It happened in the present private affair. Some further months went by, and at the end of them Mr Rich himself proved, rather unexpectedly, to have been addressing his mind to the same problem as was confronting the ladies. The vicar was conceivably a self-indulgent man to a degree a little beyond the average. But he was also a conscientious parent: a character in which he has already been exhibited in those early anxieties in the field of female education. It was his slow discovery that he was sacrificing his daughter to his own domestic ease. The germ of this perception had come to him when Charles Gaston had inadvertently half-revealed to him the fact of his having made Penelope that offer of marriage. Mr Rich found himself disappointed rather than relieved when nothing further seemed to have come of this, and it appeared to him that he himself must be a factor in Penelope’s hanging back. He had to conclude that his dependence on his daughter, domestically and as a helpmeet in his parochial labours, must be where the impediment lay, and he saw that to rectify this state of affairs there was a clear instrument close to his hand: in the room with him, in fact, as often as Mrs Martin visited the vicarage. After long deliberation, therefore, he took the plunge. He held a serious conversation with the chosen lady, and at its close found that he had specifically proposed that rational and (it was to be hoped) mutually agreeable arrangement over which Mrs Martin had been hesitating, as she knew, too long. The marriage was to take place, and Penelope thereby to be released into some vaguely conceived larger world – this perhaps under the superintendence of the useful and reliable Dora Quillinan.
As with many rational schemes designed to operate within the obscure field of the human heart, the result didn’t quite answer to expectation. Perhaps this was in part because the actual sequence of events was not as Dora had envisaged it. More significantly, Penelope saw what was going on, and took no particular pleasure in the idea that rescue work was in hand. She had been doing everything that her situation required uncomplainingly and efficiently, and she was humiliated by the thought that she had perhaps been betraying any sense of frustration or hankering after a different manner of life. Moreover the notion of a job (which she divined as intended to bring her into promising contact with eligible suitors) was slow to mature. Some sort of preliminary secretarial training there would have to be, which would be almost like going back to school. So all that happened for some time was that Penelope lived on as the second, rather than the first, lady of the vicarage. The situation was reasonably harmonious, but it could be that without being entirely comfortable, all the same.
And then there occurred the first event in Penelope’s life justly to be described as strange to the point of amazement. Fulke Ferneydale died abroad after what appeared to have been a fairly long illness. His will, when its contents were revealed, held nothing unusual in any major regard. To his wife, Sophie Ferneydale, whether because of some estrangement or not, he left little: a disposition of things not particularly out of the way, since Sophie was a rich woman in her own right. The bulk of his fortune was held in trust for his son, Silvan. There were various minor bequests. But one bequest couldn’t quite be described as that. To his sister-in-law, Penelope Ferneydale, he left a small income for life. And he left her, too, as her absolute property, his villa in France..
XI
‘But there’s nothing uncommon about it at all,’ Mrs Henry Rich said. She spoke with just that hint of patience which she had allowed herself when her pupil was being unreasonable long ago. That hadn’t been often. Reasonableness was one of Penelope’s endowments. Yet she wasn’t being altogether reasonable now. Her first reaction to the news of her unexpected inheritance was simply that she had been singled out for undeserved and undesired notoriety.
‘At least it’s ludicrous,’ she now said. ‘It makes me remember that Fulke went in for ridiculous jokes.’
‘Penelope, dear, that’s absurd. Listen to the facts. It’s hard nowadays for even a very successful writer or artist to build up a fortune – even with big cheques dropping in on him month after month. But Fulke was enough his father’s son to know just how. Living now in this country and now in that, and having advisers who knew all about what they call tax havens. I don’t say it’s edifying, but it’s the way of that sort of world. And you see, although they were so different in temperament, he and Caspar were fond of one another. And Caspar had made no money at all out of thinking and writing of a much more serious sort than Fulke’s. Fulke knew that; knew that his success hadn’t been at the level he had promised himself when young. Fulke wasn’t insensitive to considerations of that sort. It would be unjust to him to suppose so. Don’t you agree, Penelope?’
‘I suppose I’m prepared to – provisionally.’
‘Very well. Because of his affection for his brother—’
‘Stop, Mary—please stop.’ This was now Penelope’s manner of address to her former governess and present stepmother. ‘There’s something you don’t know. I think only Dora knows it. Fulke Ferneydale once proposed marriage to me.’
‘After proposing to be divorced by Sophie? I can’t believe it.’
‘You don’t have to. It was before Sophie, and when I was still at school. Caspar may have had an inkling of it, although I never mentioned it to him.’
‘Was that some kind of joke?’ Mrs Rich was momentarily put to a stand by this extraordinary information.
‘It was odd, but it wasn’t a joke. He was quite serious. And I think I’d been inclined to admire Fulke in a childish way. But I knew at once I wasn’t going to marry him, either there and then or later on. So I said so, and that ended it, and in time it pretty well went out of my head. You see, we never ran into one another again, and all I retained was a feeling that I had upset or mortified him surprisingly. So you see how disconcerting it makes what has happened now.’
‘I see nothing of the kind. Fulke, with all that wealth, would naturally have left something to his brother. And Caspar being dead, he would equally naturally do something for his widow, particularly if it was plain she wasn’t going to be too well off. And if long ago, and as a very young man, he’d had this strain of romantic feeling for you as a schoolgirl, that simply adds to the naturalness of his eventual bequest. I don’t think, Penelope, that there is anything you need feel strange about it.’
‘But a house in France! It’s not as if I’d ever seen the place, or owned any associations with it.’
‘That makes it a little curious, I agree. It suggests Fulke as rather prompted to direct your life. It’s as if he were saying, “Here’s something new, Penelope. Have a go at it.” ‘
‘But he has been a stranger for years and years, on no sort of terms entitling him to say anything of the sort.’
‘He was your brother-in-law. So you must go and take a look at the place, even if you decide to part with it at once. It would be almost feeble to do anything less than that.’
‘Oh, yes—I’ll go.’ Penelope hadn’t liked this. ‘At once, in fact – and perhaps see French lawyers and people.’ Penelope paused, but only for a moment, for she knew what Mrs Rich was about to suggest. ‘And alone,’ she said. ‘The best way to see it through will be that.’
To this resolution of a solitary exploration of Le Colombier Penelope stuck, even when – not unexpectedly – Dora Quillinan offered to accompany her.
‘Of course you know your way about France,’ Dora said. ‘But circumstances have taken me a bit further, and I know my way about the French. That’s a different thing from being well up in châteaux and cathedrals, and even knowing when to go for the prix fixe meal. I might save you from any number of man-traps.’
‘There certainly won’t be any of them – in one sense of the term, that is.’
‘Well, no. I don’t see you falling for a French adventurer, abounding in powers of swift and subtle seduction. But in that general direction lie my doubts about the whole thing. The house turns out to be enchanting; you fall in love with it and dig in; and not within a hundred miles of it is there going to be anyb
ody apt and fit to fall in love with you. You’ll become an expatriate old English widow, occasionally visited by elderly friends from England. It’s not what I want for you, because I know it’s not what you are and need. There! I’ve said my say.’
‘As you’re entitled to, being my oldest friend. I’ve promised Mary to go and take a look, which is only reasonable. And I want it to be without the hint of a nudge while I’m doing the looking. It’s a strange and rather daunting thing to have happened. I even feel, Dora, that there’s a mystery about it which I haven’t begun to fathom – and that I may do that best on my own. Do you see any sense in that?’
‘I do see something obscure in the whole thing. But the world is full of obscurities. You must stick to the practical issues, and I agree that you’re capable of doing that on your own. You’ve been left money, and you’ve been left a house. But what about all the stuff in it? Is that to be yours too?’
‘Yes – and it’s a part of the thing that I particularly don’t like. Mary points out that the house – which is said to be fairly modest – and the small income with it form something that might properly have gone to Caspar, and may properly go to Caspar’s widow. Sophie, who is wealthy, would be unlikely to take exception to it. But Fulke, it seems, was very much the connoisseur from the moment he had the money to set up as one. So Le Colombier may contain heaven knows what.’
‘In other words, real trouble. Sophie saying the Cézanne was really hers, and not Fulke’s to give away. And sweet little Silvan ‘
‘Sweet little Silvan must be getting on for grown-up.’
‘And Silvan is prepared to swear that yes, it had always been known to be that. Not nice at all, I agree. But you could just gracefully cede anything in dispute. And we know that Fulke owned several places grander than Le Colombier, and that Sophie is in the enjoyment of one of them now. Le Colombier was a working retreat, so far as I can make out. Fulke would keep his showing-off things in his show places.’
‘I’d expect that a writer or artist would have his most beautiful and cherished things beside him where he worked. And not, say, on board some glossy yacht in which he went cruising in off times with a gaggle of bounders and high-class tarts.’
‘Well, yes.’ Dora Quillinan glanced at her friend with some curiosity. ‘You resent – don’t you? – Fulke’s stupidly dissipated life. It’s a kind of loyalty, that. Yet you last had words with him when you were seventeen. How odd we are! Human beings in general, I mean.’
‘He was the first person I ever knew whom the world knew about too. But only when I was a half-baked adolescent. After that I did really and truly clear him out of my head, even despite that old irresponsible proposal of his. So I agree that fussing over this bequest is a little on the unreasonable side.’
‘Well, Penelope, off you go. And I’d drive myself there, if I were you. It doesn’t seem a region of France particularly easy to fly to, and you have a perfectly good car eating its head off there in the garage. France is nice for driving in. There’s a sense of space and freedom about it, particularly if you keep to the quiet Departmental roads. You’ll arrive already feeling in control of the situation. And one other piece of advice, my dear. If you positively take against Le Colombier, don’t go straight to the nearest estate agent and flog it there and then. Any piece of house property – and especially in what is becoming something of a rich man’s holiday area – is under present conditions a far more permanent asset than a big lump of francs cash down.’
So Penelope packed a suitcase and drove to Southampton a couple of days later. The channel-ferry failed to afford a promising start. She was old enough to remember the small groups of polite children on such vessels in process of undergoing exchange with appropriately selected families abroad. These had now been superseded by hordes of gang-like teen-agers, ceaselessly hallooing as they charged and jostled from stem to stern. They represented, it appeared, a sizeable proportion of the juvenile population of some English town ‘twinned’ with a French one to which they were proceeding en masse for cultural purposes. There were also juke-boxes and fruit-machines, as well as a place where you could play a primitive form of roulette. She had to queue to buy a ticket entitling her to queue for a meal.
Nothing of all this did Penelope take to or find fun. She had escaped growing up as a prig, let alone as a snob, but her instincts and habits were yet on the fastidious side. She had, she told herself, the vicarage on her back, and always would have. She was quite as old as her years and probably a good deal older – certainly too old to be facing with any sense of positive pleasure the total unknown of a house in the Dordogne called Le Colombier. Yet the name, at least, was reassuring. There was a dovecot at Mallows Hall, and she had always found it a most peaceful spot.
The two long days’ driving were reassuring too, much as Dora had foretold. There were many things she knew nothing about, and one of them was the kind of regard in which a solitary female motorist would be held. This particular dubiety – doubtless an inheritance, again, from her father’s archaic way of conceiving such matters – didn’t survive her first stopping for petrol, and had become absurd by the time she foraged for, and consumed by the roadside, her first picnic lunch. She hadn’t forgotten a corkscrew, and opening her first half-bottle of wine was an exhilarating experience. She spent the night at Amboise, and wandered around it till it grew dark, full of naïve wonderments. How strange that some people should have lived in that towering château while others cowered in troglodyte dwellings excavated in steeply sloping hills or near-cliffs, and still advertised their doing so with brightly painted front-doors and flower patches outside. How odd that a municipality lining the majestic Loire should conceive that an additional charm to their scene was achieved by vapid music piped to every street corner. How odder still that Leonardo da Vinci should have taken it into his head to die here. Strangest of all was the gargantuan fountain presented by Max Ernst to Michel Debré, and by Debré (expeditiously, one supposed) to this unoffending town – the inhabitants of which, not being given to the mouvement surréaliste, had promptly vandalised it in the most atrocious manner.
Sated with these curiosities, Penelope dined on carrot and potato soup, truite au Vouvray, and another half-bottle of wine. Then on the next morning the great straight roads received her, with just occasionally those tricky twists and turns through little towns bewilderingly provided with sign-posts to everywhere except the next town to which one wants to go. But these were difficulties not hard to overcome once she had found that very decent French still lurked at the back of her mind. Eventually she arrived at one small town where business had to be transacted. She found an office of indefinite character – a lawyer’s, she supposed – in which she was received with considerable respect. Keys were handed to her by the principal functionary in the place, but with what she felt as an obscure intimation that this was a formality only, and that she would have no immediate need to sort out which was which. With marked ceremony, too, she was escorted back to her car, so that she drove off with the sense that Fulke Ferneydale had been judged a man of mark in this district at large.
The road became narrower and winding, skirting wooded slopes through which she had glimpses of water not far below. Then what she knew to be the Vézère and the Dordogne joined their streams almost under her wheels; the road rose steeply above the augmented flood; she knew that Le Colombier now lay only a few kilometres ahead. This was Penelope’s first moment of panic, and she had to tell herself sternly that nothing irrevocable was happening to her. She had been more to Fulke Ferneydale than she realised, and he had made her a handsome present as a posthumous token of the fact. His way of life had been totally remote from hers; it had become one in which a great deal of wealth floated around, and in which people floated with it, and would find nothing remarkable in inheriting under some friend’s will a little house in the middle of France. To feel panic was absurd. A lively curiosity was what ought to be commanding her.
Penelope had just told he
rself this when she found that any curiosity she did command was about to be gratified. Straight before her, at a corner of the road, the words ‘Le Colombier’ were repeated on white wooden posts on either side of a white wooden gate. The gate stood open. Penelope braked, swung her wheel, and in an instant had exchanged ground which was the property of nobody in particular for ground which was the property of herself alone. In a suitcase in the boot of her car were documents that she knew attested the fact in the most incontrovertible manner. The sudden sense of possession which came upon her as she made a cautious and rather bumpy progress up a short drive in indifferent repair took her by surprise. With the exceptions of a room of her own, and books of her own, and unspectacular sums of money trickling into a bank, the notion of proprietorship of any sort had been alien to her. Now there was this. For she had turned a final bend, and Le Colombier was before her.
What she was first aware of was the structure from which the house took its name. The dovecot was evidently of great antiquity, beautiful in itself, and so massive as an assertion of manorial privilege that it must have been the appurtenance of a château, long since vanished, in which dwelt whole armies of retainers passionately addicted to the consumption of pigeon pie. Since then, but unobtrusively, the high conical building appeared to have been transformed into living quarters of a modest sort, since here and there glazed windows had replaced the tunnel-like apertures appropriate to its original denizens. Penelope wondered whether Fulke had turned it into an ultimate sanctum for his literary labours. Then she drove on to look at the house itself. She saw that it was quite modern, although designed after the traditional domestic architecture of the region. She saw, too, that there was nothing showy about it; that it had been contrived, in fact, to look a good deal less spacious than it probably was. The north front, at which she was looking now, would have been a blank brick wall had it not been pierced in the centre by a handsome doorway, beside which hung a bell-rope accompanied by a board carrying the brusque instruction, Sonnez ici. Above broad eaves there could just be discerned, as if peering cautiously down at visitors, a line of dormer windows. Le Colombier’s unassumingness evidently extended to the possession of no more than an attic type of second storey.
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