Christmas at Candleshoe (2 page)
Lord Scattergood, conscious of being a shade vague, pauses to collect himself. The little group gazes around and talks in whispers. The whispering is something they feel to be polite; it is not the issue of timidity. People are impressed but not overawed. They have just been told, it is true, that such and such paintings are by Titian and such and such by Velasquez; that here is a casket by Cellini and there a wax figure by Michelangelo. But are they not, after all, familiar with super-cinemas? And has not the cinema-screen itself conducted them in the course of historical films through palaces more gorgeous than this? Obscurely but quite confidently, the English feel that things have happened which make them, in a sense, joint-owners with the Marquess both of Benison itself and of all its treasures. They are in the same boat with Lord Scattergood; they will sink or swim together; on this sunny afternoon it is pleasant to have been invited to climb to the bridge. Their five shillings are forgotten; they are well-disposed and well-behaved guests; it will be tomorrow before some of them recall that they have peeped into a fantastically remote and still obstinately privileged world.
The Americans are different. They are keeping the full measure of their awe for the Tower of London, the crypts of the great cathedrals, the birthplace of Shakespeare in Stratford, the cradle of the Washington family at Sulgrave Manor. That the owner of Benison Court should confess the place to be of no great antiquity impresses and pleases them; they see in it the high standard of personal honour which the English aristocracy – they believe – manages to combine with the utmost of Machiavellian duplicity in the political and diplomatic sphere. At the same time a few of them are looking at their watches, and presently one of them asks the question that is in all their minds. He is a bald pale person from Buffalo, where he carries on the profession of mortician. Conceivably by way of reaction from this sombre calling, he now wears a lemon-coloured suit and an extraordinary tie – a tie as complicated as the flag now fluttering above Benison, and akin to it – we may feel – as a gesture of naïf ostentation. The mortician has a camera slung at the ready just above the bulge of his stomach, and this gives to the most prominent part of his person the appearance of a large Cyclops-face set directly upon two short legs. He swings round and faces Lord Scattergood with the camera’s single staring eye. ‘What’, he demands, ‘is the oldest thing you have here?’
The mortician is paying Lord Scattergood a compliment, is acknowledging him to be the sort of man who will take and deal with a straight question. And Lord Scattergood is once more delighted. The vocation of Edward Gibbon, although he must have learnt it when at the large school near Windsor, has long ago passed out of his head. But he knows how to answer the mortician. ‘Well now, talking of that, I can show you rather a jolly thing.’ On long loose limbs he strides out of the octagon room; from the back he might be a youth of twenty; the tourists puff and shuffle after him, their foothold uncertain on the great polished floors. They file between rows of portraits, a complexity of mirrors, cliffs of books; they descend a broad cold staircase hung with enormous canvases of conjectural Spendloves prancing upon badly foreshortened horses. Presently they are peering into a chill and musty gloom, while their guide fumbles for an electric switch. ‘There you are. Rather fun – what?’
With a flicker and a ping a bar of fluorescent lighting has snapped on. Lord Scattergood’s party takes on an unhealthy tinge and the mortician might be a piece of bad embalming. Only Lord Scattergood’s own complexion is so florid as to be indestructible. He watches with amusement as his guests peer doubtfully into the great wedge-shaped space beneath the last flight of stairs. It is the corner into which, in a suburban house, one pushes the pram. And now Lord Scattergood’s guests, as if they were Gullivers in a Brobdingnagian semi-detached villa, are looking at an enormous baby-carriage, elaborately painted and carved. The greengrocer’s younger child becomes excited and utters cries.
‘Constructed for the children of the Swedish Countess in 1722.’ Lord Scattergood embarks somewhat uncertainly on an explanation of how this lady found herself a Spendlove. ‘But, as you can see, it is really a sledge. She is said to have had reindeer brought over, and in winter her children went bowling about the park.’
‘Did you have more snow in those days than you have now?’ The American lady who inquired about the ghost has put this question with an air of much acuteness. Lord Scattergood, cheerfully accepting the character of a Methuselah, replies that the winters were decidedly more severe then than now.
Meanwhile the sledge is being a great success. It is pronounced to be cute and sweet. A young female from Sydney, who is mostly bare legs and an enormous rucksack, declares it to be dandy. The greengrocer’s younger child starts shouting. Only the mortician from Buffalo remembers the motive behind this inspection. With professional deftness he applies a scraping fingernail to a leather surface. ‘I don’t get this,’ he says. ‘1722 isn’t so very old. And it don’t
look
old, either.’
‘Ah – you misunderstood me.’ Lord Scattergood glances amiably round, collecting the attention of his auditory. ‘It’s not the carriage itself that is at all notably old. I’m not sure that the fellow Gibbons I was mentioning didn’t have a hand in it. But the sledge-runners are quite old – and fine pieces of timber, as you can see. Cedar wood. They came from the Middle East.’
‘The Middle East?’ The mortician is suspicious.
‘Yes – brought back by an ancestor of mine – quite an enterprising fellow – from the top of Mount Ararat. Ship’s timbers, he decided they were. And he was a sailor, so he ought to have known.’
The more mentally alert of Lord Scattergood’s hearers giggle or gasp. An explanatory voice at the back, unconscious of offence, says, ‘Blessed if the ol’ bastard doesn’t say ’e’s got Noah’s ruddy Ark.’ The greengrocer’s second child, thus hearing mention of this object of juvenile enchantment, breaks loose, rushes forward, trips, grazes a knee, and howls. The greengrocer’s wife, deeply mortified, seizes the child, rights him, and is about to administer the alarming if innocuous shaking with which in England the simpler classes are accustomed to admonish their young. But Lord Scattergood is before her, whisks the child to his shoulder, and marches off with brisk talk of warm water and sticking-plaster. The greengrocer, his wife, and his elder child follow. They are really awed now. Lord Scattergood pauses until they catch up. He has forgotten his damned tourists and the turn he puts on for them. The child has casually attracted him, and for five minutes he will chat to the parents just as he would do to any of his great neighbours in the county. He believes that they will go away with the unspoken knowledge that one does not shake small children.
Autocratic and benevolent, Lord Scattergood disappears. The group remains for a moment in uncertainty, staring at the sledge. But almost at once a less exalted guide sweeps down on them and politely carries them off. Opening Benison Court to the public has proved to be a money-earner. A good deal of efficiency has been mobilized for the job.
But at Benison even quite a lot of efficiency is liable to get spread out thin. Lord Arthur Spendlove, as he leads his own party round, knows all the closets where chaos and confusion lurk. The very skeletons in the cupboards, he likes to remark, are in a sad muddle. A clever man, seemingly shiftless because profoundly at odds with his time, Lord Arthur wonders if any amount of efficiency could now make much difference. His father, briefed by some soothing old donkey in Chancery Lane, declares that penal taxation is ephemeral, and that of the really big English properties the ownership has not changed. But Lord Arthur is aware of the price of coal and the state of the plumbing; fitfully but with an alert intelligence he conducts inquisitions in the estate office; he has followed certain financial clues through their labyrinth, and it is his conclusion that Benison is a Grace and Favour house, the patronage of which is vested in two or three powerful persons in the City. By an agreement among these, the Spendloves could be sold up tomorrow. But could he, knowing all this, control the situation any better than his father does, or than his elder brother will do, when in the fullness of time he is called home from his endless bird-watchings and other blameless idiocies in Scotland?
Lord Arthur checks himself in these musings, and turns in negligent ease to face his little flock. He has all his father’s charm of manner, and although he will tire more quickly of this new family game, he is prepared to put greater finesse into it for a time.
‘First it is very necessary to apologize to you about one or two things. The truth is that we are not quite straight at Benison.’ And Lord Arthur meets the respectful attention of his group with a gaze the frankness of which must dispel any possible ambiguity lurking in his speech. ‘In the early years of the war we had a government concern quartered on us – quite an important government concern – and after that we had a couple of schools. I didn’t see much of it myself, because I was having a quiet sort of life in the desert and Tripoli and Italy. But it seems that things got pushed around a bit and stowed away and so forth; and we still don’t know quite where we are.’
‘Did the schoolchildren cause a lot of damage?’ An elderly woman turns from fingering the long gold curtains of the music-room to ask this question.
‘Oh, no – dear me, no.’ Lord Arthur’s glance has travelled over his hearers’ heads – he is inches taller than any of them – to the long line of paintings on the north wall. They no longer correspond with the faded patches on the green silk behind them, and he sees too that Canova’s frigid Aphrodite has been shoved into the corner formerly occupied by Flaxman’s bust of the elder Pitt. He is assailed by the renewed conviction that he and his family are now only camping in Benison, even that they are unlawful squatters who may at any time be evicted by the police; that they may be required to pack up their improvised domesticities and quit – trundling the Aphrodite, and Pitt if he can be found, down the league-long drive on a wheelbarrow. The vision of his father doing this rises before him, and hurtling in the other direction he sees an unending line of motor-coaches, crammed with citizens feeling in their pockets for small change. When the Ministry took over in 1939, he is thinking, my father expected the whole place to be blown sky-high within a week. But it wasn’t to be, and Benison is going to end not with a bang but a whimper.
Fortunately he is still talking. He hears his own voice insisting on how agreeable the schoolchildren were, revealing that some of them still write, still come back and inquire about horses, dogs, gardeners. Lord Arthur has the inventiveness of his father, into whose head will come nonsense about family ghosts or Noah’s Ark. But he has too a streak of artistry. As he tells how the bigger girls played Sheridan in gowns which had for two centuries been laid away in lavender, or how the smaller girls were allowed to paint with their water-colours the
putti
that play hide and seek round the tall marble chimneypiece in Queen Caroline’s Drawing-Room, or how, treasured in the library, there is a sound-strip of a hundred young voices echoing in the great gallery: as Lord Arthur tells of these things he makes them golden – as golden as the light now pouring in level shafts across the park – Claude’s light, the light of the great ideal landscapes, glinting on the gold-leaf that sheaths the high windows without, on the gold damask that drapes them within, on the long lines of gilt frames on the walls, on furniture here smothered and here licked with gold. The great room is full of the golden light. But soon it will be fading and everybody will go away. Already from the nearer stretches of the park comes the pulse and throb of engines, as if the pasturing
chars-à-bancs
were raising their heads and lowing – lowing to be led to some milking-parlour mightier than that erected by the sixth Marquis of Scattergood in the Chinese taste.
And presently this is answered by another sound. From a distant court of the great building – a court palatial in itself, but here serving for offices and stables – a deep-toned bell is calling the hour in long golden syllables that carry through Benison’s two hundred rooms, roll across its spreading formal gardens, its ornamental waters, and its spacious park, to die finally into a just perceptible vibration in the distant streets and houses of Benison Magna, Benison Parva, Abbot’s Benison, and Candleshoe.
‘If that wasn’t a darn queer thing!’ Grant Feather slows down behind a
char-à-banc
on the Palladian Bridge. ‘What makes them put in time, do you think, taking round a raggle-taggle of tourists like you and me?’
With her nose still in her guidebook, Mrs Feather absently shakes her head. ‘The Temple of Ancient Virtue’, she reads, ‘was designed by Kent. Now, why didn’t we see that? A graceful but massive structure. The Temple of Modern Virtue was constructed nearby in the form of a ruin, the contrast being allegorical in intention. It was removed by the seventh marquess, who intended to erect in its place a Temple of Progress and Perfectibility. His interests changed however and he built a mosque, now used as a cow-shed. I’d say that folks crazy enough to do things like that are crazy enough to take round tourists.’
‘You agree, momma, that it was a mite crazy?’
‘Well, Grant, it was courteous too. If you’re good enough to be let in at all, even at half a dollar, you’re good enough to be talked to. Your grandfather would have done the same, if he’d ever felt like collecting half-dollars from people wanting to see round his house at Newport.’
‘Nobody would want to see round that house at Newport.’
‘They might now. Your grandfather’s house is almost as much a period piece as Benison.’ Mrs Feather turns the page of her guidebook. ‘The chapel is by Wren, and contains a fine statuary group by Roubiliac. We didn’t see that either.’
Grant Feather sets his foot on the accelerator and chuckles. ‘Perhaps that’s another half-dollar. After all, Benison isn’t just one period piece. It’s several.’ He stops the car. ‘There’s your last glimpse of it.’