The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison

them.
    “When I grow up, can I have your rings?” Claudia asked one day.
    “Of course you can, my darling,” their mother replied, “and Thomas can have this bracelet for his wife,” she added, to be fair.
    Thomas had felt instantly possessive about her white-gold bracelet – so elegant, so delicate, already part of his future. He watched his mother slip it on her wrist and snap shut the clasp.
    Those were the Edwardian years of plenty, Thomas now recognized, when the rooms overflowed with rich trailing draperies and potted palms, and his mother’s exquisitely coloured figurines were scattered on tables covered with ornate cloths.
    There had been many reassuring family traditions, which he still liked to retrace in his mind. He could picture the longlight of summer evenings, when the Ashtons and their guests would sit out on the garden steps, under the colonnade, with drinks and stories. Sometimes, he would accompany the butler on his clock-winding rounds. There were grandfather clocks, carriage clocks, hanging clocks – some that chimed, some with swinging pendulums, all requiring regular winding with their own key. Stillwell, the butler, held all the clock keys together on one ring, and he occasionally let Thomas do the winding.
    “Gently does it – gently, gently,” he would mutter, stooping his back awkwardly to check on the boy. “Be careful not to force the mechanism.”
    Thomas never looked up to notice Stillwell’s face, though now he fancied he could imagine the butler’s anxious expression, as if reliving the scene outside himself.
    Every spring, a man would climb up on a high ladder to polish the great crystal chandelier suspended in the Marble Hall. When he was finished, the crystal drops glistened like the purest water. Or if Thomas stood below it and looked upwards, the chandelier shone like the sun against the painted azure sky of the high-domed ceiling, where a halfnaked man played his lyre amongst the clouds.
    “hat’s Apollo,” his father explained to him one day, “Greek god of the sun, and music too. Decent of him to join us here in Yorkshire – very decent.”
    Thomas’s parents were frequently away at their Regent’s Park house in London, but whenever they returned to A shton,a mood of relaxed gaiety would flow once more through the house as their trunks and suitcases were carried upstairs. Twice a year, they held dances in the gilded-oak saloon – a long, many-windowed room which glowed in the late afternoon sun. Sometimes, Thomas was allowed to stay up for the occasion. Guests would assemble in the MarbleHall, and he would shake their hands without ever quite recognizing their faces. He retained an impression of the men throwing back their shoulders to carry their bellies, while the women seemed always to be tilting their heads to one side, as if to balance precious objects on their noses.
    At the centre of any room stood his parents. He would never forget his mother in blue-shadowed silk, sweeping into the dining room on his father’s arm, truly beautiful.
    “You’re an Ashton,” his father would fondly tell him, to the mild annoyance of the others. For Thomas had inherited his father’s arresting blue gaze, which Robert, in his vainer moments, believed was the gift and guiding spirit of the Ashton family. When Robert looked into his youngest son’s face, he saw a pleasing mirror of his own soul.
    History, too, pervaded Thomas’s childhood. Family portraits looked down at him from the walls, and he ran his fingers across the calf-backed books accumulated over generations in the library.
    In one corner of the library was a secret door, subtly encased in dummy books, which revealed the gallery steps at the flick of a catch. Thomas knew that this device had been installed by his grandfather, and he felt a rush of complicity with him whenever he clicked open the door. He would spend hours walking along the brass rail of the library’s gallery, touching all the old books,