A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

This letter, which drew from Isobel the exclamation that Harriet overheard, was in fact only a copy of the original which reached Henry Brandon in the Toulouse lodgings to which he had retreated in order to avoid his creditors. After which, conventional to the last, he retired to his bedroom, took out his father’s army revolver and blew out his brains.

It was thus as a widow of ten days’ standing that Isobel Brandon sat in front of the mirror in her suite at the Hotel Astor in London, pinning up the rich red braids of her hair. Black suited her, thank heavens, for she would be in mourning for at least a year; the velvet jacket, bought in one of the few shops where her credit still held good, brought out the whiteness of her skin; she was one of those fortunate redheads untroubled by freckles.

But the sight of her reflection was the only thing of comfort in the bleak wilderness that her life had become, for it did not occur to her to find solace in the small, bespectacled child curled up in an armchair with his nose, as always, in a book. Henry, with his pale, pinched little face, his unmanly terrors, was not at all the kind of son she had hoped for—and suddenly exasperated by his concentration, his inability to see what she was enduring, she said, “Really, Henry, you don’t seem to realize at all what is at stake. It’s your heritage I’m trying to save. Do you want us to go and live in a sordid little hut somewhere?”

With a tremendous effort of will, Henry rose twenty thousand leagues from the bottom of the sea, abandoning brave Captain Nemo who had just sighted a frightful monster with bristling jaws, and considered her question.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d like that. With a palm-leaf roof. The ubussu palm is best; it keeps the hut cool when the weather’s hot and doesn’t let in the rain at all. I’d go out every day and shoot animals for food. And I’d fish in the river. I’d look after you,” said Henry to his mother.

“Oh, God!”

The child’s face fell. He’d got it wrong again; his mother didn’t believe he could provide for her. Harriet would have believed it… Harriet, who had said that spectacles were an advantage …

For a while he waited, wondering if this was the moment to ask what “sordid” meant—was it some kind of hut—but his mother’s face had that closed look again, and with a small sigh Henry sank back and rejoined his companions on the ocean bed.

Why did that plain little son of hers have to inherit the General’s wide gray eyes, thought Isobel—eyes that her husband had missed, but that had so curiously lightened Rom’s vivid dark face. But here she veered away, as always, from the memory of that quicksilver, brilliant boy she had loved so idiotically. It was ten years since anyone had heard from Rom and he might as well be dead.

Had it been such a crime to marry sensibly, thought Isobel, jabbing pins into the fiery coils of her hair? To want Stavely? Land outlasted passion, everybody knew that. Henry, then, had seemed a wise choice. Dear God, to let the mind overrule the heart—was that something she should have paid for with such misery only to be left a pauper at the end?

Who could have foreseen that this prudent marriage would turn out to be the kind of nightmare it had been? That she, who had hardly been able to let Rom out of her sight, would be unable to endure the caresses of his half-brother. And who could have foreseen that Henry, faced with her disgust, would go to the dogs as thoroughly and conventionally as he had formerly played the country gentleman? Even before she had shut him out of her bedroom he had begun to drink, to gamble, and afterward…

She lifted her hand to the bell in order to ring for the manicurist who usually did her nails but dropped it again, remembering the appraising glance of the maitre d’hotel as he had noted—even while he bent over her hand, murmuring condolences on her loss—that she had come without her maid or a nurse for the child. He knew, as did the rest of London, that the sands were running out for the Brandons. Not that she had actually been refused a room, but there were none of the attentions she was accustomed to when she came to the Astor: no bowls of fruit or baskets of roses… and in the dining room she had been shown to an obscure table in the corner.

Oh, God, it was impossible, intolerable! There had to be some way out of the trap. And like one of those awful recurring dreams from which one thinks one has awoken, only to find it start again, she recalled the interview she had had with old Mr. Hathersage the previous day in his fusty office behind St. Paul’s.

“I’m afraid there is absolutely no help for it, Mrs. Brandon. You must know that if there was any other way my accountants would have found it. But the figures are inescapable. You must sell, Mrs. Brandon; you must sell for what you can get, and you must do so quickly.”

She finished buffing her nails and rose. “We’re going shopping, Henry,” she said. “Come here while I make you tidy.”

“Could I stay here and read?”

“No, you couldn’t. We’re going to the dentist afterward.”

Henry nodded. Shopping and the dentist. A somber prospect, but not more than he had learned to expect, and he stood patiently while Isobel tugged at his Norfolk jacket with unpracticed hands and jammed his cap on his head. The impertinence of that nursemaid, simply walking out without warning just because she had not been paid for a few weeks!

Usually there was nothing Isobel liked better than to shop and her mourning provided an excellent excuse for several new outfits, but there were only a few places now where her credit still held good. To these—little glove shops and hatters in the discreet, quiet streets around St. James’s whose owners, accustomed to serving the Brandons, had not learned to defend themselves—she now repaired. If she knew that the exquisite black kid gloves, the jet-beaded reticule and velvet toque she purchased would not be paid for, she concealed any anxiety she might have felt with remarkable success.

It had been hard for Henry to abandon the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, but now he trotted obediently beside his mother studying with scholarly attention the posters on the hoardings, the men digging a hole in the road, the passers-by.

“Why do they make ‘ Little Liver Pills?’” Henry wanted to know. “If they made them big , wouldn’t people’s livers get better more quickly?” And “If those men in the road dug and dug and dug, would they be the right way up when they got to Australia, or would they be upside-down?”

“Oh, Henry, be quiet!” They had just passed Fortnum’s, in the window of which there was ah exquisite ink-dark chenille gown which would have suited her magnificently, but the last time she had tried to charge anything here there had been a most unpleasant scene.

Henry made a heroic effort, forbearing to ask what made the red color in the glass dome in the chemist’s window and not even suggesting that they stop to give a penny to a beggar on crutches and with a row of medals on his chest. But when two men walked right across the pavement in front of him carrying a big wicker basket into a shop, he found it impossible not to pluck at his mother’s sleeve.

“Look!” he said. “That’s my name on the basket—one of my names. It’s spelled the same too.”

Isobel looked up, following her son’s pointing finger, and saw on the side of a basket, with its heavy leather straps, the letters R. P. VERNEY.

“Is something the matter?” Henry asked anxiously. He had hoped for once to interest his mother, but not to interest her as much as that. She had stopped dead on the pavement, her hand at her throat.

R.P.V.B. Romain Paul Verney Brandon. How often had she seen those initials entwined with her own! Not carved in the bark of trees—Rom allowed no one to despoil his beloved trees—but he had drawn them for her on the clear, fawn sand when they spent a day by the sea; sown them in cress seeds on a bed of earth while the old gardener scratched his head and muttered at the foolishness of the young. If Rom had wanted to forget Stavely—forget her and the Brandons—what more likely than that he had simply dropped his last name—too careless, too arrogant perhaps, to make a more fundamental change?