More Than You Know (2 page)

And then there was her own dance, so much discussed and planned. It had passed far too quickly, a magical fairy-tale evening that had just drifted by without any clear memories of anything, except fragments: the perfect June night, the garden filled with roses, the white marquee so gorgeously dressed up, the crowds and crowds of friends, the band
playing exactly what she wanted, the endless champagne, her father flushed with pride, her mother kissing her and telling her how proud of her they were. She’d danced and danced, literally till dawn, with an endless flow of charming young men, and then fallen into bed, amazed that she wasn’t drunker, considering how much champagne she had consumed.

It was the crown on a wonderful summer, and she wished it need never end.

Her mother was pale but happy the next morning, relieved at the success of the dance, relieved it was finally over. It had occupied her thoughts and fed her anxieties for almost a year; but it seemed to have been worth it. Worth the bank loan Adrian had had to take out, the sleepless nights, the endless work. But it was all an investment in Eliza’s future, and not even to be questioned.

Having her dance at home in the country, rather than in London, had saved a lot, and was so much nicer, everyone had (apparently genuinely) said.

Eliza’s dress had been from Bellville Sassoon again—but Sarah had had her own dress run up by her dressmaker, and Adrian’s tailcoat being a little worn and slightly out-of-date was desirable rather than the reverse. Nothing more common than spanking-new evening clothes on the older generation. Adrian had bought his coat soon after they had first met; she had invited him to a dance in the country and, seeing where Sarah Cunninghame’s infatuation with him just could be leading, Adrian had considered it a sound investment for two weeks’ salary, and twenty-five years later it still looked superb.

And Charles, of course, darling Charles had looked brilliantly handsome as always; he had danced with her not once but twice, telling her how lovely she looked, how proud of her he was. Not many sons would do that.

And as a final coating of icing on the cake, both
Tatler
and
Queen
had sent photographers.

“Hallo, Mummy. Pleased with your night’s work?”

“Oh, Charles, hallo. Darling, you look tired. Sit down and I’ll get you some breakfast.”

“No, I’m fine. Had some earlier. Well, it all went well, didn’t it? And Eliza looked jolly nice.”

“Didn’t she? And seemed to enjoy herself.”

Sarah smiled at him: her firstborn and the great love of her life. After Adrian, of course. She could hardly believe he was twenty-one, and out in the world. Well, he’d have to do his National Service first before finally settling down to his career. He was hoping to go overseas: “Hong Kong, or maybe Gib. See a bit of the world before I have to buckle down in the city.”

“Darling,” she said, patting his shoulder affectionately, “I shall miss you.”

“Oh, nonsense. Time’ll fly by. I’m looking forward to it, actually.”

“And you’ll be called up soon, now you’ve left Oxford?”

“Yes. It should be fun.”

“I believe it’s awfully tough.”

“Can’t be worse than the first half term at prep school.”

“Charles! Were you really so unhappy?”

“Well, a bit. I was homesick. And quite hungry; the food was awful. But it didn’t do me any harm, did it? God, the old place looked nice last night, didn’t it?” he added.

“Didn’t it? Your grandfather would have been so happy.”

The old place was an exquisite small Palladian villa, built at the top of a gentle rise, smiling graciously down on the village of Wellesley, a little to the south of Marlborough and looking just slightly—although beautifully—out of place there, like a fashionable woman wearing her couture clothes to walk down the village street. Built in 1755, it had a charming legend. A young but very wellborn architect called Jonathan Becket was at a soiree one evening in Bath. There he met and fell in love with the beautiful Lady Anne Cunninghame, and she with him; married to Sir Ralph Cunninghame, she was the young and dreadfully spoiled daughter of the eccentric Earl of Grasmere, used to having her own way in all things and not in the least in love with her middle-aged husband.

Sir Ralph could refuse her nothing; and when she spoke longingly of a “fine house, created precisely for me,” young Becket got his commission and created a breathtaking place, not large set against the grand houses of its day (a mere ten bedrooms, and only three receiving rooms), but very beautiful with its glorious south front “greeting the morning sun,” as Lady Anne described it in her journal, and with its classical pillars, its gently curving steps, its wide terrace, its exquisite orangery, set some five hundred yards from the house. “It is just for me,” she went on, “created to suit my beauty, as my darling says.”

Her darling (presumably Jonathan Becket, rather than Sir Ralph) went on to serve her with a wonderful park behind the house and a small sloping grass sward to the front of it; most of the park had now been sold, leaving only ten acres for the present-day incumbents.

The house was christened Summer Court; it was to be largely a summer residence, for Sir Ralph liked the bustle of Bath, and she saw herself holding her own small court there; the name was contracted to a single word by one of her more modest descendants.

It was hugely uncomfortable: impossible to heat satisfactorily. When Eliza arrived for her first term as a boarder at Heathfield, she was astonished at the other girls’ complaints about the cold dormitories, the draughty study bedrooms, the “dribbly” showers. It seemed the height of luxury to her, accustomed as she was to waking to ice on the inside of her windows and a four-inch bath deemed disgracefully wasteful. But she adored the house. It had stayed with the Cunninghames through ten generations; Sarah’s mother, the last Lady Cunninghame, had been the first in the line to fail to produce an heir. She had produced only one child, and that was Sarah. Thus it was that Sarah’s father, the ninth baronet, had been forced, his signature dragging with dreadful reluctance across the paper, to entail it to her. Or rather, to her and her husband. It was better than selling it, which was the only other option. And Sarah did love it.

“Never let it go” had been his last words to her; and she promised. It was owned by a trust, and they were merely its tenants for life; it was slowly bankrupting them. But keeping it was what mattered, and the children loved it as much as she did.

The fact that the estate was far too small to support anything more than rabbit shooting and a few pheasants didn’t apparently trouble
Charles; but Eliza once overheard two of the fellow undergraduates he’d invited down for a few days discussing “Charles’s Brideshead fantasies” and that they’d expected something ten times its size: “Drives and lodges, that sort of thing.”

There was no proper drive, only a rather pretty tree-lined avenue up from the village, and certainly no lodges. The house had been designed to stand as part of the village. But the charming stone cottages, pretty Norman church, medieval duck pond, and seventeenth-century inn that had set the house off so prettily in 1755 had become extended by a sprawling growth of mock-Tudor bungalows to one side and to the left another of council houses—albeit it for the most part with lovely gardens—a school (late Victorian, not beautiful), a bus shelter, a children’s playground, and a shop.

But it was a proper village; it had a heart. The school was thriving, the church more than half-full most Sundays, and the inn (now the White Hart pub) busy; most people knew most people. And the Fullerton-Clark family were popular—the children had all gone to the village school for the first few years of their education, Sarah opened the grounds several times a year—most famously for the Easter-egg hunt, in which the whole village took part—and Adrian did his bit, as he put it, by drinking in the White Hart whenever he could.

The village had even been made to feel part of Eliza’s dance; the local band had played a set, and the fireworks had been let off on the village green rather than at the back of the house.

Yes, Sarah thought, her father would have been very happy last night, happy with what she had managed to do.

And even forgiven her for marrying Adrian. Perhaps.

1958

S
OMEONE WAS CRYING IN THE DARKNESS
. M
ORE THAN ONE, ACTUALLY
. God, it was like being back at prep school, Charles thought. And he hadn’t cried even then. It was absurd, blubbing like that. And this hadn’t been that bad a day.

They’d come in lorries, a wildly assorted mass of very young men, mostly eighteen years old, to a depot called Blackdown, near Aldershot,
to do the compulsory duty to their Queen and country, two years of military training and experience known as National Service. Charles had sat smoking, offering his pack round to his neighbours, not talking much, all on the advice of a friend who had just survived this ordeal.

“For the first and probably the last time in your life your accent’ll be a disadvantage,” he had said, “so keep mum as much as you can until you get a bit stuck in.”

They’d arrived and been hustled out of the lorry against a background of interminable shouting; shouting and a lot of hustling went on all day. They’d been shown to their hut, allotted a bed, and then hustled off to another hut for kitting out, walking down a long line of tables bearing clothes and equipment, and piling up kit in their arms as they went. It all had to be stored in the iron wardrobes that stood next to every iron bed.

And then the haircut: the clippers run straight from the nape of the neck to the forehead and then a swift finish off round the sides. Charles had been appalled to see a couple of teddy boys, all swagger in the lorry, near to tears as their DAs, short for drake’s arse, drifted to the floor.

They had eaten that night in the canteen—pretty disgusting muck on tin plates, sausages, some burnt, some almost raw, a heap of oily onions, another heap of watery mash, followed by bread and jam. Charles, used to the horrors of public-school food, found it not too unbearable, but several of the boys silently scraped their still-full plates into the dustbins. Probably they were the ones crying now.

God, he wanted to pee. He eased himself out of bed and walked quietly down the hut, carefully avoiding looking at any beds in case he embarrassed one of the blubberers. Actually, why bother with the latrines—which had looked pretty disgusting—when outside would do? He slipped out of the hut, peed with huge relief into the darkness, and was just going back when he heard an amused cockney voice.

“That better?”

“Eh? Oh, yes, thanks.”

“I s’pose this is all a bit like your school, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, it is a bit.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard you public-school lot take to it all like ducks to water. Drakes, rather. Ciggy?”

“Oh—yes, thanks.”

Charles took a cigarette from the pack of Woodbines being offered.

“Talking of drakes, did you see that bloke crying as his hair came off?”

“I did, yes.”

“Quite a few crying in there now. Poor little mummy’s boys.” He held out his hand. “Matt Shaw.”

“Charles. Charles Clark.”

“Where you from, then, Charles?”

“Oh—Wiltshire.”

“Yeah? I’m from London. As no doubt you can hear.”

“Sort of,” said Charles carefully.

“What you been doing up till now then, Charles?”

“I’ve been at university.”

“Yeah? Thought you was a bit older than the rest of us. Oxford, I s’pose? Or Cambridge?”

“Oxford,” said Charles.

“Thought so.” He grinned at Charles. “As you can see I know all about the upper classes.”

Charles grinned back at him. He liked him. As far as he could make out in the half-light, Matt Shaw was rather good-looking. Dark hair—what was left of it—rather broad face, dark eyes, wide grin, and surprisingly good white teeth. Quite tall—a good six feet.