‘Fanner?’ The Minister stood still beside the great mulberry tree. The laughter and the thumpings from the ghetto blasters and the subdued gossip of the other guests walking behind him died away. He seemed to be listening to other voices, coming at him from the past. ‘Why the hell do you call him Fanner?’
‘Stupid of me.’ Sir Willoughby smiled. ‘I’m sure some of his friends call him that. I must have heard it somewhere. Is that not part of his name? Not double-barrelled, is it?’
‘It certainly isn’t.’ The Minister’s tone was icy, and help for the Blane Biology Library faded into the distance. ‘There’s absolutely nothing double-barrelled about my Nick.’
Chapter Five
‘I’m bored with dying. Let’s have a cocktail party,’ Lady Fanner said. ‘For God’s sake, let’s organize a cocker!’
The Reverend Kevin Bulstrode had flirted, during his first curacy, with the idea of joining a mission to Central Africa. He had felt a calling to care for the sick, educate the children, comfort the persecuted in some distant land, but fear of being hacked to pieces by machetes on a hot African night had deterred him. He had set his eyes on a less adventurous path and become the Rector of Rapstone. Now, as he sat by Grace Fanner’s bed trying to decipher the spidery numbers in her ancient address book and dial them for her, his thoughts turned with longing to any dangerous spot on the Zimbabwe border. The fragile but alarming old woman demanded his full attention. She telephoned the Rectory day and night to call him to her bedside. He had a terrible fear that, unless he obeyed her, she might contrive to leave her bed in a final burst of manic energy and appear, her nightdress fluttering against her skeletal body, in church to interrupt the service. Visiting the dying was no doubt a pastoral duty, but he hadn’t taken orders to become the unpaid secretary, champagne pourer and telephone operator to an old woman whose accounts of high life in the thirties, at one time entertaining, had been so often repeated that he now knew them all by heart.
‘Betsy von Trump. Isn’t she there? It’s Kensington somewhere.’
‘It’s ringing. There’s no answer.’
‘Probably tucking up with some lover-boy. Who’s next?’
‘Jack Annersley-Vachell.’
‘Well, he can’t be dead. Not Jack. That wouldn’t be his line at all. Telephone up, why don’t you?’
Kevin’s finger got to work again. The instrument whined. Jack Annersley-Vachell, whoever he might have been, was no longer obtainable.
‘What do I say to these people, if I get hold of them?’
‘Tell them to come down for a cocker, of course. If they don’t get their skates on I’ll be gone, and most likely the house’ll be gone with me. Tell them that. If I know Jack, he’ll go anywhere for a glass of Bollinger and a couple of cheese straws.’
Grace Fanner was right about one thing. Rapstone Manor was going with her. Centuries ago, at the time of the Civil War, when the Cavalier Fanners fought the Roundhead Stroves of Picton Principal, their lands stretched far from the valley and down to the riverside near Hartscombe. A Fanner cousin, a man with a head for politics, had joined the Parliament army as a wise insurance against the King’s defeat, which had therefore brought no loss of family acres. At the Restoration a number of Strove farms were added by a grateful monarch and the eighteenth-century Fanners could ride for almost a day without leaving their boundaries. Gambling during the Regency, and a vague lack of interest in money in later years, had considerably reduced the family’s estate and by the time Grace’s husband had died it was owned by farmers who had once been Fanner tenants. Only that sacred area of wood and chalk downs, bought by S.C.R.A.P. as a place of safety for the stone curlew and the Duke of Burgundy’s fritillary butterfly, remained unavailable for commercial exploitation.
But still, as Grace planned her final party, the cultivated land and pastures around her looked much as they had done in her husband’s, and his father’s and grandfather’s day. Only the garish yellow fields of oil-seed rape were different and the old farm-labourers’ cottages, converted with open-plan kitchens and extensions containing granny flats and saunas, had been sold off to bankers and men in satellite television. And they, appearing at weekends in their waxed jackets, driving their Range Rovers, were loudly eager to maintain the rustic appearance of their neighbourhood.
Market forces, however, were sweeping up the Rapstone Valley and secret plans were being made to change it as it had not been changed since the Fanners, with a commercial sense not much apparent in their subsequent history, had fought on both sides in the Civil War. The scattered farms had, without anyone paying too much attention, amalgamated and formed a consortium. They had approached Kempenflatts, the builders, a firm which had done well erecting multi-storey car parks, communications systems factories and office blocks. Kempenflatts had long wished to attract new business, change their image and ‘go into the countryside’. Accordingly they formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Fallowfield Enterprises Ltd. Fallowfield was prominent on the list of subscribers to all societies out to protect the environment and contributed largely to Friends of the Planet, Friends of the Maypole (The Folk Art Preservation Society), Friends of the Rain Forests and Friends of the Leopard. It extended the hand of friendship to the farmers of the Rapstone Valley and paid them a handsome sum for an option to buy their land in the event of planning permission being granted for the building of Fallowfield Country Town. If all went well and the scheme were finally to be approved by the Secretary of State, the farmers would make half a million pounds an acre, a sum unattainable by slaving over oil-seed rape or battery hens.
These seismic movements in the countryside had not yet touched Rapstone Manor, and its small area of surrounding parkland, as Lady Fanner planned her cocktail party and Kev the Rev. made telephone calls to people, most of whom seemed to be either dead or in hiding. When he had, at long last, managed to escape from her bedside and the nurse, whose services added so considerably to Lady Fanner’s overdraft, was downstairs making tea, the invalid, stimulated by champagne and telephone calls, suddenly jerked herself out of bed. The sitting-room! It was a long time since she had seen it but was it, could she be sure it was, in a fit state for a cocker? Was it warm, was it comfortable, were the cushions plumped on the sofa and was the chandelier sparkling? It must be as it was when they had their first parties, before the war ended and everything got so dull. She had to make sure. Her small, white feet, dangling from the bedside, searched in panic for her slippers. Then, with her lips pursed and her hands held out in front of her as though the room were dark, she made the long journey to the door, which seemed enormously heavy as she tugged it open.
Heaven alone knew how she got down the stairs. She was like a marionette operated by a drunken puppeteer. She floated, she stumbled, she almost fell in a pile of dislocated limbs. By an extraordinary effort she crossed the marble hallway and pushed open the sitting-room door. She switched on a light and what she saw caused her to cry out and bite her knuckles.
There was no chandelier, dim or sparkling; a dusty bulb dangled from a wire in the middle of the ceiling. Everything of value had gone, including the Georgian bookcases, the console tables, the Chesterfield, the claw-footed wing-chair in which Sir Nicholas had sat after dinner and infuriated her by falling asleep. What remained, mostly wickerwork covered in chipped white paint, she seemed to remember from the conservatory or the garden. What she didn’t remember were the bedside conversations with Jackson Cantellow during which he had given her the news, which she had done her best not to hear, that a great deal of furniture had to be sent to auction to satisfy the ever more anxious demands of the caring West Country Bank.
She stood, swaying, wide-eyed and dismayed, until she saw, on a table which had lived somewhere quite different (the scullery, the potting-shed?), her old wind-up gramophone. It was among a clutter of unsaleable objects, broken lamps, cracked decanters and family photographs. She had used it often, particularly to play her favourite record made by Pinky Pinkerton, her immac
ulate spade from the Café de Paris, who had sat at a white piano and added, in his black treacly voice, a special verse for her in ‘You’re the Top!’. She made for this beloved object and clung to it. In her head she sang, in a high, girlish voice, her own particular words:
You’re the top!
You can trump the A–ace.
You’re the top!
You’re the Lady Gra–ace …
but no sound came from her. She managed half a turn of the handle and then fell, as though the wires which held her up had been dropped at last.
When Grace Fanner died, her few friends and numerous relatives felt that some invaluable subject of gossip and entertainment had been removed from their lives. Her funeral was well attended and the Reverend Kevin Bulstrode conducted the service with considerable relief. He made use of all his long-prepared phrases and said that she was ‘a genuine character’, ‘one of the Old Brigade’ and ‘never one to suffer fools gladly’.
She was buried in Rapstone churchyard and whether her grave would look over damp fields and dripping woodlands, or at the bleak prospect of a multi-storey car park and another pedestrian shopping precinct, was a matter which the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss, as the Secretary of State for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning, would eventually have to decide. Lady Fanner’s future was in the hands of H.E.A.P.
Chapter Six
‘Some people. People with plenty of money who can enjoy the privileges of living in the “green field areas” will talk a lot about not disturbing the peace and tranquillity of the English countryside. Strangely enough these are often the same whingers and belly-achers who criticize the government for not providing enough houses, who accuse us of lack of compassion, or of not being “fair”. Well, if they’re so keen on fairness, why don’t they want to share their little corner of England with ordinary folk who have worked and saved enough to buy a decent, newly built house of their own in these privileged areas? [Applause.] “Oh, no,” say the green welly brigade of the Countryside Clubs and the Rural Preservation Societies, “we want the government to be fair, but please, not in our back garden!” [Laughter and applause.] My old father had a word for their sort. Dogs, he would have called them, in the manger. [Prolonged applause.]
‘I would say to them, I would say this. Don’t come to me in your tweed hats … [Laughter.] … and lecture me. I know all about England’s green and pleasant land. I was born there! [Applause.] In a little two-up and two-down where my father died and my old mother, bless her, still lives. We didn’t take in Country Life. [Laughter.] We didn’t have a herb garden or breed up pheasants for the pleasure of their ritual execution. We didn’t have a woman from the village in to do the washing. My mother did that herself in the old copper. [Applause.] I got to know about country life by cutting down nettles in the Rectory garden for sixpence a day and a glass of ginger-beer, if the Rector’s wife was feeling generous. [Laughter.] My mother got to know about country life by cooking steak and kidney pie for the local big-wigs. And it’s no reflection at all on this five-star eatery, ladies and gentlemen, to say that my mother could have taught them a thing or two when it comes to steak and kidney! I knew what the English countryside meant to me. It meant damned hard work and a decent home for anyone with the determination to save up for it. [Loud applause.] That’s more than the rich Socialists who live in their converted farmhouses will ever understand. Here’s what I would say to the Rural Preservation Society which means the Keep the Other Folk Away Society. Oh, we shall have whiners, ladies and gentlemen. We shall have whingers. We shall have petitions and we shall have protests and we may get a vote against us in the House of Lords. But a wind of change is blowing through the English countryside. And let me say this to you. While I’m at H.E.A.P. there shall be very few No Go areas for the operation of the free market economy. Thank you.’ [Prolonged applause mixed with ‘Hear, hear!’, ‘Sock it to them!’ from the partially intoxicated lady wife of one of the guests, and a solitary attempt to start the singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, quickly silenced by the Chairman, who rose to thank the Secretary of State for his wise and genuine understanding of the problems of the construction industry.]
Leslie Titmuss sat at the top table, with a winged collar sawing at his neck like a blunt execution, and, his speech over, he thought about the past. He thought about it particularly because the Chairman of the United Construction and Developers Association (U.C.D.A.), who was making such a gracious speech of thanks, was that same Christopher Kempenflatt who had led the baying band of ex-public schoolboys who had pushed the young Leslie into the river. It was Kempenflatt also who had, many years ago, invited the young Titmuss to go into a property business with him, a venture which had left Leslie with enough money to devote the rest of his life to politics and Kempenflatt temporarily in debt. It goes without saying that neither man mentioned these past events, although no doubt they had not forgotten them.
‘It was a tremendous speech,’ Kempenflatt said as he sat down to renewed applause beside his guest. ‘They loved every word of it. I hope you’ve enjoyed the evening.’
‘I always enjoy a speech.’ Leslie never tired of the way he could affect an audience.
‘Because you’re so good at it.’
‘I have an uncanny knack of bringing out the baser instincts in any gathering. That’s what the Leader of the so-called Opposition said about me.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it? I rather hoped it was,’ Leslie Titmuss said seriously, and Kempenflatt paused, a lighted match in his cupped hand on the way to his cigar. Then he laughed at what he could only assume was a joke. ‘Well, you certainly gave them what they wanted to hear.’
‘I like it better, though, when I give them what they don’t want to hear. And they have to take it. That’s when politics begins to get interesting.’
Kempenflatt, a big, square-shouldered man, an old rowing Blue fast going to seed, tried to establish a little more common ground with the Secretary of State that he would need when Fallowfield Country Town came up for planning permission. ‘I’m sorry to hear about poor old Grace.’
‘Are you? Can’t say I am.’
‘Well, I suppose it was a merciful release.’
‘About the only merciful thing she ever did.’
‘I forgot. Your wife never got on with her mother.’
‘Lady Fanner thought her daughter ugly and me common. I needn’t tell you what we thought of her.’
‘What’s going to become of the house?’ As soon as he had asked it, Kempenflatt regretted the question. His guest of honour looked at him, stony-faced and silent. Ken Cracken, Leslie’s second-in-command, whom Kempenflatt called a ‘personal friend’, had advised him to say nothing about the proposals to ‘develop’ the Rapstone Valley until he gave the word that the time was ripe. Ripeness was clearly not yet.
‘She’s only just cold in the ground,’ Leslie said reproachfully. ‘Isn’t it a little early to be talking about that?’
‘Smashing speech that Leslie made at the U.C.D.A. dinner,’ said Joyce Timberlake.
‘Yes. The old boy was terrific. From our point of view.’ Ken Cracken put his hands behind his head, leant back in his desk chair and looked at his political adviser with every sign of satisfaction.
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Just that now he’s said all that, he’ll find it very difficult to backtrack. Even in a difficult case.’
‘What sort of difficult case?’
‘I mean difficult. For him personally.’
‘He doesn’t know yet? About that new country town at Rapstone?’
‘He hasn’t said anything. And I’m not telling him. Yet. I’m worried about Leslie, though. He seems to have got culture.’
‘You mean he’s read a book?’ Joyce, who had a degree in the History of Art from Exeter, was often contemptuous of the Secretary of State’s reputation for reading nothing but Green Papers and Cabinet minutes.
‘Wo
rse than that. He asked me about the ballet.’
‘Oh, Christmas!’ Joyce, even as a political adviser, sometimes went too far. ‘I don’t fancy seeing him in tights!’
‘The funny thing’ – Ken Cracken didn’t laugh, but then he rarely did – ‘is that he asked what was so amusing about the ballet, In Maskera. I was able to tell him it wasn’t a ballet at all. It’s an opera.’ Ken’s friend Christopher Kempenflatt often invited him to his firm’s box at Covent Garden and so he was not altogether uninformed about such matters. ‘You know, he has been behaving rather strangely.’
‘Why? What did he say when you told him that? About the opera, I mean?’
‘He said, “Bastards!” And that’s all he said.’
‘What on earth is it?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s a flower.’
‘It looks dead.’
‘It looks laid out. Embalmed.’
‘In that awful little plastic coffin.’
The women speaking were Jenny Sidonia and her friend Sue Bramble. Sue had been, was perfectly well known to have been, the girlfriend of Tony before Jenny married him. They had, however, liked and trusted each other for a long time. Sue had told Jenny she was absolutely right for Tony, and Jenny had felt that the other woman, five or six years older than herself, had understood her husband whereas she could only love him. Now, in the London flat Jenny had bought when she sold the spiky, Victorian Gothic house in North Oxford in which she had been happy, they had their heads together. Sue was blonde, freckled, slightly sun-tanned – even in the most unlikely weather – went hunting and smoked like a chimney. Jenny was dark, delicately boned, ivory-skinned, amused and slightly aghast as she looked at the object which they were examining, nothing more or less than a single orchid lying on a bed of velvet in a see-through box, tied up with gold ribbon.
Titmuss Regained Page 4