The Belting Inheritance (2 page)

“I know,” I said. “From the Christmas cards.”

Lady W drew her brows together. Uncle Miles popped up with a jerky movement, shook my hand, said “How do you do, Christopher,” whispered loudly in Lady W’s ear, “Father’s family,” and sat down again. She nodded.

“I have been in communication with your father’s family, and they would be agreeable to this arrangement.” From the little I knew of them I could imagine that they would not welcome the idea of looking after a twelve-year-old boy. “What do you say, Christopher?”

I had wept when I first heard of my parents’ deaths, but this was the first time after hearing the news that I felt like weeping again. I was faced with an act of choice, but I knew even then that in any real sense I had no choice at all. What would become of me if I said no? It was not that I wanted to say no, but that I felt the humiliation of being a thing rather than a person, a thing that was not wanted by “my father’s family,” but that Lady W was prepared to accept. I looked down at the floor and mumbled something.

“What’s that?” Lady W asked fiercely.

I managed not to cry as I said, “All right.”

“I like a boy who can make up his mind,” she said as she got up. Uncle Miles got up too, and no doubt he understood something of what I felt, for with the eye that was on the blind side of Lady W he gave me the most tremendous wink.

After that things seemed to happen as if I were in a dream. Outside, Mrs Parker had already packed my things, and Uncle Miles had been to our house, collected my games and toys and put them into a suitcase. Within a few minutes the Parkers’ front door had closed on me and I was stepping into an enormous old-fashioned Daimler, which had a speaking tube between the chauffeur (who disposed a little contemptuously of my small cases) and the back seats. I can remember perfectly that my feeling as I got into the car was one of regret that Billy Parker was at school, and could not be there to see me drive away.

The House and the People

What was Belting like? I have thought about the way in which I ought to describe it, without much success. At first I thought that I would extract the description of the house in Pevsner’s
Kent,
but Pevsner’s interest is naturally enough
in it as a Victorian Gothic eccentricity, and the account of spires and flying buttresses doesn’t bear any relation to what I saw and felt at the time. And since that is the really important thing, that is the way I have decided to put it down.

The Daimler drove through an entrance each side of which was guarded by a battered but formidable stone lion, down what seemed an endless tree-lined drive, clattered across a cattle grid, and debouched finally into a wide gravelled courtyard. My immediate reaction as I looked at the forbidding spires of the Victorian Gothic front that seemed to stretch endlessly upwards was that I was being taken to live in a church. I went very hesitantly inside, snatching off my school cap, and found myself in a great hall with enormous doors leading off it.

Almost straight ahead there was a winding staircase which led up to a gallery that ran round three sides of the first-floor landing. Bits of armour and out-of-date weapons – assagais, Zulu shields, old muskets, swords – lined the walls. In one corner was what I took to be a sentry box. In fact it housed the telephone, but for a long time I was afraid that somebody would leap out from it and attack me. But the thing I hated most was the prevailing gloom. The house was dark, Lady W was mean in small matters, and at some time in the past she had been told that daylight lamps were better for the eyes than ordinary yellow electric light. The hall and all the corridors, both upstairs and down, were bathed in a funereal blue glow. When I was upstairs, in a bedroom which I had been told would be mine and which was four times the size of my room at Woking, I sat on the bed, looked round the vast spaces and at my toys which had been dumped in the middle of the floor, and began to cry. I was crying when Uncle Miles came in.

“What’s up?” He looked round. “It is a bit of a barracks, I agree. But you’ll get used to it, you know. Nice to have a bit of space, really. I say, what’s this?”

I sniffed. “It’s a mechanical bowler.”

“Is it, now. How does it work?”

He was down on the carpet examining the bowler, and I joined him. We found the mechanical batsman, the fielders and the wicket, Uncle Miles pushed aside a section of the carpet, and we began to play. His enjoyment of the game, as of all children’s games, was prodigious. “Be careful, here comes a devilish googly,” he would say, or “Oh, good shot, sir, right through the covers…a classic off drive…brilliantly caught, he’s a fine field, that man.” Crouched on the floor, his bald head shining and his face intent, he played this cricket game with me until there was the sound of a gong. He leapt up.

“Good God, young Christopher, it’s dinner. We must go down.”

“Can I go down with you?”

“I don’t think exactly
with
me, that wouldn’t quite do, you see, Mamma wouldn’t want you to be under my wing as you might say. But supposing you
follow
me at a short distance, keep me in sight, eh?” He gave me another of his winks.

Emboldened by the wink, I said, “Who’ll be there?”

“Mamma, of course. You don’t want to let Mamma worry you. She won’t eat you, though she may look as if she will.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “My brother Stephen. And his wife. That’s the lot.”

While he had been saying this, Uncle Miles had been splashing water over his face from the wash basin in one corner of the room in a rather ineffectual way. Now he straightened his tie and smoothed down his little fringe of hair.

“You live here, don’t you?”

“Yes, I live here.” There was nothing unfriendly in the way the words were spoken, but somehow I asked no more.

Perhaps this would be a good place to put in a few words about family relationships. A family tree is always boring, and anyway there’s no need for it, but it may be a good thing to set out just who everybody is, because as will be seen in a few pages it is important to the story. Lady Wainwright was the widow of a general who had been knighted for his services during the First World War, and had died in the Second. She had had four children, all boys. The two eldest, Hugh and David, had been killed in the war, so that only Stephen and Miles remained. As to my relationship with them, I have already said that my mother was Lady Wainwright’s niece. That is as clear as I can make it, and I hope it is clear enough.

I can remember very well dinner on that first night, not the things we ate but what seemed to me the enormous room with its dark oak panelling, the pictures staring down from the walls, and Thorne handing round the food. I was uncertain what knives and forks I should use and that bothered me a little, but what really worried me was that a man should be hovering about, as I felt, to make sure that everything on the plate was eaten. I very soon came to know that I was misjudging old Thorne, who was a sort of general factotum playing the parts that in other days would have gone to several servants. Apart from Thorne, there was a succession of daily helps, most of them young, and Lady W’s maid Peterson, a starchy lady with a moustache. She was a general female factotum as Thorne was a male one, and the running of Belting devolved largely upon them, for apart from occasional bursts of enthusiasm, Lady W took little interest in household affairs.

We sat down five to table, as Uncle Miles had said we should. I did not take to Stephen or Clarissa, and I saw at once that they did not take to me. I have never seen a man so tight and boxed-in as Uncle Stephen. I called him that, since if I was to call Cousin Miles Uncle, it was only natural to apply the same name to Cousin Stephen. The tightness came partly from the clothes he wore, stiff white collars that seemed always half a size too small for him, ties knotted to strangulation point, and suits that managed to be at the same time baggy and tight, baggy at his thin chest and tight at the hips, where he was big without being at all a fat man. The parting in his hair might have been made by a knife, and beneath it his face was white and intense, sharp nosed and thin lipped. When he spoke it was as though words were butterflies which had escaped from his mouth, and which he was trying with sharp snaps to retrieve. There was something about the passion with which Stephen tore a bread roll into pieces, the savage, loving care with which he dissected a piece of fish, that remains with me still.

Clarissa was a red-faced loud-voiced woman who was somehow, for all the loudness, not in the least jolly. She wore rather tweedy clothes, and was passionately fond both of hunting, and of breeding bull terriers. Perhaps it was in sympathy with the bull terriers that her own legs were bowed. I thought at the time that I had never seen anybody like her before in my life, and this was an accurate observation, for there are no such people in Woking.

Dinner could not in any case have been a comfortable meal for me, but it was made worse by a sense that I was on trial, that Uncle Stephen and his wife were waiting for me to make some mistake that would exclude me from Belting for ever. I subconsciously realised that Lady W and Uncle Miles were on my side, and that Uncle Stephen and his wife were against me. I did not understand, however, that their wishes were of no importance, since what Lady W wanted was what happened at Belting.

After dinner we went into the drawing-room. The whole of Belting seemed to me then so strange that this was no odder than the rest, although I did think that it was extraordinarily cluttered with furniture. It was in fact a remarkable room, for Lady W had preserved it as nearly as possible as a drawing-room of the late eighteen-eighties. It was a kind of museum piece, except that this museum was lived in. There was a dark flock wallpaper, the curtains were of dark red velvet with tassels and a fringe, above the carved mahogany chimneypiece there was an ornamental mirror. Vases and ornaments stood everywhere, in all sorts of niches and on little tables. There were four highly decorative clocks, two glass domes containing wax flowers and fruit, mahogany tables covered with dark fringed cloths and inlaid mahogany cabinets. The fireside and wing chairs were, however, very comfortable, and Lady W had so far succumbed to modernity as to permit electric lighting – and not daylight lamps, either – to replace gas.

Miles and Stephen excused themselves after they had drunk coffee, and Clarissa went off to look at something in the stables, so that I was left alone with Lady W. She told me to come and sit beside her, and I went over and sat on a cushion at her feet.

“Do you think you will like it here, Christopher?” She checked herself abruptly. “That’s a stupid question, don’t bother to answer. Let me tell you something about Belting. I love it myself, and we can all talk about the things we love.”

She told me then that Belting had been the family home of her husband, General Wainwright, and that he had brought her there when they were first married before the First World War, an unimaginably long time ago. She talked about him, and about the great work on the Egyptian Wars that he had been engaged on for years when he died in nineteen-forty.

I interrupted her. “That was Arabi, wasn’t it? And he was beaten at Tel-el-Kebir.”

My knowledge came only from a history book that we happened to have at home, but she was delighted. She pressed my hands together in her two hot old ones, and said that I should help her with the book – for since her husband’s death she had dedicated herself to the task of finishing it. She had said that I might wander round the room and so, while she was telling me the history of the house I did so. I looked at the wax flowers which fascinated me, and at a small stereopticon in which pictures appeared to be three dimensional. Upon the top of a carved mahogany grand piano there were a number of photographs in frames. She told me to bring over one, which showed two young men in uniform. When I brought it to her she sat looking at it with a face like a mask. Above it her white hair, which I had not seen beneath the hat when she first came to see me, was piled up with wonderful care.

“Hugh and David,” she said. “My two elder sons. They were both killed in the war.”

Looking at the photograph I could see a likeness to her in the beaky noses and in the eyes. I asked what Stephen and Miles had done in the war.

“Stephen was in a
reserved occupation.
And Miles – Miles has never been any use. Do you play the piano?” I shook my head. “Hugh played the piano, that one over there. It hasn’t been touched since he died.”

“When did he – ”

“He was killed soon after D-Day, in France. David was a bomber pilot. He was shot down. Sometimes I think I died with them.” She said almost angrily, “Put them away. Put them back where they belong.”

Now that I pause to re-read all this the whole thing seems to me immensely Victorian, and I suppose that what existed at Belting was the shadow of a Victorian situation. Lady W’s determination to perpetuate the glories of the Wainwrights was always touched by her knowledge that this kind of thing was out of date, just as she knew that there was something ridiculous about preserving the drawing-room as a museum. She knew that it was absurd, but she was serious about it too, and she exerted on Stephen and Miles the power that a strong personality has over weaker ones. Stephen worked in a desultory way as partner in a firm of surveyors in Folkestone a few miles away, and had lived at Belting all his life. When he married it must have seemed to him natural that his wife should make her home there too. Miles had come to live there near the end of the war, in circumstances made known to me later on. In one sense it was true that they couldn’t get away from Lady W, but in another way they were simply waiting for her to die.

Her husband had been killed in one of the early German raids on London, and he had died without making a will, so that the house and all the money had come to her. I gathered that there was a great deal of money, although she never said so; or talked about it in detail. But Thorne, of whom I saw a lot in my early days at Belting, once told me that General Wainwright could have bought up the whole surrounding countryside if he’d a mind to, and both Stephen and Miles left me in no doubt that there was a lot of money, and that it would come to them. I gathered that when she died they expected that the house would go to Stephen as the elder, and that the rest of the estate would be divided between them. I once heard Clarissa complaining bitterly to Stephen of all the work she had to do. Why couldn’t there be a proper cook, proper housemaids? Such things were obtainable even in these days, and goodness knows there was enough money. Why didn’t Stephen say something? Stephen glanced at me and said that little pitchers had long ears.

As far as I know, neither Stephen nor Miles dared to speak to Lady W about the money, or to criticise her in any way. She made little secret of the fact that she despised them both, and that her heart had been given to her two elder sons. The moustached Peterson told me one day of her reaction when she heard of both their deaths, within a matter of weeks of each other.

“She shut herself up for two weeks, and she never ate or drank in all that time. And when she did come out, her hair that was black with just a few streaks of grey in it, had turned pure white.”

That turning of the hair white, which looks slightly comic and implausible now that I put it down on paper, impressed me greatly at the time. Stephen and Clarissa had no children, and I think it was partly for this reason that Lady W “adopted” me. I put the word in inverted commas because there was no actual adoption, nor any firm arrangement ever made about my position. If she had got tired of me she could, I suppose, have cast me out, although I am sure she would never have been guilty of that inhumanity. She was a possessive and lonely woman, and in many ways far from an admirable one, but she was never anything but kind to me. I suppose she enjoyed being able to talk to me about Hugh and David, as she did during school holidays, when I helped her with research into the Egyptian Wars. This “research” – the word again deserves inverted commas – was carried out in the Map Room (or as Uncle Miles called it the Pam Moor), a bleak cold room with a north light, which had spread out over the floor a great panorama of the positions at Tel-el-Kebir. There was a large expanse of sand, there were Arabi’s encampments, there were all the preparations made for Wolseley’s decisive night attack. General Wainwright had managed to buy a big collection of Victorian lead soldiers and guns that were approximately of the right regiments (Arabi’s troops, I’m afraid, were of a motley kind, but there were a great many of them), and the whole layout really looked very fine. It was a thing to delight the heart of a boy, and I spent hours with the panorama, imagining possible moves that might have been made by either side. Battle prints of the Crimean War looked down upon me, and so did sketches and photographs of General Wainwright, a mild and even gentle-looking man.