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

them.
    Halting their activities and all at once, the family realised their sweating, dirt-streaked selves, and with as much hurry as had characterised their housework they set about dressing; the train was to arrive in less than an hour. The women would help one another into their under-garments. Corsets were not routinely worn at Sterne but when guests were expected, vanity more than propriety demanded them.
    ‘Bags I first bath!’ shouted Clovis, and was pursued up the stairs by Emerald.
    ‘Let’s not queue in the corridor as if we lived in a boarding house,’ said Charlotte – who had known one or two of these. ‘Can’t we use our wash-stands? And yes, Clovis, first bath for you, or you’ll be late meeting the train.’
    ‘Tsk-tsk, it would never do to try the patience of Insignificance,’ said Clovis, tearing off his collar as he disappeared into the bathroom.
    ‘You aren’t at all funny; you just think you are,’ Emerald said to the closed door.

2
    A DREADFUL ACCIDENT
    Lady was a useful sort of pony, part cob, and well up to pulling the brougham if the journey wasn’t too long nor the passengers too heavy. The car was impractically small and unreliable in comparison to the proven team of Lady and the brougham, and had been left in its stall next to Ferryman, its black wheels resting on the straw-scattered cobbles, radiator cold. Robert, having returned from his first journey to the station with Edward Swift before lunch, had the carriage ready by the front door from a quarter past three, but Clovis, as usual, was late, having suffered one of his plunges in spirits, and instead of hurrying, he oozed from the house so slowly that Robert had to examine a small split in one of his leather driving gloves to stop himself from shouting at him.
    Closed against sudden showers, the carriage rolled away from the house between the yews. Robert would not trot until reaching the lanes, for fear of wrenching Lady’s muscles before they softened to walking.
    Myrtle began dressing Emerald’s hair at quarter to four; hair that was thicker, browner and longer than her mother’s but usually piled up hastily, and impatiently stuck with pins. Emerald was never sure she had found them all when she took it down at night. There was so much hair that it literally weighed her head down, straining her neck when she was tired. The relief of letting it fall down her back, brushing it out in chunks and luxuriant handfuls at bedtime, before putting it into a loose plait for sleeping was one of the pleasures of her life (although she half-expected to find mice in it one day).
    While Myrtle worked, Emerald, as slowly as she could to stave off the boredom, powdered her face. She never coloured her lips as her mother did, but she did lightly powder her face and bosom and sometimes, as now, even more lightly rouge her cheeks.
    ‘If you fiddle with my hair much longer, Myrtle, I shall make up my face to look like a clown just to occupy myself,’ she said.
    ‘Nearly finished, Miss Em,’ answered Myrtle, with her mouth full of pins, but she did not release Emerald for another twenty minutes, by which time her hair did look – she could not deny it – marvellous: improbably shiny, richly looped and piled up upon itself over a small frame, so that its height, in contrast to the creamy face below, gave her womanly jaw a kittenish proportion.
    ‘Myrtle, you’re wasted here; you could make a fortune in hair.’
    ‘Yes, Miss Em,’ said Myrtle. ‘We’ll put the comb in it for your party.’
    ‘Or feathers …’ said Emerald, and got up.
    She had two gowns to wear on her birthday, and she stepped carefully into one of them now. It was an old friend, having been worn on her last two birthdays and once at Christmas with a velvet shawl to render it seasonal. She stood at the window, quite as still as she could stand, while Myrtle fastened the buttons at the back. In the main, Emerald preferred clothing she could get in and out of herself,