Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (27 page)

For some reason Soames’s extravagant behaviour had a calming effect on me. I picked up a magazine and leafed through it, adopting the pose of a “regular.” Just as Soames finished, there were sounds in the corridor. Doors opening and closing. Voices, male and female. He grabbed the Kleenex, hoisted his fly, and sat down.

“All done?”

Soames, a peculiar expression on his face, had no time to respond before the door opened and, preceded by a waft of expensive perfume, Yvonne came into the room. I stood up to look at her and was rendered speechless by her startling resemblance to one of my mother’s best friends.

“Allo,” she said, in a charming French accent. “I am Yvonne, and you are…?” she asked me first, holding out her hand. We introduced ourselves. Her handshake was soft and feminine. She was small, well rounded, and attractive. Her thick brown hair was elegantly coiffed, and her floor-length silk
négligé
was the palest blue.

“Would you like to come first, chéri?” She took my hand without waiting for a reply. I exchanged Cheshire-cat grins with Soames and followed her out of the room. She led me gracefully down the corridor and opened the door to her bedroom. The dark red theme continued, greatly enhanced by antique mirrors, a handsome commode, delicate French armchairs, and voluptuous pillows and cushions. The light was soft and subdued.

“Why don’t you undress while I wash?” Yvonne suggested in a matter-of-fact way as she headed for a small basin in the corner, dropping her
négligé
on the bed
en passant
. I complied. My mind was rushing in every direction, and I was deeply grateful to Yvonne for telling me what to do. I didn’t wish to appear shy, so I removed my clothes as rapidly as I could, a task made difficult by my inability to take my eyes off the naked woman wandering around the room, acting as if everything was as normal as could be. Which, for her, it was.

Not since my last highly agreeable session of doctors and nurses, conducted at the age of six after tea in the privacy of my brother James’s empty bedchamber, underneath the bed, with my equally youthful female friend of the time, had I been naked in a bedroom with a female. Through my sole remaining article of clothing, Willy was registering his approval.

“Come here, please, and I wash you too.”

I was not sure that I had heard Yvonne correctly. “Do what?”

“Come to the basin, please. I need to wash you too.”

I walked to the basin, slowly. Everything started to take on a dreamlike quality. I thought I needed to pinch myself but before I had time, Yvonne pulled down my shorts, took my startled willy in her hand, and proceeded to wash him in soap and water. This came as such a surprise that the poor fellow, instead of standing to attention like a guardsman on parade, did the exact opposite and shrank ignominiously to a blob. Yvonne pretended not to notice, smiled reassuringly, and completed her task with a few dabs of a conveniently located pink hand towel.

“There, chéri. We’re ready. Now, come with me.” She took my hand once more and guided me to the bed. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said, shifting through a pile of photograph albums on the bottom shelf of the bedside table.

Lying on the pink sheets—there was no blanket—up against a mound of pillows, I attempted nonchalance at being naked and looked around the room. I asked myself how I was doing so far. Quite well, the answer came back.

Yvonne handed me an album and removed her bra. I didn’t know whether to open the album or watch her, so I did both. Her breasts were magnificent; large, but firm and exquisitely round. Willy was, again, displaying a keen interest. The photographs were all of naked men and women doing what we were about to do. Yvonne slipped off her panties. Her nakedness was enthralling and fabulous to behold. She climbed onto the bed, and for the first time I felt her skin against mine. It was like velvet.

Quite unexpectedly, in one fluid motion, she descended to my nether region and took Willy in her mouth. Oh my! This was something else—this was most assuredly something else! I kept a tight grip on the album, but I was not looking. Through her delicate ministrations, Yvonne had my complete and undivided attention. I wondered what degree of heroic self-control was required to prolong the pleasure.

Yvonne stopped. Unlike myself, she had the situation totally under control. She moved up the bed, put the album away, and lay next to me, on her back. “Put yourself inside me, darling,” she said, in the same tone of voice Nanny would use telling me to work hard at school.

“Do what?”

“Move on top,” she murmured “Gently.”

I obeyed, as gently as I could. I knew what I was meant to do, but it wasn’t clear in my mind precisely how to do it. I had no need for concern. Yvonne placed Willy where he needed to be, and as he slipped inside the secret territory, Willy and I were both immediately struck by the warmth and softness of the surroundings. I was gripped by new and brilliant sensations. Yvonne guided my head to a position by hers on the pillow. There was no kissing. I savoured her smell and the intense eroticism of the moment and began to move against her with ever-increasing strength of purpose.

The finale, which arrived soon after, was an anticlimax. It was the one great feeling I already knew. What I wanted was a lot more of the others. I was, however, pleased with myself for holding out much longer than I had anticipated.

“Well done, darling,” Yvonne said sweetly. Assuming she said that to everybody, I slipped a five-pound note into her hand, got dressed, and left the room.

On the ride back home Soames and I compared notes.

“Fantastic,” he said.

“Incredible,” I agreed.

“Did she…?”

We went through the details. Nothing was left out. Certain things were embellished, according to taste. It transpired that we had both received identical returns on our investment with the notable exception that Soames, due to his pre-session indulgence, had taken rather longer to conclude matters than I. He told me Yvonne had congratulated him on his performance.

I said, “Me too.”

*   *   *

“Do what?” Richard asked me.

“Come for the weekend and watch a day’s shooting. I think you might find it fun.”

“What do you shoot?”

“Pheasants mainly, sometimes the odd duck, rabbits.”

I was calling my Stowe friend from the telephone in the Maiden’s Tower playroom following a ping-pong marathon with James. I’d forgotten Richard hated the idea of killing anything but I thought he would enjoy witnessing the spectacle and spending some time at the MT. “Hey, why not?” he said. “Thanks. Sounds great.”

At the age of eleven or twelve I had discovered that the act of firing a shotgun and hitting a rapidly moving target was a satisfying sporting endeavour. There were less appealing features, however, such as standing around in the freezing cold for hours, waiting for the pheasants to make an appearance, which they were often reluctant to do. In addition, being obliged to spend the day in the company of some suspect individuals who had paid a tidy sum for the privilege of “a gun” at the castle shoot, frequently reduced my enthusiasm for the sport faster than Uncle Bobby could say, “Large gin and tonic, please” to the Park Gate Inn barman at, all being well, one o’clock on the dot.

I mulled over this vaguely inconsequential matter on a crisp December morning while standing at my number-one peg on a pathway facing Church Wood. Behind me was a wooden fence and, off in the distance, Leeds village church, its eight-hundred-year-old Norman spire clearly visible across the ploughed fields and meadows. Before the gamekeeper’s whistle-blow announced the beginning of the morning’s last drive, I spotted Richard, my weekend guest, making his way up the path towards my position, warmly dressed in rainproof garb, scarf, gumboots, and a peculiar striped woolly hat. He was smiling but also looked confused. “Good morning. Congratulations on finding me!” I said.

“Hello, Anthony, how are you? Your mother very kindly dropped me off where all these people were milling around, and one of them told me how to find you. Nice chap, fairly tall, wearing thick tweeds and glasses.”

“That sounds like the gamekeeper’s son, Peter. He’s a very nice man.”

“Who are all those other blokes?”

“They’re the beaters. If you like I can give you a rapid little scenario of what’s about to happen.”

“That would be an excellent idea. I have absolutely no concept whatsoever of what’s going on here.”

“Okay, any minute now you’ll hear a whistle blow, telling everyone the drive, which is the last one of the morning, has started. What that means, basically, is all the beaters who’ve been forming a long line, from one end of the wood to the other—the opposite side to where we are here—begin slowly walking through the wood beating the trees and the undergrowth with their long sticks in order to cause maximum havoc amongst the pheasant population and send them bursting up into the sky and, with any luck, drive them forward over the eight ‘guns’—the seven others all being spread out to the right of me—you can see someone just over there, if you look, I think it’s my uncle Gawaine—and then whoever they fly over gets a chance to shoot at them, hopefully with some degree of accuracy.”

“How do you avoid shooting your uncle? He’s not that far away.”

“You never shoot sideways and low, always forward and up or behind you and up, and you stick to an arc of about forty-five degrees on each side—that way, no one on the ground is endangered.”

As I spoke I demonstrated the movements to Richard, who, quick as a wink, backed off, thinking I was about to fire. “Don’t worry, this little peashooter makes a pathetic bang,” I told him, indicating my 20-bore shotgun, formerly David’s property but now mine since he became the proud owner of a secondhand Churchill 12-bore. “And anyway it’s not loaded yet.”

Just as I finished speaking, we heard the distant whistle and I loaded up, popping two cartridges into my shotgun from a belt around my waist. Similar to the huntsman’s horn, this was the moment when expectation mounted, and in shoots across the land all armed personnel went on maximum alert, ears straining for the flap of feathers and the tremendous shouts of “Forward!” from keepers and beaters. At Leeds laws of probability kept the adrenaline levels at more subdued levels than at some of England’s famously well-stocked shoots.

“Nothing much will happen for a while,” I went on. “They beat around and stir things up. Sometimes the odd bird is discovered loitering conspicuously and is dispatched up into the sky with terrific hullabaloo. Normally one has to wait until they’ve advanced at least halfway through the wood, pushing the birds further in front of them before they—the birds, that is—come to the conclusion that flight is their only remaining option. My number here at the beginning of the line—you’ll notice this distinguished looking stick with a ‘one’ inserted into the notch, means I’m unlikely to see much action because the middle ‘guns’ are usually the lucky ones—but you never know. I’m always optimistic.”

Assorted blandishments, cajoling, and threats could now be clearly heard as the beaters reached what probably was the halfway mark in the wood. Quite a number of birds started to fly over the line and for several minutes the crackle of gunfire filled the air. Very briefly a pheasant headed directly at me, but before it was in range it veered off towards Uncle Gawaine, who gave it short shrift, rising casually off his shooting stick, firing one barrel, and sitting back down before the bird hit the ground with a thud a few yards behind him.

Then, as if by way of compensation, a rabbit suddenly scurried out onto the pathway down to my left about twenty-five yards away. It paused and twitched its nose, as rabbits are prone to do, and—thinking I had no more than a second before it disappeared forever—I turned and fired my 20-bore in one motion, one-handed, one shot, and killed the rabbit stone dead.

“Good Lord! That was amazing,” Richard said from the safe position in which I had asked him to stand, three feet or so behind me. “A Wild West show at Leeds Castle!”

Chuffed to the nth degree by the shot, I found myself pondering whether I should have fired in the first place, and, more to the point, would I be able to perform the exact same shot again? “I’m sorry,” I told Richard, “I’m afraid I somewhat broke the rules I just explained to you. I could see it was a clear shot, there was no one on the path or nearby, but still—I hope I didn’t freak you out.”

“Oh boy, I’m so glad I saw that, Anthony. Despite my being totally anti–killing anything, it was still pretty cool. You know I’m just a hippie at heart, but, wow, this is all too much—the castle, this lifestyle, it’s not something I could even have imagined.”

“My mother drove you up the front drive past the castle after collecting you from the station and bringing you to join the shoot?”

“Absolutely, assuming the road we came up was the front drive because there was no shortage of roads leading in a bunch of directions. My God, the castle is stunning—it blows my mind!”

“It never fails for me either.”

“What’s it like living in a place like this?”

The question came as a surprise. I couldn’t recall anybody asking me something similar, certainly none of my other friends from school. I knew their parents had to be sufficiently well off to send them to an expensive public school such as Stowe, but I was equally aware that Granny B’s “empire,” crowned by Leeds Castle, was in all likelihood unmatched by any other Stowe family. However, because Richard was so open himself, I answered him straightforwardly, if a little self-consciously. “We don’t strictly speaking live here. We come for weekends, but during the holidays I am here a lot. It’s got everything but, if truth be told, I feel a little isolated from time to time. It’s like being in a cocoon where every conceivable luxury is provided but no one knows you’re there. And when you step out into the big wide world you find yourself a little … I don’t know … unprepared. Don’t get me wrong, I know what a lucky bugger I am to have grown up with all this … sometimes, though, I wonder.…”

I stopped speaking as peculiar thoughts entered my mind telling me to pipe down, I was not talking to Sigmund Freud. Richard had time to observe, “I think I know what you mean”—and I thought he did—before a final whistle told us the drive was over and it was time for lunch. We walked down to pick up the rabbit, but before I did Richard took a moment to crouch down and inspect the damage I had inflicted.