‘In the old days on the Challacombe estate,’ he said, ‘it would have happened less humanely.’
I didn’t want to hear him going on about that so I didn’t ask him what he meant. Even though he was considerate, I had begun to feel I was his property. It was an odd feeling, and I think it came from the other feeling I had, that he’d married me because I was part of an idea he’d fallen in love with. I used to look at the china vases on the drawing-room mantelpiece and feel like one of them, or like the carpets and the new wallpaper. I was part of something his money had created, and I don’t think he noticed that the rattling of his newspaper or the clink of the decanter against his glass had a way of interrupting my thoughts. These noises, and his footsteps in the hall or in a room, were like the noises Mrs Stritch made with her buckets and the Electrolux, but of course I never told him that.
I have forgotten a little about all that time in the house with Ralphie. He didn’t always tell me what was happening on the estate; in a way he talked more readily to Mrs Stritch, for I often heard him. He also talked to himself. He would pace up and down the lawns Mr Stritch had restored, wagging his head or nodding, while I watched him from a window of the house. As time went by, it was clear that he had done what he’d wanted. As he said, the estate was all of a piece again. He had bought our farm and the farmhouse, offering so much for both that it couldn’t be resisted. Joe and Arthur worked for him now.
Years were passing. Sometimes I walked over to see Miss Pritchard, going by the meadow we’d gone through on our way to school. I can’t quite recall what we talked about as we had tea; only bits from our conversations come back to me. There is my own cheerfulness, my smiling at Miss Pritchard, and Miss Pritchard’s glumness. Now and again I walked down to our farm and sat for a while with my mother, getting up to go before my stepfather returned. I went to see Betty and Belle, but I did that less and less. I began to think that they were all a little jealous of me. I thought that because I sensed an atmosphere when I went on these visits. ‘You’re cruel, Matilda,’ Miss Pritchard said once, seeming to be unable to control the ill-temper that had caused the remark to surface. She turned her head away from me when she’d spoken. ‘Cruel,’ she said again, and I laughed because of course that was nonsensical. I remember thinking it was extraordinary that Miss Pritchard should be jealous.
Ralphie, I believe, must have begun to live some kind of life of his own. He often went out in the evenings, all dressed up. He came back jovial and would come to my room to kiss me good-night, until eventually I asked him not to. When I inquired at breakfast about where he’d been the night before his answer was always the same, that he had been to a house in the neighbourhood for dinner. He always seemed surprised that I should ask the question, claiming on each occasion that he had told me these details beforehand and that I had, in fact, refused to accompany him. In all this I really do not think he can have been right.
I welcomed the occasions when Ralphie went out in the evenings. I drew the curtains in the drawing-room and sat by the fire, just happy to be there. I thought of the time when we were all together in the farmhouse, my father teasing Betty about Colin Gregg, Dick going as red as a sunset because my father mentioned an empty Woodbine packet he’d found. Every Sunday morning Ralphie went to church and, since Mrs Stritch didn’t come on Sundays, that was another good time. Ralphie would return and sit opposite me in the dining-room, carving the beef I’d cooked him, looking at me now and again from his pink face, his teeth like chalk beneath the trim brown hedge of his moustache. I wanted to explain to him that I was happy in the house when Mrs Stritch wasn’t there and when he wasn’t there. I wanted to make him understand that old Mrs Ashburton had wanted me to be in her house, that that was why she had told me so much when I was a child, that everything had to do with the two wars there’d been. He didn’t know as much about war as Mrs Ashburton had, even though he’d fought in one: I wanted to explain that to him, too. But I never did because his eyes would have begun to goggle, which they had a way of doing if something he couldn’t comprehend was put to him. It was easier just to cook his meals and smile at him.
There was another thing Ralphie said I had forgotten: a conversation about a party he gave. When I asked him afterwards he repeatedly assured me we’d had a conversation about it, and in all honesty I believe it must have been his own memory that was at fault. Not that it matters in the least which way round it was. What mattered at the time was that the house was suddenly full of people. I was embroidering in the drawing-room, slowly stitching the eye of a peacock, and the next thing was that Ralphie’s parents were embracing me, pretending they liked me. It seemed they had come for the weekend, so that they could be at the party, which was to be on the following night. They brought other people with them in their grey Daimler, people called Absom. Mrs Absom was thin, like Mrs Gregary, but younger than Mrs Gregary. Mr Absom was stout, like Mr Gregary, but not like polished marble, and younger also.
Mrs Stritch’s daughter Nellie came to help on the Saturday morning and stayed all day. Apparently Ralphie had given Mrs Stritch money to buy navy-blue overalls for both of them so that they’d stand out from the guests at the party. They bought them in Blow’s, Mrs Stritch told me, and it was quite funny to think that my stepfather might have served them, even fitted them with the overalls. Mr Stritch was there on the night of the party also, organizing the parking of cars.
It all took place in the drawing-room. People stood around with drinks in their hands. Ralphie introduced them to me, but I found it hard to know what to say to them. It was his mother, really, who gave the party, moving about the drawing-room as if she owned it. I realized then why she’d come for the weekend.
‘So how you like Challacombe Manor, Mrs Gregary?’ a man with very short hair asked me.
Politely I replied that I was fond of the house.
‘Ralphie!’ the man said, gesturing around him. ‘Fantastic!’ He added that he enjoyed life in the country, and told me the names of his dogs. He said he liked fishing and always had.
There were fifty-two people in the drawing-room, which had begun to smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was hot because Mrs Gregary had asked Mrs Stritch to make up an enormous fire, and it was becoming noisier because as the party advanced people talked more loudly. A woman, wearing a coffee-coloured dress, appeared to be drunk. She had sleek black hair and kept dropping her cigarette on to Mrs Ashburton’s Persian carpet. Once when she bent to pick it up she almost toppled over.
‘Hullo,’ a man said. ‘You’re Mrs Ralphie.’
He was younger than the short-haired man. He stood very close to me, pressing me into a corner. He told me his name but I didn’t listen because listening was an effort in the noisy room.
‘Ever been there?’ this man shouted at me. ‘Ferns magnificent, this time of year.’
He smiled at me, revealing jagged teeth. ‘Ferns,’ he shouted, and then he said that he, or someone, had a collection of stuffed birds. I could feel one of his knees pressing into the side of my leg. He asked me something and I shook my head again. Then he went away.
Mrs Stritch and her daughter had covered the dining-room table with food. All kinds of cold meats there were, and various salads, and tarts of different kinds, and huge bowls of whipped cream, and cheeses. They’d done it all at the direction of Mrs Gregary: just by looking at the table you could see Mrs Gregary’s hand in it, Mrs Stritch wouldn’t have known a thing about it. The sideboard was entirely taken up with bottles of wine and glasses. The electric light wasn’t turned on: there were slender red candles everywhere, another touch of Mrs Gregary’s, or
