The Last Houseparty (8 page)

“Indeed, indeed,” interrupted Professor Blech. “And like this poor Scotsman you admitted splinters of foreign matter under your skulls during the war, so now you have this unpredictable temper.”

Even so early in the week-end Sir Charles must have established that in the Professor he had found a conversationalist, or at least a monologist, as formidable as himself, but he was long used to dealing with heavy metal among Zena's guests. He accepted the point with a nod and a smile, but managed to make it seem that he was chiefly grateful for the chance to draw breath.

“And now we are proposing to embark on another great war,” he said. “Have you asked yourselves who will be building our tanks, repairing our ships, manufacturing the aeroplanes to defend our skies against wave upon wave of dive-bombers? The answer, my friends, is that it will all depend on McGrigor!”

“Do you really think it will come to that, sir?” said a tall young man who had been sitting on the very edge of the sofa and gazing with great attention at whoever happened to be speaking. While it had been Lord Snailwood he had merely gazed. For Sir Charles he added a small repertoire of nods. Professor Blech's interruption had evoked a miraculously balanced expression of appreciation of the point and polite doubt of the good taste of a foreigner in making it. The young man's name was Flitwick-Johnson. He was a fairly regular guest at the Saturday luncheons, because he was a leader-writer on the
Sunday Clarion
, one of Sir John Dibbin's newspapers, and so it was often necessary for him to stay at Bullington in order that he should receive Sir John's intimate direction for tomorrow's clarion blast. He preferred to be called by the initials of his surname. Nobody knew his Christian name, but according to Harry Quintain his wife was permitted, in moments of endearment, to refer to him by his hyphen.

Sir Charles, sitting because of his corset on a throne-like upright chair, began to speak with his usual emphasis on the pointlessness of the proposed conflict. Unlike Lord Snailwood he had the knack of appearing to speak to a single person, in this case Flitwick-Johnson, while commanding the attention of a wider circle. This included Lord Snailwood, who at the start of his own harangue had been in the process of taking the sherry decanter round but for the last ten minutes at least had stood holding it while his guests did their best not to display their empty glasses in too obtrusive a manner. Now Purser, who had finished satisfying the more complex needs of the cocktail-drinkers, came over and with a murmur of apology took the decanter. Lord Snailwood glared at him as if the momentum of sacking McGrigor might carry him on to dismiss his entire staff. Purser appeared not to notice.

At last Sir Charles made the mistake of asking a rhetorical question, immediately answered by Professor Blech, who having established this bridgehead proceeded to advance rapidly into Sir Charles's front along several main routes of thought, but concentrating on the manner in which Germany's own economic impetus, its downhill career, would inevitably carry it into war. The Professor's mode of speech, rapid and hushed, allowed members of the listening circle to withdraw from the engagement and start their own conversations.

Lady Dibbin, a small but broad woman whose masterful air and flattish, sallow face gave her a look of Napoleon in a white wig, had some months before attended a concert at which Mrs Blech's quartet had performed. She beckoned her husband over to the further sofa so that he could bear witness to the pleasure they had both had. Mrs Blech, recovered from her car sickness and now only naturally pale, treated these approaches with reserve, perhaps as a means of controlling her own chronic jumpiness, or perhaps because she had heard of Lady Dibbin's reputation for arranging charity concerts and was unwilling to begin to commit herself and her colleagues. Sir John, a fleshy, purring man, showed no impatience to be back in the political argument, though Sir Charles had now counter-attacked by conceding the inevitability of Germany fighting a war of some sort, but arguing that the natural enemy was Russia, and that British and French commitments to nations such as the Poles and Czechs should not be of a sort to prevent this happening.

Two of the Bullington visitors turned out to know one of the Snailwood guests, a cheerful tanned girl called Nancy Blaise, and the three of them began to recall the highlights of
Yes, My Darling Daughter
, which they had seen together at the St James's Theatre the previous week. Several other guests, though they had not apparently seen the play, found the recapitulation of its merits and defects more interesting than the political argument. Zena, lounging as usual on a pile of cushions on the floor, was by now telling Brigadier Trotman about her childhood—or rather about one of her childhoods, as the events and even the country seemed to vary from week to week. For Brigadier Trotman it was a castle in the south of Poland; he had admitted only a slight knowledge of Poland, the result of a four-day visit to the Baltic. The south, Zena assured him, was very different.

The size of the Great Hall, and the number of guests, meant that there were several other groups beyond the central ellipse whose vague foci were Sir Charles on his throne and Zena on her cushions. One of these consisted only of Harry and Mrs Dubigny, sitting on a chaise-longue between two of the windows, Mrs Dubigny doing most of the talking and Harry laughing a great deal in a rather curious fashion, throwing his head about and opening his mouth as if to emit the explosive guffaw which she had heard the previous afternoon in the courtyard, but in fact making almost no noise at all. She seemed to appreciate the display. Whatever she was telling him—some long anecdote of comic disaster, to judge by her grimaces of mock dismay—evidently stimulated her also. Though she remained pallid as ever the slight aura of tragedy that had hitherto hung round her as the survivor of the wreck of a marriage was gone, as was the apparent age difference between herself and Harry.

Vincent was in the group remotest from the centre. Its other members were Prince Yasif and Mrs Flitwick-Johnson. They had originally split off because Mrs Flitwick-Johnson wanted to look closely at the new Rex Whistler. She was a thin but soft-featured blonde who kept her large blue eyes a little more open than is usual. This and her small round mouth and receding chin gave her a look of innocence, but not the innocence of a child, rather that of some animal whose mode of life seems sinless because it has been fixed by the weird decrees of evolution. In Mrs Flitwick-Johnson's case, had she been that animal, the mouth and chin would have suggested an adaptation for the painless sucking of juices from a host-animal, and the large too-round eyes another adaptation for nocturnal hunting. Nevertheless she would definitely have been considered a beauty in most gatherings; the Prince clearly found her attractive; Vincent showed little of the unease he had on first meeting Mrs Dubigny. When they had studied the Whistler the Prince had deliberately led them further apart, and now he and Mrs Flitwick-Johnson were leaning against Zena's absurdly elongated piano, while Vincent faced them and took very little part in a conversation about which English painters the Prince should think of buying supposing he were to start a collection. Mrs Flitwick-Johnson showed a thorough grasp of the values involved, aesthetic and financial.

Over in the central group Sir Charles had countered Professor Blech's thrusts by opening hostilities on the home front.

“Mosley's muffed it,” he was saying. “The moment he put his chaps into uniform he went off course. He's a brilliant man, but he's no notion of what our people will stand. That's the prime art of the politician, you know. If you haven't got it you're like a carpenter who has no feeling for timber, however sharp he may keep his tools. A chap like that will cut you out a plank and it will fit its space and look a treat—until you put a load on it. Mosley's still got a lot of the right ideas, but he's trying to work against the grain of England. In many ways he's a better man than Adolf, but England is not Germany. I have no doubt that this country will be ruled by a dictator in ten years' time—sooner, if we don't manage to keep out of fighting Germany—but it will never be Mosley we put in the driving seat.”

“What about Churchill, sir?” said Flitwick-Johnson.

“A spent force, an empty man, a wasted life. No, none of the present crew—nor myself, in case that was what you were thinking. Just possibly I might fit a position analogous to that of Doctor Goebbels. But whether the man comes from the right or the left …”

“Why must it be a man, Charles?” said Zena over her shoulder, without apparently interrupting her own close attention to Brigadier Trotman's account of a camel race near Bizerte. Sir Charles, unready for this thrust from a presumed ally, snorted.

“You have a knack of making serious questions frivolous and frivolous questions serious,” he said. Zena, her eyes wholly on the Brigadier, answered with a lazy movement of her shoulder blade. Blech, regrouped, flooded forward into the breach, leaving Sir Charles silent, bolt upright on his throne; his right hand, which had been readied for some oratorical gesture, closed its fingers stiffly upon nothing.

A few minutes later Purser announced luncheon.

V

“T
here's masses of room for your bike in the Coach House,” said Miss Quintain. “I expect you'd like to put it under cover on a day like this. Out through the arch, turn left, past the No Entry sign—that doesn't apply to you—and through the second pair of double doors. But if you'll let me show you the clock room first—I've only just time. I have a visitor coming and it's absolutely vital I should see him. Now …”

Miss Quintain had a large iron key in her hand. She led the way beneath the arch of the clock tower, inserted it in a door in the right-hand wall and after a slight struggle to turn it tugged the door open. A narrow stone stair circled up into darkness.

“As I told you on the telephone the pigeons have been getting in for I don't know how long,” she said.

“I've brought a load of plastic bags,” said Mr Mason.

“Splendid.”

“Very good stuff for starter for compost heaps. Quite as good as anything you can buy commercial.”

“I'll tell Mr Floyd. And then of course there was the fire … oh, dear! It's always far, far worse than one remembers.”

Miss Quintain had stepped off the stair into a room that filled the whole square of the tower and rose another twenty feet to a plain stone vault pierced with a number of slots through which dangled ragged ends of rope. The room was quite well lit by the lancet windows in its north and south walls, and it was almost empty, apart from the hummocky mounds of bird-droppings and a jumble of ironware stacked along the right-hand wall—mostly round weights, called “cheeses”, but also oddments of metal—a ploughshare, a huge rusted cogwheel, several flat-irons and other shapes less distinguishable beneath the pall of droppings. The dried-out body of a young starling lay on one of the heaps. In the far corner the floor seemed to have given way.

“Better not come any further just now,” said Mr Mason. “Weights came down in the fire, I take it?”

“Yes—how did you know?”

“See where the ropes burned through. Else you'd have them hanging, like that one.”

He pointed at the wall to the right of the window, where a loop of rope hung almost to the floor with the pendulum vertical beside it.

“That'll be the going train,” he said. “What turns the hands. Someone's had the sense to take its weights off, but they wouldn't be so heavy. Ruddy great weights you'd need to turn the carousel. Should have been hung in a chute, for safety, case something like that happened.”

“It was dreadful. They came clean through the floor and the arch below. There was a man standing underneath who got killed. I must have seen it happen, but I didn't realise. I had the arch repaired when we opened for visitors, but it didn't seem worth doing the floor.”

“Least it smells dry.”

“I think it smells awful.”

“There's awful and awful. You don't need to stay no more, Miss Quintain, seeing how you're in a rush. I can look after myself if you'll just give me the key. I'm used to all this, you know. There's a lot of vicars, for instance, who've never been up their own towers—too old, or too scared. I can find my own way.”

He spoke with gentle confidence. His was not a bedside manner but something of that order, designed to comfort and reassure and at the same time to emphasise his own especial competence in this field. Miss Quintain, hitherto immensely brisk, relaxed slightly.

“Oh well, if you really mean it,” she said. “Would you like to come over to the kitchen at eleven for tea or coffee?”

“Thank you, but I've brought a flask.”

“Lunch, then?”

“I usually cut my own sandwiches.”

“I've got to see you some time. I did as you suggested and looked into the insurance, and you don't seem to be covered. You're not strictly a workman, and you're in an area excluded under the policy for visitors. But if you really don't mind signing an indemnity …”

“That's all right. I'm getting on. You might say there's not all that left of my life to be worth insuring.”

“I'm very grateful. I've been in such a rush with this man coming that I haven't had time to get Mrs O'Rourke to type the thing out, but she'll have it ready by lunch. Really it would be best if you came then, as I'll be busy with visitors all afternoon. We have lunch in the old kitchen, twelve-thirty sharp. I'll send Jo-jo over to show you the way. She'll enjoy that.”

“Thank you, then.”

“You can bring your own sandwiches if you don't trust our food, but it's very good. Don't forget to lock the door when you go out.”

Mr Mason grunted and watched Miss Quintain leave, then took a pair of galoshes from the Laker Airways bag he was carrying, put them on and began to move with six-inch paces around the floor, shuffling the muck aside to test the planking beneath. He kept well clear of the hole. After a while he left, went down the stairs, locked the lower door and crossed the courtyard to where his motor cycle and side-car stood. Leaning his weight against the handlebars he wheeled it round and under the arch, where he stopped to unload a shovel, brushes, a blue metal tool-case and a bundle of black plastic dustbin-liners. Then he pushed the bike out and round to the left. With its side-car it was a fair weight and it might have been easier to start the machine and ride it, but somehow this did not seem to suit Mr Mason's style. He did things his own way. His actions expressed a willed personality, long conformed to. The slow, forceful trundle of the bike gave an impression of certainty, almost of remorselessness, of aims it was useless for anyone to try to frustrate.

He wheeled the bike well into the Coach House, straightened and looked round. A two-year-old Marina Estate and a five-year-old Rover 2000 stood near the open doors, and by the closed ones a newish Landrover, a beat-up little 2CV, and a small Fordson tractor hitched to a flat trailer loaded with drums of weed-killer. Sideways behind these three stood a much larger shape, swathed in dust sheets. Mr Mason walked through to the inner wall to inspect the workbench, trying the vice, lifting a file from its rack and testing it with his thumb, rapping a power socket with his knuckle. The process brought him close to the shrouded vehicle, and casually he lifted the dust sheet to expose the front of it. Above the radiator grill gleamed a series of parallel scooped hollows into which a child might lay her fingers, caressingly, to relish the warmth within. Mr Mason grunted, jutted his lower lip out, blew air up his face as if to cool himself after the effort of shoving the bike, and let the dust sheet fall.

At twelve-thirty Miss Quintain was waiting for him outside the kitchen door under the cloisters. The air was still, and soft with odours of baking for the visitors' afternoon teas in the Orangery, but her attitude seemed unusually tense as she stared out over the courtyard, glittering in sudden sunlight after yet another May downpour. At the sound of Mr Mason's footfalls she turned and came quite hurriedly to meet him, but it would have taken her eyes a while to adjust to the shadows of the cloisters. When they were a few paces apart she stopped abruptly and turned her head away.

“You oughtn't have …” he began.

“What did you do to Jo-jo?” she said in a low voice.

“The kid? I yelled at her to get out. Sorry about that. Didn't hear her coming, and there she was, right out in the middle of the floor. That's the upper floor I'm on about. I reckon the beams are sound, they'd have to be, to carry the weights, but I can't say for the planking and after what we'd been saying about the insurance I was scared …”

“You were scared! You seem to have frightened the living daylights out of Jo-jo.”

“Sorry about that. Maybe she was jumpy before I yelled, coming up all that way in the dark. And the smell and all. Matter of fact, she gave me a bit of a start. For half a sec it was like one of those figures had begun walking around.”

“Oh well, I expect that explains it. Usually she's tough as old boots, not afraid of heights or strangers. And you probably don't realise what a state you look—you'll need to clean up before you eat. I'll show you where.”

“It's a dirty job.”

“I suppose so.”

When he came into the kitchen Mr Mason's face glowed with scrubbing, giving him an absurd look of the culprit schoolboy, though otherwise he showed no sign of guilt or bravado. Miss Quintain rattled off the names of the half-dozen women who were eating at one end of a large scrubbed deal table. The child Jo-jo, blonde and tanned, a tough and perky-looking little specimen wearing a red T-shirt, sat huddled against one of the women. Mr Mason seemed to take no notice of her stare.

“There,” said the mother. “There's nothing wrong with the gentleman, and you're a silly little scaredy-cat.”

“I shouldn't have yelled at her,” said Mr Mason. “I was telling Miss Quintain, I don't know as that floor's safe.”

“That's all right,” said the mother brightly.

“I only said he …” complained the child—already, as if from habit, preparing defensive positions for the coming change of role from sinned-against to sinner.

“Personal remarks,” said her mother.

Mr Mason sat down, and the child continued to stare at him as he opened the plastic box he had brought and took out sandwiches made with brown commercial bread, the filling too thin for one to be able to discern what it might be except by taste, and possibly not even then.

“Do try one of Mrs Floyd's rolls, Mr Mason,” said another of the women, pushing a shallow basket across the table. “She bakes them for the Orangery and we get the ones that don't come up to standard, though I must say if I could bake bread as good as Mrs Floyd's rejects I'd think I had every right to be pleased with myself. Oh, come on, do! They're fresh, and there's always more than we can eat. And we brew our own cider, too, don't we, Jo-jo? (Jo-jo's a great help with the bottling.) Only we're not allowed to sell it. This is quite a good brew, though I say it myself. Please try, Mr Mason.”

Reluctant but polite, Mr Mason accepted a wholemeal roll and half a glass of cider. When he tasted them he contrived to express his appreciation with no actual words and a minimum of facial change, but it could not be said he seemed in any way churlish; the reserve and stolidity were clearly part of his personality, a personality that implied considerable inner coherence. He ate slowly and replenished his glass with water, explaining that he was not used to drinking at midday. When he had finished he put back in his box the half-sandwich whose space in his stomach had been usurped by Mrs Floyd's roll.

Meanwhile he took very little part in the conversation, which was almost wholly to do with the running of Snailwood in a manner to extract for them all a reasonable living by means of a steady throughput of visitors. The roles of the women became clearer. Jo-jo's mother was Mrs Floyd, cook to the enterprise and also the head gardener's wife. Mr Floyd himself—a man with something of Mr Mason's stamp, but smaller, younger and with close-cropped dead-white hair—came in at one o'clock with his assistants, two young women, one on the lumpish side of buxom, the other dark and lanky. They settled further along the table and ate with almost angry hunger.

The woman who had spoken of the bread and the cider—and continued to speak with equal flow and enthusiasm of every other subject that emerged—was called Mrs O'Rourke and doubled as manageress of the Orangery and secretary to Miss Quintain. Two others were official guides. Mrs Robson was primarily a cleaner, married to the estate handyman, who was at this moment taking Miss Quintain's morning visitor back to the station. The two last performed a number of functions, such as issuing tickets at the garden gate and the front door and waiting in the Orangery. They all lived on the estate, either in what had once been the gardeners' cottages or in flats in the old servants' quarters on the upper floor of the main house. Some were married, but apart from Mr Floyd and the handyman the husbands had jobs unconcerned with Snailwood. No doubt there were various complex arrangements balancing rents against wages. The lunch in the kitchen on Open Days was a routine, a functional occasion rather than a gathering of kindred spirits, but the fact that all the talk concerned the efficient running of Snailwood, the maintenance of order in the face of the chaotic impulses of visitors, gave an impression of great single-mindedness.

Though Miss Quintain owned the house and estate, her attitude was in no way dictatorial and there was no obvious deference to her. The only exception to this came when the subject of that morning's visitor emerged briefly. Mrs O'Rourke brought the matter up, the unmitigated eagerness of her conversational style making it hard to tell whether this was a subject of special interest. But Mrs Floyd paused as she raised a cream and pastry gâteau to her lips, it being impossible to cope with so explosive a mouthful and at the same time listen attentively, though the others had all ceased talking. Miss Quintain answered with no especial brusqueness that the man had been quite sympathetic; perhaps she would have been more expansive if Mr Mason had not been there. In any case she immediately turned to him and asked how he was getting on in the clock room.

“Too soon to tell,” he said. “I've hardly begun clearing the mess out. Then it'll be a matter of testing the main beams. You're going to have two tons, two and a half tons, bearing on them once I've hung the weights back on. There was the fire, of course, and then how long was the roof leaking, would you know?”

“Most of the war, I should think. They must have done a temporary repair, but Lord Snailwood was very ill for a long while, and by the time my stepfather took over the war had almost started. My mother managed to wheedle a grant out of the Ministry of Works in 1950 to do the main roof, and there was enough left over for the clock tower then.”

“Let's say the temporary roofing lasted half that time, then. Five years before it began to leak, and a couple more before it was bad enough to notice … Your main beams should be sound still … if they're not, I don't know … it could turn out more than I can tackle alone … in any case half the carousel timbers is going to want replacing …”