Happily Ever After

Chapter 12

12

ILLYRIA – TWELFTH NIGHT, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Lady Tanith was looking up at Oswald’s portrait when we came in. Without the curtains, the sun shone fully on his countenance and I could see that he must have been painted at about the age of forty or so. He looked like a thoughtful older man with a face only now starting to feel the effects of gravity, his hair had traces of grey at the swept-back temples but was still mostly the same dark shade as his grandson, and his back was erect.

Lady Tanith was murmuring sweet nothings to the painted visage and gently stroking the edge of his frame.

‘How old was Oswald? When he died, I mean,’ I asked casually, flipping the computer back on again carefully where she could see, so that she’d know I now turned it off when I wasn’t in the room. Hopefully talking about Oswald would distract her from my twelve-minute lunch hour overrun and I could learn something more about him. Any information which might lead me to the diaries would be welcome.

Lady Tanith pointed to a small brass plaque set into the bottom of the frame. ‘Oswald Matcham Dawe,’ it said. ‘19 January 1912 – 21 February 1975.’

‘Sixty-three? No age at all.’ I sat down.

‘Taken too soon,’ Lady Tanith sniffed. ‘In his prime.’

‘How old was he when this portrait was painted?’

She gave me a narrow-eyed look as though she suspected me of some kind of wicked calculation. ‘Forty-seven. He was very well preserved. Very active, for his age. Of course, he didn’t meet me until later. I came to the house in 1969, as companion to Caroline, his wife.’

‘That must have been?—’

‘We fell for one another instantly,’ Lady Tanith went on, talking over the top of me. ‘It was a true meeting of minds. We understood one another without saying a word.’

‘Lucky old him,’ I muttered into my collar. I was now deeply regretting getting her on the subject of Ozzie. It wasn’t going to lead me to the whereabouts of the diaries, it was going to lead to more borderline salacious details about their relationship. Which I so did not want to hear.

‘But, of course, Caroline was so frail, so dependent, and Oswald was such a gentleman. She needed him so utterly.’ Lady Tanith gazed up at Oswald’s face again, her tone softened. ‘I used to sit with him in this library, while he wrote his poetry and his novels, and suggest ideas to him.’ She stroked the frame again. ‘He was always so grateful.’

I had a horrible mental flash of a very young Tanith ‘suggesting ideas’ to an older man with a frail wife and, again, hoped that none of those ideas had come to fruition on this table. I found I was wiping it with my sleeve, just in case. The thought that Lady Tanith might have hastened Caroline’s departure from this veil of tears to get Oswald all to herself struck me suddenly and horrifically.

‘How did Caroline die?’ I asked tentatively, a little worried that a fall down the stairs or other nasty ‘accident’ might be the next thing I had to worry about.

‘She’d been ill for a long time,’ Lady Tanith said, still wearing the expression of misty fondness that she always adopted when staring at Oswald’s picture. ‘It was a release at the end.’

That did not answer my question.

‘I had the plaque with the dates put onto the portrait, after he… passed.’ Lady Tanith started stroking the plaque now. ‘So that nobody could forget. Oh,’ she sighed. ‘He was a genius, Andromeda. A genius. The world will never see his like again.’

A silence fell. I didn’t feel that I could go and get another pile of books, not whilst she was having misty remembrances.

‘So, you married his son?’ I tried to bring her back a little more into the here and now.

‘Mmm? Oh, Richard, yes. Of course, he was a lot older than me, but, with Oswald gone – it kept me close to the family.’

I felt a pang of sympathy for poor Richard, who seemed to have been an also-ran to his own father. I wondered if Lady Tanith had ever loved him, or even liked him, or whether she’d only married him because of his father.

‘Then, of course, the boys came along and Richard died.’ She turned away from the portrait now. ‘But now I feel the time is right to find and publish Oswald’s diaries, to let the world know what lay behind his genius and what we meant to one another. He idolised me, you know. Idolised. Far more so than Richard ever did, but the boys are old enough now to learn the truth. Edited, of course. I’d prefer them to think of their grandfather as the creative talent he was, without stressing the importance of my own contributions.’

I held my breath for a minute, in case any great revelations were about to appear about the parentage of her sons, but then I realised that Oswald had been dead for some while before they were born and I was trying to force a book narrative onto real life. Of course her father-in-law wouldn’t be the father of her children, that wasn’t how real life worked. That sort of relationship belonged to the concupiscent world of daytime television and the tabloid press, not Lady Tanith’s world. Jay was right. Life was messy and didn’t have proper endings.

‘Caroline had the portrait commissioned as a birthday present,’ Lady Tanith carried on. Even spreadsheets were starting to look appealing now. ‘Oswald asked to have it hung in here; the library was very much his space, you see.’

And of course he’d have wanted a gigantic version of his own face staring at him every time he sat down for a read or to write, I thought, and wondered if Caroline had been as off the wall as Lady Tanith was, and whether that had been Oswald’s ‘type’.

‘It’s very…’ I tried to think of a word. Big wouldn’t do. Neither would ominous, oppressive, egocentric or off-putting. ‘Powerful,’ I settled on.

Lady Tanith nodded. ‘It was painted by someone quite famous. Spencer, possibly. Caroline did tell me but I really don’t remember.’ The dismissive way she said this told me an awful lot about how she’d felt about Oswald’s wife. Maybe Lady Tanith really had hastened Caroline’s end. Then I remembered what Hugo had told me, about this being Caroline’s family home and Oswald ‘marrying in’ and wondered whether Lady Tanith had a big chip on her shoulder about it. ‘But I don’t know why we’re talking about dear Oswald. You are supposed to be sorting my books.’

I couldn’t say ‘well, bugger off and let me get on with it, then,’ so I just raised my eyebrows, which she couldn’t see, and opened a new sheet on the screen.

‘The stringing of the fencing wire

Hangs tighter than the player’s lyre.

Whilst all around the pigeons flock,

And with their calls, the humans mock.’

‘That was one of Oswald’s verses. It’s from a poem he called “Party on the Estate Lawn”. I know all his work by heart, obviously.’

I stopped, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. That had to be the worst piece of poetry I thought I’d ever heard, but I couldn’t say so. ‘Are his published books in here?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t come across one yet.’

‘Oh.’ Lady Tanith looked around vaguely at the shelves. ‘They’re all in the house somewhere. He wrote fifteen novels and three collections of poetry, all privately printed, of course. He was far too much of a gentleman to deal with editors and all that nastiness.’

I was beginning to utterly loathe Oswald Bloody Dawe now. ‘Interesting,’ I said, half-heartedly. ‘I’m sure I’ll come across his books at some point.’ And then burn them, if that poem was a typical example of his work, for the good of mankind.

‘But the diaries .’ Lady Tanith lowered her voice. ‘The diaries are what you’re really here for, Andromeda. Please, do try to find them. I feel they could be such an important contribution to the world of literature, a true historic voyage into the working mind of a creative genius.’

But they weren’t here, were they? For the look of it, and because Lady Tanith was watching me expectantly, I fetched another armful of books from the nearby shelf and plonked them down on the table with a resulting puff of dust. I also peered into the gap the books had left, in case the pile of diaries was in there, double stacked and waiting. They weren’t.

I wanted to tell Lady Tanith what Jay had told me. Life isn’t like the books. Being brought into the house to find the diaries didn’t mean that I was going to find the diaries. Find the diaries, marry her son, wait for her to die and then open the house as a hotel or sell up and move to somewhere where Hugo could wear his beautiful dresses all day. Wasn’t that how the story was shaping up?

The library door opened and Hugo put his head through the gap. ‘Ah, you’re back,’ he said, seeing me sitting. ‘I just wanted to ask…’ Then he caught sight of his mother, still frozen in an attitude of adoration more commonly seen in religious iconography. ‘Oh! Mother, you’re here too.’

‘Clearly. You sound surprised, Hugo. This is my house.’

I watched Hugo take a deep breath. He’d obviously nearly blurted something out that couldn’t be said in the vicinity of his mother, and was now realising that my knowing his clothing secret was going to mean a whole other level of checking before he spoke. Maybe it had just been less confusing when nobody knew and ‘keep quiet’ had been the order of the day.

‘I, err… I just wanted to ask if you’d seen The Master.’ Hugo switched mental gears and went on. ‘I didn’t want him to be still shut into your bedroom.’

As Hugo had watched the cat saunter from my room and follow us down the stairs earlier, this was quite an inspired lie. But then, I told myself, he’d probably had quite a lot of practice at lying about things.

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘He’s here, under the table.’

‘Oh. Good. I was worried about what he might do on your bed, if he was shut in there for most of the day.’ Hugo’s eyes were wary, fixed on me with a kind of wounded begging. Did he really think I’d gone straight to his mother to pour out his cross-dressing secrets? Was that how he saw me?

‘The Master and I are going for tea now.’ Lady Tanith clicked her fingers in the region of my knees. ‘And possibly an early night. I am feeling a little overwrought just now.’ She clicked her fingers again but the cat resolutely refused to appear. He was sitting in the darkness beneath the desk, his blue eyes narrowed in a cat smile, and the tip of his tail twitching.

Tanith made a ‘tch’ sound, as though she suspected me of having the cat strapped to my leg, and, with a last moue of affection directed towards Oswald’s gigantic face, stalked out.

As soon as the door closed, Hugo let out a long breath. ‘Did you tell her?’

‘No, Hugo, of course I didn’t tell her. I already said I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

There was a look on his handsome, high-cheekboned face, which told me he wasn’t entirely sure, and that he was beginning to realise that someone else knowing his secret wasn’t quite as much fun as he’d first thought. It wasn’t all whispered comparisons of fabric or my opinion of the hang of a particular gown. It was having to trust another person. And he wasn’t completely sure that he could or ever would.

At that point, I knew I could never marry Hugo.

‘I’m sorry, of course you wouldn’t.’ He said it smoothly, confidently, but just too late. I’d seen the doubt.

‘Anyway. What did you want to ask me? Now that your mother has gone?’

Hugo shook his head. That moment of fear, that second of thinking that I’d gone straight to his mother with his secret, had clearly impacted harder than he’d realised it would. ‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh. OK.’ Trying to pretend that I hadn’t seen or understood, I flipped open the first book on my pile and ran my finger down the title page to find the publication date.

Over near the portrait, Hugo sighed and draped himself over the back of a chair. ‘I didn’t realise,’ he said wearily. ‘You knowing. It means I’ve got to be more careful.’

I wanted to tell him not to worry, that his mother wouldn’t always be around. That one day she’d be gone and he’d be free to live his life wearing all of the dresses. But she was still his mother, and it seemed a bit tactless to predict her demise.

‘I’m beginning to understand Jasper a little better now,’ Hugo went on, still in full drape situation. ‘He saw freedom beckoning and he went. When I talked to you about… about the dresses and everything else, I felt a little less isolated, if you see what I mean. As though someone understood, and I’ve never had that before. I presume that my brother wanted the same understanding and he was never going to find it here.’

‘You could go too,’ I suggested.

Hugo unfurled like a weary umbrella. ‘No. You don’t get it, Andi. There isn’t another life out there waiting for me. This, Templewood, it’s the only life I know and I’m afraid I’m stuck with it. What is there for me out there in the world? I’ve no friends, no qualifications apart from rowing for my house at school, and I don’t think there are many jobs out there for men with a lot of upper body strength but no A levels.’

I couldn’t refute that, having taken the only job I’d been able to find for a woman without even upper body strength.

‘Anyway.’ Hugo’s voice was a little stronger now and he seemed to have shaken off the doldrums. ‘I wanted to ask you if you thought I should try the Elizabeth Taylor dress tonight. I mean, now you know, I don’t have to stick to the Marie outfit in case you see me, and it might be a good chance to make sure that the hem doesn’t hang too high. It’s slightly too small, but I can do what I do with the other dresses that don’t quite fit and leave the zip down. It’s fine if I put a stole or a shrug over the top so you can’t see it’s not done all the way up. I thought I might team it with the blue sandals?’

I nodded. ‘Why not? Although the heels on those might be a bit high? For the length?’

‘Mmm. Maybe I should stick to the kitten heels.’ Hugo lapsed into thought for a moment before dragging himself back to the matter in hand. ‘But, Mother being here, I’m always going to have to check, aren’t I? Before I say anything, just in case she overhears. I never had to worry before, when I couldn’t say anything.’

‘What did Jasper do?’ I asked, resigning myself to absolutely never getting this library catalogued. As soon as I felt I was making any inroads, another drama crept its way out of the woodwork. ‘To get away, I mean.’

‘I don’t… look. We don’t talk about Jasper.’

I remembered that I’d thought Jasper might have been being held captive in the house. It had been less frightening to think of him as the cause of those mysterious noises, rather than ghosts but that whole train of thought now sounded ridiculously overwrought and dramatic. There were no ghosts, only sadness and Hugo’s ephemeral longing for freedom. ‘Your mother does. And she visits him. Where does he live, the estate village? So he’s given up his birthright, but he still lives close by; it can’t really be family rift territory, surely?’

My thoughts about the mysterious Jasper were beginning to form into something uncomfortable again.

‘Oh, all right.’ Hugo swung around now and perched himself on the desk beside me. ‘Look, Jazz is gay. He’s always known that he wasn’t going to marry a nice girl and do the decent thing by the estate, produce the next generation and all that, so he had to come out and tell Mother that he didn’t want to inherit. I think’ – he bent forwards a little so that he could see my face – ‘you can appreciate the amount of silent reprobation that went on in this house after that little explosion was detonated.’

‘She clearly got over it.’

‘She’s had a while. Jazz dropped the bombshell when he was twenty-two. I’m nine years younger, so I was thirteen when it happened. Suddenly, all Mother’s focus switched to me. There I am, adolescent, just starting to discover that actually I look damned good in velvet, and I’m being groomed to take over the estate while my brother buggers off to live a life of splendid isolation and take up a course in design.’ A deep breath. ‘So, yes, I fully understand you resenting your sister for being able to live a life that you feel you’ve been denied.’

The uncomfortable feeling was intensifying. It had become a niggle that I couldn’t fully explore, like having an itch in that part of your back that you can’t reach, and you can’t wait for everyone to leave you alone so that you can press yourself up against a doorframe and have a good scratch.

‘But you’re going to sell the estate anyway.’ I tried to ignore my thoughts and focus on Hugo’s distress. ‘So you get what you want, in the end.’

He jumped up. ‘It could be years though. Jazz has had his own way since 2003! Twenty-two years of being able to live the life he wants, while I’m here with Mother! And if I so much as mention selling the estate, then she’ll dash off to the solicitor and get everything changed to an entailment or some kind of trust that means I physically can’t sell, and I’ll be doomed to living here until I die.’

‘At least you’ll have a roof over your head,’ I said, somewhat sarcastically. ‘And it will be all yours. I can either share a bus with my parents – who can’t or won’t get something more comfortable, because the bus has become the star of the show, or move into my sister’s guest suite and have the care of her hyperactive children thrust at me, to help cover my keep. I suppose there’s a very slim chance that I might, somehow, be able to find a job that will take someone with no qualifications or experience and yet, miraculously, pays enough to rent somewhere to live and pay my bills, but that’s pretty unlikely. You can swan around in your lovely house, wearing all the velvet you want, and I’ll still be the dependent unmarried daughter with no life!’

Hugo blinked at me. ‘We’d both be unhappy, then.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Or, we could go along with my mother’s intentions. Marry, do up the house, sell, travel.’ He looked half-hopeful.

‘Are you proposing to me, Hugo?’

I’d injected just the right amount of jocularity into my tone, I saw it in his eyes. They stopped looking worried and gained a little more twinkle. ‘No. You don’t need to say anything, Andi, it’s fine. I know the whole’ – he made ‘flary dress’ motions with his hands along his body – ‘isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK. Being my friend is enough. Although, if you really need me to marry you and save you from whatever, we could do that too.’

I shook my head. ‘No. That only works in stories, Hugo. It’s a lovely thought, but we’d resent one another and it would stop you from finding someone who might absolutely adore having a man who looks better than they do in a frock.’

‘Do they exist?’

‘I’m sure they do. A little bit outside my area of expertise, but they must.’

‘And you really won’t say anything to Mother?’ Hugo looked happier again now. He began to drift towards the door.

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ I grinned at him.

‘And you won’t let on that you know about Jazz? Mother has just about come round to him after some truly dreadful years, but she’s not happy about it.’

I sighed. ‘Hugo, I don’t want to incur your mother’s wrath in any way that I may not currently be incurring it. I’m going to keep my head down, find…’ Oops, nearly. So many people were keeping so much from one another that I’d almost forgotten that I was one of them. ‘Finish cataloguing these books, and then go. To whatever life might offer me.’

Hugo flittered his fingers at me in farewell and closed the door behind him. I collapsed across the desk and keyboard in a slump that brought the cat out from under my legs, with a chirrup of complaint.

Books had made life and love sound simple . Even fun . Some of my more up-to-date reading had been cute romantic comedies, where, despite misunderstandings and grim secrets, everything worked out happily and the end was telegraphed right from the beginning.

According to books, I had to marry Hugo. But absolutely none of my reading, classic or modern, had mentioned what to do when narrative causality meets the hero who just isn’t attractive to the heroine, and vice versa. Or did my life story switch tracks – become a marriage of convenience? Hugo and I marrying to save him from discovery and me from the life I was currently contemplating? I somehow doubted that I was going to undergo an epiphany and discover that I really could find him sexually desirable in a dress and heels, and I really didn’t think that it would be fair to ask him to renounce the silk and velvet, that entire collection he had hanging upstairs in the locked room. It was part of who he was and my lack of attraction to it was my problem, not his.

The Master chirruped again and came around to jump up onto my lap, four tiny paws supporting his bulky body so that all his weight was concentrated on my leg in those four points of contact. He stared into my face, his blue eyes very bright in the burnished brown of his face and his pale coat shedding noticeable hairs all down my front.

Without thinking I began to stroke him, incurring a deep, rumbling purr and a stomp that felt as though it was bruising every inch of my thighs. ‘This is too complicated for me, puss,’ I muttered. ‘What I suppose would be the dark moment in the story of my life. I’m not getting anywhere with the diary-finding, I’m not going to marry Hugo. I guess I should just admit that I’m wasting my time here. Less of a denouement and more of an intercession.’

A tiny brown nose raised and shoved itself into my eye. The purr intensified as I blinked my way clear and reared my head away from the contact, and a spaghetti-slim tail, seemingly with a life independent of its wearer, coiled around my wrist.

‘You can stop that,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you in the first place, Lady Tanith would have sent me back home straight away.’

Purr purr. Stomp stomp. Then, as though annoyed by my lack of any follow-up actions, The Master sprang down off my lap and strolled off to sit underneath Oswald’s portrait, where he bent himself into a shape any acrobat would be proud of and began licking his back end.

I shook my head at him and went back to stare at my spreadsheet, but that little itch in the back of my brain flared into life again when it had nothing to distract it.

Hugo’s brother. Who lived on the estate. Jasper.

They call me Jay.

No. Surely not.

I only live over there, in the estate village.

Please God, no.

He’s a designer.

Could that design be – garden design?

Gay .

A little harder to be exact about, but that tattoo on the inside of his wrist? That tiny bunch of flowers with the rainbow coiled around it that sprang from the cuff of his dreadful gardening clothes? His reticence, his maintaining that life wasn’t like the books, that it was heartbreak and no happy ending?

Oh God.

I mentally audited all my conversations with Jay, just in case I’d said something horribly incriminating about Hugo or Lady Tanith but couldn’t remember him recoiling in shock at anything. In fact, hadn’t he been the one to be dismissive of them both as bonkers?

But then, if Lady Tanith had reacted badly to his renouncing the estate – and Lady Tanith’s normal behaviour left me in no doubt that her ‘reacting badly’ wasn’t going to mean that she simply took to her bed with a headache – then Jasper probably was under no illusions about her bonkersness.

I groaned, dropping my forehead to rest on the desk. Right. Of course. Of course.

Then I straightened up. It didn’t matter. Jay had been nothing but pleasant and friendly to me; his being Hugo’s brother shouldn’t matter at all. It wasn’t my fault that I hadn’t picked up on it – there was no strong family resemblance although both were dark haired and eyed. Hugo had the fine build and slender frame of their mother whilst Jay was rangier and more muscly – I hit my head against the desk again. Of course he was! He dug flowerbeds and cut bits off trees all day! And single – well, he was hardly going to flaunt a partner who may well have to contend with Lady Tanith, was he? She was rude enough to me, and I wasn’t stuck here for any reason other than financial; any poor bloke unfortunate enough to be here for love would probably be put through the metaphorical mincer on a weekly basis.

Damn it, I’d liked him!

OK, so the only sensible course of action was to catalogue the books. Make increasingly feeble and doomed attempts to find Oswald’s seemingly non-existent diaries. Try to scrape together enough money and a decent-enough reference, and perhaps I could – what? Find myself a job that didn’t ask for qualifications, in a town small and cheap enough to rent a room in a shared house? Well, it wasn’t totally impossible. People did it. They survived.

I had to realise that life wasn’t like the books, that there was no gorgeous man, heir to a ready-made way of life, willing to sweep me off my feet and take me away. There were no ghosts walking the corridors of a down-at-heel mansion, waiting for me to discover their secret, avenge their murder and banish their spirit.

That, as Jay had said, sometimes life was just heartbreak, getting up, going to work and going to bed. No narrative, no fabulous adventures. Just life.

At this rate, I wouldn’t even get a go at the heartbreak bit.