Three Graces (4 page)

It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning and there was only one car parked in the visitors’ car park at Amberley Court and that was Carys’s Marlva Prima. She’d paid her £4.50 to a little old man who sat in a hut inside the gate.

‘I’d like to go inside the house too,’ she’d said.

‘That ticket will get you into both,’ he’d explained.

Four pounds and fifty pence. No wonder the estate was short of money, Carys thought, leaving her car and taking a footpath towards the walled garden. It was a long time since she’d visited an historic house but she was sure it should cost more than she’d just paid.

It was a beautiful summer’s morning. The air was cotton-soft and filled with the delicate perfumes of flowers as she entered the walled garden. The walls were a rosy red, like those of the house, and had the mellowed look that time and weather bring. There were a few low-lying box hedges and a token bed of vegetables and a few fruit trees but, overall, it had the look of somewhere that could do with an extra gardener or two.

As Carys wandered around, she started trying to picture the garden as it should be: bursting with blooms: great fat roses launching their perfume into the air, rows of neat cabbages in the beds whose borders would be neatly trimmed with box hedgerow which didn’t look as if a pack of Jack Russell Terriers had been playing hide and seek in them. There’d be bucket loads of apples and pears, and gooseberries - fat and crunchy - would glow greenly. It would be the perfect kitchen garden: a blend of the pretty and the practical.

As it was, it looked as if somebody had thrown a couple of packets of wildflower mix across the soil and hoped for the best. It was very pretty but it wasn’t fulfilling its potential. It was like a supermodel before make-up and Carys felt desperate to get going with a bit of foundation and blusher.

As she turned a corner at a bed of flowers that looked as if they could do with a good sorting out, she saw a dog hurtling towards her, its long ears flapping and its tail rotating like a mini windmill

‘Hello, there,’ she said, bending down to ruffle the silky-soft head. ‘What’s your name, then?

The bright chestnut eyes peered up at her from a brown and white face.

‘You’re a beauty, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling at the cheeky freckles. ‘Is this your garden, then? You lucky dog. I bet you have fun in here, don’t you?’

‘Carys?’

Carys stood back up to full height and turned round, seeing Richard walking towards her.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked and she couldn’t tell if he looked happy or perplexed at seeing her there.

For a moment, she was tongue-tied. She felt like a thief that had been caught red-handed.

‘You told me I should visit so here I am,’ she said, managing to keep calm.

‘I didn’t think you would. But I’m glad you did. You didn’t give me your phone number.’

‘You didn’t ask for it,’ she said and then wished she hadn’t. It sounded as if she’d minded that he hadn’t asked for it which wasn’t true, of course.

‘You gave me the impression that you wouldn’t have given it if I had asked.’

‘Did I?’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

The brief exchange dried up and both seemed at a loss as to what to say next.

‘She’s a gorgeous dog,’ Carys said at last, bending down to ruffle the long fur on the top of her head.

‘She’s Phoebe’s. My sister. One of my sisters, I should say.’

‘How many do you have?’

‘Two: Phoebe and Serena. There’s a brother too: Jamie.’

‘You’re lucky. I’m an only child.’

‘I think you’re the lucky one.’

They smiled at each other and the tension was instantly dispelled.

‘You should have told me you were coming.’

‘Well, I didn’t know myself. It was kind of a spontaneous decision,’ Carys lied.

‘You didn’t pay, did you?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Then we must get you a refund.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she argued. ‘You’re charging little enough as it is, by the way. You really should think about increasing your entrance fee.’

Richard frowned. ‘You think so?’

‘Absolutely! You can’t buy anything for four pounds fifty any more.

‘The only thing is, Barston Hall only charges £6 and they have a lot more to offer. More rooms, grander gardens, an animal park, a playground for the kids-’

‘So? That’s their business.’

Richard smiled. ‘You’re very-’

‘What?’

‘Direct.’

‘No point being indirect, is there?’

‘I don’t suppose there is,’ he said.

They began to walk towards the arch in the wall which would lead out into the main gardens.

‘Dizzy!’ Richard called, as the spaniel hurtled towards the exit. ‘Wait.’ The dog came to a halt and looked round, tongue flopping pinkly out of the side of her mouth.

‘Dizzy?’

‘That’s Phoebe for you,’ Richard explained.

‘I like it.’

‘She didn’t think how silly I’d feel yelling that name across the estate.’

Carys grinned. ‘Maybe she did.’

This made Richard smile.

They left the walled garden and turned right. There were a few more cars in the car park now but it was still quiet.

‘Will you please allow me the honour of showing you the house?’

‘Haven’t you got things you should be doing?’

‘Nothing that can’t be postponed,’ he said.

Carys looked at her watch.

‘Unless you have somewhere else you should be?’

‘No,’ she said. She wasn’t sure why she’d looked at her watch. It must have been a nervous reaction because she had absolutely nothing to do with her time other than tidy up and that could wait for another month.

‘I’d love to see the house,’ she said.

‘We’ll sneak in the back way.’

‘The tradesman’s entrance?’ Carys teased.

‘The owner’s entrance,’ Richard corrected her. ‘We won’t be told to wipe our feet if we go in that way.’

They followed Dizzy down a gravelled pathway and Richard produced a key from a pocket as they approached a door.

‘This is the private part of the house, of course, so we won’t run into any coach loads of pensioners.’

He opened one of the double doors and Carys followed him inside, her mouth dropping open at the enormous hallway which greeted her.

‘You could fit my whole house in here,’ she said, looking round the huge open space, its flagstone floor taking up acres of ground. A long row of boots and shoes stood on sentry duty by the door, quietly flaking mud, and a coat rack was hung with more coats than Carys had ever seen outside a department store. The smell of wax was quite overpowering. There was also a fascinating collection of hats. Most were flat caps in various shades of green and grey but most were woolly, shapeless creations - fiercely practical and terribly unattractive.

‘Big family - big hallway essential,’ Richard said. ‘I’m one of four. Dizzy’s one of five. Add parents and other relations and friends and, if you all decide to come in at once, it’s chaos.’

Carys noticed a huge Ali Baba pot stuffed full of walking sticks of every shape and height. Some were curved, others were dead straight. One looked as if its handle was made of horn and others were carved and painted to look like birds, badgers and foxes. There was also a rifle.

Richard followed her gaze. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s broken. Father uses it to scratch his back.’

Carys frowned. That sounded awfully dangerous to her, broken or not, but she didn’t say anything.

There was a beautiful fireplace and Carys could imagine how wonderful it would be to come home to: to walk through the door, throw your coat onto the rack, kick your boots across the floor and toast yourself in front of a real fire. There were two large, arched windows at the far end of the hall through which Carys could see a small enclosed courtyard and columned walkway resembling a cloister. Was the house old enough to have a cloister? She wasn’t sure about dates and architecture but it was very pretty nevertheless.

There was also a fabulous barometer in a rich chestnut-coloured wood. Carys had always been fascinated by them even though she wasn’t at all sure how they worked. Something to do with air pressure, she thought. But did they tell you what the weather was like now? Or was it a way of predicting what weather was on its way? Reading left to right, it read: stormy, rain, change, fair and very dry. It was pointing to ‘change’ at the moment, which sounded about right for a summer’s day in England. She was tempted to reach out and touch it - it had such a wonderfully curvy smooth look about it but she didn’t want to risk his disapproval by fingering antiques before they’d even left the hallway.

‘Should I take my shoes off?’ Carys asked, noticing a beautiful rug in front of them.

‘Good heavens, no! Your feet will freeze and you’ll most likely catch a nasty case of carpet beetle.’

She grimaced. Could you really catch carpet beetle? Carys wasn’t sure what carpet beetles were but imagined something like a cockroach crossed with a dung beetle scurrying up her bare legs.

‘Come on,’ he said, leading the way through to a small drawing room which looked like any drawing room in the country but for a collection of spectacular portraits hanging on the walls.

‘Wow!’ Carys said.

‘Ah! The dreaded relations. I’m afraid there’s no escaping them. Very vain family, the Brettons. Lost count of how many portraits were commissioned down the centuries but it’s enough to fill a hundred country houses and they invariably end up hanging in the oddest of places. There are even one or two,’ he said in a whisper, ‘in the guest lavatories.’

‘Most off-putting,’ Carys said with a grin.

‘So I’m told.’

‘And this is one of the private rooms?’

Richard nodded. ‘The Yellow Drawing Room. Reserved for naps after walks and arguments after dinner.’

There were two large yellow sofas on which sat fat red cushions, squashed and dented by happy bottoms. Newspapers lay scattered over coffee tables and there were neat piles of
Country Life
,
Cuthland Life
,
Social Whirl
and
The Field
on the coffee tables. It was a cosy, comfortable room. Dizzy certainly seemed to be making herself at home: leaping up onto an armchair and snuggling into a large red cushion.

‘That’s the dog chair,’ Richard said by way of explaining why he hadn’t reprimanded the animal.

As they walked through the room, Carys saw a shoal of silver photo frames standing on a sideboard which looked more Habitat than Chippendale, and herd of wooden deer marched across the mantelpiece of a fireplace.

‘My mother’s,’ Richard said. ‘Dotty about deer.’

A large window looked out onto a private lawn where a motley collection of deck chairs stood waiting for the sun to find them.

Carys felt she could have spent all day in the room but was aware that Richard was probably en route to something grander and far less homely.

‘This way,’ he said, opening a door which led into a narrow passageway.

Carys got completely lost after that. They walked down corridors, up staircases, through endless rooms hung with silks and tapestries, down staircases, along passages lined with portraits, passages lined with cabinets of china, under ceilings decked with plaster garlands, through rooms inhabited by ginormous beds, and ante-rooms hiding tiny baths and washstands.

Her head spun with portraits, busts, screens, tables, chairs and chandeliers. She heard terms she’d never heard before: acanthus, ormolu, japanning, bollworm. She sat on a balloon-back chair:

‘I feel like a queen!’

‘You look like one too.

She looked at her reflection in a pier glass mirror:

‘It’s very flattering.’

‘It doesn’t need to be.’

She stroked a piece of William Morris wallpaper.

‘Don’t tell mother I let you do that.’

‘I won’t.’

And had even been allowed to lie down on a full tester bed.

And neither of them had dared say a word.

When she got up, he led her down another staircase and into a corridor.

‘Stay there,’ he told her.

‘Why?’

‘Stay right where you are,’ Richard added, almost running ahead to open the door in front of them.

‘Where are you going?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘What are you doing?’

She watched in bemusement as, after opening one door, he walked through the next room and opened another door. Then another. Then another. Before walking back with a huge grin on his face.

‘It’s an enfilade. A series of interior doors arranged to provide a kind of vista when the doors are open.’

‘Ah, yes! I remember now. I have one just like it at home.’

Richard laughed. ‘Then you’ll know what fun they are,’ he said. ‘When we were growing up, we used to open all the doors and roller skate down it.

Carys smiled as she tried to imagine Richard on roller skates. The funny thing was, she really could. He still had that boyishness about him: that edge of fun which followed you into adulthood and made sure you didn’t turn into a funless frump.

‘Sometimes, we’d even risk a scooter or one of those go-carts. And Serena would journey down the corridor on her space hopper.’

Carys laughed, staring down the seemingly endless runway of fun. She’d never thought of ancient houses as being places of fun before but she was beginning to see them in a new light now. She could imagine rainy days being no obstacle to having the time of your life. There were miles of corridors and acre upon acre of space inside the old walls of Amberley. How different it must have been from her own childhood in her mother’s immaculate apartment where everything was white, forbidding any activities which might have been deemed fun like painting or baking or owning a pet.

‘Don’t leave that there!’ was a regularly shouted command from her mother if Carys dared to leave her toys out.

Carys had always had a sneaking suspicion that she’d remained an only child because her mother couldn’t have coped with any more mess.

‘The mirror at the end gives the illusion of infinity. You can imagine it reaching right to the edge of the world,’ Richard said, bringing Carys back to the present.