The Hardie Inheritance (14 page)

Had he made a mistake in leaving the law? As a young solicitor he had married the daughter of the senior partner, and his legal career seemed set fair. But as time passed he realized that he had no hope of advancement until his father-in-law should choose to retire. Trapped by the strength of his own expectations and Sheila's family feeling, he could neither look outside the partnership nor hope for senior status within it.

That was one of the factors which had persuaded him to take active control of The House of Hardie in 1929, after the death of Will Witney, its manager. He had not been trained for the task. His eldest brother, Frank, destined to inherit the business, had been killed in the war. Another brother – David's twin, Kenneth – had worked under Will Witney for a time; but his desertion from the army had made it impossible for him to stay in England. As for Philip, disabled by shell-shock and lung damage, he would never be strong enough to shoulder the responsibilities of running a business.

David had given the matter careful thought. The legal profession offered a safe career. The wine trade was risky – but for almost the first time in his life, he had decided to take a chance. Even more surprising was the fact that his reason was a sentimental one. David saw himself as the only member of the family competent to be a vintner. If The House of Hardie was to be saved, only he could save it. And then it would be inherited by his son, to continue through the generations for another two hundred years or more.

Neither his brothers nor his sister, as far as he could tell, understood that the strength of his family feeling was as great
as their own. It expressed itself differently, that was all. The House of Hardie had been handed down from father to son through many generations and it was his responsibility to continue the tradition. Greystones, more recently, had become part of the family heritage as well. Had the house belonged to him, he would never have been as selfish as Grace in refusing to offer it as security for a necessary loan. It would be a long time before he forgave her for that – and yet she sometimes appeared to think that he was the one who was being unreasonable.

More than anything else, Greystones was the cause of his dissatisfaction with his life. It ought to be his one day. The present position was quite ridiculous. Grace had no money to keep it up, and for years had not bothered even to try. Since her marriage the house had recovered a trace of its old dignity, but it was still absurd that a mansion which could, with care, have preserved its grandeur, should be owned by a woman who spent her life in workman's overalls chipping off bits of stone or wood.

He was realistic enough to see that there was nothing to be done for the moment. But he had spent years drawing up wills and trusts and settlements and felt no sentimentality in accepting that even his own closest relations must die eventually and in considering what then would be for the best. Greystones ought to come to him.

It was Grace, in a sense, who had condemned David himself to a suburban existence. The House of Hardie maintained premises not only in Pall Mall but also in Oxford's High Street. As the owner of a firm of such antiquity and prestige, he would only need to move to Oxford to become a big fish in a smaller pond of high-class trades, instead of representing merely one of many minor businesses in London. But he could not afford to buy a property on the scale of Greystones, and it would be unthinkable to live in the city in something unpretentious while his sister was lording it up on Shotover Hill.

Had she had a scrap of generosity or family feeling in her
body she would have invited him to bring his family to live in the house when he made the move from the law to the business. Goodness knows, there was room enough for them all. Common sense told David that the arrangement would never have worked and that Sheila would have been horrified at the idea of moving in with her mother-in-law. Nevertheless, the offer should have been made.

All these resentments could be borne as long as his sister remained a spinster, for even someone as eccentric as Grace would have recognized that a family home must stay in the family, and his own children were the only members of a younger generation of Hardies. But her marriage to Ellis Faraday had wrecked that last hope. Sooner or later the house would become the home of the Faradays and no longer of the Hardies. There was no chance that David or his children would ever inherit it. It was a disgraceful business.

How often it happens that a name which dominates the mind for reasons of either love or hate by coincidence forces itself on the attention in a quite different context. David had crossed Piccadilly by now and was walking up Cork Street when he was stopped in his tracks by a poster displayed in the porch of a gallery.

GRACE HARDIE
Recent Work

Astonished, he stared through the plate glass window. In the centre of the display area were a few of the immense shapes with which Grace had been amusing herself for years: carvings full of holes and twists, not representing anything recognizable at all. One of them at least he had seen in the walled garden at Greystones, used as a perch by birds on their way to attack the fruit. Surely no one would want to buy something so misshapen!

There were smaller carvings on view as well, mounted on pillars or in cases, and these he had not seen before. Curiosity
prompted him to push at the door, but it was locked. A private view party must only recently have ended, for the gallery staff were collecting wine glasses and bottles and packing them into boxes. There was no sign of Grace herself – but one of the gallery's occupants was familiar. Sitting at the reception desk and talking with animation into a telephone was Ellis Faraday.

Nothing could have persuaded Grace to attend her own private view. Only after much persuasion from Ellis had she agreed to hold a show at all. After experimenting with her shapes for so long without any thought of selling the finished works, she feared that both her enjoyment and her style might be affected if she began, even subconsciously, to take into account what a buyer might choose to own.

In the end she was persuaded that she had almost a duty to contribute publicly to the new movement in sculpture, in order that the tastes of art-lovers might gradually be educated. It was flattering, too, to think that she might be recognized as a sculptor and begin to establish a reputation. So Ellis had won that part of the argument. But the idea of being present to watch dozens of people sipping champagne as they glanced at her works and passed on without buying them – that was a form of rejection which she could not have endured.

Since Trish had become a member of the household supper was taken early, at six o'clock, allowing Grace time for an evening session of work if she chose. She was in the studio, twisting a ball of clay into miniature shapes, when her mother came to say that the telephone was ringing.

Mrs Hardie, approaching her seventieth year, was not at ease with the apparatus, which Ellis had installed when he first began to look for sitters in Oxford; but Grace had become familiar with its use many years earlier, when she worked in the High Street shop. Most of the calls made to Greystones were either for or from her husband, and this one was no exception.

‘Such an exciting evening!' Whether because of the excitement or merely the distortion caused by distance, Ellis's voice emerged at a higher pitch than usual. ‘I'm phoning from the gallery because I can't wait to tell you.'

‘Tell away, then.' It must mean that the private view had been a success. If that were the case, the credit must go to Ellis, for the show represented the end of a three-year campaign on his part. He had first of all devoted weeks to photographing her early works, whose large scale needed landscaped grounds to show them off at their best. He lit them dramatically so that the strength of the design was emphasized by shadows, and sometimes used the holes which were Grace's speciality as frames for a secondary subject.

The book which resulted, following fast on his studies of Patrick Faraday's buildings, established a reputation for Ellis himself. He was no longer merely a society portraitist: his new work was recognized as a form of art in its own right. But the book also achieved exactly the effect he had intended for Grace, arousing curiosity about this woman whose name nobody knew and whose work nobody had seen but who was producing pieces of such extraordinary power and originality.

Many of the photographs from the book would be hanging on the gallery walls at this moment to illustrate what was too big to be moved. The little maquettes from which her garden sculptures had developed were on show as well, together with four of the major pieces themselves. But Ellis had encouraged her to carve smaller pieces which could be displayed inside private houses; and it was when she had a sufficient collection of these that he had used his London contacts to arrange this one-man show. In spite of her refusal to attend, Grace was as eager to hear what was happening as he was to tell.

‘Well, someone bought the Figure of Eight within five minutes of the door opening. He made such a fuss about how he had to have it that it built up an atmosphere even before other people had got their first glass of champagne in their hands. You know, a kind of nervousness. Are they going to
miss their chance if they stop to think? I tell you, Grace, it felt as though the work were giving off electric shocks. And of course everyone wanted to know why you weren't here.'

‘I hope you didn't confess that it's simply because I'm a coward.'

‘No. I've been churning out a story about how you never come to London because you're working obsessively away in the country. There should be one or two stories in tomorrow's papers about this mysterious, reclusive genius.'

Grace was not at all sure that she wanted to feature in newspaper gossip columns, but Ellis gave her no time to protest before rushing on.

‘So two of the large pieces and five of the smaller ones have gone already. That's terrific for the first evening, Grace. And so many people expressed interest in one of the maquettes – the Breaking Wave – in spite of being told that it wasn't for sale, that I've said you'll get a bronze made of it, in an edition of twelve. That's possible, isn't it?'

‘Yes, I suppose so.' Grace's breath seemed to have been snatched away by the speed at which things were happening. Making a bronze involved foundry charges, so she had never considered the process before; but if the edition were to be subscribed before it was made, she would welcome the chance to explore the possibilities of a new material.

‘And there's another thing.' Ellis had not finished yet. ‘Oh, hold on a second.'

‘What's the matter?' asked Grace, as the pause lengthened.

‘Nothing. There was someone staring through the window as though he wanted to come in. Looked rather like your brother David.'

‘I don't see David as an art-lover. And he's never been able to make sense of my shapes. Did you say that
two
of the large ones had gone?'

‘Yes. The Second Pregnant Woman is the other one. Bought by a chap called Lawrence Ley. He's whatever doctors are called who deliver babies.'

‘An obstetrician?'

‘Yes. I knew I couldn't pronounce it. Rolling in money, I rather gather, and has his own clinic. Anyway, I'll give you a blow-by-blow account when I get back. Look after yourself, Mysterious Recluse.'

‘Are you coming here tonight?'

‘No. Going to an all-night party. ‘Bye.'

A sense of mystery did indeed shroud Grace's mind as she replaced the receiver, but it had nothing to do with herself. London was the mystery. A city packed, it sometimes seemed from Ellis's account, with exciting people who spent their lives not merely painting pictures, making statues, writing books or symphonies or poems, but talking about them as well at an endless succession of glamorous parties. Grace had no wish to live their sort of life, but the thought of being recognized by them as one of themselves, in a remote way, was heady.

Her marriage to Ellis had grown into a partnership. Each of them lived an independent life and produced independent work, but each of them at the same time had gained from the stimulus provided by the other. Tonight was the first great test of the partnership, and it seemed that it was a success. Grace was in a cheerful mood when she went to bed that night.

In the early hours of the morning, however, she was awakened from a deep sleep. Trish was shaking her shoulder.

‘What's the matter?' Grace asked sleepily – and then, suddenly alarmed, ‘Is there a fire?'

‘No. But someone wants to talk to you on the telephone. It kept ringing, so I went downstairs. I knew you wouldn't be able to hear.' Grace's bedroom in the tower was far away from the receiver on the ground floor, and it was surprising that even Trish had heard it.

‘Who was it?' she asked anxiously. No one but Ellis would need to phone in the middle of the night, and Ellis would know better than anyone else how unlikely it was that the ring
would be heard. Unless he was drunk. Was that it, that he was drunk?

‘He wouldn't say. He asked for you and then he asked who I was and I could hear him talking to someone else and the someone else said “She's only ten.” So the first person told me to go and fetch you and said he'd ring again in five minutes.'

It must be a hospital. Ellis had had an accident. What other explanation could there be? Grace's feet groped for their bedroom slippers and she was already pulling on her dressing gown as she made her way down the stairs. She picked up the receiver as soon as the first ring was heard and waited impatiently while the connection was made.

‘Grace? It's me. John.'

Grace had a nephew called John, David's elder son. But why should he need to get in touch with her? And he would call her Aunt. Besides, the voice was familiar, although not attached to that name. It was Jay, surely, who was speaking.