There was no lingering pain. No redness of the surrounding skin. Just the shapes and almost-letters, stark against Robin’s skin. When he stared too long at them they seemed almost to crawl.
Bowden knocked on the door to Robin’s dressing room, and Robin hastily smoothed the shirtsleeve back down.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear the dinner gong, sir,” said Bowden reproachfully. Bowden had been the late Sir Robert’s valet and was doing his respectful best to encroach upon Robin’s own dressing habits. It was equal parts affection and an understandable anxiety to remain employed, even though Bowden’s hair was as white as Robin’s shirt.
Robin submitted to Bowden’s arthritic fingers fumbling his cuff links and helping him into his dinner jacket, and made a mental note to talk to Gunning about a pension for the man.
Robin sat at the head of the dinner table and hated it. If it were left up to him and Maud then they’d have abandoned the whole thing in favour of an informal supper, but the mouths of the housekeeper and butler formed identical moues of disapproval whenever Robin hazarded the prospect of anything less than a proper family dinner, even when the family in question now numbered only two.
At least they were in the small dining room, cosy with wood and memory, instead of the sparkling cavernous room that had been the scene of the late Sir Robert and Lady Blyth’s social triumphs.
“—the entire pond, ducks and all.” Maud was coming to the end of a story about her friend Eliza’s brother Paul, and some exploit involving a runaway bicycle. “And Paul and his friends are going to the Gaiety tomorrow night, and have promised to tell us all about it,” she added, her voice gaining a provocative edge. “Liza says that Paul is arse-over-nose for a blonde in the chorus line.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Robin, taking a bite from a lamb cutlet.
The somewhat awkward silence was that of Maud realising that there was no point in needling the dinner table with unladylike talk, because Robin wasn’t going to leap in and disapprove. It was an empty reflex now, Robin thought. Ingrained. It was all still too fresh for things like that to be unlearned.
Robin glanced up at the painting of their father that stared in benevolent solemnity down from the wall. Unwanted grief rose like acid in his throat.
“I have an announcement” was Maud’s next sally.
Robin smiled. Maud had approximately three announcements per week. “What is it, Maudie?”
“I want to attend Newnham.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do! I shall die if I don’t!”
“No, you shan’t,” said Robin. “Pass the mint jelly.”
Maud deflated. “I dare say not, but you know what I mean.”
“Why on Earth do you want to go to Cambridge?”
“Why’d you?”
“That’s different and you know it,” said Robin.
Maud lifted her chin and speared a carrot as though it had offended her, an annoyed little shadow in her black crepe-trimmed dress. She’d refused to buy jet jewellery, but hadn’t dared pearls; her neck and ears were defiantly bare. Mourning dress was particularly unfair on eighteen-year-old girls, she’d told Robin. At length.
“Look, ask me again next week,” Robin said.
“You always say that when you’re trying to dodge something.”
“You know what Gunning said yesterday,” said Robin, grasping for a solid excuse. “We haven’t enough money that we can toss it around.”
Martin Gunning was his parents’—now his, although the possessive still felt slippery—primary man of business in London. Robin had guiltily rescheduled until he couldn’t put the man off any further, and had marched into the study to meet with him with the vague feeling of climbing the gallows.
Gunning had stood with frustration painting his face as he reminded Robin about the wills of Sir Robert and Lady Blyth, which were as sparkling and selfless and attention-grabbing as any words they’d uttered in life. They committed the bulk of their liquid assets to various funds and orphanages and projects that would probably do them the favour of immortalising their names—and divided, as an afterthought, the rest between their children. In his more forgiving moments, Robin believed they were the wills of two people in the prime of their life who never honestly thought they could die. They were showpiece documents.
And Robin didn’t even have the luxury of wholehearted resentment, because the irony was that those documents had probably done a lot of good. Orphans and nurses and starving families in the East End wouldn’t care a whit about the character of their deceased benefactors. Charity done out of ruthless self-promotion was still charity.