Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ ran up the narrow stairs and came out via a small door into a large airy corridor. It was a different world, the difference between downstairs and upstairs. Izzie tried to take it all in.

      The walls were palest green, covered with silken wallpaper that almost looked as if someone had painted exotic birds on by hand. With their wings spread as they flew, the little birds were rainbow-bright: acid yellows, crimson reds and electric blues. Beneath their feet was a wooden floor covered with a long, threadbare carpet. Even though it was old, it had clearly once been very beautiful with an intricate architectural design along the edges and huge old roses tumbling over each other in the middle.

      Jodi half ran down to big double doors at the other end of the hallway and pushed them open. Izzie followed her and they found themselves in a light, airy sitting room with huge sash windows and heavy silk curtains. The original furniture was still there, some draped in off-white Holland covers. A pair of gilded chairs sat in front of a beautiful fireplace, a vision of white marble with delicately chiselled Roman goddesses frolicking around the edges. Izzie guessed this must be the lady of the house’s personal salon. Here, her ladyship could sit and amuse herself, in sharp contrast to the women toiling downstairs in the scullery.

      Next were bedrooms, two huge ones, for the master and mistress: his with a small dressing room and masculine bookshelves on the walls; hers with an enormous four-poster bed as centrepiece. Izzie recognised Indian carvings on the heavy bedposts, but the crimson and golden hangings had been badly attacked by moths and they hung in threads around it. It was such a shame. The wardrobes and the other furniture didn’t match the Indian bed. The wardrobes were vast 1930s style, with simple lines and doors hanging open, smelling musty. There was candle grease on the small bamboo table beside the bed and Izzie had a sudden vision of the last of the Lochravens as a little old lady getting into bed on her own, with a candle to save money on electricity. Jodi had told her that Isabelle Lochraven had been ninety-five when she died. She’d never married and had lived here in the house all her life. Izzie knew her grandmother must remember Isabelle from a long time ago because Isabelle had been a young woman when Lily worked in Rathnaree, yet Izzie was quite sure the two hadn’t met after that, even though they were of similar vintage. They must have shared many memories, but the servant/mistress divide was so great that even in old age they’d never thought to breach it.

      Izzie thought back to her childhood in Tamarin. She couldn’t recall hearing anything about the Lochraven family, apart from the odd reported sighting of Isabelle driving into town in one of her ancient cars. She was a danger on the roads, everyone said. Drove as though she owned the road, which a long time ago she had.

      What a sad way to live, Izzie thought, touched with empathy for these people. They had so much and yet, because of their position, they cut themselves off from the people around them. They were part of the country and yet not part of it. How sad.

      On the next floor up were children’s rooms and a giant nursery, painted bright yellow with all sorts of old-fashioned children’s toys lying in disrepair on the floor. There were cross-faced dolls with hard china heads and little wigs; a tricycle that must be at least a hundred years old, with its paint nearly all chipped off; and little books from another age, Kipling and Noddy in tattered covers.

      Further along the corridor was another door that led up to the servants’ quarters in the attics via a narrow and winding staircase. Here were the maids’ bedrooms: tiny little box rooms separated by paper-thin walls. Some had iron bedsteads, but only one had a small fireplace. Perhaps with their tiny windows, the attic rooms weren’t as cold as the rest of the house, but with so many chimneys it seemed heartless that these maids, after a day stoking the Lochravens’ fires, would climb the stairs to shiver under the eaves.

      Again, she began to get an understanding of why her grandmother resented the Lochravens. For a woman as proud and intelligent as Lily, it must have been hard to have to serve these people with their sense of right and privilege. Lily, who thought that respect should be earned, would have found it hard to admire people who thought themselves entitled by virtue of their aristocratic blood. They lived in the pretty gilded salon and dined on fine china, while their servants were denied any comfort whatsoever.

      Finally, she went downstairs. The main stairs were grand and at least six foot wide, carved out of the palest white marble with a vein of grey running through them. On either side was a solid brass stair rail. There was a huge hall at the bottom, with a pattern picked out in black-and-white Victorian floor tiles and ornamental columns topped by pots of dusty earth now sat on top of them with no trace remaining of the ferns that once must have been planted there. An ornate grandfather clock stood against one wall and the mounted heads of several stags stared down at her through dusty eyes that hadn’t gleamed with life for many decades.

      ‘Here it is,’ cried Jodi. She’d found the room from her precious photograph: the room in which the glamorous men and women had posed for the picture marking Lady Irene’s birthday. Without the sepia mystique of the photograph, the room looked sad and tired, for all its elegant proportions and huge windows and the giant fireplace with the club fender exactly as they’d seen it in the photo.

      But there was no fire in the grate. The tables with the beautiful arrangements of flowers were gone, nor was there the sense of music in the background or the feeling of laughing people enjoying themselves, holding up crystal tumblers to the camera.

      ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ breathed Jodi, enchanted.

      And Izzie wondered exactly what was wrong with her, because all she felt was sadness in this place. Maybe she lacked the archaeology gene. Or maybe she was a lot more like her grandmother than she knew. She didn’t long to be in this grand house playing at being a lady, with servants running up and down the back stairs every time she rang a bell.

      There was too much unbalance here. As if something had kept Rathnaree going unnaturally and, now that the cycle was over, all that was left was this beautiful, sad shell which had witnessed so much. Many people had lived their lives out in the house, yet the only stories people heard about Rathnaree concerned the wealthy people who’d lived here. The poor people of Tamarin who’d served them had been forgotten. That felt wrong to Izzie.

      ‘It’s a pity we don’t know more about the people who worked here,’ she said. ‘That’s the interesting story, isn’t it?’

      ‘I agree, both stories are interesting,’ Jodie said, surprising her. ‘It’s like there were two separate worlds here, independent and yet linking up: the aristocrats, and the servants. Two different stories at the same time, how interesting is that! Oh, I’m so glad we got to come in here. Thank you, Izzie, for arranging it.’

      ‘You’re going to work on it, then – the history from both sides?’ Izzie asked.

      Jodi nodded. ‘I love uncovering the past, don’t you?’ she said happily. ‘It teaches us about ourselves: that’s what they told us in college, anyway.’

      Izzie stood in front of the big fireplace the way the people in Jodi’s sepia-tinted photograph had stood and tried to imagine herself back in their world. She’d read a novel about time travel once, where a woman from the twentieth century had been whisked back to the seventeenth. The idea had fascinated Izzie. What would she bring to the past if she was transported back to 1936 right now? Would her wisdom be of any use then? Or would she find that, instead of her bringing superior modern knowledge into the past, the past would turn out to be her teacher?

       FOURTEEN

      When she was older, Lily found that the seasons reminded СКАЧАТЬ