The Ashford Affair Page 24

  Even that she had trouble picturing. She had no difficulty with the concept of marriage in the abstract, but it was as though she hit a dead end whenever she tried to imagine actually being married to David. Which was nonsense. He was very good to her; everyone said so. Good and kind.

  And utterly boring.

  Addie squelched the unworthy thought, hoping that no hint of it showed on her face.

  Frederick turned his head briefly to look at her. “Congratulations,” he said. “I hope he’s worthy of you.”

  She searched for the taint of mockery but didn’t find it. “Thank you,” she said guardedly.

  “We must make sure you enjoy your last weeks of freedom,” said Bea. “You must suck every last drop out of life before we send you back to the matrimonial shackles, mustn’t we, darling?”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t view it as a shackle,” suggested Frederick.

  Bea ignored him. “We may be on the outer edge of nowhere, but we do still command some little society. Dina Hay’s parties are simply divvy—and not all of them are wicked,” she added with a sideways glance at her husband. “Just the amusing ones.”

  Addie had heard something of those parties back in London. Garbled rumors had drifted home of cocaine-fueled orgies, random couplings in the drawing room, spousal swaps. “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” ran the phrase back home.

  “Do you dine out a great deal?” Addie asked.

  “The farms are too far apart. But there is Race Week. And we do have some lovely Saturday to Mondays.” Another one of those sidelong looks. “Frederick doesn’t like to leave the girls.”

  “They’re very young,” said Frederick shortly, and pulled the car up by the side of the road at what, to Addie’s eyes, looked like nothing in particular. There was no sign of a house or even a track, just a river winding along one side of the road, fringed with reeds and tufts of papyrus. A few twisted trees thrust stubbornly up from the brown grass, blazing with flowers the color of sealing wax,

  “Is there something wrong with the motor?” asked Addie with a dubious glance at that long lemon-yellow hood, now liberally streaked with red dust.

  “Just the climate,” said Bea as Frederick collected a rusty can from the boot. “Everyone stops to water their cars here. It’s the heat. It’s hell on the engine. Not to mention the complexion. We might as well step out to stretch our legs,” she added. “We won’t have another stop until Ashford.”

  Addie followed Bea out of the car, her London shoes sinking into the red dust as she stepped out. “It doesn’t seem to have touched yours,” she said. “The heat, I mean.”

  “Really?” Bea looked genuinely pleased. “I feel like such an old hag these days, all dried out and shopworn.”

  “You look lovely. Really. As beautiful as ever.” Frederick was already yards away, nearly to the stream. Lowering her voice, Addie said, “Are you all right?”

  Bea turned away from her. “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m in raptures to see you. It’s been far too long. I should have had you out here years ago.”

  Years ago, Addie would have had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to visit. As it was, the ticket for the ship over had strained her slim resources to the breaking point. David would have loaned her the money, if she’d asked—but she hadn’t wanted to ask. Not for this. This was her own private pilgrimage.

  Bea plucked at a tall blade of grass with gloved fingers, shredding the brown stalk into smaller and smaller bits. “My mother didn’t send on a message with you, did she?” she asked with seeming carelessness.

  “No.” Addie tried to keep her voice light. “It’s non-speakers, I’m afraid, ever since—you know.”

  They had blamed her for Bea’s indiscretion, for introducing Frederick into the household. A cuckoo in the nest, Aunt Vera had called her, a scheming, ungrateful chit. All that and worse. She had been cut off without a penny and found herself, rather abruptly, scrabbling to make a life for herself. For the first time, she had felt truly an orphan.

  If it hadn’t been for Fernie, she would have been on the street. As it was, Fernie had let her stay in her tiny bed-sit, had shared what she had while Addie embarked on the quest for employment. She’d had to leave The Bloomsbury Review; it didn’t have the money to pay her. She didn’t remember much of those first six months; it was all a blur of sticky typewriting machines and weak tea and rainy days. She hadn’t realized how very much she had taken for granted until she had lost it all.

  “Oh,” said Bea. The light had gone out of her face. She looked, thought Addie, like a lithograph of herself. “I’d thought—never mind.”

  Addie thought of Aunt Vera as she had seen her last, that last, awful interview, in the sterile sitting room from which all the pictures of Bea had been removed, expunged, as though Bea never was. And, yet, Addie was quite sure that Aunt Vera loved Bea, loved her more than Edward and Dodo put together. It was a strange sort of love, compounded of equal parts pride and ambition, but that was love as Aunt Vera understood it, and she had loved Bea, in her fashion, as fiercely as Pygmalion had loved his Galatea. Aunt Vera’s rage over what she perceived as Bea’s betrayal had been horrible to behold.

  But, now, after all this time …

  “Maybe if you wrote them?” ventured Addie.

  Bea laughed, sharp and bitter. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? There’s been nothing back. I should have thought that by now—” She broke off as Frederick returned, replacing the empty can in the boot. “Heavens, that was speedy. Are we all watered and ready to go?”

  Frederick held out a hand to help Addie into the car. “Ready for the final leg?” he said. “It’s not much farther now.”

  “I don’t know how you can tell,” said Addie. “It all looks the same to me.”

  The landscape seemed to stretch on forever, with brown grasses and twisted trees and the red road that twisted on and on. Even the sky looked different, larger. There was a vastness to it that was both exhilarating and daunting.

  “I imagine the Kikuyu might feel the same way about Dorset,” said Frederick.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Bea, and slipped around the other side of the car, planting herself firmly in front of the wheel. “No one dies in the desert in Dorset.”

  “No one dies in the desert here.” Frederick took the seat on the other side of Addie. He didn’t dispute Bea’s possession of the wheel. “At least not this far south.”

  “No, only of boredom,” said Bea, and started the car with a roar that sent a tiny antelope scurrying from the brush. Addie held on to the seat and watched as the scenery blurred past in a cloud of red dust and her cousin leaned low over the wheel, driving like someone fleeing demons.

  They drove in awkward silence, the red dust billowing around them, until Frederick suddenly shouted, “Stop the car!”

  There was a man running down the drive, holding his white robe up around his knees as he ran, the dust making little puffs around him. His white robe was streaked with red—not dust, Addie realized, but blood, and a lot of it.

  Bea slammed on the brakes, the wheels skidding in a half circle that sent Addie careening into Frederick. His hands closed briefly around her shoulders. “Steady, there,” he said, and vaulted out of the car without bothering to open the door.

  There was a flurry of words in a language Addie didn’t understand as the man in the robe began expostulating, his hands flying, his turban askew. Frederick’s face was grim. He interrupted to ask a terse question in the same language and then cursed, loudly, at the answer.

  “What’s wrong?” Addie asked Bea in an undertone. “Is he hurt?”

  “He’s all right,” said Bea, and Addie realized, with surprise, that she understood whatever it was the man was saying. It shouldn’t have surprised her; Bea had always been quick with languages. “It’s his son. There’s been an accident.” Raising her voice, she said, “Where’s Miss Platt?”

  “Mbugwa says she’s taken the girls out on their ponies,” said Frede
rick. “They aren’t back yet.”

  “Miss Platt is the girls’ nurse,” said Bea to Addie. “She deals with the scrapes and bruises. How bad is it?”

  “He tried to hammer a detonator into an ornament,” said Frederick tersely. “You can imagine what happened. You’ll have to fetch Miss Platt back—or go for Mrs. Nimmo.”

  “She’s gone to Nairobi. We’ll never get her back in time,” said Bea. “Not even with the car.”

  “What about me?” Addie rose to her feet in the car, holding on to the dashboard for balance.

  “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry,” said Bea. “I certainly didn’t mean for your arrival to be like this. But we can still—”

  “No,” said Addie quickly. She could feel the blood thrumming through her veins, the heat and the light making her light-headed, the dry, peppery smell of the dust tickling her nose. “That’s not what I meant. What about me? I have some nursing experience. Let me help.”

  SEVENTEEN

  New York, 1999

  “Your grandmother was a wonderful woman.”

  There was a woman holding Clemmie’s hand pressed between hers. Clemmie had no idea who she was. Not that that was unusual. Clemmie had been hugged, kissed, and cooed over by a whole series of strangers over the past hour, in knit suits smelling of mothballs and Chanel No. 5, and golf-ball pearls that hurt when they hugged her.

  “Thank you,” said Clemmie. There was no point in asking the woman’s name or how she had known Granny Addie. Hers not to ask why, hers simply to press hands, murmur thanks, and feign smiles.

  “They don’t make them like her anymore,” said the woman, shaking her teased head. And then, as an afterthought, “Happy New Year, dear.”

  Seriously? How happy did she think it was going to be?

  Clemmie gritted her teeth and held her tongue. She couldn’t take it out on this poor woman. She wasn’t the one who had made the idiot decision to hold a funeral on New Year’s Eve day on the eve of a new millennium, with half the world out partying and the other half huddled in bunkers, waiting for the apocalypse. In the mood Clemmie was in, she would take the bunker.

  “You, too,” she said gruffly. “Happy New Year.”

  Through the half-open windows in the living room, Clemmie could already hear the revelers gearing up for the night’s festivities. It was only four, but the sky was already orange and purple. The black branches of the bare trees above the wall of the park stood out in sharp relief against the orange sky.

  “She’ll be missed,” said a man in a gray suit, crunching Clemmie’s hand.

  “Thank you,” said Clemmie demurely.

  That was the only way to manage, she knew, to tuck the part of herself that thought and felt away in a drawer and let the remaining shell murmur the commonplaces people expected to hear. Somewhere, locked away, the real Clemmie was curled up in a ball, whimpering, but Robo-Clemmie stood at the living room door in a black sheath dress, calmly shaking hands and accepting condolences, every hair in place and mascara unsmudged.

  There hadn’t been any Christmas this year. None of them had been in the mood for it. Vaguely Clemmie had been aware that the rest of the world was celebrating, that there was still Christmas music in the stores and wreaths in the windows and those annoying Christmas car commercials on television. She knew, in an abstract way, that the offices had emptied as people took off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, but to her it was a blur of gray slush and hospital walls and the hushed voices of those whose job was to deal with the dead. When other people had been opening presents, they’d been discussing embalming. There had been legal documents to unearth, instructions to be followed, movers and packers and appraisers to contact.

  Clemmie’s mother had already begun the hunt for a new apartment; she could stay at Granny Addie’s until the will was probated, but the terms of the will were clear: The apartment needed to be sold to fund a trust, of which Mother and Aunt Anna would get the interest in their lifetimes, with the remainder to all of the grandchildren, divided equally.

  Clemmie hated the idea of Granny’s apartment being sold. This, more than anyplace else, was her home. She knew there had been a time when she had lived in California with her brothers and both parents, but she didn’t remember it, not really. Her memories began and ended at Granny Addie’s, in the little room they had decorated with Minnie Mouse cutouts for Clemmie, in the kitchen where there were always treats left over from parties, in the blue and white bedroom where Granny Addie had welcomed her when she had become too weak to walk. They’d already started packing up the bedroom, Mom and Aunt Anna—but Clemmie didn’t want to think about that now, not now.

  “—so sorry,” the person holding her hand was saying.

  “Thank you, you’re very kind,” Clemmie murmured, and turned to the next person, automatically holding out her hand.

  “Hey,” said Jon, and something about the sympathy in his hazel eyes made Clemmie’s carefully arranged smile start to crumble.

  She drew in a long breath through her nose, fighting for composure. “Hey, yourself,” she said unsteadily.

  He’d been around all day, a familiar presence in a black suit, his light brown hair shining like an old penny, but they hadn’t had much to do with each other. He’d been supporting Aunt Anna, quite literally, propping her up on her too-high heels, whisking her neatly out of the way of Clemmie’s mother. If Mother and Aunt Anna hadn’t yet come to blows, it was largely Jon’s doing. The two had been snapping like small dogs all week.

  Clemmie would have felt more grateful to Jon if she hadn’t harbored the unworthy suspicion that keeping Aunt Anna out of Clemmie’s mother’s way had also provided a convenient excuse for staying out of Clemmie’s.

  “You holding up okay?” he said, and Clemmie didn’t know whether to fling her arms around his neck and weep or kick him in the ankle. Or, preferably, both.

  He was wearing his coat over his suit, a blue and gray scarf hanging around his neck, a pair of leather gloves sticking out of one pocket.

  Clemmie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving?”

  He had the grace to look abashed.

  “You’re going to leave me to keep Mom and Aunt Anna away from each other’s throats?” She tried to make it sound like a joke.

  “I’m sorry I’m not staying for the cleanup.…” He tugged on the ends of the scarf. “I, er, have to get back to my place.”

  “Exciting New Year’s Eve plans?” said Clemmie acidly. It wasn’t fair, she knew; he had done more than his bit. But she was angry anyway.

  “Hardly.” There was a shadow of stubble on his chin, a patch of golden brown that he must have missed while shaving. It gave him a scruffy, down-at-the-mouth look, which, unfairly, only increased his resemblance to Indiana Jones. “You really think I feel like celebrating?”

  Somehow, he had always had a knack for making her feel in the wrong. Especially when she was in the wrong. “Sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t fair. You’ve done more than your—”

  “Don’t,” said Jon, and there was something raw in his face that shamed Clemmie into silence. “Please.”

  Clemmie bit her lip, not sure what to say.

  Jon leaned over to peck her cheek. “Hang in there,” he said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  She caught his sleeve, the wool soft beneath her hand. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to minimize—I know she mattered to you, too.”

  Jon’s face could have been carved out of stone. “Happy New Year, Clemmie.”

  And he was gone, moving on to the line waiting to pay their respects to her mother at the front door.

  Oh, screw it. Screw him. Clemmie abandoned her post and headed into the living room. She’d done her bit. There were only a handful of stragglers left at this point, grazing among the buffet and discussing their New Year’s Eve plans. Clemmie hated them all, impartially. She hated them for scarfing all the crab cakes, for their too-strong perfume and their too-bright lipstick. She hated them for talking abo
ut Granny Addie as though they knew her.

  But what did she know? What Jon had said the other night, about Granny Addie warning him away from her—she just couldn’t reconcile it with the grandmother she had known, the grandmother who had told her to take her own risks and make her own choices. Clemmie took a mini quiche off a silver tray. It had long since gone cold, the cheese congealed on the top. She forced herself to chew it anyway. It tasted like rubber.

  What did she know about Granny Addie, anyway? Apparently, not enough. Clemmie’s mother had given the eulogy at the funeral, speaking more clearly and calmly than Clemmie would have imagined possible. Some of what her mother had said Clemmie had already known, about the farm in Kenya and her grandmother’s perspicacity in breaking into the American market when many other coffee growers in Kenya were going under.

  Clemmie hadn’t known that her grandmother had trained as a nurse during World War I or that she had helped found a maternity hospital and a nurses’ training course in Nairobi. She had never asked how they came to be in Kenya or why they had moved to New York instead of London. She hadn’t known that her great-grandmother had been a novelist or that her great-grandfather had been the brother of an earl. She hadn’t known any of it.

  There was a portrait of Granny over the mantel, painted in the forties, not long after Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick had moved to New York. Clemmie looked up at her, at that familiar, heart-shaped face, the hair that hadn’t changed style in all the years Clemmie had known her, the double strand of pearls at the throat.

  “It feels like she’s still here, doesn’t it?” It was Aunt Anna, on the loose at last, heading towards the bar. “Same food, same booze, same bartender … It’s sick.” Without waiting for the bartender, she reached for one of the bottles of wine and topped off her glass. “I keep waiting for her to walk back in and shout, ‘Surprise!’”