The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Is the family at home, madam?’ he asked as they proceeded up a narrow back staircase.

  ‘The family?’ she said, over her shoulder.

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘No family, sir,’ she said. ‘Only my lady.’

  Stokes left it. They came to a door, and the housekeeper fumbled with keys for some time before finding the right one. Stokes followed her into a long low room. The furniture was all covered with dustsheets, and the saloon – as she announced it to be – presented the appearance of a room filled with gigantic blancmanges. She said nothing else, and Stokes stood and nodded encouragingly for a while.

  ‘Very fine,’ he said in the end. It was too dark to see much, but, apparently satisfied, the housekeeper turned and led him out. Stokes resigned himself to more unassuageable country boredom.

  ‘Do you care for pitchers, sir?’ she said.

  ‘Pitchers?’ he said. Surely she was not going to show him the pantry?

  ‘Pitchers,’ she repeated. ‘Pitchers of the fam’ly. This is the long gallery.’

  ‘Highly picturesque,’ Stokes supplied. In his view, all collections of family portraits were much the same, and none was very interesting to anyone not intimately related to the subject. The first in the dauntingly long line was a dirty unlearned portrait of Queen Elizabeth, apparently standing on the surface of a pond.

  ‘The old Queen,’ the housekeeper said. Then she moved on to the next, a pasty gentleman in a ruff and hose, and said, ‘This is the old squire, from the old times.’

  ‘I see,’ Stokes said. ‘The house seems to me to have something of the flavour of – forgive me, madam, I forget the name of the house – the very celebrated castle, the Sussex house of the Harringtons. It is a great mystery, is it not, how some of these splendid old houses become the target of virtuosi and the object of aesthetic celebrity and others – others, such as this, truly no less beautiful – somehow remain to be found. A great mystery, madam.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, scrutinizing him. He resolved to make no more effort with his London charm. This could decently be cut short; he had enough for his evening story now, surely.

  ‘A splendid old house,’ he said, briefly.

  ‘This is his son,’ she went on. ‘This pitcher. They say he drowned in the moat, searching after the old King’s treasure.’

  ‘Does his ghost still walk the house?’ Stokes inquired, hopelessly.

  ‘Not that I heard,’ she said. ‘This is old Thomas Garraway.’

  ‘Garraway?’ Stokes said, surprised before an ambitious but not very lovely portrait of a fat archer with two greyhounds. ‘Garraway, did you say, madam?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘He was the old Colonel Garraway’s great-great – let me see now – well, great-something-grandfather.’

  Stokes was silent, but thoughtful. He remembered now; an appallingly picturesque house in Gloucestershire, moated, inconvenient, too large for use. He recalled, too, the surprising disappearance of Bella Garraway from society, retired to the country with her poor health. He almost wasted another comment on the woman, then did not.

  3.

  Bella set down her novel with a yawn. She rose, stretching her back, and went to the window. The house was so normally silent that her attention was drawn by small noises; she could distinguish the creaks and groans of an old house from the activities of the housemaids without effort, and she knew without having to consider when a voice and a tread in the wooden corridors was an unfamiliar one. She wondered, idly, who it could be; a man’s voice, perhaps an irregular carpenter, talking to – surely – Mrs Bruton. Yes, that was certainly Mrs Bruton, with her keys rattling and her low Gloucestershire voice. She concentrated, and as the voices grew nearer, she realized with some surprise that the man’s voice was that of a gentleman. She went back to her sofa, and closed her novel, placed it neatly on the table.

  There was a low exchange of comments outside the door, Mrs Bruton’s unmistakable knock, and then she came in, half-shutting the door behind her.

  ‘There’s a gentleman, madam,’ Mrs Bruton said, setting down her basket and keys. ‘He says he is acquainted with you, though I’m sure he only came to see over the house. I said you were indisposed.’

  She held out a piece of pasteboard, with Stokes’s name on it. Bella took it; it meant nothing to her.

  ‘I am quite well, Mrs Bruton,’ she said. There was no reason to turn people away; she was no hermit, here. ‘Show the gentleman in.’

  Mrs Bruton obviously disapproved, but did what she was asked. Stokes, entering, was no more familiar to Bella than his name, and she rose with a general but rather vague smile.

  ‘An unforeseen pleasure, to find you here, Miss Garraway,’ Stokes said, accepting her invitation to a sofa. His voice fell on her strangely, but it took her a moment to recognize how long it had been since she had heard anyone who did not have an accent. ‘Forgive my unannounced intrusion.’

  ‘A pleasure to see an old friend,’ Bella said idly. She supposed she had met him, in some long-ago London drawing room; it all seemed so far away and unimportant now. ‘Most kind of you to pay a visit. Thank you, Mrs Bruton. If you could be so good – yes, thank you, that will be all. I will ring.’

  He was looking her up and down, in a manner which seemed barely decent, as the housekeeper unwillingly retreated from the novel spectacle of a visitor at Queen’s Acre. Of course, Bella thought, she had changed a great deal, and since he could only have known her in her London days, he would not necessarily be prepared for her matronly transformation, and his eyes seemed to be searching for the girl of five years ago in what she knew was a fat red country face. He appeared disconcerted, at a loss as he inspected her, as if searching for the right word to describe her so altered appearance. Coarsened, she silently supplied, you find me greatly coarsened, sir.

  ‘An unexpected discovery, I have to say, madam,’ Stokes – was that the man’s name? – went on. ‘I had heard of the great beauty of your house, and thought your housekeeper might be good enough to admit me. I had no idea that it was your house, or I should not have ventured to pay a visit in so very irregular a way.’

  ‘You are interested in old houses, sir?’ Bella asked, trying to find her way in the conversation; he was so very much at her advantage.

  ‘Most passionately, madam,’ he said. A silence fell.

  ‘And I hope Mrs Bruton was able to satisfy your curiosity?’

  He looked at her oddly; perhaps that sounded less than civil. It was so hard to know.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I am in the country for a few days, a guest of your nautical neighbour. Admiral Doughty,’ he enlarged, seeing Bella’s blank expression.

  ‘Yes, I recall,’ Bella said. ‘I fear that the country hereabouts can offer few diversions to one accustomed to a London life.’

  ‘There is a lack of sound and fury among these harmonious hills, true,’ Stokes said, ‘but I never spend two days in such surroundings without reflecting how very much more rational a mode of existence you live than we poor cits in—’

  Stokes broke off. There was an odd sound, somewhere nearby; a thin wailing cry. For a moment, he thought absurdly of his question to the housekeeper about the ghosts of the house. The cry was muted, as if by the closing of a door. It was only the strange sound which made him see how silent and empty the house truly was. Bella looked at him, composedly, as if she had heard nothing.

  ‘—we poor cits,’ he persevered, ‘in our sooty little rooms.’

  She wished he would go now. Looking at Stokes in his absurd unfitting garb, Bella could not think that there was any truth in what he said – and she could not imagine that anyone, on the briefest examination, could describe her life, at least, as rational – and she replied with an equal and opposite untruth. ‘I greatly miss London, I confess, sir, but circumstances have forced my retirement, and I must make the best of it.’

  ‘I am sure your friends all greatly miss you, madam, and I will be
pleased to carry the report that I have seen you and found you well. That will surely be a great consolation to the grief and concern which was so generally felt – I mean on hearing the news of your decline in spirits.’

  ‘That is most good of you, sir,’ Bella said. She felt unequal to talking about her health with this fellow. But conversation, in fact, was not something which withered with lack of practice, it seemed, she thought complacently, and she allowed her odd visitor to range over the dullest subjects for a few minutes like the hostess she once might have been. Only at the end of the conventional ten minutes did something go wrong, and it was not her fault, but Stokes’s.

  ‘I hope your father is well, Miss Garraway?’ he asked brightly.

  ‘I am afraid my father died, near on two years ago, sir,’ Bella said, untroubled.

  ‘Miss Garraway – I am most heartily sorry – I had not heard. I would not for the world …’ Stokes was thrown into confusion, and it was his abrupt change of demeanour which finally recalled him to her. Yes, she remembered him now; a literary man, an argufying sort of individual, always talking at the corners of London ballrooms, never deigning to dance, never seeming to notice the unserious diversions of his society.

  ‘Really, sir, it is of no consequence,’ Bella said. She did not quite know why, but she felt like providing him with an excuse for his blunder, however false. ‘My father was in very poor health for some time, and so entirely had he withdrawn from the world that his end was little remarked by anyone but his family. It was not to be expected that you would know of it.’

  ‘I am most sorry, nevertheless, to have been the occasion of any pain to you,’ Stokes said, and, as if wretchedly certain that he could not retrieve his slip, stood up to go.

  Bella levered herself up, and rang for Mrs Bruton to show him out. There could hardly be anything but a thick silence now between the two near-strangers, but Bella surprised herself by breaking it, and hearing herself inviting Stokes to call again before he left the country. Perhaps it was his confusion at the last, but she felt a little sorry for him, and did not mind at all that he immediately accepted, with an unexpected and genuine pleasure. When she was alone again, she did not return to her novel, but went over and sat at the escritoire. A letter from her sister had lain unanswered for a week now, stuffed into the half-open top drawer, since Bella had had no news to convey, no sentiments to express; but if, now, she had an event to interest Elizabeth, she found, after sitting for a while in absent thought, that she did not quite want to mention it, and the letter she sealed after an hour contained nothing but the usual mild reflections about the weather and the servants. There was so much, in truth, that Bella did not think about; there was so much that did not enter her thoughts, so much that lay unconsidered in a life that was now past, that might have been that of a distant acquaintance. What she had once done was simply not present to her mind; her London life, her girl’s life, was as remote and unimagined as China. Her happiness was of an oblivious, uncontemplative nature, and as the indifferent days went by, she was entirely absorbed, like water falling onto a verdant land.

  When Bella sat at the little desk, which faced the wall, she could see the window in the mirror. The light here was subdued, blocked by the steep-rising slopes which surrounded the house, and the look of the outside world, in the mirror, was of some dim swimming underwater landscape. She sat, hypnotized, and did not see the door behind her opening. The maid came in with her luncheon, and set it down.

  ‘Has he been good?’ Bella asked, without turning round.

  ‘We’ve been very good, haven’t we?’ the maid said, in that especial emphatic way, and realizing from the way she spoke that she had brought her son in with the tray, Bella turned, a ready smile on her face. Bella’s child hung back at first, until he saw his mother, and then his smile matched hers, and he ran forward to kiss her, stomping in his infant way as he went. She spread her arms out for him.

  ‘You’ve been a good boy, haven’t you, Henry? You’ve been a good boy for Mary?’

  ‘Good boy,’ Henry said, delighted.

  ‘You’ve been quiet all morning,’ Bella said. ‘I was listening, and you didn’t make a sound.’

  ‘Very good boy,’ Henry said, in a full, satisfied tone, as if he were supplying a deficiency.

  ‘What have we been doing?’

  The boy seemed too full of joy to speak at first, and then the nursemaid helped him out. ‘We cut paper shapes – and then—’

  He started on a long complicated explanation, his new words falling over each other like his hilarious run, and, though Bella could not understand everything, she nodded seriously, her big eyes fixed on his, her face holding his excitement.

  ‘If you are good,’ Bella said, ‘you can come and have tea with Mamma, and then, before bedtime, we can go and look at your flowerbed with Mary. Would you like that?’

  ‘He’s turning into a proper little countryman, madam,’ the nursemaid said. ‘He was talking about his flowerbed all morning.’

  ‘I do hope he isn’t a nuisance to the gardeners,’ Bella said.

  ‘Oh, no, madam,’ she said. ‘Good as gold, he is.’

  ‘Today?’ Henry said.

  ‘If you are good,’ Bella said. ‘Would you like to hear a story?’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘A sad story? Or a merry one?’

  ‘Sad,’ Henry said.

  ‘Yes,’ Bella said, wondering a little. ‘Yes, a sad tale’s best.’ The nurse left, noiselessly, and Bella began. ‘Once upon a time – beyond the horizon – beyond the ninth horizon, and the ninth horizon beyond that – there lived a beautiful princess in a great glass palace. She lived alone, since her mother and father were dead, and she was very lonely. Now, in the garden of her palace there was a magical tree, surrounded by walls of glass. Its trunk was gold, and its leaves were silver, and when it bore fruit, the fruit was emeralds and diamonds and rubies. Nobody knew how long the tree had been there, and people said it was older than the palace itself, and older than the memory of men. The glass garden was the princess’s favourite place, and she went there, often, to be alone. And one day, she was sitting underneath the tree, and found herself saying “Tree, leaves, roots and fruit, tell me who can cure my wound.” For she was so very lonely and unhappy that she felt her unhappiness like a wound.

  ‘But when she spoke to the tree, something strange happened. There was a rustling from the leaves, although there was no wind, and the branches seemed to creak, and then the princess heard a voice. She looked around her, but there was no one near her, and then she understood that it was the tree, speaking to her. And the tree said, “Princess, I can cure your loneliness. But first you must kiss me three times: once on my roots, once on my trunk, and once on my leaves. And if you do that, I shall fall and die, but in my place you shall have a child, whose hair will be black as coal, whose skin white as frost, whose eyes blue as the sky.”

  ‘At first the princess would not do this, because she loved the tree, and did not wish it to die. But the tree said again what it had said, and slowly the princess thought that her loneliness mattered more to her. “If you do this,” the tree said, “you must chop up my trunk, and make of me a cradle for your child, and then I will have served my purpose.” So she kissed the tree three times, as it had asked, once on the roots, once on the trunk, and once on the leaves, and all at once, the tree fell on the grass, so gently it hardly made a noise. And as it did so, the princess heard a call from the highest tower of her palace, and she ran inside. Up and up the stairs of the highest tower she went, until she came to the upmost room: and there, lying in swaddling clothes, was a baby, whose hair was black as coal, whose skin was white as frost, whose eyes were blue as the sky, and the princess was so filled with joy she cried …’

  Henry was a good boy, and responded as seriously to the idea of stories as of treats. Bella’s story wound on, as the cradle grew into a bed for the child, then a marriage bed, and then a coffin, and that was the sad story, wi
nding and unwinding behind the boy’s blue eyes, blue as the sky. It was when he frowned in concentration that he took on the look of Burnes. In some ways he was different every day. His life changed from hour to hour as he learnt something new. To have a child was to place a being under a glass, and watch the swarming invisible events of a small new life, the instantaneous quick changes, and each day left behind for ever. She, now, had no new days; each fresh newness was in him, and she was pleased. She never thought of Burnes. She had a child.

  He listened silently to the very end of the story, which was his own story, and in a moment she kissed him, patted him on the head, and let him return to the nursery. It was so hard to say goodbye, and whenever she sat here, in her room, whatever activity seemed to occupy her, in her mind was always the idea that she might set it down, go to the nursery and kiss her boy, for no reason whatever, as if she had been separated from him for months. Sometimes she did that very thing. She never regretted it.

  4.

  The housekeeper turned back without a comment, dropping Stokes’s proffered shillings gracelessly in her basket, and left him at the entrance to the house. Stokes stood there for a moment, with his horse. He tried, in his routine way, to begin the retelling in his head, to start to practise the anecdote he would tell at dinner. ‘I had an odd – no, an interesting – adventure today,’ he began, but then it obstinately halted. He had had an odd, no, an interesting adventure today, that was true, but what was it? He tried again; poor Bella Garraway, so changed, so dull, and once she had been … Well, what had she been? What, in truth, had he seen, now? What was there that could be told to Castleford and his dull sister and their dull guests? Something – some story, true – had been vouchsafed to him, and he knew that there was no betrayal like the telling of it to people he despised. People – he surprised himself – people unlike Bella. He had had an odd, no, an interesting adventure. There it was, undeniable, but behind him, and for once it would not become anecdote. No, he would not return.