Penelope, who had got out of her car, presumed it would be pointless to ring the bell, no caretaking person having been mentioned to her. So she walked round an angle of the house, and discovered that it was without a regular garden of any sort. What surrounded it was a generous parterre of ancient stone; beyond this, and broken only by the drive, was a wide circle of well-tended lawn; and beyond this a yet wider cincture of unmown but not untended grass: this last displaying such an abundance of wild flowers as triumphantly to assert that Nature can be her own gardener with only the hint of a helping hand. Further off lay woodland on every side. But from a broad terrace shaded with abundant vines which ran the entire length of the south front of the house a vista had been created through the nearer trees, while those in the middle distance dipped, as in a deep natural saucer beyond which, far below, was a glimpse of the Dordogne itself: of the Dordogne and a vast champain of cultivated land finally lost amid the blueness of a range of far-off hills.
So this was Le Colombier, her strange inheritance.
XII
But the house itself was yet to be explored, and Penelope turned back to it now. The ground floor presented a long row of identical French windows, and at first all of them appeared to be shuttered. This might well be a normal practice on a hot summer afternoon, but on the present occasion was presumably due to the fact that the dwelling was unoccupied. She felt in her handbag for the bunch of keys she had been given, but as she did so became aware that one of the shutters and the French window behind it were only half-closed. So there, at its eastern end, one could walk straight into the house. For a moment Penelope was alarmed. Nothing had been made clearer to her than the substantial isolation of Le Colombier. It stood, indeed, only a couple of hundred yards from the quiet country road on which its unassuming entrance gate lay, but on every other hand stretched empty woodland which was now hers alone. The nearest dwelling must be half a mile away.
And now she recalled that conversation with Dora Quillinan, only half-serious, about Le Colombier’s being conceivably a small treasure-house of collector’s pieces of this and that. The villa was a sitting target for burglary – and perhaps there were burglars in it now. But she was already advancing upon the single window when she recalled that slight suggestion she had been given that the keys were not of essential present utility after all. So perhaps there was some sort of femme de charge in residence, or at least somebody sent in for the day to make reasonable provision for her arrival. Taking courage from these speculations, she walked straight up to the open window, and entered the house.
She was in a large room, furnished, as she sensed at once, with considerable elegance, but oddly and confusingly lit by the single bar of strong sunlight behind her. Yet this was enough to show her that the room was not untenanted. Near its centre a young man was standing before an easel, and he swung round and confronted her now.
‘Oh, hello,’ the young man said in English. ‘I’ve just been monkeying around with edges in an odd light. Op art, I suppose they’d call it. Purely academic, and not my sort of thing at all.’ He paused for a moment, as if realising that this, if informative, was scarcely adequate to the situation. ‘I say,’ he went on, ‘you’re not Penelope, are you? But of course you are! I knew you were coming, but didn’t know it would be so soon. Let’s have more light on the state of the case.’ This remark was intended in a literal sense, since the young man rapidly pushed back two pairs of shutters and filled the room with sunshine.
‘Yes,’ Penelope said, ‘I am certainly Mrs Ferneydale.’
‘That’s splendid. Welcome to Le Colombier. I think you’ll find all quiet, and everything ship-shape. Although it was only a couple of days ago that I had to repel boarders.’
‘Boarders?’ Penelope managed no more than this stupid echo because considerably taken up by the appearance and the implications of this strange young man. He was much younger than herself, and very good-looking. Penelope believed herself to be rather prejudiced against good-looking men, and particularly against that odd sub-species among these to whom ‘beautiful’ was an applicable term. This youth was certainly beautiful, and was certainly going to remain handsome. She was also inclined to dislike male persons in whom a marked ease of manner and conversation too rapidly made itself apparent. So she ought not to have been attracted by this unexpected and so-far anonymous intruder upon her property. The situation, however, wasn’t working like that. It was all rather surprising. But she found herself much disposed to accord it the provisional benefit of a doubt.
‘Just that. Pirates, you might say. Tiresome Sophie, with her Silvan in tow. A hulking great brute, isn’t he?’
‘I’ve never met Silvan Ferneydale.’
‘Then you haven’t missed much. They simply rang the bell – Sonnez ici, you know – and demanded the picture.’
‘Not the Cézanne?’ Penelope was recalling again that recent conversation with Dora.
‘The Modigliani. Silvan declared it to be the property of his Mum, and actually made to take it from the wall. That just couldn’t be put up with, and I had to deal with him a shade roughly. No, Penelope, I’m not romancing – slender of frame though you see me to be. Just a spot of karate, followed by something that tends rapidly to hurt quite a lot. Finally I let him bolt howling, with Mum behind him. They haven’t a shadow of a legal claim, you know, so we shan’t have any nonsense from them again. And now sit down. I’m going to make you some tea.’
Penelope sat down. She had received an instruction, and had obeyed it. This in itself required thinking about. Who was this young man, and what was his function? He was at least to some extent conversant with Ferneydale family affairs, and it had been without any effect of impertinence or presumption that he had addressed her by her Christian name. Was he perhaps a Ferneydale of sorts himself – a kind of cousin of her own, for instance, born on the wrong side of one of Fulke’s innumerable blankets? Or was his connection with Fulke merely of a professional kind, which had nevertheless taken on a friendly and intimate character? Her thought had gone a little beyond this, and she was on the brink of remembering some name she had once heard mentioned, when the young man reappeared, carrying a tray.
‘The parfumé à I’essence de la bergamote,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Exporté par Jacksons of Piccadilly. But en motisseline, I’m afraid. Which means tea-bags.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Having accepted her cup, Penelope decided that the moment for firmness had come. ‘May I ask,’ she said, ‘what is your position here?’
‘I suppose it does need a little explaining.’ For a moment the young man showed some sign of turning serious. But then his gaiety returned. ‘I’d be inclined to put it,’ he said, ‘that my position is like the Modigliani’s or the Cézanne’s. I go with the house.’
Penelope found this a disconcerting remark. It had been uttered whimsically or lightly, and perhaps she should have replied, ‘Like a washing-machine, you mean, or a billiard-table?’ But something made her reject this. ‘And does anybody else go with the house?’ she asked.
‘There’s an old woman who comes as well as goes, and who does the washing up. And a boy called André, who looks after the grass. But essentially just me, Penelope. Fulke never had more than one secretary. At a time, that is.’
‘Then are you Cyril?’ This was the name some casual mention of which had come back to her.
‘Cyril? Good heavens, no! I’m Bernie. I never set eyes on Cyril, or so much as knew his surname. Two or three before me, Cyril must have been.’
‘I see. My brother-in-law can’t have been too fortunate in his secretarial assistance. May I know your surname, please?’
‘Huffer. But I’ll consider myself snubbed if you call me that way. I’ll call you Mrs Ferneydale, and it won’t sound friendly at all. Not if we’re going to work together. “Bernie” it would have to become, and “Bernie” it had better be now.’
Bernie said this while pouring Penelope more tea. She had held out her cup when it became
apparent he proposed to do so. Part of what Bernie had said was perfectly true. He was a good deal her junior, so it would be absurd to address him as if he were an elderly gardener. There was something singular about the whole thing, all the same.
‘Very well, then – Bernie. But I don’t understand what you said about our working together. Judging from that’ – and Penelope pointed at the canvas on its easel – ‘what you are is a professional painter. I don’t think amateurs go after quite what you’re trying to do there.’
‘Well, perhaps not. But one can test oneself, you see, by seeing whether one has the technique to master other people’s tricks. Those lines and areas I’ve been daubing on are perfectly static and inert on the canvas. But I want to make you believe that you see them moving as you look at them. It’s fascinating in a way, but even if it succeeds it’s no more than a superior form of conjuring. Much like a lot of Fulke’s writing, as a matter of fact. He wants to kid us that things created by him are moving when they are not. And at a certain level he gets away with it.’
‘I suppose I follow that.’ Bernie, it seemed to Penelope, was possessed of rather more of critical intelligence than of simple loyalty to his former employer. ‘But you still haven’t told me how and why we’re to work together.’
‘On Fulke’s papers. There’s a letter about them waiting for you upstairs which I imagine to be similar to one he left for me. He wants the papers to remain in this house – your house – and the copyright in them is vested with you entirely. He hopes we’ll sift through them, and prepare a certain amount of them for publication.’
‘But it’s absurd, Bernie. I read English at Oxford long ago, but I’m not any sort of literary person. It can be nothing but a sick man’s fancy.’
‘Fulke says – a shade enigmatically for me – that he once tried to place something rather important in your hands, and failed. He wants to do the same with something less important now.’
This small thunderbolt silenced Penelope through her second cup of tea. But when she did speak, it was to the point.
‘Bernie, do you yourself much want to take part in this job you talk about? You sound to me as if not all that impressed by Fulke’s talent and his success with it. And your association with him seems to have been fairly brief. Do you really want to get to work on his stray papers?’
‘I like Le Colombier. And now I like you.’
‘That’s a frivolous thing to say. You haven’t known me for half an hour.’
‘Well, in a way I haven’t. But my feeling is that here at last you are, and that it would be nice to do the work together. If that sounds silly, I’m sorry. By the way, when I said “Le Colombier” I meant it literally in one sense. I have quarters in the dovecot. And I’ll promise, if you like, never to emerge from them before blowing a whistle to let you know. The propriety of the situation shall be unflawed.’
‘Whistle or no whistle, it will certainly be that.’
‘Sorry again, Penelope. When I’m nervous I tend to produce silly quips. And I’m as nervous as hell. It has all been a bit sudden, for one thing. I suppose you knew – as I didn’t – that Fulke rather went in for making quirky wills. Every now and then a new one, with fresh ideas turning up. Quite a gold-mine to his lawyers, Fulke must have been.’
‘No, I didn’t know – although I was told the effective will was of very recent date.’
‘And those letters to be posthumously delivered: it seems that was a thing of his too. The creative impulse getting a bit out of hand, I suppose. But let’s drop Fulke for a moment. Do you know what I’m going to do? Leave you for a couple of hours to settle in, and then come over and cook a meal and find a bottle of wine. I’ve been a pretty good cook for rather a long time. But with wine it was a matter of a crash course with our late friend.’
‘Was Fulke—’
‘No, Penelope – not another word about Fulke now. There’s a lot I want you to know about him – or I think there is – but I must arrange my thoughts on the subject or I’ll just muddle him. Would you judge champagne a vulgar and unpromising start to our association?’
‘I’m not sure there’s going to be an association, Bernie. But I’ve no doubt whatever that Fulke owes us a bottle of champagne.’
‘Good girl! Do you mind my calling you that? I’m beginning to work it out that you must be – but amazingly – a few years older than me. But then I’m very young indeed.’
‘Go away, Bernie. That couple of hours not filled with incomprehensible nonsense may remove some of the lines from my brow. But I look forward to my dinner.’
‘And there’s the same promise of propriety—although I never gave a harder—’
‘Go away?’ Penelope found herself – distinctly with surprise – uttering this command with amusement rather than indignation. Bernie Huffer obeyed it at once. So Penelope was left to make what she could of as strange an encounter as she could remember. She tried to tell herself that ‘perky’, or even the more demotic ‘fresh’, was the correct and sufficient epithet for Fulke’s late secretary. But she saw that nothing of the sort would quite do. She had been amused by Bernie Huffer. And it was undeniably rather a long time since she had been much amused by anybody else.
Bernie proved to be indeed a very good cook, and he produced a dinner much superior to the one Penelope had judged it prudent to order for herself in Amboise. Moreover he was tactful over the champagne, ensuring that the bottle should be empty before she had finished her second glass. His guest (or employer) was left not without misgivings, all the same. Although now a widow who would not again see thirty, she still – as has been remarked – carried around with her at least a residue of her father’s persuasions in several fields. Mr Rich would distrust a young man who, being born or at least bred in no sort of menial condition, had turned himself into a competent chef. And Mr Rich would judge it decidedly strange that his daughter should sit down to any sort of meal at all in a secluded situation and the sole company of her late brother-in-law’s male secretary. But although such notions did lurk in some corner of Penelope’s own mind they didn’t greatly trouble her. And she found that Bernie was much more capable of a discreet comportment than her first rather bewildering encounter with him might have suggested.
He provided an amusing preview of the character both of Mme Saval, who came in to clear up and clean around, and of André, who looked after the lawns and the terrace and everything else outside. After this he talked a good deal about Fulke – and on the unstated but perfectly just premise that Penelope’s information on this family benefactor was of a sketchy sort. Penelope did know that Fulke’s life had been not such as Mallows could approve. It had to be admitted, Bernie said, that Fulke was a man too frequently liable to be fondly overcome with female charm. But he had been a good-hearted chap, and amusing in a variety of ways. At this point, although always waiting to be prompted by some question or other token of interest, Bernie’s conversation took on an anecdotal turn. His stories about his late employer were sometimes very funny, but at the same time not without a hint that a certain improvised expurgation was operative as he talked.
‘I suppose,’ Penelope asked as she did finish her champagne, ‘that he was the sort of person – eminent as a writer, I mean – whose life will have to be written by somebody?’
‘It’s sure to be. I’d say there are bound to be two or three books before the world begins to forget about Fulke Ferneydale.’
‘Does this business of going through his papers hitch on to that? Is there stuff that will have to be suppressed, at least for the present, before the papers are made available for research?’
These acute questions, which were perhaps the fruit of Penelope’s study of English literature at Oxford, visibly impressed Bernie as entirely relevant.
‘I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen much of the stuff, which is all up in Fulke’s work-room in the attics. But I don’t think you and I are expected to work as censors. And it’s my guess that we’re n
ot likely to come on anything much in the way of autobiography, or materials for a memoir. It’s likely all to be working stuff: note-books and stray observations, and abortive starts on plays and novels. There were several such miscarriages and pseudo-pregnancies during the comparatively short time I was with him. I don’t know that you’re going to find it particularly interesting, or that it’s quite your sort of thing – or mine either, for that matter. I think that if we just sort things into categories our duty will be done. After that, you’ll simply have to discover the appropriate chaps to hand it all to. Or nearly all to. For processing, you know, before it’s shoved profitably into print.’
‘I still find it rather puzzling.’
‘Yes, it is in a way. And – do you know? – I think we should put it all off for a little. You’re entitled to be much more interested in the house and the countryside than in that particular chore. Or in me, for that matter. And that brings me to a first suggestion. It’s that I take myself off for a few days – I’ve friends in Le Bugue I rather want to visit – and that then I come back – supposing, that is, you want me to – and that we get through the job as briskly as we can. Old Mme Saval isn’t all that bright, but she’ll be able to answer any questions of a practical sort. Sit on the terrace and absorb the view. Like the house, it’s your very own, because there’s nowhere else from which just that view is to be had. And André, circling the place on his little motor-mower, makes a kind of mobile repoussoir to the scene.’
A Villa in France Page 17