Christmas at Candleshoe (3 page)

They have driven for two miles through the park, and lodge-gates and the public highway are just in front of them. On their left is a broad sheet of ornamental water, part balustraded and part overhung by dark-foliaged trees. Small islands support obelisks, groups of statuary, miniature temples. Beyond, the river winds gently through a valley whose wooded slopes, artfully converging as the scene recedes, finally form the wings of a theatre in which the backcloth is Benison itself – the great house in all its incredible length and high Ionic elegance planted squarely to the view, with only the open sky behind the bold symmetry of its central mass, its spreading wings, its end pavilions.

For a moment Mrs Feather contemplates the large assertion of it in silence. Then she snaps shut the guidebook. ‘I was wrong. Period piece isn’t the name for it. It’s a show-place.’

‘Well, I guess it’s that too.’ Grant is amused by what he discerns as a change of mood in his mother. ‘And grandfather’s Newport mansion is hardly that.’

‘Benison was a show-place from the start, and that’s why that old man must go on showing it now. He’d prefer a more time-sanctioned ostentation – big parties of his own sort, with fifty housemaids staggering up and down those great staircases with coalscuttles, and everything very grand and splendid. But that’s no longer possible in England. And rather than have his great house degenerate into something useful – say an orphanage or a convalescent home–’

Grant Feather lets in his clutch again and shouts with laughter. He is from Harvard; he has finished his first year at Oxford; it pleases him to pretend that his mother is a cosy little woman, much lacking in sophistication. ‘Rather than do that, the old boy continues to show off – but to new classes of society?’

‘Just that. You see, Benison isn’t really old – and those Spendloves aren’t really old either, or at least they ain’t old as the biggest sort of aristocrats are. When you get true antiquity–’

Mrs Feather has again provoked an explosion of mirth in her son. ‘A single thirst for modernity distinguishes the American at home, and a single passion for antiquity grips him when abroad.’

‘Grant, you got that from your Oxford tutor.’

‘Perhaps I did.’ Grant grins. ‘But it’s true, all the same. “What is the oldest thing you have here?” I heard one of our countrymen fire that at the old marquess an hour ago. Or there was the woman that pointed at a portrait of Margaret Plantagenet and asked if she came of an old family. And now here’s you complaining that Benison Court misses out on the owls and ivy.’

‘That’s not quite why I find I don’t like it.’ Mrs Feather settles back comfortably as the car swings into the highway. ‘If it’s a period piece, it’s a period piece of the show-place period. Do you get that?’

‘I get the ostentation. Benison makes its gesture half across its tight little county.’

‘That’s just it. Rather a blatant gesture. Right at the end of that century – the seventeenth century – the English sense of values deteriorates. They begin putting up big empty vulgar things, and demanding admiration for their mere size and expensiveness. Mind you, Grant, I think it may have been largely our fault.’

‘
Our
fault?’ Grant takes his eyes from the road to glance at his mother in astonishment.

‘For quitting. For crossing the Atlantic, and draining England of the folk with the old, mature sense of values. English society has been kind of raw ever since.’

‘Perhaps we should come back?’

‘Perhaps we should.’ Mrs Feather considers it seriously. ‘After all, they wouldn’t put us in the pillory any more, or burn our books, or stop us going to church. You might figure it, Grant, that the practical reasons for our exile being past and done with, it’s our business to pack up and come home.’

‘You would advocate founding a new England on the western seaboard of this island? You would push back the savages of Lancashire and Cumberland into Yorkshire and Northumberland?’ Grant pauses for a moment to peer at a signpost. ‘But you wouldn’t like it, momma. The immemorial spirit of the place would take charge, and presently you would find that your new England was being run by men. The great American Matriarchy would have perished in the resettlement.’

Mrs Feather opens her guidebook again as a gesture of scorn. The Matriarchy joke always offends her. For some minutes the car travels in silence, and then she makes a discovery. ‘The church at Abbot’s Benison has long-and-short work.’

‘Has what?’

‘A stonemason’s technique not found in England after the Saxon period.’

‘Sure – Owl-and-Ivy. Do you know, I kind of get it mixed with Decorated and Perpendicular. Well, it’s just too bad we missed Abbot’s Benison.’

‘Second on the left, and then left again, will take us straight back to it.’ Mrs Feather is inflexible. ‘There is a three-decker Jacobean pulpit.’

‘That’s fine. But these English hotels, remember, believe in something called the dinner-hour. If we miss–’

‘And an elaborate marble monument, with curious original iron-work, is believed to be by Gerard Christmas, carver to the navy. I was reading about him only the other day.’

With a sigh of resignation Grant swings the car left. His mother’s indefatigable antiquarianism at once delights and bores him. ‘You know,’ he says presently, ‘if you lived in this country, you’d never go after all these period pieces and show-places and churches with Owl-and-Ivy work. Your bondage to them would be broken, and you could sit quietly at home, toasting your ten toes before a nice English open fire. Why not settle for a year or two and try it? Your own little experiment in the new New England.’

‘Now, Grant, that’s a curious thing. I’ve been thinking as we drove along this morning that Oxford has a great attraction for me. And last week I was shown a very nice apartment there, right opposite the gates of your college. And the society would be attractive, too. Your dear old President and his wife, and your tutor, and a heap of your own friends.’

With a quick glance Grant assures himself that this devastating idea is a product of his mother’s sense of humour. ‘Oxford has plenty of Owl-and-Ivy, sure enough. But would it give you scope, momma? You’d do better to buy Benison.’

‘You think it’s for sale?’ Mrs Feather speaks with the prosaic interest of one who would have no difficulty in finding the money – and she is, as it happens, an extremely wealthy woman.

‘They’d jump at a good price, and retire to Corbies and the family ghost with the bagpipes. Or you might rent the place, and bind Lord Scattergood to live in one of the lodges and continue to act as chief guide.’

‘Benison isn’t at all what I want. And none of the places I’ve looked at is
quite
right.’

Grant stares. ‘You’ve
really
looked?’

‘I went over several manor-houses in the Cotswolds last week. If your sisters follow you over here, a house will be a convenience. But those I’ve seen have all had something – well, subtly wrong with them.’

‘Something spurious about the immemorial flavour?’

‘That – and their being kind of thrust at you. I want to
find
a house. That, you know, is what a period piece is – something that you yourself rescue from oblivion, and that quite perfectly recalls its own epoch because it has seen unregarded and uninterfered with ever since… Look out!’

They are on a winding secondary road and Grant, driving well, is not really in danger of an accident. But he has to brake hard, and the boy who has burst out of a hedge on his near side is lucky to have got across without at least a bad fright. He is through the opposite hedge now, and in a moment he vanishes. Grant changes gear and drives on.

‘Wasn’t that rather a queer boy?’ Mrs Feather’s voice is perplexed. ‘Did you notice?’

‘I didn’t notice much about him. Reckless little brute.’

‘He had a cap.’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t think that English country boys much wear them. And it had a long feather in it. And he had long stockings that looked almost like–’

Grant is aware that his mother has broken off in order to concentrate her attention upon some object, apparently in the middle distance, that lies over his shoulder. He glances in the same direction and sees nothing but a hawthorn hedge, and beyond this a beech copse in which the shadows of evening are beginning to gather. Recalling the celerity with which the less unpalatable dishes are prone to be ‘off’ in English hotels, he accelerates. But his mother lays a hand on his arm. ‘Grant – do stop. It’s Jacobean.’

He stops, and Mrs Feather at once gets out of the car. He follows and sees rising above the beeches two chimneystacks in cut brickwork, each of them of three grouped shafts. They rise boldly above a scrollwork gable which can just be glimpsed through the tree-tops, and the evening sun catches them so that the mellow red above the foliage is like flame. Children’s voices can be heard in the distance, but the evening is curiously still and the beech copse has an air of mystery. Mrs Feather is entranced and Grant is apprehensive. ‘If you really want to see the church at Abbot’s Benison–’ he begins.

But his mother shakes her head. Without taking her eyes from the peeping gable and its clustered chimneys, she feels in the car for her guidebook. ‘If it hadn’t been for that boy, we’d have gone by without noticing it. Did you ever see a place that had such an air of being hidden away?’

Grant does not audibly assent to this; he sees the looming danger of trespass, barbed wire, torn clothes, detection, embarrassment. He has been through it before. So he reaches for a map and studies it. ‘Three miles to Abbot’s Benison,’ he presently announces. ‘And two miles short of that there’s a hamlet called Candleshoe.’

‘Candleshoe?’ Mrs Feather’s delight deepens. ‘Isn’t that a wonderful name?’

‘I don’t find it all that striking, momma. And that house, if you want to know, must be Candleshoe Manor.’

Mrs Feather consults her guidebook. ‘This says nothing about it. Yet I’m sure it’s Jacobean. It may even be Elizabethan.’

‘And good Queen Bess herself may have slept here?’ Grant moves back towards the car. ‘Well, if it isn’t mentioned, it can’t be on show. So we may as well move on.’

‘But, Grant, that means we’ve practically discovered it.’

‘Nonsense. There will be some big county history with screeds about it. But that doesn’t mean that the folk who live here want inquisitive trippers poking round.’

‘Perhaps nobody lives here. They say a lot of these places are deserted and going to rack and ruin. Would that be some sort of drive fifty yards down the road?’ Mrs Feather sets off at a brisk pace as she speaks. ‘I believe it is. And there’s a lodge.’

Resigning himself to the situation, Grant steps out beside her. The road appears wholly unfrequented, and he recalls that he has seen no other vehicle since branching off on it. The boy – according to his mother, the oddly dressed boy – is the only sign of life that has appeared. And the lodge, when they come up to it, is clearly deserted; the windows are boarded up and a hole gapes in the roof. Even his mother acknowledges it to be a nondescript of no antiquarian interest; she opines that it is a nineteenth-century affair, built when some secondary approach to the house was constructed by a prosperous owner. On each side of the drive itself a masonry column of undistinguished proportions attests to a sort of perfunctory grandeur; one is topped by a meaningless stone ball and from the other an identical ball has toppled and lies half-buried in grass. Rusted hinges show that there must once have been a pair of iron gates. But these have vanished and there is open access to a cart-track – it appears little more – that presently takes a twist among the beech-trees and vanishes. The house can no longer be seen.

‘We’ll just look what’s round that bend.’ Mrs Feather is still briskly resolved. But in response to the silence that seems to be gathering round them she has unconsciously lowered her voice. A rabbit not twenty yards ahead nibbles undisturbed, and for a moment the intruders find themselves standing quite still in tingling expectation. It is a drift of primitive feeling that has worked its way up wards into their eminently civilized consciousness; were it to break in on a more substantial scale they would experience panic, and the god himself might catch and claim them as they bolted for their car. But this passes; they set off up the neglected avenue; the rabbit vanishes; Mrs Feather gives a moment’s attention to the commonplace business of finding half-a-crown.

‘Probably it is deserted. But there may be a caretaker, and he will be glad enough to show us round. There will be quite enough daylight, although it is already dusky here in the trees.’

Grant says nothing. He sees only cold corned beef, watery salad, blancmange, and the crowning horror known as ‘jelly’ between himself and bedtime. These will be served in penitential conditions by an obtrusively promoted scullion in an empty dining-room depressingly ‘laid’ for breakfast.

They have reached the bend and rounded it. A few yards ahead a tree-trunk sprawls dead across the drive; it is a barrier which they must scramble over if they are to go further. Grant supposes that it must have been brought down by a storm, but when his eye travels to its base he sees that this is not so, and that it has been expertly felled to lie as it now does. He and his mother both come to a halt; as they do so there is an odd twang in the air somewhere to their left, and they are looking at the shaft of an arrow quivering in the obstacle before them.

‘That’s your boy with the queer cap.’ Grant is at once clear-headed about this surprising occurrence. ‘And it has a message.’ He advances to the tree-trunk and takes hold of the arrow. It is homemade, powerful, and correctly feathered; it pierces and has carried a twist of paper. Grant tears this off and unfolds it. They are looking at a single word scrawled in pencil:

Avaunt!

‘An inhospitable boy.’ Mrs Feather frowns. ‘But where would a village child come by a word like that?’

Grant laughs. ‘From a five-cent story of Robin Hood and his merry men, I’d guess. And I don’t suppose it’s meant to be ambiguous.’

‘How could it be ambiguous?’ Mrs Feather turns colloquial. ‘Don’t it just mean “
Git
”?’