The Snow Globe Read online

  The main driveway wound a circuitous route through the scenic western gardens, where the rhododendrons loomed largest and a few ancient trees remained, before emerging in front of the south-facing house with its vast oriel windows and broad front door. The driveway then continued through an archway to the courtyard, cottages, coach house and garages, and, eventually, became the back driveway, or tradesman’s entrance, and ran down the eastern side of Howard Forbes’s estate to the road.

  To the north of the house, brick pathways led to the tennis court, the orchard and the pink-walled kitchen gardens and greenhouses. Beyond this, the land fell away steeply to woodland, where bridle paths and tracks zigzagged beneath the lofty pine trees into the valley known as the Devil’s Punchbowl.

  Shortly after the house was completed, the National Trust had acquired this land, and it had become a popular place for walkers and ramblers, particularly in the summer months, when Howard had from time to time found campers behind the northern shrubbery, or short-trousered foreigners ambling across his striped lawns. However, invariably polite, he had sometimes taken these tourists on a guided tour of his property and offered them a glass of sherry at the end of it.

  More than any trespassers, the ever-increasing number of local property developers irked both Howard and Mabel. The new houses being built on the nearby site of the recently demolished mansion the Laurels, now to be known as Laurel Close, made them both privately wonder if Eden Hall, too, would one day be demolished. Would theirs and Mr. Lutyens’s vision—their painstaking planning over windows and aspects and views—be reduced to rubble and dust, only to reemerge in the shape of a dozen poorly built houses, sold off at exorbitant prices and collectively known as Edenhall Close? It seemed to be the way things were going. What had once been secluded and peaceful, sought after for its natural beauty and charm, was changing.

  “The world won’t be content until it has motored here, there and everywhere—honking its horn, widening every road and putting up electricity cables and streetlights,” Howard had recently said to his wife. Mabel had thought better than to remind him that he was a horn honker himself, or that they had added to the cables and lighting in that part of the world.

  Howard had been like this a lot recently: agitated and complaining. Fearful. It was his age, Mabel thought; he felt out of step with the times. Modern times. And though she sometimes felt this way also, she was quietly determined not to fall too far behind. But it was tricky, a balancing act, she thought, to set an example for her daughters, to hand on wisdom and age gracefully, while wanting—still feeling the need—to live and have new experiences.

  “New experiences!” Dosia, her sister-in-law, had declared to her the last time they had seen each other in London. “That’s what you need, Mabe. What we all need.”

  Mabel had created an idyll, an orderly idyll, where the dressing bell sounded at six thirty and the dinner bell at seven twenty-five, but she was bored of bells and order. She was bored of Eden Hall. She had had no new experiences for a quarter of a century, and what she longed for, privately longed for more than anything else, was a lover.

  Chapter Three

  Ten days before Christmas, Mrs. Christie was found, alive and well and staying at a hydropathic hotel in Harrogate, where—Iris told Daisy—she had been registered under another name: that of her husband’s mistress.

  “What an almighty lark,” Iris said on the telephone. “And all to teach that wretched husband of hers a lesson.”

  “Do you honestly think she planned it all?” asked Daisy.

  “Of course!” shrieked Iris. “And what a brilliant wheeze.”

  “Really? I read that it’s cost the country a fortune and been the biggest manhunt in history.”

  “Hmm, well, the bill should certainly be dispatched to Colonel Christie,” Iris said and snorted. She seemed to find it all amusing, like everything else.

  “Poor Dodo,” Iris went on, “I know you’ve been awfully caught up in the whole thing—Mummy said—but it has been frightfully entertaining . . . We should all be writing to Mrs. Christie to thank her for keeping us so riveted.”

  Daisy shook her head. She felt for Mrs. Christie—because of her marriage problems, and hoped they wouldn’t interfere with her ability to write—but she also felt cheated. For if what Iris said was true, if Mrs. Christie had staged the whole thing simply to teach her husband a lesson, the whole country had been nothing more than pawns in her own domestic squabble. Stephen was right. Either way, it seemed as though the writer’s disappearance had been some sort of publicity stunt . . . and what publicity she had garnered.

  “Are you excited about Christmas, Dodo? Have you unpacked your snow globe yet?” Iris asked.

  Daisy rolled her eyes. “I am eighteen, you know. I’ve grown out of all that.”

  Iris laughed. “Oh, darling, we all know what you’re like.”

  “Have you been out dancing much?” Daisy asked.

  Dancing: It was Iris’s obsession. And everybody was doing it, she said, even the Prince of Wales, whose dancing she raved about—“Such fabulous rhythm and so extraordinarily light on his feet!”—and with whom she had danced on more than one occasion at the Embassy in Old Bond Street. It was Iris’s favorite club and only a short walk from her second favorite, the Grafton Galleries. These places and others seemed to be like second homes to Iris, and Daisy had heard enough about them to know them all, vicariously.

  “Almost every night . . . London’s simply devastating,” drawled Iris.

  Devastating: It was Iris’s favorite word. She used it to describe almost everything, or everything she had a passion for, but it had to be said in a particular way, and in a much deeper tone of voice. And it wasn’t just people or places that were devastating to Iris; even a hat could be “simply devastating.”

  “And when are you coming down?”

  “I’m not sure . . . maybe Christmas Eve.”

  “I rather think you’re expected to be here before then.”

  “Really? Oh, well, maybe I’ll cadge a ride back with Howard, if I can bear it.”

  Iris was always so mean about their father, and for absolutely no reason. “You can always get the train,” Daisy suggested.

  Iris laughed again. “Have to dash now. Bye, darling,” she said, and the line went dead.

  When Daisy walked into the hallway, her mother was standing in front of the Christmas tree with a clipboard and pen. Scattered around the tree and across the floor were the tattered boxes and crates Daisy had helped Mr. Blundell bring down from the attics.

  “We really do need to get the thing decorated,” said Mabel.

  The thing? It was a tree. A magnificent Christmas tree, thought Daisy, staring up at it.

  “The electric lights will only be a problem if your father gets involved,” Mabel went on. “He has an uncanny knack of breaking the wretched things.”

  More things. What was wrong with her? They were beautiful lights. Prettier than any others Daisy had seen. “Blundy said he’d help me decorate the thing tomorrow morning.”

  Her mother slid her a look. “It could’ve been done by now, Daisy. If you spent less time wandering about dreaming, less time chatting on the telephone—which, may I remind you, is very costly and not what it’s designed for—you would achieve more . . . And please don’t roll your eyes like that,” she added.

  “Sorry.”

  “We must make sure the tree’s decorated and the lights are up and working before your father arrives home,” Mabel said. Then she turned and marched off down the passageway toward her boudoir.

  Maybe she was cross with Howard, Daisy mused, watching her mother disappear into a doorway. He had not been home in more than two weeks. But it was a busy time for him. He had had various dinners and functions to attend up in London and had long ago stopped asking Mabel to accompany him, because, as everyone knew, she didn’t enjoy those so
rts of events and preferred to be at Eden Hall. And yet, though Mabel claimed to love the place—and ran it like a sergeant major, Daisy thought—she no longer seemed to enjoy it in the way she once had. She spoke about it as though it was a job, and a job she had grown weary of. She was like a Henry James heroine, one of those formidable women whose sense of duty left them unable to breathe properly.

  When Daisy stepped outside, the sky was translucent. A fiery sun shone through the black trees and danced on the moth-colored stone. She found Stephen shutting up the greenhouse, a solitary figure in the peaceful shadows of the walled garden, where hen coops and a long-vacated rabbit hutch stood in a far corner. There, too, were the little house and wire-covered run once inhabited by Sherlock, Daisy’s tortoise, who’d failed to wake from his hibernation the previous spring and whose grave lay on the other side of the wall, next to that of a goat named Charlie.

  “You were right,” said Daisy, walking up the brick pathway toward Stephen. “It seems it was all just some massive publicity stunt.” She had decided it would be indiscreet to share Mrs. Christie’s personal problems with him.

  “What was?”

  “Mrs. Christie . . . her disappearance.”

  “Oh, that.”

  He was unusually quiet, and she followed him back to the yard and watched him as he began to stack logs on a wheelbarrow.

  “What do you think of my coat?” she asked, referring to the long fur coat her grandmother had given her, and suddenly desperate for him to look up at her.

  “Noonie’s?” he asked, glancing at her only very briefly.

  “Not anymore. She’s given it to me.”

  “It suits you,” he said, without any smile.

  “So what are you doing tonight? Do you want to come and play some cards? Listen to the wireless? You know my grandmother’s just bought another—so she can have one in her room, next to her bed, and the new one in the drawing room.”

  He stretched his arms up into the air, interlinked his fingers and brought them down on his cap. “I don’t think so, Daisy . . . not tonight.”

  The lights in house were being switched on, illuminating the gritted courtyard, pulling them out of the shadows. Mr. Blundell, the butler, was on his rounds.

  “It’s getting cold. You should go inside,” said Stephen, staring at her.

  “I don’t want to. Not yet. I want to stay here and talk to you . . . I feel as though you’re angry with me and I don’t know why. Is it about the whole Mrs. Christie thing?” she asked. “Because if it is, or was, I’m sorry I was so pigheaded and dragged you into it all. And I’m actually rather cross myself—with her.”

  Stephen laughed. He pulled off his cap and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not angry with you. I’m never angry with you. You know that. But I do get . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Frustrated, I suppose.”

  “By me?”

  “Yes,” he said quickly, tilting his head to one side, narrowing his eyes.

  “I see,” she said, though she didn’t and couldn’t. “Well, I can only apologize . . . because I really don’t mean to be.”

  “I know this,” he said.

  It was inevitable that their friendship had changed, Daisy thought, watching him as he continued to stack logs on the barrow, from those days when he’d been eager to see her, turning up at the house most evenings to see what she was doing and spend time with her. It was inevitable, she supposed, that he’d prefer to spend his evenings at a public house. It was what young men like Stephen did, her mother had told her. But Daisy missed his company. Missed their friendship.

  “Are you going to the pub?” Daisy asked, adopting his terminology.

  “Not sure. Might be,” he said, without looking up.

  Daisy often wondered what went on there—apart from drinking. She’d have liked to be asked, be invited, and be allowed to go. The only time she had been to the local public house was last Boxing Day, when the hunt had met there and she and Iris had stood about with their parents holding glasses of punch, then watched the horses and hounds set off in search of some poor fox. She had told Iris then that she thought it all very uncivilized and that she’d not go again. But she’d meant to the hunt, not to the place.

  “Well, if you change your mind . . . ,” she said.

  Then Mr. Blundell opened the back door and asked Stephen if the logs were ready, and Daisy turned and went inside.

  She walked down the passageway to the kitchen, said hello to Mrs. Jessop and to Nancy and Hilda, and went up to her room. She threw off her coat, lay down on her bed and thought once more about Mrs. Christie and what, exactly, had driven her to stage her own disappearance. In truth, Daisy still couldn’t believe it had been a publicity stunt. It seemed so drastic, so desperate. It had been a cry for help, Daisy thought, sitting up. And no different from all those times she had run away to the summerhouse; for she had, she suddenly realized, staged a few disappearances herself.

  That evening, the dressing bell sounded at six thirty, the dinner bell at seven twenty-five, but there were only Daisy and her mother at dinner, seated at one end of the long dining table.

  “Noonie’s not feeling too grand, is having a tray taken up,” said Mabel, shaking out her white linen napkin. “But I quite like it like this,” she added, smiling. “It’s rather cozy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, rather cozy,” said Daisy.

  Mabel peered at the bowl of watery green liquid in front of her, then sniffed it. “Cabbage?”

  Daisy shrugged. “Greenery.”

  “Holly!” said Mabel. “Holly soup? What an idea,” she added, giggling at her own joke as she picked up her spoon.

  She was in a better mood, Daisy thought. Perhaps Howard had telephoned, or, and more likely, her new best friend, Reggie.

  “They’ll all be upon us next week,” her mother continued. “But quite a few less than I’d thought . . . I had a letter from Rivinia today. Unfortunately, she took a tumble out hunting last week and has broken her wrist, poor dear. She’s quite devastated not to be able to get south . . . She so loathes being stuck in that drafty pile and having to wear tartan for Hogmanay,” Mabel went on, referring to her cousin who fled the Scottish borders each New Year in favor of the bright lights of the south. “And one of dear Dixie’s reindeers has taken ill, so we shan’t be seeing her, either,” Mabel added, referring to another cousin, an animal lover extraordinaire for whom Christmas was a year-round festival.

  “What about Aunt Dosia’s friend Harriett? Is she coming to stay again? She was so much fun last year—with all her mad outfits and her dancing—and she promised she’d be back,” said Daisy.

  “No, apparently Hattie has a boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  Mabel nodded. “A divorced chap in the Foreign Office. Simon Something-or-other. And, according to Dosia, rather lovely—despite an unusually penetrating manner.”

  “And Sophie and Noel?” Daisy asked.

  “Saint Moritz. Again,” said Mabel, fluttering her eyes. “Though I do hope they don’t put dear little Freddie and Jessie on that toboggan run again. Not after last year.”

  “The Cresta Run,” said Daisy. “Is that why you were tense earlier? Because certain people aren’t going to be here?”

  Mabel laughed. “I wasn’t tense. And to be honest, I’m rather relieved not to have quite so many to stay this year. There’ll be more than enough with all of us and Dosia . . . and Reggie, of course.”

  “Of course . . . And where is he tonight?” Daisy asked. “I thought he might be dining with us again.”

  “He had some military dinner to go to.”

  Reggie—Major Reginald Ellison—was a widower and lived at High Pines: a Gothic-style mansion situated a little way down the road to the west of Eden Hall. He’d served out in India for more than two decades, returning to England and earl
y retirement only the previous year. Major Ellison had no children and lived at his “pile”—as he called it—with a young couple he’d brought with him from India who acted as housekeeper and gardener and whatever else he needed. The initial appearance of these two had caused quite a stir in Little Switzerland, particularly the day they boarded the omnibus and sat opposite Mrs. Jessop in nothing more than sheets. But later, Mr. and Mrs. Singh—she, in her exotically colored saris; he, in his silk pancha with shirt, jacket and tie—had become a common enough sight about the locality.

  It had been Howard who had established the friendship, quickly inviting the major over to Eden Hall, eager to hear about far-flung parts of the empire. But with Howard up in London each and every week, it had been Mabel who’d developed and cemented the friendship with Major Ellison. He often came to dinner or called in for morning coffee or afternoon tea or for an early evening aperitif after walking his dog on the common. And he had been the most wonderful help to Mabel with the wedding arrangements at the end of last summer, when Lily married Miles: on hand to direct the men putting up the marquee, the deliveries of tables and chairs and crockery; driving Mabel hither and thither, always there to offer calm reassurance. He had taught both Iris and Daisy to drive, sitting with them as they took turns and had a go about the lanes of Little Switzerland. And thus, Major Ellison had become Reggie.

  When Lily had had a row with Miles, shortly after returning from their honeymoon in Scotland, and had sent Mabel a telegram to say that she was leaving Miles and would be arriving on the 4:20, it had been Reggie who had gone to collect her; Reggie who had sat with her, talked to her, wiped away her tears and then driven her back to the station in time for the 7:42. When Daisy and Mabel returned from what Mabel described as a “completely pointless and totally exasperating” visit to a dressmaker at Farnham, it was Reggie who’d sat and listened to Daisy as she explained why she did not want another pretty floral summer dress; Reggie who had then gently conveyed this to Mabel. And when Noonie took a turn late one night in November and was found out on the front driveway in her nightgown (on her way to see someone called Samuel, she’d said), Reggie had immediately driven over and been the one—the only one—who was able to get her back indoors.