But it was the man who rose to the occasion. Stubbing out his cigar with dignified meticulousness, he eased himself out of his chair, advanced to the door, and inclined his head in the direction of the Earl.
‘Was there something Your Lordship required?’ he asked.
CHAPTER 6
THE GREAT HALL
As Joan was later to tell the Chief Superintendent with an odd pride in her voice, the Earl was like a man transformed. He seemed to be seized suddenly and decisively by the spirit of his ancestors, a reborn nobleman of the eighteenth century.
‘Well, I’m damned!’ he bellowed, with that confidence in dealing with servants that these days can only be displayed by those who have no need of them. ‘I can guess who you are. You’re the bloody butler or some such flunkey. With your little bit of housemaid floozie in tow. I don’t need to ask what you’ve been doing here.’
The superior squatter, though he had taken a step back in the face of the onslaught, still had some reserves of self-confidence to call on. He said with an attempt at urbanity:
‘It seemed to us, My Lord, that there would be no harm in our camping out here, so to speak, until we found ourselves—’
‘Oh, that’s how it seemed to you, did it? Well, I can tell you, it seemed to you wrong. How would it seem to you if I came and camped in your house, that is when you’ve stashed away enough of other people’s belongings to buy yourself one?’
‘Chetton being so large, My Lord—’
‘Large or small has nothing to do with it. You just counted on it being so large you wouldn’t get caught. Camped out here, my foot! You just tell me when you’ll be leaving tomorrow and I’ll ring the nearest caravan site: you can take your camping gear along there. Only make it before ten o’clock, because if you’re in the house after that I’m going to ring the Meresham police. Got it?’
The man bowed.
‘Perfectly, My Lord.’
The Earl banged the door shut, and marched down the corridor, down the stairs, and resumed the long trek back to the Green Drawing-Room, watched and then followed by an unusually admiring family.
Still, the discovery effectively broke up the birthday party. On the way back the children were shooed off to bed. Then the Countess recognized the State Bedroom and trailed into it, saying that all she wanted now was her shut-eye. Back in the Drawing-Room the Earl, unusually for him, poured himself a stiff whisky, muttering the while (again, unusually for him) more swear words than had been heard from him over the counter of the iron-monger’s in a whole lifetime of service. And though the rest of them poured themselves drinks, the life had well and truly gone out of the jollifications. None of them said so, but they felt, somehow, as if they had become unpleasantly public—as if their most intimate actions had been watched and commented on. Only Trevor remained unaffected. But then Trevor was used to having his most intimate actions watched and commented on.
‘Bloody cheek!’ fumed the Earl, incensed rather than calmed by the golden spirit he was downing. ‘Hiding themselves away up there. Spying on us the whole time we’ve been here. Coming out at night, I don’t doubt. Do you know, I recognized him? He was down at the Chetton Arms last time we went there. Slipped out as soon as we came in.’
‘No one there said anything?’ asked Digby.
‘Not a word. That’s the feudal bloody spirit for you. I’ve often thought I heard a car in the night, then decided I must be imagining it. You know the smallest little thing wakes me. I bet it’s that old Escort that’s in the stables. It must be his, or theirs. Bloody cheek!’
‘I think it’s a right old giggle,’ said Trevor. ‘It really creases me up.’
‘It does, does it? Well, it doesn’t crease me up. It gives me the gripes. I’d like to know if old Lillywaite knew about this. If I thought he did I’d give him the boot.’
‘Dad, he wouldn’t,’ protested Dixie. ‘A man like that . . .’
‘He might. After all, I’d told him to pay them off, but he didn’t do it very effectively, did he? Perhaps he wanted to keep the tabs on your mum and me. Have somebody here all the time . . . Spying.’
And, in truth, that aspect did seem to make most of the others a bit uneasy too. After the Earl had downed his Scotch and stumped grumpily off to bed, for all the world like some Hanoverian monarch who has just been defied by his Prime Minister, the others tried to get things going again. Trevor and Michele, whom nothing seemed to affect greatly, intertwined themselves on the sofa, while Digby and Lady Joan had a serious discussion sitting on upright chairs at the far end of the room. Dixie set Sam on to play again, but even though he played ‘The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid’, and Dixie danced desultorily with Chokey, their hearts weren’t in it. When both Trevor and Digby had declined to dance with Dixie they began to drift off to bed, some alone, some in pairs. By half past midnight the great house was in darkness.
• • •
The first thing to happen on Sunday morning was that a lone figure left the Blenheim Wing and walked (rather jauntily, it must be said) to the stables. A cream Ford Escort was brought round to an unobtrusive door in the wing, and for ten minutes two figures piled it high with possessions as the morning light gathered around them. Then they both slipped nonchalantly into the front seats and the car drove off down the approach road, past the Dower House and the Lodge, and turned right at the gates along the main road to Chetton Lacey. By this time it was nearly seven o’clock, but the house slept on.
The Countess awoke at about eight-thirty. She felt across the width of the great bed, satisfied herself that her husband was preparing her tea, and then drowsed off again.
It was nearly nine when Lady Joan came down to the kitchen. She looked brightly at the mess of glasses left over from the previous evening. She ran water into the sink, squirted a dash of washing-up liquid into it, and then piled the glasses carefully in. She liked to treat nice things properly. Then she put a large saucepan on to boil on the gas cooker, and put some cut bread—how askance she eyed it!—under the grill to toast. Before long Digby came into the kitchen, looking unusually sporty in autumnal open-necked shirt and cream slacks.
‘I’m going to boil eggs,’ announced Joan. ‘It’s easier, when you don’t know when people will be coming down.’
‘Much easier,’ agreed Digby. ‘I’ll put on the kettle and we’ll make a big pot of tea.’
They worked in companionable silence, united in a single aim. As Joan popped a couple of eggs into the boiling water, Digby said:
‘I slipped down to the stables to have a look. The Escort has gone.’
‘Dad will be pleased,’ said Joan. ‘I must say in this case I see his point. It was an awful cheek.’
‘Agreed. Anyway, they’re out of the way now, but I do think someone should have checked what they took with them. I wish I’d thought to do it myself . . . At least now there’s only the family to cope with. I wonder what today will bring.’
‘Today will bring Dixie, you can be quite sure of that,’ said Joan grimly, lowering her voice to a whisper which echoed round the cavernous expanses of the kitchen.
‘That’s for sure,’ agreed Digby, pouring boiling water into a teapot. ‘Still, I think your Dad can cope with Dixie if we back him up. If it were just Dixie, I wouldn’t worry. It’s this bringing Phil into it that I don’t like. If Phil gets the idea—’
‘Or gets given the idea,’ said Lady Joan bitterly. ‘He’s being put up to it by Dixie and that solicitor, that’s obvious. And if the three of them start in on Dad—’
She broke off suddenly as footsteps were heard down the passage. It was Michele, her flimsy nightgown covered this morning by a warm coat, since she had at last realized the refrigerating potential of Chetton Hall. She wafted in, and looked vaguely about her. There was plenty to look at: the kitchen stretched for yards and yards in every direction, and off it opened up various dark rooms, some of considerable size, all of them devoted, no doubt, to some domestic mystery or other in bygone t
imes.
‘Hello!’ said Joan, all bright and cheery. ‘Did you sleep well? Anything you want? I can put a couple of eggs on for you, if you like.’
Michele wafted over to the stove, looked disdainfully at the boiling eggs, then shook her head.
‘Just toast,’ she said, taking the slices that were under the grill, knifing butter and marmalade on to a plate, pouring two cups of tea, and then drifting out with them all on a tray.
‘Little minx,’ said Joan, her mouth hard again as she put fresh bread under the grill and turned it up high. ‘So inconsiderate. Now the eggs will be overdone.’
Digby and Joan were just decapitating their eggs when Dixie and the children arrived.
‘Hello, Digby and Joan! Early birds, aren’t you? What worm are you two hoping to catch? Oh—boiled eggs, is it? No, don’t stir. I’ll do them.’ Dixie, resplendent in shining morning face, claret-coloured slacks and frilly blouse, turned to the children. ‘Right. Get four glasses of milk from the ’fridge, Karen. Hop to it. Then you lot hook it over there, and don’t let me hear a peep.’
Dixie pointed to a distant table tucked into an obscure corner of the great barn of a kitchen—a table where perhaps, in plushier times, the under-tweeny and the rough-work skivvy had eaten their meals apart from the upper servants. The children scuttled there and sat with their milk, watching their elders with round, critical eyes. Dixie, who never understood her children were watching her and taking notes, took five eggs in her large, threatening hands and plopped them into the water.
‘Oh, Christ—two of them burst.’
‘You only have to prick their ends,’ said Joan.
‘You watch your language, Joanie,’ shrieked Dixie, with a high laugh. She began slapping margarine on bread, while Joan, her little piece of schoolmistressy advice rejected, raised her eyebrows at Digby and spread her toast with lemon marmalade.
‘Where the hell are Sam and Chokey?’ demanded Dixie, as she took plates of bread and scrape and undercooked eggs to the children. ‘They’ll just have to get their own.’
An unnatural quality in Dixie’s voice made Joan and Digby glance at each other again: they thought that Dixie knew perfectly well where Sam was, at any rate. They said nothing. Tight-lipped silence was their response to other people’s sexual habits. Dixie poured herself tea, and brought cup and plate to the table. She began tucking in, and pretended not to notice the silence around her.
‘You know,’ she said, supping from her cup thoughtfully, ‘I’ve been thinking. It seems to me you two and me ought to get together and have a good talk.’
‘Oh?’ said Lady Joan.
‘About—things,’ said Dixie. ‘I mean, about here, and all that: the house, and what Dad ought to do with it.’
‘Ah,’ said Digby, taking charge of the conversation with the silent consent of his wife. Digby was experienced in financial negotiations, and few were the insurance claimants who ever got the better of him. ‘Personally I don’t see that there’s anything much to talk over.’
‘Don’t be like that, Digby,’ protested Dixie, her mouth stretched into an ingratiating smile.
‘Well, is there? What are the facts? The options at present under discussion seem to be: one, selling the house and all its contents, with a view to eventually splitting up the proceeds between all the children; two, trying to keep the estate intact for Phil. It’s plain as the nose on your face that our interests conflict with your interests. The more Dad tries to compromise and be fair to Joan and Trevor, the less likely it is that the estate could be kept together for Phil.’
‘But we could negotiate, surely?’
‘You’re talking as if Dad had nothing to do with it,’ protested Joan. ‘We can’t negotiate behind his back. It’s his decision.’
‘Partly,’ admitted Dixie, taking a third piece of toast. ‘Still, Dad wouldn’t want no trouble. Anything for a quiet life, that’s your dad’s motto. If we three was to get round a table and come to an agreement. . .’
‘That’s the point I’m making,’ said Digby. ‘There’s no agreement possible. It’s one thing or the other, with no middle way.’
‘Anyway, it’s not only us,’ said Joan. ‘What about Trevor?’
‘Oh, I meant Trevor too,’ said Dixie, pushing aside her plate and lighting a cigarette. She smiled at them as if she were a cat playing with two uppitty mice. ‘Though frankly Trevor doesn’t know his arse from his elbow most of the time.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Digby. ‘When it comes to the crunch Trevor will know which side his bread is buttered on. People always do. And if he doesn’t Michele will tell him. And Trevor’s interests are our interests.’
‘Anyway, what I’m saying is, if all of us got together—’
‘Mum, can we go and play?’
The children had bolted their bread and marge and left their sloppy eggs in their shells, and now they stood around the table in an attitude of hypocritically humble supplication.
‘Christ, what did I tell you? . . . . Oh well, yes. Go on, get out. We’ve got things to discuss.’
The children scampered off to the door, and once they were out of the way Dixie turned back to the discussion.
‘I wish you’d try and see my position, though, Digby. And Joan. With Phil . . . out of the way . . . not able to take care of his own interests . . . naturally it all falls to me.’
‘It seems to me that Phil is taking care of his own interests perfectly well,’ said Digby. ‘What with you and this Lillywaite.’
‘But he’s not here. And you lot are. With a vengeance,’ added Dixie, her mask of friendliness dropping for a moment. ‘It would be taking advantage if you were to push Dad into making a decision now, without talking to Phil.’
She looked around the kitchen, as if expecting a chorus of assent, but all she saw was the mountainous figure of the Countess, enveloped in her habitual grubby blue dressing-gown, steaming down the passage and into the kitchen with an air of resentment that was almost palpable.
‘Here, your dad forgot my tea,’ she said. ‘It’s never happened before in forty years. He must have gone mooning under them trees as usual, and forgot he never brought it up. It’s being upset by that butler chappie. Give us a cup, Joanie.’
‘Well, fancy Dad,’ began Joan, fussing over to the dresser and pouring a cup. ‘It’s not like him—’
But she got no further. She was interrupted by the children, who ran back into the kitchen, their faces screwed up with fear.
‘Mum! Mum!’
‘God in heaven, you little mongrels, I’ll—’
‘No, Mum. Come quickly! Grandma! You’ve got to come! It’s—’
‘What is it, Karen?’ asked Lady Joan, in her practised infants’ teacher voice. ‘Tell us quietly now—’
‘No. Come. Come quickly,’ insisted Karen.
First Joan, then Digby, then the rest of them got up and followed the children out of the kitchen. Through the long cold winding passageway they trailed, uncertain and a little apprehensive, then out of the baize door that led down a further oak-lined passage, then finally out into the Great Hall. All of them had crossed the Hall that day—down the stairs and across it, and down those passageways to the kitchen. But none of them had seen what the children pointed to. The Countess looked in that direction, gasped, then screamed.
‘Oh, my God! Perce!’
For in the dark little niche made by the stairwell, hunched on his side by the marble by Bernini that Digby had priced on his arrival, lay the body of the Earl. He was in his dressing-gown, and from below it there protruded the bottoms of his pyjamas. His head was tucked into the dark, cobwebby recesses of the wooden panelling, and he was not stirring.
‘Oh Dad!’ said Joan, going over to him, but stopping some way from him as if he were something a dog had left on a pavement. ‘We must get a doctor.’
But no doctor was going to help the Earl now. As Digby strode to the telephone in the Drawing-Room the others stood back, the Countess sobb
ing, the rest of them staring, at a loss for words. Above their heads, brought there by the scream, could be seen the figures of Sam and Chokey, gazing down on the scene beneath. And everyone there, above and around, knew that the Earl was very, very dead—beyond the help of country doctor or Harley Street specialist. Just as 1936 had been the year in which Britain had three kings, so this seemed destined to be the year in which it had four Earls of Ellesmere.
Four to date, that is.
CHAPTER 7
THE GREEN DRAWING-ROOM
Chetton Hall, with its immensely long and varied history, could not in the nature of things have remained innocent of policemen. The fourth Earl, it is true, after his celebrated attack on his wife’s lover, had given himself up, with an air of triumphant self-satisfaction, to a brother magistrate, so the Bow Street Runners had not been needed. But later on, after Sir Robert Peel had established his splendid force, there had been visits from the police, and visits above stairs at that: there had been the involvement of the Hon. Frederick Spender in the Gladwyn Street scandal of 1891, when he was only saved from public prosecution by his threats to implicate the elder son of the Prince of Wales; there was the unfortunate way the seventh Earl’s name was drawn into the Tranby Croft affair, and the matter of the wife of the eighth Earl’s curious financial involvement with a fraudulent medium. But in all these matters the police had approached Chetton delicately, even hesitantly: would you be so kind, they had seemed to be saying, to subscribe for the moment to the polite fiction that all are equal before the law? No heroine of musical comedy was ever wooed with more tremulous earnestness than was Chetton on these occasions.
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