Lost Among the Living(7)
“I understand,” I said.
She signed another paper, flipped the page again. “Martin arrives tomorrow morning.” Again, her voice was grim, so unlike the cloying tone she’d used when she’d shown her son’s photograph on the boat from Calais. “He had a health problem that affected his nerves after the war and has been in a spa in Switzerland.”
So the husband was a lech, and the son was a madman fresh from the asylum. No wonder Dottie had been sparse with details until now, when she had me captive in the motorcar, unable to run screaming. And I still knew nothing about queer cousin Fran. “It’s nice that he’s coming home,” I managed.
“I do not want any distressing subjects raised in the presence of my son,” she said as if I hadn’t spoken. “The war is not to be mentioned. Alex is not to be mentioned—Martin liked Alex a great deal and found his death upsetting. If he asks you about it, I expect you to deflect him and change the subject.”
“All right,” I replied, unable to think of anything more repellent than discussing my husband with a man who had lost his senses. The conversation with Mother had been more than enough. I studied my thumbnail, scraping a fingernail along it and rethinking my decision not to live in poverty in London. “What exactly will my duties be?”
She glanced at me for the first time, then directed her gaze back down to her papers. “You are to accompany me throughout the day and assist me. I expect you to report to me at eight o’clock every morning, at breakfast. I will be meeting with artwork buyers and negotiating with them. You are not expected to make conversation—in fact, the less you speak, the happier I will be. Your job will be to serve tea and help me manage my correspondence. I understand you have typing skills.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I can type. But I have never served tea.”
She gave me a glare that plainly said I was stupid. “It isn’t hard, Manders. Just try not to spill it.” She leaned back in her seat. “Aside from selling the pieces I’ve bought, I will also be busy planning Martin’s engagement and wedding.”
I frowned, confused. “Who is Martin engaged to, if he’s been in a spa?” If she wanted to call it a spa, I would go along with it.
“He is not yet engaged. I believe I have mentioned that he is coming home to marry.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. The sequence seemed backward to me. “I thought you needed a fiancée in order to have an engagement.”
Dottie dismissed this detail with a flick of her hand. “I will take care of it,” she said, and as I sat gaping at her, she picked up her pen and continued. “There will be some afternoons when I will not require you, and you will be released for free time. After six o’clock, unless I have a special requirement, your evenings are your own.”
I looked out the window at the woodland passing by, thinking about long evenings alone as the autumn stretched into winter. “It seems isolated.”
“There is a town less than an hour’s walk away,” Dottie replied. “It’s possible you can use the car and driver, if they are free. There is a lending library, I understand.”
It was a generous offer, most unlike Dottie. I turned to her, ready for once to be friendly, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring ahead, her papers forgotten. She pulled out her long cigarette holder, attached a cigarette to it, and lit it, right there in the motorcar, creating a foul fug of smoke. She had forgotten me, and she had certainly forgotten the driver, who had never registered to her at all. Her gaze clouded, and something about the look on her face chilled me.
The Dottie I had spent three months with in Europe had been disagreeable, but she had been energetic and edgy, unable to sit still. I now saw that that woman had actually been the happier version of herself—marshaling her luggage from train platform to train platform, negotiating with hotel clerks, clipping briskly down cobblestoned streets with a map in her hand and a cigarette between her lips, haggling for hours over works of art. In her way, she had seemed to thrive. This still moodiness, this introspective unhappiness, was new, and it made me uneasy, because clearly something at Wych Elm House was the cause of it.
In silence I followed her gaze, tearing my own gaze away from her profile. She was staring past the driver and through the front windshield, where, as the thick trees parted and we juddered along the unpaved drive, a house was coming into view.
Dottie took a long, slow drag of her cigarette, exhaling smoke like a dragon. She blinked slowly, the lines of her face settling into tension, and when she opened her eyes again, they were shuttered, impenetrable, whatever had been on the surface sinking back into the depths again.
“Well, then,” she said to no one in particular. “There it is. Home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It just looked like a house to me. Big, with buttery yellow brick and gables and large, double front doors at the head of a circular drive. The center of the building, above the entrance, was crowned with a high gable, thrusting upward through the canopy of trees. It was not one of those rolling, manicured estates you saw in newsreels of the royal family, the kind of place that had been there for centuries, attended by throngs of gardeners. Instead it was an expensive house built in a tangle of woods, dappled by the encroaching trees that tapped the roof, surrounded by browning thickets of brush adorned with dying flowers. It had a forlorn air of emptiness to it. The house itself worked to impress with its rich blood, but if a gardener had been here, it wasn’t for a very long time.