Read Online The Towers of Love by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page A

he began to wonder if home had somehow been the wrong place to come back to. But still, as his mother had said, what other place was there to come to besides home when you had to go somewhere?
    He walked over to his bed. Pappy had laid out his dinner clothes. Dinner in the house was always black tie. After all, if you lived in a castle, didn’t it follow that dinner should always be black tie? It was more amusing that way.

Four
    The dining-room had come from some château on the Loire, and stretched across the ceiling between the fruited garlands of carved plaster were four frescoes that were supposed to represent the four seasons. But the frescoes were dim now in the table’s candlelight, which were caught and refracted by the pear-shaped prisms of the chandelier, and the gambolling seasonal figures were merely shadows that swam in the vague upper air. He reached the table slightly ahead of his mother and, when she came into the room, he saw that she had put on a long grey chiffon dress and that, twisted in the bracelets of both wrists, she had hung two long matching grey chiffon scarves which floated at her sides as she walked, like strange, gauzy wings.
    â€œSit down, darling,” she said, waving one plumed arm towards him. And when they were seated, at opposite ends of the long table, he saw that she had disappeared completely behind a large and, he thought, rather pompous arrangement of gladioli that sprouted from a bowl at the centre of the table. Pappy, in his white coat, came from the kitchen with cold soup.
    â€œPappy, darling,” Alexandra Carey said, “please take away those damn’ flowers.” Pappy set down the soup plates hurriedly, bowed and moved quickly towards the centrepiece. “Pappy, I love you dearly,” she said, “but I do wish you wouldn’t try to do flowers. Leave that sort of thing to the Japanese. And now,” she said, when the flowers had been removed to the sideboard, “champagne. Champagne to welcome home our Hugh. And the good champagne, please, Pappy. You know where it is. Ice two bottles quick-quick-quick.” She clapped her hands, which sent sprays of chiffon outwards on either side of her.
    â€œI don’t have to have champagne, Sandy,” he said.
    â€œNonsense. It’s your second night home. We want champagne. We want to get absolutely gassed on champagne to-night.”
    â€œWell, we don’t need two bottles, do we?” he asked, but Pappy had already left the room, scurrying across the rug in his slippered feet.
    â€œWe can’t get gassed on one bottle, for God’s sake,” she said.
    The “we” here, of course, was theoretical because his mother no longer took a drink. And though Pappy now brought two champagne glasses to the table and set them at their places, Hugh knew that his mother would have cold ginger beer, as she always did, from a little crockery bottle. And, sure enough, the next thing that arrived in the dining-room was the champagne cooler with the two green champagne bottles settling in the ice along with the smaller bottle of her soft drink.
    â€œOh, goody,” she said. “We’re going to get positively sozzled, aren’t we?”
    â€œI guess we are,” he said.
    They sipped their soup.
    â€œHugh,” she said, “you look so solemn, baby. Are you feeling solemn about something, baby?”
    â€œNo, I’m not feeling solemn about anything, Sandy,” he said, smiling.
    â€œOh, don’t be solemn! Gaiety, gaiety. We must have gaiety. Damn it, Pappy, isn’t that champagne ready yet?”
    â€œA minute, miss,” Pappy said, bowing.
    â€œYou’re not angry with me, are you—for dragging you up here?”
    â€œYou didn’t drag me, Sandy,” he said. “I was glad to come.”
    â€œWere you? Were you really? I thought you sounded—oh, just a tiny bit reluctant when I called you on the phone.”
    â€œIt