The Malcontenta (19 page)

He saw Grace Carrington again in the dining room at lunch-time. He began to make his way towards her with his pathetic tray, but was stopped by a call from Martha and Sidney, whom he hadn’t noticed as he threaded between the tables.

‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there,’ he muttered, taking the chair they offered him.

‘Perhaps you were wanting to sit with someone else,’ Martha said coquettishly, raising her eyebrow suggestively in the direction of Grace Carrington’s corner.

‘Not at all.’ Brock felt his spleen return. It was hard to decide which of her little acts was more aggravating, the Tartar or the tease.

‘You seemed to be more cheerful today, when we saw you earlier.’

‘Yes, I feel reinvigorated,’ he said. ‘I had hydrotherapy first, then physiotherapy. Stress management this afternoon.’

‘They’re breaking you in gently, David. Will you be having acupuncture later, do you think?’

‘Ah.’ Brock’s sense of well-being suffered a further deflation. Somehow, every time the word ‘acupuncture’ was mentioned, his mind jumped to Kathy’s description of the punctured eyeball of the corpse on the mortuary table. ‘Yes, it’s on the timetable for later in the week. Thursday, I think.’

‘And osteopathy for your shoulder?’

‘Yes, that too. Why? Is it uncomfortable?’

‘No, no, no.’ She patted his arm with the reassuring smile of a veteran, exaggerated enough to raise serious doubts. ‘And the fast, how are you coping with that now?’ She stared fixedly into his eyes.

‘Oh, fine. I think I’ve more or less come to terms with that.’

‘That’s splendid. You’ll find your stomach will shrink and you’ll lose your appetite after a while.’

She smiled winsomely and lifted her fork to her mouth.

‘What have you got there?’ Brock regretted hearing himself say.

‘Golden Slice. It’s quite delicious, and so very simple to do yourself. Some finely grated carrot and cheese, and some rolled oats, about equal quantities of each to make up to about a pound in all, then an egg, a couple of ounces of margarine and a little rosemary. Mix them all up with seasoning to taste, but only a little salt of course, and press the mixture into a greased tin and bake at gas mark four for twenty minutes or so until quite browned. Then cut it into slices and serve with a parsley sauce. Isn’t it good, Sidney?’

Sidney nodded, scraping up the last of the sauce on his plate.

‘And he’s a very fussy eater. You must buy some of the Stanhope recipe books before you go, David, so you can try them all at home.’

Brock cleared his throat and sipped at his glass of water. The name Stanhope …’ he began slowly, then paused.

‘Yes?’ she chirped.

‘It was familiar to me, before I came. I wasn’t sure why, but then I remembered: it was in the papers last year. Didn’t a member of staff have a nasty accident or something? You must have been here then, weren’t you?’

‘Oh yes, we were here.’ Martha lowered her eyes for a moment as if contemplating whether he was yet enough of an insider to be confided in. Mrs Thatcher took over from Mae West as she made up her mind and continued. ‘I will not encourage prurient gossip, David,’ she said sharply.

‘Prurient?’ He raised his eyebrows in innocent surprise. ‘Was there something . … unsavoury about it?’

‘I sometimes think that Stanhope is like a ship in many ways, don’t you? Self-contained, somewhat detached from the everyday world, especially at this time of the year with the countryside so silent and white all around.’

Brock wondered if the thought of prurience had made her lose track of the conversation, but she continued. ‘And on a ship, it is not uncommon for gossip to get out of hand, to become … overheated. I’m afraid there was some of that here. You may hear stories about Alex Petrou’s death which you must simply ignore.’

‘Really.’ Brock shook his head sadly. ‘What sort of stories?’ He looked at Sidney encouragingly.

‘Well,’ Sidney spoke up for the first time since Brock had arrived, ‘he was found hanged in the Temple of Apollo, out there in the grounds. Have you been there? Spooky sort of place. And the story is that he not only did it in the middle of the night, but that he first dressed himself up in these -’ Sidney cast around for a term he might use ‘- fetish sort of clothes.’

‘That’s the sort of unseemly gossip -’

But Brock broke in before Martha’s scathing voice could entirely dampen Sidney’s prurient imagination. ‘That’s right, I remember now. It was mentioned in the papers. So he was involved in some kind of sexual perversion, then?’

Martha gave a squawk of protest. Sidney raised his eyes towards the chandelier as if to say, man to man, what would you think?

‘With the patients, do you mean?’ Brock persisted.

‘David!’ Martha’s outraged voice stopped the conversations at the surrounding tables. ‘That is
precisely
the sort of speculation that makes for an unhappy ship!’ she spluttered, then registered the puzzled expressions on the faces turned her way.

‘But, Martha,’ Brock said, in a reasonable tone, ‘what was the explanation, then? It seems an odd sort of thing to do to yourself.’

With an effort she brought herself under control and spoke with suppressed indignation. ‘Drugs,’ she hissed. ‘The poor man had come under some very bad influence, outside of the clinic of course, and had taken drugs. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘Ah.’ Brock noticed the sceptical pursing of Sidney’s mouth. ‘Didn’t I read that he was gay?’ Martha’s nostrils flared again and he hurriedly added, ‘Nothing wrong with that, of course. So,’ he beamed, ‘you don’t think he was making a bit of extra cash selling drugs and bizarre sex to the patients, then?’

Martha brought her fork down so hard it nearly broke her plate. She rose to her feet.

‘How
dare
you’ - she struggled to keep her voice down -’suggest such a vile,
vile
thing, about a
Stanhope
person you never even met!’

She tossed back her head and marched towards the door. Sidney half rose from his seat as if to follow her, then thought better of it and sank down again.

‘You’re a game sort of chap, aren’t you?’ he said after a moment.

‘Oh dear. As bad as that, eh?’

‘Martha’s very strong on loyalty, especially to the dead, I’ve noticed. And to the clinic, of course.’ ‘I went too far. I’ll apologize to her.’ ‘I’d leave it for a bit if I were you. Just my advice.’ Brock nodded. ‘Thanks.’

‘I never liked him, myself. Couldn’t stand him touching me, for some reason. Wouldn’t really have surprised me if he had been up to something odd.’

‘Could that have had anything to do with the “goats” among the patients that Martha was talking about yesterday, do you think?’

Sidney’s eyes, invariably watery and distant, snapped suddenly into focus, and a worried expression passed across his face. Then he looked away and began to push himself to his feet again. ‘No idea,’ he muttered. ‘Best to drop the subject, old chap, eh?’

Brock smiled and watched him walk stiffly out of the room. Looking round, he saw that Grace Carrington had already gone.

A one-hour rest period was scheduled for the clinic after lunch each day, and Brock, having no postcards to write or good books to read, was uncertain what to do. The nagging deadline of his forthcoming paper in Rome was making him increasingly uneasy, but he found it hard to think about it in the present circumstances. He wanted to visit the Temple of Apollo, but wasn’t sure how to go about getting there across the snowy gardens, dressed as he was. He crossed the hall to the reception desk and asked if he could see Ben Bromley, the Business Manager of the clinic, but was told he was away that day. Brock settled for an appointment on the following day and made his way to the library instead.

This was a much smaller public room, next to the dining room and also facing north across the gardens. It was lined with glass-fronted bookcases, and a leather-topped table occupied the centre. Most of the shelves carried well-worn paperbacks donated by past patients, but one bookcase was marked ‘Reference - Not to be Removed’ and contained a collection of hardback books, among them a black-bound volume with the title
A History of Stanhope
on its spine. Brock took it from the case and sat down with it at the end of the table.

Though not old - the dedication was dated July 1978 - it belonged to the days just before photocopiers and word processors became ubiquitous, when people still used carbon paper and foolscap sheets, and it had a prematurely dated air about it. It comprised the yellowing carbon-copy pages of the typewritten account of the history of Stanhope House, and more recently of Stanhope Naturopathic Clinic, as compiled by one Felicity Field. It had clearly been a labour of love. Chapter headings such as ‘A Herb Garden is Born’ and ‘The Invalid is Nursed Back to Health’ brimmed with coy enthusiasm, and the text was illustrated by many black-and-white photographs glued into the pages. The first was a picture of the south front of the house, with a small figure of Stephen Beamish-Newell just visible between the columns at the top of the entrance stairs, chin up, like Mussolini surveying a party rally. It accompanied the dedication by the Director, which commended the unflagging efforts of Miss Field to record the past of a great landmark of English social and architectural culture at this moment standing at the threshold of an exciting new future.

Miss Field had begun with Stanhope House itself, originally the home of Sir William Stanhope (1698-1752), a member of Lord Burlington’s circle. Like Burlington, Stanhope had visited Palladio’s buildings in Italy and had determined to promote the revival of his work in England by designing his own Palladian house in the Weald. Where Burlington had taken the Villa Rotonda as the model for his house at Chiswick, Stanhope had chosen the Villa Foscari, known also as the Malcontenta, as Miss Field explained:

Some would have it that the name
Malcontenta
was local to the site long before Niccolò and Luigi Foscari built their house there. Much more romantic is the story of an ungovernable daughter of the family who was exiled there from the temptations of Venetian society, and whose ghost is said to haunt the house still. Lord Stanhope certainly preferred this latter account. Whichever explanation you choose, the name seems to evoke perfectly the spirit of its setting in the Veneto, so often wreathed in mists and vapours, and it may have been this which persuaded Lord Stanhope when he came to build upon the meadows beside the River Strood.

Stanhope had begun his version of the Malcontenta shortly after Isaac Ware published his translation of Palladio’s
Four Books on Architecture
(as Miss Field noted, ‘from Scotland Yard, in 1737’), which was dedicated to Richard, Earl of Burlington, and for which Stanhope was one of the original subscribers. After Stanhope’s death, his son commissioned Humphry Repton to landscape the estate in 1796, and followed his father’s taste for things both classical and elegiac by instructing Repton to include in his scheme a series of monuments, ‘modest yet sublime’, on the theme of
memento mori.
Miss Field helpfully provided a list of these, and a little map showing where they might be discovered about the grounds. One of them was to be a ruin of four Ionic columns standing on a knoll to the north-west of the house, based on Palladio’s drawing of the ancient Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. These columns later became incorporated as the front of the Temple of Apollo, built, along with the west wing, by the architect Albert Fusy in 1910 for the industrialist who then owned Stanhope House. Miss Field obviously relished the quotation which she provided from Pevsner’s Buildings of England series concerning these additions, as ‘unfortunate efforts which, taken with Fusy’s contemporaneous remodelling of much of the interior of the original house, can only be described as mutilations of what had been one of the finest neo-classical houses in the country’.

Brock skimmed to the end of Miss Field’s account of the history of the building, with its decline into neglect after the Second World War, ‘a home for spiders and mould’. At this point the library door opened and a man came in. He nodded to Brock and went over to one of the bookcases. His hair was longish and wavy over a pugnacious, fleshy face, and his dressing gown looked as if it had been tailored in Savile Row, a piece of double-breasted power-dressing which gave him none of that air of comfortable domestication that most patients quickly slipped into. From the top pocket he drew out a pair of spectacles which he brought up to his face with a flourish, accompanied by a frown of concentration and thrust of the chin, all of which looked to Brock more like a display of male dominance than a serious attempt to focus on the paperback titles.

Brock resumed his reading, skipping through the herculean efforts of Dr and Mrs Beamish-Newell to restore the house, to clear the jungle which they found within the walled garden and re-establish the organic cultivation of vegetable and herb beds in soil which had never known modern chemical herbicides or pesticides, and to rationalize the land holdings around the house.

‘Interested in ancient history, eh?’ The voice from behind his left shoulder was deep and sonorous, as if its owner was a heavy cigar smoker or had just woken up. Brock looked at him.

‘Just browsing, really,’ he said, and offered his hand. ‘David Brock.’

‘Norman de Loynes,’ the man introduced himself and sat down beside Brock. ‘You’re a new boy, I gather. Overheard your little contretemps with Lady Martha at lunch just now. Couldn’t help it, I was sitting at the table behind you. She’s an impossible cow, isn’t she? I call them S 8c M, the two of them, although they’re the wrong way round of course, Sidney being an irredeemable masochist. Have to be, to put up with her. I sometimes amuse myself, when I have to sit through some tedious discussion about fruit and nuts or how to defecate in a bio-friendly way, by imagining her in the role of Madame Lash. Frightening thought, eh?’

De Loynes chuckled playfully until he had raised a grin from Brock. Then the smile vanished from his face and he said abruptly, ‘What’s your interest in Alex Petrou?’

Brock stared at the book in the man’s hand and noted the title,
Showdown at Purple Gulch.
‘Who?’