Happily Ever After

Chapter 6

6

PEMBERLEY – PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, JANE AUSTEN

I had to have a bath to get rid of the smell of pond water, which meant that I was late down for breakfast. Normally this wouldn’t have mattered; it would have been Hugo eating something like a five-year-old who’s been left unsupervised and chatting lightly to me about whatever came into his head.

Today, however, it seemed that Lady Tanith had decreed we would be having a Formal Breakfast. When I came down the stairs with my hair in a towel, because I’d had to wash it – there had been weed in the fountain water – Mrs Compton was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Lady Tanith and Master Hugo are in the Breakfast Room,’ she said with disdain leaking from every syllable. ‘You’re late.’

‘I didn’t know there was anything to be late for ,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, it’s the twenty-first, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ I replied, as though this made things any clearer.

Mrs Compton gave me a look such as might have been given by a stern father to a daughter who has forgotten her stepmother’s birthday. ‘Yes, it is, so you’d better get your gold-digging self into the Breakfast Room before her ladyship disturbs herself coming to look for you!’

My mouth fell open. Gold digger? Was Mrs Compton really calling me a gold digger?

She further compounded her statement by muttering ‘hussy’, and shoulder charging me towards the door to the little Breakfast Room which lay between the Morning Room and the Study, and which served only to play host to orphaned furniture and unwanted paintings as far as I could remember.

‘She’s here,’ Mrs Compton announced me in her own, unique style. ‘At last.’

I shuffled over the threshold to see that the table was laid immaculately. There were covered tureens on a sideboard, silverware on a cloth so white it made my eyes ache, some wonderful china which looked old, and a smell of sausages and bacon that made me start to dribble.

Hugo half rose in his seat. ‘Ah. Andi, good morning,’ he said pleasantly.

‘Eventually.’ Lady Tanith was drinking coffee. ‘We eat together on the twenty-first of every month, Andromeda.’

‘Oh.’ I refused to be abashed. I’d learned this much in my few weeks here; Lady Tanith would be scathing whether I was apologetic or unabashed, and it was less painful to me if I just shrugged and let her sarcasm bounce off. ‘Nobody told me. Why?’

I heard Hugo give a little gasp, and when I looked towards him he was making little ‘cut throat’ mimes.

Lady Tanith stood up. For a moment I thought she might pour her coffee over my head. ‘Because,’ she enunciated, as though I were a very stupid child, ‘the twenty-first is the date on which darling Oswald died.’

I’d stopped being afraid of her, that was it. She needed me to find Oswald’s diaries; I couldn’t see anyone else being desperate enough for a job to stick around this haunted, wobbly place for more than a couple of days listening to her being rude, even if they did intend to marry her son. Besides, I did feel a bit sorry for her and her devotion to the deceased Oswald. She had clearly loved him very much and every time I thought of her solitary loyalty to the memory of a man who’d been dead half a century, I had a tiny heart-twang of pity.

I raised my eyebrows at Hugo. He pulled his mouth down sideways, stopped the mime and looked firmly down at his plate, where half a rasher of bacon and some egg stains showed that I had missed the start of breakfast by some margin.

‘I’m very sorry, Lady Tanith. I didn’t know,’ I said, but without the obsequiousness that I’d had when I first started here. ‘It would have been helpful if someone had informed me last night,’ I continued, still speaking like someone in a 1920’s drama.

Both she and Hugo had sat in the library yesterday evening. Hugo had been reading the paper, and Lady Tanith had kept her hawk-like stare trained on me the entire time. I think she wanted to make sure that, had I actually suddenly found Oswald’s diaries, I wasn’t going to announce the fact in front of her son. Either one of them could have mentioned this ‘eating together’ tradition, and I hoped I’d managed to inject the tiniest amount of sarcasm into my words to get this point over.

‘Well.’ Lady Tanith subsided in the face of incontrovertible fact. ‘We’ll say no more about it, but please bear it in mind for next month, Andromeda. If you are still with us, of course.’

I knew I was meant to take this as a rebuke, as a threat that she could fire me at any time. As I’d not only come to the conclusion that she wouldn’t , I’d also decided that I’d be only too delighted to be sacked, and I’d regard living in the draughty and rusty old bus again as an improvement, because at least it wasn’t haunted, I just smiled and sat down.

Hugo visibly relaxed and ate the rest of his bacon.

Nobody made any attempt to tell me where the food was or what I was meant to do, so I got up again and went to investigate the tureens. Lady Tanith began a conversation with Hugo which seemed so pointedly obscure that I knew I was meant to feel left out, but I was so enthused by the sight of more bacon, and eggs done three ways, plus a pile of toast that had been covered by a napkin to keep warm, a dish of butter and some crumpets, that I didn’t even bother to try listening in. It was something to do with the estate, I got that much.

The food was delicious. I’d endured two weeks of Mrs Compton’s random dinners, whatever cereal Hugo didn’t want and a vacuum flask of tea, so I dug in. Once I’d heaped my plate with bacon, sausage and toast and poured myself a cup of coffee, I sat down again, to find that Lady Tanith had stopped talking and was staring at me.

‘Are you going to eat all that?’

‘Yep,’ I said, with my mouth already full.

Hugo grinned at me. His hair looked as though it needed cutting; it was beginning to flop, but the unstructured look suited him and his incredible bone structure. I grinned back, around a sausage, and renewed my intention to marry him and put ground glass in Lady Tanith’s food.

‘A lady ,’ Lady Tanith continued, ‘should watch her weight. Elegance in all things, Andromeda.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Butter dripped down my chin. I wiped it on my hair towel.

‘I trust you will be joining us for the service of thanksgiving in the chapel this afternoon?’ she tried again, and this time I looked at her.

Lady Tanith was sipping her coffee delicately. She looked a little tired and I had that little twist of empathy for her again. Poor woman, still mourning her lost love after all this time and living in his house with all his things around her to try to feel close to him. Grief, I knew, could do strange things to people and it had obviously stuck Tanith in time, pinned to Templewood as it had been when Oswald had been alive. It really was dreadfully sad.

I knew there was no point in saying any of this to her. Lady Tanith was far too upper class to admit to any emotions, and I didn’t want to antagonise her, not when she might be my future mother-in-law. It was bad enough having Mrs Compton calling me names, I didn’t have that many people who cared whether I lived or died that I could rile one of the few who actually needed me. So I nodded.

‘Good.’ Lady Tanith stood up now. ‘I’m visiting Jasper this morning, Hugo. Any message?’

Hugo shook his head and Lady Tanith left the room, closing the door firmly behind her. I put more sausages on my plate and listened for sounds of her opening a door somewhere in the house to rising screams. They didn’t come and I had to assume that Jasper wasn’t chained up anywhere within earshot. Why didn’t he come to the family breakfast, if the twenty-first was so important?

‘Do you do this every twenty-first?’ I asked.

‘It keeps her happy,’ he replied.

I wanted to say ‘that’s happy? ’ but didn’t. She was his mother, over the top insane though she may be. ‘Your brother doesn’t come and join you?’

‘No.’ This was definitely tight-lipped and I saw Hugo narrow his eyes at the bacon still remaining on his place. Questions about the invisible Jasper obviously made Hugo uncomfortable.

‘Where’s the chapel?’ I asked, to change the subject.

‘Over there.’ He pointed with a corner of toast towards the window.

‘How far away?’

‘Oh, it’s still on the estate. We just don’t use it very often, because it’s inconvenient and none of us has had even the slightest interest in religion since we left pre-prep.’

‘But you go along with Oswald’s remembrance services.’

‘It doesn’t cost anything and it keeps Mother happy,’ Hugo repeated, putting his cup into the saucer. ‘Anyway. How are you, Andi? Did you sleep well?’

I remembered the disturbed night. The ghostly vision on the landing. ‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘I got up to use the bathroom and saw – well, I’m not sure what I saw. A ghost?’

Hugo didn’t seem surprised. ‘What did it look like?’

I tried to remember. Actual horror was what I could mostly recall. ‘Tall, blonde. Wearing a dress of some kind. I didn’t really look, to be honest, I was too scared.’

He nodded slowly and took a sip from his cup. ‘Her name was Marie. Oswald apparently used to host huge parties for the literati up from London. Everyone got really drunk and there was scandalous behaviour.’

I wondered if Oswald had held these parties simply to cover up his affair with Lady Tanith – what’s a little more ‘scandalous behaviour’ when everyone is up to it?

‘Marie was the “friend” of someone at one of the parties. Apparently she wandered off upstairs, went out onto the balcony very drunk, and it came away from the wall. She fell onto the path and died of a broken neck.’

So the ghost was real. I had no idea how to process that thought. I had seen a real, genuine ghost. Ghosts walked Templewood. Any fear I’d felt on that dark landing had gone now, replaced by a tremulous sympathy, and the prosaic way in which Hugo spoke about her death made me even less fearful. Whatever ghosts were, it was just a ‘thing’. Another weirdness in Templewood, where the oddnesses were stacked up so far that they almost reached the ceiling.

No wonder the slim, elegant Marie still walked the landing. I tried to imagine what she must have felt as she fell, and hoped she’d been too drunk to know what was happening. ‘That all sounds straight out of a standard ghost story,’ I said.

Hugo gave me a look I found impossible to interpret. I wondered if my levity had upset him; after all, this was his family home. Then he drank more tea and stood up. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘Like I said before, probably best if you don’t go out of your room after dark, if you’re worried about meeting ghosts. This place is riddled. Right. I have to go and do some work. I’m guessing you’ll be in the library? I’ll come and fetch you when it’s time to head over to the chapel. Oh, don’t worry, the service is very informal, a couple of hymns and a quick homily and we’re back in time for high tea. Mrs Compton always puts on a good spread on the twenty-first.’

‘ Every twenty-first?’ I buttered another crumpet. If it was going to be a whole month before we got food like this again, then I was going to stock up while I could. ‘You have a memorial service every month?’

Hugo came back into the room and closed the door again. ‘My mother,’ he began, and gazed at the ceiling for inspiration. ‘My mother was devoted to Oswald.’

I remembered Lady Tanith’s shining face when she spoke about him, and the twinge of sympathy I felt for her plight. ‘But wasn’t he her father-in-law or something?’

‘Yes. And forty years older than her, which was why she and my father had quite an age-gap relationship. But she admired Oswald’s writing and he – well, he drew inspiration from her, according to Mother.’

I’m not sure that’s all he got from her , I was too full of crumpet to say. The thought of Lady Tanith loosening her stays sufficiently to have wild, abandoned sex, and the grim Oswald letting go enough to be any good at it, really upset my world view.

‘She was so devastated when he died, Mrs Compton told me in strictest confidence that they thought they might have to have her put away.’

‘Well, it’s never too late,’ I said cheerily.

‘I’m sorry?’

She could be your mother-in-law… ‘I meant, it’s never too late to celebrate someone’s life,’ I said quickly. ‘So I suppose having memorial services for fifty years after someone has died is…’ I tailed off. There wasn’t a single spin I could put on it that didn’t make Lady Tanith sound unhinged.

‘It’s all we’ve ever known,’ Hugo said simply. ‘The twenty-first is Oswald Day. Not so bad for me, but tough on Jasper. His birthday is the twenty-first of November; I don’t think he ever had a birthday celebrated on the actual day as it’s been taken up by family meals and then the service in the chapel.’

I felt a momentary sympathy for the as-yet-unseen Jasper. ‘What does your brother do now? If he’s renounced the estate?’

‘He’s a designer,’ Hugo said vaguely. ‘Anyway. Better pop.’

I waved him off and filled my pockets with toast-and-bacon sandwiches to take to the library. I had really begun to wonder about the absent Jasper. Surely the son of the house, even one who had renounced his birthright, might be expected to be around sometimes? If the twenty-first was important to Tanith, why did her eldest son not pop over, for old times’ sake?

The memory of those footsteps in the attic plucked gently at the back of my brain and I shivered. No. It was birds, that was all. Birds. Definitely.

With the reassurance of a proper lunch warm and bacon-scented in my hand, I headed back to work.