The Mistletoe Bride(22)
On the floors above, the family bedrooms. Each perfect in their detail, porcelain washbasins and jugs, matching counterpanes and portraits in tortoiseshell frames. In the attic, the maids’ quarters and a nursery with a metal cot and blackboard and chalk.
The gong rang for dinner, its brass song reverberating up from the hall below. Knowing she couldn’t put off joining the party any longer, Daphne reluctantly stood up and closed the glass fronted doors. She wondered if the doll’s house had been modelled on a real house, if it had been made for the daughter of the family that once owned Dean Hall, or whether it was a recent acquisition for decoration only.
The gong sounded again.
Daphne straightened her dress and her stockings, and was about to rush down the stairs when she noticed a pinpoint of light in the miniature study. Uneven, like the light from a candle flickering in a draught. She looked along the corridor, assuming it had to be some kind of reflection from the wall lamps bouncing off the glass frontage of the doll’s house, but the angles seemed wrong.
She cupped her hands over the glass and looked at the room on the first floor. Now, the study was dark again, of course it was, though the tiny chair was, once again, lying on its side. As if kicked away from the desk.
The final gong bellowed for dinner and, this time, Daphne heard Teddy shouting her name to hurry up. She ran to the minstrel’s gallery and waved down to the assembled company. She hurried down the stairs, suppressing a shudder as she passed the ghastly floor-to-ceiling display of stuffed birds. The hard beaded eyes and frozen feathers of the robins and blackbirds and malevolent cranes stood motionless behind the glass.
Teddy knew nothing about another house on the estate – though he knew there were a few grace-and-favour cottages for farm workers – and nothing about any of the pieces of art dotted around the Hall.
He was, however, an excellent host and the evening passed in a haze of vermouth and ragtime. The company was congenial and Daphne flirted a little with a boy who worked in a dispensary, putting out of her mind, for a while, the drab existence to which she would have to return on Monday morning.
Later, while the men talked finance, she got into a conversation with a girl from Surrey about the best new detective novels. Like Daphne, she thought Poirot rather tiresome and preferred Mrs Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. An intimacy established, Daphne realised the girl was building up to ask about Douglas and everything came rushing back again, as it always did. Quickly, she excused herself and went in search of coffee. By the time she came back, the girl had moved on to someone else. It was, Daphne thought savagely, why she rarely ventured out. It was too dull always to have all eyes on her.
The party started to wind down at three o’clock in the morning. The men were slumped in the low armchairs with their ties loosened and their eyes bleary with booze and smoke. One of the girls had passed out on the sofa in the Oak Hall. Teddy had long since taken himself off to bed.
Daphne slipped away, averting her gaze from the display case as she climbed the stairs. The upstairs corridor was in shadow now and, though she glanced as she passed, there was no light to be seen in the doll’s house.
Her room was cold, the meagre fire in the grate long since burnt out. The maid had turned down the bed, but omitted to close the curtains. The house on the hill was no longer visible, but out on the Downs, the glint of white chalk in the Sussex soil turned over by the plough glistened white in the moonlight, like fragments of bone.
Daphne undressed and got in to her wonderfully warm cotton pyjamas. Before, she would have worn a nightgown, regardless of the temperature, knowing her appearance at night mattered quite as much as her appearance during the day. Now, she could at least put comfort before glamour. In fact, she’d taken up many things since Douglas had gone. Smoking, drinking cocktails and wearing trousers. Without her husband at her side, she could at last please herself.
But as she climbed into the cold bed, even though she told herself the evening had been a roaring success and a welcome change from her usual scratch suppers eaten alone with just a magazine for company, the stark truth was that she still felt as lonely as she ever did.
Daphne wasn’t sure what woke her, shortly after five in the morning. One moment she was fast asleep, dreaming of the beach at Deauville, the sun on her skin and sand between her toes and Douglas’s arm resting on her shoulders. The next moment, she was wide awake, heart pounding and mouth dry.
She sat up, hearing nothing. The silence of the sleeping house surged around her, interrupted only by the gurgling of the water pipes, but yet there was something. As if the air itself was alive.
Daphne waited for her eyes to adjust, then realised it was a disturbance of light, not sound, that had roused her. Through the window, the sky was no longer black, but the colour of an August sunset. It took a moment to gather her wits, then she flung back the covers and ran to the glass. In the space between the two clusters of trees, where she had seen the single candle burning, the sky was now orange and gold. Fierce and violent flames, flickering and dancing.