Written in Blood(7)

Amy had long tired of it all. She had wondered more than once how Honoria came by her obsession, for it certainly did not run in the family. Ralph (or Rafe as his sister still insisted on calling him) had been the least class conscious of men. He would talk to anyone and everyone in an easygoing and friendly manner. Unlike his sister he just liked people.

Honoria despised people. Especially the lower orders. ‘Unwholesome barbarians breeding like bacteria in their squalid little hutches’ was one of her less extreme descriptions. How her aristocratic spirit looked down on them! Barely civilised rabble.

Ralph had always laughed at this nonsense and could not understand why Amy didn’t do the same, but she found Honoria’s insistence on a ‘natural aristocracy of the blood’ far from funny. To Amy it seemed dehumanising, smacking of eugenics, born leaders and chilling attempts at social engineering.

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, Honoria.’

Amy sighed as she lied but was glad of the interruption. Every recollection of her husband could so easily tip her into a spiral of unhappy nostalgia. She tore open a plastic carrier and placed it over a tray of brown-bread cartwheels containing Primula cheese and asparagus tips. Honoria was still going on about the asparagus, even though the tin had been reduced to half price because it was badly dented. Amy had defended her purchase, saying everyone would be taking something special out of respect for the celebrity speaker.

‘Anyone would think he was a reincarnation of William Shakespeare,’ Honoria had grumbled, adding, ‘if there are any left make sure you bring them back.’

Amy finished arranging her second tray. Triangular sandwiches with the crusts cut off filled with cucumber and home-made mayonnaise. She would much rather have used shop-bought. Not only did it taste nicer but the consistency was much more satisfactory. This stuff either ran out in little puddles or seeped through the bread so it looked like mustard-coloured blotting paper. But Hellmann’s was deemed too costly.

‘People seem to be going mad,’ persisted Honoria. ‘Laura spoke of buying something from that ridiculously expensive pastry shop and Susan is baking a cake, no doubt full of the disgusting hamster food they all seem to thrive on.’

‘An iced carrot cake actually.’

‘He’s coming from the far side of High Wycombe.’ Honoria, already wearing an old Barbour, now rammed a tweed pork-pie hat over her short, straight, iron-grey hair. ‘Not the North Pole.’

‘Where are you going?’ asked Amy, meaning, as she always did, how long will you be?

‘Just to Laura’s.’

If Max Jennings was coming from the North Pole, thought Amy, shivering in spite of two jumpers, a cardigan, tights, leg warmers and ankle boots, he would certainly feel at home in Gresham House.

She went into the library, where Honoria, having finished work for the day, was letting the fire go out. Amy crouched over the smouldering grey-white remains and rubbed her frozen fingers. She wondered whether to go down to the cellar and kick the boiler. This was a voracious wood-burning contraption connected to iron skirting pipes which it was supposed to feed with hot water. There were two or three dials to be twiddled as an alternative to physical violence, but neither method was wholly satisfactory. The pipes never had more than the chill taken off. The water was never more than lukewarm.

Amy decided against it. By the time she had got down there and attacked the thing she could be in her room and writing. Never a day without a line had been Olivia Manning’s dictum and Amy tried her best to live by it.

Her novel, Rompers, was safely locked away in a shagreen hat box on top of the wardrobe. She had described it to the group, not untruthfully, as a family saga, but just what type of families they were and what sort of thing they got up to remained a secret between herself and Sue. Although the sexual shenanigans were pretty decorous compared to some bestsellers and although she had, so far, been unable to bring herself to use the ‘f’ word, which seemed to look so dreadful written down, there was still enough hot stuff sizzling in the rich and glamorous stew to give Honoria serious pause for thought. A process which might well lead to the conclusion that the loosemoraled person producing such unsavoury rubbish was not worthy to reside beneath the Lyddiard roof. And then, thought Amy, where would I go? A woman of forty, completely unskilled and without a penny to her name.

This was not Ralph’s fault even though, in the eyes of the world, he had not been a success. A sailor when Amy met him, she often thought it was a mistake that he left the service. But he was worried about abandoning her for long periods and she, of course, had missed him dreadfully. He had no special gifts and talents and, while not unintelligent, never really discovered what he was cut out for. With a legacy from his parents - Honoria got the house and a small annuity - he opened a second-hand bookshop. This failed, as did other idealistic ventures - growing olives in the Evvia, picture framing in Devizes. Finally, having almost exhausted the money, they bought a tiny cottage in Andalusia with an acre of stony soil and struggled towards some sort of self-sufficiency. It was during this period that Ralph became aware of the first signs of the cancer that was to cost him his life.