Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

‘I had to abandon it, my dear, when I had the good fortune to marry. I was wise before I wed, and now I am otherwise.’

Sophie nudged Daniel with her elbow and whispered, ‘Best leave them to it. I’ll ring for Millicent and tell her to get her dustpan and brush.’

WHEN THE TELEPHONE rang, Millicent was not in the vicinity to answer it, and as Rosie was at the foot of the stairs on her way to the drawing room, she picked it up herself. It was the kind where the mouthpiece is fixed to the apparatus on the wall, but the earpiece has to be detached and applied to the ear. It was an impractical design because it made no allowance for the height of the speaker, and this one had been mounted at Millicent’s height, since it was her job to answer it.

Rosie said, ‘Eltham 292,’ and a faint and distant voice said, ‘Is that you, Rosie? Rosie? …’ and then the connection was lost. Rosie depressed the hook several times, but it was not restored. She stood quite still for a few moments, and then replaced the earpiece. She felt a cold tremor run up her spine, and the urgent need to sit down and be alone.

She went to the morning room and sat at the window seat, remembering when she had been waiting for the cats’ meat man, and Daniel had turned up on his combination instead. Caractacus came by and chirruped as he sprang on to her knee.

She stroked the cat’s head absent-mindedly as she questioned herself about the voice on the telephone. It had been a bad line. Did it really have an American accent? Her head began to hurt, as if her brain had turned to lead. She felt hopeless. To whom could she speak about this? Fairhead, perhaps. She had resolved not to go back to Madame Valentine. She certainly could not tell Daniel. She might be able to tell Ottilie and Christabel, but she knew what they would say.

Just then the cats’ meat man went by, full of strength and ebullience, with a basket of horseflesh on his head, bawling his latest verse in his loud Irish voice

‘Cats’ meat, cats’ meat,

Make your cats fat meat.’

Everything was unbearably strange. The whole world was out of kilter. Rosie put Caractacus down and ran to get her coat and scarf and hat, and hurried down to the Tarn.

Sitting on the bench where she had once sat with Ash, and more recently with Daniel, she looked out over the water and thought about that poor old dead dog. She wondered what had become of the Romany girl. How strange that this small lake should have played so great a part in all of their lives. It had been everything to them: a place of recreation, a place for confidences, for being in love, for grieving, for contemplation. It seemed to have a consciousness of its own, oblivious to those who stood on its banks and walked its path, as if it knew something that they could not. Rosie wondered if, in a hundred years’ time, the Tarn would still be the same, with someone just like her beside it, revolving similar thoughts.

HAMILTON MCCOSH WAS sitting motionless at his desk before the window, looking out over Court Road. Caractacus was sitting in the middle of his blotter, bolt upright like a statue of Bast, making work impossible, and he was playing with the cat’s ears. Outside it was raining heavily, and the tradesmen were hurrying by wearing shining mackintoshes, and sou’westers. The fingers of his left hand rested limply round a glass tumbler containing a dram of his favourite Bladnoch. He was, as it were, trying to listen to his own body, to attend to its machinery. He had been having pains in his chest fairly frequently, and thought it unlikely to be indigestion. That would not explain the bouts of dizziness that could fall upon him at any time. He was expecting Dr Scott to call in at any minute. There was a tap on the door, and Ottilie put her head round it. ‘Daddy, can I come in?’ she said.

‘Hello, lassie. Is it teatime?’

‘No, I just wanted to talk to you about something, now that Fairhead’s asked you about Sophie.’

‘It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?’ said Mr McCosh. ‘Couldn’t be better. I’m very glad about it, I’m bound to say.’

‘Daddy, I’ve had an idea and I wanted to see what you thought of it.’

He looked up at her. ‘Fire away, lassie.’

‘I’ve been thinking. It’s an horrendous expense to have two weddings one after the other.’

‘That has also occurred to me. I’d have to sell a lot of shares. It’s extremely worrying. Naturally I’d have to do them proud, and one wedding can’t be seen to be better than the other. Very worrying indeed.’

‘Well, it’s hard to say this, but one wedding is bound to be much happier than the other, isn’t it? I mean much more joyous. It’s going to be terribly obvious to everyone.’

‘I fear you’re right, Ottie bairn. But what can be done about that? We’re stuck with it.’

‘That’s the thing, Daddy. We’re not stuck. We could have a double wedding.’

‘A double wedding! Now there’s a thought! I believe you might be on to something. It’s not as if it’s never happened before.’

‘Well, if you think about it, it would be largely the same guests coming to both. And the novelty of it would be rather thrilling. And … well …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, the fact is that Rosie will be so happy for Sophie and Fairhead that it will make the day much happier for her too. She’ll get caught up in all that happiness, don’t you think? And that’ll make it happier for Daniel. It’ll help to give them a better start.’

‘I do wish Daniel and Rosie weren’t going ahead with it. It can’t come to any good.’

‘I think it could work,’ said Ottilie, ‘but it all depends on Rosie, doesn’t it? She’s got to cut the cord that drags the ghost of poor Ash along with her wherever she goes. But a double wedding’s a good idea, don’t you think?’

‘We’d have to talk to everyone and see what they think,’ said Mr McCosh.

‘I’ve already done it,’ said Ottilie. ‘Everyone rather likes the idea.’

‘Gracious me, Ottie, you could have been a diplomat. Or in business.’

Ottilie smiled and said, ‘Actually, I haven’t suggested it to Mama yet. I’m sure she’ll kick up about it, so I haven’t dared. But I do have a plan, if you’d like to hear it.’

Accordingly, Hamilton McCosh approached his wife as she made up her face before dinner, and was peering intently into the mirror. Her reaction to the idea was one of horror. ‘Why,’ she cried, ‘this has certainly never been done in my family before! It can’t possibly be! A thousand times no!’

‘A thousand times, my dear? That seems an unduly large number, when only a few hundred will do.’

‘I will not be mocked!’

‘Perhaps not, my dear, but I do have to tell you that two weddings would be unmanageably expensive. It couldn’t possibly be done without personal economies.’

‘Personal economies?’

‘Well, I’ve been scratching my head about this, and I’ve realised that we could do two separate weddings if you were to forgo your dress allowance for eighteen months.’

‘My dress allowance?! For eighteen months?!’

‘The sums work out very neatly, my dear. I’m sure you could bear the sacrifice, for the children’s sake.’

‘Well!’ she huffed. ‘I never … well, I never did!’

‘I’ll leave you to think about it,’ said her husband. ‘Now I must go and change for dinner.’

After dinner, when Mrs McCosh left the room to ‘powder her nose’, Hamilton McCosh said to the girls, ‘I think we might have pulled it off.’

‘I told her that the daughters of a Scottish duke had a triple wedding to three Montenegrin princes last year,’ said Christabel. ‘I think she was impressed.’