The Rectory

by Ivan B

  He smiled from ear to ear, “that really is most genero…”

  The full impact of what I had said hit him.

  “You mean the field with the Lay Chancellor’s position attached?”

  I said quietly and I hoped forcefully.

  “Let me put it this way, the church has had its pound of flesh, if the church owns the fields it will have to stand on its own feet and not rely of reluctant charity. On the other hand it will also put you in a position to approach other grant giving bodies.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll put it to them.”

  I smiled, but I hoped he saw the no-nonsense light in my eyes.

  “Before you start on the chancel floor I hope.”

  He grinned.

  “Of course, we have a meeting next week and I’ll put it to them then.”

  He paused almost lost for words and ended up whispering.

  “And thank you for this you have no idea what burden you have lifted by giving us this.”

  I left him standing by the vestry door, he had no idea what a wrench it had been for me to part with the money, on the other hand it had absorbed all my charity giving in one go, or so I thought at the time.

  Yolande met me by the church door, if she’d seen a yeti she could hardly have looked more surprised. I decided to give a minimal explanation.

  “Church hunting, thought I’d come here this week.”

  She grinned and waved a scrawny arm.

  “Nice church isn’t it.”

  I remembered her (feigned) surprise at the church’s demand for my money and decided to test her betrayal.

  “You never said you came here.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t, I go to St Marks, were doing choir swaps with St James, St Thomas’ and St Peters this year. It’s all part of a church initiative to help choirs broaden their repertoire.”

  So no betrayal and no feigned surprise; in fact I even felt slightly guilty that I had mistrusted her.

  Before I go any further I must say a word about Millicent. Barney is of laid-back freewheeling Afro-Caribbean descent and very little phases Barney; sometimes I think that even mañana is rather a too hurried approach for him to grasp. Millicent has no concept of mañana either, but in her case if something needs to do done it should be done now, not tomorrow, not in the next hour or minute, but now as in this second. This is probably due to her constitution. She was born and bred in a small North Suffolk village so she speaks like a native of a hayfield and dresses like an advert for young farmer’s clubs, but she is Latin – pure unadulterated Latin. Her mother is Spanish and her father Italian, giving her the looks and build of a flamenco dancer plus an energetic drive and volatile temperament that has to be seen to be believed. She can go from sleepy conversation to volcanic eruption in less than a microsecond; Barney seems immune to it, but it sure scares the hell out of me.

  Yolande and I arrived at Barney’s and he showed us in, the smell of boiling tomatoes and incense greeted our nostrils; I didn’t ask and Barney didn’t tell. He took Yolande’s Oxfam coat from her and for a moment I was totally throw off my guard. Yolande was wearing a pillar-box red dress that was obviously the twin of the white dress she had worn to Church. In the white dress she had looked like someone who had reluctantly put on a dress for a special occasion and was ill at ease wearing it, in the red dress she looked stunning. It seemed to emphasise her tennis-ball breasts, hug her narrow waist and make her bony hips look sexy. Yolande had never seemed particularly feminine in anything she wore, in this she could not be mistaken for anything else other than 100% woman. It also occurred to me that for the first time I was seeing her with make-up on and her face had lost its normal insipid look for something much more attractive. I only hoped that her father didn’t know that she was dressed up like this for an excursion with me or I feared that I might not live to the end of the day.

  Lunch was a home-made pizza and salad. That was fine in itself, but somewhere along the line Millicent had lost the contents of a couple of spice bottles in the pizza topping and it was like eating a clutch of boiling hot red ants. The desert was far better, that is better as in not indigestible, not better as in palatable. By the end of the lunch I was beginning to wonder why I ever tolerated such an assault on my digestive system and decided that it was out of both friendship with Barney and fear of Millicent.

  After lunch Millicent poured us some super-thick glutinous mix that passed for coffee and pulled out some notes. Millicent might be a lousy cook, but she was an excellent historian. She looked at me.

  “Ready?”

  Actually my comment about the rectory’s history to Barney had been off-hand as I expected to sell the place, so what did I care? But if Millicent had beavered away I could not be impolite.

  “Ready.”

  She licked her lips as if anticipating a scrumptious feast.

  “The story starts in 1899 when a Victorian Building Engineer called Albert Clarke, who had made his money from building canal bridges, decided to build himself a mansion. Your rectory was his idea of a mansion, although it didn’t have the kitchen extension or the conservatory then, they came later. It took him three years to build and according to the county archive he had the roof taken off and re-built as he was unhappy with the quality of wood used in the roof-beams. Apparently he was something of a sticker for Victorian sturdiness, in other words if a two-by-two was strong enough you put in a three-by-three just in case. You might like to know than none of his bridges have fallen down and most of them are still in use; so I wouldn’t worry about the build quality of your house if I was you. However, the poor chap never really enjoyed his mansion, he staffed it and put his family in it, but went out to India for a job with the Indian railway and got shot for his pains.”

  She took a sip of coffee and added a spoonful of sugar.

  “I’m not sure what happened to his immediate family yet, but the house was commandeered by the British Army in 1914 and apparently used as a convalescent home for injured officers. The army returned the house in 1919, but by then Albert’s three sons had been killed in the war so according to the caveat to the deeds his daughter Felicity took the house on behalf of Albert’s estate. I have no idea what happened to his wife, but there is a Harriet Clarke buried in St James churchyard and she was buried in 1917.”

  She took another sip of coffee, obviously relishing her centre stage role.

  “A year later the house was purchased by the church and became the rectory for St James, the old rectory was demolished and the remains now lie in the field behind the church, but there’s not much left. The church refurbished the place and installed the Reverend Thomas, his wife and their three children plus a housekeeper and a maid; they lived differently in those days. He was replaced in 1933 by the Reverend Edward Evans, who was a grand-uncle to your Aunt Georgina. He wasn’t married, but his sister and her two daughters lived with him. According to the local paper the rectory became quite a social centre for the village, especially for young eligible men!”

  To be honest I was already losing interest and I let Millicent prattle on about a long dead family waiting for her to get to the Grants, it was them I was really interested in. However, I started re-listening when she got to 1939.

  “… So the house became home to some special operations unit of the Royal Navy. They dug out the basement and annoyed the locals by dumping the spoil three miles away on top of a pill-box; apparently the locals wanted it for topsoil. Whatever they did here is still secret, along with the rectory over at Felburgh that was commandeered by the same lot. What is certain though is that they returned the rectory in a sorry state, so much so that the stable block they had used for barracks had to be demolished. Next up Lord Felburgh renovates the place at his own expense for the church and it’s then that the kitchen annex was added and mains drainage connected. At the same time he built the stables in the far paddock. It all must have cost him a fortune, but the estate wouldn’t let me look at the
records for that period.”

  She took another sip of coffee.

  “Reverend Higgins moved in July 1947 with his wife Dilly, but be 1953 they realised that…”

  I let my mind wander as Millicent prattled on about the Higgin’s orphanage and it wandered to Yolande. She was sitting in the armchair opposite me and listening to every word of the rectory’s history. Sitting there in that dress she could have been a secretary, a tax inspector or a photographer, you would never have guessed that she was an electrician. I reflected on the sobering thought that had I been in a pub with Barney with a couple of pints inside me and seen her dressed like that I might have been tempted to… My mind suddenly switched back to Millicent.

  “Pardon?”

  She gave me a patient look and I realised that I had just used up my quote of Millicent’s patience for the day.

  “I said in 1962 the Reverend Higgins retired and the church sold the house to Dunstan Jones of Stolen Excess.”

  I smiled and risked an eruption from Millicent, “I think you mean Stollen Excess, they were an all German rock group and he was their drummer; didn’t he die about that time?”

  She amended her notes, Millicent was always thorough.

  “Quite right, he had the garage and flat built and there were plans for a studio in the basement, but he died in a car accident eighteen months after buying the house.”

  Yolande murmured, “How tragic,” and I remembered the photographs of his Porsche; he’d gone clean off a hairpin bend at speed in the Alps.

  Millicent refilled her cup from the coffee jug and offered it around, only Barney had a second cup; even in sips her coffee was deadly.

  “It seems that after that there was some wrangling about the estate and some squatters moved in, apparently it took six years to get rid of them as no-one was sure which of Dunstan’s relatives owned the house. Eventually they left, there was rumours of a no-strings payment, and a builder bought the house to convert it into flats. However, the local historical society and local authority managed to get the rectory listed status and the builder sold it to a Religious community. They apparently did a do-it-yourself renovation, but decided to move to Norfolk in 1975 and sold it to Mr John Grant – your benefactor.”

  I was now all ears. Millicent paused to drink some more coffee.

  “As far as I can make out your Mr Grant was already a millionaire by the time he bought the rectory. He made his money from those little transistor radios we all remember and those huge loudspeakers that get stacked up at open air concerts. He had the house totally renovated, according to the papers he tore out all the work the religious community had done and had the place gutted. He also, despite the listed status and lack of planning permission, had the conservatory built on the back.”

  The conservatory! One place I hadn’t searched was the conservatory! I composed myself and continued listening.

  “He had the place furnished and decorated by a London firm of interior designers and he and his family moved there in July 1978. He then infuriated the planners even more by buying the paddock and adding to the stables. You should see the minutes of the planning committee!”

  I was more interested in the man than the planning committee.

  “Did he win?”

  Millicent looked up from her notes.

  “Only years later and after his wife had died. It had become a matter of winning at any cost by then. Seems that was a trait of his anyway, he had a fearsome business reputation as a hard-nosed autocrat. He fought the planning committee all the way through the courts and when it seemed like he was going to lose he out manoeuvred them. He suddenly let the disabled riding school use the stables and paddock at no cost, threatening the planning committee that if he lost he'd make sure that the local paper knew who’d thrown the children out. It was an election year and the committee backed down. Still I suppose some good did come out of it as the club has used it ever since.”

  I internally grimaced, bang went any chance of getting rent for the paddock; being a local landowner was proving to be an expensive occupation. Millicent went back to her notes, clearly I had broken her thought pattern.

  “As you know his wife died in 1985 and after that he seems to have become increasingly eccentric. At first he was just slightly reluctant to be sociable, by the end he was a total recluse; do you know that he probably didn't leave his house at all for the last eight years? The only person he’d apparently let in was the local vicar, that’s where your Aunt comes in as she was vicar of St James from 1995 to when she died in 2002”

  She leant back in her chair, clearly near the end of her story; “Sad thing is he never enjoyed his money. He spent all that effort building up a fortune and then let it slip away.”

  Yolande said quietly.

  “He must have loved her very much, I guess his world came to an end.”

  We sat in silence for a minute and I decided that it was time I exploded a myth. I produced my brown envelope with a flourish and laid out the two photographs.

  “I found these in the house,” I said.

  Yolande raised an eyebrow and I explained that they had been in the safe between two shelves. I went back to my myth destruction.

  “This photograph is of the Grant family a few months before they died in the plane crash. It’s dated on the back. This second photograph of Mr Grant and some expensive female was taken six months later. That’s a mere three months after his families death.”

  I had expected silence and awe, what I got was Yolande and Millicent saying as one, “That's Mari Mathu!”

  Clearly I had missed something.

  “Mari Mathu,” said Yolande patiently, “Only daughter of Gerry Price.”

  The penny almost dropped, “Gerry Price the actor?”.

  “Got it in one.”

  Trouble is I hadn’t got it, I wasn’t even close. Yolande read my face and tapped the photograph.

  “In the late eighties she was the woman to watch; she was known as the socialite’s socialite. She went to all the right places, wore all the right clothes and was tipped to be woman of the decade.”

  I felt there was more,

  “So what happened?”

  Millicent took up the story.

  “She dropped out. Went home one night as Mari Mathu and left by the back door as Mary Matti. No one noticed for a few days, then people who were expecting Mari Mathu at their parties were disappointed. A socialite magazine followed up why she wasn’t around as there were rumours of a pregnancy. They found out that she had just walked out. Her solicitor confirmed that she was taking a ‘rest,’ but wouldn’t say where or how. It was a seven day wonder at the time.”

  Yolande leant forward.

  “She turned up again several years later living with a boat-builder in Vietnam. She had two children and seemed sublimely happy. She just told reporters that one night she had realised that she was living a false life with false people doing false things and not enjoying a minute of it.”

  Barney muttered something about the fact that he’d be happy with her sort of money living in Vietnam and Yolande wagged a finger at him.

  “You’ve missed the point, she gave the bulk of her fortune away, she just randomly picked an obscure French charity that provided education for the poor girls in India and gave them the bulk of her money.”

  Millicent jumped to her feet and left the room, I hoped that she was not going for cake, I’d suffered Millicent’s cake before. Barney picked up the photograph of Mr Grant and Mari Mathu and studied it.

  “They sure do look like they’re more than just friends,” he drawled.

  Millicent reappeared clutching a book.

  “There you are, that’s her and her children in Vietnam.”

  Yolande looked at the photograph in the book and then at the photographs I had brought. She took the book from Millicent and read the text under the photograph, we all waited patiently. Eventually she looked up and straight at me.

  “Take a look,” she said softly
, “Mr Grant has an unusual nose, sort of squat. Just look at the older child in this photograph and study his nose. What’s more according to this book this photograph was taken in 1993 the boy was seven.”

  The implication was not lost on me and I grabbed the book. An older Mari Mathu stared out of me and yes there was no doubt that she was happy. I studied the boy in question and like Yolande I had no doubts, especially when I looked at the sister who had totally different facial characteristics, those of the Australian standing next to Mari and grinning like a startled kangaroo. I passed the book back to Millicent and her and Barney went through the same process. In the end we were all convinced the my Mr Grant had another son and heir, perhaps one he didn’t even know about. And a son and heir that might just have a legitimate claim should he ever decide to contest the will.

  Chapter 12

  When in Doubt - Work

  I managed to ensure that we left Millicent’s clutches before it was time for tea, unfortunately this gave Barney the impression that I wanted to be alone with Yolande and I knew that I was opening up myself for ribbing from Barney the following night. Still when it’s a choice between Barney’s jokes and Millicent’s cooking I’ll go for Barney every time; jokes never kill you. As we left Barney’s house and Yolande tried to breath life into the Land Rover’s heater by waggling the lever up and down I muttered about living to tell the tale. Yolande was not impressed with my comments on Millicent’s food, probably something in the female genes and solidarity for the sisterhood. She tossed her head.

  “I think she does rather well considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  She gave me a sideways glance.

  “Barney’s never said?”

  “No.”

  She looked out of her door window.

  “Then I won’t either.”

  We drove on in silence with me wondering what to be considering and what had I missed when Yolande said slowly;