A Coat of Varnish (2 page)

There was no reason to think that Cubitt, or anyone else, was self-conscious about the architecture. Belgrave Square was an elegant piece of urban composition, and looked, as it did a century later, as if it came from one architect’s mind. It didn’t. It was the work of at least four. For posterity, here was one of the major pieces of Cubitt’s luck. He and his other builders were all working in a decent unfussy domestic idiom. It wore well. It ought to have looked monotonous. Thousands of houses, none of them much decorated, nearly all shining white up to the second storey.

In Aylestone Square, in this respect like the whole of the district, permutations had been played with the simplest of means. The building style had been prescribed from the beginning; so had the height – four storeys plus basement for the tallest; so had the frontage, except for the corner houses; so had the colours, where there was an unspectacular choice between stucco over brick or stone, or alternatively naked brick or stone. Plain enough; but people could do their best with unspectacular choices. They could play with the harmony of repetitiveness. Which they had done.

On his way towards number seventy-two, the house he had to visit, similar to his own and on the same side, Humphrey Leigh hadn’t noticed any of the minuscule variations in the house fronts. That was natural enough. No incumbent was ever likely to. He took it all for granted. In any case, the contrasts were not as dramatic as the first sight of the Grand Canyon. Occasionally, when he had nothing on his mind, he might have thought that this was an enclave, a comfortable and restful enclave to live in and, of course, a privileged one. He probably wouldn’t have recognised that he was glad he could still live there.

While he hadn’t noticed any of the architectural details along the Square, he had, brooding the minutes away, absently noticed something else. In two of the houses the basements had young men and girls, who looked like students, climbing down the area steps. It was long odds that those basements had been sublet. Once all those basements, which were large enough to hold three or four rooms, had been servants’ quarters and kitchens. By this time, domestic service in London was difficult to get. Some people in the Square were rich enough to buy anything. Usually they acquired Filipino or Spanish couples to live in. A very few were lucky, like Humphrey Leigh himself. He had a housekeeper who had once looked after his mother and needed a home. Many made do on daily help, and some on none at all. Even Lady Ashbrook, the old lady who had called for Leigh’s company, had nothing but a Portuguese ‘daily woman’ as they called her, five mornings a week.

As in most of Belgravia, Lady Ashbrook’s house might have a narrow front, but was bigger than it looked. Apart from the basement, it had ten rooms, which was about standard for the neighbourhood. Lady Ashbrook was well over eighty. Others wondered how she managed. Of course she could afford, the gossips said, to spend any amount of money on herself. The gossips had been busy on Lady Ashbrook for a lifetime. She was one of those few, and this was more true as she became older, who seemed grander the more she was talked about. It was generally thought that she was living so simply just to lavish gifts on relatives and charities.

Domestic service unobtainable, it wasn’t surprising that those basements were being sublet, residents turning an honest penny when they could. It was not, however, quite such an honest penny. It was certainly a breach of contract. Humphrey Leigh might not know many of his neighbours, but he had a good idea of their terms of tenure and the value of their property. All those houses had been acquired by leasehold. In his own case, though he had been brought up within the tantalising sight of money, he had never had much. After the war, he had married his second wife, who had died, only two years before these events of July 1976. They had had nothing to live on except his salary. But if one had been brought up within the sight of money, as he was the first to point out, a little sometimes came one’s way. A little did, by way of a legacy. With it, and with a mortgage, they bought a forty-year lease of the house in Aylestone Square. It cost them £15,000. Humphrey Leigh later reflected, that was the only successful financial transaction of his life. Twenty years later, it would have cost five times as much.

Coming near to number seventy-two, Humphrey Leigh quickened his pace, as though he were at last impelled to get the visit over. When he had rung the bell, sound tinkling distantly back in the house, there was what seemed a long wait. Then slow footsteps, a woman’s steps on stone. The door opened. He didn’t see much, for the hall was in shadow, but he heard a familiar voice.

‘Oh, Humphrey,’ Lady Ashbrook was saying, ‘it is nice of you to come.’

That voice hadn’t changed much with the years. It was at the same time deep and half-strangulated. Humphrey had heard that peculiar tone in the past from other upper-class women, but by now it had gone out of fashion, and none of the young produced such a sound at all.

Humphrey heard himself being bluffer and heartier than he liked, because he wasn’t much at ease.

‘You haven’t got Maria (the Portuguese help) here, then? You know, you ought to have someone with you.’

‘Why should I?’ she said.

Humphrey was repeating himself, but she just said: ‘Come upstairs.’

In those houses, most people lived as their predecessors had done, a dining-room on the ground floor, drawing-room on the floor above. Humphrey followed Lady Ashbrook up a flight of stairs, passed a bathroom on the half-landing, six more stairs, along a corridor. She did it slowly, and paused once, but her back was straight as a guardsman’s. The drawing-room stretched through the depth of the house, the front windows looking over the Square, the back windows over strips of garden. Each house in the Square and nearly all in the entire district had, this being England, a kind of token garden behind it.

Originally that room would have been divided into two, with a partition between. Now it was nearly fifty feet long, but still looked cluttered. On other visits there, Humphrey, less preoccupied, had thought that she had accumulated the debris of a lifetime. Tables, whatnots, tallboys, writing-desks, some old, some looking like last year’s presents – even a prie-dieu, though she attended the most evangelical of the Anglican churches nearby. A box of tools, among which a hammer-head protruded, lay in what had once been a fireplace, witnessing that she did her own repairs.

There was no sign of what her visual taste was, if she had any. True, there were two fine pictures, a Boudin and a Vlaminck, badly hung and close to meaningless landscapes. One academic painting of her second husband, Ashbrook, who, according to some worshipping gossip, had been the great love of her life, from whose death – collapsing over his desk in Whitehall, the perfect way for a Minister to die, said somewhat less worshipping commentators – she was reported not to have recovered. No picture of her first husband, who had been a marquess and much more of a grandee. A painting by Sargent of herself at the age of about twenty, just at the time of that first marriage, a flattering romantic picture of a young woman strong-willed, elegant, beautiful, certain of happiness.

Sixty years after, in her drawing-room with Humphrey that evening, it would have needed imagination, maybe romantic imagination, to feel that her face could have been as soft and tender-smiling as in the painting. There her arms were shown as slender but rounded. Now the bones were left. But in the painting the neat skull-like Hamitic head foretold the head of today, sculptured under the parted hair. The eyes, set deep in the skull, burning brown, hadn’t changed, though they stared more now that the flesh had dissolved away. Occasionally, Lady Ashbrook had been known to harangue pretty women who were sad that age was gaining on them, pretty women half a century younger than herself. She did so by a vigorous exhortation: Once a beauty, always a beauty. It was to be inferred, so the cooler of her listeners had reported, that she was speaking from direct experience of her own. Had she ever been a beauty? Not according to the standards of the nineteen seventies anyway, and some said not at all. But she had had the confidence of one, and that was nine points of the game.

‘Help yourself to a drink,’ she said to Humphrey, after she had sat down. ‘You know what you like.’

Humphrey did help himself, and to a distinctly stiff drink. He didn’t trust all the myths about Lady Ashbrook, certainly not about her reasons for existing so frugally. Humphrey, who had observed her for a long time, believed that she was, to say the least, somewhat parsimonious. He didn’t expect to be invited to have another drink that night.

She was sitting, still straight-backed, in an armchair which rested on the carpet in front of the extinct fireplace. He returned to another chair opposite hers, and started on what he had come determined to say.

‘You oughtn’t to live here alone. You know that, Madge. You must have someone here.’

Madge was the most incongruous of names for her, but for myth-makers she had glorified it.

‘Why?’

‘You oughtn’t to be by yourself.’

‘It makes no odds.’ Voice ungiving.

‘I wish you’d listen to sense.’ It was useless, he knew, to force or bully her, as others must have found, and so he became easier, not as over-hearty. He asked if there was anything he could do.

‘Nothing at all.’ Again she said brusquely that it had been nice of him to come, but she said it as though she felt weak for having asked him.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘It’s a tiring business, having those wretched tests.’ Suddenly, turning the subject, she went on: ‘How are you, my dear?’

‘Oh, I’m all right.’ He couldn’t let her divert him. He said: ‘Of course, there can’t be any news.’

‘Didn’t I tell you there couldn’t?’ She had rasped out in anger. ‘They said they’d have some next week. I suppose they’ll report to my doctor; that’s the way they do it. You know Ralph Perryman. They’ll tell him. He’s a good little man.’

This Dr Perryman had other patients in the vicinity, and was an acquaintance of Humphrey’s. In any normal sense, he was by no means little, but Lady Ashbrook tended to use the term about anyone she employed.

At a loss, Humphrey was asking about the hospital, but she gave a sarcastic smile.

‘Look, my dear,’ she said, ‘this is all boring. It’s boring for you. It’s quite as boring for me. There’s nothing to say. When there’s nothing to say, it’s better to say nothing. Let us talk of something else.’

Humphrey distrusted some of the myths which grew round Madge Ashbrook, but was sometimes surprised at the myths which didn’t grow. He couldn’t remember any of her admirers saying that she was a woman of absolute courage, yet that myth would have been true. Flawless courage, stark as she was showing now. Courage of any kind, including brute physical courage. In the war, as a middle-aged woman driving a car through bombings, she had been glacially brave, and made her soldier companions ashamed. The trouble was, it was a courage so stark that it wasn’t comforting for anyone like Humphrey, knowing what she was going through.

So they talked of something else. At the best of times her conversation wasn’t the most illuminating that Humphrey listened to, and that evening, though it might be gallant, it didn’t illuminate him at all. She had, as usual, only two subjects. On both her opinion was simple, acerb and positive. One subject was the Labour Government and the state of the nation. On that, there was just one thing which puzzled her. Of course, the country was being ruined. Were the people doing it communist, crooks or fools? She was inclined to think that there was a marxist conspiracy, possibly abetted by crooks. Her second subject was their common acquaintances, in particular the young women they both knew. It was some time since she had had much of a social life, but she kept a scathing eye on the people round about, particularly the young women. On this pet topic Humphrey had known her to be bleakly funny, but now she was trying too hard. She was not fond of women, and thought they were overestimated.

‘That Kate Lefroy,’ she said dismissively. ‘She tries to
do good
. In that hospital of hers. I suppose she tries to do good to her ridiculous husband. Doing good!’

Madge Ashbrook was interested in people’s goings-on, but not over-concerned about their feelings. Kate Lefroy, who lived in a house on the other side of the Square, was a woman for whom Humphrey had affection, and in his imagination occasionally something more. It was not the morals of those she called ‘young women’ (they weren’t so young as all that) that she reprobated. With Humphrey, who knew something of her own history, she would have had too much sarcasm for that. No, where she found them deplorable was in their
lack of style
.

‘Style! It’s all gone,’ she said. ‘It won’t come back.’

Lady Ashbrook made one exception. She had noticed someone who had a little style. She’d also noticed the young man who seemed attached to her.

‘Now, he’s
brilliant
,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s to be hoped nothing comes of it. He mustn’t throw himself away.’

Sometimes, in Lady Ashbrook’s inspection of the human scene, it seemed that almost any woman, even one with a trace of style, was bad for almost any man.

There was a special and aggravated case, about which her voice became even deeper and more dismissive. Her grandson Loseby had somehow picked up a girl – she pronounced that word gairl in the old-fashioned way – who lived in Eaton Square. Contempt growling out, she went on saying that this gairl was totally unsuitable. Loseby was a nice boy, she told Humphrey.

Loseby was neither a surname nor a Christian name. It was a courtesy title. Her own son was now the Marquess, and this was one of the titles in the family. Regressing to another old fashion, she continually addressed her grandson by it in company, as though the period were the eighteen nineties, when she was born.

‘Totally unsuitable. Does anyone know who she is?’ In fact, Lady Ashbrook knew well enough. The girl’s father lived in luxury in Eaton Square. He was rich. That might have passed, but he was a Labour Member of Parliament, which made it doubly bad. He was being tipped for office, which was worse. The scandal sheets were also tipping him as a candidate for financial shenanigans, which was worst of all.