A Game of Consequences Page 3

  TWO

  Nettlefold was a nice old village, remarkably unspoiled, with agreeably old-fashioned shops. Ellis & Hand, the estate agents, was almost next door to The George in the middle of the High Street.

  Roy Ellis was a long lean gentleman with sandy whiskers and a yellow waistcoat. He gave Tom an up-and-down look and said, ‘Ah yes,’ when he introduced himself. He opened a drawer and selected a bunch of keys: ‘Let’s go!’ he said. ‘Better take my car, I suppose, as I know the way.’

  ‘Are you a friend of Mrs. Eskdale?’ he asked with casual curiosity as they climbed into his MG and shot off.

  ‘More a friend of his.’

  ‘Ah. Of course I’ve known the family for years.’ He began to speak of Aurora with snobbish familiarity. A couple of miles outside the village he turned up a drive that was a dark tunnel of overgrown copper beeches. ‘A sight in the spring,’ he observed.

  ‘I’m sure. Is there a decent school round about?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ellis said, ‘we haven’t gone Comprehensive yet!’

  ‘You must tell me about it.’

  An immense red brick mansion loomed into view, tall windows glinting in the sun through a sprawl of Virginia creeper as red as raw beef.

  Ellis walked him past the main entrance with its heavy iron-studded door to the side of the building — if a structure of such indeterminate shape could be said to have a side — to another entrance.

  An ancient in a tattered hat passed slowly by trundling a wheelbarrow, not even giving them a glance. ‘Morning, Perce,’ called Mr. Ellis, but he took no notice.

  ‘Deaf?’ said Tom.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Is he the gardener?’

  ‘The gardener! There are five acres, my dear man. Perce helps out his nephew, who can only just about manage to keep the grass cut and the hedges tidy, and even that, I may tell you, runs Mrs. Eskdale into over fifty quid a week.’

  ‘No wonder she wants to sell the place.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Ellis, unlocking the door. ‘And then there are the cleaning women, who between them put in nearly thirty hours a week. No one could keep it up in these times. That’s the trouble … This is the living-room … and here, the dining-room … and as you see, the kitchen.’

  Tom glanced up at the high ceilings with their plaster mouldings, the deep fireplace, the shabby chintz hangings, the dingy paint yellowing with age, which had for him a faded melancholy that he found romantic. It was like stepping into a bygone era. He saw the Axminster ripple, as if a snake was gliding under it, stirring the threadbare roses. ‘Only the draught from the door,’ said Ellis, following his gaze.

  Upstairs there were white honeycomb counterpanes on the beds and tremendous views across the meadows.

  All that land belong to Upperdown too, Ellis explained, 450 acres of it, leased out to farmers. A dead loss, of course, because it could never be built on.

  ‘I should have thought that it was an advantage: preserving the amenities.’

  ‘A dead loss financially. Think what it would fetch as building lots!’

  ‘If we cut down the cherry orchard,’ murmured Tom, too low for the other to catch. ‘If the school is all right for the children, I think we should be very happy here. What exactly am I expected to do in the way of looking after the place?’

  ‘Just keep an eye on things, see that nothing leaks or overflows or tiles fall off the roof. Turn the lights on and off, open and close the shutters, so that it is apparent the place is being lived in. There’s really nothing else.’

  They had a drink and a sandwich at The George and then Tom went off to look at the school and have a word with the head.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Kate inquired anxiously on his return.

  ‘Absolutely splendid.’

  ‘But what’s it like?’

  ‘There’s an Art Deco lamp in the living-room.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That sums it up in one word.’

  ‘Oh thanks. There are some chairs and a table besides, I hope.’

  ‘Of course. And a huge cosy fireplace with an ornamental tile surround.’

  ‘How about the kitchen?’

  ‘The kitchen is almost perfect. There is a fridge, but it’s otherwise quite unspoilt. An old earthenware sink and a scrubbed wooden table. You’ve never seen anything like it in your young life. And old tin bygones hanging on the walls. A tin tea-caddy advertising Mazawattee, and a kitchen cabinet painted grass-green, like something out of a dolls’ house. The stove works all right. I particularly asked,’ he added with an air of conscious virtue.

  ‘Well, I suppose one must be grateful for that at least,’ said Kate turning up her eyes.

  ‘Wait till you see the girl pierrot, dancing under the lampshade with her skirts spread out!’

  Oh well, it won’t be for ever, Kate thought.

  When she saw it three weeks later on a dark drear November day, she was not quite as struck with its charms as her husband. It did not move her to sentimental tears. If she had shed tears they would more likely have been tears of despair.

  But Kate did not weep. It would do well enough for the time being.

  The children loved it, loved exploring the wild overgrown gardens, were much taken with the mysterious laconic figure of Norman, whom they would chatter to by the hour, when they were not out playing with their schoolfriends. They made friends easily, like their father.

  The cleaning women always turned up together, talking nineteen to the dozen as they slogged up the drive. At least, Tom discovered, it was the tall beige one called Mrs. Slaughter who carried on an interminable monologue to her companion. The other one, stocky Mrs. Savage with the mauve hair listened more or less and nodded from time to time. They would disappear into the house and sometimes Tom would catch the drone of a banshee wailing to a bagpipe, which was either Mrs. Savage or Mrs. Slaughter indulging in her repertoire of excerpts from ‘Oklahoma’ or The King and I’, accompanying herself on the hoover.

  He always gave them a lift if he was going down to the village. They liked him, he made them shriek with laughter. They thought him a nice young man, but odd as two left feet. And what about Her? Off every day, leaving him to fend for himself and the kiddies. A fine one she must be. They would have thought him a widower if he hadn’t talked of his wife constantly. It wasn’t right, they agreed. They’d never seen her (for they never came at weekends, and she apparently never went into the village and certainly never put in an appearance at The George on a Saturday night). She was, they decided, one of these liberated women for whom they had no time or respect. ‘I’d like to see anyone try to liberate me,’ Mrs. Savage said, to which Mrs. Slaughter responded with a wild shriek of laughter.

  They were not to know that Tom and Kate’s weekly treat was a lunchtime drink at The Wykeham Arms, the posh pub down by the river, frequented by the Merc, and Jag. wolves in their sheepskin coats.

  The rest of the week Kate had to leave so early in the morning and got back so late that she departed and returned in the dark. She scarcely saw the children except at weekends. The commuting she found tiring, but there was nothing to be done about that. She certainly could not afford to give up her job: it was all the income they had.

  The darkness and isolation of Upperdown depressed her. There was nothing to see and nowhere to go. To persons accustomed to lighted streets and nearby houses patched with light, there is something chilling and eerie about night’s impenetrable darkness pressing against the windows. It made steady sensible Kate nervous: Nature is too alien, unfamiliar, unfriendly.

  But Dinah and Biddy were happy. And the look of strain had left Tom’s face which had been there since Martin’s death, when everything had begun falling to pieces for them. Yet she could wish he were not quite so well satisfied with things as they were. They were still living on the edge of nothing, their tiny capital dwindling week by week. It unnerved her slightly that it no longer seemed to worry him.

  Tom worried, of c
ourse, if he thought about their situation, only he practically never did. He had too much to do. He led the busy active life of a lady of leisure: up first in the morning to make coffee and toast for Kate before driving her to the station, then back to get the girls’ breakfast and take them off to school; pausing in the village to do any shopping that was necessary. Then back to make the beds and tidy round and do any bits of washing or ironing. After which he would probably spend twenty minutes in the john reading the paper, and then, if he happened to come across a likely job advertised, drafting a reply. After which it would be about time to pop into The George for a swift half and a pie for lunch. He liked to chat to the locals and pick up the gossip.

  That was the thing about village life: one participated. Unlike the random disconnected nature of life in town where the world drifts before one’s eyes in a continuous meaningless frieze of unknown passers-by, in a village like Nettlefold everybody was somebody. Families had lived there for generations, their names embedded in the history of the place. It gave to life a feeling of significance beyond one’s personal existence. It was almost as though one found oneself taking part in a play, albeit in a minor walk-on role and as yet having no notion of the plot or whether it would turn out to be Comedy, Tragedy, or Farce.

  Afternoons he would often spend scooting round the nearby villages hunting through the junk shops for something he could pick up cheap to sell again — perhaps to Roger, who owned the antique shop in the village and with whom he had become quite chummy. He even looked after the shop for Roger once or twice a week when Roger was off on his buying expeditions. That brought in a few extra quid, which paid a bill or bought an overcoat or shoes for one of the girls — they did grow out of things so fast.

  If it was dry he might spend an hour or two roaming through the grounds collecting firewood: viewing with interest the relics of what must once have been beautiful gardens; the neglected rose-garden with spindly unpruned bushes and tall weeds bursting through the crevices in the brick paths; stones falling out of the walls; barren vines and peach trees thrusting through the paneless framework of dilapidated hothouses … It had the pathos and nostalgic beauty of all ruins, of forlorn churchyards with mossy headstones.

  Aurora’s father in his old age, it seemed, had become a crabbed and crotchety recluse, wrapped up in his private quarrel with a declining world, snarling at visitors like an old dog. He had resented anyone, Tom learned, even members of his family, intruding into his solitude. No one knew what treasures there might be in the house, Roger told Tom with a greedy insinuating glance. The old man had become as crazily stingy as Sir Pitt Crawley, complaining bitterly that the Government had ruined him, taxation had brought him to the verge of destitution. He refused to spend a penny on keeping the place in repair, said he couldn’t afford it. ‘Let it fall down,’ he said. ‘What do I care?’ Grudgingly he permitted a village woman to come up two or three times a week and leave a cooked meal for him — as one might put out a saucer of milk for a hedgehog on a warm musky September night.

  This desolating inheritance, this Castle Rackrent, this Nightmare Abbey, went to Basil, Aurora’s elder brother; and Aurora must have counted herself fortunate indeed that it was not she who had to cope with it.

  When Basil learnt that he had inherited the family home and half his father’s not inconsiderable fortune (before the greater part was snatched away in Death Duties) he decided to resign from the Diplomatic Service, of which he was not a noticeably distinguished member, and devote himself to making the place into a suitable background for his collection of oriental art. He returned to England with countless crates of Chinese porcelain, jade, lacquer, and silk, and his devoted Thai body-servant.

  Perhaps the English climate disagreed with him after so many years abroad. Something went wrong. His health began to fail, and a mere two years after his father’s death, Basil himself died at the age of 56.

  Being a bachelor he had never bothered to make a will. The estate went to Aurora, his next-of-kin. It had landed in her lap after all. It seems one cannot escape one’s fate.

  With double Death Duties to be paid, she had no hesitation about what was to be done; she put it up for sale. Right away. It seemed in the circumstances a terrible waste of time and money to continue Basil’s task of putting it in order. Let the purchaser see to it. The mere thought of the work involved and the expense of setting it in order made her flinch, Ellis said.

  Tom could well believe it, wandering through it, as he often did. The parts which Basil had restored were admirable in their exotic way, but the rest was grim. That was not what he concerned himself with in his wanderings; he was on the look-out for the good things. Like Dr. Johnson scanning the titles in a person’s library, Tom too liked to know where things were to be found if need should ever be. He could not resist turning china upside down, examining the assay marks on silver, looking at the underside of furniture, scrutinising pictures, opening drawers and neatly sifting through their contents. It was as pleasant a way of spending an hour as he knew; a private luxury he allowed himself now and again; something he did not even mention to Kate. He was not above reading old letters if they looked as if they might be interesting, or leafing through a diary: he knew no more diverting occupation, but it was not one to talk about.

  Tom had been through all the rooms of interest several times, except, strangely enough, for the library which seemed to contain on its panelled walls nothing but show-cases of silver cups and countless volumes of Wisden and Ruff’s Guide to the Turf. A depressing room with its big leather chairs and the two tall windows opposite the marble fireplace. Nothing to look at there at all.

  A depressing day it was too; a dull dark February day with rain drenching down out of a heavy pewter sky. There just might be something to read, he thought, switching on the light, and as he turned towards the shelves, a glint of gold between the two windows caught his eye.

  Queer that he’d never noticed it before, there in the shadow of the heavy curtains, a quite large dark picture in a handsome simply-moulded gilded frame.

  Tom went closer, moved from one side to the other, stepped back: the light, shining on the surface of the paint, obscured the subject. If he turned the light off, the picture vanished into the shadows. He was about to lift it down, when he saw that it was time to collect the children from school, that he was, in fact, already late. He would have to leave the picture till tomorrow.

  But the next day Mesdames Savage and Slaughter were doing their slovenly stint. After that he forgot about it, probably having no expectation that it would turn out to be anything of interest and he had other matters to occupy his mind.

  *

  Kate said:

  ‘Do you realise we’ve been here three months!’

  ‘I do indeed. And not a soul has been to look at the place. Aren’t we lucky?’

  ‘I just wonder how much longer we shall stay.’

  ‘Many months, I hope. I can’t see any point in leaving until we have to.’

  ‘It’s not exactly getting us anywhere, is it?’

  ‘It’s getting us a place to live, the children are doing well at school and have made lots of friends, and living here is as cheap for us as it could be anywhere. I know it’s not much fun for you, love, but I don’t see how we can do any better. I think we should hang on as long as we can, with any luck to the end of the summer — if I haven’t found a job with reasonable prospects before that.’

  ‘That’s what scares me, Tom. How can you ever hope to find a proper job stuck down here, miles away from everywhere and never meeting anyone? Our situation isn’t improving. At the end of the summer we shall be no better off, you won’t have found a job, and we’ll still have no money and nowhere to live.’

  ‘But meanwhile we are living, don’t you see? That’s what matters: the present moment. Being together as a family, living a jolly enjoyable life. Isn’t that enough? Why spoil now with worrying about then?’

  ‘Because — I hate to say it — you
’re getting older with every month that passes and your prospects are deteriorating all the time. You don’t need me to tell you surely that the older you get, the less acceptable you are job wise.’

  Tom said quietly:

  ‘No, I don’t need you to tell me. Though you’re quite right to make sure I never forget it.’

  ‘Oh darling!’ Kate cried, twining her arms round him tightly, tears jetting from her eyes. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it. What a beast I am!’

  ‘Poor Kate,’ he murmured, stroking her hair. ‘Poor Kate. Tied hand, foot and finger to a man so hopelessly incompetent he can’t even keep himself, much less his wife and children. It’s hard on you, my poor girl. I’ve let you down.’

  ‘No, you haven’t. Shut up, will you? Just shut up.’

  She was his dear Kate and he loved her. If only she would go on having faith that things would come right in the end, as he did. One day a job would turn up for him in some miraculous way, just as this place had to meet their need. Or some brilliant idea would jump into his head, some startlingly clever scheme that would solve all their problems. Or he would find a wonderful picture. An unknown Rembrandt, maybe, in a bundle of old canvases lying among the rubbish at the back of a saleroom. The hopeful dream of everyone connected with the world of art, from knocker to expert — though it has less chance of ever coming to pass than a big win on the pools or a top Premium Bond coming up.

  But life is full of surprises. Who would have thought Tom would find ‘the wonderful picture’, there in the house? Hanging in the library in the space between the windows.

  As soon as he took it down and started to examine it in the light of day, Tom saw that it was very old, dark with time, even the back of the canvas was stained and brown with age. The stretcher was made of olivewood, the bevelled wedges of mahogany.

  The picture itself was painted in muted tones of silvery greys and fawns relieved by bold areas of black and one patch of faded crimson by way of dramatic contrast. The light fell from a high window to the right of the picture, illuminating the central figure and diffusing to a dim translucent greenish tone over the rest of the immense chamber, to the extreme rear of which in the back wall could be discerned the portrait of a fair-haired child in a long red dress (the patch of faded crimson). The distant door was heavily panelled in painted squares, the floor was of tessellated marble.