Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

He looked at her and felt the tears spring to his eyes, because after all she had been through she had kept the gift of laughter, could offer him what he longed for with such gallantry and grace.

‘You want to creep from the foot of the bed into the presence?’ he asked with mock severity.

Harriet admitted that this was so. ‘They weren’t abject, the odalisques,’ she explained. ‘People have that wrong. They just worked very hard at love — it was all they had.’

But Rom, aware that the time for conversation was running out, was applying himself to the practical aspects of the problem.

‘Under the counterpane or over it, do you wish to creep?’ he enquired.

Harriet’s face crumpled into its urchin grin, acknowledging a hit. Then she raised her arms as does a child who wishes to be gathered up and in two strides he was beside her.

‘We will creep together ,’ announced Rom idiotically and carried her — this lightest and most beloved burden — to his bed.

‘Hurry, girls!’ cried Hermione Belper. ‘The bus will be here in a minute.’

The ‘girls’, however, were not easy to hurry. It was not as in the old days, when a word from their president had the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle jumping to attention. Now, ten years since they had last been to visit Stavely, the changing times had taken their toll. Bobbed hair, a penchant for rag-time and radical ideas of all sorts had spread through the ranks. Even Eugenia Crowley, one of Harriet’s erstwhile chaperones, wore a skirt which cleared her ankles by a good nine inches.

But it was not the fact that the ladies no longer sprang to attention at her command which annoyed Mrs Belper; it was the condescending and superior behaviour of Louisa Morton, who had declined to accompany them.

‘My dear, I regard Stavely as my second home,’ she had said snootily. ‘It is hardly necessary for me to go there in a charabanc.’

The remark was quite untrue, of course. Harriet was polite and friendly to her aunt, as she was to her father, but Romain Brandon — who mercifully had come through the war with only an arm wound and a string of medals — always seemed to be absent or unavailable when the Mortons visited. What was true was that Louisa was compelled to spend more and more time looking after her brother, for since that extraordinary episode when his entire class had thrown him in the fountain and gone virtually unpunished, the Professor had become something of a recluse and now took almost no part in the life of the University.

The bus arrived. Mrs Transom’s daughter had died of Spanish influenza in the last year of the war, as had Mr Belper, the president’s undersized husband; but Mrs Transom (now in her ninety-eighth year) seemed to grow younger every day and was easily hauled aboard by her attendant.

‘This will be no ordinary outing, Cynthia,’ explained Mrs Belper to her god-daughter, who was paying her a visit. ‘As I have told you, I have known Mrs Brandon since childhood. I understand we are to be shown round by a member of the family and that there is to be a sit-down tea!’

As they drove in between the tall gates, the ladies were amazed by the change in Stavely. The Hall had been a military hospital during the war but now, three years after the Armistice, all signs of the army’s occupation were gone. Making their way to the front door, the visitors passed through one of creation’s undoubted masterpieces: a lovingly tended English garden on a fine day in June.

And sure enough, a member of the family was waiting to show them round! Not Harriet Brandon, shortly expecting her third child, but a tall good-looking young man with russet hair — the owner’s nephew, who had grown up at Stavely and was to inherit Paradise Farm and a substantial parcel of land as soon as he came of age.

‘That’s Henry Brandon, Cynthia!’ hissed Mrs Belper, pushing her god-daughter forward and wishing that the girl’s mother had had the sense to do something about her teeth. ‘Stay close by his side and ask questions. Gentlemen always like to tell you things.’

Henry had shed his fears and his spectacles, and his good nature was proverbial. Nevertheless, his detestation of the ‘Tea Ladies’ who had made Harriet’s childhood a misery was almost as great as his uncle’s. If he had volunteered to show them Stavely, it was by way of a thank-offering — for on the previous day he had won his long-standing battle with the man who had been more than a father to him. Rom had fought harder than the old General, for Henry was an excellent scholar and to let him turn down three years at Oxford seemed madness; but in the end he had conceded defeat.

‘Go back, then, if you must. God knows they’ll welcome you with open arms at Follina. I don’t think the good times will come again, but perhaps one doesn’t want them to — the world’s a different place now and something can be done still, I’m sure. Alvarez’ report actually throws up some interesting angles where the minerals are concerned. And of course Harriet will expect you to have the Opera House open again for Natasha’s debut!’

If his offer to show the ladies round had sprung from gratitude, Henry found himself enjoying the tour, for he never wearied of pointing out the beauties of Stavely or ceased to take pleasure in the contrast of the cold, neglected house of his early childhood and the lovely cared-for place it had become.

‘Goodness, who is that lady?’ asked the buck-toothed Cynthia, who was obeying her godmother’s instructions to the letter. ‘She looks most unusual!’

They had reached the picture gallery on the top floor and that part of the house reserved for recent portraits of the family and friends.

‘That’s Galina Simonova — the ballerina. It was painted in 1913 after her triumph at the Maryinsky. That diamond star she’s wearing was given to her by the Tsar.’

The slight melancholy which attacked the ladies at the mention of the murdered Tsar was dispelled by the next picture — that of an imperious-looking, red-haired woman in a white gown, standing on the steps of a flag-bedecked mansion and flanked by a pair of elephants en grande tenue.

‘“The Lady Isobel de Larne”,’ read Cynthia, giggling coyly. ‘She has exactly the same colour hair as you, Mr Brandon. Is she a relative?’

‘My mother,’ admitted Henry, looking with amused affection at the flamboyant portrait of Isobel, now living in immense style with her diplomat husband in Udaipur.

In front of an enormous Sargent entitled ‘The Brandon Family at Home’, the ladies insisted on staying for a considerable time. Painted three years earlier in the last months of the war, it showed Rom Brandon still in his colonel’s uniform, his arm in a sling and on his face the exact look of boredom at this time-wasting procedure which was to be seen on the portrait of his father on the opposite wall. Beside him, very close to her husband, was Harriet, one slim hand resting on the fawn hair of her daughter, Natasha, in an effort to hold her down long enough to enable the painter to do his work. Henry himself stood beside Harriet and on a low stool — still boasting his baby ringlets and apparently strangling (with loving concentration) the white puppy in his lap — sat Paul Alexander, Stavely’s heir, whose birth Henry had greeted with unconcealed relief. For Henry had never wavered in his determination to return to the Amazon and but for Paul’s birth would have felt obliged to repay his debt to Rom by learning to take over at Stavely.

The furthest part of the gallery had been set aside for photographs and Henry led the way towards these with alacrity, for he had become a keen photographer and many of the pictures were his own.