A Winter’s Tale (16 page)

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘That was good timing, darling. I’ve just come in from spending the most exhausting day, being given a crash course in estate management! I thought I had the estate manager for that—or steward, as Mr Yatton calls himself—but I suppose I ought to try and get my head round it, if only to understand how much I’ve got—or not got—to keep the place running. That bank loan is
crippling
and since we’ve only just repaid the interest and started on the capital, there would be nothing to be gained by paying it off early even if we could…’ I tailed off. ‘But, Lucy, just wait until you see Winter’s End! I only hope you love it as much as I do.’

‘Actually, Mum, I already have.’

‘Have what?’ I said, puzzled.

‘Seen Winter’s End. After Great-Grandfather visited us I was curious. You’d always made Winter’s End sound like some lost Eden, the Shangri-La of Lancashire, so I thought I’d have a look.’

‘But no one has mentioned—’

‘No one
knew
,’ she interrupted. ‘You always said I had the Winter colouring, so I disguised myself with a beanie hat and dark shades and just came on an open day. I saw Great-Grandfather on one of the lower terraces, talking to a gardener, but he didn’t see me. He looked ill—much frailer than when he visited us.’

‘You could have told me.’

‘I thought it might upset you. You always said you could never go back, though I didn’t see why not.’

‘Because my mother always said—’ I stopped. Susan had said a lot of things, not always the exact truth—more an embellished retelling of old stories that grew and changed in time. But somehow her fear of going back to Winter’s End had infected me, so that even long after she had died and I was an adult with my own child, it had never occurred to me to return.

Perhaps it was partly because I had loved it so much and felt secure there that I feared to go back and find it all changed. I didn’t want the memories tarnished by reality. Just as well too—I’d have been devastated to find Jack had taken my place in Hebe’s affections, and Seth in Ottie’s and Grandfather’s. Not that I think I had ever featured much in either of the latter’s, since Ottie was the most unmaternal woman I had ever met and Grandfather had seemed at the time to regard me merely as an irritating blot on the family escutcheon.

‘What did you think of it, Lucy?’

‘Well, I only saw the gardens and the Great Hall, really,
though the maze was…well, amazing! The house looked pretty shabby and the catering facilities were tea and buns in this sort of outhouse at the back. But it…I don’t know, as soon as I started up the drive I knew it was one of those magic spots that seem to be in a time warp of their own. Do you know what I mean? Like when we took the van up to the Roman fort at Vindolanda, that was a magical place too. You felt you’d stepped out of time.’

‘That’s interesting, because I feel the same way, and I just
can’t
let Winter’s End go. Mind you, I can’t really afford to keep it, either, because the house has been terribly neglected. All the money for its upkeep has been poured into the gardens and no one even took an interest in keeping the place properly clean. It’s disgustingly dirty!’

‘Oh, Mum!’ Lucy sighed. ‘Handing you a big neglected house of your own is like the best present ever! What have you cleaned so far?’

‘Only the dog. There’s a little spaniel called Charlie, and he was all matted and dirty. But I didn’t do it myself—he was beyond that. I had someone come out to clip and bath him and do his toenails.’

‘Bet you are dying to get on with sorting everything out, though?’

‘Yes, I am, but I had to have this session with Mr Yatton, today first—and apparently the solicitor, the accountant and even my personal bank accounts manager are going to visit me too, in the next few days. I wish you were here, Lucy. You are so much better at business and figures and stuff than me.’

‘I should be; that’s what I did my degree in.’

‘Yes, and amazingly enough, Grandfather seems to have sussed that out. He suggested to Mr Yatton that you could learn to be the steward when you came back, and take over from him when he retires. I don’t know how you feel about
that? If you like the idea, Mr Yatton said he could start sending you figures and spreadsheets (whatever they are) by email right now. I gave him your address. Is that OK?’

‘He emails?’

‘The estate office has a computer, but he has a swish laptop too—he’s a silver surfer.’

‘Cool.’

‘So, what do you think? He said he could teach you quite a lot of it by email.’

‘Why not? He can send me the figures over and keep me up to date, and I can discuss it with you, or send him emails to show to you—and we’ll see how it goes when I get back. But it would be a job, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes, a proper job—though the salary might not be huge, to start with. But if we can keep Winter’s End going, then one day it will be yours.’

‘That’s a really, really odd thought…though Winter’s End sort of got to me, and I keep thinking about it…’ She added more briskly, ‘Don’t do anything sudden without asking me first, especially involving men. You know you always go for the wrong sort.’

‘I don’t! In fact, I’ve hardly had a chance to go for
any
sort, and it’s not my fault that when I started dating again only the dregs of humanity were left over.’

‘Jack sounds to me like the wrong sort, or why wouldn’t Great-Grandfather have left Winter’s End to him? Bet he’s a snake in the grass. Don’t be too trusting.’

‘He is not a snake in the grass and I am not too—’

‘I’ll have to go. Love you lots. Byee…’

I stared at the phone, feeling aggrieved. Lucy had managed to get rid of the few boyfriends I had acquired while she was growing up, and by the time she left for university the pool of available men in my age group had shrunk to a very dubious puddle. I washed and changed,
then flaked out on the bed until Jonah beat the gong for another gargantuan dinner, which Hebe, after her day spent in the garden and stillroom, fell on with huge gusto. She ate Ottie’s share too, since she was in Manchester at the opening of someone’s exhibition. How can she put away so much food and stay so thin?

She was wearing a forties-style dance dress and her hair in a roll with a butterfly hairpin, and after dinner left me to my solitary coffee and went off to the dance.

I spent a happy and productive couple of hours in the cleaning room, checking off and reorganising the supplies, and adding to my shopping list.

I had a feeling that it might take some time to teach Grace new ways of doing things—if it was possible at all. But then, I could just confine her activities to the floors, the bathrooms, changing the beds and doing the laundry, where she couldn’t really do that much more damage.

Charlie got bored watching me after a while and vanished, and on my way to bed I found him fast asleep and blissfully snoring in his basket next to the Aga.

Chapter Eleven: O Mother,
Where Art Thou?

Thomas in his great kindness has given mee a wooden coffer such as I have never seen before, carved prettily inside and out, and fitted with ingenious drawers and compartments. There is a sturdy lock—he says he fears for mee, and I should keep my secrets therein and the key close.

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1581

Breakfast was, if possible, even more indecently lavish than the day before. Recalling Mr Yatton’s final words of advice, which had been to the effect that I should take control straight away and start as I meant to go on, I decided to make my very first economy. It might save my figure, as well as some money.

‘Aunt Hebe, you know when I said yesterday that cooking this much food was such a huge waste?’ I began cautiously, gesturing to the hotplates groaning under the weight of enough calories to keep an entire rugby team happy. ‘Well, I’ve decided to ask Mrs Lark not to do it any more.’

She looked up from her toast, which she was consuming while reading a new gardening magazine that had been left by her plate, presumably by Jonah. ‘But I always eat a full
cooked breakfast on Sundays, Sophy, and I like a poached egg most days too—and occasionally a bit of bacon.’

‘That’s fine, then—we can still have bacon and eggs every day, but the full monty just on Sundays, as a special treat.’

‘Jack won’t like that in the least,’ she protested, shaking her head. ‘He often brings friends for the weekend too, and they all have good appetites.’

‘I’m quite sure Jack will have the good manners to be happy with whatever he’s offered—as will his friends. We simply can’t afford to go on wasting food on this scale, and it would make less work for Mrs Lark.’

‘But she’s the
cook
—that’s what she
does
.’ Aunt Hebe looked at me blankly.

‘Yes, and she does it very well too,’ I said patiently, ‘but she’s no spring chicken, is she? Cutting down her workload wouldn’t hurt.’

‘I suppose you will make what changes you like, Sophy, but I think you are unwise to start without consulting Jack, for you may well find yourself having to put things right back again to how they were before.’

I mentally counted up to ten. ‘Of course, I’ll always be glad to hear any of Jack’s suggestions, Aunt Hebe, and I will always value his advice. But this is only the first of many economies and changes I’ll have to make if I’m to turn Winter’s End back into the beautiful place it used to be, rather than the shabby, neglected creature it is now.’

‘That is a very odd way of putting it! You make it sound as though the house were alive.’

‘It is, to me.’

She looked at me strangely, then put down the magazine, drained her cup of tea, and rose to her feet. ‘Well, I must get off to feed the hens—but I warn you, any changes to my walled garden will be done over my dead body!’

‘Of course, Aunt Hebe—I wouldn’t dream of it. But I’m
going to tour the grounds later and I hope you’ll at least show me the walled garden and the hens?’

‘Certainly,’ she said grandly. ‘What are you going to do this morning?’

I indicated the embroidered fabric bag slung over the back of my chair. ‘Mr Yatton gave me a big notebook and I’m going to go round the house again, this time writing down what needs to be done in order of urgency, and adding to my shopping list. I did a stock-check of the cleaning room last night, while you were out.’

‘Oh? Perhaps you should just get the agency in for a sort of late spring clean,’ she suggested vaguely. ‘What were they called? Ah, yes—Dolly Mops.’

‘I’ll see,’ I said tactfully, because I hated to think of the damage a domestic cleaning agency had already unwittingly wreaked on Winter’s End, not to mention Grace’s casual attentions over the years.

‘Jonah,’ I said, as he came into the room and started loading a vast brass tray with crockery and unused dishes of hot food, ‘I’m going around the gardens this afternoon—could you send word to Seth Greenwood? Tell him he can come with me himself if he wants to, or delegate it to one of the other gardeners. About two o’clock.’

‘I’ll do that,’ he said, and I followed him back into the kitchen, where I proposed the revolutionary idea of reducing the number and style of breakfast dishes to Mrs Lark.

She looked even more incredulous than Aunt Hebe. ‘But we’ve
always
done it like that!’

‘I know, but times change and no one is eating most of it, so it’s such a waste.’

‘As to that, I make sure Mr Yatton has something in his stomach to start the day with, other than the rabbit food his sister gives him, and then what’s not eaten in the kitchen, Jonah makes into swill for the pigs out at the back of the
courtyard. All our bacon and ham comes from pigs reared at Winter’s End.’

I resolved to avoid the pigsty since I didn’t want to meet my future breakfasts face to face. ‘It’s a pity to cook lovely food just for the pigs, Mrs Lark, but of course you can still cook bacon and eggs every day—just not the kippers, kedgeree, kidneys and all the rest of it.’

‘I
suppose
so,’ she reluctantly conceded, ‘and you’ll still want all the trimmings, of course, like tomatoes and mushrooms. Then, on Sundays, you can have a
proper
breakfast.’ The thought of pulling out the culinary stops at least once a week seemed to cheer her. ‘We could have an extra high tea every day too, to make up!’

‘I’m trying to make less work for you, not more,’ I protested.

‘Now, Sophy love, you’ve got to keep your strength up—and so has Miss Hebe, what with all the work she does in her garden.’

We seemed to have reached an impasse, so I gave up the battle at this point and changed the subject. ‘Mrs Lark, I wanted to ask you a favour.’

‘Ask away.’

‘I thought I’d invite all the indoor and outdoor staff—that sounds terribly grand, but you know what I mean—to a meeting in the Great Hall on Saturday morning at about ten, to tell them my plans for the future of Winter’s End. I should think everyone has been in limbo long enough, wondering what’s going to happen. I wondered if you could provide refreshments? Tea and coffee and biscuits, or something?’