Chapter 12
Roo apologised for saying ‘Wow’ yet again, but this room really did have the wow factor.
It had turned her into a giddy puppy from a bog-roll commercial.
She’d only intended to dump her big bag and coat and go back to the bar but the lure of all those cupboards with surprises inside, so many of them, was too much to resist. She looked everywhere and opened everything.
It was like the train version of a luxury advent calendar.
‘Yorkshire Belle toothpaste? Who has their own toothpaste? I bet the royal family doesn’t even have that.’
Elizabeth laughed. She’d had the same intention, a quick visit to check out where she was spending the night, but Roo’s discoveries were keeping her too entertained, her wows and gasps of delight and ‘Will you look at this’ exclamations.
‘Oh my god, toothbrushes in here. Total cock-up on the ergonomic front – why aren’t they with the toothpastes?’
‘You should leave them a note. Write one for Mr Ingleton on the Yorkshire Belle stationery,’ said Elizabeth.
Stationery that Roo had discovered in a drawer: pens, ink, envelopes, notepaper and a jotter, all with the train’s name in gold lettering somewhere on them.
What’s more, when she pulled it out fully, a flap magically appeared and it became a writing desk top.
Elizabeth thought that Gregory’s mother would have deep logo envy.
She had the family coat of arms plastered everywhere that would take it, but she didn’t have it on her toothpaste.
Not yet anyway, but no doubt when Elizabeth told her about it, she’d immediately investigate the costs.
Not that they would be preventative, for she had the sort of money to splash around on small, expensive runs of things, especially when she knew it would impress people. The Penningtons were all about that.
‘You coming for a swift one before we turn in or do you have other plans?’ asked Roo, making Elizabeth smile yet again. She had taken to this young woman from the get-go.
‘Well, I did have, but I’ll cancel them, Roo. Please lead the way.’
They were the last to arrive in the Lutine carriage. Frank was behind the bar serving up drinks. Someone had turned off the radio; there would be no more news tonight anyway, they figured. Not now Brian ‘the real BBC’ was tucking into his hash.
‘Anyone using their robe?’ said Roo. ‘Asking for a friend.’
‘Well, I most definitely am,’ replied Jane, lifting the very generous measure of calvados to her lips. It never failed to bring back the best of recollections.
‘It’ll probably be too small for me,’ said Tim.
‘I doubt it, they’re massive,’ said Roo to that. Shit. ‘Not that I’m implying in any way you’re… over… sized.’ That exchange wouldn’t exactly thaw the already frozen relations between them.
‘I think we can find a happy medium between being respectful to Mr Ingleton and the need for us to keep warm and comfortable at this time,’ said Jane.
‘I don’t want to forecast anything but I would be very surprised if the owner of this train is going to be having his Christmas dinner on it as planned. ’
‘You reckon we’ll be having ours on it then, Jane?’ Vincent posed the question.
‘I think it’s a distinct possibility.’ She cast her eyes over to the window. There were so many snowflakes they almost joined up in a sheet.
‘Well, if we do, we won’t be having cheese sandwiches, I can promise you that.
Not if I can fire up the ovens. I’ll check that out tomorrow morning,’ said Frank, coming from behind the bar with two glasses of Grand Marnier, one for himself and one for his wife.
It was too much to hope that it would rekindle any happy memories for her, as it did for him.
Sometimes he thought that all he had to look forward to was remembering the past, how it had been when they were happy; and they had been really happy.
They used to talk about one day holidaying on one of the great trains: the Trans-Siberian railway, although that plan was up in smoke now with the world being as it was.
But there were still a few other trains to go at: the Rocky Mountaineer, the Transcantábrico Gran Lujo, but the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express had always been their hot favourite.
Frank had told her in no uncertain terms what he’d do to her while the train was rocking and make it rock a lot more and she’d told him to make the booking NOW.
They didn’t have the money back then though, not to do it properly, splashing out on every luxury.
They had enough spend now, but they didn’t talk about it any more.
It all seemed so long ago, even if it wasn’t: eight, nine years, but also another lifetime, when they were different people.
Or at least when she was different. He hadn’t changed, he hadn’t lost himself.
He had been as bruised and broken as she was but at his core, he was the same man with a great capacity to love, one who wanted to make the world a better place and enjoy this gift of life as fully as he could; and he hoped he always would be that man.
‘I’ll be making breakfast for everyone in the morning. I think we’ll need something warm and substantial inside us for whatever the day brings,’ Frank announced.
‘We can take turns in catering, mate,’ said Vincent.
‘No one object, please. It’s what I do. It’ll keep me busy.’
‘I’m not going to object, Frank. Not one bit. I’ll be your sous chef if you like,’ said Roo. ‘I’m crap at cooking but I’m keen.’ She made an exaggerated salute.
‘Roo, you crack me up, gel,’ said Vincent with a chuckle.
‘Frank’s breakfasts are what pull our customers back time and again,’ said Grace then.
Frank grinned as if warmed by the compliment.
It seemed to Jane that she had surprised him with it, maybe because her praise was a rare occurrence.
Damn you, Clifford Wutheridge, she then thought silently.
Living with him for so many years had given her a compulsion to analyse people.
He used to say that she’d overtaken him in those stakes.
‘You got a hotel?’ Roo directed the question at both Grace and Frank.
‘A little inn in Norfolk: The Salty Cockle,’ explained Frank. ‘We don’t do lunches or dinners as such, just occasionally some catering for a special event but there’s always a big breakfast for the paying, staying customers.’
‘I really like Norfolk,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I had a friend Drusilla from uni who came from Wroxham. I used to go and stay with her in the holidays. I loved all the pretty little villages around there, so many of them. I think I’ve always been a village girl at heart, despite coming from a large town. ’
‘Which town would that be?’ asked Grace, because she couldn’t place Elizabeth’s accent. It was one of those neutral accents that spoke of money and class.
‘Reading. I come from Reading.’ Although she had lived her whole life there – apart from the three years at uni – she didn’t feel connected to the place.
She’d been to boarding school there too, despite the family home being only a few miles away: St Padre Pio’s Establishment for Girls.
It had been a centre for those who exhibited educational excellence, but also for the daughters of rich people who wanted to buy their way in and bask in the reputation of the school, which is how Elizabeth came to be there.
It was no coincidence to her that St Padre Pio advocated suffering to bring him closer to Christ because she’d been thoroughly miserable for most of her time there.
And no, it hadn’t brought her any closer to Christ; if anything, it had converted her into being a fully-blown agnostic.
She wasn’t a natural academic like most of the other pupils and the teachers hadn’t been particularly motivating or memorable.
But she had studied hard, she’d worked over and above anyone else in her year to keep up and got the grades at A-level to get into one of the more prestigious universities in the country.
It was amazing how much a flower can grow when watered with encouragement.
Her tutors there were rousing, inspirational and she discovered a true love for the English she was reading at St Edythe College, which extended to far more than just an intellectual interest. In the second year she and three other girls stayed in a cottage in a nearby village and it was her first taste of living in a small, intimate community.
She had grown particularly close to Drusilla from Wroxham.
Elizabeth felt real happiness for the first time in that period of her life, when she had fun and experienced friendship from people who really seemed to value her company.
But it was always expected of her to return to Reading after she had graduated and join the family firm – R.
W. Dudley and Sons Exports, which was even more dull than it sounded.
Her father didn’t have any sons, just her, but he’d thought adding it to the company name gave him more credibility than ‘daughter’ would have done.
She sometimes thought that he considered Gregory the son he’d never had: Gregory Murdoc Pennington, nine years her senior, who had been lured in to serve by an enormous salary.
No one had been more delighted than Roderick Dudley to see a romantic spark develop between his new whizz-man MD and his heir.
And when the engagement was announced, it was almost as if Gregory had proposed marriage to him rather than his daughter.
‘If you like little villages, you’d love where I live,’ said Vincent, pulling Elizabeth away from her thoughts.
‘Cary’s Pond, it’s ’bout thirty miles away from Reading.
I was a bit like you, country boy at heart, always hankering after a cottage with roses round the door sort o’ thing.
Then about eighteen months ago I had a fare and by chance my driver was off sick so I did it myself: St Pancras to Cary’s Pond, city gent visiting his old mum.
You’ll think I’m nuts if I tell you that as soon as I landed in the place, I thought I’d come home.
Village green with ducks, couple of pubs, row of shops, little school, park, houses that looked as if they’d been made out of gingerbread.
Six months later, I’d bought an old farmhouse that came up for sale there and we moved in and that’s where my office is now. Never been happier.’
Elizabeth noticed he said, ‘we’.
‘It enhances your life no end when you’re happy in your castle,’ said Frank.
‘How come you two ended up in Norfolk then?’ asked Vincent.
That beat, that pause again, before Frank answered.
‘I… was looking for a pub to buy and that one just came up. We didn’t know anyone there at first, but you soon get to know people when you sell beer. We just fancied a change of scenery, didn’t we, love?’ Frank turned to his wife for confirmation. She gave a tight little nod by way of response.
‘What about you, Tim? What line of work are you in?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘I was a director in a Japanese firm. A jet-setting, hand-shaking, clean-shaven, schmoozing seller of world-leading technological equipment,’ he answered, which came as quite the surprise to them all.
Roo especially. She could see Tim in a fur-trimmed red ensemble swearing at reindeer, but oiling and greasing around other execs in sharp suits, eating canapes and ‘talking turkey’ – nope.
‘I loved it,’ Tim went on, ‘travelling business class all over the world, getting off on making multi-million-pound deals.’
His words were at odds with his tone, Roo thought though. The bloke was an enigma. He was probably making it all up to impress them.
‘I took early retirement two years ago. It was my fifty-eighth birthday present to myself.’ Then he addressed what he knew must have been running through their minds.
‘Yes, I know I look older. I’ll drop ten years at least when I shave all this off at the end of the season.
’ He flicked at his splendid beard. ‘I started going white-haired when I was in my twenties.’
‘Same here with this bit,’ said Roo, pointing at the thick white flash running from her left temple and sitting stark against her dark, dark brown hair. ‘It’s not fake. I think my mum read too many Catherine Cookson books when she was pregnant and turned into one of them Mallens.’
‘I loved those books,’ said Jane. ‘It was very wrong to fall in love with Thomas Mallen, but I confess I did.’ She’d had a few book boyfriends; her unrequited passions had needed somewhere to go back then, before Clifford.
Elizabeth shuddered at the name, remembering the teacher Miss Mallen at her school: a dried-up stick of a woman who looked exactly like a mummy she’d once seen in a museum.
She’d called Elizabeth a ‘talentless, stupid, privileged brat’ when she found out she’d got into the university of her choice.
Later Elizabeth found out Miss Mallen hadn’t reached the grades to get in there herself.
She taught pupils she was insanely jealous of, resented, despised and the resulting poison she produced leaked out of her every pore.
Coming from a moneyed background warped how some people interacted with you.
She found it so at work, as the ‘nepo baby’; some refused to see past it and give her credit for what she could do.
They didn’t want to see her for who she really was.
‘And what do you do with your time now you’re retired?’ Vincent asked Tim.
‘Not a lot.’ Tim’s tone indicated he was done with answering questions, though Roo would have liked to know why, if he’d loved it so much, he’d stopped doing it. But she couldn’t be arsed asking the old goat, even if sixty wasn’t old these days.
‘I think I’m going to turn in,’ said Jane, finishing the last of her drink. ‘I want to have a wash and put on that lovely robe.’
‘Well, there are plenty of bathrooms. The first shower is just next to your cabin, Jane, and there’s a few more going forward. You go and fill your boots. Leave your glass, love, I’ll swill it out with the rest when we’ve done.’
Jane stood. ‘Thank you, Frank. I shall bid you all goodnight,’ she said.
Her leaving acted like a cue for the rest of them. It had been a long day – the longest any of them could remember for some time.