Corpse in a Gilded Cage

by Robert Barnard

  ‘By Jove! These trees have been here hundreds of years. As long as my family has. It makes you think.’

  In this the twelfth Earl was quite mistaken, for the elms of the Countess’s Mile had been replanted shortly before the First World War. It was not these trees under which the fourth Earl’s wife had flirted with Richard Mont, her groom, tapping him playfully with her whip as they swapped innuendoes drawn from the world of horsemanship; nor was it these that had seen the fourth Earl burst in on them and commence that ferocious attack on Richard Mont that had led to his serving three years for felonious assault in the most luxurious apartments in Newgate Prison. But the accuracy of the twelfth Earl’s reflections is beside the point, for the Romantic impulse which led to that lift of the heart was of a kind that has never depended on literal truth. The important point was that it was there, even if it did not go very deep, and his man of business could not have caught him in a better place for his purposes, had he but known it, and had he but known how to make use of it.

  But he did not. When Mr Lillywaite was sent thither by the Countess (in an early morning dishabille that was by no means as enticing as that of the first Earl’s wife in the portrait by Kneller that dominated the Great Entrance Hall) he merely clicked his tongue at the unbusinesslike character of the place of meeting, and set reluctantly off.

  When the Earl saw the cadaverous figure of his man of affairs approaching down the great flight of steps from the Dutch Garden, he roused himself from his mild reverie among times past and strolled to meet him along the leafy shadows of the Mile, his mouth set in a genial smile that involved him in some effort, for Mr Lillywaite did not inspire geniality.

  ‘Lovely day, eh?’ called the Earl. ‘Makes you feel more alive, a day like this. I always love walking down Clapham High if there’s early morning sunshine. Shall we take a turn along the avenue here?’

  The sunken face of the tall lawyer looked down into the round face of the dumpy peer, and rather bleakly said:

  ‘Of course. If you wish.’

  Mr Lillywaite had long ago given up any attempt to ‘My Lord’ or even ‘Sir’ the present Earl, faced with the crude ridicule that these formalities excited. Indeed, the whole six weeks of their acquaintanceship had been one series of shocks to Mr Lillywaite’s old-fashioned sensibilities, beginning with the new Earl’s demand that before he and the Countess come to Chetton his man of business should get rid of every man jack (and every woman jill) of the house’s domestic staff. ‘Give ’em their marching orders pronto,’ the Earl had said. ‘Me and Elsie don’t want spies around us all the time. We’re not used to it. And specially we don’t want any of the toffee-nosed types you get in these places, watching our every move.’ Mr Lillywaite (inspired by notions of decorum rather than of humanity) had protested the length of service, the devotion to the family, of this or that retainer, but—beyond paying the severance pay that the law demanded, and a very little over—the Earl had been adamant. Mr Lillywaite had known from this point that things were not going to go well, and they had not.

  ‘Well,’ he said now, gazing unhappily at his black shoes, which were gaining a patina of sandy dust from the surface of the Mile, ‘we are getting on. There is clearly going to be no difficulty in establishing your title, or indeed your claim to the estate. There is no question that your father’s marriage to your mother was legal, and none of any previous tie on either side.’

  ‘I should think not,’ said the Earl, with a touch of mustard in his tone. ‘They were practically teenagers at the time, weren’t they? He was just twenty, and Ma was eighteen and a bit, that’s what I heard. It wasn’t likely either of them had ever been spliced before.’

  ‘No. No indeed. The marriage was always recognized by the family, even though, as you no doubt know, it was highly disapproved of.’

  ‘They were too young. I don’t wonder the family were against it.’

  ‘That was one of their objections,’ said Mr Lillywaite, from a great mental distance. The Earl shot him a quick glance that, had it been seen, might have warned Mr Lillywaite that he should not underestimate either the Earl’s intelligence or his strength of character.

  ‘Oh, I get the point,’ said the Earl. ‘I know they thought Ma wasn’t their class. You don’t have to be shy of saying it straight out. She wasn’t either. I know that. But you could say we had the last laugh there, couldn’t you?’

  Mr Lillywaite sighed. Indeed you could. It was something that had not been foreseen. Even the old Earl—a courteous, prudent, private sort of man, an aristocrat of an old-fashioned school—had not foreseen it. He had settled the estate and the bulk of the family fortune on his grandson some years before, his only son being many years dead. The grandson had legally come into the estate on his coming of age, but it had been little more than a formal assumption. Who could have guessed that three weeks after the death of the old Earl, the young Earl would also die—driving up the M1, considerably inebriated, on the way from one celebration of his new independence to another, from one set of well-heeled drinking pals to another. It had all been unimaginably shocking to Mr Lillywaite’s nervous system.

  ‘The old Earl was, alas, never reconciled to his brother,’ went on Mr Lillywaite, in a well-practised voice of formal regret. ‘This perhaps explains why he never cared to anticipate the possibility of—of this happening.’

  ‘I’m surprised they never made it up,’ said the Earl. ‘After all, the marriage only lasted a year or two. I was hardly crawling when Dad left. Packed his bags and took ship to Australia. I believe he made good there: they say he ended up as a member of the South Australian parliament.’

  Mr Lillywaite’s upper lip held the suspicion of a curl. That was not his idea of making good.

  ‘Ye-es,’ he said. ‘Well, as I say, there can be no doubt that, on your father’s death three years ago, you became the legal heir after the Earl’s grandson. Naturally no arrangements to circumvent death duties could be made. There was every reason to assume that the young Earl would have heirs.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ said the Earl cheerfully, without any suspicion of disapproval. ‘Sowed a fair few wild oats, from what we heard down at the local the other night.’

  The idea of the Earl discussing his predecessor in a public house in Chetton Lacey was intensely distasteful to Mr Lillywaite. He would like to have made this clear to the Earl, but could think of no way that was likely to get through to him. After a pause he resumed the walk, the two of them resembling more and more a Victorian private tutor hired to rein in the levity and trivial-mindedness of a high-spirited young charge.

  ‘Nevertheless, there is no question of any legal heir to the young Earl being in existence. So perhaps we could turn now to the question of the house. I trust you have turned the subject over in your mind since our last conversation?’

  ‘Oh, I have,’ said the Earl, walking confidently, even cockily forward, his hands clasped behind his back, looking very much as Harold Wilson used to look after a particularly triumphant Question Time in the House. ‘The result is exactly the same. Elsie and me have made up our minds, and we’re not going to go back on it. Sell out and get out. House, pictures, furniture—the lot. Get what they’ll fetch is all we ask. We want to be rid of the whole caboodle.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ sighed Mr Lillywaite, his whole gaunt frame suggesting the stiffest form of disapproval. ‘I must ask you—er, My Lord—to think what you are doing, think what this must do to the good name of the family in the eyes of the public at large. I have tried to make it as clear as I could that Chetton Hall and its contents are, considered as an entity, one of the national treasures.’

  ‘Let the bleeding nation buy it, then—provided it pays the market price.’

  Once more Mr Lillywaite, in spite of his natural servility, could not keep from his face a fleeting expression of distaste. He had always known that the old Earl’s brother had married beneath him. The moment he heard, with horror, of the young Earl’s death he had r
ealized that the new Earl and his Countess might not be up to par. Quite how stupendously below par they would turn out to be he had not for a moment suspected.

  ‘The point I tried to make at our last meeting,’ he said, with what he felt was heroic patience, ‘was that in these matters there is something more to be considered, something more than mere money. There are the family obligations, as custodians over the centuries of part of the nation’s artistic and architectural heritage. This is one part—one part, only—of what we understand by the phrase noblesse oblige. It is this obligation that noble families like your own strive to uphold in these admittedly difficult times.’

  ‘Not all of them they don’t,’ returned the Earl triumphantly. ‘Do you think I haven’t read in the papers about that lot that live in the South of France and are selling the old ’ome bit by bit and living off the proceeds like pigs in clover? And I don’t blame ’em either. The nation can’t have it both ways: you can’t slam on death duties and income tax and wealth tax and I don’t know what, and then scream “noblesser bleege” when the people who’ve got the stuff want to cash in their chips and get what they can while the going’s good.’

  ‘Of course we would not disagree about death duties—’

  ‘I’m damn sure we wouldn’t. And another thing: when you talk about “the national heritage” and all that rot, how come this place was only open to the public one day a year in the old Earl’s time, eh?’

  ‘Er . . . the old Earl felt . . .’

  ‘Well now, I’m going to hand it to you straight: this is one nobless that isn’t going to bleege. I don’t owe no favours to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, nor to the nation. Neither the one nor the other has ever done any great favour to me. I’ll be forking out enough from this little lot as it is.’

  ‘True, I can’t deny it. There is, of course, the option of offering Chetton to the National Trust,’ murmured Mr Lillywaite, following that line of thought reluctantly. ‘But I’m afraid that, even were you to do that, you would also have to offer it a considerable sum to cover the upkeep.’

  The Earl stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘You must be joking.’

  The lawyer did not pursue that option.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it will be necessary to offer the nation certain works of art, in lieu of death duties.’

  The Earl looked suspicious.

  ‘Does that mean they’ll be getting them on the cheap?’

  ‘As a rule the sum agreed is rather less than the piece would fetch on the open market.’

  ‘Forget it. Sell to the highest bidder, and then pay the death duties.’ The Earl stopped in his tracks. Talk with Mr Lillywaite always made him feel ‘badgered’. He had felt the same way, not long before, when he had been questioned after a road accident by the police. It brought out all his usually latent aggression and pig-headedness. ‘Here,’ he said, turning to the lawyer with a look of intense suspicion on his face, ‘you’re not in the pay of the Chancellor or something, are you?’

  Mr Lillywaite screwed up his face in an expression of pain and outrage, as if he had been accused of frequenting a credit-card brothel.

  ‘Lord Ellesmere, I am merely trying to serve you—and the good name of your family—as best I can, in difficult circumstances. As I have done, and my father before me, all our working lives.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the Earl, speedily appeased, and equably resuming his walk, ‘no offence. But from now on I’d be happier if you served me and let the family’s good name take care of itself. The family’s never done anything for me, you know.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Lillywaite, also resuming his walk, but engineering a turn in the direction of the great house, conceivably hoping for some psychological effect from the sight of it. ‘But you must realize that, even were selling decided on—’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘—it would be far from easy to find a buyer for a mansion—one might say a palace—of this size.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. All these bleeding Arabs are just itching to buy up places like this. They point their prayer mats towards Buckingham Palace and pray it comes on the market.’

  ‘But surely you wouldn’t want—’

  ‘I wouldn’t give a monkey’s fart.’

  ‘For the neighbourhood it would be a sad, sad blow.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. They’d lap it up. He’d come into residence once a year, throw open the grounds for a church bazaar, wander round in his nightshirt and hand out tenners for a slice of homemade sponge, and if I know that bunch down at the Chetton Arms they’d love every minute of it. They’d rake in a lot more shekels from Sheik Yerfanny than they would out of me and Elsie. More than they got out of the old Earl, too, I’d lay a tanner.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Lillywaite, unwilling to admit that the Earl probably understood more about popular local reaction than he himself did. If he had been unbiased, which he was not, he would have admitted that the Earl gave his opinions with a good deal of force, and that they held more than a few grains of common sense. Indeed, down at his real local, the Prince Leopold in Clapham, the Earl’s opinions on anything under the sun were listened to by the regulars with the sort of respect they gave the Prime Minister, appearing on the Jimmy Young Show. But Mr Lillywaite was not yet willing to admit that he had lost the argument.

  ‘Of course, if any decision were made to sell, it ought to be the decision of the whole family. You have to remember that in this matter I in some sense represent Lord Portsea’s interests as well.’

  ‘Whose? Oh—Phil’s.’

  ‘Your elder son’s.’

  ‘Oh well, Phil will be easy. He’ll go along with anything I decide. He’s a good chap—never the sort to make trouble. You’d like Phil. I’ll introduce you when he gets out.’

  Mr Lillywaite’s eyebrows rose a fraction, but he had an inkling he had discovered a straw worth clutching on to.

  ‘These are, you realize, things that both he and his heirs in their turn are vitally concerned in. Do I gather you have not discussed them with him yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Quite apart from the fact that discussion with Phil isn’t that easy at the moment, I never thought of it. I didn’t discuss it with him when we sold the house in Hackney and bought the house in Clapham, and I shan’t discuss it with him when I sell this place neither. He wouldn’t expect it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, he has his rights. As heir presumptive he has clearly defined rights. I think it might be as well if I talked to him. You have no objections?’

  ‘None at all. Visiting days are Mondays and Thursdays.’

  ‘I feel sure the governor of Daintree will admit me whenever I care to appoint a time,’ said Mr Lillywaite stiffly.

  ‘Pals, eh? Yes, well, it’s quite convenient Daintree being only thirty-five miles away. Dixie was going yesterday, then stopping the night in Bristol and coming on here this morning.’

  ‘Ah—Lady Portsea.’

  ‘That’s the ticket. Mind you, Dixie is another type again. A mind of her own, has Dixie. Too much so, if you believe my Elsie. Philip’ll go along with anything—happy-go-lucky type, open as the day is long. But you never know with Dixie—I haven’t the faintest idea how she’s taking all this.’

  Lady Portsea’s reactions to ‘all this’ did not interest Mr Lillywaite. He had no curiosity about human feelings. He had never inquired about the present Earl’s reactions on succeeding. He would have shrunk from the Earl’s cliché—‘you could have knocked me down with a feather’, as like as not—though he had accepted a whole barrage of clichés from the old Earl in his time, most of them to the effect that such and such behaviour was ‘frightfully bad form’, or that the country was ‘going to the dogs’ and its working men ‘needed a good kick up the backside’. But though Mr Lillywaite did not speculate about the reactions of the new Lord and Lady Portsea, he did consider them, coolly, as possible new counters to be used on his side of the game.

  ‘Well, that’s all settl
ed, then,’ said the Earl. ‘You know, I don’t plan to stop here much longer. There’s nothing to keep us, thank the Lord. You go and talk to Phil, but you’ll find he certainly won’t stand in our way. And I wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice if he did. It’s “Home, Sweet Home” for Elsie and me, and I tell you it’s not a moment too soon. I always sleep light, but this business has been that much worry that I haven’t had a good night’s kip since we got to this place.’

  ‘Certainly I’ll see Lord Portsea as soon as I can make arrangements,’ murmured Mr Lillywaite pensively.

  They were emerging now from the Mile, and Mr Lillywaite noticed with regret that the Earl cast not a second glance at the monumental pile of Chetton Hall that now stood in all its glory before them. They strolled on, an ill-assorted pair, and they had just reached the flagged floor around the fountain when Mr Lillywaite paused, puzzled. From the distance, from behind his back in fact, there came the sound of a motor vehicle. Approaching nearer. Surely it could not be . . .

  But he turned and—yes, it was. A vehicle—an estate car—was actually driving up the Countess’s Mile, throwing up clouds of sandy dust in its wake.