Except Herbert, of course, who had only been here three or four times in his life. Evelyn sent him up with a maid to show him his room. She pretended, of course, not to see the pat Herbert gave the maid’s behind as they went up the stairs, but her heart sank at this reminder of their extra guest’s proclivities. Herbert, unlike many men who have never married, was neither a latent homosexual nor low in sex drive. The business world was his wife — as the military world was BJ’s — but Herbert supplemented that wife with a string of mistresses and a longer string of passing amours, these latter frequently among the ranks of maids, waitresses, carhops, usherettes and (if a story of Howard’s was to be believed) at least one lady cabdriver. Don’t let him cause trouble among the servants, Evelyn thought. And especially not the cook.
Meanwhile the guests were still streaming in. Herbert had followed Harrison and Patricia, and now Patricia Chatham came in, complaining in a low harsh voice to her husband Earl, who was wearing his usual pained smile. He seemed always on the verge of apologizing to the world in general for his wife’s bad disposition. A tall and slender man of thirty-eight, Earl Chatham had soft blond hair on a narrow fine-boned head and a soft blond slender moustache above the deprecatory smile of his mouth. He looked like someone who wanted to look like an RAF spitfire pilot but who didn’t quite have the strength of character to bring it off.
This Patricia looked like the other Patricia, but eighteen years younger. Both were rigorously slender and sharp-featured, both dressed stylishly but somehow aggressively, and both were, always spoiling for a fight, their rather hawklike good looks marred slightly by a deep vertical line of frowning discontent on both foreheads.
Their voices were alike, too. Evelyn couldn’t make out the words Patricia Chatham was saying, but the inflections were just like the mother’s. She forced herself to smile at the Chathams anyway, saying, “Hello, Patricia. Hello, Earl.”
Patricia ignored her, exactly as though no one were standing there at all, but Earl, his pained smile a little more pained, waved over Patricia’s head en passant and said, “Hallo, Evie. Good to see you again.” He was the only one who had ever called her Evie, a name about which Evelyn’s feelings were ambivalent.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, my love.”
Bradford Chatham, age twelve, trailed in after his parents, who had now started up the stairs. “Hello, Aunt Evelyn,” he said apologetically, as though despite all his best endeavors he had just now yet again filled his pants. He was holding to his chest, one finger inserted to mark his place, the paperback reprint of a Eugene Burdick novel.
“Hello, Bradford,” Evelyn said, resisting an impulse to pat his head, and watched the skinny bespectacled kid trudge up the stairs in his parents’ wake. Thank God, she thought, for Gutenberg.
No one left but the Simcoes. The five daughters, ranging in age from eight to sixteen, burst in all together, squalling and yowling at one another. They passed Evelyn without noticing her, being too passionately involved in their intramural struggle, and crash-banged up the stairs like an animated wool tangle falling up. They were followed by their mother, Martha Simcoe, who came in stoop-shouldered and apologetic, blinking and saying, “Hello, Evelyn. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”
“I will,” Evelyn promised. The first few times Martha’d taken her through this ritual, Evelyn had pointed out that in a houseful of servants there was little enough for the hostess to do, much less anything for a helpful-minded guest, but as Martha persisted in the offer Evelyn had come to understand it was a kind of nervous tic, the necessary price of admission. Offer to work, and maybe they’ll let us stay. These days, Evelyn merely accepted and then neither she nor Martha ever made reference to it again.
The yowling of the Simcoe girls reached a sudden crescendo at the top of the stairs, and Martha gave a jangled jump and muttered, “Oh, those kids. Excuse me, Evelyn.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll talk — I so want to—” She was hurrying toward and then up the stairs, moving with short rapid worried steps, dropping in her wake short apologetic sentence fragments. “I’m sure we’ll — such a long trip — they’ll be all right when—”
They would never be all right, and everyone knew it. Evelyn turned back to the door, and now servants were coming in, carrying luggage. Amid them came Maurice Simcoe, almost disappearing in their midst, a slow-moving portly silent man never without his cigar. “Hello, Maurice,” Evelyn said, and Maurice took his cigar from his mouth but didn’t say anything. He never said anything. He bowed his head at Evelyn and sailed on for the stairs, still surrounded by servants, a trout in a school of perch. Howard, having once seen Maurice sit silent and impervious among his five daughters for over an hour, had come to the conclusion that he was a deaf-mute, and refused to consider any other explanation. Evelyn knew that Maurice Simcoe could both hear and speak when he chose to, but he chose to so seldom that it was a temptation to believe that Howard was right.
Bradford himself came in last. He’d stood out there to the end, greeting each of them as they’d emerged from the bus, like a minister at the church door after Sunday service, except that his smile had contained more a touch of the diabolical than the holy, and now he came in from the sunlight, the same smile still on his face, and quietly closed the door behind him. He looked at Evelyn and said, in the manner of a quiet observation, “Well, they’re here.”
“They certainly are,” Evelyn said.
“I will see you at dinner,” Bradford said.
“Where will you be before? Just in case I need you.”
“In the back library. But don’t need me.”
Evelyn wasn’t sure the smile on Bradford’s lips was directed at her — he seemed to be smiling about something private, inside his own head — but she answered it with one of her own anyway, saying, “I’ll try not to.”
“Good.” He nodded — that seemed a distant gesture, too, as though he’d caught from Harrison’s family the trick of never quite acknowledging Evelyn’s existence — and went on down the hall. He would take the back stairs, to avoid running into any of his guests.
Evelyn watched him go, her expression troubled. Bradford was in a mood she’d never seen before, both remote and hostile and yet at the same time full of a pushing kind of good humor. It was probably the combination of the Paris mess with the Harrison mess right on top of it, and she hoped it wouldn’t result in his making these three days even more difficult for Harrison — and everybody else — than they would be anyway.
Thinking enviously that the back library was soundproofed, Evelyn went off to see how the uneasy truce was surviving in the kitchen.
iv
After dinner, Bradford and Harrison went for a talk into the green study, a small room on the first floor, facing the orchards and the farther off woods and the distant mountains to the rear of the house. Patricia went with her husband, of course, and the rest of the family scattered to its various concerns. Dinner had been a strained affair, in the downstairs dining room overlooking Dinah’s garden, but it had at least not been calamitous. Martha Simcoe and Earl Chatham had made most of the abortive attempts at starting a lighthearted general conversation, with Evelyn dragging herself in to help them from time to time against her sure knowledge that nothing would do any good. Rage simmered beneath the surface here and there around the table, and everyone was aware of it, but it stayed beneath the surface for now, and that was blessing enough. Also, there was so far no trouble in the kitchen.