by Jilly Cooper
‘Blanche and Basil will be with us around one,’ Etta told Sampson, then, with a surge of spirit: ‘I wasn’t aware.’
‘I told you last week,’ interrupted Sampson, ‘but you never listen. Why don’t you stop being obstinate and get that deaf aid.’
By the time Etta had chucked a leg of lamb in the oven and defrosted a raspberry Pavlova, lit the fire, laid the table in Sampson’s study and organized drinks, Blanche, who liked to catch her on the hop, had arrived half an hour early, giving Etta no time to change, put on make-up or hardly wash.
Blanche was looking stunning, her sleek silvery-grey bob enhanced by a red suit with a large ruby brooch on the lapel in the shape of a geranium – no doubt given to her by Sampson. Instantly she went into an orgy of plumping Sampson’s cushions, re-buttoning his saxe-blue cardigan, which Etta’s trembling fingers had done up all wrong earlier, and smoothing his hair with a dampened hairbrush.
‘We must make you look as handsome as possible.’
Basil, who had a puce face and a fat tummy, reminding Etta of Keats’s poem about the pot of basil, tucked into a large whisky and the Financial Times, while Blanche talked to Sampson. Etta raced back and forth to the kitchen, and throughout lunch, crying: ‘You’ll need mince sauce’, ‘Redcurrant jelly?’, ‘Sorry I forgot the water jug’ and ‘More cream on your raspberries?’
No one noticed when she went missing. With the sound turned down, she lingered in the kitchen to watch the races.
They had moved on to celery and a very ripe Brie, and Sampson was beginning to look grey from the exertion, when Etta noticed the clock edging towards three fifteen.
‘You need another bottle of red and a glass of port,’ she said airily.
Back in the kitchen to open the wine she couldn’t resist turning up the sound, mindlessly finishing off the Pavlova as the coloured carousel of jockeys and horses circled at the start. Instantly she recognized Rupert’s dark blue and emerald green colours, today worn by Rupert’s longtime stable jockey Bluey Charteris, whom Rupert, spurning younger jockeys, had coaxed out of retirement to ride a special horse.
This was Lusty, a magnificent plunging liver chestnut showing a lot of white eye. Home-bred and the son of Rupert’s greatest stallion, Love Rat, Lusty had been disappointing on the flat. Once gelded, however, he had won over hurdles, but was still at five the most inexperienced horse in the race.
‘Oh!’ Etta gave a sigh of longing and took a slug of red out of the newly opened bottle, for there was Rupert himself, gimlet blue eyes narrowed, smooth Dubai tan displaying none of those wine-dark rivulets caused by years of icy winds pulverizing the veins. His thick brushed-back gold hair was hidden by a trilby tipped over his Greek nose. A covert coat emphasized the broad shoulders and long lean body. Goodness, he was heaven.
Having rudely refused to discuss his horse’s prospects with any of the press, he had taken the unusual step of going down to the start to calm Lusty. Now, with his arm round the horse’s neck, he was repeatedly smoothing his satin shoulders.
The cameras then switched to Rupert’s lovely wife Taggie, who, in a big midnight-blue hat with a feather, was biting her nails in the stands.
The horses were coming in, bunching up towards the tape, and they were off, lifted by the most exhilarating noise in the world: the Cheltenham roar. Etta turned up the volume even further to hear the Channel 4 commentary over the rattle of hurdles and the thunder of hooves on dry ground.
Three from home, Lusty was still tucked up in the back watching the leaders battling it out. Bluey unleashed him, hurtling up the field, overtaking everything. Coming up the straight, Bluey glanced back between his legs. The rest were nowhere.
‘Come on, Lusty!’ screamed Etta, as with the relief of a fox who’d shaken off the pack Lusty sauntered past the post and Cheltenham exploded, hats and race cards hurled in the air.
As two beaming red-coated huntsmen led them back past wildly cheering crowds, Bluey rose in his stirrups to punch the air with both fists and nearly got bucked off by a still fresh Lusty.
Now the cameras were on an exultant Rupert who’d loped up from the start, pumping Bluey’s hand, hugging Lusty and Lusty’s ecstatically sobbing stable lass, and the crowd erupted once more.
Rupert had mostly deserted jump racing for the flat but the punters loved him, and once again he’d delivered. Taking another celebratory slug, Etta jumped higher than Lusty, as an accusing voice cried: ‘We thought you were fetching us another bottle. Sampson’s getting very stressed, he must be due his second lot of pills and poor Basil’s still waiting for his glass of port.’
‘So sorry,’ gasped Etta.
‘And now you’ve spilled wine all over your jersey. You really ought to smarten yourself up,’ chided Blanche, grabbing the bottle and racing back to Sampson.
Scurrying after her, dripping port like drops of blood on the flagstones, Etta heard Blanche say: ‘She was drinking from the bottle and drooling over Rupert Campbell-Black, triumphalist as ever, winning some race at Cheltenham.’
‘Would you all like some coffee and we can eat your lovely chocolates?’ asked Etta nervously.
‘Not if it means you disappearing for another hour to salivate over Rupert Campbell-Black,’ snapped Sampson.
He wouldn’t bawl her out before Blanche and Basil, that would come later.
Bartlett stirred in her sleep. Etta must walk her before it got dark and the greenhouse needed watering, but Blanche and Basil were showing no signs of leaving.
Blanche was rhapsodizing over the children.
‘So good-looking – you must be so proud. So brilliant Carrie winning that High Flyer of the Year award and Martin doing so well in the marathon, he looked almost as dishy as his dad on telly.’
Basil slept.
If she had known they were coming, Etta would have arranged for Ruthie, her daily, to pop in to wash up and stay on to keep an eye on Sampson, but Ruthie had gone to her grandson’s school play. The sun was sinking, round and red like Basil, as they finally left. Feeling dreadful, knowing Sampson shouldn’t be abandoned in such a choleric mood, even with the distraction of a video of the Bahrain Grand Prix, Etta escaped to walk Bartlett.
Scuttling through drifts of white daffodils and blue scillas, past un-cut-back flower beds, through an unpruned rose walk, she reached the fields. Here she got her daily horse fix, from a lovely bay mare and her plump skewbald Shetland companion. Although they flattened their ears and nipped each other as Etta gave them chopped carrot, the two horses were utterly devoted. If parted, their anguished cries could be heard by half of Dorset.
A proper marriage, thought Etta wistfully.
Bartlett progressed slowly, her waving blond tail gathering burrs, stopping to sniff everything, leaving Etta to admire the sulphur explosion of the pussy willows and leaves escaping like green rabbit ears from the lank brown coils of the traveller’s joy. Nature had already carpeted the woodland floor with wild garlic. As she returned through the trees, she could see the faded russet towers and gables of Bluebell Hill warmed by the last fires of the sun.
‘Come on, Bartlett.’
Bartlett smiled and refused to be hurried.
Where the wood joined the garden, Etta found a sycamore blown down by the recent gales and gave a cry as she noticed that three or four bluebells, trapped beneath its trunk, had struggled out from underneath and were trying to flower. Such was their longing to bloom.
Frantically Etta tried to roll back the tree but it was too heavy. She’d get Hinton the gardener to lift it tomorrow and chop up the logs. Tomorrow she’d prune the roses.
Bartlett was snuffling smugly ahead, searching for a stick or a leaf to take home as a present for Sampson.
There was no bellowing as they entered the house, nor when Etta called out. In the drawing room, she found Sampson slumped in his wheelchair. The television was still on, with Bancroft engines roaring round the track. The telephone had fallen from Sampson’s hand. His grey, waxy, outraged face would h
aunt her for ever. And wilt thou leave me thus? He had been extinguished by a massive heart attack.
3
Martin Bancroft was sailing in the Mediterranean when he heard of his father’s death. His inconsolable grief was intensified by guilt at not having visited his father more and by the horrific realization that because Sampson, after making over so much money, had not lived the requisite seven years, his dependants would be stymied by estate duty. Both Martin and Carrie were overstretched by mortgages and expensive extension schemes in London and the country.
Martin was a shit like Sampson, but a more devious one. Although he earned enough to support his wife Romy and his children, Drummond and Poppy, he was fed up with the rat race and his sister’s success. Poised to leave the City and switch to fundraising, with a caring celebrity bias, he was much in need of capital.
Martin’s wife Romy was a beauty, with large brown eyes, lustrous dark hair and a full, deceptively generous mouth. Her athletic big-breasted figure and clear tawny skin needed little upkeep. She and Martin, who insisted on jogging hand in hand, resembled one of those bouncy couples on the label of a multi-vitamin container.
Romy, like her husband, was intensely smug and self-regarding. Unlike her sister-in-law Carrie, she was also into creative child-rearing and when asked if she worked, would reply: ‘Yes, extremely hard as the mother of two little people.’
Five-year-old Drummond, the stairlift wrecker, was an over-indulged fiend. Poppy, a four-year-old applause junkie, would interrupt any adult conversation to demand an audience for a handstand or ‘Alla Turca’ thumped out on the piano. Both children lived on absurdly healthy food. Juice was a rarity, chocolate or a grain of salt had never passed their lips.
Martin had a handsome oblong face, dark hair slicked back from a smooth, untroubled forehead, and a loud, hearty laugh instead of a sense of humour.
Both he and Carrie had houses in London and adjoining barns in the Cotswold village of Willowwood, some eighty miles from Bluebell Hill. Sampson had bought these barns through his property company and, in some tax dodge and possibly as an act of sadism, had gifted them to Martin and Carrie knowing they disliked each other intensely.
Arriving at Bluebell Hill the morning after his father’s death, delighted to pre-empt his sister Carrie, who was hammering out some deal in the Far East, Martin found his mother ashen, staring-eyed, jersey on inside out and in total shock. Even the doctor’s reassurance that there was nothing she could have done and the heart attack must have been a complete whiteout could not comfort her.
Etta’s own heart sank when she saw Martin had brought Romy and the children, who whooped off round the house.
‘We thought you’d need your family round you, Mother,’ said Martin. ‘Tell us what happened.’
‘And left Dad by himself!’ cried Romy in horror a minute later. ‘But he was supposed never to be unattended.’
‘I know,’ whispered Etta, ‘but Blanche and Basil stayed so late, and I had to get Bartlett out before dark.’
‘Always putting animals first,’ reproved Martin. ‘Has anyone rung Blanche?’
Etta started in terror at the imperious bleep of the stairlift.
‘Sampson,’ she gasped, darting towards the door, ‘you mustn’t use it on your own. It’s simply not safe.’
Outside she found Drummond sailing calmly up the stairs.
‘How did Grampy get up to heaven without his stairlift?’ he asked.
Martin immediately commandeered the telephone: ‘Yes, it’s Father, I’m afraid – a massive cardiac arrest.’
Having rung lawyers and financial advisers and ascertained there was nothing they could do, even though Sampson would only have had to live another year, Martin and Romy’s resentment hardened towards Etta.
They also spent a lot of time blocking calls of sympathy. ‘I’m afraid Mother’s too much in shock to talk.’
Ably assisted by Drummond, they then wandered round Bluebell Hill, tempering their grief as they assessed the value of pictures and furniture and, while claiming to be searching for ‘mementos of Dad’ to put in their funeral orations, decided what pieces they wanted. Their barn in Willowwood cried out for large furniture.
Bartlett, who picked up vibes, was desperately concerned about Etta. When Ruthie, Etta’s daily, gave her the lamb bone from yesterday’s lunch, Bartlett left it in her basket and came back to comfort Etta, nudging her and laying a soft golden paw on her knee.
Bartlett had also been fond of Sampson. As soon as the men in black suits took his body away in a zipped-up bag, she had heaved herself on to Sampson’s bed and growled at Romy when she tried to shoo her off.
Drummond proceeded to tease Bartlett, plunging fingers like four-point plugs into her eyes and nose, trying to tug her off by her arthritic legs until Bartlett bit him, drawing blood. Whereupon Romy, who believed any atrocity on animals was permissible if it benefited mankind, made a fearful scene and demanded Bartlett be put down.
4
Carrie Bancroft, square-jawed and hefty like Sampson, was not as good-looking as her brother Martin. Tough and aggressive, having witnessed her father bullying her mother, she herself bullied people, particularly women. In the office, she was known as ‘Carrie On Bitching’, although what is called character in men is often described as being a bitch in women. Carrie was brilliant at hedge funds – Etta still couldn’t work out what they were – and the managing director of a very large company. Still steeped in the yuppy ethos of her youth, she rose at five when she was in England, spent token quality time with her teenage daughter Trixie, who was invariably asleep, and jogged to the gym before spending an eighteen-hour day at her desk. After breaking off to dine or go to the opera with clients, she would return to work.
At the office, Carrie insisted on being called by her maiden name. Her charming, dissolute husband, Alan Macbeth, was referred to as ‘Mr Carrie Bancroft’ (his wife, because of her back-stabbing qualities, was ‘Lady Macbeth’).
Furious to be trapped in Hong Kong while her brother Martin would no doubt be pulling a fast one, Carrie arrived the following day by helicopter, for which she would later claim expenses from the Trust. She found Martin still commandeering the telephone.
‘Where’s Alan? He’s turned off his mobile,’ she demanded, chucking down her briefcase.
‘Rang and said he was coming down later,’ said Martin acidly. ‘He was always a tower of jelly in a crisis.’
Carrie’s lips tightened. ‘He’s interviewing some monk up at Fountains Abbey for his book on depression. How’s Mother?’
‘Off the wall, in the kitchen.’
Etta, who’d woken five times in the night only to find there was no longer any Sampson to turn, had leapt out of bed dripping with sweat, terrified his breakfast wouldn’t be ready on time.
Carrie found her mother mindlessly stirring porridge in the kitchen, gazing at bumblebees glutting themselves on the winter honeysuckle. She had odd shoes on her feet.
‘I am so sorry, darling.’ Etta tried to hug Carrie, who shook her off.
‘Don’t, you’ll get me going.’
‘You must be tired. Would you like to lie down or have some breakfast?’
‘I’ll have Dad’s porridge since you’re making it,’ said Carrie, then, as Martin and Romy joined them: ‘Where’s Dad’s body?’
‘In the Chapel of Rest,’ replied Martin. ‘I spent most of yesterday afternoon with the undertakers. They were delightful but by the time I’d filled in all the forms, organized the service, the cars, the coffin and the music, I could have been dead myself.’ He laughed heartily.
‘We decided on a wickerwork basket instead of a coffin,’ he went on. ‘Romy’s offered to decorate it with flowers. She’s so artistic.’
‘Won’t that look a bit cheap?’ snapped Carrie.
‘Certainly not.’
Etta stopped stirring the porridge and, with a rare surge of dissent, cried, ‘Sampson should have a proper coffin. Oak or yew. He deserves one.
’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin crushingly. ‘Dad wanted to save the planet and you know how he hated wasting money. Now if he’d lived longer …’
‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Etta.
‘You’re burning that porridge,’ said Carrie.
Having topped up a bowlful with treacle and cream, she dragged Martin into Sampson’s office.
‘Is there nothing to be done?’
‘Nothing.’
It took Martin and Carrie only five minutes to work out that ravishing Bluebell Hill would have to be sold to pay the massive estate duty. Sampson, like many philanderers, had been unable to bear the thought of his friends moving in on Etta. Aware of her hopelessly generous nature, he hated the idea of her squandering his inheritance on lame ducks and had handed everything over to Martin and Carrie with the proviso they looked after their mother.
By the afternoon, Carrie had conjured up an estate agent who valued the house at between three and four million.
‘If it’s going to reach top whack, we should get all those rails, stairlifts and hoists out of the house,’ mused Martin.
He and Carrie had also in their peregrinations noticed herbaceous borders dark brown with un-cut-back plants, sculptures hidden by overgrown shrubs and trees, ground elder on the rampage, and agreed the romantic garden was too much for Etta.
Their mother was clearly over the top, rushing around making beds, cooking for everyone, trying to answer the letters of sympathy that poured in: writing three times to some people, chucking other letters in the wastepaper basket still in their envelopes.
‘Get some cards printed, Mother,’ ordered Martin, ‘then you can top and tail them.’
Drummond, meanwhile, trailed after his mother assessing loot: ‘If you have the Rossetti, can I have the stairlift and the reclining chair?’
While Carrie worked on her BlackBerry, Martin was kept very busy planning the funeral. If they held it at three, they could get away with canapés, sandwiches, cake and champagne, just a glass, and lots of interesting teas, which he and Romy had discovered on a visit to China. Then they wouldn’t have to provide people with lunch.