A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Therefore, when I misbehaved, when I had tantrums, screamed ‘It’s not fair!’ to the heedless winds, refused to eat, got my clothes filthy in the grounds, and displayed my slovenliness for family and guests to wonder at, there was no one whom I loved to coax me into a more amenable frame of mind. Beatrice, to be sure, gave me what time she could, but her mind was already on future children for whom I was merely a foreshadowing and a substitute. Uncle Frank was rarely at Blakemere (which did not mean he was necessarily at Tillyards with his bride-to-be), and when he was, his notice of me was more off-handed, as a consequence of his preoccupied state of mind – and perhaps, I now think, of some feelings of shame.

  Mary Coverdale, when she came to Blakemere, treated me as she meant to treat me when she came into her future state: that is, she ignored me. I was an irrelevance, and future sons would render my insignificance even more palpable.

  Inevitably I was asked to be one of the bridesmaids – no, was told I was to be one of them.

  ‘I refuse,’ I said.

  My words, repeated as often as the subject was brought up, took on a heroic ring in my ears. So much more dignified and principled than a mere ‘no’, I thought. In time the words began to rank in my egotistical imagination with Martin Luther’s ‘Here I stand’ and Lars Porsena’s oath that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more. A great deal of effort was put into making me change my mind – not by my mother, who put no effort into anything that concerned me, and not a great deal by my father, whose feelings about the marriage were ambiguous. But Aunt Jane, Grandmama, Beatrice (under pressure), and Aunt Sarah all tried. Grandmama was the most persuasive, the greatest danger.

  ‘Your refusing will get the marriage off to a bad start, my dear,’ she said, when I had obeyed a rare summons to her own boudoir.

  ‘It will start off badly in any case,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear. What can you know?’

  ‘What could be a worse start than a bridegroom who is reluctant?’ I asked, very conscious of right on my side.

  ‘You’ve got a very silly idea into your head. Just look at how lovely your future aunt Mary is. It’s a love match – everyone can see that.’

  ‘Uncle Frank is handsome as any man I’ve ever seen, but they can both be as lovely as anyone has ever been in the history of the world and still not be right for each other. Uncle Frank will go down the aisle as if he’s being marched to the hangman’s yard, and I won’t be part of it.’

  Finally I convinced them, and a daughter of Aunt Clare (and Uncle Alfred, though he was hardly ever mentioned at Blakemere) was drafted in to represent the Fearing family. This meant inviting both the child’s parents to the wedding, which the family had hoped to avoid. However, a few weeks before the wedding, Uncle Alfred was elected to the Royal Academy (he was a very boring painter, though a charming man), and this meant that his profession could be mentioned when he was introduced to the other wedding guests, though some of the local gentry were still rather sniffy.

  I was thrown during those weeks on the company of my governess Miss Roxby – Edith. With her I was petulant, indignant, openly contemptuous of the bargain that had been struck, but the worst of my tantrums and moods were controlled in her presence because I had come to respect her greatly, and because I sensed that she sympathised with my attitude to the marriage. She introduced me, in our spare time, to many books that have become lifelong friends, and she awoke in me an interest in my country’s history which has been a great standby in my two main careers. I remember one occasion a few weeks before the wedding when I was questioning her about how the then Queen had come to the throne, and she had taken down a tall, heavy book full of photographs and engravings, which had been published for the Golden Jubilee (we were by then between Jubilees). It had a family tree of some complexity, and I studied it intently.

  ‘So she inherited the throne,’ I said eventually, ‘even though her father’s younger brothers had sons.’

  I had studied it, you see, with my own situation very much in my mind.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Edith Roxby. ‘If the Duke and Duchess of Kent had had a son, he would have taken precedence over the Princess Victoria, as she then was. But they didn’t – he died soon after she was born – so she took precedence over the sons of his younger brothers.’

  ‘I see. That seems quite fair … But it does seem odd that Uncle Frank should be badgered into marriage to produce a son.’

  ‘That is quite different, Sarah,’ said Miss Roxby, peddling the family line, I now know, with reluctance. ‘A son is needed to take over Fearing’s Bank.’

  ‘So a woman may take over the country, but one may not take over Fearing’s Bank?’ I said, with remorseless logic. ‘Not that I want to! I can’t think of anything more stuffy and tedious. But you’d think that what was good enough for the Royal Family would be good enough for Fearing’s Bank, wouldn’t you?’

  Thus did the seeds sown by Mr Gladstone’s casual remark flourish in my childish brain.

  As I have mentioned, there were occasions on which the happy bride-to-be Mary Coverdale visited Blakemere, and on such visits Uncle Frank (but she always called him Francis) was in attendance, glumly but dutifully. If she noticed his glumness she did not comment on it. She was not naturally a gay person herself. She had her mind set seriously on one subject, and went after it single-mindedly.

  This was brought home to me forcibly by a scrap of conversation I overheard on one of those visits. As I have said, Mary Coverdale ignored me – not so much snubbing me as simply being unaware of my presence, since I had no place in her view of her own future at Blakemere. She was almost equally unaware of the existence of Aunt Jane and my mother, while being very conscious of the respect due to my grandfather and grandmother, and more uneasily aware of the claims of my father.

  Anyway, the fact that I and Miss Roxby were also in the vicinity was ignored during one of these visits when Uncle Frank and his future bride were walking in the terrace gardens. They were arm-in-arm, yet they could not have seemed further apart. Miss Roxby and I were on a seat behind a hedge, studying a map of Africa showing how it had been opened up in recent years (by our heroic Empire builders, whose work will have to be comprehensively undone in the years ahead). As they passed by on the other side, I heard Uncle Frank mumble something into his beard – I imagine it was some professed doubt as to whether he could ‘make her happy.’ Mary Coverdale’s voice came across the hedge to us clear as a silver spoon on fine glassware.

  ‘You mustn’t worry, Francis. We are extremely well suited. I shall be an excellent hostess for Blakemere.’

  They passed on. Miss Roxby looked at me and raised her eyebrows. Since she would never initiate such a conversation but sometimes allowed herself to be led into one, I said, ‘She doesn’t understand the situation at all.’

  ‘Seemingly not,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Uncle Frank doesn’t care a fig for Blakemere, or for his wife being hostess here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘At least she doesn’t imagine she is being married for love,’ I admitted grudgingly.

  ‘True. And I suppose it will have been difficult for anyone to explain to her that she is being married in return for the wiping out of debts.’ She realised at once she had said too much, had given rein to a side of her that her profession obliged her to keep hidden. A child, however secretive by nature, could never entirely be trusted. She said quietly: ‘But to return to the Dark Continent …’

  We were on our way to understanding each other very well indeed.

  Meanwhile, preparations for the wedding were proceeding apace, though all the bride’s preparations were going on at Tillyards, so I was not nauseated by them. The wedding was to be large, indisputably an event, but a local event. Uncle Frank had insisted on this latter point. I had heard him do this one day when, exceptionally, I was allowed to sit with the family at teatime. He made it clear he wanted none of the banking bigwigs fr
om London invited, nor the national politicians.

  ‘It is only the wedding of a younger son,’ he said. ‘To pretend otherwise would be tasteless.’

  He looked at my father when he said this.

  ‘Don’t expect me to back you up,’ Papa said. ‘It’s a matter of indifference to me what sort of wedding you have.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Uncle Frank carefully, ‘the fact is that circumstances could change, and you could be father to a whole string of future lairds of Blakemere.’

  My father’s face twisted in distaste.

  ‘I assure you that should circumstances change, as you so tactfully put it, the last thing I would consider would be to embark on a second venture of matrimony.’

  I rather pertly put in my two pennyworth: ‘And you needn’t think I want to be Lairdess of Blakemere. I’m going to be a great writer.’

  Uncle Frank turned to me, with something of his old smile.

  ‘Well, that’s original, at any rate. We’ve never had a writer in the Fearing family.’

  ‘We’ve never had an explorer, either. I don’t see why the Fearing family should produce nothing but bankers. I’m going to be a great writer, like the Bronte sisters.’

  ‘I won’t have those women mentioned at my table!’ thundered Grandpapa. I subsided into silence, but I noticed a satiric glint in my grandmother’s eye. I think she knew that Grandpapa had very little idea who the Bronte sisters were, only that they were not quite respectable.

  My ambition to be a writer, which lasted all of three months, at least made me observe the preparations and the wedding itself with an eye eager to absorb the telling details. I will not bore myself by setting them down – they would seem impossibly lavish and fussy in this Age of Austerity we live in now. Uncle Frank absented himself as far as possible from all the fuss and flurry. I imagine him as having several last flings in all his favourite bachelor haunts, though on second thought I don’t imagine he saw them as last flings, and why on earth should he? Such a marriage as he was undertaking was not likely to change his essential nature, or his habits. It was like a royal marriage of convenience – like Charles II marrying a Portuguese princess he had never seen.

  Finally the day dawned. I was not a bridesmaid, but I was not excused attending the awful event. My mother, of course, did not go. She had resisted all pressures to make preparations for it, saying that she had many dresses bought for other weddings she had not attended, and she would wear one of those if she was well enough to put in an appearance at Church. In the event she stayed in bed, as everyone knew she would. By this stage in her life she never did anything to please anyone other than herself. I saw her about once a month. I on the other hand was primped and prettified and eventually was taken in one of the family tumbrils to sit toward the back of the church with Miss Roxby, Aunt Clare and Uncle Alfred, and their three boys – those doubtful insurers of Fearing’s Bank and its future. They were boisterous boys but pleasant enough, and they loathed the flummery of the wedding as much as I did, though for different reasons.

  The church was St Michael’s at Great Orpenden. The family had no associations with the village, but it was the only church in the area large enough for the sort of grand wedding the family had planned (it was built in the fifteenth century to the glory of God and the woollen trade by one of the sleek profiteers of the time). Uncle Frank sat awaiting his blooming bride in the front pew, making no attempt to hide the fact that he would rather be anywhere else but here, doing anything else but this – a common enough feeling among bridegrooms, so it aroused little comment except some mild jocularities.

  The bride, when she arrived, looked beautiful I had to admit – like a winter landscape in the sun. She walked slowly up the aisle to the usual musical accompaniments, attended by my cousin Kate, Aunt Clare’s only female child, and various Coverdale girls, each one a biscuit box picture in herself. Uncle Frank stood up, joined up with her as casually as if she were a lady he was meeting outside Swan and Edgar’s, and went through his part of the ceremony with studied casualness, as if it was no part of the agreement he had entered into to pretend to take such nonsense seriously. Mary, on the other hand, was clear and word-perfect, a tribute to the elocution teacher’s art. Eventually it was all over, and we got into the tumbrils again and returned to Blakemere for the festive baked meats.

  I had hoped to slip away from there, but Miss Roxby was under strict instructions that I was to do the honors of the house to all the other children. This was something I was used to, though I never enjoyed it. Since most of the children there, including the Coverdale biscuit boxes, had been to Blakemere before, I confined myself to finding out what they wanted to do and providing them with the wherewithal to do it. Blakemere was good in that respect – its hospitality was a well-oiled routine, and every age and taste was catered for. And of course the taste of young people for food was amply met on this occasion – grossly, wastefully, too richly catered for, so that the poor children of the village on whom it was off loaded the next day were gorging themselves on unaccustomed delicacies for weeks afterward, and making themselves very ill.

  ‘Why are children given plain nursery fare for three hundred and sixty days a year, and disgustingly rich food on birthdays and holidays?’ I asked Peter Coverdale as we watched the infant gentry stuffing themselves.

  ‘I always imagined nursery food at Blakemere would be rather grand,’ said Peter disparagingly. ‘Everything else is.’

  All bad times come to an end. Eventually the adult gorging was over, the bride and groom disappeared to various appointed bedrooms and re-emerged smartly dressed for going away, on the first leg of their journey to the south of France – a conventional choice, perhaps Uncle Frank’s way of suggesting that this was a conventional marriage: one of convenience, mercenary and unromantic. They mingled for a while with the guests, she immensely self-assured, he terribly diminished. He sauntered up awkwardly as I stood watching a cricket game on the lawns from the windows of the Conservatory.

  ‘Well – it’s done,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Yes, it’s done,’ I replied, looking at him. His eyes dropped to the floor and he wandered off.

  It was as if the light of my life had been dimmed to a flickering rush. I could bear it no longer. No mere Miss Roxby could stop me. I ran from the Conservatory, along corridors, up the grand staircase, up less grand staircases, along dingier corridors, and finally threw myself on my own bed in my own little room, and sobbed and sobbed, eventually sobbing myself to sleep, only to awaken in the night to sob again.

  In my fancy, remembering it now, I form the notion that if I were to go and unboard Blakemere, turn on the switched-off power, go down the dusty corridors again, up the uncarpeted stairs, and find again my little bedroom, I would feel the mattress and it would still be damp from my tears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Happy Event

  They returned from the honeymoon after six weeks, two weeks earlier than planned. When I heard they were due at Blakemere there was no lifting of the heart for me, though the news intrigued me. I accounted for the change of plan by deciding that he was so bored by her company – and he must have had a great deal of it, even in the midst of what I thought of as the ‘mad whirl’ of the south of France – that he was desperate to return home, dump her at Blakemere, and go about his business.

  There was an element of truth in my conjectures, but they were not the whole truth.

  When Uncle Frank brought his new bride home (a separate apartment of several rooms had been carved out for them in the South Wing with no difficulty at all), both he and she were different, but subtly so. She was more confident – still more so – but she was also complacent, she purred, and I caught her looking round the magnificence of Blakemere’s statelier rooms with the same air of calculation I had seen in the eyes of her father.

  The difference in Uncle Frank was more difficult to pin down. He was certainly not jaunty, as experience has taught me many bridegrooms are: he was casual,
flippant, careless of the attentions usual to a new wife. These things I would have expected from his behaviour during the engagement period. But there was something else. There were moments when it seemed as if a load had been lifted from his shoulders rather than laid on them. I didn’t understand at all.

  Within two days of their return there was a visit – a visit made so quietly, almost surreptitiously, that I did not hear of it till some days later – by the foremost medical man in Wentwood, the nearest town of any significance. Almost a week later, from my coign of vantage at the top of the grand staircase to the first floor, I heard a departing visitor say to my grandmother, ‘And when is the happy event?’

  Happy event! I turned and scurried to my room, my cheeks burning, my eyes starting to fill. So that union was going to produce that result! I would have been infinitely happier if it had produced no result at all – not because I was jealous at being supplanted, but because a barren marriage would have been the only appropriate sort in the circumstances. There was no love, ergo there should be no child.

  As I resorted and replaced my ideas, things began to fall into place: the early return from Nice; the new confidence of the bride. Uncle Frank had done what was expected of him and ensured the future of Blakemere and Fearing’s Bank.

  Provided, of course, it was a boy.

  In the next few weeks Uncle Frank fulfilled my predictions by being away from Blakemere and his new wife for long periods. Mary (I never called her Aunt Mary if I could avoid it) did not seem to mind. Quite the contrary, in fact: I think she felt she could consolidate her position at Blakemere best on her own and in her own way. She remained entirely respectful to Grandpapa and Grandmama, but she had decided she could largely ignore my father, and she concentrated her energies on carving out niches for herself where she could be supreme, where no one would dispute her authority. She appointed two maids for herself, she arranged the decoration and equipment of a nursery, she had special meals cooked for herself alone and ate them in her own apartment. She began to visit in the village, to dispense her own charities, attach to herself by moderate largesse or by employment Melbury people whose ties to the family had previously been general rather than particular. Perhaps most newly married women would have done likewise, but, observing her actions, I sensed a specially calculated brand of selfishness. The servants hated her.