One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [10]
‘Easily. That’s why Laura and Mum are so twitchy with excitement. City bonuses still go a long way these days.’
‘She’s quite shrewd, your sister, isn’t she?’ Maggie dropped the cloth and turned to me, narrowing her eyes. ‘I mean, she’s nabbed an aristo, but he’s not a chinless wonder: he’s got brains too. Most of them are penniless and stupid, aren’t they?’
‘No, she’s not shrewd,’ I said shortly. Maggie was an only child, and sometimes I sensed she resented the closeness Laura and I shared. Single girlfriends can be awfully possessive. I ushered her out before we were caught loitering in the master bedroom. ‘She loves him,’ I said simply. ‘Always has. She certainly didn’t marry him for his money. After all, money doesn’t buy happiness, does it?’
She gave me an arch look before going into her bedroom, the one she’d been shown to. ‘Maybe not,’ she drawled, ‘but it certainly helps.’
*
Supper that evening was a sparky affair. Toxic, even. No children as yet, to lighten it. Laura’s brood, like Seffy, didn’t come home from school until tomorrow lunchtime after matches, so we were missing the high spirits of the young, and more than usually prey to the quixotic undercurrents of bubbling bad temper of the adults. We ate in the kitchen, Laura coaxing a roast chicken out of the oven, pink-faced and muttering darkly as she nearly dropped it, whilst Hugh popped corks, keeping up a resolutely chirpy banter. Maggie, at the table with Mum, Kit and me, looked on in an alarmingly anthropological manner. She was quiet too: always a bad sign.
‘D’you ever use the dining room?’ she piped up eventually, innocently, but I could tell this was going somewhere.
‘Never,’ said Hugh cheerfully. ‘At least not for ten years or so. The aged Ps never liked it. Fiendishly cold and dark, ridiculously large too. I remember the odd Christmas in there, as a boy, but other than that, no.’
‘But you’ll use it, won’t you?’ she persisted. ‘I mean, eventually?’
‘Oh, well, I suppose the odd dinner party. But kitchen suppers are more the thing, aren’t they? Much cosier.’ He put the bottle on the table and sat down.
‘And you don’t use the morning room or the billiard room, the ones you want us… the ones that need decorating?’
‘Christmas,’ said Hugh again. ‘The morning room, that is. When the village children come to sing carols, we pop them all in there. Quite jolly.’
‘But the billiard room?’
‘Well, I don’t play billiards!’ he chuckled, pouring everyone a glass of wine.
‘What about that blue room, then? The one off the drawing room through the double doors.’
‘That’s the Blue Room.’
‘But you don’t use it for anything?’
Hugh looked bewildered. ‘It’s not really for anything.’
‘So… why d’you live here?’
I cringed.
‘I mean, if you only use one or two rooms downstairs, and hardly any upstairs, and you’ve got so much work to do, which will frankly take ages and cost a small fortune, why not sell it and buy somewhere smaller?’
Laura’s eyes boggled into the chicken as she brought it to the table on a board. We were short of men so she was next to me. ‘Don’t be silly, we’d never do that. Hugh’s family have been here for two hundred years.’
‘Yes, but two hundred years ago people had servants, masses of them, so there would have been about twenty people living in a house like this, which would have made sense. All those attic rooms would have been full of maids and now they’re empty. The coach house would have had grooms sleeping above it, and even though you’re a big family, you’ll rattle around in it. Surely you’re perpetuating a patriarchal way of life that simply doesn’t exist any more?’
Maggie had read Sociology at Newcastle. She’d also had two large gins.
‘What you mean is, isn’t it rather selfish to have all these empty rooms when so many people have nowhere to sleep at all?’ enquired Kit slowly. Disingenuously too, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
Laura put