‘Good evening, Miss Davy. May I say that you look very lovely?’
‘Thank you, kind sir.’ Tess gave a slight bogus bow and returned his look equivocally. She was amused, but instinctively cautious.
‘Let me introduce Luke Norman.’ Dunford half turned towards the stranger. ‘He runs an antique shop in Richmond in which I have an interest. Luke…well, I don’t think I need explain who Tess Davy is.’
‘Of course not. Simon said you would be here. It’s a great pleasure to meet you.’
Tess later wondered why she had not realised certain things at that moment. Luke Norman was…the only word that came to her was beautiful. Black hair, pewter-grey eyes with a natural grace about his movements and the very way he stood. At one time she could have been very foolish about a man with such looks. Please don’t be a cricketer, she thought—and say something else, I like your voice.
‘Simon was telling me that you’re a friend of Gus Maltravers, the writer.’
‘Yes, he’s…’ Tess turned to where Maltravers had been standing next to her, but he had wandered across the hall with Peter and the other men to examine some photographs on the wall. She sighed. ‘I’m afraid he’s talking cricket at the moment.’
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ Norman observed mordantly, glancing round the hall. ‘Personally, I’ve detested the game ever since they made me play it at school.’
Tess smiled in consoled gratitude. ‘You I like. I’ve had the damned game inflicted on me all day. You weren’t at the match were you?’
‘No, but I gather they won.’
‘Yes. Gus has been talking about nothing else since.’
‘Simon’s been virtually the same,’ said Norman as a fellow sufferer, glancing at Dunford. ‘We’ll have to make sure they both…behave this evening.’
The simultaneous arrival of someone with a tray of drinks and Maltravers’ return covered the slight edge in Norman’s voice which Tess caught but did not hold for long enough to think about. The four of them started to chat about antiques, including some of the treasures of Edenbridge House, while the barrage of talk rolled on around them.
‘But the gypsies have got to live somewhere’…‘Of course he won’t be prosecuted because he’s a member of the Cabinet’…‘Then I decided to try the five iron’…‘I used lumpfish roe and honestly you can’t tell the difference.’
Alister York’s mask of cold politeness covered his contempt for Oliver Hawkhurst as he diplomatically avoided revealing anything to him about the affairs of Edenbridge House, suggesting that certain questions could only be dealt with by Lord Pembury personally. It indicated the extent of Hawkhurst’s financial crisis—York knew all about the imminent collapse of the property company and the bailiff’s notice on the door of the ludicrous nightclub—that he would probe the possibilities of salvation by his uncle by approaching his secretary at the party. Edenbridge money had been provided in the past for previous boneheaded indiscretions but there would be no more. Lord Pembury had tetchily authorised the last £60,000 a year earlier with a warning that any further commercial disasters his nephew created would be his own problem. Now Hawkhurst, who had blatantly used the Pembury connection to conjure up six-figure loans, appeared unable to grasp the situation. The merchant bankers, to whom he now scathingly referred as usurers, had become icy and hard-eyed, but Lord Pembury was indifferent about a member of the family appearing in the bankruptcy court. Hawkhurst had tried asking his cousin and his bitterness and resentment at being born just outside the charmed circle of family wealth had deepened to hatred when Dunford had also refused to help.
As he bit on the humiliation of having to approach York, the censorious and patronising secretary, in a last desperate effort to extract something from the Pembury wealth, Dunford walked past with Luke Norman and Tess and Maltravers. Seeing them disappear into the garden at the back of the house through the door of the crowded sitting room, Hawkhurst’s hatred was fuelled by the ever-recurring thought of how agonisingly and impotently near he was to becoming heir to the title, the house, money and salvation. He frequently played out in his mind the scene where he would dangle that prospect in front of his persecutors, and watch them turn to fawning sycophants, prurient at the prospect of the smallest fraction of one of the greatest fortunes in England. But the dream was always destroyed by meeting the man who stood in his way; not yet thirty, depressingly healthy and surely soon to produce the wife and inevitable son, pushing Hawkhurst irreversibly down the line of inheritance, an embarrassing, impoverished and finally irrelevant and excluded relative.
York watched Dunford walk past as well, distastefully noting how he held Tess’s arm as he guided her between the guests and out of the house. He had been planning to murder him for so long that further evidence of his casual liaisons with women was academic.
It was a long garden with high walls, stained by countless changing seasons to a patchwork of old rose and rust brickwork. Three steps led up from a paved terrace to the start of a lawn, cut off towards the far end by a wooden trellis fence smothered with Dorothy Perkins roses. Many of the guests had made their way outside, the sound of their still-incessant voices drifting upwards into the limpid lemon evening air.
‘Isn’t that a Vincent’s tie?’ Maltravers asked, nodding towards Dunford as they walked up the steps.
‘Yes. Not many people recognise it.’
‘Is it something special?’ Tess looked at the pattern of small gold crowns on a dark blue background.
‘Oxford Blues—or those who get near enough—can wear them,’ Maltravers explained. ‘My father got one for cricket as well. The Cambridge equivalent is the Hawks tie, which…’
Tess’s smile coupled excessive sweetness with incipient insanity and she used his full first name, a standard sign that their relationship was not working at that moment.
‘Augustus, if you mention that bloody game again, I am going to throw up! Right?’
Dunford laughed. ‘Then I’ll rescue you from it. There are people here who would love to meet you and I shall personally hit anyone who uses the word. Come with me.’
They merged with the guests ebbing through the garden and the rooms of the house like water trickling between rocks, accompanied by the racing torrent of talk.
‘Changed his tune of course when I told him I knew the Chief Constable personally’…‘Make it Tuesday and it’s on my expenses’…‘I don’t know who he’s screwing but if he gets Aids he’ll get no sympathy from me’…‘Forty to the gallon on a long run.’
Tess was never quite sure how she found herself alone with Dunford. For a couple of hours there had been a series of people talking to her about her career, endless bottles of wine kept appearing and there was a well-mannered mêlée around the food tables. Back in the hall, Dunford introduced Norman to a man who wanted to buy some Regency glassware and Maltravers had been pinned in a corner by a woman who did a ‘little modest writing’ and wanted to know what motivated a true professional; she was quite disillusioned when he said money. The flashing lights and throbbing rhythms of a disco completed the disintegration of polite behaviour loosened by alcohol, and people grouped and regrouped constantly. Dunford asked Tess to dance as the DJ played Chicago’s haunting ‘If you leave me now’ and put both his arms around her as they swayed together in the darkened room, lit only by the slow red, yellow and blue blinks of the lights. She had drunk enough to be carelessly relaxed and was only half aware that he did not change the way he was holding her or how they were dancing when the tempo quickened with the next record. When it finished he said he wanted to show her something and took her hand as she followed him out of the room. She smiled at Norman who was still in the hall talking to the man about Regency glass and wondered why he looked back at her so resentfully.
Dunford led her out of the house again and down the night-covered garden, the sounds of the party fading behind them, until they reached the private stillness beyond the trellis, its honeysuckle silence amplified by the m
uffled music and voices from the house. Tess warily marshalled her defences to deal with the pass she felt was inevitably coming.
‘You were asking me about my family last night,’ Dunford said unexpectedly. He indicated a wooden door in the end wall of the garden. ‘We can get through to the church this way. I’ll show you the Pembury mausoleum.’
‘Surely they keep the church locked at night?’
‘I’ve got the key for our private chapel,’ he replied, opening the door. ‘I promise you it’s fascinating.’
Tess, who had stopped several paces behind him, reflected that being chased round a tomb by a randy aristocrat who conveniently brought the chapel key to a party would certainly be fascinating. But it had all been so charmingly done that she could not imagine him turning unpleasant; if he did, she knew several ways of bringing tears to his eyes. She stepped through the door as Dunford held it open for her and they walked towards the moon-grey church, looming up against the stars in front of them.
*
Observing the high proportion of guests whose adolescence would have begun in the age of wide skirts, shoestring ties and milk bars, the DJ lined up a series of records which would trigger their memories and make them temporarily forget the physical limitations of creeping middle age. For thirty minutes the room was filled with the formative rocking beat of their generation. Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’; Chubby Checker twisting again; Jerry Lee Lewis; Bill Haley; The Ramones; the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Brown Sugar’; the ‘Good Vibrations’ of the Beach Boys; the Beatles’ raw ‘Twist and Shout’ and joyous ‘I wanna hold your hand’. As the DJ let them down with McCartney’s wistful ‘Yesterday’ and Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, the dancers collapsed against each other, breathless, laughing and exhilarated. It would be worth the aching backs and stiffened joints of the morning to have danced again with the years of Espresso coffee, Mary Quant and the glittering, betrayed Camelot of living Kennedys.
*
Maltravers had finally got rid of the woman whose ‘little modest writing’ had turned out to be poetry of the greetings card and pokerwork school, without actually committing himself to promising an opinion on her dire rhyming couplets. Peter and Susan had left and he wondered where Tess was. He could not see her anywhere on the ground floor of the house but realised that the party had spread itself to the first-floor living rooms as well and went up the wide stairs from one corner of the hall to the balcony landing above to explore. The last room he reached was Trevor Darby’s study, which was also used for cricket club committee meetings. Two men were settling an argument about record fourth-wicket stands in Test matches between England and the West Indies from the almost complete collection of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack that filled one bookcase; the accumulation of recondite statistics was among the many aspects of the game that Tess found meaningless. Standing apart from them, Luke Norman was looking out of the window.
‘Hello again,’ said Maltravers as he joined him. ‘You haven’t seen Tess anywhere about, have you?’
‘Miss Davy? No. I think she’s with Simon.’
There was unmistakable annoyance in Norman’s reply. The two men left the room to celebrate the settling of their argument with another drink.
‘If you find them you might tell Simon I’m up here and would like to talk to him,’ Norman added, still gazing through the window at the nearby houses on the opposite side of Bellringer Street. Maltravers found it interesting that he was clearly not prepared to go and look for Dunford himself. It seemed childish, a condition possibly brought on by too many glasses of wine; Norman was speaking with artificial precision as though not confident that he had complete control of his tongue.
‘Of course,’ Maltravers said. ‘I don’t imagine they’ve run off together.’
The look of fury Norman flashed towards him at this immaterial piece of banter, before turning away again, was vivid. Maltravers left the room, reflecting that certain suppositions he had made earlier appeared to be correct. He noticed another set of stairs near the study door, presumably used by the servants in an earlier age of the house, and went down them to find they led to the kitchen, its table covered with still substantial reserves of wine in bottles and boxes and the room filled with another swarm of guests. As he refilled his glass someone spoke to him and he was drawn into the talk again.
‘The BBC? It’s nothing more than an annexe of the Kremlin’…‘He knows as much about the menopause as I do about his blasted Masons’…‘Don’t talk to me about people offering to lay a garden path’…‘Been living with the chap for two years and now she wants me to pay for a white wedding.’
Tess’s laughter rippled through the high, still silence of St Barbara’s, echoing off walls pierced with tall, narrow windows of muted stained glass which let in the only gloomy illumination. The sound came from the Pembury chapel on the south side of the altar, ringing across dark oak pews and fading into shadows of Saxon and Norman stone.
‘Simon, you’re joking!’ she protested.
Dunford grinned as he shook his head in denial.
‘I promise you I’m not,’ he insisted. ‘Hubert, the fifth Earl, was absolutely barmy. He was convinced he could fly, leapt off the roof of Edenbridge House to prove it and landed right on top of his mother-in-law who was visiting them. She was killed—after all, she was nearly ninety—but he survived, dashed back upstairs and tried it again. This time he killed the butler who had gone to help her. The family had the devil of a job keeping it quiet.’
Tess shook her head disbelievingly. ‘You’re making it up.’
‘Believe me, it’s all in the family papers. Even the bribes they had to pay to various people to keep it hushed up. Look at this.’ He led her to where a small plaque was set in the wall and pointed to the inscription as he read it aloud.
‘“Obediah Bottomley, 1740—1813. Died in the service of the family”. Now how does a family retainer, however faithful, end up in the family vault? Only because the sixth Earl felt so guilty about his death that he wanted to make the gesture. The story’s not in the guidebooks—for obvious reasons we’d rather keep quiet about insanity in the family—but I assure you it’s absolutely true.’
‘Then if you’d prefer to keep it quiet, why are you telling me?’ Tess’s voice added several layers of interrogation to the question.
‘Oh, it’s not all that secret,’ Dunford replied indifferently. ‘It’s a curiosity I like to share with certain people.’
Tess wondered how certain people were selected—and how many other available women had been entertained with the incredible story on the same private tour.
‘And are any more of you mad?’ she asked casually.
‘Not in the conventional sense. A few eccentrics here and there, but otherwise quite normal.’ Dunford paused and looked at her quizzically. ‘There are no hereditary problems or anything like that, I’m happy to say.’
It was, Tess felt, a much more subtle line than the one used by a television producer at a first-night party when he had explained how successful his vasectomy had been. And it was, at last, something that could be recognised as a line. For the previous half-hour she had felt as safe as if she had been with her own brother, which was not what she had been anticipating. She was puzzled and mildly disappointed; it would have been interesting to see how one of the most eligible bachelors on the matrimonial hit lists of several titled families operated. Now, perhaps…but Dunford had turned away from her, almost as if he was uncomfortable about the implications of his remark.
‘We ought to be getting back,’ he said. ‘I’ve monopolised you much too long.’
As they returned through the silent and darkened church-yard, the faint clamour of the party growing louder as they approached the gate in the garden wall, Tess could make no sense of their private excursion. Dunford had blatantly flirted with her while they danced and had deliberately taken her to where they would be alone together in a setting with at least a touch of Gothic
romance. He had been attentive, amusing and flattering and then—she smiled to herself as the parallel struck her—he really had just shown her his etchings. Now he seemed strangely quiet as if his mind was occupied with something. Just outside the gate he stopped by an unremarkable gravestone, obviously old and neglected, tilting like an ever-falling domino. ‘This is the other member of the family.’
Tess glanced at him sharply. In the church he had joked about his ancestors; now he sounded immensely sad. The tombstone was half in shadow and she had to crouch down to read the worn lettering: Susannah Hawkhurst, 1835-1858. No quotation, no indication of affection, no grief of loss, just the baldest record of a name and twenty-three years of a woman’s life.
‘Why isn’t she in the family vault?’ she asked as she straightened up.
‘Susannah was the youngest daughter of William, the eighth Earl,’ Dunford replied softly. ‘In Capley they borrowed the nickname of the Duke of Cumberland and called him Stinking Billy. It had been arranged that she should marry the second son of the Duke of Fennimore. There may have been a nastier man in Victorian England but I doubt it. She was in love with a captain in the eleventh Hussars. She had spirit and pleaded with her father but it was no use. She and the officer ran away together but were captured as they were boarding the Dover ferry just before it left for Calais. He was cashiered and she was brought back to Edenbridge House and confined to her room until the wedding. It sounds like a Victorian melodrama now, but such things really did happen.’
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