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Authors: Clare Curzon

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Jess didn't ring to apologize. Nor did she. Neither of them had been in touch since.
 
When Kate arrived at Larchmoor Place they were all assembled indoors for afternoon tea, except Eddie who couldn't just slope away from work after Friday lunch. She had taken a week's leave from the library, unsure how long she was meant, or was meaning, to stay. Whatever free time was left over would be profitably spent getting her little garden in order.
If Carlton or Claudia had changed since she'd last seen them it was only to have become even more what they were before: he a frail
guru
figure and she utterly daunting. Thin and erect, she had beautiful bones under the tightly stretched parchment skin. Her dark eyes in hollowed sockets were matched by the sepulchral tones of a contralto voice which could imbue the most banal of remarks with momentous significance. Besides her early legal career she had been an amateur singer of some note, but now for several years had restricted herself to public recitations of her husband's verses. She was, Kate knew, fifteen years younger than Carlton and would have carried her years well if she hadn't always dressed in cobwebby draperies of black or grey. Eddie, as a little boy, had called her the Spider Lady.
Carlton's surviving brother, Matthew, had been born after a gap of six years, and Kate's dear Michael much later, the only son of their father's second wife, Lorna. Had he lived he would have been almost fifty. She was four years his junior. The twins had been twenty two this St. Valentine's Day.
If you counted Matthew's step-grandson, the assembled family covered three generations. Matthew was a widower, Joanne having died of typhoid fever on her return from a dig in Egypt when Robert was seven and Madeleine only five. Now fifty, Madeleine was married to Gus, with a
stepson Jake who had arrived that day with due biker panache on a Kawasaki and flaunting the company's matching leathers. He'd dared to park his mount opposite the house's double front doors. Jake was three or four years older than Kate's two, but there was little come and go between the younger folk.
A family member easily overlooked was the late-produced daughter born, to general amazement, some thirty-odd years ago to Carlton and Claudia. Daringly christened Miranda, she'd failed to live up to her name, once she'd miraculously survived. She had almost made the Guinness Book of Records for low birth weight, had three times stopped breathing and three times been resuscitated in hospital before eventually being brought home, puny and ailing, in the care of a nursemaid who'd been kept on as nanny until the child was eight. She'd been a solitary little girl, almost autistic, dumpy and without charm; an enigma to most of the family, not least to her parents.
The last member of the party, an outsider who had yet to become acclimatized to the impact of a full Dellar assembly, was Dr Marion Paige. An unknown factor as yet, she was engaged to marry Robert as soon as his divorce was made absolute.
As Kate slid in, the murmur of greetings only momentarily broke the conversation. Robert, robust ego that he was, had been centre-stage.
‘That book you left lying around …' said Claudia accusingly.
‘Oh, did you see it?' Impervious to any attempt to deflate him, Robert preened himself. ‘An advance copy. It comes out next month. Rather a good cover this time, I thought.'
Nobody rushed to assure him he was right, but then none of the family shared his enthusiasm for science fiction. They doubted, in fact, whether Robert could be much of an author. If pressed into reading the things as they came out year after year they might have felt obliged to give an opinion on his efforts.
‘It's very large,' Madeleine ventured, to fill the gap. Its size alone had been too much for her.
‘For the American readership,' Robert claimed. ‘They demand a big book.'
‘I remember – ' fluted old Carlton, his nose lifting like a police dog on a waft of cannabis – ‘I remember when editors edited. They discussed the content, advised one what to cut.
‘Nowadays,' he complained reedily, ‘it's like putting money in a chocolate machine. Typescript in, hardcover out. No discussion, no editorial foreplay, no delightful West End lunching. All haste to get a profit. Automatic as phoning the quack for a repeat prescription.'
‘Mine's not like that,' Madeleine sighed. ‘Doctor, I mean. I have to wheedle and cajole like some courtesan in a cinquecento Italian intrigue before I'm allowed the weeniest amount of pain relief.'
‘Then he's the rare, old-fashioned sort. Nowadays, once you hit fifty they've decided what to put you on, key it into the sacred computer and it's set that way for the rest of your natural – or thereby
ruined
– life. More of the chocolate-machine reaction,' said Matthew, backing up his elder brother whatever the cost to his embarrassed daughter.
At the mention of age, scoring its menopausal bullseye, Madeleine had jumped up, scarlet-faced, and started fussily rearranging Claudia's white lilac in a vase on the grand piano.
‘Oh, do mind the drips!' Miranda burst out; then, covered in confusion, put both hands over her mouth.
Everyone stared pityingly at Maddie's back except Robert, stung by his sister's disparaging attitude to his book. ‘Oh hard luck, Sis. Dad forgot you'd just hit the sensitive half-century.'
‘You're looking well, Kate.' Gus Railton moved across with a freshly poured cup of Earl Grey tea. She thanked him, conscious of all eyes swinging to read something into his effort to turn attention off his embarrassed wife. Poor
Gus had a reputation for half-hearted womanizing. He had the unfortunate good looks of a melodrama villain: lean, smooth cheeks with high colour under the eyes, which were of a piercing blue. Elsewhere his porcelain complexion contrasted with the sleeked-back gloss of jet-black hair. He even had the fine, smiley moustache of a thirties Hollywood star. Possibly there's a Sir Jasper gene, Kate had thought, which also includes a weakness for gambling. In an old Western, Gus would've been the one with the figured silk waistcoat.
‘I've been gardening,' she said to explain her slight suntan. ‘It provides a welcome break from working indoors all the time.' She looked around and saw that apparently the ball was still in her court. She had to slam it back to keep the game going.
‘Actually I've seen a copy of your new book, Robert,' she told him. ‘It's on our order for June.'
‘At the library, yes.' He eyed her shrewdly. Like the others he considered her occupation a pathetic effort, but never failed to call on its uses. ‘Did you happen to see how many copies the county's taking this time?'
‘Er, no,' she lied. It was only eight. Last year they'd gone for twelve, but all departments were economizing at the moment. The cut could have been simply for that reason.
‘Won't you introduce us, Bobbo?' asked the thin woman in lime green who'd been on the outer edge of the standing group.
‘A million pardons. Forgive my crude manners,' Robert babbled, putting an arm about his fiancée's waist. ‘Darling, this is Kate, my late Uncle Michael's er, wife.' He had shied off from using the word widow. Kate supposed none of them was accustomed to it yet, but his hesitation had made it sound as though her legitimacy were in doubt. She found herself smiling ironically as she took Marion Paige's hand.
‘I should have known who you were,' Marion said. ‘You're so like your lovely daughter. Same eyes; same sweet smile.'
Kate dared then to look straight across at Jess. Gone was her erstwhile mouse-nest neglect. Instead, the long, chestnut hair was twisted high into the glossy coiffure of a Roman matron. Under it a row of little circular curls appeared stuck flat across her brow. Her hair and skin shone. She looked wonderful. From student grunge to Caesar's wife in one leap.
‘I hardly think she'll find that a compliment,' Kate couldn't help saying, then wondered if that had been Marion Paige's intention.
With the removal of the tea things the atmosphere eased a little and they were able to move about, trickling through to the terrace and fanning across the lawn. Kate found herself again in the company of Robert's intended. ‘Have you picked on a date for the wedding?' she asked.
The woman gave a lean grin and Kate decided she might actually be quite fun. ‘His divorce isn't absolute yet. When it is – ' and she darted Kate a sideways look – ‘I think we may just go off and do the
fait accompli
thing.'
‘Cheat us of another family gathering?' Kate suggested, almost innocently.
Marion chuckled. ‘Could you bear that?'
‘Just about.' They turned at the end of the shrubbery and started walking back towards the house. Robert was talking to Claudia in the doorway of the room they'd just left and waving his arms extravagantly. Dr Marion Paige regarded them both, head tilted. ‘He's not too bad an old stick really,' she said dispassionately.
Kate was impressed. The newcomer had acuity and humour, a rare coupling. On the spur of the moment she dared ask, ‘What have you got against my daughter?'
‘Ah, that,' Marion said sombrely, not denying what Kate had intuitively picked up. ‘That is another story entirely.'
Marion never answered Kate's question but turned to smile at Robert as he advanced on them alone. ‘That woman!' he complained. ‘Boadicea had nothing on her.'
‘A little opposition can be good for one occasionally,' his fiancée murmured mischievously. In Robert's case Kate doubted it. His face was turkey-red and he seethed with indignation.
‘What has Claudia done now?' she inquired. ‘Had swords fixed to the wheel-hubs of their ancient Daimler?'
‘She's only sold off most of Grandfather's library.'
‘I'm sure she was well advised on its value first,' she suggested.
‘That isn't the point. There were books there which he'd always meant me to have.'
Marion faced him with her lopsided smile. It entirely changed the severe expression of her straight, leathery face. ‘You can still get them, if you discover which dealers they went to.'
That, of course, would mean reaching into his pocket, and Kate was quite certain that Dr Marion Paige was by now as aware as she that this action was painful to her intended. Kate doubted that their coming marriage would prove entirely comfortable. But certainly interesting. As Marion had herself said, a little opposition can be good for one occasionally.
‘What are you grinning at, Kate?' he demanded, scowling.
‘I've been enjoying your fiancée's company,' she said, ‘and finding we've a lot in common. Contemporaries and all that, you know.'
‘Yes.' He considered that a moment. ‘Silly, isn't it,' he told Marion. ‘Kate's husband was born so much later than Carlton and my father that here she is, my aunt, and I'm actually her senior by six years.'
‘Fascinating,' Marion lied. ‘Now come and show me round the garden. It must be simply vast.'
‘A wilderness.' Robert went off still complaining. ‘If they were short of cash why didn't they get rid of a few acres, instead of the books?'
Kate left them to explore together and turned back towards the terrace where Jessica was standing alone by a clematis pillar. It was time, perhaps, to bury the hatchet.
Warily Jess watched her mother approach. When she was close she darted her a cool glance from under the fringe of flat curls. On near sight they reminded Kate of those little gilt coins Mediterranean girls sew on to their veils: intended, perhaps, to allure. She wondered who among this family party her daughter intended to work on. She hoped it wasn't Old Carlton, with venal motivation?
Had she hopes of a major mention in his will? However much she dazzled him with her vibrant youth and beauty, she'd hardly succeed there, with Claudia standing dragon-guard all the time. Jess would get as short shrift as her cousin Robert had over the books he'd coveted. Kate was realist enough to accept, and forgive, that the young couldn' t avoid an occasional view of the elderly as eventual treasure-troves.
‘Is Eddie coming?' Jess brusquely demanded, breaking into her mother's thoughts.
‘I understood so.'
‘Good. I need to see him.'
It was Kate's turn to be spiky. ‘He's been perfectly visible for the past few weeks. You could have looked at him then.'
‘I know,' she admitted, suddenly almost humble.
Kate was reminded of that later, because the first thing her son asked when he finally arrived, somewhat in a lather after the first gong for dinner had sounded, was almost the same question.
‘Is Jess here?' he asked, having dutifully kissed her.
‘Very much so,' she said dryly. ‘I suppose you suddenly need to see her?'
‘Something like that,' he replied; and although it came out lightly, his eyes were deadly serious.
She hadn't stayed long in her daughter's company that afternoon because Jake, divested of his biker gear, had come out in T-shirt and daringly brief Robinson Crusoe denim shorts with frayed edges, to monopolize the girl.
Expensive Wild West-type fringed leather Kate always found amusingly elegant, but ragged grunge had raised her ire ever since Jess's teenage flares threatened her clean carpets with their sweepings from the street. ‘I won't have dog crap in with the rest of my washing,' she'd warned her.
Jess hadn't spoken to her for four hours after that, profoundly wounded. Then she'd hand-laundered the offending jeans and thereafter wore them rolled ostentatiously high whenever in the house.
Smiling at the recollection, Kate passed on from the young couple to Carlton, alone for once and stretched out on a rattan lounger, exposing scraggy bare arms to the welcome sunshine.
‘How are you, Carlton?' she asked her elderly brother-in-law.
His washed-out blue eyes almost twinkled. ‘Do you really require an answer?'
‘Yes: I don't waste words. Not many, anyhow.'
‘M'm.' He considered how to reply. ‘It's a strange thing, this relationship with one's body – like having an old acquaintance yoked on. From habit and with any luck, most of the time you don't notice it's there, then gradually things start to happen to it: small accidents, deficiencies. You begin to feel it's letting you down, being disloyal.'
He waved a hand airily. ‘Not that you've ever done much for it yourself. Often the opposite; taken chances and dragged it along. Then, irritably, you have to realize it's fallible. You start to feel some pity for it, a little guilt. Eventually, I suppose, you're relieved to be rid of the damned thing.'
His piping voice, high for a man's, ceased and he smiled dreamily into the distance. ‘Though I don't particularly care to have mine done with yet.'
He had almost implied he believed in a separate soul, or at least a personality independent of its physical shell. An avowed agnostic, maybe towards the end he was at least considering an alternative. Teasingly she put the possibility to him.
‘The individual's essence? Ah, solve that little puzzle if you will.' He was in a whimsical mood now, pleased with himself and the opportunity to tease back. ‘I'm delighted to have stimulated your curiosity about me.'
His puckishness didn't deceive her. She'd read his most recent book of verse,
The Century's Done,
published for the millennium. Had read it, actually, more than once. He'd used the same coy style he affected now, but in fact he was a seeker after truth. What had the twentieth century – his lifetime – been about? Scientific discoveries; extension of earth's physical boundaries; labour – and time-saving devices; but to what end? Perhaps – after the nineteenth's advocacy of Duty and Acquisition, had come the Pursuit of Sensation. Wisely, he'd not settled for summing it up in a single phrase. But the book had left her thinking. ‘Solve that little puzzle,' indeed.
‘They should have made you Poet Laureate,' she said, and meant it.
‘Wrong brand of politics,' he disallowed. ‘I don't speak the language of New Labour. They consider me outdated, like landed gentry. But it's interesting, you know, how fast these socialists become what they deride. Remember Wilson, Bevan, Healey, the Old Guard, how, once in power, they couldn't wait to become gentleman farmers. So, deliberately ignorant of the countryside, where will this new lot finally go with their self-congratulatory life peerages?'
His voice was growing slower. Kate touched the fine skin on the back of his hand, smiled and wandered off, leaving the sunshine to claim him. Next time she looked
across he was asleep, chin on chest, his wild, white beard shivering with each expelled breath. He tired easily, after rare moments of sweetness and wit.
That evening they toasted his eightieth anniversary at dinner. ‘In advance,' he overrode them rather pettishly. ‘I didn't make my entrance until almost midnight: not that I've since embraced nocturnal activities.'
Nevertheless he accepted their gift-wrapped offerings at coffee time, and had them set out on a table in the drawing-room. ‘If you'll permit me I'll leave opening them until tomorrow morning, when I'll be fresher,' he said. ‘It has been a long and exciting day. I thank you all for making the effort to come.' After which he withdrew and Claudia guided him to bed.
Kate had vaguer memories of the evening after that. There was music because Matthew had prevailed on Robert to bring along his CD player and a variety of disks. When Claudia had returned they joined her for Bridge with Madeleine as fourth. The rest helped themselves to drinks, wandered in and out of the open french windows, smoked on the terrace or strolled in the garden until the last of the light went. Twos and threes formed, re-formed and broke up again. Conversation was desultory and lethargic. Even Marion Paige was trying to hide yawns behind one thin, brown hand.
Kate wondered where she had achieved such a rich tan so early in the season, then decided she had a touch of foreign blood, perhaps Mediterranean. She had seen features like hers when on holiday in Turkey and Greece.
She left her in Eddie's company, discussing some recent show at the Tate Modern. As she said goodnight she could hear Jess laughing with Jake and his father somewhere out in the dark garden. Suddenly missing Michael so badly just then, she knew she wasn't good company, and so withdrew.
Although there were single rooms available, previously servants' quarters on the top floor, Claudia had put her in what had been Michael's big bedroom overlooking the
neglected rose garden. It was airy and old-fashioned. On her marriage, twenty-four years earlier, a double bed had been installed and the furniture was still the same as when, on visits, they used to hug and whisper there under the covers, fearful of the ancient springs broadcasting their love-making.
Carlton and Claudia now occupied the suite across the landing, which had then been Michael's father's. Matthew, already widowed, shared a home near Ascot with his horse-loving daughter and journalist son. They had seldom visited and never before stayed overnight.
Kate thought about her twins, aged twenty-two and the youngest Dellars, accorded single rooms up under the eaves; and she fervently hoped Jess wouldn't be entertaining Jake there overnight. As Gus's son by his first marriage, Jake wasn't a blood relative, but he struck her as too willingly sucked into the Dellar family culture.
Not that Charles Stone would be anyway preferable as her daughter's partner. At least Jake was of the same generation as Jess and single. So, reflecting gloomily, she slid into sleep, hugging the feather pillow where once Michael's head had lain beside hers.
 
It was shouting that woke Kate, then a thunderous knocking on her door which instantly burst open. Gus hoarsely cried, ‘For God's sake wake up and get out, Kate. The bloody house is on fire!'
She didn't doubt him. Already smoke was billowing into the room. She threw on her travel coat and shoes and grabbed her leather grip; looked wildly round for whatever she could snatch and stuff in. She reached the door, then ‘Handbag!' she told herself.
It was somewhere on the floor by the bed but had overturned and spilled out her reading spectacles. She'd be helpless without them. She scrabbled under the rumpled covers, found the specs case, then a couple of loose credit cards. That was all she had time for.
Leaving, she shut the room's door firmly behind her. Contain the fire; cut off oxygen. She knew that from library fire drills. Where were the twins? She ran to the servants' staircase. ‘Top floor's cleared,' someone sang out. At the far end of the passage Robert was standing with a hand on the banister rail, waiting to help her down the main stairs. It seemed she'd been the last to wake.
Smoke was rolling up at them through the square stairwell, and as she hesitated it was shot through with flame. ‘For God's sake, woman, move!'
But it was too late. They were cut off. ‘The kitchen roof,' she shouted. ‘We can get through a back window …'
‘Kitchen's gone,' he yelled back.
‘The front porch then.' She started running in that direction. The smoke was less dense there and it might offer a way down.
As they threw themselves through the doorway of the upstairs library, she heard flames roaring behind them, leaping up to where Robert had stood waiting. One of the library's two high windows already gaped open. As they fled past the other she noticed bare shelves on two sides of the room. Claudia must have sold Carlton's books by the yard rather than the title.
Robert was leaning out over the pediment to the front porch. ‘It's about a fourteen foot drop to the flat bit once you're over the sill. Then hang on till someone brings a ladder. You first, Kate.'
Looking down scared her, but fire was the immediate hazard. She dragged on the heavy brocade curtain beside her and the old fabric tore, coming away in her hands. She threw a great bundle of it out, then got her legs over the sill and jumped after it. The fall still jolted her and she rolled, barely able to grab at the edge. On the terrace below people were milling about in panic. Then Robert called down and someone waved back. ‘Stay there! I'll get help.'
BOOK: Last to Leave
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