Ralph
The smog was so thick visibility was reduced to less than a few yards. With a handkerchief pressed to his mouth and nose, Ralph had lost count how many times he’d bumped into another person or building, or stumbled off the pavement very nearly into the path of an oncoming car crawling along in the dark. It was unnervingly disorientating, and he supposed this was how it had been during the blackout in the war. Just without the choking air.
Everyone in London was hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as the smog that killed thousands ten years ago. He’d been a boy back then and could remember receiving a rare letter from his mother – from the safety of the south of France – advising him to stay indoors. The letter had been sent to the prep school he attended in North London and he’d opened it with a mixture of emotions. He hated the slapdash nature of her communications – nothing for six months, then suddenly a rambling letter telling him how much she loved him and how she wished he could be with her. Initially he had made the mistake of believing her, but when he replied saying he would like to spend the school holidays with her, there was a lengthy silence. His father hated him to have any contact with his mother, and so he kept her letters secret. He had enjoyed keeping secrets. But didn’t everybody?
More than once he had thrown a letter from his mother straight into the bin, not bothering to read it. She had abandoned him, after all. What kind of mother did that? But as the years went by, he reasoned that any woman in her right mind wouldn’t stick around for long with a husband like Arthur Devereux. For the life of him, Ralph couldn’t understand how any woman would want to attach themselves to his father in the first place.
Women were unfathomable creatures. Take Isabella for example. One minute she was fine with him, the next she was criticising him and making out she was so much better. He really shouldn’t have raised his hand to slap her, but then she shouldn’t have provoked him.
She was spoiled, that was her trouble. Just like Annelise. And that was Romily’s doing. Why hadn’t the woman shown him a fraction of the attention she’d lavished on those two girls when they’d all been growing up?
It was a rhetorical question. He knew jolly well why Romily had kept her distance. Why they all did. It was because of his father. They despised Arthur Devereux. When Ralph had been old enough to realise this, and wanting to dissociate himself from the old man, he’d tried his best to be affable and charming in order to gain acceptance into the inner circle, as he saw it.
In some small measure, he had achieved a degree of approval, but he would never be granted full membership to the clan. It was laughable, that he, atrue-blooded Devereux – unlike Isabella, the bastard child of a mother who’d been a bastard child herself, and Annelise, a German and not even a blood relation – was made to feel he was a stranger on the outside looking in.
He let out a loud curse as he missed his footing on the kerb of the pavement and breathed in a lungful of foul sulphurous air. Where the hell was he, he suddenly thought?Damn this smog!He’d been so preoccupied he’d taken a wrong turning. As he often did, he blamed his father. Had Arthur not insisted they meet for dinner at his club in St James’s Square this evening, doubtless to check up on his employment status, he’d be enjoying a quiet night in.
His eyes itching and his mouth and the back of his throat burning with the poisonous cold air, he stood still and peered through the opaqueness to locate himself.
He arrivedforty-five minutes late, as his father, already seated in the dining room with ahalf-empty bottle of wine, was only too quick to point out.
‘As ever, your punctuality is not what it could be,’ he said.
Ralph rolled his eyes. Could the old man sound any more pompous? ‘I presume you have looked out of the window today from the comfort of your leather armchair and seen how awful the smog is?’
‘Don’t be smart with me, Ralph. Of course I know what it’s like out there.’ He moved the bottle of wine towards Ralph so he could fill his glass. ‘I’ve already ordered for us,’ he added.
Annoyed that he was denied the right to choose his own meal, Ralph wilfully filled his glass to the top and drank deeply from it. ‘So what brings you to town?’ he then said. ‘The usual things, boredom and a desire to have your lungs poisoned with noxious smog? Or perhaps your visit was entirely for my benefit, an opportunity once again to tell me what a failure of a son I am to you?’
His father stared at him across thewhite-clothed table. ‘I’ve been here for several weeks if you must know. But I would advise you not to engage in battle with me.’
‘Why? What will you do, lock me in my room like you did with Julia? You’re aware, aren’t you, that people in the village know that you punished her for drinking too much at Meadow Lodge?’
‘And whose fault was it that she drank too much?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Ralph responded with a detached air.
‘I’m pleased to say that the severity of Julia’s hangover has insured she’ll never again drink or make a disgusting display of herself.’
Ralph took a long sip of his wine. ‘You never have denied yourself the pleasure a good reprimand gives you, have you? You know, if you’d bestowed half as much love and affection on me as you did the belt or the cane, who knows, I might have turned out to be the perfect son. Imagine that.’
His father looked back at him unmoved. ‘Frankly, I can’t. At last, here’s our soup.’
The waiter now gone, a silence settled on the table as they each picked up their spoons. The soup was thick and too salty, not at all what Ralph would have ordered. While his father gave it his full concentration, tearing at a bread roll and slathering butter on to each piece, before dipping them into the soup. Ralph shuddered with revulsion. He may well have inherited a number of his father’s characteristics, but gluttony would never be one of them.
It hadn’t always been this way between the two of them. Ralph could recall a time when his father had appeared to care about him. That all changed when Arthur discovered that not only had Ralph been receiving letters from his mother, but had kept some of them and written in return.
It had been one of the masters at school who had informed Arthur. From that day their relationship was different. Arthur made it clear he considered Ralph had betrayed him. Where there had once been pride in Ralph’s achievements at school, and reward for doing well, there was now harsh criticism. Nothing he did was good enough, and the harder Ralph tried to win back his father’s approval, the more he failed to do so. In the end he simply gave up. Would the same fate befall his stepbrother?
‘How’s Charlie?’ Ralph asked, when he’d had enough of the disagreeable soup and sat back to drink his wine in preference. His father had all but licked his dish clean. The doddery old waiter immediately appeared at the table and shuffled off with the dishes.
‘I’ve told you before,’ Arthur intoned, ‘it’s Charles. And according to his letters, he’s well.’
Poor devil, thought Ralph, remembering the Herculean task of trying to think of something to say in those tedious letters home when he’d been away at school.
‘I suppose he’ll be looking forward to Christmas, won’t he?’ Ralph said, remembering also how he came to dread the end of the school term. How he’d prayed that he could spend the holidays with one of his friends, or even remain at school in the care of matron.
Arthur’s reply was halted by their waiter reappearing with a trolley laden with food. Removing a large silver dome, he commenced to carve slices of meat from a colossal joint of beef. When all was served, Arthur requesting extra potatoes and another Yorkshire pudding, plus a second bottle ofChâteauneuf-du-Pape, he said, ‘By the way, it’s unlikely your aunt Hope will see Christmas, she’s been in a coma for the last two weeks. Or perhaps you’d heard via the family jungle drums?’
