he was late arriving in the evening, and she teased him sometimes; but she was never coquettish. She told him how disappointed everyone was about the baby she had lost: Boy, Fitz, Bea, her mother in Buffalo, even her father, Lev. She could not shake the irrational feeling that she had done something shameful, and she asked if he thought that was foolish. He did not. Nothing she did was foolish to him.
Their conversation was personal but they kept their distance from one another physically. He would not exploit the extraordinary intimacy of the night she miscarried. Of course, the scene would live in his heart for ever. Wiping the blood from her thighs and her belly had not been sexy – not in the least – but it had been unbearably tender. However, it had been a medical emergency, and it did not give him permission to take liberties later. He was so afraid of giving the wrong impression about this that he was careful never to touch her.
At ten o’clock she would make them cocoa, which he loved and she said she liked, though he wondered if she was just being nice. Then he would say goodnight and go upstairs to his attic bedroom.
They were like old friends. It was not what he wanted, but she was a married woman, and this was the best he was going to get.
He tended to forget Daisy’s status. He was startled, one evening, when she announced that she was going to pay a visit to the earl’s retired butler, Peel, who was living in a cottage just outside the grounds. ‘He’s eighty!’ she told Lloyd. ‘I’m sure Fitz has forgotten all about him. I should check on him.’
Lloyd raised his eyebrows in surprise, and she added: ‘I need to make sure he’s all right. It’s my duty as a member of the Fitzherbert clan. Taking care of your old retainers is an obligation of wealthy families – didn’t you know that?’
‘It had slipped my mind.’
‘Will you come with me?’
‘Of course.’
The next day was a Sunday, and they went in the morning, when Lloyd had no lectures. They were both shocked by the state of the little house. The paint was flaking, the wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains were grey with coal dust. The only decoration was a row of photographs cut from magazines and tacked to the wall: the King and Queen, Fitz and Bea, and other assorted members of the nobility. The place had not been properly cleaned for years, and there was a smell of urine and ash and decay. But Lloyd guessed it was not unusual for an old man on a small pension.
Peel had white eyebrows. He looked at Lloyd and said: ‘Good morning, my lord – I thought you were dead!’
Lloyd smiled. ‘I’m just a visitor.’
‘Are you, sir? My poor brain is scrambled eggs. The old earl died, what, thirty-five or forty years ago? Well, then, who are you, young sir?’
‘I’m Lloyd Williams. You knew my mother, Ethel, years ago.’
‘You’re Eth’s boy? Well, in that case, of course . . .’
Daisy said: ‘In that case, what, Mr Peel?’
‘Oh, nothing. My brain’s scrambled eggs!’
They asked him if he needed anything, and he insisted he had everything a man could want. ‘I don’t eat much, and I rarely drink beer. I’ve got enough money to buy pipe tobacco, and the newspaper. Will Hitler invade us, do you think, young Lloyd? I hope I don’t live to see that.’
Daisy cleaned up his kitchen a bit, though housekeeping was not her forte. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said to Lloyd in a low voice. ‘Living here, like this, he says he’s got everything – he thinks he’s lucky!’
‘Many men his age are worse off,’ Lloyd said.
They talked to Peel for an hour. Before they left, he thought of something he did want. He looked at the row of pictures on the wall. ‘At the funeral of the old earl, there was a photograph took,’ he said. ‘I was a mere footman, then, not the butler. We all lined up alongside the hearse. There was a big old camera with a black cloth over it, not like the little modern ones. That was in 1906.’
‘I bet I know where that photograph is,’ said Daisy. ‘We’ll go and look.’
They returned to the big house and went down to the basement. The junk room, next to the wine cellar, was quite large. It was full of boxes and chests and useless ornaments: a ship in a bottle, a model of Ty Gwyn made of matchsticks, a miniature chest of drawers, a sword in an ornate scabbard.
They began to sort through old photographs and paintings. The dust made Daisy sneeze, but she insisted on continuing.
They found the photograph Peel wanted. In the box with it was an even older photo of the previous earl. Lloyd stared at it in some astonishment. The sepia picture was five inches high and three inches wide, and showed a young man in the uniform of a Victorian army officer.
He looked exactly like Lloyd.
‘Look at this,’ he said, handing the photo to Daisy.
‘It could be you, if you had side-whiskers,’ she said.
‘Perhaps the old earl had a romance with one of my ancestors,’ Lloyd said flippantly. ‘If she was a married woman, she might have passed off the earl’s child as her husband’s. I wouldn’t be very pleased, I can tell you, to learn that I was illegitimately descended from the aristocracy – a red-hot socialist like me!’
Daisy said: ‘Lloyd, how stupid are you?’
