Page 5 of Happily Ever After
I decided that honesty was best and more likely to endear me to her than a continued failure to act. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’
‘Catalogue my books.’
‘Buthow? I mean, in what way?’ I still couldn’t see any sign of a computer. The cat stopped its ablutionary activities and stared at me, twisted into a portly arabesque.
‘Just… catalogue. You know. Into… order.’
I began to suspect that she had no idea how one went about cataloguing a library either. ‘Shall I just make a list of all the books, maybe author, title and year of publication? On the – computer?’
She waved an irritated hand and the cat bent back to its flank, tongue still protruding. ‘Whatever you think,’ she snapped, then lowered her voice and leaned slightly forward as though she were about to offer me confidences. ‘Cataloguing the library isn’t the real reason you’re here, you know.’
I felt my shoulders loosen. This was where she confessed that she’d brought me in as a companion to her lonely son. He’d probably had a disappointment – been jilted at the altar or caught his fiancée in bed with another man and sworn to never love again. I was here to bring him out of his shell and teach him about the beauty of life; to fill him with a new positive attitude and, possibly, the desire to build a sanctuary for abused horses, or similar. My arms prickled with her unsaid words. Or maybe it was the dust and cat fur.
‘I need you to find something,’ Lady Tanith breathed.
Oh, evenbetter! A quest. A mysterious artefact. The whole ‘save Hugo from himself, fall in love’ thing was asubplot! I hadn’t considered this might be the case. ‘Find what?’ I bent forward too.
She glanced up at the portrait hanging above us, as though Oswald could be listening in. ‘I was his muse, you know.’ Her voice had gone a bit dreamy, reliving a past only she could see. ‘I came as a companion to his wife Caroline – an invalid, poor woman. Before we knew it, Oswald and I had fallen in love. Of course, nothing could besaid, and he wouldn’t have divorced her; he was utterly, utterly dedicated to Caroline. But weworked together closely.’ She gave the final three words such a weight and spin that I was imagining them having frantic sex on the tabletop in here before she went on. ‘When Caroline died, I thought… but he needed some time. He’d been married to her for most of his adult life, the poor darling, and he didn’t want to appear precipitate or cause any form of scandal. So…’
As though a little ashamed of confessing as much as she had, Lady Tanith looked down and began picking cat fur off her trousered leg. I waited. There had to be more.
The Master opened his pink mouth and yowled, a surprisingly human sound. ‘Iamcontinuing, darling,’ Lady Tanith said. I eyeballed the cat with deep suspicion. ‘It was decided that he would go abroad for a time. To let the dust settle.’ There was absolutely no indication in her tone that this was meant to be anything other than a statement, when any other person would have used the opportunity for a joke, given that the levels of dust in this room were almost tomb-worthy. ‘Oswald died. In Switzerland.’ There was a lot of emotion behind those words. ‘It was very sudden. He never came home to me.’
In the following silence, more dust settled. From outside I could hear the sound of furious snipping,but that was the only noise that penetrated this stuffy, over-furnished room. Lady Tanith was gazing up at the portrait, her eyes shining with affection.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, wondering how thehellany of this could be anything to do with cataloguing a library, and hoping that she wasn’t going to send me on a quest to bring home Oswald’s remains or anything. Cataloguing a library was a suitably romance-heroine task. Grave robbing hadnotfeatured in my reading material.
‘So, I married his son Richard and stayed,’ she finished, as though this was the only possible ending.‘Had the boys, and honoured Oswald’s memory every day.’ Another glance at the painted face. I forbore to point out that she seemed to have honoured his memory by allowing his house to slide gradually into dereliction, but then remembered Miss Havisham, and didn’t. A momentary twinge of pity for Lady Tanith and her disappointing love life plucked at my heart. She’d clearly loved Oswald very much and loving a married man only to lose him at the point when she thought he’d be hers must have hit her hard.
‘However, somewhere in here, are his diaries.’ Lady Tanith seemed to dismiss all extraneous details, like emotion or getting to the point. ‘Oswald used to work in here all the time, on his novels, the dear man. It’s my favourite room, you know.’ She gazed fondly around at the shelving.
I made another encouraging noise, hoping she would actually tell me what I needed to know soon. I could feel a sneeze coming, and sneezing hugely would break the mood of anticipation that Lady Tanith was clearly building, with rather too much foreshadowing for my liking. It felt a little like waiting for a terrible curse to be revealed.
‘I want you to find the diaries.’Ah, here we go, I thought. Hardly lost treasure, but good enough. ‘I’d like to publish them,’ Lady Tanith went on. ‘It’s been fifty years this year, since he passed away, I think Caroline’s memory has been sufficiently honoured. Now is the time to let the world see what lay behind his creative genius.’
I was mentally trying to draw a timeline, work out how old she was; how old she’d been when Hugo was born, because he looked to be in his early to mid-thirties; whether Oswald had strayed into ‘dirty old man seducing young companion’ territory; and basically, what the hell had gone on here. ‘Just that?’ I asked. ‘Find the diaries?’
‘And catalogue the books, of course,’ Lady Tanith continued, as though this would be the work of moments. ‘But the diaries are the important thing, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I echoed faintly. There had to bethousandsof books in here. ‘I presume you’ve already had a look.’
Lady Tanith pursed her lips at me and crossed her legs. She was still slim and elegant, like her son. Her face was mostly unlined and she had wonderful bone structure, if somewhat sharp-edged – yes, I could see what Oswald had seen in her. Older man with invalid wife, pretty young thing coming into the household. I bet he’d mused the hell out of her in every room. I had another momentary pang of pity for this woman, ageing away in this crumbling house and pining for her lost love. ‘Of course I have,’ she said, as though this should be obvious. ‘But I couldn’t have a very thorough look because I don’t want the boys to know. They understand that I had a veryspecialrelationship with their grandfather’ – another, beatific gaze at the portrait – ‘and that he took much of his inspiration from me, but I don’t want our love for one another to become…’ She stopped, as though groping for the right word. ‘Salacious,’ she finished. ‘I want to prepare the diaries for publication and I don’t want the boys reading them first. Oswald was alwaysmostdiscreet, but there may be – comments. I’m sure you understand.’
She didn’t enlarge on the nature of the comments, for which I was overwhelmingly relieved. My imagination was already on double overtime.
‘And the diaries are definitely in here?’ I looked around again. There could be an entire NASA space probe in here, plus astronauts, there was so much stuff.
‘Definitely.’ Lady Tanith also looked around. She clearly wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, because there was a wistful smile tugging at her cheeks. ‘Oswald did his best work in here.’
I tried very hard not to imagine her and Oswald ‘doing their best work’ in here.
‘He would have left the diaries with me, of course, but the trip to Switzerland was very impromptu; Oswald had friends in Geneva who’d invited him out, to help him get over Caroline’s death, you know.’ She stared mistily at the portrait again. ‘He always said that one day posterity would own him. He’d say it just like that, Andromeda – “One day Posterity will own me.”’
I blew out a silent breath. Posterity, clearly, had not known what it was letting itself in for.
‘But I have to edit them sensitively. They cannot be left for the boys to find. And you’re not to tell Hugo, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I echoed faintly.
