Complete Short Stories (VMC) (52 page)

All the preparations were made. Red ropes made passageways through the rooms, heirlooms were brought out and personal possessions put away. The dogs and their baskets were moved from the library to the gun room. A stall for picture postcards and ice-cream was built in the courtyard, and upon two of the doors hung notices printed ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’.

‘Ladies! Gentlemen!’ said the Duchess. ‘What lady or gentleman would wish to spy upon us just because we are poor?’ She could hear all the teacups of Harrogate tinkling as the cries of pity passed above them, eager and energetic as cries of pity are. ‘How dreadful for her! Imagine one’s own feelings!’ And the coronet and the seat in the Abbey would be forgiven.

Arthur had felt the air about him riven with expectation and dissent. The staff had split apart, as his parents had. The steward, the wood ranger – but not the gardeners – stood close to the Duke. Footmen and housemaids were excited; the butler saddened, but understanding. The housekeeper was in a frenzy of indignation and the Duchess’s maid aligned herself fully with Harrogate and almost outdid the Duchess herself in sensibility and distaste. Arthur’s tutor, who had begun to see his present employment coming to an end as talk of Eton grew more frequent, was wondering if he might not make himself indispensable in other ways: his attachment to the
house, and the knowledge of its history he had come by, fitted him beautifully for the task of Guide or Lecturer. Perhaps Guide and Librarian would be a pleasant combination and might keep him settled for the rest of his life. He became as eager as the Duke to bring in the half-crowns and to have the ice-creams sold. He had written a little guide-book and Arthur’s lessons were neglected while he polished up his commentary.

‘When they are about the place, you are to keep to the schoolroom or play in the walled garden,’ the Duchess had told her son. As for herself, her pianoforte, her painting materials, her tapestry canvas with enough wools to last five years or more, were carried to her sitting-room. She gathered her possessions about her, as if to withstand a long siege.

With feelings totally curious and expectations muddled, Arthur had awaited the day. He sensed surveillance lifting from him, authority rising away from him, as indifferent as the sun going up in the sky. He was sure that neither schoolroom nor walled garden should play any part in his day.

His father now came out on the terrace below. He stood looking across the lakes, his hand resting on the winged foot of a stone Mercury, whose shadow mingled with his own. All along the front of the house the sun was bleaching the statues. Rain-pitted, damp from the dew-fall, with mossy drapery and eye-sockets, they held out their shells and grapes and cornucopias to dry.

‘Nothing gives me more pleasure than the notion that every little helps,’ the Duke had told the steward. This feeling had led him to what his wife called ‘excesses of vulgarity’ and which had even slightly estranged those who were sympathetic to him. The steward was obliged to turn his eyes from the litter of paddle-boats on the harp-shaped lake.

The first cars to drive in when the gates were opened came very slowly and looked purposeful and menacing to Arthur – like a funeral procession – but soon the atmosphere became jollier; the car-park filled up; the crowds spread about the terrace, invading the house from all sides, like an army of ants, penetrating in no time the stables and courtyard and lining up for the house itself. The tutor, Mr Gilliat, soon collected his first batch of sightseers and fluently and facetiously began his description of pictures and cabinets and carvings.

Arthur had wandered round into the courtyard. Helpers from the village, selling postcards and refreshments, might have recognised him and he dared not buy an ice-cream and so risk being identified and imprisoned in the walled garden for the afternoon. When the steward came through the courtyard, people looked at him respectfully. A boy beside Arthur nudged him and whispered: ‘That’s the Duke.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Arthur said.

‘How do you know? He’s got a badge on with the coat of arms.’

The boy was running his tongue over his ice-cream cornet, long, slow licks which Arthur watched with increasing irritation. They leant against the warm stone wall. The sun in this enclosed place made them feel drowsy.

‘I’ve shaken my lot off. Gave Dad the slip,’ the boy said. He was about Arthur’s age. He wore a school blazer with a row of fountain-pens clipped to the pocket. His lapels were covered with little enamel badges. Ice-cream, melting fast, dripped on to his trousers, and he spat on his handkerchief and wiped it off.

‘I gave mine the slip, too,’ Arthur said.

‘They get my goat,’ said the boy.

‘And mine.’

‘Once they’re safely inside we might get on a boat. What say?’

The afternoon now seemed to Arthur to have expanded with brilliant promise.

They moved on together as if by a silent arrangement and came to the Orangery which was apart from the house. Crowds shuffled through it, looking at the rows of statues and busts, and nymphs and goddesses and broken-nosed emperors.

‘Might as well have a look round as it’s free,’ said the boy. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Arthur Blanchflower.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Well, rather you than me. I bet it takes some living down at school. My name’s Derek Beale,’ he added with simple pride.

The Orangery smelt of damp stone and a chalky dust filtered down through the sunlight over all the mutilated and dismembered sculpture.

‘What a lot of rubbish,’ said Derek, and in fact this was so. The statues had become a burden and problem, accumulating through the centuries, breaking and flaking; crumbling, but never quite away. Until today, no one had glanced at them for years. Now they were the object of derision and ribaldry. Laughter echoed round as the crowds drifted through the building.

‘Look at this one! He’s had his knocked off,’ said Derek.

Arthur felt vexed. He had begun to toady to Derek, who had taken the initiative from the start, but he wondered if he was prepared to toady to the extent of disloyalty towards his home.

‘Some of the best statues have bits knocked off,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

But Derek only went eagerly ahead and now was testing the strength of the armature upholding a disintegrating torso of Aphrodite.

‘You’re not supposed to touch them,’ Arthur said nervously.

‘I should bloody care,’ said Derek.

Difficulties arose all the afternoon. On the lake, taking turns to manage the little boat, Arthur felt exposed to view from the house.

‘What will happen when your father finds you?’ he asked Derek.

‘I shall tell him where he gets off.’

‘Won’t he mind that?’

‘What he minds or doesn’t mind’s up to him, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘Let’s go and chase those deer,’ said Derek, when they got out of the boat.

Arthur could see the deer-keeper riding up the avenue. ‘There’s … a man’s watching.’ He sat down on the grass with his face turned away.

‘He can’t do anything to you.’

‘Yes, he can. He did once before,’ Arthur said truthfully.

‘What, for chasing the deer?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He told my father.’

‘What of it? I thought you meant he had used that whip on you.’

Arthur’s wits were exhausted with all the day’s evasions and the risks he had run. A girl from a nearby riding-stables was walking his pony round at the edge of the lake, giving sixpenny rides to the children – since every little helped, His Grace had said.

‘Want a ride?’ Derek asked.

‘Not much.’

‘I’m going to. I’ve only ever been on a donkey. I shall tell her where she gets off, if she thinks she’s going to walk round with me, though. You go first.’

‘I don’t want to go at all.’

‘She’ll hold you if you’re afraid.’

He was forced to go up and pay his sixpence and the pony recognised him if the girl did not. She insisted on walking beside him.

‘They’re my orders,’ she said. ‘I’m responsible. You can take it or leave it.’

He was led round the lake’s edge in humiliation. His face burning with embarrassment, he dismounted and threw himself on to the grass while Derek had his turn. Yet, despite the anxieties and indignities, he clung greedily to this casual encounter, his first meeting with another boy, free of the incidence of hovering adults. He tried to make the most of the opportunity to discover a great deal that he needed to know, and doggedly asked his questions and listened with respect to Derek’s terse replies.

‘You swear a lot, don’t you?’

‘Yep.’

‘Do you like school?’ (He could not ask, ‘What is school like?’)

‘No.’

‘Do the bigger boys bully you?’

‘They better not try it on.’

Derek’s father, mother, and auntie were now seen coming away from the house. The boys hid behind a tree until they had disappeared into a tunnel of wistaria which led to a grotto.

‘Now they’ve come out, we can go in,’ said Derek. ‘You don’t have to pay extra so we might as well take a quick butcher’s.’

A ‘quick butcher’s’ sounded vaguely brutal to Arthur but he would not demean himself by asking for translations of slang.

‘I’ll stay out here,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot to go inside. I’m not interested in houses. My father might be in there.’

‘If he is, he’ll have gone to the front by now. We can hang about at the back so no one sees us.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Are you afraid of your father?’

‘No.’

‘Well then …’

He went towards the house as if hypnotised by the older boy. Waiting wretchedly for the appalling moment when he would meet his tutor’s eye, and to delay his discovery and disgrace, he stood behind two fat women and tried to merge with their swarm of children.

Mr Gilliat had become rather tangled up and confused with the queue and most people were simply drifting through at their own pace, not listening to him. The group which he had gathered about him stayed only from courtesy and listened with a sense of rebellion, eyeing with envy and reproach those who had escaped. Too slowly they were taken down the long gallery, past one Duchess after another, by Romney, by Gainsborough, by Sargent.

‘The mistress of the Third Duke, by Lely,’ said Mr Gilliat, standing coyly before the portrait.

‘That means they weren’t married,’ Derek whispered. ‘She was breaking the law all right. What a mug, I ask you! She looks like a bloody horse.’

‘Lady Constance Considine, the present Duchess, before her marriage,’ said Mr Gilliat. They all gazed up at Arthur’s mother. ‘Lovely gold tints in her hair,’ one fat woman said. ‘The lace is quite life-like.’ ‘She looks half asleep,’ said someone else, and Arthur bowed his head.

Mr Gilliat drew them on. He was almost hysterical with fatigue and with the failure of all his little jokes. Like cows they herded together, his unworthy audience, gazing blankly, mute and stupid. He felt like taking a stick
and whacking their rumps. His domed and nearly bald head glistened with sweat, his hands flapped and gesticulated and he smiled until his face was stiff.

‘Proper pansy,’ one young woman murmured to another.

All the time Arthur managed to conceal himself behind the fat women; but Mr Gilliat was no longer looking at the crowd, could meet the bovine stares no more.

The Haunted Bedroom with its legend of scandal and tragedy interested only Arthur from whom such frightening stories had been kept. The others stared dully at the worn brocade hangings and at the priedieu where some wanton forebear had been strangled while she was praying – presumably for the forgiveness of her sins. A burden of vice and terror was descending upon poor Arthur. The best that any of his ancestors had done was to be arrogant in battle. They were painted against backgrounds of carnage, standing, with curls blowing and armour shining, among contorted and dying horses.

Mr Gilliat now brought them to the partition chambers. Here, he explained, was an ancient, creaking apparatus which could lift one wall in its entirety so that eighteenth-century house parties might be diverted by having a curtain, as it were, raised without warning to disclose their friends’ discomfiture and deshabille. Arthur felt shame to hear of such behaviour and he did not wonder that these rooms were usually locked. Scenes of cruel embarrassment he could imagine, obscene hordes of mockers in night-caps and ruffled wraps jeering at sudden exposure, invading the privacy of their fellows’ undressing or praying or making love.

This last possibility Mr Gilliat did not suggest. He merely dwelt laughingly upon the picture of an imaginary lady discovered without her wig – bad enough, thought Arthur.

Derek moved closer to him and murmured: ‘Yes, and people might be … you know.’

‘Rather childish,’ someone said. ‘They might have had something better to do with their time.’

Arthur felt stifled and frightened.

‘My feet!’ a woman complained.

They were nearly at the end, had wound through the core of the house and now were to descend the other side of the horse-shoe staircase.

‘Fancy keeping it clean,’ one of the fat women said. She stopped to run a finger along the carved banister and Arthur drew up close behind her.

‘Very tiring,’ they said, coming out into the fresh air again.

‘Where the dickens have you been?’ shouted Derek’s father, pushing into the crowd. ‘Wasting our time; worrying your mother? Don’t answer me back, my lad, or you’ll get a taste of my hand.’

Disillusioned, Arthur watched the boy pushed on ahead, nagged and ranted at. He took it in silence. He did not tell his father where to get off, but kept his eyes averted. ‘Where have you been?’ cried his mother. ‘We’ve been beside ourselves.’ He straightened the row of fountain-pens in his pocket, looked nervous and meek, did not glance back at Arthur, who could not bear to witness this sudden change in him and turned away in the opposite direction.

The Duchess went to her bath as the last visitors departed. Although she had kept to her room, she felt bruised and buffeted and contaminated. ‘The noise!’ she said, pressing her fingers to her temples and thrusting back her beautiful golden hair. ‘I tried to be brave,’ she told her maid.