Sarah Rayne - House of the Lost

Theo had been almost twenty-one, at the end of his third year at Cambridge, and Charmery was seventeen, still at school, but already making plans for what she would do when she left.

‘But it doesn’t sound as if she’ll need to do anything, if she doesn’t want to,’ said Theo to his mother who drove him to Melbray at the end of June. Theo was spending the whole of the summer there; Petra would stay for one night, then go off again.

‘Won’t she want to try for university? Or at least get a job?’ said Petra, concentrating on the road.

‘She says not. She says her father will give her an allowance and she’ll probably get herself a flat somewhere trendy like Chelsea or Holland Park. I suppose,’ said Theo thoughtfully, ‘the allowance will be quite generous. Uncle Desmond and Aunt Helen are very well off, aren’t they?’

‘I hope so,’ said Petra rather wryly. ‘Helen certainly spends enough to give that impression – remember the party they gave for the millennium?’

‘Nancy had to be decanted into a taxi at two a.m.,’ said Theo, grinning at the memory.

‘The legend is that Desmond made a lot of money a few years ago when he was attached to the Treasury.’

‘The unpronounceable Middle-European state,’ said Theo, smiling, because the elder Kendals still occasionally planted a gentle jibe about Desmond’s months in some exotic country, just emerged from communism and needing help with its new monetary policy. Great-aunt Emily Kendal, who was Theo’s godmother and who liked to regard herself as the matriarch of the family, was fond of saying it was Desmond’s sole claim to fame. ‘He never lets anyone forget about it,’ she said.

‘Wherever it was that Desmond went, I think he did get some huge fee for the work,’ said Petra. ‘But I wouldn’t like to say whether there’s any of the money left.’ She frowned, then said, ‘I wonder if Charmery will turn into a kind of It-girl. A bit of modelling, a bit of publicity work. Travel and smart parties and getting her name in minor gossip columns.’

For once Petra sounded bitter, which was unlike her. Theo said, ‘What an aimless existence. I should think she’d want to work properly. It’s far better – far more satisfying – to be paid honest coinage for working—’

‘Oh God, next you’ll be quoting Karl Marx at me.’

‘What’s wrong with Marx?’ demanded Theo.

Petra glanced at him, and said, warmly, ‘D’you know, you’re a constant delight to me.’

‘Lot of slop,’ said Theo, which was a family saying, generally used if someone appeared in danger of getting emotional or over-demonstrative. The Kendals, en masse, were not great on being emotional or demonstrative.

It had been an oppressively hot summer but there was an unsettled feeling that had nothing to do with the weather. Looking back, Theo thought it had been the summer of endings: Charmery, seventeen, was approaching the end of her school life, and Theo was facing his final Cambridge year that September. Even Lesley, who was fourteen, had left her school for a new one that had a better art department.

Despite the thunderstorms, the clans, as Desmond said, had gathered in force that year. Desmond himself came and went at intervals, pleading pressure of business, sometimes bringing sheaves of paperwork with him, and shutting himself away in the small room off the hall which Helen had designated as the study, but which was not much more than a general dumping ground for things people could not be bothered with.

Guff was at Fenn as he was most summers, although this year he was calling it the summer solstice because he had recently become interested in ancient religions. He had met a young lady who was instructing him in the history of the druids, he said. There was still an Order of Druids in existence it appeared, and he was hoping to accompany them to their midsummer’s vigil at Stonehenge, although some kind of endowment was apparently required before he would actually be allowed to join the Order itself.

‘She drove him here and spent the night,’ said Helen, after the high priestess of druidism had left next morning.

‘Just don’t tell me which bed she actually ended up in,’ said Nancy.

‘I gave her the spare bed in Lesley’s room,’ said Helen, to which Nancy said that was as maybe, but there had been a suspicious amount of creaking of landing floorboards around midnight.

‘Oh, Guff’s encounters are never physical.’

‘I should think not at his age,’ said Nancy tartly.

Nancy herself was at Fenn House that summer because Helen had invited Great-aunt Emily, and Nancy was going to help with her. She was very good with elderly people, said Nancy, and did not hear Aunt Emily telling Charmery and Theo if she had known that old bat Nancy was coming she would have gone to Frinton-on-Sea instead.

But even though it had been a peculiar summer, what with Guff’s druidism and Nancy’s bossiness and Great-aunt Emily’s bluntness, and what with Lesley’s two small brothers turning the lawn into a football pitch, there were no quarrels. The Kendals did not go in for quarrels any more than they went in for emotions. They sniped a bit and grumbled a bit, but in the main they were civilized and polite to one another.

‘I love them all madly,’ Charmery said to Theo one Sunday afternoon towards the end of that summer. ‘Of course I do. But don’t you sometimes just want to run away from them, as far as possible?’

Theo looked at her. She was wearing her big 1920s-style straw hat, and she had tucked a vivid pink Charmian rose into the band which ought to have clashed with her bronze hair but somehow did not. The hat shaded her eyes, deepening their colour almost to jade, casting light shadows over her high cheekbones. She had on a thin silk skirt and a white cotton top – simple but probably expensive – and her bare arms and legs were tanned. He wondered if he would ever stop feeling this overwhelming surge of love and desire every time he saw her. But when she said this about running away from the family, he said, very lightly, ‘I often want to run away from them. Shall we do it together, right away?’

There was no knowing how she would answer which was why he had kept his tone flippant, but she looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, let’s. Where shall we go?’

‘To the river?’ Theo’s heart had performed a double somersault. ‘The boathouse?’

The boathouse was a bit of a joke because the river frontage was supposed to be the house’s main attraction. Desmond always said ruefully that it had added thousands to the purchase price and when he was declared bankrupt they could all blame the River Chet. In practice, the boathouse was hardly ever used although there was a rather battered rowing boat moored in its leaky gloom. Charmery kept suggesting to her father that he buy a motor launch, and Helen got leaflets about boat furniture and cabin fridges so they could drink chilled wine on deck, but Nancy and Great-aunt Emily said it was a waste of time. ‘In high summer the river smells like a sewage farm,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘I don’t care if Desmond buys the Queen Mary , I’m staying on dry land, thank you.’

Guff had taken the rowing boat on the river a couple of years ago. He had been interested in photography that summer and wanted to capture dappled river banks and weeping willow trailing into the water. There was a very nice young person in his local photographic shop who had been advising him on what cameras he should buy. Lesley had gone with Guff to help carry the light meters and flash attachments which he had bought from the young person’s shop, but unfortunately they had capsized the boat, the cameras had sunk irretrievably, and Guff had to be fished out and given rum toddies to ward off a cold.