A Mansion and its Murder (6 page)

‘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.

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.

Her own maids less obviously so, but they hated her nonetheless. The only mode she had of treating domestic staff was a coldness veering toward disdain. The old family servants showed their feelings by never embroidering any mention of her name. The mention of any other family member might be embroidered along the lines of: ‘The salmon mousse is for Lady Fearing – you know how much she loves it.’ The equivalent for Mary would be: ‘The salmon mousse is for Mrs Francis,’ with silence left after the name both by the speaker and by the person spoken to. If they could have made it even more formal by
saying ‘Mrs Francis Fearing’ without sounding ridiculous in the Fearing household, they would have done.

Uncle Frank, on his rare visits to Blakemere, did not change in his demeanour toward his wife, but he did seem to be increasingly delighted by the prospect of becoming a father. He also made efforts to mend his bridges with me. He did not need to try very hard. My respect for him was dented, but my love hardly at all. This was the period when he taught me tennis (my game has always been rather mannish as a consequence), and occasionally we would have one of our old companionable days fishing on the riverbank.

‘You’ll have to bring the little one out fishing when I’m not at Blakemere,’ he said, on one of them. ‘Which I don’t intend to be very much.’

‘By the time your son is old enough to fish,’ I said, my eyes on the far bank and the meadows beyond it, ‘I shouldn’t think I shall be much at Blakemere myself.’

You notice I didn’t use endearments about the approaching baby, though I did suspect that when it arrived I would be unable to resist its charms.

‘Aha! And what will you be doing in the big
world, little rabbit? Studying life in order to be a writer?’

I giggled. ‘You promised not to call me that any more. I’ve changed my mind about what I want to be.’

‘Quite right, too. Never set yourself goals too early on.’

‘I think I’m going to be a wonderful nurse and social reformer like Florence Nightingale.’

Uncle Frank let out a great Hrrrmff. ‘Florence Nightingale these days is nothing but a great hypochondriac and a great nuisance to everyone in government. What she needs is a nurse of the old school, who would either kill her or shake some sense into her. And social reformers, though sometimes admirably useful, tend to be the sort of person that sensible people go miles to avoid.’

‘That’s because most people don’t like having their eyes opened to the truth,’ I said solemnly. ‘I think you are essentially frivolous, Uncle Frank.’

‘Of course I am. Would you like me half as much if I wasn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Then consider yourself very fortunate that you have been spared a social reformer as your uncle.’

We fished on companionably for a while.

‘What if the little one is a girl?’ I blurted out eventually.

My uncle shrugged. ‘What if it is? You know I love little girls. I’ll teach her to fish, as I’ve taught you,
and
to play tennis.’

‘The family will want a boy.’

His face reddened, and he turned to me almost fiercely.

‘The family be damned! God rot them, each and every one. I’ve delivered my side of the bargain.’

Thinking over those words today, I think Uncle Frank was saying that sexual relations with his wife were at an end. At the age of thirteen I knew next to nothing about how babies came into the world. Who in the family did I have to ask? Who would think to take it on themselves to tell me when the right age came? Beatrice had told me only that this was something ‘between men and women,’ and that I would be told about it ‘when the time came.’ I suspected the time would never come. I suppose I could have asked Uncle Frank, but his marriage, the reasons for it, his reluctance to go through with it, made doing that more, not less difficult.

I did ask Beatrice again on one of my visits
to the spruce little cottage on the perimeter of Tillyards, that warm, red-brick old manor house with so many cold-hearted people inside. ‘Bea, tell me how babies are made.’

Bea was also expecting a happy event. She was sure to know. ‘It’s something between a man and a woman.’

‘So you’ve said.
Tell
me.’

She got the usual cagey expression on her face. I knew it well.

‘Something a man and a woman do together … It’s not for me to tell you. Someone will at the right time.’

Oddly enough, I accepted that from her, and was distracted on to a topic that interested me more.

‘Bea, was Mary liked when she was Mary Coverdale and lived at Tillyards?’

For answer, Beatrice merely rolled her eyes. She did not need to say any more. Servants always
know
, I said to myself triumphantly. We got on to talking about the approaching lying-in which was to produce her eldest son – the imaginatively named Merlin South (Bea had always loved storybooks with pictures). In later years he was for a time chauffeur at Tillyards, then a commercial traveller, and is now managing
a factory producing wireless sets in Bedford – not a magician, by any means, but a solid, sensible man. Anyway, I learnt something about the birth of babies from her, even if I learnt nothing about procreation.

This knowledge did allow me to make some judgments on the preparations for the lying-in at Blakemere, and to discuss them with Miss Roxby. I told myself that Miss Roxby probably knew as little as I did about lyings-in and how babies were made, but that was not in fact true. She knew plenty about them, and was certainly interested in the approaching ‘happy’ event.

‘I think all these preparations are flying in the face of Providence,’ I said. It was a phrase I was fond of.

‘It’s hardly flying in the face of Providence to prepare for something that you know is going to happen,’ she pointed out. I shook my head impatiently.

‘I mean the
scale
of the preparations. Dr Morris from Wentwood is to be in residence here for a week before the poor little thing is due, and our fastest horse is to be in readiness for the coachman to ride to Aylesbury to summon Dr Petherbridge. How absurd! And the number of midwives, nurses, extra servants that have
been hired – as if we didn’t have enough already!’

‘Perhaps Mrs Francis insists on them,’ said Miss Roxby slyly.

‘Perhaps she does! It would be in character. But it doesn’t alter the absurdity.’

‘I believe some of the extra servants are already causing problems below stairs,’ said Miss Roxby. ‘Incomers usually do.’

‘Were you ill last night?’ I asked.

‘Ill? No, why?’

‘I heard Robert come from your room.’

‘I sent for hot milk. I found it difficult to sleep.’

My doubts about the preparations were only confirmed in the weeks ahead, for they became more and more grandiose, and Blakemere might more reasonably have been awaiting the birth of an heir to the throne instead of an heir to the banking firm of Fearing’s. But Uncle Frank was not party to these preparations. How could he be, when he was hardly ever there? The preparations could be laid to the account of my grandfather and his exaggerated sense of the family’s importance. I think I have hinted that my grandmother was much the more intelligent of the two. I suspect she adopted the policy of many women married to stupid (or
limited
would be a fairer estimate) men, and let him have his head in public, hoping to influence him privately, if only in small ways. In the matter of the approaching birth he had his own way entirely, and if the ironic eye might have said he made a great fool of himself, such an eye (and there were not many at Blakemere, apart perhaps from my grandmother, and Uncle Frank) would have made sure his perceptions never were given verbal expression.

Uncle Frank was summoned home by telegram one week before the birth. They should have known him better. Nothing had actually happened, and he knew perfectly well when the baby was expected. He ignored the summons and came down three days later. I saw him greet his wife in Grandmama’s sitting room: he could have been an atheist in court kissing the Bible. His jokes about her size were brushed aside, as all jokes were by Mary. She told him the opinions of the doctors, which interested him, then outlined her plans for the future of their son, which interested him not at all. Uncle Frank intended to make all the important decisions about the boy’s future himself. And if I knew Uncle Frank, there would be no element of predestination in the plans – no sense that the
child was born for one fate and one fate alone. He thought of himself as a free spirit, and his son would be the same.

The labour began two days late. Mary, I was told, had been very impatient with the delay, as if a tradesman had not turned up on time for an appointment. The birth was to take place not in her own bedroom, but in one of the largest bedchambers in the body of the house. Grandpapa had not actually asked the Home Secretary to witness the birth, but if he had thought he would come, he would have done so. I need hardly say I was kept well away from the centre of so much drama and expectation.

‘What happens when a baby is born?’ I asked Miss Roxby, though, as I say, I doubted she knew much more than me.

‘It is a time of great pain and suffering for the mother,’ she said. ‘Great joy eventually, too, of course.’

This last was definitely an afterthought, and one reluctantly brought out. I perceived I was not going to get anything but generalities.

‘And how long does it take?’

‘It can be quite short, and it can be horribly long.’ Again, she seemed to speak with intense feeling.

‘It doesn’t sound as if you ever want to have a baby.’

‘I don’t. I had an elder sister die in childbirth. There are ways of avoiding it.’

It had never occurred to me that childbirth was unavoidable, so I said rather priggishly, ‘It’s a good job
some
people want to have babies, or what would become of the Country?’

‘There will always be plenty of women who find their vocation in having babies and bringing up children,’ said Edith Roxby.

I thought of Beatrice, and nodded.

I became less sure that I was one of them when the labour started.

I was, as I say, well away from the bedroom in question, and was denied my usual freedom to roam. However, I registered the beginning of the birth (the phrase I used to myself) by the sounds of servants scuttling around, and by a series of subtle changes in the routines of the house. That was not long after breakfast. I said nothing to Miss Roxby, but bent low over my schoolbooks. For some reason my cheeks were burning. When the usual time came for a break in lessons, Edith led me down an obscure back staircase and stayed with me as we roamed well away from the house, talking of all sorts of miscellaneous
matters that were not really what was on our minds. The servant who brought us our dinner (our main meal was served at about two, this being thought healthy for a child) was flurried, and whispered to Miss Roxby. When she had gone, my governess told me that the birth was difficult and protracted, but it was hoped it would soon be over.