Read Online The Rich Are Different by Susan Howatch - Free Book Online Page B

farms in the neighbourhood, but in the past fifty years the farms and cottages had been sold so that all that now remained of the estate was the house, the garden and the seventy-five acres of water, reeds and marsh which formed Mallingham Broad.
    ‘But I shall make it live again,’ said Dinah as we dined that evening. ‘Oh, not in the old way, of course – that’s gone for ever. I don’t expect to be the lady of the manor living on the rents of my tenants. But if – when – I make enough money at my business, I’ll restore the house and grounds and there’ll be a yacht in the boat-house again and a motor car instead of that dilapidated old pony-trap and servants to look after the house properly, and antiques to replace the ones my father sold. And I’ll stock the library with valuable books again, and everything will be as perfect as it was two hundred years ago when William Slade was a member of Parliament and the Slades were a great Norfolk family … Mrs Oakes,
do
stop looking as though the Day of Judgement were about to dawn! I can’t tell you how depressing I find it!’
    The old woman had just brought in the summer pudding. ‘No good was ever a-coming out of foreigners stroaming about these parts, Miss Dinah,’ she said, taking care not to look in my direction.
    ‘And to think I put on my best English accent!’ I said ruefully as she marched out of the room.
    ‘Oh, never mind her – she doesn’t even trust anyone from Suffolk.’
    When we had finished our meal we went for a stroll in the garden. The Broad was golden, flocks of starlings and lapwings flew over the marshes across the pale evening sky and a bittern was booming far off in the reeds.
    ‘Would you like to see my laboratory?’ suggested Dinah.
    ‘About as much as you wanted to see the Rouen Apocalypse.’
    We paused among the shrubbery. I wondered if Mrs Oakes was watching in disapproval from some hidden window.
    ‘I actually use the scullery as a laboratory,’ Dinah explained as she led the way into a glasshouse which had a number of panes missing from the roof. ‘I need running water for my experiments, but I store the results of my workhere so that Mrs Oakes doesn’t throw them away.’ She moved to a bench which had been cleared of horticultural impedimenta, removed a tarpaulin and revealed a row of bottles confusingly labelled with such instructions as ‘Percy’s cough syrup: one teaspoon every four hours.’
    Dinah’s paternal grandparents had lived in India and on their return to England they had brought with them the Indian nursemaid who had cared for their infant son. The ayah had remained for twenty years in England before dying of homesickness, and it had been her recipes for cosmetics, conscientiously recorded for posterity by Dinah’s grandmother, that had formed the basis of Dinah’s experiments.
    ‘The ayah amended the original Indian recipes herself because of the difficulties of getting the ingredients she had used in India,’ Dinah explained. ‘Of course she used only natural ingredients and each phial took an eternity to prepare, but the perfumes are so good that I was determined to find the formulae which would create the same scents artificially. I’m going to start with perfumes first, as I told you in my report. The preparations for skin-care are all simple variations on a glycerin base, but the secret is to get the texture right and the scent perfect. Here smell this,’ she added, thrusting under my nose a bottle labelled ‘For Back-Ache’.
    I had expected to be reminded of the exotic east but instead I thought of an English garden at sunset on a summer evening. ‘Lavender?’ I murmured. ‘No, too musky. Roses? No, not quite. What is it?’
    ‘A mixture of eighteen scents including nutmeg, magnolia, myrrh and sweet pea. Now try this.’
    I sniffed. At first the perfume seemed identical. I sniffed again and realized it was sweeter and more cloying. ‘I don’t like that so much,’ I said.
    She