snake might cast off, dry with months of accumulated life. The oldest was turning into a skeleton, the dried leaf flaking off the intricate frame each time she picked it up.

Verena had to scale back her plans for a Versailles garden in the end for Rudolf couldn’t spare the money from his factories. She ruled off the back of the lawn with a hedge, the tiniest of gaps in the centre to allow one person only to pass. Beyond that, the garden billowed, a riot of thorny rose beds flanked by shrubs that not even Mr Camlett recognised, so overgrown that you could not tell where one ended and the next began. The oldest trees Celia had ever seen in a garden grew around it, the bottom of their trunks thick and furled with age. Behind it all was an old pond,
with a dried-out fountain in the middle, green and stagnant, the edges untidy with weeds and frizzed with grass, a great willow tree hanging over the water. Verena hated it all; she fenced it off with the hedge and planted trees in front so she would not have to see it from her bedroom. It was like the room with all the broken things in a house, the door you did not open, and it was Celia’s favourite place. If she just crept under the willow next to the pond and past the red flowering bush, there was a patch of soil and a rock where she could sit. Even though she had grown two inches since last summer, she could still just about perch herself there without the shrub scratching her eyes. She loved the darkness and the smell of soil, the feeling that what she had was hers alone. In the spring, daffodils flowered next to the stone, and in summer, she watched the violets bud by the moss. She could stay for years, she thought, emerge and still be the same, while everyone else had become aged and grown. When she was younger, she had thought it was a place where fairies played, their tiny feet touching the stones, leaving no trace.

She stared at the leaf in her hand. In the flower press on her windowsill, she had two pansies from her spot in the garden. She had picked them yesterday, delighted by how the more you stared at them, the more it seemed quite amazing how perfectly joined together was the whole thing: stem linked to leaves and petals dropping from their green tip behind. She thought she had never seen anything quite as marvellous as a pansy. She touched the screws on the edge of the flower press. She would just open them, see how it was getting on, even though she knew it would spoil the effect.

There was a heavy knock on the door and Jennie poked her head around. ‘Come on, miss! They will all be waiting!’ She bustled into the room and started pulling at Celia’s dress. ‘Sir Hugh will be here in a minute!’

‘Is this a German dish?’ Sir Hugh poked at the plate in front of him. ‘I fail to recognise it.’ He sat poker upright, eyes crinkled around his monocle, his moustache quivering as he spoke.

‘It is chicken in wine,’ Verena replied. ‘French influenced.’

‘The whole thing tastes German to me. The seasoning is too strong.’ His plate was hardly touched. Celia thought he never really ate anything, just pushed the food around almost as if it were poisoned.

Thompson, standing at the side, moved forward, but Verena was quicker. She passed him the gravy boat – the best fine china one. ‘Try a little gravy, Sir Hugh.’ She had put her hair into a particularly elaborate style. The curls dropped around the diamond earrings that Rudolf had given her for special occasions. Celia looked at the slight quiver in her mouth and knew immediately that her mother wanted to bite her nails.

Sir Hugh nudged the meat with his knife. ‘I think the thing cannot be salvaged. Your cook has too heavy a hand.’

Celia hated how Sir Hugh hardly ever called her mother Mrs de Witt. She detested how Verena flurried around him, asking him his opinion, humiliating herself, she thought, in her desperation to please. They all had to agree with whatever Sir Hugh said, as if the King himself was at dinner. Although the King, she thought, would surely be nicer to her father than Sir Hugh was. Sometimes she even yearned for Arthur, who might have been rude to Sir Hugh, laughed in his face as he did to everybody.

She kicked the table. Now she hated Sir Hugh even more. Without him, Tom might have been here.

‘Sir Hugh will be your brother,’ her mother had said to her once, when she had tried to tell her not to fuss around him so. ‘You must learn to love him.’

She tried to write a list of all the things you might like about Sir Hugh, but in the end could only think of two: he was about to marry Emmeline, and he had a large house.

‘I find seasoning ruins the flavour of properly good meat. I think it is only intended to cover up the taste of the really poor cut. That is the kind of meat that people put in cans. As your customers find. Disgusting stuff.’ He turned to Rudolf. ‘I did send you some beef from my estate, did I not?’

‘Oh yes,’ rushed in Verena. ‘It was quite marvellous. We were delighted with it.’

Sir Hugh inclined his head graciously. ‘I shall ask Carmichael to send further.’

‘That would be so terribly kind of you.’ Celia wanted to kick her mother under the table.

They had visited Callerton Manor at the beginning of the year. Celia had hated every moment of it: the preparations, her mother bustling and flurrying, Emmeline vowing never to speak again to Michael if he teased Sir Hugh and despairing over everybody’s dress but her own. Then the journey, during which their mother told Celia that if she did not behave, she would not have pudding for two weeks. The huge, cold house had more windows than you could imagine. Stiff servants propped up every corner like vases. They took tea with Sir Hugh’s mother, who to Celia looked older than the oak tree in the back garden, staring at everyone through her lorgnette. And then there were hours spent wandering the frosty gardens, Verena cooing over even the tiniest flower bed. Every vowel of Sir Hugh’s declamations spoke of his endless family tree, informed them that however many elocution classes they took, they could never make their voices sound like his.

During the visit, Michael kept his head bowed, asked attentive questions of Sir Hugh’s mother, winked at Celia when none of them were looking. Then, in June, Rudolf had bought a new Rolls-Royce motor car. He said it was what a man should have for the country lanes. Celia thought he’d bought it to impress Sir Hugh – who had two motor cars, one all the way from France. One afternoon when Rudolf was away, Michael had taken the keys and driven Celia down the lane and out to the village. Then, after she had begged him, they changed places. He showed her how to push down the clutch, set the accelerator. She stopped, started, stopped, started. ‘Push that one!’ he said. ‘More carefully. Think of it like a horse.’ She thought of Silver – and then they were away. She was driving, and they were free. ‘Let’s go to stupid old Callerton Manor!’ Michael said. ‘Come on, Celia. Turn right!’

She followed his directions, wobbling around until they came
round the corner to the great iron gates of Callerton. ‘Go faster!’ Michael shouted. ‘You are a dreary old windbag, Sir Hugh!’ he cried. Celia laughed so much she almost took her hands off the wheel. She thought of it, Michael shouting, the wind battering her hair. He hadn’t laughed much since then.

‘The Callerton game is most superior,’ said Emmeline, graciously. Celia had to admit that her sister looked handsome, the jewels in her fair hair glittering in the light, the pink and white of her face set off by the peacock colour of her dress. The shadows from the candlelight made her eyes glow larger than ever. Jonathan, sitting next to her, looked at her, and Celia knew, as if she could read his mind, that he wished to speak to her but thought her too beautiful. Something in her stomach sharpened.