A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “Oh, yes. Definitely female. Annabel Sowerby. I don’t know what happened to her. They’ve only recently started to mention her again. Reports that she wrote while she was director get quoted, usually with the implication that she was on the ball—more so than Wesley Gannett. I’m pretty sure that’s unfair to Wes and just part of the whispering campaign that the crowd around Sir Stafford have, I suspect, been organizing. Any mud is welcome, even if it means partial rehabilitation of the sacked Annabel. They rely on people’s memories being short.”

  “But you could learn more about the sacking or suspension of Ms. Sowerby if you tried?”

  “I should think so. Ben was on the board then, I’m pretty sure. Ben Hooley. He was a great help today. But what’s your interest?”

  Felicity decided she had better come clean.

  “Raw material. I had my first novel published earlier this year, to what my agent called a ‘chorus of muted praise.’ The second is all but finished. I have to have a good nose for a subject if I’m going to go on, and I think I’m acquiring one. A nose, I mean. Walbrook Manor seems to have all the characteristics of a meaty plot.”

  Maya smiled, in obvious appreciation and interest. “There’s a concert at Walbrook next Saturday. They have three or four a year to generate interest in the festival. There are still a few tickets going . . .”

  Felicity thought. “I wonder if I could persuade Charlie to come. He’s a policeman. Good at getting information. I suppose those were the performers we heard rehearsing? Charlie hates chamber music—calls it ‘all that scraping.’ Still, he’s often the only black at things like that, and people come up and talk to him as some kind of interracial gesture. I might put the thumbscrews on him. We don’t have any problem with babysitters.”

  “If you do come,” said Maya, “it might be a good idea for you and me to keep apart.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Some people might be unwilling to talk to your husband if they associate you with me. You don’t want to get labeled—docketed as one of the awkward squad. Who knows—Sir Stafford will be intrigued that you are a novelist. He might try to sound you out. Even see if you might be interested in coming on the board.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s better than geriatric gropings.”

  “Oh, Sir Stafford is not geriatric, or, so far as I know, a groper. . . . Would you be?”

  “Interested? Well, in the abstract definitely not. I don’t like bodies like that, and I don’t think I function well on them. On the other hand, if there’s something interesting going on . . .”

  “I really do think there must be something, and that a good part of the board has sold its soul to the devil.”

  “Sir Stafford is a very smooth, subtle devil by the sound of it.”

  “Devils usually are. We mustn’t jump to conclusions. There could be a quite different Satan at work. Do you really know what hurts most about the business of bringing Theo into the meeting? More than Sir Stafford making me think it was quite okay, then using it as an excuse to get me out of the meeting?”

  “No. What?”

  “All the women members of the board voted against me.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Night Music

  The Music Room at Walbrook Manor had probably not been a music room until the idea of the Walbrook Festival had materialized a couple of years ago. What it had been was unclear: it was large, but not so large as the Drawing Room, through the outskirts of which tourists had tramped (hedged in by ropes) during open hours. Perhaps it was a lesser Drawing Room that the family had used when they were not entertaining. Perhaps it was used when they were throwing a not-too-distinguished ball—tenant farmers, clergymen, that sort of person. Then again, perhaps it had been Lady Quarles’s Drawing Room at times when she and the Sir Whatsit Quarles of the time were not on speaking terms. Walbrook seemed a house made for collapsing marriages, and the Quarleses were rumored to be a family united to the world but liable to blowups in the privacy of their manor.

  “Nice,” said Felicity, looking around her.

  “And very suitable,” said Charlie. She shot him a glance. He obviously didn’t mean suitable for chamber concerts. Possibly he meant for mixing and mingling, for chatting and overhearing chat. Or then again perhaps he was sizing up its suitability for a scene-of-the-crime investigation should the need ever arise.

  The chairs were arranged in blocks, fastened together as insisted upon by fire officers, but the blocks were separated by large areas between and behind each one so that mixing and shifting from group to group was easy. At the far end of the room was a dais with music stands and a grand piano, and the walls were hung with pictures of three centuries of the Quarles family as well as Dutch landscapes to alleviate the weight of so many determined chins and expressions of self-satisfaction. Felicity and Charlie studied the labels and the descriptions in large print for the partially sighted.

  “ ‘Arabella, Lady Quarles,’ ” Felicity read out. “ ‘By Allan Ramsay.’ ”

  “Wife of Sir Richard,” put in Charlie. “Ran off with the second footman in 1764.”

  Felicity looked at him. “You’re making it up. It doesn’t say that here.”

  “It does on the Internet. I’ve done my homework.”

  “Hmmm. Ramsay was said to be ‘born to paint women.’ ”

  “The footman seems to have been born to provide other services. Still, she didn’t have to run away with him. There must have been excellent opportunities in-house.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was dead within a year, from mistreatment. Nobody did anything to help her because she was thought to have betrayed her class.”

  The room was beginning to fill up. Felicity saw Maya Tyndale arrive without baby or husband, but the two let no flicker of recognition pass between them. People were not taking seats but were standing around in groups—talking, gazing at pictures, or looking a bit forlorn with the free program fluttering in their hands. Felicity was beginning to wonder if they should go up and introduce themselves to somebody when someone she recognized steamed in from a side door beside the dais, accompanied by a svelte, well-preserved woman with an air altogether more determined and businesslike than her husband’s. The husband was the man Felicity had seen walking from the house to the stables the previous Saturday.

  “Sir Stafford and Lady Quarles, I presume,” said Felicity. “The chairman of the Walbrook Trust Board.”

  “Watch him,” said a voice at her left arm. “Watch both of them. They’ll do the room—all the new people and all the people that matter. They have it down to a fine art.”

  “Is he a member of the old ruling family of Walbrook?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes,” said the man, “but in a fairly minor way: the ‘sir’-dom was for services to heritage studies.” This stocky man had gray starting in his hair and a bonhomous manner. He had clearly not thought it necessary to dress up for the occasion. “I’m Ben Hooley, by the way. I’m on the Walbrook Manor Trust Board.”

  “I’m Felicity Peace. My husband, Charlie.”

  “Whoops. You must be either new or important. The old rogue is making a beeline for you.”

  Ben Hooley evaporated into the crowd the moment Sir Stafford arrived, his hand outstretched.

  “Ahh . . . welcome to Walbrook. I haven’t seen you before, have I, at Walbrook? I’m Stafford Quarles. Chairman of the Trust Board which runs the place.”

  “I’m Felicity Peace. This is my husband, Charlie. He’s a police inspector based in Leeds. I’m a novelist—just become a real one instead of a would-be one, and the feeling is very good.”

  Sir Stafford’s smile became more genuine. “Oh, congratulations! What a wonderful feeling of satisfaction you must get, actually holding a printed book of your own words in your hands.”

  Felicity was getting used to standard responses of this sort and just smiled and murmured. Why did she get the impression that Sir Stafford was more interested in the information she had
just given him about Charlie’s profession than in her own credentials?

  “We’ve had an idea about grafting onto the usual musical components of the festival—the Walbrook Festival, we couldn’t think of a better name—a literary element as well. Perhaps add a literary person to our board. Edinburgh has combined music and literature most successfully, and Buxton. Something like a panel of new Northern novelists, including perhaps yourself. Do you think some such thing might be a starter?”

  He was so “conditional tense” that Felicity wasn’t going to put money on it.

  “Quite possibly. I’m only Yorkshire by adoption, not birth, so I don’t think in regional terms as a rule. Maybe my agent could help, or the Society of Authors.”

  “And what part do you play in this literary powerhouse?” Sir Stafford said, turning to Charlie, with only the slightest bit of defensiveness in his manner—something Charlie and all policemen were accustomed to.

  “Oh, as sounding board, litmus paper, what you will. Felicity only reads things to me if she is quite sure it is not something I would leap on for legal reasons, or because I’d recognize the characters and tell her to be careful.”

  “Oh, dear! Real-life characters! I must beware.” Sir Stafford gave the impression he thought he was the first person to react in this way. “Well, I do hope you’ll put our little festival in your diaries. And do remember we have a very active Friends group. Ah—here’s Lord Warrender. I must have a word with him . . .” His voice faded as he floated off. As Lord Warrender was only a couple of feet away and had been in his line of vision all along, Sir Stafford was probably following a preordained trail.

  “Platitudinous old sod, isn’t he?” said Ben Hooley, slipping back to their side. “He wields a truism so that it feels like being slapped with a wet dishcloth.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t that bad,” said Felicity. “Charlie and I both have jobs that embarrass people. They don’t know how to respond to us.”

  “I heard the bit about your being a novelist. I must have been filling my glass when you were introduced,” said Hooley, turning to Charlie.

  “Police inspector,” said Charlie.

  “Aha! Did that faze Sir Stafford?”

  “Not really. Maybe he’s up on police titles—realizes that an inspector is just a dogsbody to the real high-ups—superintendent and loftier still. When anybody is impressed by the word inspector, it usually means they read detective novels from the thirties.”

  “Point taken,” said Hooley. “I didn’t imagine Sir Stafford had anything to hide beyond a determination to keep himself in charge of everything—having ultimate control anyway. The trustees get a look in, a say in, but we never really wield any power.”

  “Is the woman with him Lady Quarles?” asked Felicity. “Somehow I assumed he was a bachelor or a widower.”

  “The ‘he never married’ syndrome? Do you know, I saw that phrase in the Times only the other day. Some things never change. But, no—that is Lady Quarles, and she supplies the tungsten in the metal. She is the thug, he is the public face—together they are formidable.”

  “But are there children?”

  “No. Why should that matter?”

  “No—of course it doesn’t. I was thinking of Sir Stafford as being part of the family who owned this place.”

  “Distantly, as I said. His father was a distant cousin of the last Quarles owner. No, the manor was owned in recent years by the Fiennes family. The last owner, before the Trust took over five years ago, was Rupert Fiennes. He’s over there. An amiable cove who doesn’t say very much and is reputed to be very pleased to be relieved of the burden of Walbrook. Old soldier, married once but long ago—the marriage didn’t survive the awfully long absences of soldiers from their families—it’s a bit like policemen: the wife and children only see the husband for a minute or two over breakfast, if then. Oh, Lord—I’m sorry. I forgot. Please forgive—ah, here come the welcoming words and the music.”

  One of the attendants had been bustling the guests into a loose crowd around the chairman of the Trust standing in the doorway to the Music Room. He seemed rather to enjoy his consequence. He cleared his throat, smiled benignly, and began.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Walbrook. I’m not going to go on at you. The program will tell you about the music better than I can do. The house, as you could guess by its style, was built in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne by the first of the Quarleses, who had made his money from hotels, inns, and the excellent beer consumed there. The family prospered here for a century and a half, and then, like most of the gentry, fell on bad times in the later-nineteenth, early-twentieth centuries, with agricultural depression and two terrible wars. This was a time when family disagreements split the large family of the owners, and there was a definite coolness between the two principal branches, the Quarleses and the Fienneses. I’m happy to tell you this division was long ago healed, and I value greatly the support of Rupert Fiennes and his cousin Mary-Elizabeth for the Trust and their work for the forthcoming festival. I think I’ve said enough. Too much, I hear someone say. Then let’s go in and listen to some fine music—German music and English music—united at last!”

  The little crowd offered some scattered applause, and the attendants ushered them to the seats. It was all done with the utmost tact and efficiency, and the seats were not numbered and all were perfectly equal. Charlie admired the low-key competence of it all, and since he had been assured there was only about an hour of music, mere tasters of music to be heard later in the year at the festival, he sat down without feeling forebodings of boredom. The musicians who trouped onto the dais were young, enthusiastic looking, and were warmly applauded. The photocopied program listed two works, to be performed without interval, with more drinks afterward. After the second movement of the Schubert string quintet Charlie whispered to Felicity, “That was very good.”

  “Like a quiet argument or discussion,” she agreed.

  “Yes. Or a crime investigation.”

  His words suggested his immersion in the piece had not stopped him from observing both musicians and audience. He had particularly observed Sir Stafford, seated beside his lady wife, she ramrod straight of back, he smiling gently and quizzically at the young musicians. If Charlie had turned his head only slightly, he could have seen something that no doubt he was aware of: that Sir Stafford’s brother had joined the audience. By the door a wheelchair had been parked, and in it was the elderly man that Felicity had already told him about: the lopsided face, the side with no motion or life in it. Beside the chair, with her back to the wall, was seated a young, competent-looking woman, obviously the attendant. The man was, Charlie knew, Graham Quarles, the composer, who had gone in and out of fashion in his composing life, until it was cut short by, presumably, a stroke. Or was he still able to compose, dictating to some kind of musical amanuensis? Not inconceivable.

  The second and last item on the program was signaled by the disappearance of the string quintet, bowing and smiling, and after some minutes, their reappearance with two wind players and three others—two singers and their accompanist. The younger singer, and the fresher of face, came a few steps forward.

  “We’re going to sing now—Gavin and me, with Jake accompanying—a newly found work, recently discovered among the house’s archives. We’ll probably know more about the cycle by the time we sing it at the festival, so I’ll just introduce each song with the name of the poet and the name of the composer. Because what we have here is something rather unusual: a song cycle based on seven or eight poems from the First World War, each song the work of a different composer. The first song is called ‘Rendezvous’—the poem is by Alan Seeger, killed in 1916. The song was composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams.”

  The young man cleared his throat and began, “ ‘I have a rendezvous with Death . . .’ ”

  The setting was competent but not memorable—certainly not comparable to Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge cycle. Maybe he was not putting his heart i
nto it.

  “The second song,” said the overcheerful young man, “is for baritone and will be sung by Gavin. The poem, by Isaac Rosenberg, is called ‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’ and it was set by Arthur Somervell.”

  The song was atmospheric, but stayed just short of being memorable.

  “Gavin will also sing the next song, which is by a well-known person but a little-known poet. It’s called ‘Many a Time.’ It is by a name many of you will know—Clement Attlee, onetime prime minister—and it ends with a politician’s flattery of his constituents. The music is by Michael Tippett.”

  The music was fresh sounding, and the poem, about the isles of Greece, ended:

  How willingly all these I would exchange

  To see the buses throng by Mile End Gate

  And smell the fried fish shops down Limehouse way.

  True politician, agreed Charlie with the young man: never takes his mind off the voters.

  And so it went on, poems by Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, with music by Gurney and Bliss.

  Then, coming to a fine conclusion, there was the tenor, whose name was Jamie, with Rupert Brooke on “Peace,” with music by the young Britten, and splendidly, Gavin showing off his full capacity, singing Wilfred Owen’s “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”—the poem where he sees God through the mud. The music was by Peter Warlock.

  Not all the audience reacted in one way, and those who were most enthusiastic also gave signs of being drained. However, there was a surprise addition to the program: Jamie then, as if emboldened by the warm applause, came forward and announced that work on the cycle was still ongoing, and that there was one song, by Ivor Gurney to words of Edward Thomas, that he would love to sing. It was probably intended to substitute for the work of Rupert Brooke—or perhaps simply be added to the corpus of the poems. He hoped people would come up and tell him their views on the poems and on the “optimum” (he liked such words) length of the cycle. He would also like comments on the title of the song cycle, currently provisionally known as From the Trenches. Could it be improved on? He nodded to the accompanist, sang the song called “Lights Out,” then with a gesture dismissed the audience and sent them in the direction of the restocked bar.