A Mansion and its Murder (14 page)

We all had tea and cakes together, after I had been welcomed at the door by Robert and had looked around a bit, wondering whether the place had outlived its time. When we had eaten
(and Edith and Robert always did themselves very nicely in the food line), Robert took Richard off to the gardens, and to watch the girls playing tennis. Robert always realised that Edith and I went so far back we liked to talk alone.

Edith’s hair was grey now, her figure firm but substantial, and she looked like – was probably seen by the girls as – a typical mid-Victorian headmistress. How very untypical she was, I was one of the few to know, though I’m sure her husband’s job before marriage was still the subject of whisperings in Wentwood.

‘You’ll be thinking of selling the school and retiring soon, I suppose,’ I said.

‘I will not.’ said Edith, in her most emphatic voice. ‘What would we do? One thing about owning your own school is that no one can tell you when you have to retire.’

‘Is the school doing well?’

Her eyes glinted. Edith was never easily fooled. She certainly always saw through me.

‘Not as well as it used to do. I suppose you’ve heard that?’

‘Yes. I wondered as I came through: is the problem that you’re starting to seem old-fashioned?’

‘It is, partly. We’re not old fashioned, not in
the things that matter. What we teach, how we teach it, is bang up-to-date, and we’ve several young and enthusiastic teachers here. But we
look
frowsty and Victorian.’

‘People are so silly, judging by look.’

‘When we started up we had to be absolutely strict, the proprieties personified.’ She looked at me straight, her way when talking around something we would do best not to talk about openly. ‘Because of my marriage nothing else would do. Well, we’re modifying the school uniform, we’re having a complete redecoration of the schoolrooms and the dormitories. But it takes time before the general public becomes conscious of these things.’

‘Do you want to advertise?’

‘Advertise, yes. But also to pick out the potential patents – I know this town through and through, know all the families with girls of the right age – and write them individual letters, stressing that we unite a modern syllabus with traditional standards and strict codes of behaviour. It will be what a lot of them will want. I really do believe it will work.’

‘Do you want a loan? Would a thousand pounds help?’

She shook her head. ‘Five hundred would
be more than enough. And it would be a loan – with appropriate interest.’

‘I don’t take interest from my friends. You were a lifeline to me when I had practically no one else.’

‘I’m a poor friend to you now. We’ve hardly said anything about your father’s death. You must feel awfully alone, over there in that barn of a place.’

‘Not much more than before,’ I said, making light of what she said, though it was true. ‘You know, my father and I had got to be quite close over the last twenty years or so, but it’s more like losing a valued and trusted colleague than a father.’

‘Yes. That sounds odd, but I can understand it.’

‘He’d had the attack two days earlier, and that was a warning. He knew he might not have long … Do you know what he said to me before he died?’

‘No.’

Was I wrong in suspecting an access of tension in her body? ‘He said: “I was never involved in that Frank business.”’

‘I expect that will be the business of your uncle Frank’s marriage.’ Edith was making a
patent effort to make her voice sound even and everyday. ‘That was a disaster, wasn’t it? And he didn’t have anything to do with it, so far as we heard in the schoolroom. It’s no wonder he would want to dissociate himself from it, though.’

I left a second’s silence.

‘“That Frank business” doesn’t sound like marriage to me. It sounds like something even more disastrous. Frank disappeared off the face of the earth, Edith.’

‘Now you’re sounding like a little girl again, Sarah. He did nothing of the sort. He went to settle in Australia.’

I felt it unworthy of her to peddle the old family lie.

‘And nothing has been heard of him since,’ I said drily. Unwisely I waded straight in. ‘Robert knows what happened on that night, Edith.’

‘He does nothing of the sort!’

‘And if he knows, you know.’ Edith stood up, her face red with anger.

‘Sarah, I’m surprised at you – no, not surprised, shocked. I didn’t think you would catch your family’s disease of thinking people can be bought.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Oh, but you did. You come here offering a loan, and you think we’ll then have to supply you with information that you imagine we have. And you’re quite wrong, Sarah. You may have a banker’s head, but you have a novel-reader’s imagination. I blame myself. You were an adolescent when your uncle Frank left Blakemere, and you conceived all manner of nonsenses to account for it, drawn from the sort of books we used to read. Your uncle Frank is in Australia, unless he has died there. Now I think you had better go. We will survive without your money, and it will be better for us to do so.’

There was nothing for it but to collect Richard – who sensed there was something wrong, as Robert did, too – and be driven home. It was very quiet in the car. I was deep in thought, and Richard kept looking at me nervously. For someone who was never blamed, he was strangely anxious when he imagined he might have done something wrong.

I acquitted myself of trying to buy Edith’s secret. I would have offered her a loan in any case. But then my logical brain said to me: but you did
use
the offer of a loan to try to make her
break her silence, didn’t you? And of that I could not acquit myself.

The next day I wrote her a note:

And we did meet, and met often, and nothing more was said between us. Edith and Robert managed to fund their campaign to woo back parents by private retrenchment, and the campaign worked. I think that gave Edith if not her husband more satisfaction than accepting a loan from me.

Nevertheless, when the anger had evaporated, when I had examined my motives and found them less than entirely pure, still some facts remained. There was no reason for Edith’s anger unless she and Robert did indeed have information about the death of Uncle Frank. For a time it struck me as incomprehensible, even absurd, that she should want to deny it to me, so close to her, and so long after the
event. Only after mature reflection did I realise that she had to deny all knowledge of events that could have led to a much-loved husband being charged as an accessory after the fact to a murder.

The day after Ed made his surprising request I had to make a brief trip to London – to Whitehall and to the Bank. I had a long talk to Digby Fearing, my stand-in, and when I told him I was going to reopen Blakemere for a few hours, to show it to an Australian cousin, and asked him if he wanted to be part of the expeditionary force, he said, ‘Good heavens, no. It was bad enough going there as a child, without going back to it all dusty and boarded up.’

‘You hated it, did you?’

‘Of course. How else could a strange child feel – so enormous a place, and so intimidating? I hardly dared utter a word the entire time I was
there. I suppose it was different for you, being brought up there.’

‘I hated it, too.’

‘Or thought you did. You never made any attempt to get rid of it after it came to you.’

‘I’ve never been one for lost causes.’

‘Who’s the Australian cousin? One of Clare’s brood?’

‘I think so. He’s rather vague. Was it Leopold, Clare’s son who had to disappear rather suddenly to Australia?’

‘That’s right. Named after one of Queen Victoria’s sons. It never got his father any royal commissions that I know of. Leopold was a charming young man, but just … lacking something.’

At least this boy hasn’t tried to off-load bogus share certificates on me.

‘Honesty,’ I supplied. ‘Well, if you don’t want to see Blakemere again …’

But for some reason – not at all because I was afraid of him – I didn’t want to go into the old house alone with Ed. I wanted someone with me who knew the place in the old days, perhaps as a sort of buffer (or maybe I mean blotting paper, or even conductor) for my memories and emotions. It was the instinct of confronting my
past not on my own, or with someone who could never understand, but with someone who knew something about it and would feel with me. In the end I rang Gabriel South, Bea’s son, the Labour Party agent in Bedford, and he readily agreed.

‘It’ll be a bit like exploring a prehistoric cave,’ he said. ‘Something from quite another age.’

That about summed it up.

Ed was going to Yorkshire for a few days, and we arranged it for the day after his return. Gabriel is a bright, bustling personality – a keen brain, but someone who has never lost the common touch. He and Ed got on at once. After lunch we equipped ourselves with the enormous key ring and with powerful torches, and I took the Morris and parked it just beside the stone steps leading up to the Grand Entrance.

‘We’ll have enough walking to do once we get inside,’ I said, a touch grimly.

I paused at the top of the steps, surveying the sadly overgrown gardens and lawns at the house’s front. Then I selected the right key. Gabriel did not offer to open the door, sensing this was a symbolic moment. I put the key in the lock of the great oaken door, and it turned – without difficulty, but with an enormous clang,
as it always had when Mr McKay opened it early in the morning. Gabriel helped me to push the dead weight of door, unoiled for seven years, and I gestured to Ed to unbolt and swing open its pair. It was a sunny summer’s day, but the warm light barely penetrated beyond the threshold. We looked at each other, Gabriel and me, and then we all crossed into the Grand Entrance Hall. I flashed my torch around it first on the walls at eye level, then gradually up to the ceiling. ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Ed. And then: ‘Sorry!’

‘That’s the main staircase,’ I said, flashing the torch up and down its magnificent expanse. ‘There are others, of course. I used to wait up there, peering through the marble balustrade, hoping that my favourite uncle would be coming home …’ I put the memories from me briskly. ‘Now, the main power points are just outside the door to the kitchens, Gabriel.’

‘I remember.’ We tracked down a long corridor, intensely gloomy but not frightening, until I could flash my torch at the series of boxes. ‘I’ll do it,’ Gabriel said, ‘but I’ll need a chair or a ladder.’

We got a chair from the family dining room nearby – an upright chair, inevitably gilded but
covered in sheeting. Gabriel stood on it and pulled a series of levers. Then I went over to the nearest light switch.

‘There!’ I said. A dim light came on, less than a revelation. I began to trek around, and Gabriel did the same – down corridors, into the dining room, into other rooms, bringing with every switch more and more light on the dusty scene. ‘There! There! There!’ we said.

Ed said nothing. He walked around as if in a dream. We went back to the Grand Entrance Hall and he stood there, head tilted back, eyes scanning the painted ceiling way above him. We went on to the drawing rooms, then the Salon, the family rooms, the Great Dining Hall where Mr Gladstone had sealed my fate, on, on, on, through all the grandiose fantasies of one of the Victorian age’s least imaginative architects. All the furniture was swathed in sheeting, and some of the pictures (those few with any artistic worth had been removed to storage), but everywhere Ed looked his eyes widened with wonder at the ornate decoration, the miniatory classical figures in the ceilings, the hideous knobbly clocks, the tormented table legs protruding from under the dust sheets. Dust – dust everywhere, the dust of wartime
years covering and dulling everything.

‘It’s incredible!’ Ed said at last.

‘It is that,’ I agreed. ‘Wonderful! Just wonderful!’

I looked at Gabriel and we both raised our eyebrows.

When I had absorbed Edith’s rebuke, and decided it was stinging, partly deserved, yet also self-protective on her part, I did what was customary with me: I began to reassert my control of the situation. I am not bossy, I do not enjoy putting people in their places or rubbing their noses in my superior wealth or position, but I do not like feeling at a disadvantage, and I do like to know precisely where I stand so I will never be at a loss. At times I can use surreptitious means to this end, even be devious and underhand. I was, and had to be, a secretive child.

Something had to be done. I had to know. If not what happened, then who was involved. But I had to be sly, had to tell no one what I was up to. The skeletons in the family cupboard might be too frightening even for me. I had to proceed still, as I had always preferred to, deviously.

I called in Digby Fearing, already a power in the Bank’s central office, and asked him for
a complete list of the Bank and the Family’s pensioners and debtors, omitting only those who were exclusively connected to the Bank itself. I wanted servants and connections, people who had worked at Blakemere, people who were associated with Uncle Frank and his end.

When I got the list, and the details of the sums involved, it was quite easy to pick out the people who were of interest, though it was also nostalgic to go through the long list of Blakemere staff, men and women whose names I had to recall with effort, and see how they were rewarded on retirement and how long they lived to remain on our list of pensioners. They were rewarded well, even generously, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that the Fearings were lavish with their money. Rich people who want to stay rich never are.

Some names stood out at once. Joe Mossman, though never head gardener or in any sort of position of responsibility among the outdoor staff, was given three times the normal gratuity on retirement, and his pension was continued after his death to his married daughter until her death. Joe was old, and very loyal, when I knew him. He was one of the figures I thought I had seen from my bedroom window on the night of
the burial. Presumably it was thought he might have talked to his daughter in his dotage, and her silence was also bought. A precisely similar arrangement was come to over Ben Burke: he had been pensioned off in 1892, but the arrangement was changed in 1893: the gratuity was added to, and his pension was continued after his death, first to his wife, then to his son.

I read with particular interest the section relating to Robert and Edith. It was much simpler. As long as they remained in service at Blakemere there was no record of any payment (though it may well be that one went to Robert). When they married and set up their school in Wentwood, they were given a lump-sum payment of four thousand pounds. I suspect that this arrangement may have been at Edith’s insistence, even if it was Robert who negotiated it. By accepting a regular payment they would have become pensioners of the Fearing family. The lump sum meant that the connection was, at least financially, at an end, and they were now on their own. I felt sure she preferred it that way.

The only non-family members to figure in the fateful family conference were the Coverdales – and Mary was, of course, by then technically a
Fearing. What I took to be her pensioning-off and silence-buying was paid to her father, and ceased at his death – presumably because she herself was also dead by then. It was the sum of fifteen hundred a year – a decidedly generous sum by the standards of the time.

What was to be done with such a record of people long dead, whose descendants, even, were dead? I stewed over it, I remember, for a weekend, but in the end I came to the conclusion that Robert and Edith were the only people on the list that I could approach. Shame should have stopped me, and fear of losing one of my best and oldest friends. Yet I felt overwhelming curiosity, felt I
had
to know. My mind tugging me in two, at least, directions, I went and had tea with her again, determined to bring up the matter one more time. But when, in a moment of silence as she poured second cups I said ‘Edith—’ there must have been something in my voice that warned her, and she fixed me with an eye that was filled with the sort of sternness she had seldom had used on me even in the schoolroom.

‘Yes, Sarah?’ she said, her voice the hardest steel. She knew me through and through, perhaps the only person who did.

‘I am awfully glad things have come right with the school,’ I said, feebly.

The list went into a desk drawer and gathered dust.

‘Dust!’ said Gabriel South, in one of the big bedrooms. ‘Dust everywhere. Mortality, the past, death.’

Ed was more interested in the life that had once been there.

‘Whose room was this?’ he asked.

‘No one’s in particular,’ I said, memories crowding in. ‘Used occasionally for an important guest. But it’s the one my cousin Richard was born in. He was retarded, and I loved him very much. So did all the South children.’

‘We did,’ agreed Gabriel. ‘He was a lovely person.’

‘Yes – he seemed to lead a charmed life. Even his death seemed to come without fuss – a cold, influenza, then just snuffed out. I was desolate, but somehow it seemed right. I always saw Richard as an innocent, untouched by all the guilt that afflicted us, and the angst and competitiveness and frustration.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Gabriel. ‘I don’t remember being afflicted by any of those things.’

‘I meant the Fearings, of course. It was after Richard’s death that I decided to open Blakemere to the public. I wouldn’t have wanted him to become some sort of sideshow.’

‘Will you open it again, when things get back to normal?’ asked Ed.

‘Not me. I’ve got much too much to do. Opening a place like this to the public is a full-time job, like being director of a big museum. I’ve sometimes wondered whether I could get rid of it to the National Trust or some such body.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Ed.

‘Before they’d accept they’d want a hefty wad of endowment money with it,’ said Gabriel.

‘Jeez!’ said Ed. ‘You mean that you’d have to pay them before they’d even accept it as a gift?’

‘That’s perfectly reasonable,’ I pointed out. ‘Think of the maintenance and the repair work. If I’m not willing to undertake them, as a rich woman, why should the Trust let me unload the burden on to them?’

‘But if you
gave
them this place?’

I had to explain the financial facts of life to him patiently.

‘It’s a white elephant, Ed. It has and can have no useful purpose. If it were a hospital, the drafts and cold would kill patients off in no time. A
monster lunatic asylum? Even the modern world hasn’t produced potential patients in such large numbers. It’s outlived any purpose it once had.’

‘But if it were opened to the public, wouldn’t the revenue—?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t.’

I opened Blakemere to the public in 1932. That gave me the opportunity to reverse my father’s decision to shut off large parts of the house – a quite unsuccessful attempt to reduce it to a more human scale. Not, of course, that I intended to admit the public to the whole house – we would have had to issue three-day tickets, and institute a rescue service for lost visitors – but the boarding-up presented a most unattractive appearance and gave a misleading impression of the place.

I tried my own solution to the size problem. I removed my living quarters to four rooms in the most modest section of the house – on the second floor, under the attics and two floors up from the kitchens. These rooms had not been used, I suspected, more than five or six times in the house’s history. Then they would have been occupied by the family’s least-valued houseparty guests. The fact that they were over the kitchen
had disadvantages where smell was concerned, but advantages where the freshness and hotness of meals was concerned – much more to the point, I felt. I ate frugally, but the dishes were brought up an obscure back staircase by one of the much-reduced kitchen staff, and when she took the silver covers off the plates, steam arose. So here I made my home, and tried to be cosy, well away from the visitors to our fadingly magnificent main rooms.

Nineteen thirty-two, at the height of the Depression, was hardly an auspicious time to be opening to the public. Initially the opening was every weekend during the summer months, and curiosity ensured that the first weekends saw a steady stream of visitors – some from the nearest big cities, but mostly local people anxious to view a house – or palace – which had loomed large on the physical horizon of Buckinghamshire and on the mental landscape of their lives. These locals often gazed with awe at the sheer size, lavishness, and overstuffed nature of the place.