Kate Morton - The House at Riverton aka The Shifting Fog

My eyes were smarting, his bitter tone made my skin prickle. I whispered, ‘I just wanted to help-’

‘To help?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘And what makes you think you can help me?’

‘Why, Alfred,’ I said tentatively, wondering what he could possibly mean. ‘You and I… we’re… It’s like you said… in your letters-’

‘Forget what I said.’

‘But Alfred-’

‘Stay away from me, Grace,’ he said coldly, returning his attention to the glasses. ‘I never asked for your help. I don’t need it and I don’t want it. Go on, get out of here and let me get on with my work.’

My cheeks burned: with disillusionment, with the feverish afterglow of confrontation, but most hotly with embarrassment. I had perceived a closeness where none existed. God help me, in my most private moments I had even begun to imagine a future for Alfred and me. Courtship, marriage, maybe even a family of our own. And now, to realise I had mistaken absence for greater feeling…

I spent the early evening downstairs. If Mrs Townsend wondered where my sudden dedication to the finer points of pheasant roasting came from, she knew better than to ask. I basted and boned, and even helped with stuffing. Anything to avoid being sent back upstairs where Alfred was serving.

My course of avoidance was on good track until Mr Hamilton thrust a cocktail salver into my hands.

‘But Mr Hamilton,’ I said disconsolately. ‘I’m helping Mrs Townsend with the meals.’

Mr Hamilton, eyeballs glistening behind his glasses at the perceived challenge, replied, ‘And I am telling you to take the cocktails.’

‘But Alfred-’

‘Alfred is busy fixing the dining room,’ Mr Hamilton said. ‘Quickly now, girl. Don’t keep the Master waiting.’

It was a small party, six in all, and yet the room gave the impression of being overfull. Thick with loud voices and inordinate heat. Mr Frederick, eager to make a good impression, had insisted on extra heating and Mr Hamilton had risen to the challenge, hiring two oil stoves. A particularly strident female perfume had flourished in the hothouse conditions and now threatened to overwhelm the room and its occupants.

I saw Mr Frederick first, dressed in his black dinner suit, looking almost as fine as the Major had once done, though thinner and somehow less starched. He stood by the mahogany bureau, talking to a puffy man with salt and pepper hair that perched like a wreath around his shiny pate.

The puffy man pointed toward a porcelain vase on the bureau. ‘I saw one of those at Sotheby’s,’ he said in an accent of gentrified northern English mixed with something else. ‘Identical.’ He leaned closer. ‘It’s worth a pretty penny, old boy.’

Mr Frederick replied vaguely. ‘I wouldn’t know, Great-grandfather brought that back from the Far East. It’s sat there ever since.’

‘You hear that, Estella?’ Simion Luxton called across the room to his doughy wife, seated between Emmeline and Hannah on the sofa. ‘Frederick said it’s been in the family for generations. He’s been using it as a paperweight.’

Estella Luxton smiled tolerantly at her husband and between them passed a type of unspoken communication borne of years of joint existence. In that moment’s glance I perceived their marriage as one of practical endurance. A symbiotic relationship whose usefulness had long outlived its passion.

Duty to her husband fulfilled, Estella returned her attention to Emmeline, in whom she had discovered a fellow high-society enthusiast. For what her husband lacked in hair, Estella more than made up. Hers, the colour of pewter, was wound into a sleek and impressive chignon, curiously American in its construction. It reminded me of a photograph Mr Hamilton had pinned on the noticeboard downstairs, a New York skyscraper covered in scaffolding: complex and impressive without ever being properly attractive. She smiled at something Emmeline said and I was stunned by her unusually white teeth.

I skirted the room, laid the cocktail tray on the dumb waiter beneath the window and curtseyed routinely. The young Mr Luxton was seated in the armchair, half listening as Emmeline and Estella discussed the upcoming country season in rapturous tones.

Theodore-Teddy as we came to think of him-was handsome in the way all wealthy men were handsome in those days. Basic good looks enhanced with confidence created a façade of wit and charm, put a knowing gleam in the eyes and gave glisten to the hair. Swiftly put paid to any suggestion of middling intelligence.

He had dark hair, almost as black as his well-pressed dinner suit, and he wore a distinguished moustache which made him look like a screen actor. Like Douglas Fairbanks, I thought suddenly, and felt my cheeks flush. When he smiled it was broad and free, his teeth whiter even than his mother’s. There must be something in the American water, I decided, for all of their teeth were as white as the strand of pearls Hannah wore at her neck, over the gold chain of her photograph locket.

As Estella commenced a detailed description of Lady Hamilton’s most recent ball, in a metallic accent I had never heard before, Teddy’s gaze began to wander the room. Noticing his guest’s lack of occupation, Mr Frederick motioned tensely to Hannah who cleared her throat and said, half-heartedly, ‘Your crossing was pleasant, I trust?’

‘Very pleasant,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘Though Mother and Father would answer differently, I’m sure. Neither have sea legs. Each was as sick as the other from the moment we left New York until we reached Bristol.’

Hannah took a sip from her cocktail then submitted another stiff sample of polite conversation. ‘How long will you be staying in England?’

‘Just a short visit for me, I’m afraid. I’m off to the continent next week. Egypt.’

‘Egypt,’ Hannah said, eyes widening.

Teddy laughed. ‘Yes. I have business there.’

‘You’re going to see the pyramids of Egypt?’

‘Not this time, I’m afraid. Just a few days in Cairo and then on to Florence.’

‘God-awful place,’ Simion said loudly, sitting in the second armchair. ‘Full of pigeons and wogs. Give me good old England any day.’

Mr Hamilton motioned toward Simion’s glass, nearly empty despite having recently been filled. I took my cocktail bottle to his side.

I could feel Simion’s eyes on me as I topped up his glass. ‘There are certain pleasures,’ he said, ‘unique to this country.’ He leaned slightly and his warm arm brushed my thigh. ‘Try as I might, I haven’t found them anywhere else.’

I had to concentrate to keep a blank expression on my face, and not to pour too quickly. An eternity passed before the glass was finally full and I could leave his side. As I rounded the lounge, I saw Hannah frowning at the place where I had been.

‘My husband does love England,’ Estella said rather pointlessly.

‘Hunting, shooting and golf,’ Simion said. ‘No one does them better than the British.’ He took a swig of cocktail and leaned back in the armchair. ‘Best thing of all, though, is the English mind-set,’ Simion said. ‘There are two types of people in England. Those born to give orders.’ His gaze found mine across the room. ‘And those born to take them.’

Hannah’s frown deepened.

‘It keeps things running well,’ Simion continued. ‘Not so in America, I’m afraid. The fellow who shines your shoes on the street corner is as like as not to be dreaming of owning his own company. There’s little to make a man so damnably nervous as an entire population of labourers puffed up with unreasonable…’ he rolled the distasteful word around his mouth a moment and spat it out, ‘ ambitions .’

‘Imagine,’ Hannah said, ‘a working man who expects more from life than the stench of other men’s feet.’