A Three Dog Problem

‘Wasn’t that a good thing?’ Rozie asked.

Eleanor’s face hardened. ‘No, it wasn’t. Because none of it was real. Sholto didn’t want friendship, he wanted access. Close proximity to your Gainsboroughs and your Fabergé and your daughters.’

She eyed Rozie coolly across the table. Eleanor herself was all angles, high-cheeked and loose-limbed, dressed in faded, flared jeans and a man’s jacket over the shirt. Rozie felt slightly wrong-footed by her shrewd, appraising gaze.

‘I was in my last year at school,’ she said, ‘when I met Sholto at a London party and brought him down for the weekend. He was the same age as me: seventeen. I was the fourth child out of five and we lived in the grounds of my grandfather’s house. A stately home, I suppose you’d call it. I was shy and biddable and loved horses and dogs. I wasn’t sure what to do with boys. I was used to the look on my friends’ faces when they saw Booke Place for the first time – but Sholto took it to the extreme. He fell in love with the estate,’ she concluded with a shrug. ‘With the situation, the architecture and everything in it. Including me, because I happened to be in it. He was obsessed. He was also a kleptomaniac.’

See what you find, the Queen had said. Rozie leaned in a little further. ‘Oh?’

‘He started off with small things: mementos of his stay. My mother was cross when a silver ashtray disappeared during his first weekend. They all assumed it had been misplaced by a cleaning lady, but I found it in Sholto’s jacket pocket weeks later. There was a rather exquisite silver hummingbird that my grandfather had brought back from Geneva years before. A Fabergé egg. This was two years later. By now I was working in a little art gallery in Mayfair and Sholto was studying art at the Courtauld. He’d taken my virginity and I’d assumed wedding bells, though nothing was said. It was all very bohemian. He cooked me supper, very well, on two gas rings in his student flat. I found the bird and the egg when I was looking in his handkerchief drawer for something to use as napkins. Later, I discovered he’d also taken a portrait of my mother. At least, it disappeared that Christmas, and where else would it have gone?’

Rozie remembered a beautiful picture of a pale young woman – all angles, too – in a fifties evening dress, that hung in his dining room. Was it a sign of what was to come?

‘He tried to take me, too.’ Eleanor leaned back in her chair, examining her strong hands, adorned with little rings. ‘I was madly in love. He knew what my parents thought of him and made plans to run off with me to Gretna Green and marry me the day he graduated from art school. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like an idiot, I told my younger brother, and of course he told my mother. Sholto came from what my parents called “trade” – which meant his father was a doctor and his mother’s family were engineers. They bought their own furniture; Sholto needed to work for a living. Of course I didn’t care – I loved that. Salt of the earth. I thought I was a socialist, but I was just a dupe. Sholto wanted beautiful things, and I was one of them. But my grandfather bought him off with a thousand pounds. He’d been prepared to go much higher.’