Page 93 of The Bedlam Stacks

I nodded.

‘Good. Where would you like to go next?’ he said, as if it was nothing. ‘There are rubber expeditions going out in Africa now. Some Arctic exploratory stuff, if you wanted a change of scene. And the Foreign Office are mooing for anyone who speaks Chinese to get on the diplomatic service in Japan. It opened to trade while you were away,’ he explained when I started to ask since when had there been a diplomatic service in Japan.

‘Did it?’ I said, surprised.

‘Well, the Americans shelled them until they said yes.’

‘Oh, right. Yes, Japan please.’

‘Really? It won’t be gardening.’

‘Just – for a while. Can I?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He watched me for a second. ‘But then we really will want you in the Congo.’

‘Yes.’

We sat in silence. Down the hill from us, Minna was walking with the baby and the new ayah, a cheery girl who danced whenever she swept the veranda. Minna had had the baby a month early, which had nearly given me a heart attack but hadn’t seemed to worry her. It was, she pointed out, far too hot to be penned up somewhere airless, even when that somewhere was your own mother.

‘Is she going with you?’ he asked.

‘No. Why would she be?’

‘Isn’t that what people do, marry their dead husband’s friends?’

‘Awkward when I killed her husband.’

‘No, you didn’t. You allowed him to be stupid for the general good of mankind. And of that village, I might add, to which we now have no need to send the army. You’re not going to have some sort of angst-driven breakdown now, are you?’ he added warily. ‘I’d encourage you not to.’

I laughed. ‘No. But I can keep a secret from someone I see only occasionally. Harder to keep it from my wife.’

‘No. True.’

He was looking at the rosary around my wrist, but he had never asked about that either. He had a pretty firm stance on religion, which was that the less people bothered about it, the fewer huffy trade impediments there were going to be. I pressed my other hand round it and squeezed until the beads printed my arm, and half the cross. I’d thought that I would stop thinking about it all after a few weeks, but I hadn’t. I’d found that if I sat still for too long without doing something useful, the way ahead – twenty years – looked as far as the stars. To Raphael’s way of thinking, you only had to sit still and the future would catch up with you from behind, but I was starting to feel like I was facing the wrong way. It got further away the longer I looked.

‘Right, morning rounds,’ I said, unable to sit quiet any more. We had slipped into talking about the cinchona plantation as if it were a hospital ward. ‘Coming?’

‘I think I’ll stay here,’ he said, for the first morning since we had arrived.

THIRTY-TWO

Cornwall, 1881

When I came in from the garden, Minna and Cecily were putting holly up around the house, which was now full of people because they had invited everyone they knew. There were trees and candles everywhere too. More than anything it looked like the garden had moved into the house for the holiday. There was a brandy, Christmas-cake smell drifting up from the kitchens and someone was playing the piano in the parlour, a beautiful version of a carol whose words I’d forgotten. I couldn’t believe how warm it was with the roof and the windows all in good repair and the fires going. It felt like another house altogether. I hadn’t been there often enough in the intervening years to have remembered it any other way than how it was when I’d left it before Peru. When I was in England, which was rare, I stayed with Sing. I could have bought a house of my own, but I didn’t want to. Silence in empty rooms whistled.

Minna turned around where she sat on the stairs twining holly round the banister.

‘Oh, Em, there’s someone here for you,’ she said.

‘Who?’ I said, confused, because I’d been sure that everyone I knew well was already here. Minna and Cecily had invited themselves and promptly redecorated because they said it was bleak, and I’d invited Sing, because it was a sort of unspoken pact to have Christmas and New Year together if both of us were in the same place, which was not every year. We were the only people either of us knew who didn’t disappear off into extended families for the holiday. Even Sing’s servant went back to the Netherlands towards the middle of December. Usually we would have been at Sing’s house in London, but Charles had died in November and I’d been back at Heligan since then, going through everything. I had a feeling Minna was there more to keep an eye on me than to put up new wallpaper.

‘He says it’s a surprise,’ she laughed.

‘Where?’

‘In the parlour. He’s the one with the piano.’

‘I don’t know anyone who plays the piano. Do I?’