by Jessica Mann
‘The Head would never let us spread up into the attics. He said it would involve too much building work. But now that you have introduced practical building and carpentry . . .’
Lawrence followed the older man along the corridors and up stairs. The fabric of the building was not in good condition. All the same, as Lawrence would tell the prospective customers later, the house was ideally suitable for its purpose, being the opposite in almost every particular to the requirements of contemporary school architecture. The windows were too small and high up for inattentive boys to gaze out of; the rooms could hold classes of only a few boys at a time; the staircases were narrow but numerous.
George Jenkin guided Lawrence up the last of them. He listed innovations for his new boss to approve. ‘Stamp clubs. Chess competitions. Debating societies . . .’
Together the two men tried the attic door.
‘Perhaps if both of us shove at the same time?’
The lock was rusty and the wood rotten. The door broke open, and Lawrence sprawled after it. He said ‘We ought to use this as the set for a horror film.’ He was in a dimly lit corridor under the low roof ridge.
‘These are the original beams,’ George Jenkin said, stroking the greyish oak, rough chiselled and pock marked, that sloped towards crumbling walls. Daylight shone through chinks in the slates.
‘This could do with loft insulation,’ Lawrence said, thinking of oil bills.
‘There are bats. This is a site of special scientific interest.’
‘Then we had better not disturb them.’ Lawrence opened a plank door that led from the passage into a long attic, dimly lit by dirty skylights.
‘Fascinating,’ George Jenkin said. ‘Treasure trove.’
Lawrence was neither moved nor interested. He glanced around him, at a rocking horse, a domed leather trunk studded with tarnished nails, a stack of metal helmet cases painted with the names and ranks of forgotten St Unys. George Jenkin enthusiastically twitched dust sheets aside and peered into packing cases. Lawrence picked up a heap of folded linen and felt it rip under his hand.
‘Do take care, Headmaster. Everything is so fragile.’
Lawrence was bored. ‘Haven’t we seen enough? There’s certainly room for conversion up here.’
‘We must sort all this out first. It isn’t all junk by any means. Things like this are valuable these days.’
Lawrence wrote his name in the dust on a chest of drawers. Then he added the date and the word ‘Headmaster’ before rubbing it clean with his sleeve. He opened the drawers, which were empty but lined with newspaper.
‘Things don’t change much round here, do they?’ he said, and read aloud from a yellowing paper dated April 1918. ‘“The first prize for water colours at the thirty-seventh annual exhibition of the Carmell Society of Artists was won by Mr Basil Hutber, of The Doctor’s House, Fore Street, for his study of rough seas. The Mayor of Carmell, accompanied by Mrs Wiseman, presented the St Uny Silver Cup for pastels to Mrs Rainsford for her sensitive study of autumn flowers.”’
George Jenkin was scuffling through the rubbish like a terrier in a heap of leaves. Lawrence was not a hoarder himself, nor a collector. Once a year he cleared out his papers. He never thought things ‘might come in useful’. But it would be unwise to discourage poor George Jenkin.
Lawrence moved idly round the room, his hair scraping cobwebs from the roof. Another chest, this one full of grey, army blankets; a school tuck box full of wooden toys; a glass fronted bureau with two broken panes, on whose shelves were some tattered classical texts, a volume of Rupert Brooke’s poems marked with Nell St Uny’s name, three parts of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 1913, and a battered book lacking its boards that turned out to be a copy of The Stroker, Rex’s first book. It fell open at a drawing whose skilful immediacy was exciting even to a man who knew the work well.
‘Disgusting. Filthy stuff,’ George Jenkin said, looking over Lawrence’s shoulder.
‘But great art.’
‘That makes it all the worse,’ George Jenkin said firmly. He held out a volume of Catullus’s poetry. ‘Even this – I’d never teach it, not even to the sixth form. Antiquity is no excuse. It’s corrupting.’ He moved away to test the floorboards under the skylight, where dripping water had saturated the wood. Lawrence pulled down the desk flap of the bureau. It was a nice piece of furniture, suitable for a headmaster’s study. Lawrence wondered whether it was an antique, and with imprecise memories of how to identify them pulled out the pen drawer to see whether it was stuck together with glue, or made with tongues and grooves. The drawer contained rusty mapping pens and a perished rubber fountain-pen dropper. In the recess under it an envelope had been missed by whoever cleared the desk out for storage years before. It was addressed to the Headmaster, St Uny’s School, and Lawrence put it in his pocket to deliver to the old man. He took The Stroker too and said, ‘I’ll leave you to this, George. I have an appointment.’
‘Right you are, Headmaster.’
Rapidly and quite involuntarily, Lawrence found himself visualising some temptations to which headmasters might have been exposed: housemaids with frilled petticoats raised over corsets and black stockings; boys with egg-white buttocks doubled over chairs awaiting the striking cane. Perhaps George Jenkin was right. Such art could corrupt.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tamara Hoyland had always done everything very quickly, which was a disadvantage when there was not very much to do, since boredom lurked ready to pounce, but which could be a useful quality at times like these. She was not on official leave from her office, but was ostensibly at home writing up a report on a field survey. The typescript lay complete and corrected in her warm and comfortable flat in South Kensington, and that might have been a preferable place for its author too, she thought crossly, better than the driving seat of her car where she sat flogging up the motorway, half blinded by muddy spray and repeatedly overtaken by men in company cars who hated to see a woman ahead of them. Tamara’s new car, apparently a small standard model, had been expensively modified; she could easily have won this race. Telling herself not to be competitive, she loaded some soothing Vivaldi into the tape deck. It was an elementary precaution to avoid being stopped for speeding, since she was on her way to get one lot of information by false pretences and another by breaking and entering.
All the same, the reason for this detestable journey, boxed in by aggressors – a lorry in front, another too close behind, a coach on the right, a furniture van dangerously tilted on the left – was an irritation in itself. Tamara did not like it when computers ruled her actions. She was among the archaeologists who preferred to rely on the connections made by a well informed and unfettered mind.
The print-out had been passed on by Mr Black’s secretary. Tamara doubted whether there was much point in following up the leads it suggested. Coincidence, no more, she thought. The very lack of reason for her assignment – and Mr Black had never offered a sensible one – nagged at her mind. Why, for heaven’s sake, did he choose to invest Department E’s money and Tamara’s expensive time and skill in Viola Hutber? Even he, apparently not subject to administrative or political control, presumably had some kind of a budget which would not be, in the jargon so familiar to anyone working in a department even distantly connected with the civil service, open-ended.
Money, time and energy were being invested in a task that any well trained reporter could have done better. Whatever the job’s motives, Tamara doubted that her own abilities were suitable. The best she could do was notice any loose end protruding from the tangle and wind it gently, like a thread around a finger, probing for joins, not tugging for fear of tightening the knots.
The first dangling end was in Maxton.
*
‘No, it wasn’t her baby,’ the man said. He obviously regretted not being able to say the worst of Chantal Digby. Even so, he went on, ‘Not that she would have hesitated to foist a by-blow on poor Sir Everard, and then who’d have been called Digby?
’ His fierce, pale eyes stared above his well shaved cheeks. He was wearing the type of clothes Tamara had only seen in films, the uniform of a stage butler with a short black coat, winged collar and white gloves protruding from his pocket. ‘Breeding still matters, say what you like. Take myself. Bred to the job like my father before me. There have always been Deebles at Maxton.’
‘And now you have outlasted the Digbys.’
‘That is one way of putting it,’ he said, pleased. Tamara had been warned that the National Trust’s resident curator at Maxton was proprietorial. He lived in a flat in the west wing of the huge Palladian house, and his furniture had evidently been culled from the public rooms and the flowers in his elaborate arrangements from the gardens. He had the advantages of life in a stately home without the usual financial consequences. When the house was closed to the public he roamed it, marking his territory.
‘It is a question of a legacy,’ Tamara said.
‘I should need to see some identification.’
Tamara expected him to produce a silver salver for her card, but he simply held out his white, fleshy hand. From the varied supply in her wallet, she had chosen the one that read ‘Miss T. Hoyland LL B, FIA, Hoyland Faber & Co., Plymouth, Devon.’
‘Are you a solicitor?’ he said, accent on the second word.
‘I am in the family firm. My father’s the senior partner.’ Five true words, at least, in a mendacious day.
‘A legacy you said? Who for?’
Tamara guessed that Mr Deeble would be the type of man to expect lawyers to use several words where one would do. ‘I am afraid that I am not at liberty to go into details at this moment in time. It is a matter that concerns old family history. The only thing is that it may be too old for you to know about.’
‘My memory is extensive. Nobody else here could tell you as much, I assure you.’
‘So you may remember the Reverend Herbert Cory?’
‘A Methodist,’ he said disdainfully. ‘We have always been Church people here of course. But as it happens I do recall the Corys. Some of the junior servants were Chapel folk when I was a lad. I can remember my mother and father mentioning the gentleman. I heard more than the other footmen, you see, because my father was the butler, and my mother had been the housekeeper before her marriage. That was how I started, footman and valet to the visiting gentlemen, before I was promoted to be valet to Sir Everard himself. Those were the days.’
Tamara could not sympathise with nostalgia for those old days. ‘So you remember the baby arriving?’
‘Allan, they called him. Scottish. Not a name used in the Family.’
‘And you’re sure he wasn’t Lady Digby’s own child?’
‘Well I should say so!’ He guffawed briefly before returning his features to their civil mask. ‘She couldn’t have children, that one, not after the things she’d done, more than once. Not that I knew that at the time, mind you, but my dear wife was lady’s maid to the Dowager and she heard women’s talk. No, it was a child of shame all right, but not Lady Chantal’s. Some of the village people were shocked that the minister would countenance it but they all knew that he wanted children and couldn’t have them, something to do with the war. It was no secret, he preached sermons about it.’
‘So whose was the baby? Where did it come from?’
‘As to that, I’m sure I couldn’t say.’
‘Oh dear. That is a pity, Mr Deeble, because I’m trying to trace a particular child. As I mentioned, there is a considerable sum of money involved, and a reward has been offered, as is usual in these matters.’
‘I did hear that it had been born in a home for fallen women – that’s what they were called then, you know – over Nottingham way. And then . . . but really it isn’t suitable for a young lady.’
‘Mr Deeble, I am a very experienced lawyer.’
‘They did say that the mother was only a schoolgirl. Not more’ – he lowered his voice to a whisper – ‘only thirteen or fourteen. At least, that’s what they said. People talk in a village, things get around. They were always watching to see if he’d grown up wanting, abnormal in some way, on account of having such a young mother.’
‘And did he?’
‘I never heard anything. But they moved elsewhere, the Corys, the Methodists keep their ministers on the move like policemen to stop them getting too intimate anywhere. I don’t know what happened to them afterwards.’
‘Do you think that Lady Digby kept up with them?’
‘Not her. Off to South America, wasn’t she, as soon as it looked as though there’d be a war. Good riddance to bad rubbish, we thought.’
‘She wasn’t popular?’
‘Popular! She was a mischief maker, that woman. Always creating trouble. And loose, too. We all knew that she was a bad ’un, right from the very first when Sir Everard brought her home, married with a husband still living like Mrs Simpson after her. It doesn’t do, you know. The parties they had here, orgies more like, and us expected to clear up after them. What I could tell you, broken glass, mess – we had to have the green bedchamber completely redone after one of her Saturday night binges, because the young man had drawn obscene pictures on the walls. He came to a bad end too, I heard. That kind of thing just doesn’t do, miss, not in England, not in the country. As Sir Englebert discovered in time.’
Tamara put the notebook into her black leather brief case. ‘Thank you, Mr Deeble, you have been most helpful. I shall certainly be in touch when I know how things work out. As I said, there is the possibility of a reward.’
‘You got what you want then?’
‘I can’t be sure at this stage. I shall have to do some more investigation. But yes, Mr Deeble, thank you, I am beginning to think that I quite possibly have.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
The front of the Abbey was out of bounds to boys and there seemed to be a traditional distance set between the masters and the headmaster’s wife, so Zoe Cory spent her days at St Uny’s alone, assured of such privacy as can hardly have been known in any previous era during which poor people would have lived crowded together with their families and neighbours, and the rich would have been at least with servants, if not friends and relations. No doubt, she thought, the very rich and very poor still did live in company. She remembered appearing on a television chat show some years ago and hearing her fellow guest, a ‘minor royal’, explain that the hardest thing for his commoner wife to get used to in her new life was the unexpected opening of doors. Maids and valets upstairs, footmen and ladies in waiting downstairs, would come unannounced, he said, into every room except the smallest one. Zoe, like the presenter of the programme, had giggled sycophantically, and had heard the snippet repeated for weeks after that.
Solitude, rare and delicious on film-sets or at boarding school, intensely desirable when imagined at a shop counter or office desk (at either of which ‘resting’ actresses were likely to find themselves), was hard to take when imposed by domestic circumstance. Zoe told herself that she was neither a prisoner nor a fool. Until her days were filled by motherhood she should surely be able to amuse herself, just as Lawrence had been forced to during his months of unemployment. For Zoe Meredith was unemployed. Her agent said that Stacey Stewart could hardly appear in other parts yet. ‘But there’s always personal appearances,’ he said.
‘I am an actress, not a celebrity.’
‘It won’t be easy this time.’
‘It wasn’t easy last time. But there ought to be something. You know I want to work.’
Zoe could hear Joe Tanner sigh into the handset. ‘Why don’t we give it a rest till you’ve pupped? Take it easy for a bit. Keep house.’
There was not much housekeeping to do. Lawrence had his meals with the school in term-time, except on the evenings when a heated trolley of cooked food was delivered for him and his wife, at the headmaster’s house. The school cleaners kept it sparkling. The school groundsmen did its flower beds. The school handymen would redecorate it. ‘All part of th
e perks,’ Lawrence explained proudly. Zoe was not so perverse as to say that she would rather push the vacuum cleaner or lawn mower herself. She had done enough of it to know that housekeeping was not better than nothing to do.
‘Why don’t you help get ready for the school jubilee? Write a history of the Abbey, or help George Jenkin with his book about Basil? That would be useful,’ Lawrence said, in the tone of voice that parents use for suggesting jobs to their children that they will have to re-do later themselves.
‘I am not clever enough to write anything,’ Zoe said, but she had never thought of it before, and later, watching from the window as Lawrence walked briskly across the quadrangle to morning prayers, she wondered whether she should pick up the writing he had been able to leave aside. The boxes of material about Rex, still packed as they had arrived from America, were heaped in the room called a study though Lawrence did all his work in the main part of the school.
Zoe cleared some piles of unread journals off the desk and sat at it facing the picture that had so offended Gillian Hutber. Gillian was equally unlikely to approve any of the papers that Zoe now spilled out of their files, photocopies of sketches and letters, quotations from improper literature, extracts from biographies of improper people, all the evidence that Lawrence had been able to find of a – to Gillian – deplorable life.
Much of the material had come from Paul Dillon the publisher. One folder contained copies of Rex’s correspondence with Evelyn Dillon. The notes were typed and signed, not with a name, but with tiny drawings of a king, in one robed and crowned, in another indecently enthroned on a lavatory. In one a skeleton wore the crown, in another a black man, and in a later letter, dated 1927, the king was chained to a dungeon wall.
The first note was dated 1922. ‘Dear Mr Dillon, amusing to meet you at the ballet. I enclose the drawings as you asked.’ The next few were acknowledgements of payments and answers to invitations. Regular acceptances changed to refusals as the twenties wore on. ‘Dear Evelyn, I cannot think why you expect me to co-operate in running round your squirrel cage. You may need to take those artistic prigs seriously. I do not. You are learning from your elegant associates to be superior and unimaginative. You accept that Nancy is a genius with no more evidence than her word for it. You won’t see the brilliance of Lewis. You are an intellectual pedant.’