Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs (9 page)

“You been busy?”

He nodded. “Not bad. Particularly running up to Christmas.”

“Funny, really, isn’t it…the major Christian festival of the year and people come here to buy things that very positively have nothing to do with Christianity.”

Silver shrugged. “I’m cool with that.”

“Me too.”

He indicated the cork board. “You thinking of enrolling in something? I’m doing a course in transcendental meditation. He’s really good, the guy who leads it.”

Jude shook her head. “I know the basics. Don’t need to take a course.”

“No.” He blinked at her, clearly interested, but too laid-back actually to ask why she’d come.

“In fact, I was trying to trace someone. Girl I came in here with once. Probably last September, October…Name’s Tamsin.”

He shook his head. “Lot of people come through, Jude.”

“I know. Tall, blonde girl…very pale…very pretty…”

“Oh, now that does ring a bell. She was ill, wasn’t she?”

“Chronic fatigue syndrome.”

“Yes, I do remember. Because she came in with you that time, and then, only a few days later, she was here again, on her own.”

“Oh? What was she after?”

“She was looking for some books, you know, on the relationship between mind and body. I pointed out a few titles for her.”

“Did she buy any?”

“She got Setting
Free the Soul
.”

“Charles Hilton?”

“Right.”

Jude looked at the board. One card was larger than the others and better printed. Beneath a picture of a large country house, she read:

Weekend Breaks for the Body and the Mind

 

SANDALLS MANOR WESTRIDGE

Get Close to Nature and Close to Your Own Nature

Find the Self That Sometimes Can Get Lost

 

Proprietors: Charles and Anne Hilton

There was a Brighton-area phone number. Jude looked at Silver.

“Did Tkmsin know about this?”

“Yes. I pointed it out to her.” Jude nodded grimly.

S
ilver had given her a brochure for Sandalls Manor and Jude looked at it in the taxi on the way there. She knew Carole would happily have given her a lift, but she still felt that this part of the investigation should be private.

The TUesday morning was clear, the green of the Downs and the blue of the sky brittle in their brightness. Outside the car, Jude knew the cold would sting her cheeks. They were driving north of Brighton, where West Sussex and East Sussex meet and the Downs change identity, flattening out in preparation for mixing into the Weald of Kent.

The Sandalls brochure, like the card in Soul Nourishment, was expensively produced. It wasn’t aimed at dispossessed hippies; instead it offered a taste of New Age attitudes to rich city dwellers.

Is your life so busy you haven’t time to know you’re alive? Have success and materialism taken away your identity as a human being? Have you lost your relationship with the earth that bore you and that nurtures you still?

If that’s the case, then the Sandalls Manor experience could be for you. On one of our Midweek or Weekend Breaks, get back in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. What’s more, get back in tune with your own rhythms. Spend some time with the self that you want to spend time with.

Sandalls Manor is set in the splendour of the South Downs, an area rich in history and spiritualism. Leave the cares of the city behind and look at nature as if for the first time. With small groups of like-minded people, enjoy vigorous—but not too vigorous—walks in some of England’s most beautiful countryside. Then, with your appetite sharpened by all that fresh air, sit down to a nourishing organic dinner, lovingly prepared from the freshest local ingredients by our award-winning chef.

And, while the concerns of your body are being catered for, we do not neglect your more spiritual dimension. You’re under no obligation to participate, but during your stay there will be a regular programme of classes in meditation, relaxation, yoga, body-mapping, soul-journeying and other consciousness-raising exercises. All of these are conducted by Charles Hilton, a fully qualified Jungian psychotherapist and teacher, whose book
Setting Free the Soul
has become an international bestseller.

Sandalls Manor may help you to shed your other addictions, but you’ll certainly find its own atmosphere addictive. Many of our guests come back time and again, knowing that they’ll leave, as one participant put it, ‘feeling that I’d just had a full MOT on my Body and on my Soul’. Sandalls Manor can provide that kind of cleansing experience for you too.

Arrive as the person who gives you problems.

Leave as the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

There was then a list of dates and prices. The latter confirmed Jude’s opinion that Sandalls Manor certainly was an experience for the well-heeled.

The house, approached by a long gravel drive, was impressive. It had been the centre-point of an extensive farm, owned by Anne Hilton’s parents in the days when farming was both respectable and profitable. They’d sold most of the land, leaving their only daughter extremely well provided for when they died within three months of each other. At the time of their deaths they had assumed she would soon marry one of her own kind, ex-Army perhaps, and stay at Sandalls Manor, breeding children and golden retrievers.

Had they known that Anne would end up marrying Charles Hilton, her parents would have turned in their graves with enough vigour to power the National Grid.

She’d met him through a friend who, as Anne herself put it, ‘had gone a bit doolally’ and set out to ‘find her soul’. Since most of the people Anne mixed with were unconcerned about whether they had souls or not so long as there was plenty of champers, at first her friend’s quest seemed ‘an absolute hoot’. But all that changed when she accompanied her ‘doolally’ friend to a north London literary institute, where a session on ‘soul-searching’ was being conducted by Charles Hilton.

It was love at first sight—certainly as far as Anne was concerned. If the subject ever arose—and they were the kind of couple who brought it up with regrettable frequency—Charles maintained that he’d felt exactly the same.

But Jude, not normally given to cynicism, questioned the truth of his claim. She had the blasphemous thought that, for Charles, it might have been love at second sight, once he had found out about Sandalls Manor and the generous provisions Anne’s parents had made for her.

She also found it hard to take at face value the seam-lessly perfect—though childless—marriage about which the Hiltons went on so much. There were suggestions that Charles was not above taking advantage of the emotional one-to-one situations in which he frequently found himself with young women. His recurrent travels abroad on conference and teaching assignments provided him with plentiful opportunities, and sometimes he came back from these surrounded by a whiff of rumour.

Under normal circumstances, Jude was extremely resistant to rumour, but in this case she gave it credence. Once, when they’d been alone doing a co-counselling exercise, Charles Hilton had made a pass at her—so unambiguous that it was in fact more of a pounce than a pass. She had dealt summarily with the advance, pointing out to Charles that he was married, that she didn’t fancy him at all, and that, even if he had been attractive to her, the manner of his approach would very quickly have cancelled that out.

But that moment of embarrassment gave them a history and even, Jude felt, gave her a sense of power over him. There was always the potential threat that she might tell Anne. It was for that reason that Jude had arrived unannounced at Sandalls Manor that Tuesday morning. She felt confident Charles Hilton would make the time to see her.

She paid the cab driver, but agreed that he’d come to pick her up in an hour, unless she gave him a call on her mobile to make other arrangements. He looked up at the impressive frontage of Sandalls Manor and shook his head wryly. “Number of loonies I’ve brought up to this place you wouldn’t believe.”

Jude was gratified that what he’d said presumably meant he didn’t include her in the category. “What do they do up here then?” she asked, faux naive.

“You name it. Frolicking around naked in the summer, painting themselves, banging drums, screaming and shouting a lot. Down in Lewes,” he confided, “I’ve heard people say they’re into black magic.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes.” He chuckled. “So if I come back in an hour and you’re not here…I’ll know you’ve been used as a human sacrifice, won’t I, darling?”

He was still chuckling as his car sped off in an unnecessary flurry of gravel.

T
hough in many ways run like a hotel, Sandalls Manor kept its front door closed and Jude had to ring the bell. Anne Hilton came to open it. Jude had met Charles’s wife before, but she didn’t expect to be remembered.

She was right. There was no recognition in the woman’s blue eyes as she uttered a deterrently interrogative ‘Good morning?’

Anne Hilton was a large woman, designed for the heavy labour that had supported her family in previous generations. Although dressed in a long purple crushed-velvet dress, she would have looked more comfortable in a tweed skirt, jumper and pearls.

“Good morning. My name’s Jude.” She spoke breathlessly, as if in the grip of anxiety. “There’s something I need to talk to Charles about.”

The approach had been carefully pitched. Charles Hilton, as a psychotherapist, would have a lot of patients unknown to his wife. And, though Anne’s natural instinct might have been to send such unexpected arrivals packing, her husband would have instructed her to be more careful. He dealt with damaged people, and knew how destructive rejection could be to some of them. The last thing he wanted professionally was a suicide on his hands.

“It’s extremely inconvenient,” said Anne Hilton, asserting what she really felt, before grudgingly standing back to let Jude enter the hall. “Charles is busy conducting a session at the moment. You’ll have to wait. And he won’t be able to give you long when they do break.”

“I won’t need long. I just need a quick word with him.”

“Do sit down.” Anne Hilton indicated a hard wooden settle. Jude wasn’t going to be allowed to feel welcome. No invitation to wait in a sitting room. She must be reminded of the inconvenience she was causing.

“You haven’t done any of the courses here at Sandalls Manor, have you?”

Jude shook her head.

“You should try one. Charles would be much more able to help you in a structured session than he will in a few moments’ chat. Have a look at some of our literature.” She thrust across a handful of brochures. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve things to do. They break at half past eleven. I’ve got to get their coffee ready.”

The way this was said made it clear that Jude wasn’t going to be offered a cup. Ungraciously, Anne Hilton marched off to the kitchen, closing the door behind her with emphatic force.

Jude looked round the hall of Sandalls Manor. The door Anne had gone through was marked ‘Kitchen’; another closed door was identified as the ‘Karma Room’. A framed painting of some Indian guru was fixed to the wall and in the stairwell hung a circle of metal tubes with a suspended wooden clapper in the middle. But these were the only concessions to the house’s New Age incarnation. Otherwise the furniture and decor were solid and respectable, the kind passed from generation to generation of gentleman farmers. A redoubtable mahogany staircase dominated the space. Through an open door—in contrast to the promise of the sign reading ‘Chakra Room’—large chintzy sofas and swagged brocade curtains could be seen. The impression was as far from the shabby mysticism of Soul Nourishment as could be imagined.

But for the bonus of a little light therapy thrown in, Sandalls Manor was like any other country house hotel, and this was borne out by the ‘literature’ that Jude had been given. As in the brochure she had read in the taxi, all the fliers and photocopies of magazine articles emphasized the level of comfort offered by ‘the Sandalls Manor experience’.

One of them identified the ‘award-winning chef as Anne Hilton herself. Jude got the feeling that Anne was the dynamo behind the operation. She enjoyed running an upmarket hotel. Had she married the sort of man her parents had wanted for her, Sandalls Manor would have offered activities such as horse-riding and clay-pigeon-shooting. It was only because she had fallen in love with Charles Hilton that soul journeys were on the agenda.

A muffled scream interrupted Jude’s thoughts, and reminded her that a soul journey was taking place at that very moment. But a scream at Sandalls Manor was not a cause for anxiety. Indeed, Charles Hilton would regard screaming and hysterics as a validation of what he was trying to achieve. Inside the Karma Room the participants were getting in touch with their inner children, and if those confrontations undammed some repressed emotions, then the therapy was working.

Jude looked round the hall, quickly to be rewarded by the sight she was expecting. A box of tissues stood on a highly polished dresser. A new sheet was fanned out in readiness for the next participant to be overcome by tears.

Jude felt sure that the Karma Room and the Chakra Room would be equipped with similar boxes. In therapeutic processes like those conducted by Charles Hilton, tissues were always a discreet presence.

There was a clatter at the door. Jude turned to see a little cataract of letters tumble from the letter-box slit. Mostly completed booking forms, she reckoned. More exhausted city dwellers applying to sit out the rat race for a few days at Sandalls Manor.

Curiosity gnawed at her. She looked across at the kitchen and the Karma Room. Both doors remained resolutely shut.

Jude was always obedient to strong instincts and something told her she was in a significant moment. She moved swiftly to the front door. With her foot, she spread the uneven pile of letters. Most of them were, as expected, bookings sent in reply-paid envelopes.

But one of them wasn’t. She looked at it closely to double-check, then crossed back to sit on her hard settle.