'And a great deal nastier,' Archie commented drily. 'Lottie Carstairs. I can't think of anything worse. When is all this going to happen?'
Violet shrugged. 'I don't know. Next month maybe. Or August.'
Virginia was horrified. 'She's surely not going to
'Let's hope not. Let's hope it's just a temporary measure.'
'And where on earth will Edie put her? She's only got two rooms in that little cottage of hers.'
'I didn't ask.'
'When did she tell you this?'
'This morning. When she was Hoovering my dining-room carpet. I thought she was looking a bit down in the mouth, so I asked her what was the matter. I heard all about it over a cup of coffee.'
'Oh, poor Edie. I can't bear it for her…'
Archie said, 'Edie is a saint.'
'She certainly is.' Violet finished her tea, glanced at her watch, and began to gather her belongings. Her large handbag, her papers, her spectacles. 'That was very nice, dear. Most refreshing. And now I must take myself home.'
'Me too,' said Archie. 'Back to Croy to drink more tea with the Americans.'
'You'll be awash. Who have you got this week?'
'No idea. Just hope they're not too elderly. Last week I thought one old boy was going to die of angina right there, in the middle of the soup. Mercifully, however, he survived.'
'It's such a responsibility.'
'Not really. The worst are the ones who've signed a pledge and take no drink. Bible Belt Baptists. Orange juice makes for sticky conversation. Have you got your car, Vi, or do you want a lift home?'
'I walked down, but I'd like a lift back up the hill.'
'I'll take you then.'
He too gathered together his papers and heaved himself to his feet. For an instant he paused and then, when certain of his balance, made his way towards them down the length of the thickly carpeted room. He limped only slightly, which was a miracle because his right leg, from a stump of thigh downwards, was made of aluminum.
He had come to the meeting today straight from his garden and apologized for his attire, but nobody took much notice because this was the way he looked most of the time. Shapeless corduroy trousers, a checked shirt with a patched collar, and a threadbare tweed jacket that he called his gardening coat, though in truth no self-respecting gardener would be seen dead in it.
Virginia pushed back her chair and stood up and Violet did the same, but much more slowly, matching her movements to Archie's painful gait. She was in no way impatient to be gone, but even if she were would never show it, for her feelings towards him were sympathetic and fiercely protective. She had, after all, known him all his life. Remembered him as a boy, as a wild young man, as a soldier. Always laughing, and an enthusiasm-almost a lust for life-that was as catching as the measles. She remembered him endlessly active. Playing tennis; dancing at the Regimental Ball, swinging his partners nearly off their feet; leading a line of guns up the hill behind Croy, his long legs covering the heather with an easy stride that left all the others behind.
Then, he had been Archie Blair. Now, he was Lord Balmerino. The Lord and the Laird. Fine titles for a man thin as a stick, with a tin leg to boot. The black hair was now flecked with white, the skin of his face netted with lines, his dark eyes deep-set and shadowed by the jutting brows.
He reached her side and smiled. 'Ready, Vi?'
'All set.'
'In that case, we'll go…' And then, in mid-step, he stopped again. 'Oh, God, I've just remembered. Virginia, did Edmund give you an envelope to give me? I called him last night. It's rather urgent. Some document from the Forestry Commission?'
Violet was instantly suspicious. 'You're not going to start planting conifers, are you?'
'No, it's about some access road they're wanting to build at the edge of the moor.'
Virginia shook her head. 'He didn't say anything about it. Perhaps he forgot. Let's go and look on his desk in the library. It's probably there…'
'Right. I'd like to take it with me if I can.'
They moved at a leisurely pace out of the dining-room and into the hall. This was even larger, panelled in pine with a massive staircase, heavily balustraded, rising in three short flights to the upstairs landing. Various items of undistinguished furniture stood about. A carved oak chest, a gate-leg table, and a chaise longue that had seen better days. This was quite often occupied by dogs, but at the moment was empty.
'I shall not come and look for Forestry Commission documents,' Violet announced. 'I shall sit here until you have found them.' And she settled herself majestically on the dogs' bed to wait.
They left her. 'We shan't be a moment.' She watched them go down the wide passage that led to the library and on to the drawing-room, and on again through glassed doors to the soaring conservatory.
Alone, Violet savoured her momentary solitude, with the old house around her. She knew it so well, had known it all her life. Its every mood was comfortably familiar. Every creak of the stair, every evocative smell. The hall was draughty, but the draughts did not bother her. No longer Violet's home, but Virginia's. And yet it felt much the same as it ever had, as though, over the years, it had assumed a strength of character all its own. Perhaps because so much had happened here. Because it had been the haven and the touchstone of a single family.
Not that Balnaid was a very old house. In fact, it was younger than Violet by a few years, and built by her father, then Sir Hector Akenside, and a man of considerable means. She always thought that Balnaid was a little like Sir Hector. Large, kindly, and lavish, and yet totally unassuming. At a time when men of newly acquired wealth were constructing for themselves huge monuments to their pride of startling hideousness, castellated and turreted, Sir Hector had concentrated his able mind on less glamorous but infinitely more important features.
Central heating, efficient plumbing, plenty of bathrooms, and kitchens filled with sunlight, so that servants (and there were plenty of them) would work in pleasant surroundings. And from the day it was finally completed, Balnaid never looked out of place. Built from local stone on the south side of the Croy, with its back to the village and the river, the face of the house smiled out over a view both domestic and magnificent.
The garden was large, rich with shrubs and mature trees. Sir Hector's passion, he had planned and landscaped it himself, so that formal lawns flowed into drifts of unmown grass, daffodils, and bluebells. Azaleas, coral and yellow, grew in fragrant masses, and mown paths twisted away invitingly out of sight between tall stands of pink- and scarlet-blossomed rhododendrons.
Beyond the garden, and separated from it by a steep ha-ha wall, was an acre or so of parkland, grazing for the hill ponies; and, beyond again, the stone-dyked fields of the neighbouring sheep farmer. Then, in the distance, the hills. They swelled to meet the sky, dramatic as a stage-drop. Constant, and yet continually changing, as the seasons and the light changed: snow-clad, purple with heather, green with spring bracken, swept by gales… whatever. They were always beautiful.
Had always been beautiful.
Violet knew all this because Balnaid had been her childhood home, and so her world. She had grown up within these walls, played solitary games in that magic garden, guddled for trout in the river, ridden her stubby Shetland pony through the village and up onto the lonely hills of Croy. At the age of twenty-two, she had been married from Balnaid.
She remembered driving the little distance to the Episcopalian church in the back of her father's stately Rolls- Royce, with Sir Hector, top-hatted, beside her. The Rolls had been decked out for the occasion with white silk ribbons. These somehow lessened its dignity, and it looked almost as incongruous as Violet felt, with her ample frame laced into a cream satin dress of quite hideous uncom-fortableness and a mist of inherited Limerick lace veiling her homely features. She remembered returning to Balnaid in the same opulent vehicle, but on that journey even the agonizing tightness of her stays had ceased to matter, because she was, at long last, the triumphant wife of Geordie Aird.
She had lived at Balnaid, on and off, ever since, and had not finally moved out until ten years ago, when Edmund married Virginia. He brought Virginia back to Balnaid to live, and Violet knew then that the time had come for her to bow out and allow the old place to welcome its new young mistress. She made the property over to Edmund and bought a gardener's derelict cottage from Archie Bal-merino. This house was called Pennyburn, and there, within the estate walls of Croy, she made a new home for herself. The restoration and refurbishment of the
