The Uninvited Guests Read Free

gambler, he had nothing to sell; he must borrow the money. It was a distasteful prospect, and it was with this distaste that he now looked down upon Charlotte’s fine, pale face.
    ‘Love,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me to enjoy asking to borrow money from a man whose employment practices I loathe and whose politics sicken me.’
    (This was in reference to the prospective lender; an industrialist of low morals.)
    ‘You needn’t do it, you know that,’ said Charlotte, looking away from him. A tear rolled from her eye. She brushed it away impatiently – but not so impatiently that he would not see it.
    ‘Of course I must do it!’ he said, kissing her damp and salty fingers.
    Ten minutes later Edward was in the passenger seat of the car, with his case strapped behind him and an expression of grim resolve as he waited for Robert to crank the starting handle.
    Emerald, straightening from her weeding, watched, as with a roar and flying gravel they set off. Their departure had drawn the lurcher Forthright from his doze beneath the yews and he loped after them, barking wolfishly. Edward, catching sight of Emerald, raised his arm and waved.
    ‘Happy Birthday, Emerald!’ he shouted above the noise, and very soon the car, the lurcher, her stepfather, Robert and the suitcase were lost to sight in the gloom of the avenue that was dark in any weather, but particularly so this morning, it seemed.
    The noise faded, the world was hushed.
    Here, then, on the morning of her twentieth birthday, having grown out of her many efforts to capture the magnolia tree or, it must be owned, much else that life might have to offer, having put away her microscope, drawing pad, girlish dreams of Greatness and all, kneeling by the stunted flower-bed, Emerald noticed that water had seeped through the thick linen of her skirt and knitted stockings and onto her knees.
    ‘Happy birthday indeed,’ she said. ‘I must stop talking to myself.’
    There was a drooping bow below her bust. She adjusted it. Her eye was caught by something and she strained to interpret the shape.
    Near the yews, paused in the shadow of them, was a small, white figure. Emerald stood, tucking the pile of weeds into the deep pocket of her dress and wiping her dirty fingers, heedlessly.
    ‘Is that you, Smudge?’ she called, and the third young Torrington, the child, replied weakly, ‘Yes.’
    Emerald crossed the grass towards the figure standing in the overhang, her puff of dark hair merging like a sooty halo with the shadows.
    ‘Good heavens, I thought you hadn’t come down. Didn’t you say you don’t feel well?’
    ‘I don’t feel well,’ the child responded.
    Emerald went to her sister and took her hand. ‘Your fingers are like ice,’ she said. ‘Come inside at once.’
    They went in by the back door nearest them to a square, stone-flagged back hall. Pausing by a stand with walking sticks and umbrellas leaning gleamingly at angles, Emerald put her hands on the child’s face and tilted it up to look at her, searchingly. ‘Why did you come out?’
    ‘I was bored.’
    ‘Is there a fire in your room?’
    ‘I don’t want one.’
    ‘Well, let’s go up and see about you.’
    They started up the echoing back stair, whose treads were naked wood.
    ‘Where’s Clovis?’
    ‘I don’t know – still at breakfast when I last saw him, sulking.’
    ‘He does sulk. I don’t. You wouldn’t notice.’
    It was true; Smudge was very often forgotten. Like Clovis and Emerald before her, she was left to herself to get on with the business of her upbringing, but unlike them, she was alone in the endeavour. Clovis and Emerald had had one another as company when marooned by the various tides of their parents’ commitments. Smudge’s loneliness suited her; she was celebrated by her mother, as well as neglected, and she found much to be cheerful about.
    They had reached a landing and went through the baize door onto a corridor, travelled the length of the house and at last