Just then the door opened and in came a large and very familiar figure.
‘Mrs Parkin!’ shouted Sebastian and Melissa together, as they recognized their housekeeper and friend.
‘Now then, no need to deafen me,’ said Mrs Parkin, beaming all over her round, shining face. ‘I got your letter yesterday and I haven’t ever let you down, have I? Though why you couldn’t sign your names properly, instead of putting fancy signs all over the place, I don’t know. I thought perhaps the country was making savages of you. But now I’ve met your aunt, I’m sure that’s not the case.’
Sebastian and Melissa exchanged glances. They both knew, of course, who had sent the letter.
‘So you’ve met Aunt Augusta?’ said Melissa.
‘I have. And a very fine lady she is, too. Took to her straight away, if you know what I mean, and I don’t mind telling you I was in a fair old fluster when I got here. You were so secretive in your letter, I didn’t know what to expect. And not knowing the lady of the house, it didn’t seem quite right to come uninvited. But I said to myself, Blossom, I said, if those children need you, you must forget about what’s right and proper and go down there. So I caught the first train I could and here I am. And mighty relieved to see you’re not dying in your beds, though you deserve a good scolding for frightening me like that. Now if you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll get your breakfasts.’
‘Are you staying then?’ said Melissa. ‘Oh, I am pleased.’
Mrs Parkin beamed again. ‘I am. As soon as I arrived this morning, I spoke to Lady Langton and told her that I’d had word from you two that I was needed. She was a bit surprised at first but then she realized what you were up to, seeing that the cook-general, some fancy what’s-his-name, gave in his notice yesterday. “Mrs Parkin,” she said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming and the children’s kind thought, but, as you can see, this house is a great deal of work and you mustn’t feel under any obligation to stay.” “Madam,” I said, “I don’t know when I’ve felt so discontented as these last few weeks in London with nothing to do and no one to look after. Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I said, “I can see a lot here that needs a woman’s touch. It’s a grand house and I’d be proud and pleased to help out, that I would.” Now keep your questions until I get back with some food. This is going to be a busy day for Blossom Parkin.’
She bustled out of the room, before the children could say another word.
‘I say, I didn’t know her name was Blossom, did you?’ said Melissa.
‘No. It suits her, rather. I expect being back in the country makes her feel like a girl again. I remember she always used to tell me stories about her childhood in the country when I was small. It will be nice having Mrs Parkin at Hadlows, although I wish we’d been able to say goodbye to Fandeagle. I feel as if I’ve woken up before the dream was over. It’s most unsatisfying.’
Just then Mrs Parkin came in with a tray of bacon and mushrooms and after they had eaten the children felt distinctly more cheerful.
‘What shall we do today?’ said Sebastian, when he had finished his coffee. ‘How about exploring the battlements?’
‘Oh no you don’t, young man,’ said Mrs Parkin, who was clearing the plates from the table. ‘I’ve got a lot of work to do today and I’d appreciate a helping hand. Lady Langton’s given me the keys of the house and I’m going to open up some of those rooms in the west wing. There’ll be furniture to shift and such-like, and I can’t manage on my own. There be work for ten men up there, I’ll be bound. Shut up for years, Lady Langton said.’
‘Why are you going to open them?’ asked Melissa.
‘You’ll find out soon enough, I expect,’ was all Mrs Parkin would say.
So the day was spent in dusting and sweeping, polishing and cleaning. They began in the west drawing-room, where the painting of Falcon and Selina was. The curtains were drawn back and the windows were flung open to let in the warm, scented air. Tea-leaves were spread over the carpet and then brushed off slowly and painstakingly, on hands and knees. The marble fireplace and tables were rubbed with vinegar and water until they shone. Every cobweb was brushed away from the painted panels and the floor was polished with turpentine and beeswax. When every scrap of dust and decay had been swept away the room was filled with flowers.
By the time they had given the same treatment to two more rooms it was late afternoon and they were all exhausted and very dirty.
‘Oh my back!’ said Sebastian, stretching and yawning. ‘I refuse to move another piece of furniture. If only you two could make up your minds where you want things. I must have moved every chair and table in this room at least ten times.’
‘Go along with you,’ said Mrs Parkin, poking him in the ribs with her feather duster, a large cobweb hanging rakishly over her left ear. ‘Get washed now and I’ll make some tea. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes and mind you’re not late.’ The children left the room, laughing.
‘Mrs Parkin seems to have taken over completely at Hadlows,’ said Sebastian as they went down to the kitchen to get some hot water.
‘Yes. She’s enjoying it enormously, too. Goodness, Aunt Augusta!’ Melissa was startled to see her aunt standing by the kitchen table. She was leaning heavily on a cane but her tiny figure was upright and her eyes were bright with happiness.
‘Bless you, my dears,’ she said when she saw them. ‘You’ve brought youth back to this house in more ways than one. I woke up this morning free from pain for the first time in ten years. I found my old stick and managed to get down here all by myself. I’m a bit shaky after all those years of idleness but I feel like a girl again.’
Melissa kissed her aunt’s cheek. ‘And you look like one. But don’t over-tire yourself.’
Sebastian brought up a chair and Aunt Augusta sat down.
‘As for Bertram, he’s been shut in his study all day, working like one possessed. I haven’t seen him so excited and absorbed since he was a young man. You both look as if you’ve been working, too. I see Mrs Parkin has been organizing you into hard labour.’
‘Yes, we’ve been opening up some of the rooms. Mrs Parkin was rather secretive about why we’re doing it.’
‘Well, it’s quite simple. I had a letter from your mother this morning. She asked me if she and your father might stay with us for a little while when they return. They are going to look for a house in the country. Your father wants to write a book and needs peace and quiet in which to do it. Well, this house is much too large for us and I know I’d miss you terribly if you went away, so I’ve decided to give them the west wing for their own use as long as they need it. What do you think? Are you pleased?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sebastian and Melissa together. ‘It’s a wonderful idea!’
‘Oh good. You know Hadlows will probably belong to you one day. Bertram was hinting this morning that we may be able to save it.’
Mrs Parkin came in, in the midst of their jubilation and they all had tea together in the kitchen, talking and laughing, as they made plans for the future of the old house.
That night, Melissa was awakened by a low whisper, close to her ear.
‘Wake up, earth-maiden. There is something I think you should see.’ She sat up, wide awake at once. Fandeagle stood by her bed, filling the room with a soft, silver light. She got up. Fandeagle placed a cloak around her shoulders and they went to fetch Sebastian. Then the three of them went downstairs and out into the garden.
The night was very dark, the moon wreathed in clouds. A slight wind blew. They watched and waited. And then a faint light appeared among the trees.
White shapes began to glide silently across the lawn towards them. A glittering host, their phantom bodies drained of colour, drew near, their faces glowing with a mystical light. And then from the darkness grew the shadow of a man, transparent in the moonlight, yet his pride and strength were undimmed. Between his silver horns was a ghostly crown. He hovered for a moment beside them and touched Melissa’s arm. It was as i
f she had been washed by the sea and she trembled with the mystery of it all. A mist drifted over the trees and became wraiths, each mounted on a pearly horse. Silently they drew near, their luminous hair flowing like a vapour. Among the drifting phantoms came a young woman, her eyes flashing like fire in her white face. A feather and a leaf, gilded in the filmy light, shivered in the night wind. A breath of coldness touched the children’s faces.
Two forms, translucent, bright as stars, glided from the dark trees. One was tall with a shining helmet and a staff of snakes: the other, a boy wearing a cloak, a great ring on his finger. He came forward and saluted Sebastian with a ghostly hand. They mingled with the fluid forms in the shadows before the old house.
From the sky came a flight of swans, pure and white like a vision. They came to rest on the battlements and every face was bathed in their ghostly light. The battlements were stark against the black sky, their crumbling stones etched in silver. Clouds scudded across the face of the opal moon. Two figures, one dark and one fair were seen for a moment on the ramparts. There was a great cry, terrible in its joy. Then they were veiled in a dissolving light and vanished.
Slowly the pale figures on the lawn melted into the night. The wind shivered the air and the whispering trees were bathed in a faint light from the stars.
‘Farewell, Sebastian and Melissa. Farewell,’ came a soft echo beside them and Fandeagle sank into the darkness.
Sebastian and Melissa stood alone before the house.
‘Oh Sebastian, will we ever see them again?’
‘I don’t know. I shan’t ever give up hope. But it was an ending to an adventure which I shall never forget. Come, let’s go inside. It’s over now.’
Melissa hesitated. For the last time her eyes searched the dark shadows on the lawn and a feeling of disappointment and sadness came over her.
‘I had hoped,’ she said, as they began to go back to the house. ‘I had just a little hope — oh!’
There, sitting on the front doorstep, licking his paws and brushing them over his fine orange ears, was Mantari.
THE END
Afterword
Those readers who were patient enough to persevere to the end of the introduction to The Winter of Enchantment may recall that The House Called Hadlows was written at the kitchen table of a tumble-down farmhouse in a valley in wildest Wales in the company of a Polish Count and an involuntary assassin. I thought rather more about the plot of this second book before I wrote it and it is a little more polished in consequence. As the rain poured and the fields became liquid mud and only the bracken flourished I pursued Sebastian, Melissa and Mantari through another set of adventures and derived much comfort from them to set against the insuperable difficulties of looking after forty cows and two hundred sheep with the help of two incompetents. I was of course hopelessly inexperienced myself.
Before I moved to Wales I spent a short time living in a water mill just outside Hadlow Down in Sussex. It was a very pretty place, four storeys of a room apiece with an overhanging jetty at the top, painted clapboard inside and out. It was surrounded by tall trees and might have been a painting by Constable or a setting for a novel by George Eliot. The only drawback was the noise. Night and day the water from the mill race that debouched into the pond with a drop of ten feet or so roared in one’s ears like the torture of tinnitus until one became distracted to the point of madness. The millers of the past had gone home at the end of the day, of course, and so saved their sanity. Anyway, the experience provided part of the title of The House Called Hadlows.
It was after the collapse of the Welsh enterprise and a lonely sojourn on Skye that I decided to read English at Cambridge University. This was in the days when Oxbridge didn’t care much about your A levels but much more about what assessment they made of you. I wrote an essay entitled The Wise Man Learns from the Experience of Others. I wrote reams but I got into rather a muddle and came to no conclusion. The interview that followed was nerve-wracking. I was given a Shakespearean sonnet to talk about but such was my state of anxiety that I could make nothing of it. The words trickled through my brain without making any sense. I asked if I could have a cigarette to help me to concentrate. Lifted eyebrows; sighs, frowns, all the windows were opened; I lit up. Silence while we all waited for Gauloise-fuelled brilliance from me. Nothing. I still couldn’t understand a word. It was terribly humiliating. One of the dons took pity and asked me about my life and achievements so far. I gave a Bowdlerized version, making as much as I could of the publication of The Winter of Enchantment and The House Called Hadlows, skating over the rest with proper reticence. I was astonished to be offered a place a few weeks later.
Cambridge changed my life, undoubtedly for the better. As far as learning anything went, I was not a particularly diligent student. I still don’t know how to structure an essay and almost every one was written hastily in the six hours before it was due to be handed in. But the ethos was tolerant and inclusive and having been persona non grata at my hidebound, class-bound, anti-intellectual school it was refreshing to find oneself accepted by authority. What difficulties there were during those three years were the result of a characteristic bit of woolly thinking on my part. Before moving to Cambridge I spent a few months in a rented house in Shropshire; a romantic black and white fifteenth century building on the slopes of a wooded valley. At its head were the Stiperstones, a windy ridge home to curlews and skylarks. At its summit is the Devil’s Chair. Legend says that whenever it is hidden by mist the devil sits there. I used to walk up there on my own quite a bit. It is a place of sinister beauty and I was not altogether surprised when I met one day a dark-visaged man to whom I was immediately attracted. Certainly he was not the devil. He was, more prosaically, a Kurd.
At first his being of a different nationality, race and culture was a definite plus. In those days I wanted to believe that good communication was all that was required to banish strife and brutality and racism from the world. I was after all a flower child, albeit by this time rather an old one at twenty-five. The dark-visaged one was a Cambridge graduate. He was handsome, clever and charming — a divine combination, you might think. Everything he told me about Mesopotamia sounded extravagantly exotic — love in a glamorous, kilim-decorated tent; eating pomegranates beneath a sinking desert sun. I thought our differences were fascinating but essentially superficial. In all important ways we shared interests that transcended cultural divergences.
In fact it was quite the other way round. What I discovered when I embarked on what turned out to be a slalom (interesting, instructive but downhill) of a love affair was that the things we had in common — shared tastes in books, art, music, jokes, architecture — were relatively unimportant. Our differences were ethical and therefore fundamental. For one thing we had opposing views about the relative importance of men versus women. Being of the generation that had embraced Women’s Lib with fervour I was not pleased to find myself rated just above beasts of burden but lower than an opium-stewed wife-beating pavement barber in a back-street bazaar.
But it certainly wasn’t all bad. We liked each other at intervals and we taught each other much that was useful. I bought a dilapidated cottage in the country, ten miles from Cambridge. It was thatched and white-washed with gables that leaned so far from the vertical that special insurance was needed before builders would agree to work on it. I enjoyed unbricking fireplaces and staircases and making my first garden. In spare moments I went to supervisions and read books, took exams. There is an awful lot of English literature. I suppose writing as a career is in some ways a soft option if you don’t care about being rich. It requires nothing more than a pencil and paper and you can do it at home in your dressing gown surrounded by unmade beds and unwashed dishes if that is your preferred domestic style. You require no training and no qualifications. So, it isn’t surprising that the written word abounds and the poor student is obliged to ‘do’ the Metaphysical poets in a fortnight and Shakespeare in a term. Of course we just skimmed the surface b
ut what we did learn was roughly how, when and where writers of fiction and history and philosophy fitted in with each other and how to use a library properly. A university course gives you a map and pointers but education is the stuff you put in your own head by reading and thinking all your life long. I made new friends, my life took on a respectability, almost, which I found unexpectedly restful. The dark-visaged one came and went, sometimes delightful, sometimes swinish.
It came to a parting of the ways. I barely had time to make a pyre of his collar stiffeners and restaurant receipts before I met the man who has nobly put up with me for thirty years. Nothing is more tedious to read about than a happily married couple so I shall draw a veil over the success or failure of this relationship. Two children, lots of cats and chickens and three moves later we live in a small seventeenth century manor house in Northamptonshire. It has been an amusing exercise to recall the far-off days of my youth as a background to The Winter of Enchantment and The House Called Hadlows, which I hope may have entertained some readers. Now I fill my days writing and gardening, which, ever since I read about Vita Sackville-West doing it, has seemed to me an ideal way to pass the time. For twenty-five years I published nothing. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I found my time fully occupied looking after the children, the livestock: domestic things. But when my son went away to school and my daughter preferred to spend her leisure hours with her pony rather than with me suddenly there was hiatus. I started to write for adults and have had six novels published under my married name, Victoria Clayton. A seventh is due in September 2007. A misspent, misguided and wholly idiotic youth have actually proved quite useful in furnishing insights into the vagaries of the human heart.
To those who write but haven’t yet found a market, I urge you not to be put off by the stumbling attempts of the industry to identify the Zeitgeist. There is so much luck in it that no one can predict what will happen. My own idea is that one should never write for money, and always write what comes into one’s head first. Keats had a word for it: two, actually — negative capability — which roughly means a deliberate open-mindedness. You make your mind as blank as possible and see what comes into it without trying to be clever or rational. You can tidy it up later. The results are usually surprising. If you have been discouraged by rejections from agents or publishers, gird up your loins and go to: writing is lonely and difficult and discouraging most of the time but the hideous effort is probably worth it. At least you find out a heck of a lot about yourself, which can only be profitable.
The House Called Hadlows Page 16