Chapter 6
Six
That evening, the cottage felt stifling. Christina had lit the fire when she got home at four o’clock, and now its heat layered over that of the Aga.
Outside, the rain came sideways off the sea, slapping the windows in soft, relentless sheets, a grey, insistent tapping that underscored the silence, though she could still hear the persistent pit pat of the buckets filling with water.
Elspeth stood at the bottom of the stairs, pink-nosed and tight-lipped. Her schoolbag bumped against her leg. ‘I’m going up to do homework,’ she said. The words came out too brightly, too fast – like someone trying to sound normal after crying in the car.
Christina looked up from her screen and smiled at her child. ‘Everything okay love?’
Elspeth gave a stiff little shrug and turned away, her plait swinging.
Something wasn’t right. Should she push?
But Elspeth hadn’t invited it, and perhaps it was better not to create conflict unnecessarily.
‘Smart girls bend, stupid ones break,’ had been her mother’s mantra, and maybe there was something in that.
Even though Dee had done a lot of bending in her life and had never been exactly happy.
‘Shout if you want anything to eat,’ said Christina.
The click of a bedroom door upstairs fell like a full stop.
Christina turned back to her laptop, where a spreadsheet blinked at her accusingly. She was paying bills; the cursor hovered over a pending payment to the school. Another four-figure term fee, despite Elspeth’s drama scholarship which covered half the usual fees.
She ran a hand through her hair. She and Hamish used to share the family admin equally.
He still insisted on making the beds – a skill from boarding school – priding himself on crisp hospital borders; he drove Elspeth everywhere and made himself useful with housework – albeit at a glacial pace – but with more guest lectureships, sharing the load had become impractical.
She suspected Hamish was grateful for the excuse to avoid the twenty-first century and immerse himself in his first love: everything that touched the Tudor world.
Behind her came a faint thump: Hamish had knocked something over in the living room.
She didn’t turn, instead pressing ‘Confirm Payment’.
Hamish emerged from the living room carrying a teacup balanced precariously on top of a teetering stack of books, each one bristling with scraps of newspaper like dispatches jutting from a general’s campaign journal.
‘Do you think Elspeth has inherited your organisational gifts?’ he asked, placing the teacup down beside her with a mild slosh. ‘She’s already annotated her history textbook in three colours. One of them sparkly. I never annotated anything as a child. I simply memorised.’
‘You also thought Edward VI was a werewolf until you were thirteen.’
‘That was speculative history,’ he said, straightening his stoop. ‘There were rumours. And the boy had a suspicious pallor.’
Christina’s mouth twitched but didn’t make it into a smile.
Hamish hovered a moment longer, then circled the table and slumped into the chair opposite hers, one hand running through his thick greying curls. He smelled of damp wool and that vaguely ecclesiastical scent of old books.
She stared at her laptop screen, which now showed a cheerful message:
Thank you for your payment.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The modern yoke.’
As if Hamish would know; he’d never made an online transfer. Hamish frowned. ‘But does it have to be this . . . daily grappling? Passwords and little codes on your phone? It’s all very Orwellian.’
‘Hamish, it’s online banking, not a dystopia.’
He looked mildly startled by her tone, as if he’d wandered into the wrong lecture hall.
‘She’s doing very well, isn’t she?’ he said, abruptly changing tack. ‘At school. I mean. She’s playing the lead role in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and she’s got a part in Macbeth.’
‘And Ratty in The Wind in the Willows – she sings a solo in that.’
He scratched his temple. ‘Theatrical bloodlines, perhaps. At uni, you played Juliet to my Mercutio.’
‘You walked off halfway through Act II to find a sandwich.’
‘It was a very long production.’
Christina shut the laptop with a quiet snap.
She felt oddly numb, as if their careful, clipped exchange had frozen something inside her.
She desperately missed his love. Christina rose, took the kettle to the sink, filled it, and lifted the lid on the hotplate.
While the kettle boiled, her eyes dropped to the worn floorboards.
That was the spot where Hamish had shown how much he loved her, the first night Elspeth boarded at school, just over two years ago.
After dropping Elspeth off, Christina had curled up next to the aga, listless.
Then Hamish had arrived, his arms full of blankets and a bottle of wine.
They’d made love right here on the kitchen floor, the warmth of the Aga around them, then lain together, cuddling in the moonlight.
Hamish snapped her out of her thoughts. ‘What’s up? You’ve been . . . quiet lately.’
She turned, dried her hands on a tea towel, then folded it with unnecessary care. ‘Have I?’
‘Well. Yes.’
She didn’t answer. The kettle began to build a quiet hiss, like a warning. ‘I’m popping out later; said I’d meet Penelope for a drink.’
‘How lovely. Do give my regards to dear Penny.’ His tone was flat, almost bored, but something in the way he said ‘dear Penny’ made her pause.
‘I will,’ Christina said slowly, studying his profile. ‘She often talks about you.’
‘Does she?’ He glanced up, and there was something in his eyes – amusement? Regret? ‘How terribly kind.’
Christina felt a flutter of unease. Lady Penelope was beautiful, accomplished and lived in her inherited manor house; and she’d known Hamish since childhood.
Summer parties at their parents’ houses, shooting weekends in Scotland.
She knew he’d dated Penelope before he went to university, but it had never bothered her before.
The thought arrived fully formed, terrible and plausible.
Wasn’t that how these things worked in his world?
Discreet affairs, separate lives running in parallel?
Somehow, she couldn’t believe that however bad things got, loyal Hamish would ever be unfaithful, but was she being na?ve?
She remembered her mother’s warning when she’d told Dee she was engaged to Hamish, ‘Is that wise luv? A Pemberton? Aristocratic marriages aren’t like ours, hen. ’
A memory surfaced, sharp and unwelcome. A few days before Hamish proposed. She’d been searching for him in the east wing of Brambleton Manor. Lost – the house had forty-seven rooms – she had found herself outside Lady Flora’s study. The door was ajar.
‘—simply must accept it, Hamish.’ Her mother-in-law’s voice, crisp and commanding. ‘She’s pregnant. I can tell. You’ll marry her and that’s the end of it.’
Christina had frozen in the corridor, one hand on the ancient wallpaper, the other on the child that grew inside her.
‘Ma, I’m not sure—’
‘I’m sure. And you know her well enough, apparently.’ A pause.
Christina had fled before hearing more, her heart hammering. It wasn’t until two years ago that she finally told Hamish what she’d overheard.
Now, with the heat of the Aga on her back, looking round at the homely cottage they’d decorated together, she asked herself if her husband regretted the day he chose his pregnant working class girlfriend over Lady Penelope, heir to Langford Manor with its grand proportions and thousand acres of woodland.
Hamish reached for his tea, sipping and grimacing slightly. ‘Cold.’
Christina opened the fridge, pulled out the milk.
Somewhere overhead a floorboard creaked, and she thought of Elspeth upstairs with her private school managed class sizes, her iPad textbooks and dedicated drama teachers.
At eleven, she had more one-to-one tuition than Christina had seen in her entire childhood.
St Andrews had been a long, steep climb; for every inch Christina gained, someone had tried to knock her back down.
If Hamish did leave her, would that be what happened to Elspeth?
She glanced back at Hamish, who was now gazing vaguely at the corner of the ceiling, where a spider was spinning a fragile, glinting web.
‘You know,’ he said dreamily, ‘in Tudor times, spiders were seen as omens. If one crawled across your left hand, it meant a journey.’
‘Is that your way of saying you want to leave?’
His eyes darted to hers, startled. ‘No! No, I meant – well, I don’t not want a holiday at some point, if we’re being generous with the term. But leave you?’
‘Don’t sound so shocked. Even when you are here, you don’t even see me.’ The words slipped out too fast, sharper than she meant. She felt her throat tighten, and she spun back to the kettle. But she peeked up to see if her words had landed.
Hamish’s eyebrows drew together. ‘Of course I see you.’
‘No. You see an administrator. A facilitator. Someone who magically handles the plumber and the expired MOT.’
‘I see the woman I married.’
She closed her eyes, mentally repeating his words ‘the woman I married’, why hadn’t he said, ‘the woman I love.’
‘Do you?’ she asked, wanting to add the words ‘love me’ but fearing the answer.
He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Just that blinking look again – like a man who’d walked into the middle of a Tudor joust armed with a pencil case.
From upstairs came the sound of Elspeth singing ‘Messing About in a Boat’, a thin thread of music through the ceiling. The wind pressed at the windows again, rattling the panes.
Christina poured the tea. Passed him a mug. Sat.
They didn’t speak.
Outside, the rain softened. Inside, the distance held.