The week that followed was blissful. Like kisses stolen when no one is looking, each minute without Edward felt precious, snatched. The three would breakfast happily together each morning in the dining room, enjoying the simple pleasure of unburdened company. Alfie had been twice to shoot with neighbours, coming back full of who was there and the conversations of the grown-ups. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Chamberlain’s triumphant claim of ‘Peace for our time’ would be left hanging like bunting at a party that was now only empty cups and abandoned plates.
‘All anyone talked about was what Germany will do next. I think we should be firm with Mr Hitler. I don’t believe he’s being straight with us. Richard’s father said that if we don’t start rearming properly now, it’ll be too late.’ Alfie was leaning forward in his chair, his face solemn. He was coming to the age where boys tried on the voices of their fathers, wanting desperately to carry off the air of certainty and knowledge they’d heard in cigar-filled drawing rooms. But Edward wasn’t there to listen.
She nodded. ‘We’ve let the people of the Sudetenland down.’
‘But is it too late?’ He put down his knife and fork with a clatter. ‘Mr Chamberlain must be told that we don’t want our country to accept this, as if we think it’s all right to trample over people if it doesn’t affect us directly. Who will be next?’
‘What do your friends think?’
‘Richard agrees with his father. They were talking about a speech that man Goebbels gave yesterday, announcing to the press that Germany’s territories were too small to meet the country’s needs. That is a statement of intent, isn’t it?’ He took a sip of his water. ‘They asked me what Papa thinks. I imagine he feels the same way, don’t you?’ He looked down, going back to his plate of eggs. ‘I said as much, anyway.’
Alfie was growing up, needing this voice of independence to be heard. She nodded as he talked on as boys of his class were educated to do, believing in the absolute rightness of their opinions, the inevitability that they be heard. But there was a hesitation there, an underlying insecurity, the boy whose father had never given the approval he so desperately sought.
George was listening too, nodding quietly as he ate the pear on the plate before him, eating each hard sliver carefully. The plate had been placed there discreetly by Stokes, the fruit sliced for him in the kitchen. It was a small act they all ignored, one of the many little things that set him apart from others, that made life a little easier for him but school, friendships, fitting in, that bit harder. He was listening to Alfie, but she knew his mind was already elsewhere. Unlike his brother, he relished his time alone, the freedom simply to be. He had taken to painting in the holidays, heading off for hours at a time with a knapsack filled with oils and a small stretched canvas, a jar for his brushes, a bottle of turps. He had always had a talent, starting with pencil sketches of the dogs by the fire when he was nine or ten, or drawings of the horses in the stables, studying their heads, somehow catching something of the life of them even when the handling was naive. It was the perfect pastime for him – paper to hide behind, a justification for observing rather than participating, his left arm not required. The pencil sketches had gravitated to little oils, and he would ask for sets for birthdays and Christmas, something frowned upon by Edward – ‘what kind of a boy paints as a hobby?’ – but encouraged by Jean as she saw genuine ability and satisfaction gained. He had tried to learn everything else that a boy of his age ought; he could shoot with one hand, as the Kaiser had done, could play tennis adequately well, could swim, just, but he didn’t really care. He had no need to prove to the world he was the same as them; he preferred, where possible, to slip to its edges and observe.
She watched now from the open front door as George headed off, wrapped up in scarf and cap and boots, satchel slung over his shoulder, a piece having been made in the kitchen to get him through to teatime.
Snow had fallen night after night since they had arrived back at Harehope and each morning they had woken to a virgin landscape, the blanket of silence broken only by the tap, tapping of pick on ice as one of the gardeners worked away at the frozen water at the base of the fountain, worrying that the birds would have nothing to drink.
Her eyes followed George as he made his way up the drive. He turned briefly to wave at her, his gloved hand held up till she raised hers back, and then he trudged on, and she could sense the happiness in the way his shoulders were, happiness for the hours of joyous solitude that stretched out before him.
But these dreamy days of three were to come to an end. Harehope had not had a houseful for some time, not since Edward had made London his centre of gravity, but guns had been invited for two days of pheasants that fell the week before Christmas. The house was gearing up awkwardly, stiff in its joints, preparing for the guests’ arrival and Edward’s return, Jean for the charade of a united family to present to the world. Meals had been planned at length with Mrs Jobson in the kitchen, and Mrs Hawkins would walk the bedroom corridors with two housemaids in her wake, a notebook and pencil in hand, jotting down each little detail that required attention. Flowers for which room, whisky on a salver for which gentlemen, which wives would be coming, who would require breakfast trays, who would need a lady’s maid. Stokes oversaw the cleaning of the silver – the candelabra, the wine coolers, the endless array of knives and forks of countless sizes and encyclopaedic uses – as nervous footmen with pimples at their chin worked away under his stern eye. Appearances, it was clear, were to be kept up.
In what must have been a veiled slight by the other guns, it was only Freddie Byam-Hughes who came with his wife. As Jean walked around the downstairs rooms with Mrs Hawkins, making a final check that everything was as it ought to be before dinner, Rose was already sitting in the drawing room, drink in hand. She got to her feet quickly when she saw her hostess.
‘Jean! How wonderful to see you. I hope you don’t mind my coming down already. It was such a long journey, and I was gasping. Freddie takes forever, fiddling with his collar and all that wretched pomade. I think I make it worse by watching him, so I thought I’d come down. And Stokes kindly obliged.’ She raised her glass happily.
Rose Byam-Hughes was relatively unchanged, though it must have been six years since Jean had seen her last. She still had that straw-blonde hair whose brushing was an afterthought and her cheeks still carried that charming flush of rose petals and cream, though she must have been nearing forty. A silk dress pulled at her hips, and a considerable bosom was visible beneath its thin fabric. She gave the hem a little tug.
‘I never seemed to shift it after Billy was born. Three boys rather does something to the girlishness of one’s figure.’ She laughed, unperturbed. ‘I would have had more, you know, but I kept losing them. Lost two more after Billy, and then Freddie said enough was enough. And I had to agree. Although I do miss it. Don’t you? All that delicious pudginess and the angelic curls.’
Jean smiled, kissing her briefly on the cheek. ‘I so loved that time. When they were your own. Now it feels like they’ll be off and away any minute.’
‘A wicked part of me longs for the day when they flee the nest. Might give Freddie and I the chance to do all the things we said we’d do and never got a chance to. They can swallow up all of one’s time. And I do so yearn to travel. Do you still have that place in France? I remember Freddie telling me when you bought it. Sounded dreamy.’
‘We do, we do. But it’s not as easy now to get away, with one thing and another, and it’s all such an expense, so we closed it up and haven’t been back the last few years.’
‘How very disciplined of you. I think I’d be there every moment I could, even if it was terribly profligate.’
Jean heard Edward’s study door opening and the hall was filled with voices, an argument dressed as conversation making its way into the drawing room. It must have been the two guests she didn’t know, friends of Edward’s from London, to whom she had been told to give the best of the bedrooms and who had arrived in a sea of valets and luggage. The pair were introduced to Jean and Rose briefly – a James Faversham and a Henry Durrant – though neither man gave more than a nod as they made their way to the drinks table. Both were older than Edward, with prosperous bellies and a layer of bloat that bulged over their stiff collars like a toad’s swell; Edward was listening closely to them, brow furrowed, the junior of the group.
‘Surely you want to have it all in bonds at a time like this?’ The taller of the two men, with a thatch of thick grey hair and hooded eyes, was scanning the room as he spoke.
The other, Henry, shook his head, dismissing his observation curtly. ‘Oh, no, no. Property is the thing, old boy. Bricks and mortar. Look at the mess up here, coal and industry failing.’ He fixed his eyes on Edward now. ‘I see you’re not all that far from Jarrow, Edward. Take heed of that. You see, I can’t build houses quick enough. Costs are low, demand is high. Put anything disposable you have into housing down south.’
His friend slapped him on the back. ‘Well, before you know it, Henry, you’ll be buying a pile like Harehope and expecting the title to go with it.’
Henry looked at Edward a little peevishly. ‘Edward’s not a duke, mind you. That’s what people go weak at the knees for.’ A small smile spread across his porcine cheeks. ‘Though a coronet on my slippers would do very nicely.’
The three men looked up. Alfie stood in the doorway, dressed in a suit for church, not old enough yet for the evening dress of the men, hesitant as to how to break in.
‘Darling!’ Jean was on her feet, cursing that she’d forgotten that he was to join for dinner. As his godfather was here she’d thought it would be nice, but it had slipped her mind in all the preparations.
Edward, irritated by the interruption, steered him over quickly to his two guests. ‘My eldest boy, Alfie. Back from school.’
Alfie shook their hands and then stood, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides, unsure if he ought to stay and talk to his father or retreat to his mother and Rose. Edward watched him waver but did nothing, so he remained somewhere between the two, looking self-consciously at a painting.
‘Lady Warre was just arriving as I came down, so she was good enough to let me steward her in.’ Freddie had entered in a bluster of good cheer and how are yous, Edward’s mother on his arm. He was still as slight as he had been in his twenties, but the intervening years had given him a modest paunch and a receding hairline, and there was a bald patch at the back of his head that was visible as he poured himself a drink. ‘How are you, Jean? So kind of you to have us all so close to Christmas.’
Alfie dutifully came up and kissed his grandmother on her cheek, proffered only with the slightest of movement. Edward made the same reluctant pilgrimage, the irony not lost on Jean.
Freddie, affable as he always had been, drink now in hand, turned to Jean. ‘It’s been so long, Jean. And I haven’t seen Edward in an age. I was quite surprised to get the nod.’
‘But you see him in London, surely?’
‘I do glimpse him at White’s from time to time, but he’s frightfully flash now.’ He dropped his voice, looking over to Edward and his two friends. ‘Always with swells like those chaps at Crockfords – they’re awash with money, most of it new. Durrant made a fortune in construction in the south in the twenties. Spanking motors and a brand-new house in Hertfordshire, all of that. I think they think Edward’s a trophy. Something special to wheel around town. A title and an ancient pile of bricks never fails to impress.’ He was smiling, but he was watching Edward curiously. ‘Do you know them?’
‘No. London friends, as you say. I don’t get down there as much these days.’
‘Well, it’s a very different crowd to the old set, is all I’ll say.’ He smiled brightly. ‘Of course, I’m sure we’re all frightfully dull. Living like church mice to cling on to what we’ve got.’ And his eyes shifted involuntarily to Alfie, standing alone and yearning for dinner to be announced.
‘How odd to use the French decanters.’
Sitting by the fire after dinner, as her mother-in-law ran through the failings of the evening – the mousse not stiff enough, the meat not pink enough, the fool too tart though she would never eat more than a morsel anyway – Jean nodded and listened, so used to it now that she almost enjoyed it. She always felt as if Alice’s judgements and criticisms were like a player knocking up before a set of tennis, establishing to the opposition how her game would proceed. Jean’s attention, though, was on Alfie, who was sitting with Rose but counting the minutes until he could escape the drawing room. Eventually, she excused herself from Alice and went over to them.
Rose looked up, merrily patting Alfie on the knee. ‘Oh gosh, am I boring him? You must stop me. He’s such a dear, and only a year older than my Simon. And so handsome. My goodness, Jean. Those beautiful blue eyes. If only I had a daughter to marry off!’
As she spoke, the doors from the dining room opened and Edward was standing in the doorway, decanter of port in one hand, cigar in the other. ‘What was that, Rose?’ The room had fallen silent at his entrance; his voice was thick with drink, and even Alice had taken note.
Rose looked to him, embarrassed by the attention now on her, confused by his tone. ‘I was just saying to Jean how utterly divine Alfie is – that he’ll be breaking girls’ hearts all over London soon.’
Edward’s voice was too loud, his eyes on Jean. ‘Well, I don’t think he gets much from me.’ He walked towards Alfie now, and he was looking directly at him, a strange, twisted smile on his face. ‘And if you’re anything like your mother, dear boy, you’d better learn to control yourself, hadn’t you?’ He turned and called behind him to the men who were still standing by the fireplace in the dining room.
Jean didn’t want to look at Rose’s kind, confused face at the periphery of her vision. ‘I’m going to take Alfie up. It’s late and he’s got tomorrow to look forward to.’ She bent down and kissed Rose briefly on the cheek, turned to say goodnight to Alice.
She walked out of the room quickly, cheeks burning, knowing Alfie was following quietly behind; knowing that she had only a moment to gather herself before she turned to look at him, only a moment to prepare another neat little basket of excuses and lies to lay at his door.