by James Wilson
‘Oh, I shouldn’t waste your sympathy on him.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What has he done?’
‘He began as he meant to go on,’ she said, ‘by putting me out of my place, and scores with me. For no worse offence than that we were employed by his lordship. Truly, you wouldn’t think they were of the same race, let alone the same family.’
And suddenly, a question which had only been fluttering at the edge of my mind until now, like a half-seen moth, sprang into consciousness.
‘Why is he only a colonel, if his father was an earl?’
‘Because he is a bastard,’ she said venomously.
I tried to press her further, but she evaded my every inquiry, and at length lapsed into silence. Only once, when we had stopped some time later at a lonely little tollhouse (much like the cottage in a fairy tale, with diamond-paned windows, and a tall chimney) by a country bridge, did she venture another remark; pointing to a deep scar in the valley, where a team of navvies was at work, she said:
‘There! That’s where Petworth station is going to be. That’s how well Colonel Wyndham likes humanity!’
The guidebook mentioned three hotels in Petworth; and I had decided in advance, out of a childish fancy, that I should put up in the first of them that I saw. This proved to be the Swan Commercial Inn, a long, white, nondescript building of uncertain age – distinguished only by a great picture of its namesake fixed over the central first-floor window – which overlooked the little market square where the coach set us down. It was not, I had to own, the romantic hostelry I had envisaged – even as I looked at it, I felt I could see within, to the too-bright dining room, and the smoking room full of stale air and stale travelling salesmen; but I kept to my resolve, and having bade a grateful farewell to the draughtsman, and a fond one to my companion, I crossed the street, and went inside.
It was, if anything, drearier than I had imagined, with a dingy hall smelling of sour beer, and I approached the girl behind the desk, to ask for a room, with a sinking heart. Once again, however, luck was on my side; for she told me that all their beds were taken, and directed me to the Angel, where she was sure I should be accommodated to my satisfaction.
She was right, for the Angel turned out to be an ancient, lopsided, timber-framed inn, with arthritic joints and drooping eaves, yet clean and well kept within, with bright scrubbed floor-tiles, and a welcoming fire in the hall. I was greeted by an old man in a stiff leather apron, who gravely took down from the rack behind him a key big enough to secure the Tower of London, and led me upstairs to a neat little room, with coals ready-laid in the fireplace, and a casement overlooking a row of quaint houses. And when he had gone, I sat on the bed, and listened to the breathy stir and thud of a herd of cattle being driven through the street below, and thanked my own good angel for bringing me here, and wondered how many travellers over the years had had the same thought, and thanked their own.
I soon had another reason to be grateful that I had ended up at the Angel; but I was not to discover that for an hour or two more, and shall come to it in its rightful place.
Nothing prepares you for Petworth House. You leave the market square by a dingy cobbled alley, lined with small shops and taverns that offer no hint of what is to come, and all at once – there it is! a mass of roofs and chimneys, of kitchens and stables and coach-houses, coiled around the northern edge of the town like a giant serpent that, having set out to crush the whole place in its embrace, has tired and fallen asleep before it could accomplish its aim.
A gate, with a small lodge beside it, stood open, from which it was apparent that in one respect, at least, Colonel Wyndham still continued the traditions of the Third Earl’s day; for even now, on a cold September afternoon, a stream of people seemed to be passing through it, on their way to or from the park, as freely as if they had been strolling by the Serpentine – and, while I should have been startled indeed to see any of those respectable matrons or sober-suited shopkeepers scrawling their names on the walls, they might, had they chosen, have done so with ease, since their path took them close to the side of the house for a hundred yards or more. By screwing up my eyes, and so blurring the details of their clothes, I could fancy myself back thirty years, and Turner yet in his studio – an illusion aided by the fading light, and the wistful autumn smells of fallen leaves and distant bonfires, which always seem to raise the ghost of other times so palpably that you feel its presence in a tightening of the throat and a prickling of the skin. In that hazy, magical moment, I allowed myself to hope that my companion on the coach had been exaggerating, and that I should, after all, find the son as welcoming as the father.
To enter Petworth House is to repeat, after a fashion, your experience of approaching it from the outside. The lodge-keeper directed me to a door so unassuming that I should have missed it entirely if he had not pointed it out – it stood in an odd angle of the wall, with none of the clues (steps, or columns, or a pediment) that normally suggest the entrance to a great house – and for a dizzying second or two I wondered if Petworth were so magnificent that even the tradesmen dressed as I did, and he had mistaken me for a butcher or a grocer, and sent me to the kitchens. At length, however, the most immaculate footman I have ever seen – wearing a livery of dark blue coat, yellow-and-blue striped waistcoat and moleskin breeches which would not have disgraced an ambassador – answered the bell; and, on being told that I had come to see Colonel Wyndham, nodded and ushered me inside.
I recall walking along an unremarkable passage, which would have seemed too plain for the hall of a simple country parsonage, let alone one of the grandest mansions in England. And then, without warning, we passed through another door, and all at once I found myself in a world conceived on an entirely different scale, and built on entirely different principles. We entered it beneath the first flight of a vast staircase, which rises (you see, as you emerge into the light) round three walls of a cavernous hall, until at length it reaches a great balustraded landing extending the full width of the fourth side. Above the middle section are two huge windows, each as tall as three men; but almost every other square inch of space seems cluttered with ornament: swags and festoons; medallions and urns; laughing putti holding shields; painted figures, in togas and laurel crowns, standing in painted niches; and marble busts, in flowing marble wigs, haughtily surveying the world from real ones. And, dominating everything, a series of enormous wall-and ceiling-paintings in the Baroque style – a gaunt Prometheus fashioning mankind from clay, Jupiter forcing Pandora to open her box, a woman (perhaps some ancestral Wyndham) drawn in state on a chariot, accompanied by earthly and celestial attendants, and a black-and-white dog. It was hard, indeed, to find a surface that someone had not somehow contrived to cover (even the underside of the stairs was panelled and painted), save only for one doorway, which – yielding to the practical necessity of allowing people to enter and escape this odd dream-state – has been cut straight through a woman’s figure, leaving a great notch in the middle of her.
The effect, I have to say, is rather like being swaddled in a giant tapestry; but, for all that I found it oppressive, I should have liked to look a while longer – partly to feast my own eyes on this great dragon’s hoard, and partly to try to see it through the eyes of a man brought up in Hand Court, to whom it must surely have seemed even more alien than it did to me. The footman, however – determined to prove himself a man of the world, by affecting a complete indifference to his surroundings, and clearly expecting me to do the same – marched ahead, and stood waiting for me by a door at the other end of the hall, with a bored expression that plainly said: The master will not be kept waiting.
When I had caught up with him, he led me quickly through two smaller rooms – which might have furnished the text for some moralist’s sermon on the dangers of excess; for they were crammed with treasures, each of which individually would have repaid an hour’s attention, but which seen together simply stupefied the senses, as a surfeit of fine food jades the palate �
�� and knocked on the door of a third. After a moment, we heard a faint ‘Come in!’; and, entering before me, the man announced, ‘Mr. Hartright, sir,’ and stood aside to admit me with the jerky grace of a mechanical toy.
After my strange introduction to the house, it was, I have to say, with some surprise (and not a little relief) that I found myself in a pleasant library, not much larger than our drawing room at Limmeridge, to which one might almost have applied the term ordinary. The immediate impression was of warmth – warmth from the bright coal fire in the marble fireplace; warmth from the fading sun creeping in through the windows, and giving its last lustre to the yellow-gold carpet; warmth from the ranks of leather-bound books lining the red-painted walls, and from the two hissing gas-chandeliers, hanging in the entrance to an alcove at the far end of the room, that made the polished hide and the gilt lettering sparkle. A cream-coloured cat preened itself on a large round table in the middle of the floor; and all about were thickset sofas and chairs, covered in a pretty white fabric patterned with flowers, that seemed to beg you to sit down, and take your rest.
Colonel Wyndham, however, was clearly not of the same mind. He was a broadly built man of about seventy, with sallow skin and a mane of white hair; and, from the moment he saw me walk in, he made it perfectly obvious that he would not be easy until he had seen me walk out again. He did, it is true, come forward to shake my hand; but as soon as he had done so he sprang away again – like a magnet forced close to another of the same polarity, and then suddenly released – and paced about the room, rubbing his fingers on his well-cut grey coat.
I waited for him to speak; but he remained stubbornly silent, and after a minute or so I saw that, if we were to have a conversation at all, I must initiate it.
‘You may remember’, I said, ‘that I wrote to you. About Turner?’
He nodded.
‘I was wondering if -’
‘I barely remember him,’ he mumbled, without looking at me (and, indeed, the whole time I was there, his eyes never met mine directly, but kept straying behind me or above me or at my feet, as if, even for him, the room had not yet revealed all its secrets, and he was constantly finding new objects of interest to distract him).
‘But surely’, I said, ‘Turner must’ve been here a great deal when you were younger?’
‘A soldier’s away a lot, Mr.… Mr.… Mr.…’
‘Hartright.’
‘And this is a big house. People don’t necessarily see each other.’
I waited for him to go on, but he turned towards the fire, pressed his hands together, and then spread them before the heat, as if the subject were closed.
‘What about servants?’ I said. ‘Would any of them -?’
‘Most of the staff came with us,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘From the previous house. Don’t think any still here would’ve known him.’
Again I waited – there must, after all, be scores of servants at Petworth, and surely a moment’s thought would yield the name of at least one who had been here in the Third Earl’s day? – but again in vain. He continued to stare morosely at the fire; and at length I was once more forced to break the silence myself.
‘Would it be possible for me to see some of the paintings your father commissioned from him?’
‘Afraid not,’ he said, shaking his head again. ‘All the pictures are being cleaned and catalogued at the moment.’
‘Or the room where he worked?’ I went on, nothing daunted.
‘Shut up for the winter.’
‘His bedroom, even?’
‘The whole end of the house,’ he said, flapping his hand impatiently.
This was, I suppose, a plausible answer – all those cavernous apartments, whose only purpose was to be filled with people and laughter and music, must have been a constant reproach to a solitary man like himself, reminding him only of his own puniness and isolation; and it would be natural enough to keep most of them sealed off. I could not, however, avoid the suspicion that he was lying, for he flushed slightly, and, fixing a marble bust on top of the bookcase with a trance-like gaze, set about tweaking the end of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if it were the most absorbing occupation in the world.
But I could not, of course, challenge him; and, after waiting a few seconds, in the futile hope that his conscience might do so on my behalf, and prompt a change of heart, I saw that – as, to be fair, he had suggested – I was merely wasting my time.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He appeared not to notice my tone – which would have turned another man to ice – but simply nodded, as if he were at last able to agree with something I had said, and gratefully seized the bell-pull. Then, as we waited, he said nothing more to me, but paced fretfully up and down the room, twining and untwining his fingers; while I, anxious to preserve my dignity, gazed out of the window at the park – which was as cunning a piece of artifice as I have seen, with a Grecian temple on a little knoll, and graceful slopes dotted with deer, and planted with copses and broad sweeps of trees. As I watched, the last few drops of crimson were seeping out of the dying sun and soaking into the horizon – making, for a moment, the sky redder, and the earth blacker, than any paint could make them; and I knew why Turner had loved this view, and returned to it again and again.
‘Where is the damned fellow?’ muttered Colonel Wyndham, under his breath; and, as if in response, the door opened, and the footman reappeared. A few minutes later – less than a quarter of an hour after I had passed it on my way in – I found myself once more at the porter’s lodge; and distinctly saw the lodge-keeper smirking out of the window at me, as much as to say: I thought I should see you again, soon enough.
It was, as you may imagine, in a thunderous mood that I retraced my steps to the Angel. It sprang, in part, from my natural disappointment at finding that my journey had been fruitless; but I was also nagged by an obscure sense of grievance, such as you might feel if you suspected that you had been cheated at cards, but had no way of proving it. A faint taint of dishonour seemed to cling to me, and I could not go down to dinner until I had washed, and put on a fresh shirt.
Once installed at a small table close to the fire, with a girl spreading a clean cloth before me, and cheerful guests all about, and the old man who had shown me to my room – now in the character of a waiter – hurrying to do my bidding, I found my spirits somewhat recovered; but I knew that this comfort was only temporary. It would keep me company as far as my bed, but forsake me in the small hours of the night, leaving me to wake all alone, and lie there in the darkness and the cold, agonizing over my humiliation.
But then, the good fortune that had aided me so often that day – call it fate, or chance, or providence, or what you will; though for myself, I cannot but see some benign power at work in it – took a hand once again. I had finished my soup, and was just making the first inroads into my steak pudding, when a woman’s voice close to my shoulder suddenly said: ‘Why, Mr. Hartright!’ and, turning, I saw my companion on the coach, her eyes wide with surprise and pleasure, with a bearded man next to her. I was, of course, delighted to see her; but also astonished – for I could not recall telling her my name, and I certainly did not know hers. She must have seen my confusion; for she laughed, and picked up the key to my room, which I had laid next to my plate.
‘There’s no mystery to it,’ she said. ‘Giles told me a Mr. Hartright had taken room 7. Though I own I never supposed it might be you.’
‘Giles?’ I said.
She jerked her chin towards the porter/waiter, who was just emerging from the kitchen with a tray laden with dishes.
It took me a moment to grasp the import of what she had said; and while I did so she stood there smiling at me, like a child who has baffled you with a riddle.
‘Oh,’ I said, at last, ‘so you’re …?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We keep the Angel.’ She gestured towards the bearded man, drawing him into our conversation. ‘My dear, this is Mr. Hartright,
the gentleman I was telling you about.’
‘How d’ye do, sir?’ he said. His voice was strong and businesslike, but he flushed slightly, and briefly inclined his head.
‘Mr. Hartright, my husband, Mr. Whitaker.’
I rose to shake his hand. ‘Would you both sit down, and take a glass of wine with me?’ I said.
‘No, sir – please – do us the honour of taking one with us, in our own house,’ said Mrs. Whitaker.
I started to protest; but she insisted, and I soon saw that I should only cause offence if I continued to refuse.
‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Giles!’ she called. ‘If you please!’
They drew chairs to my table; and, as soon as a fresh bottle of wine was before us, and the glasses poured, she leant towards me and said quietly:
‘So. How was the colonel?’
‘Very much as you described him,’ I said. ‘Only perhaps more so.’
She laughed – the delighted, mischievous laugh of one who expects to hear a piece of illicit gossip, and intends to enjoy it.
‘Tell us!’ she said, confidentially – as if, instead of hotel-keepers and guest, we were three friends who had chanced upon one another at their club.
And, strange as it may seem, I did; for I felt I owed Colonel Wyndham no debt of loyalty, and had nothing to lose by being frank about him, since there seemed no possibility now that he would ever help me. And it was a relief, truth to tell, to unburden myself to an attentive audience – particularly one that seemed so ready to take my part.
‘Bless me!’ cried Mrs. Whitaker gleefully, when I had finished. ‘That’s surly enough, even for him!’
Her husband chuckled, and looked into his glass – like a man embarrassed by his wife’s forthrightness (for it must be perilous for a tradesman in Petworth to be heard criticizing the colonel) but powerless to stop her.