The Last Houseparty (2 page)

“There's no earls any longer?” asked a young man who had been peering at Birley's brushwork on the gleaming leather gaiters.

“The sixth earl was the last of the line,” said the guide.

“I thought the last two were killed in the war,” said another man, in a tone pitched to demonstrate that he too knew a little history.

“That's right,” said the woman who was with him. “Don't you remember reading me about one of them getting in trouble with …”

She stopped as the man shook his head in warning. A remarkable blush suffused her face. Perhaps to cover the woman's confusion the guide moved briskly to the piano and touched a silver-framed photograph.

“The Earl's two sisters each had a son,” she said. “One of them would have inherited the estate, but not the title.”

The photograph was of two young men—or boys, only it was so hard to tell with the Snailwoods. One was wearing a cricket cap and blazer, the other a top hat and frock coat with butterfly collar and white bow tie. They were, in the phrase characteristic of captions to photographs in the society magazines of the period, sharing a joke.

“Now,” said the guide, “if you'd care to look around for a few minutes, I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”

The group fragmented, some continuing to study the portraits of Zena, a wife squeaking to a husband to come and look at the wireless, just like Aunt Moo used to have, the three children settling rather noisily to count the scarlet tulips in the enormous bronze urn beneath the gallery, and a few serious thirties aficionados moving over to study the line of framed photographs of guests, assembled in the courtyard to have their picture taken as an essential element in the ritual of a Zena “do”, or week-end party. The guide moved to a window and studied the sky. One problem of providing guided tours to a house whose main attraction is its garden is that in certain weathers your visitors are likely to flock indoors for a spell, all at the same time. This was just such a day, warm and soft when the sun was out, but with the wind carrying from the west a series of isolated hummocky clouds, hard-edged and silver above but almost purple where they dragged their trains of rain along the valley.

A visitor came and stood beside the guide and she turned as if expecting a question, probably the quite frequent one of why the final photograph in the line showed one of the sitters in Arab fancy dress. But in fact the man—elderly, slow-moving, heavy without particular fatness, merely looked out at the view. There were five other windows he could have chosen for the purpose.

“Changeable,” he remarked.

“What?” she said. “Oh, yes. Very.”

He did not speak to her again until the tour was effectively over. The next fierce shower had come so the party had stayed in the shelter of the cloisters to gaze between fretted arches across a wide rectangle now pelted with hailstones at the remarkable north face of the courtyard. It was as though the architect had used this range to fit in all the elements of Germanic mediaevalism for which he had been unable to find a niche elsewhere—to the left the buttresses and lancet windows of what seemed to be a section of cathedral, though the guide explained the building merely housed the old coach houses and stables, entered from outside; to the right (and really very successfully) the packed, tumbled, haphazard frontage of a street in some old university town, crammed into this great keep for safety; and at the centre the clock tower. The guide recounted the intricate movements of the painted figures who had appeared each time the clock struck, at the quarters a personification of one of the seasons dancing with her attendant figures until Father Time emerged to scythe them down, and at noon, at a higher level, a crusader and a Saracen fighting blow for blow until on the last stroke the Saracen's head flew from his shoulders.

“Did it really come right off?” asked one of the children.

“It came right off and hung there,” said the guide. “It was on a spring, but you couldn't see that from down here. It was like a conjuring trick.”

A flush of enthusiasm tinged her voice. It was obvious that as well as having seen the Countess Zena in the flesh, she had watched the clock strike noon.

“Pity they can't get it going again,” said the children's mother.

“I'm afraid it would cost the earth,” said the guide. “Well, that's the end of the tour. If you go this way round the cloisters you'll find the souvenir shop on the right of the gateway. If you want to buy plants, turn left outside the gateway, go past the garages and follow the signs to the Nursery. I think it will stop raining in a minute. Don't miss the gardens—they're really the best part. And thank you all very much for listening.”

Without apparent rudeness she managed to move rapidly out of reach of further questions, and was almost at the corner of the cloisters when a voice behind her called. “Excuse me, madam. One moment.”

She turned, stiff, polite rejection ready on her lips. It was the man who had spoken to her about the weather, trotting purposefully forward and feeling in his waistcoat pocket as he came.

“I don't want to be a nuisance,” he said. “I could write, but …”

Reaching her he held out a card. She took it a little unwillingly and kept it at arm's length to read, “Lauterpracht and Mason. Clock Specialists.”

“Is there a chance of me looking over the clock some time?” asked the man. “Internally, I mean to say?”

She handed the card back.

“If you're saying you want to repair it,” she said, “I'm afraid it's no go. We've had estimates and they're absolutely prohibitive.”

“I know that,” he said. “You had one from my partner, Sid Lauterpracht, years back.”

“Ah yes, I remember the name. So you'll understand, Mr … you're Mr Mason, I take it …”

“Right. Sid died in 'fifty-nine, and I took over, but now I've retired. Come to live in Marlow. But, you follow, I still love clocks, and I need something to get my teeth into. I've looked out Sid's report on your clock, and he considered it could be done. The cost was in the time, you see, and now I've got plenty of that. I wouldn't expect to be paid. There'd be something for materials, but I've kept a lot of my tools, so I can cut the wheels and such … They're really very simple, clocks.”

“This one is supposed to be the most complex piece of clockwork outside Germany.”

Mr Mason's face, heavy, square and earnest, was not made for smiling.

“Oh no,” he said gently. “As turret clocks go, I'll give you, but even an ordinary marine chronometer … and those are simple, really. Very simple pieces.”

From somewhere a noise like a fire-alarm jangled briefly.

“I've got to go,” said the guide. “That's the rota bell—it means there's another party ready to go round. But if you really think …”

“Shall I write to someone?”

“Yes. Me. Sarah Quintain. Q-U-I-N-T-A-I-N. Miss.”

With the stolid confidence of an old craftsman Mr Mason took a silver propelling pencil from his waistcoat pocket and wrote on the back of his card. Miss Quintain was already at the door in the corner of the cloisters when she turned and said, “We'll need references, of course. But do write. I'd love to try and get it going after all these years.”

Mr Mason merely nodded. Carefully he tucked pencil and card away in their correct pockets before moving to the edge of the arcading to gaze up through the last spatterings of the storm at the clock tower. It was a grimmer structure than either of its wings, no less fanciful but more in keeping with Byron's notion of “chiefless castles breathing stern farewells”. Its archway could easily have housed a portcullis and its corner turrets were pierced with arrow-slits. The face of the tower was recessed several feet back between these turrets, not merely for aesthetic reasons, but so that the figures who danced or fought as the bells chimed could emerge from doors set at right angles to the clock face. There was one plain gothic window above the archway; above that a strange, foreshortened arch, a stone mouth, cut the whole tower from side to side, to allow the carousel that bore the dancing figures to rotate; above that came the clock face, and above that again a miniature line of battlements which screened the track along which crusader and Saracen came out to do battle; then eight feet of vertical masonry and the battlements proper. Along suitable ledges pigeons huddled from the shower, two or three of them almost wholly white, others piebald, but mainly native grey, whose genes over the years had gradually dominated the strain of the snowy tumblers that once had graced the courtyard.

The clock had stopped at two minutes past twelve, but the carousel was out of phase, with the figures to accompany the first quarter showing. Perhaps somebody had disconnected the whole striking train and let the timepiece work out its last years without its allegories. Or else, to have something worth showing the visitors, they had cranked the carousel on to this point, with the lissom figure of Spring about to vanish into the right-hand turret and the scythe of pursuing Time swung back to sever the ankles of the last lamb who danced behind her.

II

1

O
n a Friday afternoon in June 1937 a woman stood in the courtyard at Snailwood and gazed at the clock tower. The masonry shimmered slightly with the first true heat of summer, and the world was still enough for one to be able to imagine one could actually hear the steady tock of the pendulum, until the silence was broken by the burr and snap of a car being driven briskly down the steep bends of the drive. Thirty seconds later an open car, a dark green AC Ace, whipped into the courtyard and parked, deliberately choosing, it seemed, in all that emptiness the one spot that would unsettle the small flock of white pigeons that had gathered there to peck among the cobbles. The birds wheeled away in a dazzle of wings. The driver, a fair-haired young man, appeared to notice the woman as he climbed out, but then turned and rather deliberately lifted from the back seat a suitcase, two tennis rackets and a golf bag. The woman walked towards him, reaching him while he was still apparently concerned to place his kit in the precise position he wanted on the gravel. She held out her hand.

“Hello,” she said. “You must be Harry, or Vincent.”

He took her hand. Her arm was pale as ivory and bare to the shoulder.

“Ver … Ver … Ver …” he began.

She neither prompted him nor waited for him to complete the agony, but took the name as spoken.

“I'm Joan Dubigny,” she said. “I was waiting to see the clock strike. I don't think I'll ever get tired of it.”

Vincent glanced up at the tower. The hands stood at eleven minutes past three. When he turned back to Mrs Dubigny it was as though the clock had performed some kind of introduction between them, putting them now on a footing that enabled him almost to master his first appalling stammer.

“Zena's new k-keeper?” he said, meeting her glance. Her eyes beneath the plucked eyebrows were dark blue, her skin despite the heavy make-up apparently as pallid as her arms but without any suggestion of fever or debility. Her red lips smiled at him, inviting him to like what he saw, though she must have been several years older than he was, perhaps almost thirty. She in her turn looked at an ordinary young man, large-framed but carrying himself lightly, face ruddy, hair and small moustache only a little darker than straw, and with no more than a faint hint of puzzlement about his countenance to prepare a stranger for the stammer. It would not have needed the straightness of his posture or the cut of the moustache to tell one that he was almost certainly a soldier. He was in fact a lieutenant in the Royal Berkshire Regiment.

“We expected Harry to get here first,” she said.

“I passed him in the town. My bus is faster up the hill.”

“But your colonel must have let you off early after all?”

“My adjutant, actually. Not at all pleased about it. I g-gather Zena had wangled it with someone in the War House.”

“That was me. I happen to know a rather sweet little general. Ought we to send your adjutant a box of cigars?”

“Doesn't smoke. Sweet tooth, though.”

“Liqueur chocs? From Fortnums?”

“Spot on. You seem to have c-cottoned to Zena's style pretty fast.”

“I love it,” she said, smiling in a very different manner than before, this time widening rather than narrowing the apparent age gap between them, as if looking down on him for a whole flight up the stairway of experience.

“Here's Harry,” he said.

A fawn Jowett, also open but much more gently driven, slid in under the archway, bringing with it a sudden sharp odour of unclean exhaust. The driver parked on the far side of the AC, climbed out and came round to shake hands. A family likeness could be seen if looked for, though Harry was lighter of frame and feature than his cousin, clean shaven, and with brownish hair that struggled to curl against its restraining hair oil. He moved, too, at a most unmilitary pace and looked as though he had never puzzled about anything all his days. As Vincent introduced him to Mrs Dubigny the clock tower emitted a slow and painful groan.

“Hush,” she said. “It's starting.”

She moved towards the centre of the courtyard. The young men followed her.

“That's only the door opening,” said Harry.

“Forty seconds to g-go,” said Vincent. “I say, old man, I'd better have a squint at your c-carburettor. I'm surprised you made it up the hill.”

“Bit of a pull,” said Harry.

“Do hush,” said Mrs Dubigny. “This is my first chance all day—I've been so busy with everybody coming.”

“Who's everybody?” said Harry, but she held up a hand as a new groaning began, staring at the clock.

The clock face was splendid enough in itself, despite the peeling gilt on its openwork hands and on the gilt angels in its four corners who now stiffly raised trumpets to their lips and blew an imaginary fanfare. The train of Spring emerged from the door that had opened in the side of the left-hand turret. A lamb came gliding out, poised on one hind hoof, then a shepherd and another lamb. Next came Spring herself, taller than the shepherd and wearing a long dress of faded blue. A symmetrical group of shepherd and lambs slid out behind her. When Spring was at the centre of the tower the procession stopped and all seven began their dance, lambs and shepherds merely rotating but the goddess, moved by much more complex gearing, seeming to retreat and advance as she turned while the arm that held her circlet of flowers rose and fell in a gawky gesture. The last workman to retouch her paint (shortly after the war, by the look of it) had given her a pleasingly puzzled and defenceless air. A carillon of bells, preliminary to the quarters, tinkled while the figures gyrated. Then, as the quarters themselves began to clank, the dance abruptly ended. The figures slid towards the right-hand turret just as Time emerged from the door behind them, no friendly old gaffer with a scythe, but close kin to the skeleton reaper of the
Totentanz
. He moved at the same speed as they did, so that it did not look as if he could catch them, but the clockwork's choreographer had designed one last surprise. The scythe had seemed fixed to Time's torso as he emerged, but when he reached the place where the dancers had performed it swung out and forward, lunging at the disappearing lambs. The effect was to make it seem as he went through the door that he was already gaining on the dancers and would mow them down in darkness.

Mrs Dubigny clapped her hands.

“Nice to see it going again,” said Harry. “It wasn't last time I came.”

“It must be terrible when it goes wrong,” she said.

“Nobody knows. Vincent is always trying to get a look at it but McGrigor won't let anyone into the tower. It stops. Uncle Snailwood sends for McGrigor. He says it can't be mended. Uncle Snailwood says he'll write to the clock specialists. McGrigor says ‘Wait'—he'll see what he can do. Next day it's going again.”

“He just hangs another half hundredweight of scrap iron on the weights,” said Vincent. “You can hear—it oughtn't to groan like that. He must be making merry hay with the rods and bearings—some day soon it'll pack in c-completely.”

“Oh, I remember,” said Mrs Dubigny. “Vincent's the mechanical one.”

“That's right. And I'm the human one,” said Harry.

“I didn't mean that!”

“It's true—you've only got to see him playing a ball game—he's so damn accurate he has to be a robot. Flesh and blood hasn't a chance.”

“Harry guh … guh … guh …” began Vincent.

“Who is everybody, Mrs Dubigny?” said Harry firmly.

“Who? Oh, you mean the everybody who's coming. All sorts. This is my first real Zena do, you know. The main thing is she's going to settle the Palestine question.”

“Oh lor!” said Vincent.

“That should be interesting,” said Harry. “Who's she got for that?”

“The list's in my office.”

“Same as Nan used to have?”

“I believe so.”

“Right. Soon as I've unpacked. Want me to sketch it out for you, Vince? You'll be expected to come up with the army line, no doubt.”

“There's a Brigadier Trotman coming,” said Mrs Dubigny. “He's just back.”

“Oho! Quite a big fish,” said Harry. “Who's she got batting for the Yids?”

“Somebody called Professor Blech.”

“Has she now?”

Harry had begun to smile with eagerness, like a child who has prepared a practical joke and is waiting to see his victim spring the trap. He made a move to fetch his cases.

“And then there's an Arab prince,” said Mrs Dubigny. “Yasif ibn Sorah—hope I've pronounced it right.”

“Oh, I know him,” said Vincent, clearly astonished. “If it's the same fellow—I played against him in the Harrow Match.”

“Probably his father,” said Harry. “They all have the same name.”

“No, it's the son,” said Mrs Dubigny. “In fact Zena invited him in Vincent's name—that was why it was so important to have Vincent staying. My general grasped the point at once.”

Vincent went red, but when Harry began a raucous and explosive laugh he joined in as if from habit.

“Come on,” said Harry. “Or we'll have to stay and let Mrs Dubigny see the half-hour strike.”

“I like Summer best of all,” said Mrs Dubigny.

By the time Vincent had loaded himself with his case and all his sports gear the other two had started towards the house and he needed to lope to catch them up.

“… school clock,” Harry was saying. “Sometimes it used to go bonkers. According to my mother there was an episode in my dad's day when a visiting preacher insisted on working it into his sermon—you know, the usual sort of thing, we'd get 'em at least once a half, old buffers absolutely besotted about Eton, pretty embarrassing sometimes. Anyway there was everyone sitting in College Chapel while the chap orated on …”

He deepened his voice and infused it with breathy pomp. The cloister arches, under which they were now moving, returned ecclesiastical echoes.

“… and we know that this great institution will continue to do its work and send out the leaders of the world as surely as we know that the clock outside in Lupton's Tower will now strike twelve. We will wait and hear it.”

Harry paused.

“He'd timed it perfectly,” he said in his own voice. “The trouble was the clock struck a hundred and twenty-eight.”

2

“It's bloody cheek,” said Vincent, speaking extra stiffly because he was gripping the turn-ups of his white flannels under his chin as he worked the coat hanger up them before putting them in the wardrobe.

“Can't expect anything else from Zena,” said Harry, tossing socks into a drawer. “She's like that.”

They were in a bleakish room on the floor below the servants' attics. The bed frames were iron, ornamented with brass bobbles. There was one washstand, its crockery bearing the Snailwood crest but mostly chipped. This and the wardrobe and the two chests of drawers and the two wooden chairs were painted white. The only element that suggested comfort was the horsehair cushions on the seats in the window niches, and even those seemed more designed for a boy to stretch out on and read a book with his fingers stuffed in his ears all Sunday afternoon, than for an adult to sit on and feel easy. Vincent and Harry went through the process of unpacking half-automatically, knowing where it was natural to put their clothes and which drawers needed a jerk to unstick them.

“She's thoroughly mucked me up with my adjutant,” said Vincent. “We do most of our training at week-ends in the TA, and I've begged off a couple of Saturdays for cricket matches already. I'd sworn I wouldn't this time.”

“But the order came from on high.”

“Makes it worse. He can't abide political soldiers.”

“Never mind. No doubt Zena will have arranged for compensation in the shape of glamour girls.”

“To help solve the Palestine question?”

“Oh, I don't know. Some of these old chaps have quite boyish tastes, no matter how grey their eminences. I thought Mrs Dubigny herself wasn't half bad, for a start.”

“Yes.”

“Think it's any part of her duties to sleep with Uncle Snaily?”

“You've been publishing too many cheap novels.”

“I hear that's why Nan left. Zena decided that she had performed that function as long as duty demanded and tried to get Nan to take over. Nan jibbed.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Nobody told me all of it. Purser was full of sly hints last time I came. Nan left without another job to go to, so I heard, and she hasn't a bean of her own. Mrs Dubigny I am told is divorced. She is distinctly easy on the eye, and she doesn't look as though she'd mind.”

“You can't trust Purser when it comes to Zena.”

“I'm making allowances for that. Finished?”

“Don't wait for me. You want to look at that list.”

“It's going to be a very interesting week-end, Vince. I'll give you a rapid crib, so you can make the correct noises while all the old buffers are woffling on.”

“I'll stick to the army line, thanks. Provided the politicians will let us get on with it we can stamp on this revolt, pacify the Arabs and carry on from there.”

“They aren't half making a soldier of you. Presumably that will be the Brigadier's line. I don't know much about him.”

“Rifleman. Said to be a sound chap, though. Bit of an expert on camel patrols or something like that.”

“Tremendously useful for settling a religious war. The point is, Vince, that this lot of politicians we've got now haven't the slightest intention of letting the army loose to pacify the Palestinian Arabs. It doesn't matter a hoot what anyone's promised the Jews in the past, they can see that if we stick to our word we're going to lose every Arab friend we've got between Persia and Gib. Lose them, lose our oil supplies, lose the supply line to India—how do you think we're going to fight a war with Germany on that basis? I'll lay you five to one in fivers that we let the Grand Mufti back into Jerusalem by this time next year. Now, a young officer who showed himself, however unwillingly, aware that this is the true situation might do himself a power of good in certain quarters.”