The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

and Myrtle’s friendly (as a rule), round one looked at her in frank and outraged astonishment.
    ‘ Soup? ’ said Florence Trieves, but it might as well have been, Rabbit’s eggs?
    ‘Ger,’ said Myrtle, or similar.
    Emerald thought of herself, Clovis and their mother guzzling rabbit pie and boiled potatoes and arguing. Charlotte was now in her room, with swollen eyes but a full stomach, and Clovis back before the fire, probably, amusing himself with mawkish introspection, while Smudge was alone upstairs, ignored, hungry and white as the sheets that covered her.
    ‘Yes, just a bit of soup, or something like it,’ she said, ‘for Smudge. Stock would do.’
    ‘The ox, Mrs Trieves. The ox-tail,’ said Myrtle tentatively (she had once been smacked about the head by Florence Trieves and no amount of subsequent civility could wipe away the memory).
    It was true, an ox’s tail had been boiled for gelatin that morning and early in the process they had saved a portion of the stock. Emerald was allowed to take some up to Smudge, with soft vegetables floating in its beaded depths, and a hunk of white bread to go with it.
    Smudge received the offering graciously, propped up on her pillow.
    ‘I’d love to stay for chattage, Smudgy, but the train’s due at four, Pearl Meadows has absconded, and the house is nowhere near ready to receive the Suttons. I must rally the troops.’
    ‘I understand,’ said Smudge meekly, ‘but don’t expect me to eat the carrots.’ And Emerald left her once more.
    The two hours between one and three were spent in frenzied activity as the household – Charlotte, Emerald, Clovis (scolded to action), Florence Trieves and Myrtle – dashed from room to room, plumping, beating, polishing and straightening the cushions, tables, carpets, handrails and all manner of glass and silver ornaments that hung about the house. A family of mice were discovered in a cushion – what a perfect home for them! – but there were very few spiders; Sterne was not dirty or uncared for, only feather dusters chase off spiders better than they do small rodents and cushion-plumping is a luxury to the over-stretched. With all the mice that the cat Lloyd caught and the many more he let slip through his paws, Florence often regretted they could not roast them, entire, on skewers and suck upon their crispy, corn-fed haunches.
    ‘They eat better than we do,’ she said.
    But in the kitchen, the ox’s massive, meaty tongue lay in splendour upon a vast and flowered platter. It had already been skinned, and a portion of it sliced into razor-thin layers by Florence’s disciplining hand. The slices were almost translucent. They were petals; red, salty, melting, damp. The tongue, nestling in tightly curled parsley, waited keenly for its entrance to the dining room at supper.
    Florence and Myrtle had toiled long and hard with fantastic and imaginative results. As well as the emerald-green roses and glossy chocolate cake, on a high crystal stand, there were bowls of cream; before that, gherkins, as well as various gratins and slabs of pork, forced or minced, with mace, capers, thyme. The rind of bacon soldered leaner components together. There were lemons, sharpening the edges of fat, and chervil.
    The house shone about itself proudly.
    China bowls and glass vases held small collections of flowers from the garden: hyacinths, lily of the valley and narcissi. The smell of them, miraculous, with wax furniture polish and blue wood-smoke, went all through the rooms and in the air of the halls and stairs, too. A person might walk from a cool corridor full of the scent of lit fires into a bedroom to find the smell of damp flowers from a pot of wild violets and hot starch from the fresh sheets and flat-creased pillow cases.
    Flashes of sunlight through the panes found the colours in the faded rugs, but the weather was most changeable; the rooms were just as often thrown into chill shadow, with only their blazing grates to light