A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “I heard they were fairly recent, the Fienneses.”

  “Yes, I believe so. About the time of the war—I’m not sure which one.”

  “The picture was of a Lady Arabella Quarles.” I’m feeding her, Felicity thought.

  “Quarles! That’s it! Sir Stafford’s branch. I’ll forget my own name next. The Quarleses got into financial difficulties and the Fienneses bought the manor from them. They didn’t last long though. You need a bottomless purse these days to own a house and an estate like this one.”

  “I’m sure you do. Thank you so much for the information.”

  Felicity suspected she heard a sigh of relief when she moved on. At least there was no danger of visitors being caught in an endless spiel by the volunteer museum assistant who wants to tell everything he or she knows. The limits of her information would quickly be reached with Marcia Phelps, the name Felicity had learned from the lady’s lapel badge.

  The direction placards, dominated by large arrows, took Felicity via a short corridor to the Estate’s Office. Here the administration was centered, led by whoever—family or employee—was in charge. She began by looking at photographs and letters that aimed to show Walbrook in its social context, and she decided the custodial work had been successful: the manor was shown as part of rural life in West Yorkshire—the house’s family mingling at shows and race meetings in the most amiable of styles. Felicity, though, could not rid herself of the feeling that the house, centered on those rolling lawns, with an entry gate about half a mile away, was essentially solitary, and the family likewise.

  “I hope you find the display interesting.”

  The voice came from the door.

  “Very much so, Lady Quarles.” Felicity spoke without looking up, then tore her eyes from the photographs of a prize bull and its owner and smiled.

  “You recognized my voice. How flattering. When they told me you were here, I came down because there’s no guarantee we won’t both—Stafford and I—be engaged when you come next Tuesday.” That put Felicity in her place as far as matters of importance were concerned. “You’ve seen the two drawing rooms, already, haven’t you? If we could just do the other rooms, I’ll rest happy that we’ve done our bit. You like this room?”

  “I do. Very much. The house seems a bit remote and cut off at first sight, but of course it is part of the agricultural jigsaw of the county.”

  “Stafford has many more photographs and he has only to choose which will go best in here. I’ve already had to dissuade him from choosing one of himself as a little boy, in the doorway of the Dower House.”

  “So Sir Stafford has a real connection with the house and the family?”

  “Oh, certainly. When his mother was dangerously ill, he and his father stayed in the Dower House for more than three months, to be near to her in the Leeds Infirmary. But in spite of the Quarles name, they weren’t close to the Walbrook family by birth. The old family did their duty, though not really enthusiastically: when there were relations to be entertained, they were put in the Dower House with a first basketful of groceries in the cupboard. They were asked up to the manor for dinner once a week and otherwise left alone.”

  “Still, that may have been wise in the circumstances—the sick wife and so on. I must go and see the Dower House, maybe next Tuesday. I expect the stay there made a big impression on Sir Stafford.”

  “Well, it must have. He was only three, and war was about to begin. But when the question arose as to what could be done with the manor, because poor old Rupert was determined to rid himself of the burden—”

  “That was how Mr. Fiennes saw it, was it?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Stafford is doing him a service. He’d been curator and director in all sorts of galleries, museums, and historic properties during his long career, and he came up with the solution of a Trust, with Walbrook at its heart—serving in fact a double function.”

  “What was that?”

  “First as a specimen of the sort of property owned by the landed gentry of this area in the last four centuries. Second as a location for secondary, smaller exhibitions, primarily of a historical or literary nature. Stafford saw at once that there had to be a changing attraction that would bring people to Walbrook at least once a year. Our first exhibition will be the First World War and its poets, which will go on to Aberdeen after we’ve had it. Next year there may be one on twentieth-century children’s writers. My idea, so I hope it comes off. And then perhaps one on royal consorts. Ah—here we are.”

  While they were talking, they had turned and walked back through the drawing rooms, into the hall where the cash register was, and then up the staircase. Lady Quarles swung round and gazed at the picture-rich stairwell. She pointed to a rather lifeless early portrait.

  “The founder of the Quarles family prosperity. Sixteen thirty to 1693. Went into exile after the execution of Charles I and clung on to Charles II until the Restoration. Did very nicely afterwards, as you could imagine. He left the sort of fortune that could build a lovely house like this. Of course people commented on the will: how could a rural hotelier amass that sort of wealth unless by swindling, and so on. He ignored them, and he was planning the house and foundations when he died.”

  “So it was a Queen Anne house?”

  “Yes, finished when she was on the throne. I doubt if that description has any meaning beyond that she happened to be queen, and people made a great deal of money during her reign. Look at the Duke of Marlborough. Well, now, there’s not a great deal to see here, though there will be. There is this landing, which is nice and spacious, and Stafford says it will be marvelous for displaying pictures.”

  “I can see that. Do you have a lot of pictures in reserve?”

  Lady Quarles screwed up her face. “Not really. Though they employed Allan Ramsay—everybody did—the family didn’t have much of an eye for artistic talent. We might be able to borrow some pictures. Alternatively if we have a larger-than-usual exhibition up here, this area could house overspill or any larger exhibit.”

  Lady Quarles turned and walked along part of the corridor.

  “This and the other corridor will be the exhibition area, except the last three rooms of the other corridor going north, which are for the moment Stafford’s and my flat. In the course of nature we won’t be occupying those rooms forever, but they are quite convenient for now.”

  “I won’t ask you to show me.”

  “No, don’t. I’m not a housewife.”

  “But they come within the remit of the Trust?”

  “Oh, yes, technically. The Trust is responsible for all the buildings on the estate, all the gardens and fields, and of course all the house.”

  “A rather daunting responsibility.”

  “Except that we have a director, who can be relied on to decide most things. And if he doesn’t have the experience to solve all the problems, there are various bodies—for museums and galleries I mean—that can offer excellent advice, estimated costings, and so on. Now, I’ll just show you the empty rooms. . . .”

  “Please.”

  Lady Quarles threw open a door that did indeed show Felicity nothing but an empty room.

  “This is going to be the first room of the exhibition. We plan to call it Recruitment and Conscription. It will cover how the young men were persuaded to join up, and how they were trained. The next room . . .”

  She threw open another door. This time the empty room was tiny.

  “This was a dressing room for the bedroom you’ve just seen. Women at War is the topic. How women aided the war effort by sewing uniforms in factories, ran hospitals and recuperation centers, even helped in the manufacture of armaments and ammunitions.”

  “The end of women as useless decorations,” said Felicity.

  “The beginning of the end, anyway. Did you know that even between the wars a woman teacher in the state system who got married had to resign? It was to be a long fight.”

  Lady Quarles sounded sincerely indignant, and Felicity
liked her the better for it.

  “The next room is the biggest of the bedrooms. The theme is the Life in the Trenches. It is big, but Stafford and I both felt we needed space for a really big picture—oil painting presumably—to convey the full horror of it, of trench life. It may turn out to be too big for this room, and if it is, we shall have to spread our wings and put it on the landing. But no matter—it would probably look mightily impressive there.”

  “You’ve got something in mind?”

  “Two or three possibilities. We want it to be really authentic, by someone who had experienced, or at the very least observed, the slaughter. Someone who only knew of the horror by word of mouth would probably be someone who would play down the horrific aspects—an apologist. So we, and Wes, will be investigating in so far as we can. They’re very helpful at the Imperial War Museum, though they haven’t themselves got anything that answers the purpose. Which speaks volumes . . .”

  She led the way to the last room, almost as big as the previous one.

  “Then comes the Approach of Peace. This means the last year, the last Allied push, and the German surrender.”

  “Will you take that into the aftermath—all the young men with severe mental problems and so on?”

  “If we have room.”

  Felicity had gone over to a photograph, one of several left higgledy-piggledy on an old table.

  “That’s—”

  “Wilfred Owen.”

  “Yes. I thought it might be Ivor Gurney. He had a real, though rather remote, connection with the house, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but he never, so far as we know, was here. You think he ought to be highlighted, but it’s Owen who everyone reads.”

  “As they should. It’s just that—”

  “I know, I know, but you know how it is. The Romantic movement is Wordsworth and Coleridge in the older generation, Byron, Shelley, and Keats in the younger. No one else—people like Southey, Leigh Hunt, or Tom Moore—gets a look in. People will remember that they saw a photo of Wilfred Owen here, will talk about it to literary folk, but if they said, ‘They’ve got a snapshot of Ivor Gurney,’ they’d be met with ‘Who?’ And it’s partly you university folk who are to blame.”

  Felicity nodded. “You’re quite right.”

  “Stafford is. He knows all there is to know about museums. Including literary museums. Now—that’s really all there is, as yet. Do you have any questions?”

  Felicity frowned and thought.

  “One or two, nitty-gritty ones. Finance. Is the exhibition—the World War One, children’s literature, whatever—separate from the main part of the house, and will visitors pay a special entry fee to see it?”

  “Not finally decided. They’ll make the decision at the January board meeting. Making them separate would mean more staff, volunteer or paid. I’d bet they go for one entry payment for the whole house. But of course you’ll be one of the voters, part of the solution, you might say.”

  “And will Wes be in charge of all the exhibitions, or will you take some visiting exhibitions that have been curated elsewhere?”

  “After this first one the door is open for very good exhibitions of the right size or any that we could cut down to size or add to, to make them right. But I don’t imagine that will happen very often. There is only one exhibition a year, after all, and Wes will want to make his mark—quite right too.”

  “Yes, I imagine he will. Thank you so much for showing me round,” said Felicity. “If I really am part of the solution, I’m a much better informed part now.”

  They shook hands, and Felicity went down the magnificent staircase, which would show off pictures so well, then past the entry point and out into pale winter sunlight. As she walked, she realized she had seen nothing of the behind-the-scenes Walbrook that she had been promised.

  Felicity had a couple of hours before she needed to collect Thomas. She was irresistibly drawn to the spacious grounds, to see them once more with her now-better-informed mind. She could see that developers must have viewed these spacious fields and gardens with a greedy eye. Whether the house was demolished or not, the property represented potential profit. The house could be divided into flats, the fields covered with prestigious mini-mansions for bankers, accountants, estate managers. The mass-market builders must send up imprecations every Sunday to bring about the downfall or death of Sir Stafford, or whoever had thought up the Trust solution.

  She wondered who that was. Was it Sir Stafford, as his wife had said? More likely Rupert Fiennes. The Trust got the property off his shoulders without giving him a guilt complex about betraying the place to commercial exploitation or to a family of newcomers. She had realized during the tour around the house and exhibition that the Quarles family were the traditional, long-standing owners of the house, and Rupert was only one of the interlopers who had taken over in the forties. How were the Fienneses related to the Quarleses? she wondered. She’d have to hunt Rupert out and have a chat.

  CHAPTER 4

  Entertaining

  When Wes Gannett had finished the arrangement of his dining room, he stood in the doorway to look at the results of his labors. There were not many results, and there had not been much labor. Would Felicity Peace approve? People react strongly against overpreparation, Wes’s wife had often said. They feel they’ve been put in a stage set, like Violetta in act 1 of Traviata, in a much too swish and tasteful decor. The room should look much as it did every day, then the guest could relax into comfort and welcome. As so often, his wife had been right. Hardly an hour went by in which Wes did not think of her.

  Felicity arrived about twenty past seven, sank into an armchair, and said an exhausted “Yes” to gin and tonic.

  “Charlie may be here about a quarter to eight,” she said. “That’s if nothing comes up at the end of his shift, which it very often does. He says to start eating when you intended to and make no concessions to the conditions of his rotten job.”

  “I think I’d like your husband’s wry sense of humor,” said Wes, coming over with two glasses. “We share job dissatisfaction too.”

  “I quite like his humor myself, normally,” said Felicity, “but it makes him accept without protest some pretty archaic working practices.”

  “Shall we wait the talk for him, if not the food?”

  “No, no. I’ll fill him in on any vital info. How shall we do it? Question and answer?”

  “If that seems to you a good idea.”

  “One thing I’d like you to tell me about,” she said, sucking her slice of lemon, “is the family—the Quarleses and the Fienneses. I found I knew more than your unpaid attendant when I went round the other week, but still I know pathetically little.”

  Wes nodded. “Join the club. I’m preparing a ten- or twelve-page booklet—not for sale in the shop, but for the attendants, when they’re asked questions, if they deign to read it. So I am a step or two ahead of you, though in the two years I’ve been here it has mostly been a fug. What do you want to know?”

  “The relationship between the two branches of the family, and how the house came to slide from one branch to the other.”

  “That’s rather good,” said Wes appreciatively. “I might nick it for the pamphlet, if you don’t mind. That’s called making you pay for your dinner.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, go right back to William and Mary, or James the Second or whoever is relevant to the family history.”

  “Let’s start with Queen Anne. That turn-of-the-century age was the last years of Charles James Quarles, the old villain. He had a number of hotels—we today would call it a chain—and, most importantly, the majority of them were in London. They were luxury hotels, with maids included in the room price, and everything shipshape and paid for.”

  “His spirit lingers on today,” said Felicity.

  “I’ve never been offered a maid,” said Wes, “but, yes—you’re spot-on. The family most years made handsome profits and set up as country gentry in Yorkshire, one of the cheapest
counties in the country at the time. They built the house you know, and generation after generation did the sort of things the landed gentry did do.”

  “What exactly was that?”

  “They farmed, sold and leased out land, were magistrates, one was an MP . . .”

  “Distinguished?”

  “Extremely so in the nineteenth century. He supported Gladstone, then took fright at his radicalism and switched to ‘Disraeli and Empire.’ He got elected to parliament every time, whatever he stood for. And through it all the Quarleses did very well, and they ruled and reigned.”

  “And were loved by the tenantry?”

  “This side of idolatry, that’s my impression.” Wes got up and went to the sideboard, where Felicity saw a tape recorder was plugged in. “I thought you might like to hear a bit of this. I’ve been talking to people, particularly old people, about the house and the family—for the pamphlet and to add to the archive. This is Jeb Wheeler, a ninety-year-old, and ‘a right cantankerous old bugger,’ as one of the museum assistants called him. I asked him a question about how the Quarles family was viewed in the West Riding as it was then called in Yorkshire.”

  Wes switched on the machine.

  “Well, of course they were highly respected,” came the old but clear and opinionated voice. “Very highly respected. That’s what we said to reporters if the family ever got into the news, and to tourists, hikers, students, and the like. Of course they were highly respected. They owned most of the farms, they could get you sacked for the littlest thing—behind with the rent, a nice bit of cheek when you were in your cups, your daughter scoring with the heir to the estates. The family had all the big cards you see.”

  “And did they use them?” came Wes Gannett’s voice.

  “Oh, aye, they used them,” said the hectoring old voice. “And quite cunning they were too. They did it, and never did it so as to lose the support of what folk nowadays call the middle classes. Professional people—doctors, solicitors, clergy, schoolteachers—oh, they were Fortune’s darlings till the twentieth century came and cut them down to size.”