THE HOUSE IS BEING SHROUDED. WHEN BEA WALKS PAST the yellow drawing room on her way back from breakfast she finds Mrs Wainwright directing Sarah and Susan in the laying of sheets over furniture, as if for its own burial. Bea stops at the doorway: she’s had a thousand, no, thousands of conversations in this room, and, among them, goodbyes. Her chest tightens. Edward, she thinks, it’s the last place I saw Edward. There’s a shadow in the corner of her eye, in front of the chimney piece, and for an instant she thinks she sees him there but as soon as she is facing the fireplace, he vanishes.
The fireplace is cold and bare. Every fluff of ash has been brushed out and only the blackened brick behind it admits that there was ever warmth there; even the furniture has been deadened. Bea surveys the room. The sofas are like corpses on stretchers, their ruined bodies hidden from sight. The last sheet has been thrown over the last chair. Susan and Sarah have slipped away – to turn the next room into a tomb, thinks Bea – but Mrs Wainwright is hovering, a question on her lips. No, Bea wants to say, we’re all still here, it is only Mother who is being buried today. But Bea can’t get these words out past the lump in her throat. She has no spare emotion to give this morning; instead what emerges is, ‘We’re coming back for lunch.’
Mrs Wainwright nods as though Bea has a desire to play out for as long as possible something that is clearly over. Bea almost says that she hasn’t any intention of leaving this house in the near future. Which is, in a way, true, for intending is not the same as possibly having to. How odd, she thinks, that I have spent so long wanting to escape all that this house stands for, and now that I might have to go, all I want to do is stay.
The rest of the country, Europe, the rest of the world, seems to be celebrating peace as though there were no war before it. Yet for Bea the past week has been a wake for every single face that will not return. If you are not going to see them again now, then you really never will.
Nor will you see Mother, though the question was raised by Clemmie, extremely briefly, as to whether the coffin should be open at any stage in the ceremony. ‘I know it’s a little strange, and you probably can’t, what with it being the flu and all that,’ she said when they met with the funeral director. ‘But she would so hate to be shut out of things. She must be furious at going the day the war ended.’ Bea can’t imagine what Mother would have done with peace. She had surged through the war on such a wave of the gallons of milk she produced from Beauhurst that it is almost impossible to imagine her ever having slowed down again.
Even from her mortuary slab, she is still being controversial. While Bea’s and Clemmie’s friends are engulfed in a wave of almost spontaneous weddings, Mother is having a funeral. Yes, Mother, marriage seems to be what they want, the men, when they’re back. A wife, home, hearth, a certainty of some kind; so they’re rushing up the aisle as though at any minute the whole bloody thing will start again. What you should have done now, Mother, was to tie the knot. You could have welcomed some war-weary general home, installed him amidst the healthy sea vapours of Beauhurst and given him glassfuls of fat milk from your cows. But you didn’t do that. You went and died, on purpose, it almost seems. When you were told to rest, you were up and about far too soon after your fever broke, and so it came back, pushing you away in its place. It was really very inconsiderate of you, Mother, to die. Of course, now that you’ve gone – or are almost gone, because you are still here, making your way over from the cold stone mortuary to the church in a polished oak box. Now that you’ve gone, we are realising how much you held us all together, even if it was by irritating us with those hypocrisies you called practicalities.
The practicality now is that we are all unravelling. Two daughters, acres of crumbling brick in the countryside, few funds and precious little means of gaining any more. Unless one of us were to marry well. Us? That’s only me, thinks Bea. And, Beatrice, who is there to marry? She can’t think of any rich man she’d want to see at breakfast every day. In fact she can’t think of any man she’d like to see at breakfast every day. Then she checks herself, for that’s not quite true. All too often the moment she ran from Mr Campbell’s room comes back to her mind. Though she still hasn’t managed to picture the life she and Mr Campbell would have lived together.
In any case, it’s too late. Every letter you sent him afterwards was returned, and you’ve no idea whether you will ever see him again or whether he is still kicking, or in pieces. Is that why you are thinking about him so much, because the fact that you are extremely unlikely ever to see him again makes him a safe dream to have? And safe because even if she did, it could never, however much she might puzzle to find a way, lead to anything.
Safest of all, however, because she’d blown it. More fool you, Beatrice.
The red drawing room, the only one on the first floor not dust-sheeted over, is still cold when Clemmie, Bea and Edie come back for lunch. Edie is staying with them for ‘moral support’, though who is supporting whom is a trifle unclear. There is no fire and Bea walks towards the bell but Clemmie interrupts her. ‘Darling, I can’t. Not after this morning. It’ll be a funeral pyre. That’s what they must have thought. Have a drink. Or a cig. Some fire in that. Throw me the box, darling.’
‘Nonsense, the servants are just annoyed that the drinks were at Claridge’s.’
‘It was, may I say,’ ventures Edie, ‘a little inhospitable.’
‘Oh, God, Edes,’ Clemmie drops into an armchair and flings her head back, blowing smoke at the ceiling, ‘I don’t think I could have stood having it here. People would never have left. I mean, they haven’t left there, yet, have they? It was turning into some sort of political rally. We all needed somewhere to escape to.’
Escape, thinks Bea, from Mother. Perhaps that’s what we’ve all been trying to do, perhaps that’s what all daughters do. But mothers reach far, even from beyond the grave.
Clemmie continues. ‘At least we are able to bury Mother.’
‘Oh, Clem, don’t.’
‘And the half of Tom I haven’t buried yet.’
‘He’ll come back to himself, Clemmie. He just needs a rest.’ Given her recent form, Edie sounds almost worryingly calm.
‘A life-long rest. How’s Tony, Edie?’
Edie shrugs her shoulders. ‘I guess he’s back,’ she says.
‘Hasn’t he come to see Archie?’ Clemmie is now leaning forward in her seat.
‘He’s not too interested in Archie.’
‘How peculiar,’ says Clemmie and, her mind clearly on children, excuses herself to go and check on the nursery. ‘I’m rather hoping,’ she says as she leaves the room, ‘that they understood enough of it to be shedding at least one tear between them.’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ says Edie when Clemmie has left the room. ‘Children don’t notice these things.’
None of them eats lunch. They just push it around on a fork enough to keep the servants happy. Nor do they manage any conversation beyond the listing and confirming of the born, married and dead. As they reach pudding, Celeste turns up in a somewhat melodramatic silk and lace mourning dress.
‘Half the nation’s suffragists are still,’ she says, ‘at Claridge’s, making speeches for the vote for women under thirty. I should imagine they will remain until the law is changed again. Rather like the idea of an occupation of Claridge’s, even if all that lot’ll do is talk until they’re out of breath. Your mother would be furious to have missed out. Can’t say I don’t miss the old girl. There’s nothing like a good feud to keep one going.’
Bea is surprised by Celeste’s words. Not just her affection for Mother but, Bea realises, it is the first time that either of them have admitted that battle lines were so clearly drawn.
The solicitor arrives at half past two. Clemmie, Celeste and Bea return to the red drawing room, and Edie diplomatically excuses herself ‘to be rather self-indulgent and spend some time upstairs with Archie’. The solicitor is a bowler-hatted and slight, quick-moving man whose discomfort seems to increase as he is asked to sit down. As he reads the will, his eyes dart from side to side, as if noting the expressions he sees. Clemmie and Bea shift positions as his gaze crosses them. Celeste sits, arms crossed, and with the motionlessness of certainty, thinks Bea, that she will not receive a thing from Mother.
‘Typical Mother,’ says Clemmie when he has left. ‘Not choosing quite the right sort of man. Seemed damn sharp to me.’
‘That’s only,’ Bea replies, ‘because he told us that there wasn’t much money left.’
‘I think that may be rather understating the situation, Bea.’
After a surprising, but modest, bequest to Celeste, there are several to trades unions and, of course, a substantial one to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. What remains is to be divided between Clemmie and Bea. However, Mother, for reasons that will now only be known to herself, left no indication of just how the houses, pictures, plates even, should be divided.
‘Blast her,’ says Clemmie, and it is Celeste who looks shocked at this. ‘After all those years,’ Clemmie continues, ‘of telling us to be practical and now what are we supposed to do, saw everything in two?’
‘I think you are both,’ cut in Celeste, ‘old enough to make a few decisions. She clearly thought you were capable of it. In any case, you should be damn grateful.’
How odd, thinks Bea, Celeste is batting for Mother. A little late, perhaps. It would have been a bit more convenient if they had managed to ride the same train while they were both alive.
‘Thank God there’s no heir,’ says Clemmie, then chokes. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, just not some wretched cousin that everyone else usually suffers. We’re too happily nouveau riche, if you can bear the irony of the riche bit, to have entails and distant male cousins who inherit, and things like that.’
‘They’d be dead anyhow,’ replies Bea.
‘Beauhurst,’ interrupts Celeste.
‘Lord knows when the soldiers will be out of there,’ replies Clemmie. And Bea finds herself saying, ‘Why don’t they just have it? You never liked it anyway, Clem, and it’s not as if anybody is going to buy it now. We’ll be lucky enough if they agree to take it.’ Clemmie purses her lips. The room is still for a moment, then she nods. Celeste looks up and smiles. Item one crossed off the agenda. Item one simply crossed out of their lives.
‘You don’t suppose,’ says Clemmie, ‘that anyone will want to buy Park Lane?’
And Bea, who didn’t cry this morning, finds herself fighting back the tears.
‘All settled?’ asks Edie as she totters into the room. Bea shrugs her shoulders. The house is Clemmie’s, too, and she wants, says she needs, the money for it, ‘Or Gowden’s roof will quite simply cave in.’ For a second Bea wonders whether she and Celeste could club together to buy Clemmie out. If only the pictures weren’t all, as Edward had so rightly said, fakes. But a house like this without pictures, and dozens of servants if not inhabitants, would feel deserted. So no, it’s obvious, Bea will go to live with Celeste, and Park Lane will be put up for sale.
‘Will probably be snapped up by an awful sort,’ says Clemmie. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Edie is out of her chair and straightening her clothes. She looks around the room and at Celeste, Clemmie and Bea, curiously slowly. Then she pulls herself up sharply.
‘Well, I’m just popping off,’ she says, and struts towards the door. She stops on the threshold and turns to blow a kiss to the room. ‘Goodbye, darlings.’ And a minute later they hear the clip of her heels echo up from the hall.
‘How odd,’ remarks Clemmie.
‘What’s odd, Clem?’ asks Bea.
‘Not quite sure, just something.’
Uncertain of what else to do, the three of them sit there for an hour or so, going through more ‘practicalities’ as their tea grows cold and the light outside even greyer.
‘How long have I got,’ Bea asks, ‘to say goodbye to this place?’
‘You’ll be much better off with me,’ Celeste butts in. ‘Think you should hop over this afternoon. You don’t want to be living here with people poking their noses and purses into every corner. Besides, it’s a bit of a mausoleum, isn’t it, Beatrice, my dear?’
‘She only died here, Celeste, we haven’t buried her under the floorboards.’
‘That doesn’t mean to say that she has, in every sense, gone. It will do you good to—’
‘It still annoys me,’ Clemmie breaks in.
‘What, Clementine?’
‘That she came up to London just at the beginning of another wave of the flu, having hardly been here for years. I can’t help feeling it was somehow negligent of her. She was always too damned busy with her causes to think about any of us.’
A small creature runs into the room in a blur of blond, starch and tweed, and buries itself in Clemmie’s lap.
‘Good God, Clementine,’ says Celeste. ‘Is that one of yours?’
‘No,’ she replies, stroking the boy’s hair. ‘It’s Edie’s Archie.’
‘I’ll see if any of them know what Edie’s up to,’ says Bea, and rings the bell.
When Susan appears Bea asks her when Edie is expected back.
‘Back?’ says Susan.
‘Yes, back.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh, what?’
‘Well, I didn’t think she was coming back, Miss Beatrice, not with—’
‘With what, Susan?’
‘With her trunk, and all.’
‘Her trunk?’
‘Yes. Labelled it was, too. Mombasa it said.’