‘Yes, those ruddy letters again. Well, I did know. All through your Svengali rule of that staff room at the Cathedral School I knew exactly what was going on: late-night calls, no one on the other end if I answered, a shower the moment you got in from work, an expensive fountain pen you’d “found” in one of the classrooms, a mawkish poem on a bookmark. I have Candida Cochrane’s mother to thank for the end of that reign.’
‘That was years ago. We dealt with all that. That’s history.’
‘That was, and you promised it had all stopped when we came here. But it hadn’t, had it? I thought if I did a few days’ guiding at the Hall I could keep an eye on things, that you wouldn’t have the audacity to carry on under my nose, but clearly I was wrong. So I stopped torturing myself and gave up working at the Hall with the only group of friends I had managed to make down here, so that I didn’t have to watch you flirting and sniffing around Donna Falkender. Then the letters started to arrive, to make sure I wasn’t able to turn a blind eye.’
‘No, Patricia. No. I’ve got to the bottom of all that. I know who was writing those hideous, venomous letters. It was Maureen Hindle – I’ve had her sacked; she’s disturbed, sick – there’s something very wrong with her. Everything she put in those letters was a pack of lies. She had it in for me, goodness knows why.’
The strangest expression fluttered across Patricia’s face and caused her to pause momentarily, but then she leaned towards him and her neck stretched out like a chicken about to peck. ‘I don’t believe you. I thought when those letters started that you would have the good sense to stop fooling around, to stop preening and strutting and schmoozing around every single bit of skirt that crossed the threshold. But no. Wrong again. A new one turns up. Sam Westbrook, and you’re seen in town having lunch, driving around the estate together, and I know it’s starting all over again. And then, hallelujah, you’re taken ill – and finally, I think to myself, finally the old goat has been put out to pasture. But I was wrong. Back you go, days after leaving hospital, and here I am, stuck in a house I hate, on my own.’
BS reached out for the back of a kitchen chair to steady himself. He was aware that one of the spotlights in the ceiling was buzzing and it would probably blow in the next few days. Patricia had turned her back on him and was finishing the unpacking. She began to put some of the things away in the cupboards, slamming each door and drawer in turn. He didn’t know what to do next. He badly wanted to sit down, but felt rooted to the spot.
When she had finished, she turned to look at him again. ‘Nothing to say BS? That’s a first.’
It was true, he didn’t know what to say, but her question broke the spell of inactivity, and he pulled the chair away from the table and sat down, stretching his leg out to relieve the pain in his knee. He looked up at her as she stood in front of the kitchen window, her arms folded across her chest, her chin still tipped upwards a little, her expression still defiant. He felt overwhelmingly sorry for himself and let his lower lip soften to show his wife that her words had hurt him very much. He leant forward, rested his elbow on his other knee and bowed his head into his hand to give the impression that he was cowed, beaten. When he looked up again, he saw it had worked – Patricia had dropped her hands to her sides and her shoulders had relaxed.
In a quiet voice BS said, ‘I came home early because I badly need your help, but you probably don’t feel very much like helping me.’ He looked down and waited, knowing his wife could seldom resist this approach. One of the reasons he felt such affection for her was that she always put him and his needs before her own and took a direct application for help such as this to mean that he valued her practical mind and his life was hopeless without it. As the minutes passed he worried that perhaps things had come to a very poor pass indeed, but eventually he heard her sigh and he slowly raised his eyes and looked up from under his brow with a doting and bashful gaze intended to be irresistible. It worked. Patricia came slowly forward, took hold of a chair and sat down opposite him giving another sigh as she settled.
BS reached out across the table and grasped her hands in his huge paws. Her fingers felt icy. He rubbed his thumbs rhythmically up her wrists and stared across at her with fervent concentration. Eventually the earnestness of his gaze pulled her eyes up until she looked into his. This was his moment. With careful modulation he said, ‘Please will you help me? I think I may be in a spot of trouble.’
This caught her interest and she frowned. ‘Trouble?’
‘I have a list, in the office here, of a few things that I can’t actually find.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Sam Westbrook ...’ He felt her fingers twist as if to escape from his grasp and saw her lips thin. ‘No, no, wait. I promise you, I absolutely promise you, God is my witness, I have no interest in her. I’ve seen a very unpleasant side to that woman over the last few days. If it gives you any comfort at all, I am certain she has her eyes on someone else at work: a pleasant fellow – divorced, I believe.’ He paused again, her hands stilled and he relaxed his grip on them a little. ‘The problem is,’ he continued in a quiet voice, ‘she has produced a list of things, little things like books and prints, which she thinks used to be upstairs at the Hall in the sealed chamber, and which don’t seem to be there now, and I need your help, Patricia. I desperately need you to help me find them because I know I’ve brought some things home over the years, and I know I’m disorganised and careless, but if I can’t find at least some of the things, she’s going to His Lordship and ...’ He felt his throat begin to tighten, it was sore and he swallowed hard to clear it, and something warm plopped on to the back of his hand followed by another and another, and he looked down and realised tears were falling not from Patricia’s eyes, but from his. He stared at her in horror, as if she had found him participating in a shameful act, and to underline this she glanced away, probably repelled by his disgrace. Feeling that his nose was about to run and compound his shame, he released her hands and plunged into the pocket of his jacket for his handkerchief.
Patricia took the opportunity to lean back in her chair. She folded her arms and he sensed her watching him once more as he blew his nose with clarion power, dashed the handkerchief across each eye, folded it until he had a dry patch on the top, and blotted and smoothed the whiskers under his nose and around his mouth. ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘How extraordinary. I don’t know what came over me.’
He gave her a wan smile which she returned, and she began to shake her head – not the small, familiar tremor which he knew well, but a slow side-to-side motion of disbelief. ‘What?’ BS said. ‘Why are you shaking your head in that way?’
‘Oh BS. Whatever do you mean?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s all gone. I can’t help you. You must know, it’s all gone.’
‘No. Most of it’s here, I’m sure of it.’
‘You’re fooling yourself.’
BS felt a great pull and drop in the centre of his stomach and his throat tightened again. ‘I know I filleted a few things out, a few duplicates.’
‘You sold them.’
‘No, not really. I found good homes for them. I found people who really appreciated them, who understood their importance, their provenance, their beauty. It wasn’t any of the really valuable things – only some books, a few prints ... You have to do that with collections, otherwise you would just get snowed under with more and more stuff. I had to marshall the good stuff, throw out the chaff.’
‘You didn’t throw it out, BS. You sold it to that man in the High Street.’
‘I did not!’ BS yelled. He was on his feet. He thumped his fist down on the table and glared across at Patricia, who cringed away from him like a slug showered in salt. ‘Goddamnit woman, if you won’t help me, I’ll ruddy well do it myself,’ and pushing back his chair, which screeched on the flagstones as he passed, he thumped up the corridor to the office and slammed the door behind him.
Half an hour later he heard the sound of
his wife making her way upstairs to bed. He opened the door of his office. ‘Patricia?’ She turned and looked down on him, her hand on the banister, her expression unreadable. ‘I’m sorry, pet. I shouldn’t have lost control like that.’ BS believed that an unconditional apology was best and should be returned by an unconditional acceptance of the apology.
‘It wasn’t control you lost, it was pretence,’ Patricia said. ‘The pretence that you are a civilised man.’
- 25 -
The ugly exchange on Friday night gave BS Moreton the perfect excuse for not presenting his wife with an anniversary gift. He hoped his taciturn silence implied that she didn’t deserve to have one. He had, of course, failed to purchase anything on the days he surprised her by saying he was shopping when in fact he had been visiting Sam Westbrook to discuss the problem of the anonymous letters. For months he had been dreading this weekend, the tsunami of family due to arrive on Saturday, but when he woke on Saturday morning in a bed already vacated by his wife, he couldn’t have wished harder for their arrival. He knew that the chaos and distraction of sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren and a badly behaved dog would throw a shield around him.
He had always admired Patricia’s ability to cover up any show of ill will towards him in public, but her performance throughout the weekend astonished him. She seemed cheerful and relaxed, if a bit tired by the end of Sunday. She played with the grandchildren, remarked when she served dessert that she had cooked his favourite sticky toffee puddings as a treat, and seemed delighted to be celebrating forty glorious years of marriage. She even managed to sit beside him, pointing things out and remarking on them as they watched a compilation of videos and old photos that David had put together for them, occasionally pushing him playfully on the shoulder when he appeared on the screen with a particularly outrageous haircut or style of clothing. In private, she cut him dead.
He had the occasional stab at searching through papers on his desk and a few more shelves of books in the office, but only as an excuse to shut himself away from the relentless noise and chatter in the rest of the house. The badly behaved dog joined him whenever he disappeared to the study and behaved well, as if to prove to the master of the house that it was years of baiting and teasing by the children that made her chew trainers and piddle on the carpets. If she could just be left in peace, she seemed to say, she could be an undemanding companion.
BS failed to find anything on Sam’s list, but he put aside a few small objects from the Hall which he had brought home several years ago to show Patricia: a small Meissen figurine; an emerald, diamond and platinum bracelet by Garrards; a neoclassical mourning brooch with a charming image of a nymph holding aloft a lantern. They didn’t belong in the Dywenydd Collection, but he thought it might be expedient in the circumstances to get them back to the Hall.
Then another thought struck him and he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. A wooden box filled the drawer. There was a handle on each end, and using the front one, BS struggled to get the box at the right angle to enable him to pull it forward and up out of the drawer. It was heavy and ungainly. Once he had manhandled it on to the top of his desk, he opened up the lid and looked down on the Golden Hand of Jerusalem. It was not the original of course – he would never have kept an item as valuable as that in the house – but rather the giltware replica that had been made when the Cellini was sold at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He lifted it out from its bed of tissue paper using both hands. It was heavy, solid silver dipped in gold, and the silver fingernails had blackened in storage, unlike the rest of the hand where the gold glowed with an amber lustre undiminished by age. The pearls around the wrist were produced by Mikimoto, the very first cultured pearls to come on to the market. The earl had them brought over from Tokyo before their fame boomed across Europe. They were flawless, huge, lustrous – probably far more beautiful than the natural pearls that would have adorned the Cellini. A number of years ago the earl, concerned that the hand was vulnerable hanging in the saloon, had commissioned the second replica which was at the Hall today. It was exchanged in the closed season, and the few people involved in the deceit were sworn to secrecy. BS had been given the task of bearing this beautiful object to the vaults up in London, but he was so fascinated by it that he didn’t want to miss the opportunity of studying it before it was locked away from view. The badly behaved dog padded over to him and rested her head on his knee. BS looked down into her eyes and said; ‘Yes. It is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?’ and the dog banged the floor with her tail. He now wondered if he had kept the treasure here for rather too long.
Later in the afternoon, as a reward for her companionship during these difficult days, BS took the dog for a walk around the village and found it an enjoyable sensation to have the company of a living creature without the compulsion to make conversation. The pleasure was compromised somewhat when the dog defecated on the bank at the side of the playing fields. BS looked around and saw a mother pushing a child on a swing a few hundreds yards from where he stood. As she pushed, she watched to see what he was going to do. He nodded agreeably at her and, making sure she could see, he began to pull a black plastic bag out of a bone-shaped dispenser which was clipped to the handle of the lead. The dog had become skittish after her success, and he had to give the lead an irritable tug to calm her down. Turning his back towards the mother and child, he gathered up a handful of leaves and grass a few inches from the pile. He placed these carefully over the faeces, then dropped a stone into the bag and moved away, swinging it from his hand – the badge of the responsible dog owner.
Buoyed by his successful deception, he set off again to circle around the field and back towards his house. He needed time to think, time to review the accusations Patricia had laid at his feet. It was true that the second-hand bookshop had taken some of the titles off him for a small consideration and put him in touch with a Swiss fellow who was interested in prints. It was all so long ago now, but BS began to realise that he probably shouldn’t have taken a finder’s fee for the material. He was worried that his actions could be misconstrued if presented to the earl and the trustees in the wrong light, although he knew in his heart that his intentions had always been honourable. He was paid for a service, albeit handsomely, but nothing more. However, he was also confident that there could be no record of any of this as the bookshop had closed a couple of years earlier. It was perfectly possible that these things had simply gone missing, as so many treasures had done over the centuries, for entirely innocent reasons. He felt secure in his own mind that he would be able to explain all this if the question arose, but was certain his length of service and loyalty to Duntisbourne would encourage the trustees to be lenient even if they came to the conclusion that he was guilty of gross inefficiency. He knew the earl loathed publicity of any kind, and if it all went horribly wrong and he had to face the possibility of some kind of retribution, it would be a mild rebuke and little more.
The families left on Monday morning and, in order to avoid another scene with Patricia when they had the house to themselves once more, he contrived to leave for the Hall while their guests were all enjoying a late breakfast. He went round the table, shaking his sons by the hand, kissing the upturned cheeks of their wives and patting the grandchildren on their heads before climbing into his car. The dog, who had followed him to the front door, must have jumped on to the chair in the office and from there to his desk, because he saw her silhouette against the window as he drove away, and he raised a hand to wish her farewell feeling a small squeeze of regret that she would not be there when he returned in the evening.
It was nearly lunchtime when he reached Duntisbourne Hall. He regarded it as a peculiarly British phenomenon that the state rooms emptied between the hours of twelve and two o’clock when the nation was feeding.
Noel was manning the door on his own. ‘Is Sam here?’ BS asked.
‘She was upstairs, putting the finishing touches to the exhibition. I think she may have popped off for a spot
of lunch though. She often goes back to her flat.’
‘Tell her, if she comes back, that I’ve gone up to have a look.’
‘Will do.’
The exhibition of the Dywenydd Collection was complete. Amber lighting from etched glass wall sconces fell on to the original Victorian cabinets. Above them the walls were decorated with paper in the style of William Morris, deep blues and rust colours swirling up to a dark mahogany cornice. A trio of vast leather button-backed sofas formed the three sides of a square in the middle of the room, at their centre a low table set with printed brochures and books from the gift shop covering the history of Duntisbourne Hall and the collections. There was even a half-played game of chess using a set BS knew they sold in the shop. Low lamps in the corners of the room stood on tables draped with antique textiles. BS almost expected to see a humidor or a decanter of whisky and some cut-glass tumblers on a tray. The cabinets had been neatly annotated in gold lettering and he drew open one of the drawers. Beneath the glass lay objects he recognised, many of which he had used from time to time to pique his jaded libido. He had never shared these erotic adventures, but had indulged them in privacy as neatly and cleanly as he could. Any guilt he had felt in the early years soon faded – like a bad smell, breathe it long enough and you stop noticing it. Fascinated, he read the notations and marvelled at the dryness of the script, the complete lack of titillation or lubricity, and realised that Sam’s scholarly descriptions robbed them of any erotic power.
He walked slowly on through the exhibition – the tavern room, the Hellfire Cave, the Beggar’s Benison with a replica of the ceremonial platter next to the genuine pudenda display trays from the collection. The lighting emanated chiefly from the cabinets themselves, and as he continued his journey through the twists and turns of artificial corridors, the walls of which were packed with display cabinets, he conceded that Sam Westbrook did know her job. She had forsaken most of the SM accoutrements – the Berkley Horse, the Lithuanian Typewriter, the strappados and thumbcuffs. That showed good taste. There was a map of the pony play routes through the estate, but the sulky carts with their elaborate harnesses and whips has been banished into storage in the undercroft along with the swings and other large pieces of erotic furniture. The brass-bound buggery box had a cabinet all of its own, but it was such a wonderful piece of craftsmanship, it deserved a place in the exhibition. Sam had created a gripping visual experience and presented it as a remarkable line of social history through the ages as opposed to a prurient display of man’s basest desire for ever-increasing intensities of erotic stimulation.
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