High Time: A novel (House of Trelawney, 2) - Softcover

Rothschild, Hannah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593470265 ISBN 13: 9780593470268

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An outlandish comedy of morals and manners about a highborn British family of outrageous characters, by the acclaimed author of The Improbability of Love and House of Trelawney

Eight years have passed and in 2016 many things have changed for the eccentric Trelawney family. In the months leading up to the Brexit referendum, Ayesha, the beautiful, young secret daughter of the late Enyon Trelawney, has married the much older thuggish banker Tomlinson Sleet with whom she has a young daughter, Stella. Ayesha is busy restoring the once broken-down Trelawney Castle in Cornwall, which Sleet has bought, to its former glory, as well as studying art at the Courtauld in London. The elderly Countess Clarissa—still ensconced on the property—the host of a camp television show, is about to head into a disastrous marriage. Lady Jane has separated from the hopeless Trelawney heir Kitto, who is crazier than ever, and found an enlightened woman to keep her company abroad. Sleet is becoming increasingly difficult, distracted by the seductive and ruthless bitcoin goddess Zamora, but Kitto’s sister Blaze and her husband, Joshua, will support Ayesha’s clever plan as she discovers shocking secrets, takes action, and brings the family together.

Biting and satirical, but also poignant and moving, High Time is a delicious story of madness, mayhem, and mischief run amok.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD is an author, filmmaker, philanthropist and businesswoman. Her first novel, The Improbability of Love, was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Her second novel, House of Trelawney, was a runner-up for the Everyman Wodehouse. The first woman to chair London’s National Gallery, she was awarded a CBE for services to literature and philanthropy.

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1

January 2016
 
The men were dumbstruck: coming toward them at great speed was a cartwheeling girl. With each rotation, her golden cowboy boots refracted light from the overhead chandeliers, creating an animated halo around her slender body. Her long limbs were perfectly straight and her hair fanned in an arc around her head. On her last turn, the girl did a flick-flack, landing lightly on both feet in front of them. She was the loveliest either had ever encountered. She had unconventional looks: a heart-shaped face and large tawny eyes fringed by thick lashes. Her skin, the color of milk, had an inner luminosity and a blush lay like two pale rose petals, spread over slanted cheekbones. Her mouth was a little too luscious; her nose, sprinkled lightly with freckles, was slightly too pronounced. Her hair, the color of polished chestnuts, fell below her shoulders in wild curls. It was cold outside, but the apparition wore shorts, a cropped stripy jumper and a chunky golden belt that matched her boots.

“Who are you?” Her voice was soft and husky. Later the men would debate if there’d been a trace of an Irish accent (it was an Indian lilt).

“We’re from Plymouth Council and we’ve come to inspect the new tanks—part of regulation 7685.” He was interrupted by achild who came tearing around the corner, her feet slapping on the wide oak floorboards.

“You did it, you did it!” the little girl shouted.

The cartwheeler laughed.

“Again, again!”

“Maybe after breakfast.” Turning back to the inspectors, the young woman asked, “Can I help?”

“Yes, can we help?” the little girl mimicked.

“We’re looking for Sir Thomlinson and Lady Ayesha Sleet,” said the one in the brown suit. Then, looking the cartwheeler up and down, he added, “Is your mother around?”

“I am Lady Sleet.”

The men, chastened, shuffled from foot to foot. Ayesha, embar­rassed for not knowing where the boilers were housed, smiled apolo­getically and texted the house manager.

“The front door was unlocked,” Brown Suit said defensively.

“We couldn’t find a bell,” the other chipped in.

“The key hasn’t been seen for nearly three hundred years,” Ayesha explained. “One of my forebears went to fight in the American War of Independence and took it with him. It appears he lost it and his head on the battlefield.”

The men looked at each other, unsure if she was joking. She was not.

Taking the little girl’s hand, Ayesha smiled and disappeared down the grand staircase. Reaching the ground floor, mother and daughter skipped all the way along the north corridor, through the Jacobean hall, and entered the Carolinian dining room, where a large breakfast was laid out on the side table. She lifted the heavy silver-lidded contain­ers one by one. Ayesha considered the scrambled eggs, mushrooms, sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and kedgeree. Everything looked and smelled delicious, but knowing the value of a perfect figure, she resisted.

Two uniformed footmen waited in the corner. They’d been trained to serve but not stare; their gazes were neutral and averted. Away from the family, behind the green baize door, the subject of Lady Sleet’s beauty and her husband’s oafish behavior was a constant topic of con­versation. In the couple’s presence, no one spoke until spoken to.

The footmen, working in unison, slid the chairs away from the table, poised for when Ayesha and her daughter sat down.

“We’ll both have boiled eggs, wholewheat soldiers and freshly squeezed orange juice. Please can I also have a home-made yogurt with blueberries and a green tea.” She looked at her daughter’s hopeful face.

“Stella will also have a bowl of chocolate Krispies.”
“Yes, My Lady.”

Ayesha tied a napkin around Stella’s neck and tucked an errant curl behind her ear. Next to one place was a child’s guide to ponies and by the other was a daily folder. Mother and daughter opened both with great solemnity. Prepared by a junior secretary, Ayesha’s contained her future appointments and recent press clippings; photographs of herself at various parties and mentions in gossip columns. Newspaper editors and photographers loved her: Lady Sleet personified glamour. She was ravishing, exquisitely groomed, consistently chic, wonderfully wealthy and titled. Even better, she was a beauty with a backstory: the daughter of the Earl of Trelawney raised in an Indian palace by her stepfather, a maharaja. The press’s only disappointment was the lack of scandal. So far. Everyone knew it was a matter of time; muck follows brass and what goes up eventually falls. She was Sir Thomlinson’s fourth wife. The previous ones had lasted less than five years. This one had done eight. The Sleets’ union was an accident waiting to happen.

No one believed she’d married for love: they were correct. Sleet, then forty to her eighteen-year-old self, had been a solution to a prob­lem which was partly money (or lack of) but mainly Ayesha’s long­ing for security. Orphaned at seventeen, she was evicted by one family and disowned by the other. Sleet offered an instant, wildly indulgent prepackaged life, complete with private airplanes, yachts, more clothes than she could wear, drawers of jewels and, best of all, for their wedding present he bought and gave her Trelawney Castle: home to her father’s family for eight hundred years. She loved, too, that he’d known her mother, Anastasia, and she was happy to hear story after story about their time at Oxford University.

Like a child trying on a grown-up’s pair of high-heeled shoes, she struggled to find balance and slipped around in a world better suited to someone else. To give her life more substance and her marriage more gravitas, Ayesha created a narrative in which she was the heroine and her husband the misunderstood hero. They were, so her story went, injured people healed by mutual love. Both were illegitimate and were told their births had ruined other people’s lives. She explained his flashes of cruelty and vulgarity as by-products of childhood wounds and mistook his need to control for caring, and his grandiosity for generosity.

In the early years of her marriage, Ayesha had nothing to do but wait for her husband to come home. For a man stimulated by the unob­tainable, her availability bored him. Ayesha spent her days shopping, buying clothes which the chauffeur carried from the store to the car and into the house for the maids to hang in color-coordinated obsoles­cence in her wardrobe. She had forty-eight pairs of red shoes, each with a slightly different detail. There were ninety camel-colored cashmere sweaters, eighty unworn. She fussed over shades of lipstick and read parts of glossy magazines and romantic novels. The birth of Stella and her enrollment at the Courtauld Institute, where she took a first-class BA and was now studying for an MA, were transformative; she was still lonely, but her days had intellectual content.

Flicking through the pages of her folder, Ayesha smiled to see her image on the front cover of Hi! magazine and skimmed through an arti­cle entitled “Lady Sleet, London’s most glamorous wife?” The pictures were flattering but she was irritated to be described as a “socialite”—no one took her studies seriously. She made a note to employ a PR agency to work on changing her descriptive pronoun to “art historian.”

Stella pulled at her mother’s shorts....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593470265
• ISBN 13: 9780593470268
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar