Freya North - Rumours

The women regarded each other. Though Lydia was pretty much the same height as Stella, her aquiline haughtiness made her appear far taller. Or perhaps Stella just felt small in this grand room in this phenomenal old house and, for the first time in her life, in the presence of someone titled.

‘And have you ever been in a house like this?’

Stella was diplomatic. ‘There can’t possibly be another like it.’

Lydia looked at her as if she’d seen straight through her words. ‘Mrs Biggins, wretched woman – she never came with my coffee. Would you care for a sherry?’

‘It’s a little early for me,’ Stella said as if she didn’t take her sherry until after lunch. Lydia looked at her witheringly, as if she’d heard sarcasm. She walked over to the walnut drinks cabinet and inadvertently chinked the crystal stopper against the decanter and then the decanter against the glass. She took her sherry and walked to the sofa, spilling a little on her skirt as she sat herself down. She motioned to the companion sofa opposite and Stella sat. Lydia took a thoughtful sip. And then another.

‘I detest Asians.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘ All agents – whatever their industry.’

Oh – agents .’ Stella’s relief was worn as an expansive smile which Lydia appeared to baulk at.

‘I am going to sell Longbridge,’ she said levelly, ‘or at least, you are.’

Stella felt herself sinking into the sofa, as if her surroundings were suddenly growing and she was shrinking under the weight of the realization that this is why she was here. This couldn’t be real – this had to be Lewis Carroll. A joke. A dream.

But Lydia was continuing. ‘I have been thinking about selling Longbridge for some time. Sometimes I stop thinking about it – but not because I’ve changed my mind. The whole concept is so very tiresome.’ She stared at Stella, who tried to nod purposefully and to stop gawping, wishing she’d said yes to sherry, just to have something to hold instead of her hands feeling like clodden sponges awkward in her lap.

‘I’m haemorrhaging cash in upkeep.’ Lady Lydia gave a little cough for emphasis. ‘It’s preposterous! All that money just to keep the rain out and the heat in.’

The look she threw Stella as she knocked back her sherry suggested she was waiting for a response.

‘I hope I don’t sound ignorant or nosy –’ Or obsequious, Stella thought to herself. ‘But would a house like this not be handed down to the next generation?’

‘There is no next generation,’ Lady Lydia barked before going heavily silent, staring into her sherry glass as if, usually, it refilled spontaneously. ‘I am the eldest of four girls. Cordelia died young. Anne never bred. She was a lesbian – still is, I believe, though at her age that’s quite unnecessary. Margaret moved to Connecticut and remained barren despite landing herself three American husbands in quick succession.’

‘You have no children – offspring?’ She shouldn’t have said that – it sounded intrusive, impudent.

‘I had a son,’ Lydia said quietly. ‘And I have a daughter. She doesn’t want to live here. She lives with the Welsh.’ She made it sound as though her daughter had converted to an extreme religion and was living as part of a cult in a compound.

What could Stella say to that? Though desperate to know more, she bit her tongue and looked at her hands. Lydia’s were bony and long; papery skin over navy veins like very old corduroy. A signet ring loose on the little finger of her right hand, an antique diamond ring and thin gold wedding band on her left. Stella had a very strange impulse to lean right over the coffee table and take Lady Lydia’s hands in hers, give them a gentle rub. Perhaps Lydia sensed it because she took to her feet and demanded that Stella follow her on a tour of the house.

Sell? Sell all this ? Is that really why I’m here? Me ? Can’t be.

‘Of course, we’re the wrong way around,’ Lydia said of the drawing room. ‘When I was a girl, this was the dining room – one never had a south-facing drawing room because all the oil paintings would take a thrashing by the sun. That’s why the good paintings are currently in the dining room – which was once the drawing room because it’s north facing. That’s what my father told me – though my mother told me it was because my Fortescue ancestors were atrociously ugly.’ The slicing look Lydia sent Stella informed her that her giggle was inappropriate. ‘Hence them being consigned to a room less used.’ She was leading on, along the flagstone hallway, to the room in question. The same beautiful tall double doors and fanlight as the drawing room, the same lofty windows, but just two of them in here, east facing. The room was light but undeniably cold. The fireplace was bereft of logs, nor was there an electric heater in its place. The cherubs on the plaster frieze weren’t hunting stags here, but hefting urns about. Their naked little bodies made Stella feel the cold on their behalf. The eyes of generations of Fortescues appeared to glower at her from the confines of their florid gilt frames as if to say, who on earth do you think you are to sell our ancestral seat as though it’s a commodity akin to a sack of apples?

‘They’re not so ugly,’ Stella remarked diplomatically, ‘they just look a little – humourless.’

She checked Lady Lydia’s expression. She looked horrified. Stella shivered.

‘Bastard!’

‘Oh God – I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean … I only meant—’

‘Bastard bastard bloody dog! Barnaby! Mrs Biggins!’

It was then that Stella noticed a furl of turd that had been deposited (quite some time ago, it seemed) on the floor just by the head of the table.

‘It’s testimony to the airiness of the room that one cannot – detect it,’ Stella said.

Lydia stared at her, unblinkingly, before nodding slowly. ‘You are most certainly an estate agent,’ she said, but Stella was unable to tell whether this was a compliment or an insult. ‘You call it spin , don’t you. This way.’ They left the door open and the dog mess for Mrs Biggins to deal with; crossed the staircase and entrance hallway and went into the library. This room was as warm and inviting as the dining room was cold and uncongenial. Stella thought, I don’t care how common I might appear – and she said ‘Wow!’ out loud as she beamed at the three walls given over almost entirely to handsome mahogany bookcases – mostly carrying leather-bound volumes. Stella estimated the longest was at least twenty feet. Three leather Chesterton sofas at right angles to each other were set around a low table in front of the fireplace stacked with logs. A desk with a dark green leather inlay was positioned by one window, a writing bureau at the other. Stella perused the titles. French and English novels, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, atlases, monographs and a whole section of art books.

‘I studied art,’ she said quietly, as if to remind herself. She ran her fingertips gently over the routered wooden shelves right to the end. She stopped. It couldn’t be! She looked at Lydia and smiled.

‘May I?’ but she didn’t wait for an answer. Where the bookcase ended in a long, slim vertical column, Stella gave a little press and a pull and the front of the column popped open like a secret door to reveal that it was a false front – behind it, the shelves continued, with just three books’ width, for the full height of the bookcase. There were books on these hidden shelves too, but their spines were blank. ‘Are they very rude?’ Stella asked.

Lydia laughed. It was an unexpected warm, earthy cackle. ‘Eye-wateringly so – that is, if you were a dainty eighteenth-century lady prone to fainting at the very thought of even a naked forearm. Hardly the Kama Sutra . They’re frightfully tame to me, so goodness knows what you’d make of them.’ Insult or compliment – again Stella wasn’t sure and Lydia’s voice had become cool by the end of her sentence.