The Shifting Fog Read Online Free PDF Page A

you have to pay for it. Luckily I had a bit put aside for a rainy day.’
    She smiles, glowing like a ripe plum, and I grasp the raison d’être for this reinvention. Sure enough, a photograph materialises from her blouse pocket.
    ‘Anthony,’ she says, beaming.
    I make a show of putting on my glasses, peering at the image of a grey-moustachioed man in late middle-age. ‘He looks lovely.’
    ‘Oh Grace,’ she says through a happy sigh. ‘He is. We’ve only been out for tea a few times, but I’ve got such a good feeling about this one. He’s a real gentleman, you know? Not like some of them other layabouts that came before. He opens doors, brings me flowers, pulls my chair out for me when we go about together. A real old-fashioned gentleman.’
    The latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.
    ‘What does he do for a living?’ I say.
    ‘He’s a teacher at the local comprehensive. History and English. He’s awful clever. Community-minded too; does volunteer work for the local historical society. It’s a hobby of his, he says, all those ladies and lords and dukes and duchesses. He knows all kinds of things about that family of yours, the one that used to live up in the grand house on the hill—’ She breaks and squints toward the office,then rolls her eyes. ‘Oh Gawd. It’s Nurse Ratchet. I’m supposed to be doing tea rounds. No doubt Bertie Sinclair’s complained again. You ask me, he’d be doing himself a favour to skip a biscuit now and then.’ She extinguishes her cigarette and wraps the butt in a tissue. ‘Ah well, no rest for the wicked. Anything I can get for you before I do the others, darl? You’ve hardly touched your tea.’
    I assure her I’m fine and she hurries across the green, hips and ponytail swinging in concord.
    It is nice to be cared for, to have one’s tea brought. I like to think I have earned this little luxury. Lord knows I have often enough been the bearer of tea. Sometimes I amuse myself imagining how Sylvia would have fared in service at Riverton. Not for her, the silent, obedient deferral of the domestic servant. She has too much bluff; has not been cowered by frequent assertions as to her ‘place’, well-intentioned instructions to lower her expectations. No, Myra would not have found Sylvia so compliant a pupil as I. Is it hardly a fair comparison, I know. People have changed too much. The century has left us bruised and battered. Even the young and privileged today wear their cynicism like a badge, their eyes blank and their minds full of things they never sought to know. It is one of the reasons I have never spoken of the Hartfords and Robbie Hunter and what went on between them. For there have been times when I’ve considered telling it all, unburdening myself. To Ruth. Or more likely Marcus. But somehow I knew before beginning my tale that they were too young to understand. That I would be unable to make them understand. How it ended the way it did. Why it ended the way it did. Make them see how much the world has changed.
    Of course, the signs of progress were upon us even then. The first war—the Great War—changed everything, upstairs and down. How shocked we all were when the new staff began to trickle in (and out again, usually) after the war, full of agency ideas about minimum wages and days off. Before that, the world had seemed absolute somehow, the distinctions simple and intrinsic. On my first morning at Riverton, Mr Hamilton called me to his pantry, deep in the servants’ hall, where he was bent over ironing The Times . He stood upright and straightened his fine round spectacle frames across the bridge of his long, beaked nose. So important was my induction into ‘the ways’, that Mrs Townsend had taken a rare break from preparing the luncheon galantine to bear witness. Mr Hamilton inspected my uniform meticulously then, apparently satisfied, began his lecture on the