A Mansion and its Murder (13 page)

‘Much too good,’ I agreed. ‘But as I said, there’ll be currency problems.’

‘Too right. Nothing but regulations. Suppose it’s normal, all things considered. But we’ll take tents – that way, the only expenses will be fuel and food.’

‘How long are you planning to stay over here?’

The boy frowned. ‘As long as I can, within reason. That will mean getting a job. What prospect of that, would you say?’

‘Not too bad. There’s none of the unemployment there was after the Great War, so you wouldn’t be taking a job an ex-serviceman might have had.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Ed admitted. ‘I suppose people would resent me if I did that.’

‘They would, but with full employment there’s no problem. What sort of job were you thinking about?’

‘Anything – labourer, farmworker, barman, commercial traveller. I can turn my hand to most things.’

‘It sounds as if you won’t have much difficulty in getting fixed up with something. Won’t your mother miss you?’

‘She wanted me to come. It would be pointless to come for just a few weeks. And she’s got the other two … Wouldn’t mind
betting you see them before too long.’

He was watching my reaction.

‘I can cope if it’s the English summer. Brothers? Sisters?’

‘One of each.’

‘And what does your father do?’

‘He’s a lecturer at the local teachers’ college. He’ll miss me more than Mum will.’

‘Oh. Why’s that?’

Ed shifted uneasily in his chair, as if any kind of personal analysis or dissection was foreign to him.

‘Dad’s not a happy man. Not too good at his job, not too happy with Mum – it’s like he gets nowhere. People don’t dislike him, they just … don’t think much of him. Take him for granted, switch off when he speaks. It’s not a real happy home.’

‘I know all about homes like that.’

‘Do you? Anyway, he sort of fixes his hopes on me. Carol’s Mum’s favourite and I’m his.’

‘At least you have some kind of relationship. What are his hopes for you?’

‘Oh, maybe champion athlete – runner, footballer.’

‘Are you that good?’

‘No. To be perfectly honest, I’m not. I’m not
built for a footballer. Football to us is what you call Rugby – Rugby League.’

‘I’ve dimly heard of it.’

‘And I’m not quite fast enough to be a champion runner. I suppose the asthma doesn’t help.’

‘Athletes have pretty short careers. It’s not a job for life.’ Ed looked worldly wise.

‘In Australia, sport opens doors. Dad would settle for my being a really successful businessman or a top civil servant. Or even going into politics.’

‘Politics is pretty dirty in Australia, isn’t it?’

‘One degree up from the sewage farm.’

I smiled.

‘We had your man Menzies over here in the war. Seemed to think he ought to be asked to take over the country. We settled for Churchill instead. What about your mother? What does she want for you?’

The boy smiled.

‘Oh, anything that would make me famous, paying good money, anything involving a lovely home, beautiful wife, healthy kids. Do you know what she had me christened?’

‘Edmund?’ I said cunningly.

‘Edmund Fearing Clements. She sets great
store by the connection with the Old Country. I get it from her, calling England that. And she also calls it “home”, though she’s never been here.’

‘Hasn’t she? Why not?’

‘Married too early, I suppose. There’s a sense of – I suppose you’d call it frustration in our house.’

At least he was opening up. I was pleased.

‘So we’re related through your mother, are we?’

‘That’s right. Dad’s family have been Aussies for as long as you like, but Mum’s always been very conscious that her father was born over here.’

‘That would be my aunt Clare’s son, I suppose. We were never close. I think his name was Leopold.’

‘Search me. He died when I was about five. It’s Mum who has this thing about family. I think you’re what you are, not what your ancestors way back were.’

Admirable sentiments. But they didn’t explain why, a week after docking at Southampton, he turned up on my doorstep, having done a preliminary reconnaissance of Blakemere.

The great joy of my early womanhood was not love, not ‘sex’, but learning my trade of banker.

You will say this was unnatural, you may even say it was contrary to what you know of my early life, so cynical had I always been of the Fearing Family and its self-worship as one of the world’s great banking firms. You may feel that I sold my soul for a mess of financial pottage. I see it quite differently. I was learning to take my place as one of the country’s leading bankers, and I was the first woman who would occupy such a position. I am still the only woman who has done so, and I look like remaining the only one for quite a time. I was also one of the few
women in the country in any position of great power and responsibility. Even now I am proud of that fact. To the younger me, bright and determined, it was heady stuff.

There again, it was a job of intense interest, particularly to someone with my sort of brain and my interests. It was also extremely complex – a many-layered vocation, which it seemed would take a lifetime to learn. Did I take too long learning it, did I labour over details when I should have intuitively got to its heart? I don’t think so. I believe I understood the profession’s complications and reverberations, as my grandfather had done, and as I think my father did not. I should say that I don’t think I was hindered by people putting obstacles in my way. Oh, they did that all right: women were alien beings to most men in the banking world, particularly the older ones. But the more they tried to thwart me, the more they tried to withhold information or advice they would readily have given to a young man, the more I delighted in finding out and deciding for myself – and perhaps subsequently parading before them the fact that I did not need them or their help. It became a sort of game, a battle. I almost always won.

‘Sarah has a man’s brain,’ my father used to say, proudly.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I would say, looking round at whatever the company was that was being boasted to, ‘but I don’t think there are such things as men’s or women’s brains.’

The more competent I became at all aspects of the job, the more my father – I was about to say let go the reins, but it was not quite that. My father got great pleasure out of being Claudius Fearing, the banker – enjoyed
being
Fearing’s Bank. But the more I mastered one area of the profession, the more he was inclined to leave that area to me.

‘See Sarah about that,’ he would say to a colleague or underling, without thinking there was anything unusual (or demeaning to him) in the order. ‘She’s the expert on that.’

So something of his old dilettante side reasserted itself, and he found he could take life more easily – travel, visit in other great houses, simply relax. Sometimes he would take down a musical comedy star or ‘Gaiety girl’ to Blakemere. It caused no scandal. This was the Edwardian era. The King set the tone, and the King’s penchant for actresses who could mix in Society circles was well known. My father’s
ladies were in the lighter branches of the trade, but Aunt Jane always talked to them as if they were serious artists (‘I’m sure the world is waiting for your Juliet’), and at dinner she would question them about what she fondly imagined were the latest trends in contemporary theatre: ‘Is Mr Pinero writing another of his controversial pieces?’

It was during the Great War that I strengthened my position at Fearing’s Bank, and put the succession beyond question. That was in every way appropriate: with the men away being slaughtered like cattle at the front, women in Britain were learning new skills, taking on heavier labour, finding there were few jobs that absolutely demanded a man’s greater strength. When my father was not in London, and sometimes when he was, I was in charge at the Bank’s headquarters in Watling Street, and whatever was said by the older functionaries behind my back, my authority was unquestioned to my face.

‘It’s a completely new world,’ said my father, both admiring and complaining. ‘An old buffer like me doesn’t feel at home any more.’

The human abattoirs in northern France hit my father very hard. All the younger men he
knew seemed to have been taken: clerks from the bank, ingénue young performers from the Doyly Carte, footmen and gardeners and stable lads from Blakemere. For all of them he knew well he shed a tear, until by 1916 the well seemed to have dried up, and when the news of further deaths were brought to him, he just shook his head and went on with his work. My mother’s death, soon after the war’s end, brought even less reaction from him.

‘Will you go to the funeral?’ he asked, coming to my office.

‘No.’

‘I thought not. You’re quite right. I shan’t go myself. The time for these hypocrisies is past. We’ll send Jane.’

Aunt Jane, he clearly implied, had not outgrown the hypocrisies of the past – and essentially he was right: decent reticence and a covering up of any cause of embarrassment were as much a part of her view of life in 1919 as they had been in 1885. She was most distressed that we both refused to go to the funeral, and the day after my mother was expensively buried (in that respect, at least, we conformed to expectations), she telephoned, greatly daring, to say that she thought of stopping on in Torquay for a few
weeks to recoup her strength after the ‘terrible years’ of the War. A few days later, my father wrote to her to tell her that, if she preferred to settle there, that was perfectly all right by both of us, and of course her income was assured.

‘Blakemere’s days as a great house are numbered,’ he wrote. ‘It is now a dinosaur of a building.’

Aunt Jane did prefer the gentilities of Torquay to a reduced Blakemere, and she soon got around her a satisfactory circle of acquaintance, for if Blakemere was a house of the past, the name Fearing still counted for something. The air of her little group was heavy with nostalgia for the Old Days – for standards, courteous manners, people who knew their place. Contrariwise there was a bitterness about the war, about Trade Unions, about universal education, and about anything else that was held to be responsible for the passing of the old way of life. Aunt Jane did not have the sort of brain that might have questioned what lay behind the old facade of standards and courtesies.

‘Jane has the mind of a suet pudding,’ said Aunt Sarah, after a visit to her at Torquay. I saw little of Aunt Sarah, but I judged that on balance she had not only the better brain, but had had
the better life – quirkiness, oddity, obsessions notwithstanding. I intended to have a better life still.

My father closed down four-fifths of Blakemere after the war. There was no way such a battleship of a house could be staffed in the 1920’s. He simply had stairways and corridors boarded up, and had curtains hung over the boards. The trouble was, the rooms we still lived in were the same old large, cold, drafty, intimidating rooms we had always lived in – altogether too ludicrously grand, and no less so with the bulk of the house shut down. Since we had almost never gone into the boarded-up sections, it made very little difference. And the reduced number of servants – a regiment, rather than an army – still cooked and cleaned and ministered to us very much as before.

The end came for my father in 1925. We were by now so close it was almost incredible to think back to my forlorn, unloved state as a child. That was something he never referred to, even when he suspected he had not long to live. He had had a minor heart attack while out shooting, and was brought back to the house by two of the male servants. I think he knew this was only a first warning, and there was more to come.
Three evenings later, I sat by his bed, holding his hand in mine, and he said, ‘I was never involved with the Frank business, Sarah.’

I just nodded, and clutched his hand tighter. He had a second, more serious attack during the night, and died alone.

After his day in London, Ed spent a few days around Blakemere. After two nights, he asked me if I wanted him to move on, and I told him he could stay as long as it suited him. I liked having him around. And quite apart from that, I was curious. I wanted to find out who he was.

He made some phone calls the next day to people he had met in London, and talked about the trip they planned to take to poor old war-damaged Europe. He scrupulously left threepence or sixpence by the phone after each call. I quietly accepted them. As my grandfather used to say, without a hint of a smile, ‘If you’re rich, people think you’re made of money.’

Ed wanted to be of help, he said; he didn’t want to ‘bludge’. I gathered from the context this meant he wanted to pay his way by doing something useful. He didn’t want suggestions, however, and in his roamings around Blakemere with the dogs he decided he wanted to cut the
lawns, to see how the house would have looked in its heyday. I wasn’t at all sure this could be categorized as useful. I had had practically nothing done in the Blakemere grounds since September 1939, and I saw no reason to now.

‘The grass is practically waist high,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to get at it with a scythe before you can use the mowers.’

‘A scythe? I’ve never used one of those.’

‘Nobody much does these days. I’ll see if I can find one in the stables.’

I certainly couldn’t use a scythe myself, but when I had disentangled one from a heap of old garden implements, and when he had sharpened it with a whetstone, I could demonstrate the sort of movements that I had seen the gardeners and farm labourers use with them in the days of my childhood.

‘I’ll soon get the hang,’ said Ed, cheerfully. And he did. When I went back at midday with a packet of sandwiches, most of the croquet lawn was down to manageable height, and he was about to get working on the great lawn beside the Terrace.

‘It’s a piece of cake once you’ve got the knack,’ he said, sitting down beside me.

‘I can’t afford any fuel for the motor mowers,
I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘If you want them looking as they used to look it’ll have to be the hand mowers or nothing.’

‘She’ll be right. I’ve nothing else to do.’

‘You should be travelling around, seeing the country.’

‘You soon get indigestion if you do nothing but that. You have to have periods in between when you just relax – give the eyes and the mind a rest.’

‘I suppose that’s sensible,’ I admitted. ‘I never went much on sightseeing myself.’

‘You must have seen the world – done the Grand Tour and all that.’

‘I started one, but it was truncated: I got bored.’

‘Bored? With so much to see?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Don’t you like Europe?’

‘I’ve nothing against it. Before the war I used to go to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam – just for a few days. To eat well, in Paris to go to the theatre, the Opera. To tell you the truth, I was always glad to get home, and back to work.’

‘I suppose if you’ve got this’ – Ed waved his hand at the brooding mass of the boarded-up Blakemere – ‘you wouldn’t want to sightsee at other grand places.’

‘Possibly having
this
, as you call it, may have made me a bit sceptical or cynical about “grand places”.’

He paused in his munching of his egg-and-cress sandwich and looked at me. His face is individual, but rather attractive, perched on the top of his beanpole body. When that fills out, he will break hearts.

‘Will you show me round?’ he said suddenly.

I shot him a glance, I think a suspicious one.

‘Blakemere? … I can’t unboard the place, you know.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why do you want to see it?’

‘I don’t know. We have rich people in Australia, but this is something … something way out of our line.’

‘Well, I suppose since I had the power turned off, I can turn it on again, for an hour or two. I’ve got the main door keys at the gatehouse …’ I felt I had to warn him. ‘But it’s a terrible barn of a place, you know. Everything overdone: too grand, pretentious, heavy. There was no judgment went into it. Money, but no judgment. Much of it is laughable, in dreadful taste.’

‘I don’t suppose I have good taste myself.’

I shrugged. ‘Admittedly taste changes from
generation to generation. But I don’t think Blakemere will ever be admired. In fact, I imagine that in a few years it will be a ruin.’

‘All the more reason to see it now. It’s part of my family background. And even if some of it is in terrible taste, it has – I can see from the outside – one thing that you never get in Australia.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Splendour.’

It was only a week or two after my father’s death that I heard rumours that Bankside School was in difficulties, or at any fate going through a bad patch. I was in the thick of taking over – not of taking over the Bank, where most things had been in my hands for some time, but in taking over Blakemere. Even with a reduced staff, with the shutting off of so much of the place and the decision to let most of the land revert to pasture, there was still much to be done, and it was labour without love. I didn’t think ‘why me?’ where the Bank was concerned, but I did very much think it where Blakemere was concerned. I decided to take an afternoon off, and drive into Wentwood to talk to Edith and Robert.

I took Richard with me – he was then in the last year of his life. I have not said much about
Richard, because there is not much to say. He had grown but he had not grown up. He was the same loving, simple, rather lethargic person he had always been, and I loved him as I loved no one else. He was my link with the past. His day-to-day existence had been transformed by a bright idea in the first year of the war, when he had been given a piece of kitchen garden all his own. Tending it, growing vegetables, lavishing on them all the love he had left over from his small circle of loved ones, became his existence, and a very joyful one it was. He readily agreed to come to Wentwood, though, because Edith and Robert, who both treated him with a brisk and unsentimental affection, had always been among his favourite people.

I let myself be chauffeur-driven. I drove myself as a rule, and with great pleasure, but so soon after the funeral, in deep mourning, it seemed right to have a chauffeur take us. What odd ideas we had, only twenty years ago, and how the hypocrisies my father spoke of did cling on!