Robin has crossed a stretch of garden already familiar to Grant, who recognizes the dull gleam of a pool and in the middle of it a patch of shadow that is the small crouching Nereid with the empty shell. There is a criss-cross of paths beneath his feet, but they are overgrown and in the faint light largely indistinguishable. The surrounding hedge, gapped and irregular, shows as a mere silhouette; it might be a scattered crowd standing immobile round some nocturnal ball game. Through one of the gaps Robin vanishes and Grant follows. For a moment he distinguishes nothing but blobs of deeper darkness in a general gloom; for another moment he is startled by a sense of living presences all about him; and then it suddenly comes to him that his whole adventure must be a dream. It is a new solution, simple and comprehensive, and he is massively surrounded by evidence not otherwise to be interpreted. He has come to a halt beside an elephant; a hippopotamus is facing him; and beyond that looms a motionless giraffe. The forms are exaggerated and monstrous, but there is no mistaking them; his dream has brought him to a circus or menagerie, and in a moment he will wake up. Grant stretches out a hand to the elephant’s trunk and finds that he is grasping leaves. He is in the topiary garden which – as Miss Candleshoe has explained – the children care for; they have transformed the shapes prescriptive in such a place into creatures that more engage their juvenile fancy. The notion of a dream must be abandoned. Here, in a special sense, is an enchanted wood, a grotesque metamorphosis of the plants. And amid these slumbering vegetable monsters or beyond them, it is his business to find the boy called Robin.
Grant advances. The creatures about him are mere roughly shaped masses. But they are done with the sure sense possessed by children for the nature of material and for essential form; and in the darkness this makes them entirely alive. No doubt the obscure presence of danger helps.
In the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear !
But here bushes are bears. Shakespeare slips into Grant’s head only to slip rapidly out again – for suddenly he grasps a new fact. Endeavouring to follow Robin, he is himself being followed. He cannot tell by what sensory channel this knowledge comes to him. But he is suddenly so vividly possessed of it that he swings round like a man expecting a blow. Only the absurd menagerie is to be seen, its members standing improbably at gaze each with another.
Mythology has been admitted, for Grant finds himself looking at a centaur. The upper part of the centaur moves. It is some common four-footed creature, with a man slinking away from behind it. As Grant marks this, he feels a hand pluck at his sleeve and hears a low warning hiss. Robin, while making his own reconnaissance, has been keeping an eye on Jay’s dubiously useful recruit. Grant sees that this is the situation, and he lets himself be guided silently from the topiary garden and into a narrow walk between high hedges.
‘They’ve come, all right.’ Robin whispers this grimly but with distinguishable satisfaction. ‘We’d better cut back to the house.’
Grant agrees. He has left his mother to the sole companionship of childhood and dotage in what has turned out to be, really and truly, an unknown degree of hazard. The first thing to do is to rejoin her in the security of Candleshoe. For the house does, he feels, represent security – at any rate in some degree. It is a rambling and tottering old place, but he has little doubt that Jay has given much thought to constituting it a fairly effective fortress.
There is turf beneath their feet and they break into a run; at the end of the alley they plunge into a shrubbery and move forward warily. Grant guesses that they have rounded the house and are approaching it by the rear; he sees that, as they move, Robin is thinking out a route that shall keep them steadily in shadow.
He feels his arm gripped. The boy has come to a halt and is pointing – is pointing out into clear moonlight. Grant sees a small overgrown terrace beyond which the ground seems to fall away. On this a man is standing, facing away from them. He holds an electric torch at arm’s length above his head and lets its beam circle slowly in air. The movement irresistibly suggests a summons, a command to gather. Grant likes it less than anything he has yet seen.
They have moved on, and a moment later the house looms before them. They skirt a wall, are in some cold, sunken place, have come to a halt in almost complete darkness. Grant hears the boy beside him tap cautiously on a wooden surface. A moment later there is a creak somewhere overhead on their left. He guesses that a window has softly opened, glances upward, and sees or imagines he sees the glint of an arrowhead, the gleam of a drawn bow.
‘Christmas at Candleshoe.’
The words are breathed in darkness, bolts are drawn back, and he and Robin tumble into a flagged lamplit passage. Archers face them as Jay closes the door and shoots the bolts back home. Jay’s pallor is greater than before; his lips are compressed; his dark eyes blaze with excitement. ‘They’ve come?’
Grant answers. ‘They’ve come all right – whoever they are. And now you must tell me, Jay. You must tell me the whole thing.’
9
It was the custom of Lord Arthur Spendlove when stopping at Benison Court to reclaim from time to time what had been an important privilege of childhood – that of climbing to the roof at sunset and lowering his father’s standard from its staff. On our particular evening – for the narrative upon which we are engaged will not carry us on to another – it was at a somewhat earlier hour than usual that he addressed himself to this mild ritual performance. The day had been a bumper one; they were still counting the stacks of notes and piles of silver at the turnstiles; presently a grand total would be arrived at and conveyed with some ceremony to the Marquess. From this and from the locking-up of the ‘takings’ – the word delighted his father – Arthur Spendlove found that he was willing to dispense himself. So he made his climb to the leads not long after the last char-à-banc had departed, and prepared to spend a contemplative half-hour with the face of nature as it appeared from that lofty station.
But from the roof of Benison the natural world shows much as does the Atlantic ocean from the deck of the Queen Mary. It is there – but at some remove, and with every appearance of respectful subjection. This appearance may be in both cases delusive; and Arthur Spendlove’s consciousness of something of the sort made him frown as he glanced over the bleak immensity of Benison as this aspect revealed it. At some time or other an idle marquess had made a half-hearted attempt to ornament this sterile world of slate and lead, and had set up a proliferation of large stone objects – compounded, it might seem, from the mingled ideas of the urn, the acorn, and the pineapple – wherever an adequately supporting surface could be achieved. These meaningless embellishments, which a score of masons must have chipped at for a livelihood for months on end, jostled with chimneystacks, skylights, trapdoors, and a complicated system of wooden ladders and guide-rails which had been run up for fire-watching purposes during the war. Round the perimeter of the building it was possible to take a brisk walk of just under half-a-mile, varied by occasional climbs from one level to another. This form of exercise Arthur Spendlove no longer favoured, but he did upon this occasion stroll some way down the east wing, pausing eventually to gaze with whimsical concern at a long line of concealed attic windows thus exposed. They represented the last addition ever made to Benison, and were just under fifty years old. For it had been Arthur’s grandfather who, in a fit of eccentric benevolence, had presented his twenty senior maidservants with windows instead of skylights – and even with a bathroom to share between them. The windows remained, but the rooms behind them were uninhabited – unless indeed it were by ghosts too undistinguished to be mentioned to his father’s tourists. Arthur liked to take a glance at these windows – forlorn and vain concession to the march of time – before turning to gaze at the unchanging lineaments of rural England.
He gazed now. The scene was not, after all, quite unchanged. Straight in front of him his mother’s flourishing poultry-farm spread over the broad paddocks once reserved for the hunters. Since the
western arm of Benison Wood had gone, more could be seen of Benison Magna – and there was more of it to see, a rash of small red buildings on the higher ground beyond the old town. Benison Parva had always been full in view; you could make out the village school to which his grandfather, in another spasm of democratic feeling, had despatched his father every day for a whole month – with a footman and a groom in attendance. Arthur Spendlove let his eye travel here and there. There was little ground, in the nearer prospect at least, of which he did not know every yard. And even in the farthest distance he knew just where the villages, the manor houses, the farms lay. For a minute longer he stood beside the flagstaff, naming the places one by one. Kerpen House was still shut up: those people clung to London like Cockneys. You could see that old Colonel Riskey had given his little box of a place a coat of white paint. The gable east of the low church-tower of Abbot’s Benison belonged to the house built by what’s-his-name – a draper or ironmonger, surely, and now the local MP. And on the other side, just distinguishable… Arthur Spendlove frowned, then chuckled. How ever could he forget that? Candleshoe, of course – the cradle of the family. He must ask his father if the rum old lady was still alive.
He hauled down the flag. As he did so he heard the hum of an engine, and went to peer over the apex of the great pediment immediately before him. One of his father’s cars had drawn up before the main entrance and somebody had got out. A footman was hoisting a suitcase from the boot. Arthur glanced at his watch. Somebody arrived by the London train. There were half-a-dozen visitors at Benison already, and his father hadn’t mentioned that another was expected… He folded the flag, dropped it into its locker, and turned to re-enter the house.
Lord Scattergood was at the door of the small, strategically placed room from which he conducted domestic business. Seeing his son come down the great staircase, he waved a slip of paper in triumphant summons and disappeared within. Arthur followed and found that his mother was there too; she sat in a window-seat and was engaged in removing burrs from an Old English sheepdog. Lord Scattergood again waved his paper. ‘A very good day. Fifty-seven pounds fifteen shillings more than last week.’
Lady Scattergood looked up. ‘Fifty-nine.’
Lord Scattergood picked up a pencil. ‘Fifty-nine? I could swear–’
‘Fifty-nine burrs on Brown.’
Brown uttered a low woofing sound. He was always gratified on hearing his own name, despite its humble associations.
‘It’s not bad going, even when you make deductions for wear and tear. And, of course, it is educative.’ The Marquess seemed to challenge his son to deny this gratifying consideration. ‘Lets one fellow see how another fellow lives.’
‘Or lived.’ Arthur walked over to Brown, disentangled an ear and tugged it. ‘This creature’, he said affectionately, ‘looks more and more like a filthy old grey rug, with some appearance of animation deriving from the presence of unspeakable things crawling about beneath.’ He turned to his father. ‘You know that this game is all nonsense?’
Lady Scattergood raised her head. ‘Surely not all nonsense, Arthur? In your father’s ideas I have always been able – well, to feel something shining through. There has always been a gleam. Don’t you agree?’
‘Possibly so. There is something to be said for hanging on, without a doubt. In three or four years’ time – well, one just doesn’t know. Circumstances may change, feelings may change – and with them the whole drift of social legislation. Brown’s day may be over.’
‘Brown’s day over?’ The Marchioness was dismayed. ‘Brown’s and Jones’ and Robinson’s. It’s excessively unlikely. But, as I say, one just doesn’t know. So there is something to be said for living from hand to mouth.’
‘I’m very glad to hear you say so, my boy.’ Lord Scattergood was delighted. ‘In point of fact, I have one or two plans maturing now. One of them is maturing here at this moment – I suppose in a hot bath. That is to say, if they go in for that sort of thing.’
Arthur looked suspiciously at his father. ‘If who go in for what sort of thing?’
‘Connoisseurs for baths. I’ve asked a fellow called Rosenwald for the weekend, and he arrived a few minutes ago. From Rome.’
‘A man called Rosenwald has come all the way from Rome to spend a weekend at Benison?’ Arthur shook his head. ‘It sounds too like old times to be true.’
‘There will be a small fee.’
Lady Scattergood was startled. ‘You mean this man is going to pay?’
‘Certainly not, my dear.’ The Marquess was really shocked. ‘We haven’t gone into the hotel business yet, I am thankful to say. This fellow Rosenwald gets the fee. And his fare.’
Lady Scattergood parted the curtain of hair hanging over Brown’s nose and gazed thoughtfully into the creature’s seldom-revealed eyes. ‘I should pay him only from Hamburg. It seems more suitable, with a name like that. And why does he get a fee?’
‘For making an expertise.’ Lord Scattergood was solemn. ‘That, it seems, is the technical term. It means that he will find buyers for both Titians, and possibly for the two Velasquez portraits as well.’
Arthur Spendlove sat down abruptly. He possessed neither knowledge nor love of the fine arts in any marked degree, but he felt both startled and shocked. For a long time, indeed, he had been convinced that these and other family treasures should go. But the revelation that the cold wind of sober fact in such matters had at last penetrated the thick garments of his father’s comfortable illusions was formidable. ‘You’ve really made up your mind to sell?’
‘Certainly. The right moment has come.’ Lord Scattergood was very serious. ‘It’s much as with timber, you know. Or as it is with livestock. Recall how I found the psychological moment for parting with the Aberdeen Angus herd. I have an instinct that it’s like that with Titian now. And probably with Velasquez as well.’
Arthur frowned. ‘It’s no more than so many square feet of canvas gone from the walls. But we’ll feel it as the deuce of a gap.’
‘Of course more must be laid down.’
Arthur stared. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It came to me not long ago that what one does with wine one ought to be doing with pictures and everything of that sort as well. Your mother must go round and pick things up. The same sort of thing, you know – but done by young fellows today. Nymphs and goddesses and portraits of bigwigs. We’ll hang ’em up in place of the Titians and whatnot. And – mark my words, my boy – in a couple of hundred years they’ll have matured out of all recognition. Given a century or two, the octagon room would do wonders for any picture.’
Arthur had heard his father assert much the same thing about the Benison cellars in relation to port. ‘There may be something in what you say. But who is this Rosenwald, and how does he go to work?’
‘He may come from Rome.’ Lady Scattergood had her own problem. ‘But is it from a shop, or from a museum? I mean, is he to have his meals–’
‘My dear Grace, he is our guest – decidedly our guest. I understand him to be a private gentleman, who has become a great authority on his subject. I understand that he advises the Pope and a number of other respectable people who have these Titians and so forth on their hands. And his method of going to work is admirable. The buyer pays for the expertise. Rosenwald inspects the paintings – although of course he has seen them before – and then approaches his man. He explains that there is a chance – just a chance, you know, and extravagant hopes must not be entertained – that if he were authorized to negotiate with me–’
‘I seem to have met expertise before – but I didn’t know that was the name for it.’ Arthur got up and opened the door for his mother, for a low-toned bell had begun to sound through Benison. ‘It sounds as if the fellow will need a bath after the transaction as well. When does he inspect?’
‘I thought we might all go up after dinner in a perfectly informal way, taking the Fernalls and the Crespignys and the L’Estranges along with us. It seems that Rosenw
ald likes these things to begin quite casually as a result of his having chanced to be stopping here or there with people of our sort.’
‘What revolting rot.’ Arthur gave the Old English sheepdog a prod, and it moved shapelessly from the room like an enormous decayed chrysanthemum. ‘What advantage can he get from a sort of charade played out before dreary people like…’
‘Arthur, my dear.’ Lady Scattergood was mildly reproving.
‘Very well, Mother, very well. But Brown must come too.’
‘Brown, Arthur?’
‘Yes, indeed. Isn’t he the last of us to know how to live with any dignity in this unfortunate house?’
10
It was early evident to his host – as also to the Fernalls, the Crespignys, and the L’Estranges – that Dr Rosenwald was a person of high distinction in the distant world from whence he came. He spoke with whimsical affection of the Pope, praised the claret, and described modestly but in some detail the little house – already a gem even amid the sequestered villas of the Brianza – around which, for the solace of his retirement, he was slowly creating a giardinetto tagliato in the antique Sienese style. Lord Scattergood, listening to this silken old person’s evocation of the severities of composition involved, felt that Benison, where not a garden but an entire landscape had been made to order, must be a shockingly tasteless and extravagant place. The Fernalls, who were accustomed to spend a fortnight of the year with an aunt at Saltino, and who had several times under the superintendence of that lady surveyed the antiquities of Florence, were conscious of a just superiority over the Crespignys, whose acquaintance with the continent was virtually confined to the city of Paris and the more hazardous parts of Switzerland. Mrs L’Estrange, since she had artistic interests and was painted almost every year for the purpose of being exhibited at Burlington House, felt it due to herself to offer some remarks on Leonardo da Vinci. Her opinions, it turned out, were of quite amazing delicacy and penetration; Dr Rosenwald, picking them up as they were delivered – somewhat embryonically, it is true – from her lips, developed them into an elaborate and felicitous discourse upon contrapposto and chiaroscuro. This continued until the ladies had withdrawn, whereupon Dr Rosenwald, easily accommodating himself to the interests of the barbarians around him, fell to patronizing the port. Lord Scattergood, who had for some years been constrained to drink wood port except upon the very highest occasions, took even this in good part. As a salesman, Dr Rosenwald struck him as being incontrovertibly in the very highest flight. With an unwonted exercise of imagination, he pictured the excellent creature putting on just such a turn as this for some tremendous American millionaire – and all in the interest of the Spendlove pictures. It was in high good humour that he presently suggested picking up the womenfolk again and proceeding to the octagon room at once.
Christmas at Candleshoe Page 9