Weyward(39)

She picked a stray twig out of her hair and combed it. The dark strands shimmered in the low light of the room, making her think of her mother.

She had the same dark hair.

Violet was reminded of the conversation she’d overheard between the servants when she was younger. What was the word Nanny Metcalfe had used for her mother? Uncanny.

What on earth did that mean? Her stomach churned as the awful image came back to her: her mother, wild and pale, trapped in a room. Mad.

Perhaps that was why everyone lied about what had happened to her. Although, when she came to think of it, Violet couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her that her mother had died giving birth to Graham. Instead, Nanny Metcalfe and Mrs Kirkby had said things like ‘Your brother survived, thanks to Jesus’ and ‘The doctor did his best’.

Violet’s fingers went to the pendant around her neck, the way they often did when she was worried, tracing the delicate W. Her head was beginning to ache: there was a tightness to her forehead and a thudding at her temple. She was still very thirsty after the kiss (how was it that something so wet could make one so parched?) and a little faint.

She had the queer feeling that she was looking at something so closely that she could not yet make out its full shape. Frederick’s words echoed in her mind.

Your father would have to take her back to her room … Lock her in.

The gong rang for dinner, reverberating through the house like a call to battle. She looked in the mirror one last time, trying to ignore the throbbing in her skull. She was wearing the green dress again, same as last night. Suddenly, she noticed how short it was: her knees were perilously close to exposure. She couldn’t decide if she looked like a child or a strumpet (‘strumpet’ was the word Violet had heard Mrs Kirkby use to describe Penny after she’d kissed the under-gardener).

Violet tried to see the dining room through Frederick’s eyes. It was a rather grand room, and in the candlelight the slight grubbiness that had set in since the start of the war was barely noticeable. The space was dominated by an enormous mahogany dining table that Father referred to – inexplicably – as the ‘Queen Anne’. (Had Queen Anne sat at it, Violet wondered?) Long-dead Ayreses looked out from the gilt frames on the walls with a melancholy air, as if they regretted not being able to sample whatever meal was being served. A stuffed peacock – which Violet had secretly nicknamed Percy – perched atop a Georgian sideboard, once-glorious tail feathers hanging limp to the floor.

This evening, Mrs Kirkby served a roast pheasant which Father had shot a few days prior. Violet could see the bullet hole in the pheasant’s neck, a dark smudge in the golden flesh. The sick feeling in her stomach returned. As she cut into her serving, she was horribly aware of poor Percy watching from the other side of the room. One day, when Violet was grown up and had become a biologist (or a botanist, or an entomologist), she would eat only vegetables.

There seemed to be little chance that Frederick shared such dietary aspirations, Violet noted as he tucked into his roast pheasant with relish. There was a hungry look to him, she thought, as he surveyed the things in the dining room: the Queen Anne, the musty old portraits, her. It didn’t go away, even though he’d eaten rather a lot of pheasant already.

Father and Frederick were having a long conversation about the war. Violet was distracted, haunted by what Frederick had said about her mother, until Graham kicked her under the table. She set her mouth into a prim smile and tried to focus on what Father was saying.

‘Can’t say I’m a huge fan of General Eisenhower,’ he said. ‘Do we really need all this help from the Yanks?’ He spat the last word out violently, as if he were still smarting from American independence.

‘We need all the help we can get, Uncle,’ Frederick said. ‘Unless you want the Hun sitting here eating pheasant with your daughter. He’d make short work of both, I expect.’

The wave of heat again. Violet wasn’t exactly sure what Frederick meant, but she thought unaccountably of the pulsing swarm of mayflies; the roughness of Frederick’s mouth on hers. Next to her, Graham was watching Father, his eyebrows raised.

But Father hadn’t heard: Mrs Kirkby had come to ask if they were ready for the pudding. Violet saw a flash of gold out of the corner of her eye. It looked as though Frederick had put something in his drink. They were drinking claret, like they always did at dinner. It was watered down, so that Graham and Violet could ‘get a taste for it’. There was the Christmassy smell again. Violet remembered the word for the substance Mrs Kirkby had deployed to make the Christmas pudding go up in blue flames. Brandy. That was it. It lived in a beautiful crystal decanter on Father’s drinks trolley. Violet had never seen anyone drink it – Father preferred port after dinner.

She looked at Frederick more closely. There was a glassiness to his eyes, she saw, and his fingers shook when he reached for his claret.

Was he drunk? In the same way that she’d read about kissing long before she’d actually kissed someone, her reference points for drunkenness also came from literature – Falstaff being ‘drunk out of his five senses’ at the start of The Merry Wives of Windsor. She’d read rather a lot of Shakespeare – not that Father knew this, of course (he hadn’t noticed that his Complete Works had been missing from its rightful place in the library for the past two years).

Frederick was now attacking the pudding – a rather pale spotted dick, doled out generously by Mrs Kirkby – so the retention of at least one of his senses wasn’t in doubt. Violet looked down at her bowl. The pudding glistened with fat. She ate the thin custard around it instead. Her headache was gathering strength, like a summer storm. ‘Good heavens,’ Father said. ‘Suet! Mrs Kirkby must have been saving some up.’