“It wasn’t crows,” she says. And as she tells me, the scene slides into focus in my mind, as if it had always been there, waiting for Beth to point it out to me.
The Storton Manor summer party was an annual affair, usually held on the first Saturday in July. Sometimes we were there in time for it, sometimes not, depending on the school calendar. We always hoped to be-it was the one occasion when we wanted to take part in something of Meredith’s, because the lights and the people and the music and the dresses turned the manor into another place, another world. That year, Beth spent hours doing my hair for me. I’d been crying because my party dress had got too small for me, something we hadn’t discovered until I put it on earlier in the evening. It was too tight under the arms and the smocking pinched my skin. But there was no alternative so I had to wear it, and to cheer me up Beth braided turquoise ribbons into my hair, fifteen or twenty in total, which came together in a plume of curled ends at the back of my head.
“Last one-sit still! There. You look like a bird of paradise, Erica!” she smiled, as she knotted the last one. I tipped my head this way and that, liked the brush of the ribbons against the back of my neck.
Flaming torches marched up the driveway, reeking of paraffin and guttering in the night air. They made a sound like flags flying. There was a string quartet on the sun terrace near where long tables had been set up, draped with white cloths and loaded with ranks of shining glassware. Silver ice buckets on long legs held chilled bottles of champagne, and the waiters raised their eyebrows at me when I dipped my fingers in, filching ice cubes to suck. The food was probably wonderful, but I remember snatching a caviar blini, cramming it into my mouth and then spitting it into the nearest flowerbed. Adult conversation that we didn’t understand volleyed over our heads; gossip and hearsay bandied back and forth, oblivious of we little spies, infiltrating the crowd.
Most of our extended family, people I never see any more, attended, as well as everyone who was anyone in county society. A photographer from Wiltshire Life circulated, snapping the more attractive women, the more titled men. Horsey women with flat hair and big teeth, who wore garishly expensive evening gowns in shades of pink, peacock and emerald. They dug out their diamonds for the occasion-rocks glittering against freckled English skins. The whole garden was flooded with the smell of their perfumes, and later, when the dancing started, that of fresh sweat. The men wore black tie. My dad fidgeted with his collar, his cummerbund, not used to the stiff edges, the layers of fabric. Insects swirled around the lanterns like sparks from a fire. The lawns rang with voices and laughter, a steady roar that grew with the number of empty bottles. Only the fireworks silenced it, and we children stared, rapt, as the purple night sky exploded into light.
A whole crew of staff was brought in to cater the party. Wine waiters; cooks who took over the kitchen; waitresses to ferry the trays of hot canapés they produced; calm, implacable butlers who lingered indoors, politely directing people to the downstairs bathrooms and discouraging the curious from peering into the family rooms. It was one of these anonymous workers that Caroline attacked, inexplicably. She had been positioned in her chair on the veranda, near enough to the terrace to hear the music, but still within the shelter of the house. People drifted over to pay their respects, bending forward awkwardly so as not to tower over her, but they drifted away again as soon as it was polite to do so. Some of them Caroline acknowledged with a faraway nod of her head. Some she just ignored. And then a waitress went over with a smile, offered her something from a tray.
She was dark, I remember that. Very young, maybe only in her teens. Beth and I had noticed her earlier in the evening because we envied her hair. Her skin was a deep olive and she had the most luxurious black hair, hanging in a thick plait over her shoulder. It was as deep and glossy as ink. She had a neat rounded body, and a neat rounded face with dark brown eyes and apples high in her cheeks. She might have been Spanish, or Greek perhaps. Beth and I were nearby because we’d been following her. We thought her incredibly lovely. But when Caroline looked up and focused on the girl her eyes grew huge and her mouth dropped open-a damp, lipless hole in her face. I was close enough to see that she was shaking, and to see a frown of alarm pass over the waitress’s face.
“Magpie?” Caroline whispered, a ragged breath forming the word so loosely I thought I’d heard it wrong. But she said it again, more firmly. “Magpie, is that you?” The waitress shook her head and smiled, but Caroline threw up her hands with a hoarse cry. Meredith looked over at her mother, drawing down her brows.
“Are you all right, Mother?” she asked, but Caroline ignored her, continuing to stare at the dark-haired waitress with a look of pure terror on her face.
“It can’t be you! You’re dead! I know you are… I saw it…” she wailed.
“It’s OK,” the girl said, backing away from the old woman. Beth and I watched, fascinated, as tears began to slide down Caroline’s cheeks.
“Don’t hurt me… please don’t,” she croaked.
“What’s going on here?” Meredith demanded, appearing next to her mother, glaring at the hapless waitress, who could only shake her head, at a loss. “Mother, be quiet. What’s the matter with you?”
“No! Magpie… how can it be? I was sure I didn’t… I didn’t mean for it…” she begged, putting trembling fingers over her mouth. Her face was aghast, haunted. The waitress moved away, apologizing, smiling an uncomfortable smile. “Magpie… wait, Magpie!”
“That’s quite enough! There’s nobody here called Magpie! For goodness’ sake, Mother, pull yourself together,” Meredith admonished her, sharply. “We have guests,” she said pointedly, leaning forward to speak right into Caroline’s ear. But Caroline just kept staring after the black-haired girl, frantically searching the crowd for her.
“Magpie! Magpie!” she shouted, still weeping. She grasped Meredith’s hand, fixed her daughter with wide, desperate eyes. “She’s come back! Don’t let her hurt me!”
“Right. That’s enough. Clifford-come and help me.” Meredith beckoned sharply to her son and between them they turned Caroline’s chair and manoeuvred her in through the tall glass doors. Caroline tried to fight them, kept craning her head to look for the girl, kept saying the name, over and over again. Magpie, Magpie. It was the first and only time I remember feeling sorry for her, because she sounded so frightened, and so very, very sad.
“Magpie, that was it. Funny name,” I say, as Beth stops speaking, undoes her own long plait and runs her fingers through her hair. “I wonder who she thought that girl was?”
“Who knows? She was obviously pretty confused by then. She was over a hundred, remember.”
“Do you think Meredith knew? She was so brusque with her about it!”
“No. I don’t know,” Beth shrugs. “Meredith was always brusque.”
“She was horrible that night.” I get up, clatter the kettle onto the hotplate for coffee.
“You should go and have a root around in the attic if it’s old pictures and papers you’re after,” Beth says, suddenly keen.
“Oh?”
“That old trunk up there-when we came here for Caroline’s funeral I remember Meredith putting everything she could find of hers up in that old red leather trunk. It was almost as if she wanted everything of Caroline’s out of her sight.”
“I don’t remember that. Where was I?”
“You stayed in Reading with Nick and Sue next door. Dad said you were too young to go to a funeral.”
“I’ll go and have a look up there later, then,” I say. “You should come up, too.”
“No, no, I’ve never been that bothered about family history. You might find something interesting, though,” she smiles. I notice how keen she is for me to investigate this distant past rather than our more recent one. How keen she is to distract me.