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CHAPTER 3

It hadn’t always been like this between Greta and Thomas. Three years ago everything had been fine, or as near to fine as it could be between them. Thomas was just thirteen, and she’d just started working as Peter Robinson’s personal assistant.

He was as dreamy a boy as she’d ever met. He had fair hair the colour of summer straw, which he wore long so that it fell forward over his forehead. He had already developed a habit of brushing his hair away from his eyes with the back of his hand before he spoke, a habit that would stay with him all his life. It was part of a natural diffidence, which led him to speak in a tone of uncertainty even when he was sure of what he wanted to say. Yet underneath he had already developed the qualities of stubbornness and determination that were to become so evident after his mother’s death.

He had inherited his mother’s liquid blue eyes and delicate mouth, which endowed his face with an attractive half-feminine quality. He also had her fine hands and long, tapering fingers, suggesting a future as an artist or a musician. Not a future that his practical-minded father wanted for his only son.

Peter had had such grand hopes for Thomas when he was small. On the boy’s sixth birthday Peter got down the model aeroplanes that he and his father had made together when he was Thomas’s age. He arranged them lovingly in squadrons on the nursery floor and told his son their names. But Thomas only pretended to be interested. As soon as his father had left the room, he picked up the book of fairy stories that he had been reading and left the Hurricanes and Spitfires to gather dust.

Two weeks later the dog pursued a ball into the corner and broke the model of the bomber that his grandfather had flown in over Germany fifty years before. That evening Peter packed all the model aeroplanes away in a box and took them with him when he went back to London. Already his political career was keeping him away from home during the week, and Anne would not hear of selling the House of the Four Winds. Peter felt it was not him but the house that his wife really cared about. Her house and her son.

Peter could sense the expectation in his son when he was about to leave at the end of each weekend. He grew to hate the way the boy seemed to cower when he spoke to him. There was no reason for it. Peter had done nothing to deserve such treatment. He had struggled all his life to make his own father proud of him, and there was not a day that he did not thank providence for letting the old man live just long enough to know that his son had become the minister of defence. But Thomas didn’t care what his father thought. He had no pride in his father’s family, no interest in his father’s achievements. Thomas’s heart and mind belonged to his mother and to the house in which her family, the Sackvilles, had lived for generations.

As the years passed, father and son moved ever further apart. Thomas loved stories – he couldn’t get enough of them – but Peter never read fiction. It was almost a matter of principle. His mind was fixed on the here and now, and he felt nothing but irritation on rainy days when Thomas lay reading for hours at a time. The boy would stretch himself out on the window seat in the drawing room with cushions piled high under his head so that he could see over the dunes to the North Sea, where great waves crashed upon the shingle beach. He would imagine the postman’s knock on the back door as signalling the arrival of Long John Silver and his pirates come to claim their treasure from Billy Bones. Or when he was out walking the dog in the evening he would be looking for Heathcliff striding across the moors in search of a bloody revenge.

Thomas knew where all the wrecks were to be found off the coast. He had their locations marked with black crosses on a map on his bedroom wall, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that he had heard the church bells of the lost city of Dunwich tolling bleakly in the small hours from their resting place beneath the waves. But such legends had no meaning for Thomas’s father, who saw their only value as keeping up the local tourist trade.

Within only a few months of being hired, Greta made herself indispensable to Sir Peter and began to accompany him on his weekend visits to his family at the House of the Four Winds. For at least half of the time they would be working in either Sir Peter’s study or the drawing room, with its french windows leading on to the garden where Anne spent so much of her time planting and pruning and tending the rose walks for which the House of the Four Winds had become so famous in recent years. And Thomas would be out there too, wheeling a barrow or unravelling a hose. Always helping his mother. The two were inseparable.

Greta made a great effort to get on with Thomas, and by and large she succeeded, for a time at least. She was a good listener when she wanted to be, and she read as much as she could about Suffolk and its history so that Thomas began to come to her when he needed information for the stories he was always writing and reading to his mother in the evenings. Anne raised her eyebrows and laughed in a disconcerting way when she heard of the assistance being given to her son by her husband’s PA, but otherwise she said nothing. Greta, however, felt an obscure disapproval emanating from Lady Robinson, a sense that the mistress of the house had found her out but chose to let events take their course without interference.

‘I know who you are and you’re not one of us,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘And you never will be one of us, however hard you try.’

And so Greta cultivated the boy but remained at a distance from the mother. Sometimes when Anne had one of her recurring migraines and lay upstairs silent with a white flannel over her head and her white bedroom curtains drawn against the sun, Thomas and Greta would walk on the beach and look for amber. Greta knew all about amber because she’d read a book about it.

Sometimes Peter and Anne would be invited out for lunch or dinner at the house of another well-connected family, and Greta, Thomas and Mrs Martin, the housekeeper, would remain behind. It was on one such Saturday that the first trouble happened. It was the birthday of Mrs Martin’s sister, and the housekeeper was taking Thomas with her to the party in Woodbridge. Thomas enjoyed these visits. Mrs Martin’s brother-in-law owned a seagoing boat, and Thomas had already extracted a promise that he would be taken out night fishing when he reached the golden age of fifteen, only five months away.

By midday Greta was alone in the House of the Four Winds. She finished typing out the corrections to a speech that Sir Peter was to give at the party conference the following week and then went out into the front hall. There was not a sound anywhere except the murmur of the sea as she climbed the stairs to Lady Robinson’s bedroom and closed the door softly behind her.

Greta stood in the centre of the room watching herself in the freestanding mirror as she slowly and deliberately undressed. It was the third time that she had done this, and each time it gave her greater pleasure. Now she carefully opened the top drawer of an antique chest and took out three or four pairs of Anne’s silk underwear, setting to one side a lavender sachet embroidered by the lady of the house. One by one she tried them on, pressing the white material against her body until at last she settled on the sheerest, thinnest pair of all and turned her attention to the closets containing Anne’s dresses.

Her green eyes sparkled as she passed the material between her fingers and raised it to her nose. As she breathed in deeply, it was almost as if she was holding Anne close to herself. Turning, she laid out five of the dresses across the wide bed and slowly tried each one on. Her erect nipples visible through the fabric of each dress and the faraway look in her half-closed eyes told their own story. She was too absorbed to notice the sound of the front door opening down below, and she didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs as she pulled a lemon silk brocade dress over her head. She only knew that she was not alone when she looked in the mirror to admire herself and saw Thomas standing in the open doorway behind her.

One of Greta’s greatest qualities as a personal assistant was her calmness under pressure.

‘It’s almost unnatural,’ Sir Peter had told his wife only the previous weekend when they were lying in the bed across which Anne’s evening dresses were now draped. ‘It’s like there are all these boats being tossed about in some terrible tempest out there in the bay and she’s in her own boat in the centre and the storm’s having no effect on her at all. She’s one in a million, Annie. I bet that some of the other MPs would pay a king’s ransom to get hold of her, but then, she’s completely loyal. That’s another of her qualities.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Anne had replied. ‘It is unnatural. She must have worked very hard to become what she is.’

Now, at this moment of crisis, Greta remained just as calm as her employer would have expected. Only a slight shudder indicated her awareness of the boy’s presence. Thomas, however, stood rooted to the spot and his cheeks flushed crimson. His eyes were fixed on the reflection of Greta’s full breasts in the mirror, with the rose-red nipples clearly visible as the buttons on the front of the yellow dress remained undone right down to the waist.

Greta looked evenly at the boy’s reflection in the mirror but did nothing to hide herself.

‘You’re looking at my breasts, Thomas.’ There was a purring note in Greta’s voice that the boy had not heard before.

‘No, no. I’m not.’

‘All right. You’re not.’ Greta laughed, pulling the front of the dress together. ‘My mistake.’

‘You’re wearing my mother’s dress. The one she said was like spring daffodils. And you’re in her room. Why are you in her room?’

‘Well, Thomas. If you sit down a moment, I’ll try to explain it to you.’

Greta picked up two of the dresses from the bed and gestured for the boy to sit in the space that she had cleared, but he didn’t move from the doorway.

‘You shouldn’t be in here. You don’t belong in here.’

‘No, I don’t. You’re quite right. But Thomas, try to understand. I don’t have beautiful clothes like your mother does. I can’t afford them like she can. And I didn’t think it would do any harm if I tried them on just to see what I looked like. It doesn’t hurt anyone, does it?’

‘It’s not right. They belong to my mother.’

‘Yes, they do. But I wasn’t going to steal them. I wouldn’t be trying them on in here if I was going to do that, now would I?’

‘She wouldn’t want you to have them on. She wouldn’t want you in here. I know she wouldn’t.’

‘All right, perhaps she wouldn’t,’ said Greta, changing tack. ‘Perhaps she would be upset if she knew. And then she might get one of those horrible migraines. No one wants that, do they, Thomas?’

Thomas did not reply. His lower lip trembled and he looked like he was going to cry. Greta pressed home her advantage.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t tell her? Then no one would get hurt. What do you say? It can be our secret. Just you and me.’

Greta put out her right hand towards the boy, thus allowing the yellow dress to fall open again, exposing her breasts.

Thomas took a step backwards, but Greta reached over and took his hand, pulling him toward her.

In the years that followed, Thomas always recalled this moment as one of the most significant of his childhood. It was a turning point of sorts. An end and a beginning. Certainly his memory chose to preserve the scene in extraordinary detail. Closing his eyes as an adult, he could recall his mother’s room with the sea breeze coming in through the half-drawn curtains; the sun shining on the rich mahogany chest with its top drawer open; the mass of clashing colours on the bed where Greta had laid out his mother’s clothes; the bright red sleeve of a gown that his mother had worn at Christmas cutting across the white of her pillow like a wound. And closer to him was his father’s personal assistant: raven hair and green cat’s eyes, yellow dress and full, exposed breasts with red nipples, which gave him a sense of urgency he’d never felt before. He was repelled and attracted all at the same time. And the mirror had been between them. They had seen each other in the mirror before she turned and began saying things. Things about his mother that he didn’t want to hear.

She took his hand, and he felt sure that she was going to place it on her breast. The breast that he could now see again so full and close. And he knew that that would make a secret between them that he could never break.

Thomas dragged his eyes away from Greta and focused on the first thing he saw. It was the white flannel on the edge of the sink in the corner of the room, the one his mother used to cover her eyes when she had her migraines.

Thomas wrenched his hand away from Greta, and the force of his action took him out into the hall.

‘No,’ he said, and all his being was concentrated in the one word.

Greta flinched, but whether from the hurt to her hand or the force of his response, Thomas didn’t know. The shudder was certainly gone from her face as soon as it had appeared, and she laughed softly.

‘I was only shaking your hand, Thomas. You certainly have got an active imagination. Your father’s right about that.’

There was no time for Thomas to reply. At the bottom of the stairs the front door was closing behind Mrs Martin.

‘What are you doing up there, Thomas? I told you the presents were in the kitchen. Come on or we’ll be late.’

Greta and the boy exchanged one final look, and then he turned and was gone.

If that bloody old housekeeper hadn’t forgotten her sister’s stupid presents and sent the boy back for them, I might not be here today, Greta thought to herself as she allowed her husband and the chauffeur to escort her to the courthouse door.

Thomas had waited until the weekend was over to tell his mother. And Greta never had to discuss the incident with Lady Robinson. It was Sir Peter who raised the subject with his personal assistant midway through the following week, and he did so in an uncomfortable, almost apologetic way that made her feel slightly sick. She, of course, had had time to prepare her response.

All morning her employer had been coming in and out of her room on one pretext or other. The ground floor of the London house had been converted into offices the year before, and Greta worked in the front room. A printer and fax machine stood on an elegant oak sideboard, while Greta sat at a circular walnut table in the centre of the room amid computer screens and telephone lines. Her employer circled the table nervously, clearing his throat.

‘What is it, Peter? Something’s bothering you.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s something I need to talk to you about, but it’s damned difficult to know how to go about it. It’s about Anne and that boy, Thomas. God, I wish I could understand him better.’

‘What about Thomas?’

‘Well, he’s told Anne something and she’s told me. And, well, it’s about you. She said I ought to talk to you about it.’

‘It’s about your wife’s dresses, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Thomas says you were trying them on. Last weekend when we were out. I told Anne that the boy’s made it up. Trying to cause trouble for everyone. He needs to be sent away to a good school. That’s what he needs. But Anne won’t have it.’

‘I did try them on. I shouldn’t have done but I did.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes. Because they’re beautiful and I wanted to see what I looked like in them. I haven’t ever had clothes like that, Peter. I’m not a rich girl, you know that.’

‘But couldn’t you have gone to a shop? A boutique or something?’

‘I suppose so. I do sometimes. It’s just they never leave you alone. It’s like they know who’s got the money and who hasn’t.’

Sir Peter was defenceless against this turning of the tables. His dependence on Greta had increased with each month that had passed since she first came to work for him, and it was in his nature to be impressed by straightforwardness of all kinds. Greta’s feminine attractions also had a more powerful effect upon him than he cared to admit.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have done it, but at least you’ve been honest enough to admit it, which is more than most people would have done. It’s my fault in a way. I probably don’t pay you enough.’

And so Greta succeeded in turning the disaster with the dresses to her own advantage. Sir Peter spent more time with her after the incident and began taking her out for working dinners when they were in London during the week. They would often be seen at The Ivy or Le Pont de la Tour with their heads close together in animated conversation. And not only that: Sir Peter raised her salary by fifty per cent, so that now she could afford designer dresses of her own to wear when she went out with her employer. As autumn faded into winter Sir Peter commented to himself that Greta looked prettier every day. And there was nothing wrong in having a pretty PA. He’d done nothing to be ashamed of.

Of course the society tittle-tattles and gossip writers didn’t see it that way, and stories began to appear in the tabloids and magazines, although they never made the headlines or even the front pages. The height of the publicity was a black-and-white photograph on page 21 of the Daily Mail of the two of them leaving a restaurant together under a caption that read ‘Minister Out on the Town’.

No word of all this reached the House of the Four Winds. Flyte might as well have been a thousand miles from London. Anne didn’t read tabloids or magazines, and none of her friends had the bad taste to raise the subject of Sir Peter’s personal assistant in her presence. She visited London less and less often, preferring to concentrate on her garden and her son.

For his part Sir Peter no longer visited the House of the Four Winds every weekend as he had done in the past. He went there once or twice a month while Parliament was in session, and Greta continued to accompany him on these periodic visits as his government duties made non-working weekends an impossibility.

The atmosphere in the house was strained, but Sir Peter refused to admit it. Anne was aloof, taking long walks with her son or shutting herself up in her room when Greta was there. The incident with the clothing lay between them unresolved. Anne was embarrassed, and Greta interpreted her silence as condemnation.

A conversation at the dinner table one evening the following January brought matters to a head. Greta sat equidistant between Sir Peter and his wife at the long dining-room table. The central heating had overcompensated for the inclement weather, and the room was hot and stuffy. The three diners were struggling to make their way through a dessert of cherry pie and custard.

Anne had been talking about a rich northern industrialist called Corbett who had bought himself a stretch of coastline on the other side of Flyte. He had made a fortune manufacturing paper clips and was now building himself a mansion overlooking the sea. More than one of the Robinsons’ neighbours had remarked in recent months on the similarity of this edifice to the House of the Four Winds, although it was clearly on a much larger scale.

‘I expect they’ll be sending their butler round to take photographs of the garden soon,’ said Anne. ‘Watch out for men in morning coats with stepladders and telephoto lenses,’ said Anne.

‘Oh, Anne, I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ said Sir Peter. ‘You shouldn’t be so sensitive.’ He had become increasingly impatient with his wife’s preoccupation with this subject during dinner.

‘I’m not being sensitive. It’s the principle of the thing that’s distasteful. People should be what they are. They shouldn’t try to wear other people’s things.’

‘Especially when they come from the north,’ said Greta, suddenly joining in the conversation.

‘No, wherever they come from.’ Anne stopped, realizing what she’d said. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant at all.’

‘It’s not your fault. You’re a lady and I’m not. People need to know their place. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘No. No, I’m not. I’m saying that people should be themselves and not try to be other people. That’s got nothing to do with knowing your place.’

‘Well, if I’d stayed being myself, I’d probably have ended up working in a paper-clip factory,’ said Greta in a rush.

‘My dear, I don’t know why you’re getting so agitated. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about this man, Corbett. You shouldn’t be so quick to take offence.’

Greta said nothing but put her napkin up over her face. A series of visible shudders passed through her upper body, bearing witness to her distress.

Part of Anne wanted to get up and put an arm around the girl. She was clearly upset, and it was rare for her to lose her self-control. But another, stronger part felt repelled. Greta seemed to cause nothing but trouble. It was Greta, after all, who had gone into her bedroom as a trespasser and put on her clothes like they were her own. It was Greta who had got Thomas so upset. Greta was the one who should be apologizing.

‘Look, who’s the injured party here?’ said Anne, unconsciously transferring her attention to her husband, who was moving about uncomfortably in his seat at the other end of the table. ‘I didn’t go and try on her clothes, did I?’

‘No, of course you didn’t. She’s got none for you to try on. That’s the whole bloody point, can’t you see that?’

‘Yes, I do see that,’ said Anne, getting up from the table. ‘I see it only too well. I’m going to bed. I think I’ve got a headache coming on. This home isn’t London, you know, Peter. I’m not here to have political debates with you. Greta may be, but I’m not.’

Anne closed the door before Sir Peter could reply. Greta’s face remained hidden by her napkin, but her shaking shoulders showed that she was in even greater distress than before. Sir Peter wound his own napkin into a ball and tried unsuccessfully to think of something to say to comfort her.

Eventually he got awkwardly to his feet and went over to stand behind Greta’s chair. He shifted his weight irresolutely from one foot to the other and then put out his hand tentatively so that it came to rest on her shoulder.

‘Please, Greta. Don’t cry. She didn’t mean it. She just got upset, that’s all.’

A few strands of black hair had fallen across Greta’s face as she bent over the table, and Sir Peter pulled them gently back over her ear, stroking the side of her head as he did so.

Greta looked up at him smiling through her tears, and he found himself staring down at the swell of her breasts beneath her simple white blouse. He felt a surge of sexual excitement.

‘Thank you, Peter. I’m sorry I was so silly. You’re so—’

But Greta didn’t finish her sentence. Sir Peter pulled himself away quite violently and stood half swaying by the wall. Across the room a portrait of his wife’s father looked down at him with an expression of aristocratic contempt. It was a bad picture but a good likeness, painted in an era when family portraits were no longer in fashion. The artist had caught the aristocratic curl of his sitter’s lip and the distant look in the half-closed eyes. Sir Peter remembered the old man’s cool disapproval when he had come asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

‘Going places, Anne says. But which ones? That’s the question, isn’t it, young man? Which ones?’

‘All right, you old bastard,’ Sir Peter whispered to himself as he stared up at the portrait. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘What did you say, Peter?’ asked Greta.

‘Nothing. Nothing except that you’re not the only one who’s felt out of place in this damned house. I’ve got to go now. See if Anne’s all right. You understand.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Greta, wiping her eyes with her napkin.