A Mansion and its Murder (9 page)

‘Then how does it happen that the marriage has come to the sorry state it is now in? Husband and wife separate in the same house. It’s unnatural.’

‘No, it was the marriage itself that was unnatural.’

‘You are an unmanly cad to describe it so in the presence of your wife.’

‘Mary knows my feelings. She had no illusions.’

His wife’s voice rang out.

‘I have feelings! Do you think you don’t cruelly hurt me when you talk about our marriage like this in front of people?’

‘I thought it was precisely to talk about our marriage that this whole confabulation was set up.’

‘My feelings have never been thought about, not from the very first. You say
you
were pressured into the marriage. But a marriage is a union of two persons. What about me? What about what I was led to expect? The position I would occupy? Is it any wonder I’m dissatisfied with what I actually got?’

‘No. No wonder at all. So let’s end it.’

‘Think, Frank dear,’ came the voice of Aunt Clare ‘how children may alter things, as Jane has said. They would bring you together.’

‘We have a child. He has driven us further apart.’

‘How can you compare that … that child with the children we might have?’ demanded Mary. She was getting on to dangerous ground, but seemed totally reckless.

‘How can I? Because I love him.’

‘You don’t love him. You can’t. Nobody could. You pretend to love him to annoy
me
, to
make people think I am an unnatural mother.’

‘I don’t care in the slightest how people think of you. I love Richard. I have an idea that when he grows up he will be a better person than any of us.’

‘That’s just silly fantasy,’ came Mary’s contemptuous voice.

‘Better than us,’ insisted Uncle Frank. ‘Because some of the things that make us what we are won’t develop in him: greed, jealousy, love of status and position.’

‘They won’t develop in him because he is an idiot.’

There was a second of silence, then Uncle Frank hissed, ‘Don’t use that word!’

‘He’s a cretin, then.’

Another silence, then a carefully controlled Frank seemed to turn on the whole assembly around him.

‘All right. He’s a cretin. Shall I tell you why he is a cretin? Either it’s because my family insisted on using an expensive nincompoop at the birth, or else it’s because Nature, having created generation after generation of covetous, pushing individuals – greedy gentry, greedy bankers, it makes no great difference – finally said: “We’ve got to strike a balance. We’ve got to show that
human beings can be something else, too.” And so it gave us Richard. A wonderful gift.’

Mary’s voice was hard and ungiving as rock.

‘You’re talking fantasy. He’s only a baby. And when he grows up he will be the mock of the neighbourhood.’

‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’

‘A rich idiot. Pointed at by everyone.’ The venom in her voice was palpable even outside in the chill night air. She hated the son who had been born to her, perhaps because she regarded his birth as personal shame.

‘You really enjoy saying things like that, don’t you? Idiot, cretin. You cold, unfeeling bitch!’

‘Frank!’ It was Grandmama’s voice again.

‘I enjoy the truth,’ said Mary, her voice rising higher. ‘He’ll be a moron, and he’ll have to be shut in an asylum.’

‘Never!’

‘Yes, he will. He’ll be put away.’

‘Monster!’

‘In a sensible society he’d be put down.’

There was a moment’s silence. Something – I had no idea what – was happening. ‘You—’

‘Frank!’

I heard a scuffle, a great cry from my uncle Frank, several bodies colliding, a punch, a heavy
fall. I turned from the window and ran, ran, ran away across the lawn, terrified at the thought of my family fighting, terrified at the thought of father against son, of brother against brother. Who had punched him? What had Frank’s terrible cry been caused by? I found the door to the obscure back staircase, and had regained my wits enough to steal in and creep up it, then along the dark, pokey corridors. But as I was turning into my own corridor I held back. A door had opened.

I withdrew round the corner, and waited a moment. Then I poked my head cautiously round and took a look. The footman Robert was emerging from Miss Roxby’s bedroom. He looked around him furtively, then stole away from me toward the body of the house. As he turned the corner he squared his shoulders, began to walk more confidently, then disappeared from my view.

Shaken to the heart, I pressed my hot cheeks against the cold stone wall. It was as if my whole world had been violently reversed – first my family world, then my schoolroom world. I stayed like that for what seemed an age. Then I swallowed hard and hared silently along the corridor to my bedroom. Once there I locked the
door behind me. I needed very much to be alone. This time I didn’t cry, but sat long on my bed, thinking about what I had heard from the sitting room, what I had seen in the corridor outside. Shock, bewilderment, revulsion were succeeded by numbness. Slowly, reluctantly, I took off my clothes, put on my nightdress, and went to bed. Eventually, hours later, I went to sleep.

That night I dreamt a strange dream. I dreamt I woke up in the middle of the night, disturbed by the happenings of the evening, or perhaps by the muffled sound of voices. I lay for a minute or two, mulling over the horror of fighting in the family, of violence against Uncle Frank. Then I was sure I heard a male voice.

I got up quietly and went over to the window. Outside the expanses of Blakemere’s park and meadowlands stretched darkly away into the distance, and clouds were sweeping across what moon there was visible. But there was one little patch of light, way below me, and to my left. One of the obscure back entrances to Blakemere was open, and a man with a lantern was standing just outside it. I recognised the shoulders and head of Joe Mossman, one of the gardeners, father to one of my early playmates. He bent down, and
seemed to be propping open the door with a slab of stone. I shivered in the night cold, and began twisting the scrap of ribbon that held back my hair. I was nervous with foreboding.

Joe disappeared inside for a moment, but then more light appeared – lanterns, from just inside the house. Then slowly, carefully, I saw another man emerge, and as he moved forward – it was Robert again – I saw he was holding his lantern with difficulty, by its little bow of a handle, because most of his hand was taken up by a pole, and so was his other hand. I saw with horror that he was holding one end of a stretcher, and as he moved forward I saw it contained a long shape, wrapped in some dark stuff that could have been carpeting, and that the other end of the stretcher was held by Joe. And when they had fully emerged and had begun their progress across the terrace, I saw that they were followed by old Ben Burke, one of the family’s pensioners from over Wentwood way, and that he was carrying spades.

I let out a squeak of horror and then put my hand to my mouth when I saw that he in his turn was followed by a dark shape in a tall hat, who turned and closed the door behind him. In the gloom I could see almost nothing. I twisted my
ribbon, and as the procession, speeding up now, began to cross the meadow toward the little wood on the other side of the river known as Foley’s Wood, the ribbon snapped as I thought I recognised the walk of the dark figure who had now gone to the head of the group.

I thought it was my father’s walk.

I watched till there was nothing more to see. Then, in my dream, I went back to bed, and finally to sleep. In the morning when I woke I found my hair untidy round my face. I got up and went to the window, and there on the window ledge was a piece of broken ribbon.

I was very quiet the next day.

Partly this was because I was upset about what I had overheard the previous evening – upset and uncertain. I was even more upset over what I had seen –
if
I had seen it. On thinking it over it seemed to me that the snapped ribbon proved little. In any case, I knew very well that if I told anybody what I had seen, or thought I had seen, they would have said ‘You’ve been dreaming.’ Even Miss Roxby would have said that. And such a dismissal of my testimony would have been entirely plausible.

Even now I do not
know
that I saw it.

In any case, who could I tell who was a power
of any kind in the household? Miss Roxby or someone in the servants’ hall would have been the best I could come up with, and I knew what their response would be.

If Miss Roxby noticed my quietness the next day, she did not comment on it. She was very good like that: sympathetic to my moods, but not demonstratively so. We went about our daily round as usual, and of course I did not ask her about Robert the footman.

But a screaming imperative was gaining force within me: I had to know about Uncle Frank. In any case, Miss Roxby was not the obvious person to ask about that, being cut off for much of the time from the body of the house. Failing members of my own family – or, rather, my heart failing at the thought of asking Aunt Jane or my father – I finally decided to ask my friends in the below-stairs part of the house.

‘I haven’t seen Uncle Frank today,’ I said to Mrs Needham, in the afternoon, when preparations for dinner were under way in the kitchens.

‘Oh?’

‘Is he still in the house?’

‘I couldn’t say I’m sure. Nobody ever tells me how many there will be for dinner, if it’s just a family dinner.’

‘Well, I know
that.
The waste in this family is shocking.’ I turned to Mr McKay, who was pottering around in his intensely dignified way. ‘Do you know if Uncle Frank is still at Blakemere, Mr McKay?’

‘Ah … I think not. I rather think he left the house either last night, or very early this morning.’

‘You must know if his bed had been slept in.’

A silly comment. Mr McKay drew himself up.

‘On the contrary, that is not something that comes within my sphere of inquiry … You are getting rather old, Miss Sarah, for coming into the kitchen – or below stairs generally.’

‘I didn’t know there was an age limit,’ I said, with some of my old pertness.

‘A
child
may go anywhere, but a young lady generally keeps herself to her own part of the house. Lady Fearing herself seldom or never comes here – only at Christmas, in fact, to thank the staff for their work over the years, and to distribute gifts.’

‘It’s nice of her to distribute gifts,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see why she celebrates Christmas at all. Jews don’t believe in Christ.’

This was in no way pejorative, merely a
showing off of a recently acquired piece of knowledge. I knew perfectly well that Grandmama was a Christian. I was not, in fact, diverted from my inquiries, and I meditated who else I might ask. Mrs Merton, the head housekeeper, was so fantastically discreet and remote that she was out of the question, but I thought I might ask one of the maids. I meandered through the baronial wastelands of the Blakemere servants’ hall and kitchens until I spotted Bertha, about some arduous but useless task in a corner. Bertha was sweet and not too bright, which was ideal.

‘Bertha, is Uncle Frank still at Blakemere?’

‘Oh, no, Miss Sarah Jane—’

‘Sarah.’

‘Miss Sarah. I can’t get used to these changes, Miss Sarah J—’

‘Uncle Frank.’

‘He’s left.’

She said it with no prevarication or embarrassment. But of course if something had happened to Uncle Frank, someone like Bertha would be the last to know.

‘Did he go last night or this morning?’

‘Last night, I think. His bed wasn’t slept in, and all his things are gone. I expect he’s gone to London.’

It seemed politic to agree. ‘I expect he has.’

‘Powerful fond of London Mr Frank is, for all he’s a married man now.’

This was said with what for Bertha passed for cunning.

‘Many men find the attractions of London increase after they are married,’ I said. I think I had been reading Oscar Wilde.

Mention of his ‘things’ made me regret that Uncle Frank had no valet, and used none of the Blakemere servants in lieu of one when he was at home. But her words did suggest to me a course of action I might have followed earlier. Uncle Frank’s rooms, his bachelor rooms, were perfectly well known to me, both from visits there while he was at Blakemere, when I was fascinated by their exclusively masculine feel and smell, and from more surreptitious poppings in when he was away, when I was looking for signs that he was expected.

Of course none of the rooms or suites of rooms at Blakemere were kept locked. They might be locked on occasion from inside, for example by people engaged in a blazing row, though not necessarily even then. The desire for privacy is middle class, and we were determinedly no longer middle class. The fact that Uncle Frank had left Blakemere meant that, once the room
was done, there was unlikely to be a servant in its vicinity.

It was the second morning after the night of the furious row that, in a break between lessons, I betook myself on the long walk to Uncle Frank’s rooms and – my heart thumping, not with fear but with dread of making an unwanted discovery – pushed open the door.

Nothing.

No signs of Uncle Frank at all – not a remnant of his occupancy. The rooms were shiny clean, bare and anonymous. It might have been a luxury suite in a first-class hotel. All the things that Uncle Frank would normally leave here – binoculars, fishing tackle, old overcoats, bottles of his favourite tipples – had been removed. It was almost spiteful in its comprehensiveness. As I stood there I imagined it being done with a sadistic relish: Francis Fearing, it seemed to say, belonged to the house’s past; he had no place in the house’s future.

I told Miss Roxby what I had discovered later the same day. She received my news without comment; she had these fits of being the faithful, discreet servant of the Fearings. A governess – any servant – had often to act against her own nature.

‘It’s not fair!’ I said passionately. ‘We lose Uncle Frank forever, and we keep Mary who is not one of us at all!’

‘I believe Mrs Francis has left Blakemere,’ she said quietly.

That stopped me in my tracks.

‘That will please everyone in the servants’ hall,’ I said at last. ‘And practically everyone above stairs as well.’

Miss Roxby said nothing. How I would love to have gone on to talk about the visitor to her room on the fateful night! But I had already trespassed on doubtful ground, on that border territory between the acceptable and the forbidden, and in fact it was many years before that matter could be discussed between us.

But if Miss Roxby was being the loyal servant of popular fiction (a role that did not sit easily on her), with whom could I discuss the fate of Uncle Frank? The memory of that blazing row, of those men in the night, above all of that shape on the stretcher, did not become less vivid as the days passed. It was impossible to imagine discussing Uncle Frank’s fate with either of my grandparents, or indeed Aunt Jane, who still talked to me as if I were in the nursery. With my
mother I never had anything that could be called conversation, and indeed I very much doubted if she knew what had happened on the night in question. That left my father.

My father had taken up golf. I spied him from the Library one afternoon a fortnight or so after Uncle Frank’s disappearance practicing his putting shots on the croquet lawn. Later he would have his own nine-hole course in the Blakemere grounds, involving more enormous shiftings of earth and creations of artificial hills and woody clumps. How the Fearings did love to improve on Nature’s plans! It is now a wilderness, and people wandering there must think that is how that corner of Buckinghamshire has been since the beginnings of time.

On an impulse – thinking it odd I hadn’t done this before – I went outside through the obscure door below my bedroom and a little to the left. Once outside I looked around. At the edge of a nearby flower bed there was a heavy stone, such as might be used for propping open a door. I gulped. One more little piece in place. Then I went over toward the croquet lawn and sat on a little wall, watching my father. He made few efforts to talk to me if I did not put myself in his way, but when I did I pricked his
conscience. Eventually, as I knew he would, he interrupted his putting and came over, rubbing his hands.

‘Capital game,’ he said. ‘Absolutely capital. You must take it up. Women can play golf, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Mary, Queen of Scots, for example. She played the game when it was in its infancy.’

‘I wonder how she found the time,’ I meditated, genuinely interested in the question. I think I imagined her as fully occupied with love affairs and murderous plots. My father failed to understand my meaning. Uncle Frank would have caught the drift of my thoughts immediately. Papa just stood there rather awkwardly.

‘Perhaps you could teach me,’ I said, to help him out of his embarrassment. ‘Now that I don’t have Uncle Frank to teach me games and things.’

He nodded, seemingly pleased.

‘Yes, that’s a good idea. I know that you and I—’

‘Where has Uncle Frank gone?’ I interrupted him to ask, at least partly to spare shame-making personal stuff.

‘Well, I think – Frank has gone to Australia.’

‘Is he on another expedition? Is he going to
cross the Great Australian Desert?’

He rubbed his chin. ‘Well, not that I know of, but I suppose knowing Frank he might – yes, it would be like him.’

‘Why else would he go to Australia?’

‘I think he aims to stay there quite a while.’

‘You mean
settle
?’

‘Well, yes. I believe that is his intention.’

I digested this slowly. I did not believe it was true, but I was careful how I should react.

‘He was driven to it,’ I said at last, passionately. ‘He should never have been forced to marry.’

‘He wasn’t exactly forced … But I think you’re right. It was never something I approved of.’

‘I know.’ My father was preoccupied, otherwise he might have wondered how I knew.

‘Frank and I were never close,’ he mused, ‘but I always
liked
him.’

‘You couldn’t not like Uncle Frank.’

‘No … I bitterly regret what happened. They were mismatched from the start. Mary was wronged as much as Frank. I know all about mismatching, about marriages that should never have taken place. But no one put pressure on your mother and me. We were quite willing. And things weren’t too bad until …’

‘Until I came along and was a girl, and she was told she couldn’t have any more,’ I supplied.

‘Something like that. You’re old enough to understand now.’

‘Oh, I’ve always known
that
. So won’t Uncle Frank ever come back to this country? Come back here?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘But that’s disgusting!’ I cried, trying to be my younger, more innocent self. ‘He belongs here.’ My father shook his head.

‘I don’t think that’s true, Sarah Jane. He never belonged here.’

And smiling sadly he went back to his putting. It seemed to me that my father was right, and that it was an unusually perceptive remark. Frank had never belonged here. Not at Blakemere, not in nineteenth-century England. I wondered whether Papa had been forced by recent events to think long and seriously about Uncle Frank. I only realised later that where I had said ‘belongs’ he had said ‘belonged’. Even when I realised it, I couldn’t quite decide on its significance: he might have been drawing a line not under Uncle Frank’s life, but merely under his life at Blakemere.

I watched my father practicing his finishing
putts for a few minutes more, then wandered off into the slope beyond the croquet lawn. It was only when I saw him go off toward the house that I directed my feet toward the little wood – the direction I had seen the men walk with the stretcher on the night of Uncle Frank’s disappearance. I did not find that day what I was looking for – looking for, yet dreading to find. It was only three visits later, when I had educated myself to spot signs of disturbance, that I found it. It was covered with leaves, branches, and bracken, yet they did not look like the natural ground cover of woodland, such as surrounded them on each side. They were easy to pull away.

Underneath the ground had been dug, and later the earth replaced. The hole had been about six feet by two feet. I gazed at it, then started to cry. After a minute or two I feverishly pulled the bracken and branches back across the bare earth. Then I ran from the place as if pursued, down to the river. It was hours before I went into the house again.

I have never been back to that little wood. I lived at Blakemere all those years until the Second World War, apart from three years at Cambridge, yet in all that time I never went
back. If that seems strange, remember that the Blakemere estate is very large – is, indeed, enormous. If I was ever tempted when I was lady of the house to put some kind of memorial there, I restrained the temptation: I am not religious, and in any case I doubted whether I would be able to find the place again. And the memorial would have had to remain blank. Uncle Frank’s gravestone was in my heart. Whether he was remembered in anyone else’s heart I never knew. Nobody mentioned him, except occasionally the servants – and then, as often as not, only because I was questioning them about him.

I realised soon after this that Grandpapa was failing. Not so much losing his mental powers as physically dying slowly. It was visible in his face, his stance, his grip on what was going on around him – not that he
couldn’t
be alert to what was happening, but that he no longer wanted to be. He was still fiercely independent, but he had to assert his independence against the general desire of those around him to minister to his growing weakness, relieve him of all possible cares and duties. I have seen in dogs a similar phenomenon: the loss of any desire to go on living. With them the cause is often a build up of physical ailments, allied to a sense
that they’ve done everything, seen everything, smelt everything, many times.