by Beech, Mark
Sue was not exactly a beauty, though by no means unattractive. Some people might have said she had a rather mannish appearance: hence perhaps—but I am getting ahead of myself. She was a big, unaffected, outdoors sort of girl, a little loud and boisterous at times, but far from stupid. We got on well, I thought, and I was beginning to believe that spending the rest of my life in her company might be tolerable, especially as she enjoyed the benefits of a substantial trust fund.
One evening I took her to a party in Fulham, one of those where showbiz celebrity cross-fertilises with posh ‘society’ people. Seymour was there, of course, he being an ardent social climber and, thinking no harm, I introduced him to Sue. He seemed instantly attracted, but still I did not worry: he batted for the other team, after all. I thought it was only her title that appealed to him. Seymour’s family was perfectly respectable—he came from a long line of stockbrokers—and he had been to a minor public school, but he was not exactly out of the top drawer. So he was just the type to be very excited by aristocratic nomenclature: to put it bluntly, he was a crashing snob.
During the course of the evening he tried to monopolise her, but she seemed to find him a bit of a bore. “Who is that funny, ugly little man?” she said to me at one point. Then, later on in the evening, Seymour was prevailed upon (and no great urging was needed) to do his Carmen Miranda act which Sue found hilarious. Laughter may not be an aphrodisiac exactly, but it dispels disagreeable first impressions like no other force.
Thereafter Seymour pursued her relentlessly, and here I must in retrospect reproach myself. I played it cool, thinking that Sue would find Seymour’s manufactured ardour tedious after a while, but she didn’t. Most women, as I have discovered, enjoy manifest adoration, however embarrassing might be its manner of delivery. It also, unfortunately, happened to be one of those rare periods during which I was in work. I was playing one of the ‘salads’ in a Chichester production of The Merchant of Venice. Seymour, by contrast, was enjoying an equally rare period for him of professional barrenness, and he made good use of it. Sue and he happened to be invited to the same house party in Wiltshire. He proposed to her for the fifth or sixth time in the middle of a chalk stream while she was trying to teach him the finer points of fly fishing. She finally accepted him while laughing uproariously at his inept attempts to ensnare a trout.
I was furious, but I thought it was beneath me to try to alter the situation. I did not even attempt to warn Sue that she was hitching herself to a notorious wrong-ender. Most of my greatest regrets in life have come from not being bolder and nastier.
I was invited to the wedding, of course, and saw them both looking happier than I had hoped or expected. Seymour drew me aside at the reception and told me how grateful he was to me for introducing him to Sue, and that he had fallen in love with her at first sight. I summoned up a thin smile from somewhere. My present to them was an up-to-date copy of Burke’s Peerage. I am not sure if the wit of my little gesture was appreciated, but there is a certain subtle pleasure to be had from unacknowledged irony.
With marriage Seymour’s career seemed to blossom with even greater exuberance. He took to writing screenplays and he was consulted by Hollywood whenever in a film expertise was needed on the English nobility, their customs and language. Somehow, he became an authority on poshness, and would lay down the law about all things aristocratic, from table settings to nomenclature. The Yanks simply lapped it up. Of course there were those who carped and said he got things wrong, but that wasn’t the point: the truth is rather more subtle. The English landed gentry, like all tribes, has its mores, but they are far from rigid and are subject to a remarkable degree of eccentric variation. In some aristocratic households fish knives are still anathema; in others, not. The offspring of one Duke might all call him “sir”; another’s might address him as “Father” or even “Pongo”. But Seymour would have none of that. He had them all subscribing to immutable laws, many of which, I am sure, he invented. It made him a great deal of money and even earned him an Oscar. He returned from America to Lady Susan and their two children with an immense reputation which he began to exploit by writing various miniseries for British television.
In the meanwhile I had given up showbusiness, though it might be truer to say that it gave me up. I had a brief, unhappy career selling antique scientific instruments of very dubious provenance to wealthy collectors which earned me a short spell in an open prison. The experience was really not that bad: in the prison dining room there was always a table exclusively reserved for Old Etonians.
Soon after my release my brother got killed in a rather bizarre shooting accident—I won’t go into the details—and, as he died unmarried, I inherited the title, Huntsmere and all that went with it. I married a cousin of mine, a nice woman, very much better at handling the Estate than I was, but she proved incapable of bearing children. When she died—again I won’t discuss the circumstances—my fortunes once more began to deteriorate, and it was at this point that Seymour’s path crossed mine again. Phis time it was, I believe, to my advantage.
He was writing a series for ITV called Denton Park, a saga about an impoverished aristocratic family between the two world wars. His production company was looking round for a suitable location and came across my place, Huntsmere Hall. It had, according to the location manager, “just the right combination of grandeur and run-downness.” I swallowed my pride and a very satisfactory fee for its use was negotiated.
Last February, a good two months before filming was due to begin, Seymour came down to see Huntsmere and me. He came in a Rolls, complete with driver, and when he emerged from it onto the front drive he greeted me like a dear and intimate friend, even though it had been almost thirty years since we had last met.
Had the years been kind to him? Well, he was sleek and pink and well-tailored, but not even Savile Row could hide his obesity, and nothing could be done about his baldness. His manner had changed too. The campness and flamboyance of his youth had almost gone though it sometimes decorated his occasional attempts at wit. It had been largely replaced by a benign and orotund flow of civility that made him sound like a Church of England Bishop at a diocesan barbecue.
I welcomed him into the house and gave him lunch while his driver buggered off to the local pub. It was during that lunch that I began to understand the secret of his success. His social skills had been honed to a kind of perfection. Without in any sense monopolising the conversation, he kept it flowing, always deferring to me and making the most of any comment I made, laughing heartily at my anecdotes, few and inadequate though they were. I had forgotten how addicted he was to gossip of which he produced an inexhaustible supply, though I noticed that he was considerably more discreet than he used to be in our acting days. He made it clear that he was on very good terms with members of the Royal Family, and while he let fall a few stories that might be considered confidential, he was careful to say nothing that was deleterious to their Highnesses. I liked the earnest way he confided to me in a half whisper, as if we might be overheard, that “Her Majesty is really a very remarkable woman, you know.”
The trouble was that, like all gossips that I have known, he suffered from the belief that a love of scandal is a universal human characteristic. As it happens, this passion is not one of my many failings. I noticed that Seymour was sensitive enough to realise that showbusiness tittle-tattle would not be to my taste, so he concentrated on what I believe is still called “society”, in other words nobs and snobs. He wasn’t to know, I suppose, that I couldn’t care less what “Debo” Devonshire had said about Alexander Weymouth, or who had been found in whose bed at some grand house in the Home Counties.
Seymour must eventually have caught on that I was not in the least interested in the activities of my peers because he started to press me about life at Huntsmere. He seemed amazed that I could live in this place all alone.
“I suppose, taking a step back from myself and looking at it objectively,” I said, “it does seem strange. For
ty odd rooms, some of them quite big. I do rattle around a bit, but it suits me.”
“But what about company? Other people? Society?” Seymour had always been one of those creatures who define themselves through the proximity of others. I was reminded of that Barbra Streisand song:
“People who need people Are the luckiest people in the world.”
Those words baffle me. I have always felt that precisely the opposite was the case, but it would seem that this is not a generally held opinion.
“I’m not exactly a recluse,” I said, trying to justify myself. Suddenly I was feeling guilty, though I had no reason to be. “I see lots of people through my work on the estate.”
“But social life? Shooting? Hunting?”
“Never got the hang of them. Of course I let out the shooting on the estate but I never partake in the slaughter. Not that I disapprove, you understand.”
“But what do you do for recreation?”
“I read a lot. I listen to classical music, particularly French stuff, late nineteenth, early twentieth century: Fauré, Ravel, Debussy... And there’s my alchemy of course.”
I must admit I had deliberately tacked that on the end in the most casual manner to see how he would react. The shock on his face was gratifying.
“You’re kidding me, Charles!” Clearly the notion was just too much for him.
“No. I have been a student of the Great Work for well over ten years now. I have even kitted out my cellars as an alchemical laboratory.”
“Good God! Can I see it?”
“I’m afraid not, Seymour. No-one has been in it but me, not even my late wife. I apologise, but there are reasons.”
“But... I mean... Do you try to turn base metals into gold, that sort of thing?”
“That is a very crude caricature of the work of an alchemist. We believe that everything in the universe, animate or so-called ‘inanimate’ has a living essence or spirit derived from the Aristotelian four elements. Our work is to discover that spirit and then to operate upon it. We believe that there is a god or spirit in that silver fork you are about to drop on the floor—please don’t!—just as much as there is in you, Seymour. The transmutation of metals has to do with the transference of the spirit of one metal into another, by means of purification. That’s putting it very simplistically, of course. The process takes decades to master and I am not nearly there yet, but I have begun to understand the principle.”
Seymour was looking at me open mouthed. I had taken him way out of what he would no doubt have called his “comfort zone.”
“Well,” he said with a nervous laugh. “You seem to have discovered the elixir of youth, at any rate. Apart from the odd grey hairs, you’ve barely changed at all.”
“Yes,” I said, summoning up the last vestiges of my vanity, “I can still wear the dinner jacket I had at Oxford. Luckily for me, because I couldn’t afford a new one.” This was a slight exaggeration, but it helped to restore normality, as far as Seymour was concerned.
“You always were a handsome devil, Charles. You still are.”
“Did you fancy me in those days then, Seymour?”
Once again I had disturbed his equilibrium, but this was something he could cope with. It had not come out of left field as the alchemy had. He burst into a loud guffaw of laughter, his way of smothering embarrassment, after which he reassumed his customary blandness.
“Well, that was a truly superb lunch, my dear Charles. Everything comme il faut and I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a better Hock: chilled to perfection. And now, if you don’t mind, we should get back to business. Would you be kind enough to show me round the house, excluding—of course—the cellars?”
“With pleasure.”
“When I’m writing a scene, you see, I like to have a clear picture of where it’s taking place. It gives it an extra—je ne sais quoi. Come to think of it, though... Talking of cellars and alchemy, I’ve just had a thought. Why don’t we have a mad uncle or something working away in the cellars, trying to restore the family fortunes by turning base metal into gold? It’s rather a brilliant idea. A bit unusual. And you could play the mad uncle. Your great return to acting. What do you say, Charles?”
“My acting days are long over, I’m afraid.”
“We’re going to have a great cast, you know. Dame Judi’s already been signed up to play the Dowager.”
“Thank you, Seymour, but no.”
“Pity,” said Seymour and his eyes, for some reason, began to glisten with tears. “You know, Charles, you really were a bloody good actor. Far better than I ever was. And a smasher too. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
I was taken aback. It was one of the kindest things that’s ever been said to me, and obviously completely spontaneous and genuine. I found myself feeling both ashamed and annoyed. I had made up my mind that Seymour was a thoroughly objectionable, puffed up, pompous little pillock and then this happens. I hate having to revise my prejudices.
We toured the house and Seymour was delighted with everything. The place is shabby, I admit, but most of it is in pretty good order. Unlike some occupants of run-down stately homes I have always made sure that the roof doesn’t leak.
Seymour was particularly taken by the Chinese Bedroom. I opened the shutters to let him see it in its full magnificence. Because the room had been kept dark for much of its existence, the 18th century chinoiserie wallpaper and the hangings on the Chinese Chippendale four poster bed were almost as bright and vibrant as the day they were made.
“But it’s fabulous!—” said Seymour, forgetting restraint, almost his former self again. “And you mean to say you’ve never used it?”
“My late wife Marina and I tried it once, but it didn’t suit. Waking up to those hordes of pigtailed Chinamen loitering on countless semicircular bridges all over the walls, not to mention the embroidered dragons on the bed curtains... It wasn’t for us. I prefer something more restful in a bedroom.”
“Well, I think it’s just fabulous.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
As we came down stairs dusk was beginning to fall. It was February, remember, and the days were short.
“I’m sorry I can’t give you a tour of the grounds,” I said. “We should have done them first, but it’s getting too dark now. I’d like to have shown you our arboretum and the maze and things—”
“A maze? You’ve got a maze?”
“Yes. Rather a good one, I believe. Apparently one of the oldest hedge mazes in the country. Yew: a bit overgrown, but still serviceable.”
“Oh, but can’t we go now quickly? There’s still a bit of light, and I’ve got a torch somewhere in the Rolls.”
“I’m sorry but we never go into the maze after dark.”
“Why ever not?”
“Family tradition, that’s all.”
“Ah.” Seymour nodded: it was the kind of thing he understood. “All the same,” he added, “A maze! We must use it somehow. I know! The scene where Hiram Katz II, son of the millionaire Laxative King, is trying to persuade Lady Winifred to marry him. We might have him pursuing her through the maze. That could be rather effective.”
I was beginning to understand how Seymour’s creative mind worked: banal perhaps, but voraciously efficient. We had reached the hall. Seymour peered through the window at his Rolls on the darkening drive.
“Well, I suppose I should be wending my way. Thank you so much, Charles, for a most delightful lunch and tour of the Hall. I say, where’s my driver? He ought to have been waiting by the car.”
He extracted a mobile from his pocket and dialled a number. “Samuels, where the fuck are you? I want to leave now...! What do you mean, you got lost...? Don’t be ridiculous! I want you here waiting for me by the car in five minutes, do you understand?”
He jabbed at his mobile and returned it to his pocket, the expression on his face that of a petulant child. I felt an odd sense of relief. Perhaps I didn’t need to revise my opinion of Seymour after all.
We were outside, standing under the portico when Samuels, a heavy man, came puffing up the drive. He looked unusually agitated.
“What on earth have you been doing, Samuels?—” said Seymour, still petulant.
“Sorry, Sir Seymour—” the government had just recognised Seymour’s invaluable services to culture “—but I thought I’d take a turn in the grounds, and then I seemed to get lost.”
“Not in the maze, I hope?” I said. Samuels looked at me aghast. Something was clearly very wrong.
“No, my lord,” he said, then hesitated. “I don’t think so...”
“Well, never mind that now,” snapped Seymour. “I have to be back in London pretty sharpish. Lady Susan and I are dining with the Home Secretary tonight. Goodbye, Charles and thank you again. I must return another day to view your grounds.”
“Come any time,” I said waving him off.
But he didn’t come: too busy, I suppose, in the corridors of power. Instead, a few days before shooting began for Denton Park, he called me.
“Charles, I’m going to be around for the first few weeks of shooting. I was wondering if you could recommend a cosy nearby hostelry to stay in. The cast and crew are already billeted of course, but I’ve rather left it till the last moment.”
“Why don’t you come and stay here in the house?”
“Really? Do you really mean that, Charles?” It was clearly what he wanted all along, but I was touched by his pretence that it wasn’t.
“Yes. I’ll clear out the Chinese bedroom for you, if you like. It’ll be fun. The company will do me good.” Thus I had made him feel that he was doing me a favour. It was the sort of courteous manoeuvre Seymour would understand and appreciate.
I must say Seymour was a very harmless guest. He brought all his own towels and never complained once when the hot water went on the blink, as it frequently does at Huntsmere. He adored the Chinese Bedroom and he frequently took me out for meals at fancy local restaurants that had long since transcended the limited capacities of my purse. He even—and this surprised me—had the sensitivity to know that I would not always want the pleasure of his company. Once or twice I was aware of him opening the door to the library where I was sitting with a book and a glass of malt whisky, look in, close the door discreetly, and tiptoe away.