The Empty House Page 14

  “Not very long. I met him in May.”

  “Love at first sight, hm?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “That’s awfully young to settle down. Not that I can see that Anthony settling down too much for a few years yet.”

  “He’ll have to,” Virginia told her. “You see, we’re going to live in Scotland. Anthony’s been left this estate, Kirkton … it used to belong to an uncle who was a bachelor. And we’re going to go and live there.”

  “You mean, you think Anthony will spend all his time tramping around in a tweed suit with mud on his boots?”

  “Not exactly. But I can’t believe that living in Scotland is going to be quite the same as living in London.”

  “It won’t,” said Janey, who had been there. “But don’t expect the simple life, or you’ll be disappointed.”

  But Virginia did expect the simple life. She had never seen Kirkton, never been to Scotland for that matter, but she had once spent an Easter holiday with a schoolfriend who lived in Northumberland and somehow she imagined that Scotland would be rather like that, and that Kirkton would be a low-ceilinged, rambling, stone farmhouse, with flagged floors, and worn Turkey carpets, and a dining-room with a great log fire and hunting prints on the walls.

  Instead, she was presented with a tall, square, elegantly proportioned Adam house, with sash windows full of reflected sunshine, and a flight of stone stairs which led, from the carriage sweep, up to the front door.

  Beyond the gravel was grass, and then a ha-ha wall, and then the park, landscaped with giant beeches, sloping down to the distant silver curve of the river.

  Overwhelmed, silent, Virginia had followed Anthony up the steps and through the door. The house was empty, old-fashioned and unfurnished. Between them they were going to do it up. To Virginia the task seemed daunting, but when she said as much Anthony overrode her.

  “We’ll get Philip Sayer on to it, he’s this interior decorator my mother got to do the house in London for her. Otherwise we’ll make the most ghastly mistakes and the place will be a mess.”

  Virginia privately thought she preferred her own glastly mistakes to somebody else’s impeccable taste—it was more homely; but she said nothing.

  “And this is the drawing-room, and then the library beyond. And the dining-room, and there are kitchens and stuff downstairs.”

  The room soared and echoed, the icy prisms of crystal chandeliers glinted, dependent from ornately decorated ceilings. There was panelling and marvelous cornices over the tall windows. There was dust and a distinct feeling of chill.

  They mounted to the first floor up a curved stairway, airy and elegant, and their steps echoed on the polished treads and through the empty house. Upstairs, there were bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, dressing-rooms, linen rooms, housemaid’s cupboards, even a boudoir.

  “What would I do with a boudoir?” Virginia wanted to know.

  “You can come and boud in it, and if you don’t know what that means, it’s French for sulk. Oh, come on, take that horrified expression off your face and look as though you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “It’s just so big.”

  “You talk as though it were Buckingham Palace.”

  “I’ve never been in such a big house. I certainly never thought I would live in one.”

  “Well, you’re going to, so you’d better get used to it.”

  Eventually they were outside again, standing by the car, staring up at the elegant front elevation, regularly spaced with windows. Virginia put her hands deep in the pockets of her coat and said, “Where’s the garden?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean flower-beds and stuff. Flowers. You know. A garden.”

  But the garden was a half-mile away, enclosed in a wall. They drove there and went inside and found a gardener and rows of fruit and vegetables like soldiers, waiting to be picked off.

  “This is the garden,” said Anthony.

  “Oh,” said Virginia.

  “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just oh.”

  The interior decorator duly arrived. Hard on his heels came vans and lorries, builders, plasterers, painters, men with carpets, men with curtains, men in pan-technicons which spilled out furniture like cornucopias, endlessly, as though they would never run out.

  Virginia let it all happen. “Yes,” she would say, agreeing to whatever shade of velvet Philip Sayer was suggesting. Or “Yes” when he thought of Victorian brass bedsteads in the spare room, and thick white crochet bedcovers. “Terribly Osborne, my dear, you know, Victorian Country Life.”

  The only time that she had raised her voice with an independent idea was over the kitchen. She wanted it like the one she remembered, the marvellous room at Penfolda with its air of stability, the suggestion in the air of good things cooking, the cat in the chair and the geraniums crowded on the window-sill.

  “A farmhouse kitchen! That’s what I want. A farmhouse kitchen’s like a living-room.”

  “Well, I’m not going to live in any kitchen, I’ll tell you that.”

  And she had let Anthony have his way because, after all, it was not her house, and it was not her money which paid for the stainless steel sinks, and the black and white floor and the patent self-cleaning cooking unit with eye-level grill, and a spit for broiling chickens.

  It was finished and Virginia was pregnant.

  “How marvellous for Nanny!” said Lady Keile.

  “Why?”

  “Well, darling, she’s in London, doing temporary work, but she’s longing, but longing for a new baby. Of course she won’t be all that keen on leaving London, but she’s bound to make friends, you know what this Nanny’s network’s like, better than the English Speaking Union I always say. And that top floor is meant to be a nursery, you can tell by the gate at the top of the stairs, and the bars on the windows. Gorgeously sunny. I think pale blue, don’t you? For carpets, I mean, and then French chintz curtains…”

  Virginia tried to stand up for herself. To say, No. I will look after my own baby. But she was so sick carrying Cara, so weak and unwell, that by the time she once again felt strong enough to cope with the situation and stand on her own two feet, the nursery had been decorated and Nanny was there, established, rigid, immovable.

  I’ll let her stay. Just until the baby’s born and I’m on my feet again. She can stay for a month or two, and then I’ll tell her that she can go back to London because I want to look after my baby for myself.

  But by then, there were further complications. Virginia’s mother, in London, complained of pains and tiredness; she thought she was losing weight. Virginia at once went south to see her, and after that, her loyalties were torn between her baby in Scotland and her mother in London. Travelling up and down in the train it became very clear that it would be madness to get rid of Nanny until Mrs. Parsons had recovered. But of course, she didn’t recover and, by the time the whole ghastly nightmare was over, Nicholas had arrived and, with two babies in the nursery, Nanny was dug in for good.

  At Kirkton they were surrounded, within a radius of ten miles or so, by a number of entertaining neighbours. Young couples with time and money to spare, some with young children like the Keiles’, all with interests which matched Anthony’s.

  For appearances’ sake, he put in a certain amount of time on the farm, talking to McGregor, the grieve, finding out what McGregor thought should be done, and then telling McGregor to do it. The rest of the day was his own, and he used it to the full, doing exactly what he wanted. Scotland is a country geared to the pleasures of menfolk, and there was always shooting to be got, grouse in the summer, and partridges and pheasants in the autumn and winter. There were rivers to be fished and golf courses and a social life which was even gayer than the one he had left behind in London.

  Virginia did not fish or play golf and Anthony would not have invited her to join him even if
she had wanted to. He preferred the company of his men-friends, and she was expected to be present only when they had been invited specifically as a couple. To a dinner or a dance, or perhaps to lunch before a point-to-point, when she would go through agonies trying to decide what to put on, and inevitably turn up in what everybody had been wearing last year.

  She was still shy. And she didn’t drink so there seemed no artificial way of getting over this terrible defect. The men, Anthony’s friends, obviously thought her a bore. And their wives, though kind and friendly, terrified her with their private jokes and their incomprehensible references to places and persons and events known only to them. They were like a lot of girls who had all been to the same school.

  Once, driving home after a dinner party, they quarrelled. Virginia had not meant to quarrel but she was tired and unhappy, and Anthony was more than a little drunk. He always seemed to drink too much at parties, almost as though it were a social grace that was expected of him. This evening it made him aggressive and bad-tempered.

  “Well, did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You certainly didn’t look as though you did.”

  “I was tired.”

  “You’re always tired. And yet you never seem to do a thing.”

  “Perhaps that’s why I’m tired.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “It has to mean something.”

  “All right, it means that I get bored and lonely.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Isn’t it? You’re never there … sometimes you’re not in the house all day. You have lunch in the club at Relkirk … I never see you.”

  “OK. Me and about a hundred other chaps. What do you suppose their wives do? Sit and mope?”

  “I’ve wondered what they do with their time. You tell me.”

  “Well, they get around, that’s what. They see each other, take the children to Pony Club meets, play bridge; I suppose, garden.”

  “I can’t play bridge,” said Virginia, “and the children don’t want to ride ponies, and I would garden only there isn’t a garden at Kirkton, just a four-walled prison for flowers, and a bad-tempered gardener who won’t let me so much as cut a bunch of gladioli without asking him first.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake…”

  She said, “I watch other people. Ordinary couples, sometimes on Saturdays in Relkirk. Doing the shopping together in the rain or the sunshine, and children with them, sucking ice-creams, and they put all the parcels into shabby little cars and drive home, and they look so happy and cosy, all together.”

  “Oh, God. You can’t want that.”

  “I want not to be lonely.”

  “Loneliness is a state of mind. Only you can do anything about that.”

  “Weren’t you ever lonely, Anthony?”

  “No.”

  “Then you didn’t marry me for company. And you didn’t marry me for my startling conversation.”

  “No.” Coldly agreeing, his profile was stony.

  “Then why?”

  “You were pretty. You had a certain fawnlike charm. You were very charming. My mother thought you were very charming. She thought your mother was very charming. She thought the whole bloody arrangement was charming.”

  “But you didn’t marry me because your mother told you to.”

  “No. But you see, I had to marry somebody, and you turned up at such a singularly opportune time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He did not reply to this. For a little he drove in silence, perhaps prompted by some shred of decency not to tell her the truth, now or ever. But Virginia, having come so far, made the mistake of pressing him. “Anthony, I don’t understand,” and he lost his temper and told her.

  “Because I was left Kirkton on condition that I was married when I took it over. Uncle Arthur thought I would never settle down, would break the place up if I moved in as a bachelor … I don’t know what he thought, but he was determined that if I lived at Kirkton I’d do it as a family man.”

  “So that’s why!”

  Anthony frowned. “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. Should I be?”

  He fumbled for her hand with his own … the car swerved slightly as his fingers closed over hers. He said, “It’s all right. It may be no better, but it’s certainly no worse than other marriages. Sometimes it’s a good thing to be frank and clear the air. It’s better to know where we both stand.”

  She said, “Do you ever regret it? Marrying me, I mean.”

  “No. I don’t regret it. I’m just sorry that it had to happen when we were both so young.”

  One day she found herself in the house alone. Quite alone. It was Saturday, and afternoon. Mr. McGregor, the grieve, had gone to Relkirk, taking Mrs. McGregor with him. Anthony was playing golf, and Nanny and the children were out for a walk. An empty house and nothing to do. No washing to be done, no cake to be baked, no ironing, no garden to weed. Virginia walked through it, going from room to room, as though she were a stranger who had paid to see around, and her footsteps echoed on the polished staircase, and there was the tick of the clock, and everywhere order, neatness. This was what Anthony loved. This was what he had created. This was why he had married her. She ended up in the hall, opened the front door and went down the steps on to the gravel, thinking that she would maybe spy Nanny and the children in the distance; she would go to meet them, run and snatch Cara up in her arms, hug her and hold her, if only to prove that she really existed, that she was not a dream-child that Virginia had conceived, like some frustrated spinster, out of her own imagination.

  But there was no sign of Nanny and, after a little, she went back up the steps and so indoors again, because there did not seem to be anywhere else to go.

  There was a pretty girl, called Liz, married to a young lawyer who worked in Edinburgh. He worked in Edinburgh, but they lived only a mile or two from Kirkton, in an old, converted Presbyterian manse, with a wild garden, that was filled with daffodils in the spring, and a paddock for the ponies.

  She had young children, dogs, a cat, and a parrot in a cage, but—perhaps because she missed her husband who was in Edinburgh all week, or perhaps because she was simply a girl who enjoyed people—her house was always full. Other mothers’ children lolloped about on the ponies, crowded the dining-room table at teatime, played rounders on the lawn. If she didn’t have whole families staying with her, then she had whole families for the day, feeding them on huge roasts of beef, and steak and kidney pies, marvellous old-fashioned puddings, and homemade ice-creams. Her drink cupboard, which must have taken a frightening beating from the hordes who passed through her hospitable doorway, was always open, always at hand for any guest in need of a little liquid refreshment.

  “Help yourself,” she would call through the open door, while she knocked up a three-course dinner for ten unexpected guests. “There’s ice in the fridge if the ice-bucket’s empty.”

  Anthony, naturally enough, adored her, flirted cheerfully and openly with her, put on a great show of jealousy when the week-ends came around and her husband was home.

  “Get that bloody man out of the house,” he would tell Liz, and she would go into gales of delighted laughter, as would everybody else who was listening. Virginia smiled, and over their heads met the eye of Liz’s husband. He was a quiet young man, and though he stood there, with a glass in his hand, smiling, it was almost impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  “You’ll have to watch out for that husband of yours,” one of the other wives said to Virginia. But she only said, “I have been, for years,” and changed the subject, or turned to speak to somebody else.

  One Tuesday, Anthony called her from the club in Relkirk. “Virginia. Look, I’ve got embroiled in a poker game, God knows when I’ll be home. But don’t wait, I’ll get a bite to eat here. See you later.”

  “All right. Don’t lose too much money.�
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  “I shall win,” he told her. “I shall buy you a mink coat.”

  “That’s just what I need.”

  He arrived home, after midnight, stumbling up the stairs. She heard him moving about in his dressing-room, dropping things, opening and shutting drawers, swearing at some cuff-link or button.

  After a little, she heard him getting into bed, and the light beyond the open door went out, and there was only darkness. And she wondered if he had chosen to sleep in his dressing-room out of consideration to Virginia, or whether there was some other, more sinister reason.

  She soon knew. The society in which they moved, the narrow clique, was too small for secrets. “Virginia darling, I told you to watch out for that naughty man of yours.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “You are marvellous, the way you never get ruffled. You obviously know all about it.”

  “All about what?”

  “Darling, the intimate dinner party that he had with Liz.”

  “… Oh, yes, of course. Last Tuesday.”

  “He is an old devil. I suppose he thought none of us would find out. But then Midge and Johnny Gray suddenly decided on the spur of the moment to go up to the Strathtorrie Arms for dinner, you know, there’s a new manager now, and it’s all frightfully dark and chic and you can get a very good dinner. Anyway, off they went, and of course there were Anthony and Liz, all snugged up in a corner. And you knew all the time!”

  “Yes.”

  “Any you don’t mind?”

  “No.”

  That was the terrible thing. She didn’t mind. She was apathetic, bored by Anthony and the outrageous schoolboy charm that had, as far as Virginia was concerned, long since worn itself to shreds. And this was not the first affair. It had happened before and it would doubtless happen again, but still, it was daunting to look down the years ahead and see herself tied for ever to this tedious Peter Pan. A man so unperceptive that he could gaily embark on a clandestine involvement, and yet conduct the whole affair on what was virtually his own front doorstep.