‘The Roundelays are people to live with and laugh at and love’ Punch
FM1
CHAPTER I
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THERE are country houses and country houses.
There is the type of mansion where the wrong kind of guest tips the staff too much and is regretfully dissected in the servants’ hall as his car slides off down the avenue, and there is the mansion where the right kind of guest is hardly able to tip the staff at all, and for whom the butler and footman continue to feel a warm affection.
There are houses, manors, halls, granges and abbeys in which Queen Elizabeth is known to have slept, and a larger number from which sheer lack of time compelled the indefatigable recumbent to abstain. There are country seats that get illustrated in Country Life, or pass, via midnight smart set pillow-fights, into The Police News and the divorce courts, and others possessing a priest’s hole but no ghost: an oubliette and ghost but no hidden treasure: a moat and no muniment room: a plentiful staff but no mention in Domesday Book, or Saxon ruins in the Home field and no butler at all.
There are denes, priories, castles and manors, in the rooms, galleries and grounds of which Catherine Howard still screams and Jane Grey had pricked her finger, Bloody Mary exclaimed ‘God’s death!’ Raleigh had smoked the first pipe of tobacco, Charles the Second hidden in an oak tree, someone else had signed something historic and damaging, Barbara Castlemaine had threatened to throw herself out of the window and Prince Arthur had actually done so: where the Queen of Scots had given away trinkets to faithful retainers and Wolsey had had all his taken from him. And there are English families with fairy banners and ‘lucks’ famed in ballads, and others of equally ancient lineage and no luck at all. One contingent still entertains the autumnal shooting party and is pictured in the papers filing like portly Sherlock Holmeses across the moors, while the second party emerges from posterns at sunset and hopefully pops away at rabbits for the larder on their own mortgaged acres.
And somewhere in England, in rating between the extremes of screaming queen and the pedigree’d pursuit of pot-luck, stands Delaye, seat of the Roundelays, presently occupied by Sir Edmund Roundelay, his family and various collaterals.
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Delaye is not officially a show place, mainly because the family recoils from exposing portions of their home for gain, love or charity, to that mythical trio, Tom, Dick or Harry. Inevitably, the polite and the genuine enthusiast alike have made the suggestion, backed by those who see in the arrangement a sensible source of profit to an overtaxed landlord which should also be educative to the bourgeois sightseer and teach his descendants — who knows? — that the fourteenth-century refectory table is not a mere surface for the carving of initials. But Sir Edmund, brushing aside the notion, would merely answer with the unfinished sentence that silenced without convincing ‘. . . playing darts on the tapestry . . .’
Delaye does not possess any objects which could be actually labelled as priceless, but its furniture and the tapestry alone would make a very fair sum at Christie’s, and if the portraits are not a galaxy of old masters, of the type that biographers write in for permission to reproduce in their Lives of Caroleans and Tudors, it possesses a respectable quota among the latest of which is numbered what Musgrave, the butler, alludes to as ‘The Hair-Comber’, as he cleanses the canvas half-yearly with a raw potato.
The principal rooms are always chilly and can be enjoyed only in a virulent heat-wave. Their windows all face north, as the direct result of that conventional parental gesture which sent its sons, on completing their education, to make the Grand Tour, a journey which commonly took in Italy, with an admiration real or inculcated of its architecture, and that was to be responsible on their return for north lights in two-fifths of the mansions of England, from a universal overlooking of the fact that the climate of the British Isles was not that of southern Europe. Thus, since the eighteenth century, from early spring to the following winter, the drawing-rooms and boudoirs were invaded once a day (and four times in the cold months) by a file of menservants, the firelight twinkling on their crimson plush and smiting flashes from their aiguillettes, bearing logs and brass scuttles of coal.
In the first-floor corridor there still stands in a dark recess a log-boy’s stool, relic of the life of some small disregarded member of the staff, whose duty it was to time by an hourglass the exact minute at which the next load must be fetched and carried.
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It is a tendency of human nature to measure the history of any large house by the yardstick of the family in present occupation. About the atmosphere of Delaye, therefore, the world at large thought nothing in particular, for the current family is never the interesting one to its contemporaries. But, as no house which has stood for four hundred years (and portions of it for five hundred) can have completely evaded the incident, the scandal, whiff of picturesque or skeleton in the cupboard, so Delaye can look back upon a time that was not solely a matter of tweeds, tithes, cold mutton, mutilated conversation, clean living, sobriety and the monotone that is security.
Nothing very spectacular had happened at Delaye, even in a past which offered more scope for assorted violence. There were no eminent bloodstains on the floor, no immured nun, no headless horseman driving oscillating family coach up the avenue at nightfall; there was in the Delaye archives, no absolutely historic parchment, no counterpart of the Luck of Eden Hall, or fairy banner of the Macleods of Dunvegan, no Airlie Drummer or Glamis monster. But every period had produced its contribution the atmosphere of which no humdrum twentieth century can ever quite disperse.
The Lacquer Room, antechamber to the drawing-room, had known the flap of cards and scent of frothing chocolate, the promised elopement with one fearful eye upon the door, the slipped billet and the swoon. The drawing-room air had rustled with acid criticism, behind the fans of painted chickenskin, of that cat, Sarah Churchill and her influence at Kensington Palace with Her Majesty. A mended rent in a dining-room curtain bore witness to the carving-knife a Georgian Roundelay had cast in a fury at the toughness of his venison, as did a broken banister-rod (never replaced) in the servants’ quarters to the rage of an eighteenth-century father on discovering that a flunkey had connived at the admittance to his daughter’s apartments of a rascally but charming ineligible. In the testers of which, century after century, the family had found itself too inert or unwilling to be rid, and whose valances were so difficult to reach for dusting purposes, had slept and borne and died not only generations of the house’s rightful family, but names which would be instantly recognized by the more erudite historian, if not by the world at large, whose memory sticks at outstanding celebrity. In the Tapestry Room had lain for two nights that gentleman who had so mistakenly been funny in Parliament about an entertainment tax upon the playhouses of London and the mistresses of a monarch who could be funnier than anybody when he so chose, while a court poet to a Tudor king had taken his ease in the pleasure grounds, and there, by rumour, committed to his tablets that lyric entitled ‘I Attempt From My True Love To Fly’.
In the linen room, now a slipway between bath and secondary staircase, the pious Roger Ascham, much troubled in his mind, had fled the religious turmoil of the city to ponder his Bible and search within its pages for riposte and refutation that he might strengthen a beloved pupil in imminent peril of a nine-days throne — not that the Lady Jane Dudley, God wot, lacked ability to defend herself before the chosen Catholic interrogators and their smooth, crafty verbal traps. . . .
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Upon the window-pane of a servant’s bedroom was spiderishly scratched the words
Heryn I dye
Thomas Picocke. 1792
The pathetic statement excited little comment among the Roundelays. It was left to the visitor to exclaim and conjecture, with wild, leaping surmise which took no account of probability and period, and ranged in speculation from a last message of the Princes in the Tower to a nothing dashed off in an idle moment by Guido Fawkes, gentleman, of Northamp
tonshire.
It was always Sir Edmund Roundelay who, smiling, would gently pull the rein of his guests’ careering fancies.
‘I’m afraid we can’t lay claim to anything so interesting. These Upper rooms, of course (except for the butler’s pantry and bedroom in the basement), were always the servants’ quarters.’ In that one sentence he indicated clearly that typographic suitability had triumphed, as it doubtless always must, over the romantic.
‘But — the diamond! Messages were always scratched with a diamond!’
‘Apparently not, in this case. The diamond leaves a clear, incisive cut. This signature and message, or whatever you like to call it, is thickened, blurred —’
‘But it must have been somebody important, or interesting, you know —’
‘Why? The instinct to achieve a species of visual immortality is still abundantly prevalent in the modern tripper who treats us to the atrocious spectacle of his obscure initials and amatory intentions upon any likely surface.’
‘Oh!’
‘There are vandals in every epoch, and no doubt John Doe of Clapham Junction may, a hundred years hence, also be subject of respectful surmise.’ And then, if further pressed, the master of Delaye would gently spring his mine and shatter the pretty fancy and the dramatic dream. Oh yes, there had been a Thomas Peacock; he was an outside servant — that settle by the second kitchen fireplace was no doubt his bed at night. His place in the domestic hierarchy was a low one. He was, in point of fact, a running footman, his duty to footslog over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar, herald and warning to the approaching town or hamlet or to any pedestrian that the coach of his master was imminent, and that a way for it must instantly be cleared. Hardly human, the running footman was more in the nature of a social gesture to the world at large, an earnest of the importance of the family he served, a panting caste-mark. Without change of linen at the end of a heating run in all weathers, including winter’s snows, the running footman must wait for hours in the kitchen, steaming in front of the open hearth, before word was brought him via a chain of house servants, that his family abovestairs had concluded its visit. He then took staff and nerved himself for the return footslogging. Oh yes, these fellows, poor devils, died off like flies of consumption — the local graveyard were known to be peppered with them. Pay? Oh, five pounds a year, livery and all found. And, oh yes, it might interest Sir Edmund’s visitors to know that the staff borne by these footmen possessed a metal cap at the tip in which was placed one hard-boiled egg to sustain them during the runs.
And at this point, Sir Edmund was always willing to show the household accounts books. Dating from the reign of Henry the Seventh and housed in the whitewashed cellars: quaint, dream-like entries of a casual day which combined the fantastically lavish with a medieval cheeseparing, seasoning the entries with a spice (spices amany) of the need or ingredient both unexpected, incalculable, or obsolete to the twentieth-century eye.
On the yellowed pages from the years 1790-1792, the name of Thomas Peacock intermittently appeared. Here, indicated the unerring finger of Sir Edmund, who soberly loved every entry and in the summer would sometimes spend an hour in a thick and ancient leather shooting jacket in the cellars, privily enchanting himself with the huge books, were the humble sums expended upon the running footman. A new livery, a shirt, the re-tipping in ‘metall’ of his stave: businesslike items, the bare-bones essentials of his occupation, with never an alleviating indulgence. . . .
‘And even the hardboiled eggs,’ Sir Edmund would sometimes add, handsomely mixing his metaphors, ‘were only a means towards keeping his nose to the grindstone.’
He would often say, as the visitors dispersed, or were assisted, up the cracked and rather dangerous cellar steps, with an enforced courtesy and arming of the ladies which smacked more of the heyday of Beau Nash than of the heartless present century, ‘So you see, there’s really no secret mystery about this Peacock follow, and precious little romance.’
Sir Edmund was a Shakespearean browser, but apparently he had not yet awoke to the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the Roundelay philosophy.
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The Roundelays were of Norman-French descent from that Rohan de l’Oeux who accompanied William the Conqueror to England. As with all subsequent Roundelays, the founder of the family was neither spectacular nor scallywag, but, as far as was publicly possible in the eleventh century, an accommodating law-abider who concurred in the right places with authority. He was, without achieving any fame in the process, inevitably advanced by the Norman William, a patronage and recognition that included land in Normanshire as recompense for his abandoned estates in France, a tenure which encroached upon the border of Brittany. In the pleasant land of Britain, he had built himself the small fortress dwelling of de l’Oeux, here married suitably and produced his family, here crashed the stillness of primeval forest after the wild boar, with its large, facetious face and calculating eye.
A family tree interests few. Inevitably, Delaye was partly ruined, partly restored and wholly burnt down over the centuries, coming at last to stability, presenting the front that it does to-day at the accession of James the First, whose reign was to leave little mark upon the house save for the apeing of sundry Scottish embellishments of which the Turret Room was a typical example.
The Roundelays themselves tended, in their matrimonial arrangements, towards the clannish. Cousins married cousins. It was very seldom that the name suffered obscurity through entanglements too alien, although there had been a bad period during which, through the death of an heir and the wedding of his sister who produced daughters only, and who, if they bore sons, lost them by battle, flood and field, Delaye had actually been possessed for two reigns by masters whose right to occupation was through that enfeebled and shameful cause, the distaff side. But just as in even the Lancers, partners, on the whole, do find each other at the finale of that confusing dance, so the Roundelays would ultimately sweep together and mate sooner or later via many a narrow squeak, family conclave and scene.
The foreign alliances were, of course, regrettable. The Roundelays all agreed about that, answering, when it was pointed out to them that the original founder of the name was a foreigner himself, that that wasn’t the same thing. They did not know very clearly what they meant, but they felt it with fervour. The enquirer, thinking it over, came to the conclusion that the solution lay in the fact that, whereas a Norman-French background, remote enough, was a recognized social asset, a concrete French woman of any considerably later date in your very drawing-room was suspect and eccentric: something you explained carelessly and smiling as brightly as possible, over the tea-table.
The Roundelays, in common with the bulk of England, were unable to think of William the Conqueror as anything but an English king who uttered the language as she is spoke. He was William-the-Conqueror-1066-1087, and the probability that his brother (if he had one) addressed him as Guillaume was too far back to be taken seriously.
There had been a French Roundelay, a chatelaine culled from a Grand Tour of the late seventeen-hundreds, but Delaye had been too much for her, the meals and chitchat too heavy, and, proceding by stages to the environs of Paris on a visit to her relations, she had been slain untimely by a misunderstanding in the salon of the Château at the hands of a renegade gardener in a tricolour cockade, whose mind, if any, and ironically enough, was confused by her surname which she never could, or would, to pronounce in the English manner.
Delaye itself was large enough to absorb the few traces that the unhappy lady had left behind her, and which were represented by a tambour frame and a frivolous bed in a lumber room, a scattering of gilt chairs which were uncomfortable, and skidded, some enamel-and-pearl comfit boxes that the occasional tables in the drawing-room swallowed whole, a marble temple in the Versailles taste in the grounds which succeeding generations of Roundelays frequently spoke of doing something about and making something of, and in which, on wet days,
the current peacock sheltered and looked critical and malevolent through the pillars, and a half-finished sunk and paved garden that you catch your heels in to this day, and the completion of which is now beyond the pocket of the present owner, and likely to remain so.
There had also been that deplorable specimen, the dashing bride, who not only insisted upon a Continental honeymoon (marriage, it was felt, ought to have been fast enough for any virgin) but who brought her complaisant husband well-nigh to the Jews through her passion for that fatal association of ideas-jewellery. In the very nick of time she was curbed of this taste removed from temptation and installed at Delaye, where, between them, she and Stacey Roundelay variously expressed their ill-humour and relief by the production of a series of daughters, who were nostalgically christened Amethyst, Crystal, Emerald, Jacinth and Sapphire. The possible names of Diamond and Pearl were mutually abandoned on the ground that the abbreviation of the former was undignified and the latter theatrical. Of these, only Crystal and Emerald had succeeded in being found by husbands, and Miss Emmy became lady to Bertram Cloudesley (spoken Clousy) of Cloudesley Hall in the adjoining county, only to lose both husband and status at the end of the Boer War, and to decline, at the age of forty-four, into dowagership through the marriage of her son, Marcus. Miss Chrissy, making a match of considerably less lustre, though still suitable, was translated to London, where she was safely delivered of one child, Maxwell, and where, the initial novelty and excitement passing off, she had ample leisure to pine for country life, air and routine — a psychologic condition which, with wives, it is customary to ignore as a piece of ungrateful rebellion in poor taste. She relapsed, finally, into a belief that we are one of the Lost Tribes. Her argumentative tedium, her friends agreed, was only to be equalled by the Golf Bore, the Card Maniac and the Roman Catholic convert. Hasty agreement with her view was no safeguard whatsoever: incredulity fatal, while indifference brought down upon your head a shower of booklets.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 35