A Mansion and its Murder (5 page)

She was lovely, I had to admit, with the loveliness one saw on biscuit tins, on postcard series of ‘British beauties’, or in pictures in the
Illustrated London News
showing Society ladies in the Prince of Wales’s circle. But there was one occasion during lunch when she looked in our direction – not at me, for I had no place in her scheme of things, was to be annihilated by it – and I caught the expression in her eyes; it was one of cold, hard calculation.

‘Is your sister nice?’ I asked Peter, with assumed childishness.

‘She’ll save you from
this
,’ he said significantly.

After lunch, which was ostentatiously simple (no rich, elaborate dishes, but everything out of season yet of supreme quality) the party separated for various pursuits – several of the ladies forming a card party around my grandmother, men playing the inevitable billiards, Frank and Mary going for the standard tour of the grounds, and so on. I told Peter about our new acquisition
of a Ping-Pong table, and he was wild for a game.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never even seen it played.’

It was while I was going for the bats and balls that I caught a glimpse of Peter’s father, Sir Thomas. He had been left on his own for a moment by Grandpapa, and he was walking along the picture gallery, surveying the Italian paintings which were our most prestigious acquisition, rubbing his hands the while. He clearly appreciated the value, if not the beauty, of pictures. He had a little goatee beard and a watery but rapacious eye. He reminded me rather of the unsalubrious last Emperor of the French, whose widow had visited Blakemere two years before. I thought that Peter’s instinct to get away from his family was a wise one. I thought that our growing involvement with them was a terrible mistake – though how terrible I could not then guess.

I was marginal to the visit, and so was Peter. Most of what I remember from the rest of the day was the Ping-Pong, and Peter’s joy at the fastness of it, and the glorious sound of the ball on the table. Though I had played often with one of the gardeners’ sons of my own age, Peter soon beat me, from his superior height and quickness.

‘If
only
I could persuade my father to buy a table,’ he lamented, as we paused between games.

‘He doesn’t
look
as if he likes buying things like that,’ I said.

‘He doesn’t.’

‘You can come here and play whenever you like,’ I said expansively.

He looked around disparagingly.

‘It’s not the sort of place you can descend on with a party of your chums, is it?’

That summed up Blakemere, and also put me in my place. But I already knew the place of twelve-year-old girls, however filthy rich, in the world view of fifteen-year-old boys.

That day made two marriages and sealed the fates of four people. One marriage was actually agreed and arranged that day. I saw my friend Beatrice and Tom South the coachman at Tillyards walking hand in hand in the kitchen garden – he large and wreathed in smiles, she pensive but not unhappy. Soon she was to go out of my daily life, though certainly not out of my life as a whole, for she visited and I visited whenever we could, and I knew the story of her marriage from its hopeful start to its dismal end.

I was talking the other day to Gabriel South, her youngest son, about his parents’ marriage. He is the Labour Party’s agent for Bedford, and likely to be an MP as soon as there is a seat vacant in the area.

‘You mustn’t think the faults were all on the one side,’ he said. ‘You think that because you only ever saw my mother, and you loved her. I sometimes think she only married him to have children, and thought his proposal might be her last chance. They had nothing at all in common, lived in separate worlds. He was all physical, loved horses and shooting and playing cricket and football. She was for reading and self-education, as you know, and thank God for that. But there was nowhere for them to come together. It was a mismatch from the start.’

That last judgment could be made on the other pair whose fate was sealed that day. Uncle Frank did not actually propose during the visit – that wasn’t his way, to do the expected or the hoped-for. It was a full month before he proposed, was accepted, and the engagement was announced in the
Morning Post
. But the die was cast that day, the match became for him inescapable. I was watching from the library as they came in from their promenade
around the grounds. Mary Coverdale’s cold eyes were aglint with triumph as she surveyed the magnificent expanse of her future domain. Uncle Frank seemed somehow smaller, and his eyes were entirely blank.

In the four months between the announcement of the engagement and the wedding I behaved abominably. Someone observing me today would assuredly diagnose a bad case of sexual jealousy. My generation heard excitedly of Sigmund Freud, discussed fragments of his theories as they were ignorantly reported in polite society, and developed a terrible mishmash of ideas based on them. The generation succeeding mine swallowed him wholesale. We live in an age of Freudianism reduced to cliché.

Nevertheless, I would contend, even at this date, that the diagnosis would be wrong, at least as far as the predominant strand of my feelings
about the marriage was concerned. I had a child’s passionate feelings for justice (I hope and believe it has never left me), and it seemed to me simply
wrong
that Uncle Frank should be pressured into making a marriage that was against his inclinations. My views of marriage were a good deal more romantic than the prevalent view in either the banking or the aristocratic circles in which we moved. The idea that, in allowing himself to be pressured into marriage as he had been, my uncle cut a less than heroic figure was not one that occurred to me, or that I would have admitted if it had.

The fact that, three weeks before Uncle Frank’s marriage, I was to lose Beatrice to her coachman only increased my desolation and worsened my behaviour. My life was dominated by a dreadful sense of loss.

Therefore, when I misbehaved, when I had tantrums, screamed ‘It’s not fair!’ to the heedless winds, refused to eat, got my clothes filthy in the grounds, and displayed my slovenliness for family and guests to wonder at, there was no one whom I loved to coax me into a more amenable frame of mind. Beatrice, to be sure, gave me what time she could, but her mind was already on future children for whom I was
merely a foreshadowing and a substitute. Uncle Frank was rarely at Blakemere (which did not mean he was necessarily at Tillyards with his bride-to-be), and when he was, his notice of me was more off-handed, as a consequence of his preoccupied state of mind – and perhaps, I now think, of some feelings of shame.

Mary Coverdale, when she came to Blakemere, treated me as she meant to treat me when she came into her future state: that is, she ignored me. I was an irrelevance, and future sons would render my insignificance even more palpable.

Inevitably I was asked to be one of the bridesmaids – no, was told I was to be one of them.

‘I refuse,’ I said.

My words, repeated as often as the subject was brought up, took on a heroic ring in my ears. So much more dignified and principled than a mere ‘no’, I thought. In time the words began to rank in my egotistical imagination with Martin Luther’s ‘Here I stand’ and Lars Porsena’s oath that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more. A great deal of effort was put into making me change my mind – not by my mother, who put no effort into
anything that concerned me, and not a great deal by my father, whose feelings about the marriage were ambiguous. But Aunt Jane, Grandmama, Beatrice (under pressure), and Aunt Sarah all tried. Grandmama was the most persuasive, the greatest danger.

‘Your refusing will get the marriage off to a bad start, my dear,’ she said, when I had obeyed a rare summons to her own boudoir.

‘It will start off badly in any case,’ I said.

‘Nonsense, my dear. What can you know?’

‘What could be a worse start than a bridegroom who is reluctant?’ I asked, very conscious of right on my side.

‘You’ve got a very silly idea into your head. Just look at how lovely your future aunt Mary is. It’s a love match – everyone can see that.’

‘Uncle Frank is handsome as any man I’ve ever seen, but they can both be as lovely as anyone has ever been in the history of the world and still not be right for each other. Uncle Frank will go down the aisle as if he’s being marched to the hangman’s yard, and I
won’t be part of it
.’

Finally I convinced them, and a daughter of Aunt Clare (and Uncle Alfred, though he was hardly ever mentioned at Blakemere) was drafted in to represent the Fearing family. This
meant inviting both the child’s parents to the wedding, which the family had hoped to avoid. However, a few weeks before the wedding, Uncle Alfred was elected to the Royal Academy (he was a very boring painter, though a charming man), and this meant that his profession could be mentioned when he was introduced to the other wedding guests, though some of the local gentry were still rather sniffy.

I was thrown during those weeks on the company of my governess Miss Roxby – Edith. With her I was petulant, indignant, openly
contemptuous
of the bargain that had been struck, but the worst of my tantrums and moods were controlled in her presence because I had come to respect her greatly, and because I sensed that she sympathised with my attitude to the marriage. She introduced me, in our spare time, to many books that have become lifelong friends, and she awoke in me an interest in my country’s history which has been a great standby in my two main careers. I remember one occasion a few weeks before the wedding when I was questioning her about how the then Queen had come to the throne, and she had taken down a tall, heavy book full of photographs and engravings, which had been published for the Golden Jubilee (we
were by then between Jubilees). It had a family tree of some complexity, and I studied it intently.

‘So she inherited the throne,’ I said eventually, ‘even though her father’s younger brothers had
sons
.’

I had studied it, you see, with my own situation very much in my mind.

‘That’s right,’ said Edith Roxby. ‘If the Duke and Duchess of Kent had had a son, he would have taken precedence over the Princess Victoria, as she then was. But they didn’t – he died soon after she was born – so she took precedence over the sons of his younger brothers.’

‘I see. That seems quite fair … But it does seem odd that Uncle Frank should be badgered into marriage to produce a son.’

‘That is quite different, Sarah,’ said Miss Roxby, peddling the family line, I now know, with reluctance. ‘A son is needed to take over Fearing’s Bank.’

‘So a woman may take over the country, but one may not take over Fearing’s Bank?’ I said, with remorseless logic. ‘Not that I
want
to! I can’t think of anything more stuffy and tedious. But you’d think that what was good enough for the Royal Family would be good enough for Fearing’s Bank, wouldn’t you?’

Thus did the seeds sown by Mr Gladstone’s casual remark flourish in my childish brain.

As I have mentioned, there were occasions on which the happy bride-to-be Mary Coverdale visited Blakemere, and on such visits Uncle Frank (but she always called him Francis) was in attendance, glumly but dutifully. If she noticed his glumness she did not comment on it. She was not naturally a gay person herself. She had her mind set seriously on one subject, and went after it single-mindedly.

This was brought home to me forcibly by a scrap of conversation I overheard on one of those visits. As I have said, Mary Coverdale ignored me – not so much snubbing me as simply being unaware of my presence, since I had no place in her view of her own future at Blakemere. She was almost equally unaware of the existence of Aunt Jane and my mother, while being very conscious of the respect due to my grandfather and grandmother, and more uneasily aware of the claims of my father.

Anyway, the fact that I and Miss Roxby were also in the vicinity was ignored during one of these visits when Uncle Frank and his future bride were walking in the terrace gardens. They were arm-in-arm, yet they could not have
seemed further apart. Miss Roxby and I were on a seat behind a hedge, studying a map of Africa showing how it had been opened up in recent years (by our heroic Empire builders, whose work will have to be comprehensively undone in the years ahead). As they passed by on the other side, I heard Uncle Frank mumble something into his beard – I imagine it was some professed doubt as to whether he could ‘make her happy.’ Mary Coverdale’s voice came across the hedge to us clear as a silver spoon on fine glassware.

‘You mustn’t worry, Francis. We are extremely well suited. I shall be an excellent hostess for Blakemere.’

They passed on. Miss Roxby looked at me and raised her eyebrows. Since she would never initiate such a conversation but sometimes allowed herself to be led into one, I said, ‘She doesn’t understand the situation at all.’

‘Seemingly not,’ she said quietly.

‘Uncle Frank doesn’t care a fig for Blakemere, or for his wife being hostess here.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘At least she doesn’t imagine she is being married for love,’ I admitted grudgingly.

‘True. And I suppose it will have been difficult for anyone to explain to her that she is being
married in return for the wiping out of debts.’ She realised at once she had said too much, had given rein to a side of her that her profession obliged her to keep hidden. A child, however secretive by nature, could never entirely be trusted. She said quietly: ‘But to return to the Dark Continent …’

We were on our way to understanding each other very well indeed.

Meanwhile, preparations for the wedding were proceeding apace, though all the bride’s preparations were going on at Tillyards, so I was not nauseated by them. The wedding was to be large, indisputably an event, but a local event. Uncle Frank had insisted on this latter point. I had heard him do this one day when, exceptionally, I was allowed to sit with the family at teatime. He made it clear he wanted none of the banking bigwigs from London invited, nor the national politicians.

‘It is only the wedding of a younger son,’ he said. ‘To pretend otherwise would be tasteless.’

He looked at my father when he said this.

‘Don’t expect me to back you up,’ Papa said. ‘It’s a matter of indifference to me what sort of wedding you have.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Uncle Frank carefully,
‘the fact is that circumstances could change, and you could be father to a whole string of future lairds of Blakemere.’

My father’s face twisted in distaste.

‘I assure you that should circumstances change, as you so tactfully put it, the last thing I would consider would be to embark on a second venture of matrimony.’

I rather pertly put in my two pennyworth: ‘And you needn’t think I want to be Lairdess of Blakemere. I’m going to be a great writer.’

Uncle Frank turned to me, with something of his old smile.

‘Well, that’s original, at any rate. We’ve never had a writer in the Fearing family.’

‘We’ve never had an explorer, either. I don’t see why the Fearing family should produce nothing but bankers. I’m going to be a great writer, like the Bronte sisters.’

‘I won’t have those women mentioned at my table!’ thundered Grandpapa. I subsided into silence, but I noticed a satiric glint in my grandmother’s eye. I think she knew that Grandpapa had very little idea who the Bronte sisters were, only that they were not quite respectable.

My ambition to be a writer, which lasted
all of three months, at least made me observe the preparations and the wedding itself with an eye eager to absorb the telling details. I will not bore myself by setting them down – they would seem impossibly lavish and fussy in this Age of Austerity we live in now. Uncle Frank absented himself as far as possible from all the fuss and flurry. I imagine him as having several last flings in all his favourite bachelor haunts, though on second thought I don’t imagine he saw them as last flings, and why on earth should he? Such a marriage as he was undertaking was not likely to change his essential nature, or his habits. It was like a royal marriage of convenience – like Charles II marrying a Portuguese princess he had never seen.

Finally the day dawned. I was not a bridesmaid, but I was not excused attending the awful event. My mother, of course, did not go. She had resisted all pressures to make preparations for it, saying that she had many dresses bought for other weddings she had not attended, and she would wear one of those if she was well enough to put in an appearance at Church. In the event she stayed in bed, as everyone knew she would. By this stage in her life she never did anything to please anyone other than herself. I saw her about
once a month. I on the other hand was primped and prettified and eventually was taken in one of the family tumbrils to sit toward the back of the church with Miss Roxby, Aunt Clare and Uncle Alfred, and their three boys – those doubtful insurers of Fearing’s Bank and its future. They were boisterous boys but pleasant enough, and they loathed the flummery of the wedding as much as I did, though for different reasons.

The church was St Michael’s at Great Orpenden. The family had no associations with the village, but it was the only church in the area large enough for the sort of grand wedding the family had planned (it was built in the fifteenth century to the glory of God and the woollen trade by one of the sleek profiteers of the time). Uncle Frank sat awaiting his blooming bride in the front pew, making no attempt to hide the fact that he would rather be anywhere else but here, doing anything else but this – a common enough feeling among bridegrooms, so it aroused little comment except some mild jocularities.

The bride, when she arrived, looked beautiful I had to admit – like a winter landscape in the sun. She walked slowly up the aisle to the usual musical accompaniments, attended by my cousin Kate, Aunt Clare’s only female child, and various
Coverdale girls, each one a biscuit box picture in herself. Uncle Frank stood up, joined up with her as casually as if she were a lady he was meeting outside Swan and Edgar’s, and went through his part of the ceremony with studied casualness, as if it was no part of the agreement he had entered into to pretend to take such nonsense seriously. Mary, on the other hand, was clear and word-perfect, a tribute to the elocution teacher’s art. Eventually it was all over, and we got into the tumbrils again and returned to Blakemere for the festive baked meats.

I had hoped to slip away from there, but Miss Roxby was under strict instructions that I was to do the honors of the house to all the other children. This was something I was used to, though I never enjoyed it. Since most of the children there, including the Coverdale biscuit boxes, had been to Blakemere before, I confined myself to finding out what they wanted to do and providing them with the wherewithal to do it. Blakemere was good in that respect – its hospitality was a well-oiled routine, and every age and taste was catered for. And of course the taste of young people for food was amply met on this occasion – grossly, wastefully, too richly catered for, so that the poor children of
the village on whom it was off loaded the next day were gorging themselves on unaccustomed delicacies for weeks afterward, and making themselves very ill.