Eva Ibbotson

Who could have foreseen that this prudent marriage would turn out to be the kind of nightmare it had been? That she, who had hardly been able to let Rom out of her sight, would be unable to endure the caresses of his half-brother. And who could have foreseen that Henry, faced with her disgust, would go to the dogs as thoroughly and conventionally as he had formerly played the country gentleman? Even before she had shut him out of her bedroom he had begun to drink, to gamble, and afterward…

She lifted her hand to the bell in order to ring for the manicurist who usually did her nails but dropped it again, remembering the appraising glance of the maitre d’hotel as he had noted—even while he bent over her hand, murmuring condolences on her loss—that she had come without her maid or a nurse for the child. He knew, as did the rest of London, that the sands were running out for the Brandons. Not that she had actually been refused a room, but there were none of the attentions she was accustomed to when she came to the Astor: no bowls of fruit or baskets of roses… and in the dining room she had been shown to an obscure table in the corner.

Oh, God, it was impossible, intolerable! There had to be some way out of the trap. And like one of those awful recurring dreams from which one thinks one has awoken, only to find it start again, she recalled the interview she had had with old Mr. Hathersage the previous day in his fusty office behind St. Paul’s.

“I’m afraid there is absolutely no help for it, Mrs. Brandon. You must know that if there was any other way my accountants would have found it. But the figures are inescapable. You must sell, Mrs. Brandon; you must sell for what you can get, and you must do so quickly.”

She finished buffing her nails and rose. “We’re going shopping, Henry,” she said. “Come here while I make you tidy.”

“Could I stay here and read?”

“No, you couldn’t. We’re going to the dentist afterward.”

Henry nodded. Shopping and the dentist. A somber prospect, but not more than he had learned to expect, and he stood patiently while Isobel tugged at his Norfolk jacket with unpracticed hands and jammed his cap on his head. The impertinence of that nursemaid, simply walking out without warning just because she had not been paid for a few weeks!

Usually there was nothing Isobel liked better than to shop and her mourning provided an excellent excuse for several new outfits, but there were only a few places now where her credit still held good. To these—little glove shops and hatters in the discreet, quiet streets around St. James’s whose owners, accustomed to serving the Brandons, had not learned to defend themselves—she now repaired. If she knew that the exquisite black kid gloves, the jet-beaded reticule and velvet toque she purchased would not be paid for, she concealed any anxiety she might have felt with remarkable success.

It had been hard for Henry to abandon the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, but now he trotted obediently beside his mother studying with scholarly attention the posters on the hoardings, the men digging a hole in the road, the passers-by.

“Why do they make ‘Little Liver Pills?’” Henry wanted to know. “If they made them big, wouldn’t people’s livers get better more quickly?” And “If those men in the road dug and dug and dug, would they be the right way up when they got to Australia, or would they be upside-down?”

“Oh, Henry, be quiet!” They had just passed Fortnum’s, in the window of which there was ah exquisite ink-dark chenille gown which would have suited her magnificently, but the last time she had tried to charge anything here there had been a most unpleasant scene.

Henry made a heroic effort, forbearing to ask what made the red color in the glass dome in the chemist’s window and not even suggesting that they stop to give a penny to a beggar on crutches and with a row of medals on his chest. But when two men walked right across the pavement in front of him carrying a big wicker basket into a shop, he found it impossible not to pluck at his mother’s sleeve.

“Look!” he said. “That’s my name on the basket—one of my names. It’s spelled the same too.”

Isobel looked up, following her son’s pointing finger, and saw on the side of a basket, with its heavy leather straps, the letters R. P. VERNEY.

“Is something the matter?” Henry asked anxiously. He had hoped for once to interest his mother, but not to interest her as much as that. She had stopped dead on the pavement, her hand at her throat.