Chapter Ten 1893
Chapter Ten
Tout Hill House was a handsome, symmetrical Georgian building.
It had huge sash windows that poured in light; high ceilings and square, airy rooms. Ralph had secured it the moment Theo agreed to marry him – he’d had his eye on it for months.
Tout Hill was a peaceful lane on the north-western edge of Shaftesbury, a ten-minute walk from the Westminster Memorial Hospital, so Ralph could return home for the midday meal – patients and emergencies allowing.
Uphill on the way to work, downhill on the way home.
‘Just as it should be,’ he said. ‘And I won’t have to go all day without kissing you, because that’ – he held her face in his hands – ‘would be unbearable.’
The house was let unfurnished, apart from a few huge pieces like the china cabinet in the pantry and the canopied bed in the master bedroom.
Ralph had been living in quarters at the hospital until then, so had few things.
The pieces of furniture they did possess scattered to the four corners of the house and apparently vanished.
‘Where does one go to get furniture?’ Theo asked. She had no idea – nothing new had ever arrived at Hallewell House; the things that were there had been there for centuries, and were only ever repaired, or recategorised from good to back.
‘On our income, we shall go to the sale room,’ Ralph told her. ‘And might we beg a few pieces from your mother? The more we spend on furnishings, the less we shall have to spend on our honeymoon. What say you to a tour of Italy?’
‘I say it would be wonderful.’
‘Anywhere you wish to go – except, perhaps, Mesopotamia. I’d like us to have comfortable beds and excellent food, rather than sandflies and bandits.’
Theo smiled. ‘All right.’
Ralph looked around with an air of approval.
‘There’s something rather fine about being the master of Tout Hill House on Tout Hill, isn’t there?
’ he said. ‘You were Theodora Hallewell of Hallewell House, and now you are Mrs Anscombe of Tout Hill House, Tout Hill. A pity we are mere tenants, and can’t change it to Anscombe House. ’
Theo missed her old name, which felt like who she really was; and she found the first few nights there deeply unsettling.
She’d never before slept anywhere other than in her old room, and every strange sound roused her, from the rumble of carts in the street to the differently pitched squeak of the doors.
For a full week she woke bewildered, and had to wait to remember where she was.
For a fortnight she turned right at the bottom of the stairs, as she always had at home, even though that was no longer the way to the breakfast room.
The servants established themselves far more quickly.
Mrs Meredith, who’d been Ralph’s housekeeper at the hospital, jumped at the chance to run a private home instead, and soon took to presenting Theo with firm suggestions rather than open-ended questions on the topics of menus, parlour maids, and the sending out of laundry.
Theo sensed her impatience, which bordered on disapproval; but after nineteen years of her mother’s constant correction it hardly touched her.
She was grateful to have Mrs Meredith take the reins.
Compared to the grounds of Hallewell House, their new garden was small.
It stepped down behind the house in two deep tiers; parallel rectangles of lawn surrounded by flowerbeds, with matching ornamental bird baths in the centre of each.
There were apple trees, and an orangery against the wall where a grapevine and tomato plants grew.
The gardener came with the house: Seth Litton, an elderly man as strong and weathered as an oak, who’d been there forty years.
Theo took to him at once. Whenever she asked him something he would look up, his eyes far away, and she’d have to wait for the answer to swim up from the depths of him.
His calm eased her sudden flurries of anxiety.
From the garden, and even more so from the oriel window of the master bedroom, there was a wide view westwards, from the Blackmore Vale to the coaches and carts on Sherborne Causeway.
The hill between them and Shaftesbury prevented any view of the town, or of the hospital, but Theo wouldn’t have wanted one.
It would always be the place where Missy had died; where her husband had battled to save her – and lost. Sometimes, it struck Theo to realise that that Dr Anscombe was the same one she’d married.
In her memory, they seemed like two different people.
Once Ralph had gone to work, Theo’s days were long.
She had no friends in Shaftesbury, and few people to write to, so she wrote long letters to her mother, and to Timothy Crudge.
Then she either read or haunted the echoing rooms of her new home, trailing her fingers along the dado rails and staring for long spells from each window.
She and Ralph had married in St Mary’s, in West End, some six months after Theo had pushed the ruby ring on to her finger to try it out.
To see how it felt to have made the decision.
It had given her no firm answers, but with each day that passed after that, each day nearer to her escape from Hallewell, she’d felt better.
She’d let Diana organise the whole thing, standing firm only on Uncle Crudge’s invitation, and on her wedding dress.
It was not to be white, or ivory, as had become the fashion since the Queen’s wedding.
Diana protested but Theo wouldn’t budge, and in the end they opted for a lavender-blue velvet, trimmed with fur since it was a winter wedding.
Theo didn’t explain her insistence. She had always pictured a dress the starry white of wood anemones, but it belonged at a different wedding, to a different bridegroom.
In their marriage portrait, Ralph wasn’t smiling – it was too hard to sustain a smile for the length of an exposure without looking strained – but his expression was one of clear and complete contentment. Theo wore almost no expression at all. Her eyes had a faraway look.
What she loved first and best about married life was not having to eat her breakfast with strangers.
To constantly meet and converse with, inform and defer to, strangers.
There was more freedom in it than even she had anticipated.
For the first time in her life, her thoughts, her company, and her time were her own.
And there were no memories anywhere. There was no castle.
No view of the Meriwethers’ house, or St Agnes’s, or the spring where she’d finally scuttled her dreams. She had Audrey, and she had Ralph; she had the rest of her life ahead of her, and she was determined to look forwards.
Diana gazed about in horror when she next came to visit.
‘What on earth have you been doing, Theo? The place is like a tomb!’
‘I did write to you that we have few things, as yet.’
‘But weeks have gone by!’
‘Ralph wondered . . . that is, we wanted to ask whether there was anything you could spare from home?’
Diana didn’t need to be asked twice. She swept from room to room, sizing up the windows and the space; tutting at the wallpaper and the bare floors.
‘There’s the green brocade settle in the music room – it has always been too big for it. And there are other things I can assemble, I’m sure. But first you need carpets, and wallpaper, and . . .’ She waved a hand at the austerity. ‘Some pictures! Really, Theo, I do despair of you, at times.’
‘Yes, Mama. I’d gathered that.’
Diana and Ralph agreed a budget between them, and soon after that things started to arrive.
Carpets from the Orient, via a dealer in Yeovil; fashionable wallpaper in wide stripes of green, or patterned with climbing vines; pictures for every wall, ceramics for every surface.
More chairs than they could ever hope to sit upon.
For weeks, crates and boxes turned up unexpectedly, for Theo to open with trepidation: another ugly lamp with a tangerine glass shade; figurines of shepherdesses and spaniel dogs; painted fire screens, and bamboo fans from French Indo-China.
A small bust of the Queen, carved from translucent marble the exact colour, Theo couldn’t help noticing, of mucus.
As the clutter piled up, the rooms seemed to shrink, and Theo realised that the simplicity of it half empty had been far more to her taste. It was too late, though, and Ralph seemed delighted.
She kept one room that was just for her: a small sitting room with almost nothing in it, just a damask chaise longue, a writing desk, and a sturdy bookshelf full of novels, journals and travelogues.
One day she found Audrey in there, staring at the spines, tapping her fingernails against the fabric and hide.
Audrey jumped back. ‘Oh! Beg your pardon, miss!’
She was supposed to call Theo madam now that she was married, but it wouldn’t stick. Ralph had taken to correcting her.
‘It’s all right,’ Theo said. ‘Did you want to borrow a book? You’d be welcome to.’
‘No, thank you, miss. I was just wondering . . . about books, I suppose. How you can spend so many hours staring at one the way you do, quite content.’
‘Well, haven’t you ever been carried away by a story?’ Theo asked.
Audrey shook her head.
‘No? Or . . . travelled to a place you might never see in person, just by reading and imagining?’
‘No, miss.’
In the pause that followed, Theo realised that Audrey meant never. That she had never been told a story, nor read one for herself.
‘Audrey . . . did anyone ever teach you how to read?’
Audrey dropped her chin, as if shamed.
‘No, miss. Not much call for it where I was before.’
‘Well, this is wonderful.’ Theo smiled.
Audrey looked up in puzzlement. ‘Why’s that, miss?’
‘Because I can teach you, of course; it will speed us through the winter, and give me a way to repay some of the . . . the help you have given me, since you came.’