Let's Misbehave: Chapter 2
‘The Present.’
A flash of white light bolted through the windows and a crash of thunder preceded the slamming shut of our bed chamber door. It was inexplicably invigorating to make love beside an open window in a thunderstorm; rain lashes against your bare chest and lightning fills the room so full that you can scarcely fit anything else. We finished simultaneously, as ever and I fell down against his chest, breathing heavily in time with his heart beat.
It was then that a frantic knocking began on the door.
“Ignore it, it’ll go away.” Ainsley whispered. It didn’t, it got louder and louder before stopping entirely for a second, to be replaced with the call of Nell.
“Master, I think you better come out here, its your sister.”
“And you said she wouldn’t interrupt us.” I shook my head. We dressed quickly, before opening the door to find that Nell was a little way down the corridor.
“Master, Mistress, you sister,” she paused before resuming in a quieter tone “she insists that there was something in her chamber.”
“Its not her bloody chamber!” I scoffed.
“Who does she claim was in there?” Ainsley asked tentatively.
“She says it was a woman - “ she looked away “but she said she could see through her.”
“For God's sake. There’s no point in this, I’m going back to bed.” I turned away.
“But Mistress, her window is smashed.”
“We’re on the third floor. It did not get in through the window.” I said.
“Nell, please tell my sister that there is nothing in her room and that we will all have a peaceful rest of the night now that the storm is calming down and we will telephone my father’s house to see if Barrett can visit us, she does enjoy his stories, hopefully that’ll put her in a better frame of mind.”
With that, Ainsley and I returned to our bed in the distinct unquiet of the night, which even as we lay awake seemed to hide in corners of our chamber, like a mist that would not clear. If I had to name that mist, that strange sense of movement in the still silence (which was only occasionally broken by the air splitting thunder) of the countryside during darkness, I would name it Lawrence Walters. To put it like that makes him sound like some kind of perverse influence on our lives, but no, no, it was that the world was a perverse influence on his life and that mist - the mist I would now name Lawrence Walters - followed him in the wake of his hopes and most critically his fears. All of us at the Radley Estate liked to imagine that Lawrence had tuberculosis, we all liked to imagine that somehow Barrett had given it to him even though Barrett had never had it and through some strange contagion this, whatever this was, had been passed onto that young pale if not slightly effeminate man that now slept in a ward in Littlemore Hospital, having made it his home on and off, now and again, since 1918.
I fell asleep uneasily that night, gazing out of the window across the grass which in the storm looked as if it was rippling under the colossal force of the wind, as if it were some kind of body of water which we were upon which we were in the middle, a little island in the wide, wide sea. My eyes followed the blades’ rippling to the dirt track which constituted the main road around ten minutes walk from the edge of the estate. You see, I had found previously when I looked to the main road at night, a little light, a street light possibly, often flickered away but not tonight. No, tonight that pathway which ran parallel to the Radley Estate and the little stream, leading northerly to Oxford and southerly to the Legare Estate was in blackness.
The next morning I awoke with the uneasy feeling that I was being watched if not currently then while I had been sleeping. But then again, so often are my intuitions wrong. I cast my eye out across the landscape which just a month ago had been lush and green, filled with summertime glory, now, those same meadows had begun to fill with the leaves which had fallen copper crisp from the trees, scattering themselves to the wind. And they too found themselves here, as if here was the edge of the world; as if here we were all standing on some great cliffedge between the world as it is or was and the world as it is or will be. After all, it is a new decade.
After dressing, I made my way down the stairs to the dining room to take breakfast to be starkly reminded of our dear guest who was plonked on the chair she had inhabited the previous evening. She sat there palely, dimly, in her white night dress.
“Sorry did I startle you?” Helena asked.
“No.” I replied.
“I suppose I must look almost ghostly. I gave myself a fright looking in the mirror this morning.”
“Have you had any more visitors?” I asked.
“No, no I haven’t. But half of me hopes the visitor from last night, the one who smashed the window, will return.” I burst out laughing as she finished. It was laughable to think of some poor confused bird, a raven perhaps, flying into her chamber to escape a storm and being faced with Helena screaming.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that, it might be like Dracula.” I laughed, “You know, the magazine I mentioned to you last night.”
“Oh.” she looked away. It was then that we were interrupted by the shrill trilling of the house phone. It was a large red thing that made a noise more ear splitting than a bell when someone somewhere else wanted to talk to you. Chester brought it over to us on a silver platter and picked it up.
“Hello?” I began.
“Is my brother there?” Barrett asked.
“No.” I replied.
“Oh, well, I wanted to talk to him.”
“Okay.”
“Can you take a message for him?” he asked.
“Maybe, we’ll have to see.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you see, my ability to take a message for my husband is very much determined by a number of things, not least whether or not I like the nature of the message.”
“Ah, well, could you tell him I would like to come over?” he continued.
“Oh, you see, I’m not too keen on that message, but I suppose as his wife I better do him the service of warning him.”
“Good girl.” he said.
“Funny.” I put the phone down and Chester whisked it away, almost as if he truly believed that he was a servant in a well manicured estate back in 1912 or some such time I could hardly remember. I attempted to eat my breakfast opposite Helena without any reference or involvement with her, though that task proved impossible when she began informing me of her belief that someone kept saying her name, an issue which troubled her immensely as she clumsily nibbled at her food, for it caused her to take a few small bites and then halt abruptly, startle and then begin to eat again. I, of course, assured her that nothing was saying her name. When Ainsley joined us and I shared with him the good news that Barrett would be joining us, she made sure not to meet his eye. Her pupils darted here and there, but made sure to come nowhere close to even vague contact with Ainsley’s which were fixed, as always, on his paper.
Ainsley didn’t seem especially keen on the idea of a visit from Barrett and personally, I appreciated why, of course, for Ainsley hadn’t been to war. Well, he had been conscripted in 1918, trained and uniformed, but the war ended before he could be posted anywhere. Lucky, I suppose, considering what happened to Lawrence. Anyway, the issue with Barrett’s visits was that they inevitably ended up discussing the war, the Great War, if a war can be considered great, and how he - Barrett - had served his country and how Ainsley should consider himself bloody lucky to have the honour to serve his country in the next one. And we would have to hear about his great business enterprise in Sheffield.
It was funny to think that Barrett viewed himself - or at least seemed to view himself - as so quintessentially English for the Legare family, as their name suggests, we’re not ancestrally English at all, rather they were French aristocrats exiled around the time of the French Revolution. I suppose in recent years the French and the English have been on the same side, so there’s that.
Out of duty, I think, Ainsley was polite to Barrett and hosted him as often as he wished which luckily wasn’t very often as Barrett resided so far away, but to suggest that he liked Barrett or felt any great brotherly connection to him would be false, in my mind at least. They did not even grow up together for the most part; by the time Ainsley was born Barrett had already been sent to some boarding school or other (indeed, we often joked that the shatter in the glass in the conservatory roof was from a cricket ball he had sent all the way to us) and Ainsley, the youngest of the Legare children, grew up on an estate with only Helena and their father for company.
Me? Well, I liked Barrett as a jousting partner, similarly to how I appreciate the company of all people. Barrett was incredibly intelligent, not as intelligent as Lawrence, but still hopelessly intelligent. I liked intelligent men, stupid men are far too good at sex, with intelligent men they get to approach it from a more holistic view, as if they were studying a Renaissance painting. But then again, how would I know? Ainsley was cleverer still, though often hard to spot, he knew everything and everyone at any time. Yes, Ainsley Legare knew that it wasn’t La Belle Epoque anymore, which was more than could be said for Helena or Barrett and possibly more than could be said for Lawrence, though since the war it had been hard to know what he thought of.
I had known Lawrence as a child, that is to say, when we were children, we had both known each other. We used to play by that stream in the summer when he was back from boarding school. He was decently older and our relationship, whatever it had been, if it had been anything, ended abruptly when he had left for Oxford University and then, not long after, for France. And I do not refer to summer holidays by the sea, no, I mean fields that used to be farmlands of green grass. Would I have liked to marry Lawrence? Possibly, possibly, however, he was a childish love and was most certainly not interested in me.
My musings of the past would not be dallying in my mind for long, though, for soon Barrett’s carriage arrived in the driveway. We did not stand on ceremony for Barrett and Barrett did not stand on ceremony for us; he was escorted into the drawing room by Chester, to which he replied that he did not need escorting, for he had been to see us many times before. Barrett was a tall bulky man of about thirty; he moved dimly and huffily as if he was perpetually annoyed by something no one else could see, plonking himself down on the first available chair as if he were very, very tired. He acknowledged us only briefly, seemingly unsurprised by Helena’s presence.
“Good morning, brother.” Ainsley smiled.
“Morning, morning. You do realise that your house has really taken a beating from that storm last night? Nowhere else seems to have been hit as badly, strange really. ” Barrett replied.
“Hello Barrett.” I smiled.
“Yes.” he said, as if I had just asked him something very rude.
“How’s Sheffield?” Ainsley asked.
“Cold.” he said. “But the business is going swimmingly,” he perked up “you know, I have almost secured a trading deal with Twinings, you know, the tea people - “
“Sounds wonderful.” Ainsley cut him off which I met with a light snigger.
“Have you seen Lawrence?” Helena piped up from her place, perched precariously atop the arm of a leather chair.
“Yes.” Barrett swallowed.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’ll be okay, he thinks he could come home in a few weeks. Yes, Ainsley, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“Go on?”
“Well, I don’t think I could bring him back to Sheffield, so I am in town to look for a place that he - I mean, he and I - could stay, you know, once they discharge him.” Barrett looked away.
“Did you have anywhere in mind?” Ainsley asked.
“There’s this apartment on the outskirts of Oxford, it's called The Music Room, I saw an advert for it in the Gazette. I was thinking I might view it.”
“Rent?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes.” He replied.
“God, now this must be a first in history; the Legare family, no, no, the eldest child of the Legare family has decided to rent a property. Industrialisation not paying well?” I asked.
“Paying very well, thank you, it's just that you know, we might want to move around.” he replied solemnly.
“I see.” I smiled.
“And Barrett may want a wife one day.” Ainsley continued. “And so might Lawrence.”
“I guess.” Barrett said, his eyes moving swiftly to the window from which he was afforded a brief glimpse into the country life he had once known.
“Do you miss it?” I smiled.
“What?” Barrett asked.
“Do you miss the countryside?”
“I find that I only miss the countryside while I’m in it - when I am in Sheffield I find that what I long for is the city.” he replied forlornly.
“What does that mean?” Helena chimed in.
“Oh I don’t know,” he replied. Both Ainsley and Helena gave Barrett a simultaneous look of utter confusion, though one of them gave that look knowingly, while the other did not. “Look, I came to give you something.” he said, his eyes turning to his leather bag.
“Oh?” I asked.
“Yes,” he continued, reaching in as if his bag were endless in capacity before allowing a small leather bound book to emerge. “I thought you - you two - should have this,” he said, looking at Ainsley and Helena.
“What is it?” Ainsley asked.
“Its your mother’s journal.” he said, with decided disconnection. “I mean, there’s no point in me having it.”
“Doesn’t father want it?”
“No, no, I don’t think so.” Barrett said.
“Ah, well, Helena might like it, I never really met her so there’s not really much point giving it to me.” Ainsley said, looking away. Helena almost nodded, but noted that she hardly knew their mother either.
“I’d love to read them, Barrett.” I said.
“Really?” he asked in surprise, “I don’t see why they’d be of much interest.”
“Well, I don’t know, it could be good to know how the last Mistress Legare lived out her life not so far from here.”
“I think she lived here when they were first married.” Barrett said.
“See, I’m interested already.” I smiled. Yes, I know it's decidedly strange for me to want the journal of some woman that had died before I was born, but I knew that my worst fear, almost my worst fear, was that I would be consigned to oblivion and leave nothing but scraps of parchment, already yellowing with antiquity only to be thrown out of the house the moment my spirit had departed. I would not leave this lady’s words to go unread.
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