The Lorimer Legacy (40 page)

‘Oh, she'll find another hero long before that,' Margaret said cheerfully. ‘Well, give my kind regards to Piers. When will you go?'

‘He asks me for Thursday, and since the Royal Opera House has cancelled its performances for the whole week, there's nothing to make this impossible. I wonder whether
the other guests will be invited for the same time. I've found myself once before arriving at Blaize a day ahead of the main party. It's one of the advantages of widowhood, I suppose, that my reputation is reckoned to be a less fragile flower than a young girl's.' She mocked herself as she spoke, and was amused to see Margaret's fleeting frown of disapproval.

‘You've never told Piers the truth?'

‘Why should I? The truth is a legal formula which in the circumstances makes no difference to our relationship. And it's a mistake to scatter too many versions of the same story around amongst people who know each other. I'll write to accept, then.'

Alexa felt no qualms about leaving Frisca with Margaret. As the two women had agreed between themselves before the birth, the little girl had always been told truthfully who her mother was. She knew that Margaret was only her aunt – but it was Margaret, all the same, who represented the constant love in her life. It was to Margaret that her nursemaid took her for an hour of play every evening, and Margaret who came each night to see her in bed and hear her prayers. Alexa's own visits, sudden and brief and full of treats and spoilings, provided excitement and the opportunity to chatter to her beautiful mother, but they were no more than holiday occasions. Margaret was Frisca's family.

So Alexa was alone as she was driven up the winding woodland drive of Lord Glanville's estate on the bank of the Thames. The sun was bright and the trees fresh and vigorous, their leaves almost visibly unfolding in the warmth of the afternoon. She breathed deeply in the spring air as she stepped down from the motor car which had been sent to meet her at the railway station.

Her host appeared to greet her with a promptitude which suggested that he had been listening for the sound
of the engine. It was interesting, Alexa thought, that he was more handsome today, in his early fifties, than he had been ten years before. His hair, which had already begun to turn grey when she first met him, was now so brightly white that it had the curious effect of making his face appear younger. During his wife's lifetime, too, his eyes had always seemed troubled, and his forehead lined with strain; his shoulders had been perpetually stooped, as though to minimize his height. Now his back was straight and his step springy. He moved like a young man and allowed nothing to disturb the smile of pleasure with which he came forward to take her hand.

‘I'm cramped after the journey,' Alexa said as soon as they had exchanged greetings. ‘May we walk in the garden for a moment before I go to tidy myself?'

‘Of course,' he said, and she could see how much the suggestion pleased him. ‘It's too early for the roses. But the azalea walk is at its best.'

He offered her his arm and led her towards the river. The terraces and gardens immediately adjoining the house were arranged in a geometrically formal manner, to suit both the original Tudor building and the wings which had been added to it in the reign of William and Mary. On the further side of the house, the terraces were divided by a ha-ha from the fertile and well-ordered land of the home farm: this was the view which Alexa knew that she would have from the window of the guest room which was always allotted to her. But between Blaize and the Thames the ground sloped down too steeply for cultivation.

Most of it was wooded, but with blossoming or specimen trees which made it clear that this was still part of the pleasure garden. On a meandering bed, artificially lined with smooth grey stones in an apparently random fashion, a small stream trickled down to join the river.
On either side of the stream low-growing azaleas pressed together so closely that it seemed almost to be the same shrub in which pink and red and purple flowers blended, or yellow and white more coolly dipped their heads to reflect in the rippling water. Alexa clapped her hands with pleasure at the rich ribbon of colour in such an unexpected setting.

‘Only in England does one find such informal beauty so carefully planned,' she exclaimed. ‘I remember that last time I came here in spring you took me to a field of daffodils and primroses. Have you a corner of your grounds for every week of the year?'

‘It's one of the happy results of being a landowner,' Lord Glanville agreed. ‘One can be prodigal of space. A man who can see his whole garden from his drawing-room window must sometimes feast his eyes only on bare branches or withered blossoms. But I can turn my back on the dying daffodils and come here instead. And within a week the laburnum avenue will be at its best, to lead us on to the first flush of the roses.'

Although Alexa had asked the question, her attention had already been distracted from the answer. They had almost reached river level by now, and she felt sure that she must have been to this part of the grounds before, on one or other of her visits; but she could not remember that she had ever noticed the building which now attracted her attention.

It was large and very long, stretching along the bank of the river. The roof was in bad repair, but the walls were built of the same dark bricks as the Tudor section of Blaize, their upper sections patterned with bleached beams of oak.

‘This can hardly have been built since I was last here,' she said, puzzled. ‘And yet I'm sure I don't remember seeing it before.'

‘Until a few weeks ago it was screened by trees which had grown up far too close to it,' Lord Glanville explained. ‘And covered with brambles and creepers. It would have been impossible for you to guess the shape of the building beneath the tangle, even if you'd been able to approach it. Recently I had an idea which would have brought it into use again, so I had the area cleared in order that its structural state could be examined.'

‘What is it?' asked Alexa. ‘Or rather, what was it?'

‘A tithe barn. Pre-Reformation – older than the house. It was built in a period when the family always kept the living in its own hands. The tenant farmers of the time must have had difficulty in distinguishing between what they owed to the church and a simple addition to their rent. It was positioned here because we had land across the river, and the harvest tithe was brought over by boat.'

‘I don't imagine your tenants would take kindly nowadays to the idea of giving you a tenth of all their crops, so I take it you aren't proposing to revive that system. What's your new idea for the barn? Shall I guess?'

‘You're not likely to be successful,' Lord Glanville laughed. ‘There's a game of tennis which is played in an indoor court. The old, royal game – nothing like lawn tennis. One or two of my friends still possess courts which were built in the Tudor period, when it was particularly popular, and others have erected new ones for themselves in the past twenty years. They've introduced me to the game, and I find it fascinating. It has a special advantage that even a player of advancing years like myself can sometimes beat a younger and fitter man by the use of craft. With a court of my own in which to practise, I should improve more rapidly, of course, and it occurred to me to wonder whether the barn could be adapted for this purpose.'

For the second time within an hour Alexa contrasted
the energy which her host displayed nowadays with the languid tiredness of those earlier years when he had borne the anxiety and responsibility for an invalid wife.

‘And could it really be used in that way?' Alexa asked. She lifted her skirts so that they should not catch on any of the cut brambles which lay on the ground, and stepped inside the barn; if ever there had been a door to close the entrance, it had rotted away a century or two before. There was a smell of musty dampness, of air which had not been disturbed for many years, but enough light filtered through the gaps in the roof to reveal a structure that seemed closer to a cathedral than a farm building. Alexa studied it curiously while Lord Glanville answered her question.

‘It would be simpler – and less extravagant into the bargain – to erect a completely new building,' he said. ‘A real tennis court has special requirements. The floor must be smooth, naturally, and of stone – but that could be arranged easily enough. The game is played off the walls, so these also must be smooth and true, with windows running the whole length of the court at a high level, above the playing area. And there are various architectural oddities which are incorporated into the rules of the game – apertures and galleries which enable winning points to be scored; and a sloping penthouse roof above the galleries, to be used in the service.'

‘A roof inside the building?' Alexa found it difficult to visualize the appearance of the court from his description.

‘It's thought that the game may have been developed by monks playing in the cloisters of their monasteries, and using every feature of the courtyard,' Lord Glanville explained. ‘Anyway, my conclusion, alas, is that the conversion would be too complicated.'

‘So the barn will be abandoned again, to decay still further? What a pity. The old brick is so attractive. And
the size is unusual.' For a moment or two longer Alexa wandered about inside, picking her way with care over the rough ground. Then she turned to smile impishly at Lord Glanville. ‘You should convert it into a little opera house,' she said. ‘It would be perfect. The length of the barn would allow plenty of room for an audience, an orchestra, a stage, and space behind the stage for the cast. There could be a gallery at the end there, where there seems to have been a loft once. It might be necessary to incline the floor and to raise the other end of the roof to accommodate the scenery, but really the alterations would be very simple. And there could be a landing stage on the river, allowing the audience to arrive by boat. Just think how romantic that would be on a summer evening.'

‘Romance on a small scale,' laughed Lord Glanville. ‘Before you could make room for a Soldiers' Chorus, you would have to evict the audience.'

Alexa shrugged away the objection. ‘Mozart wrote operas to be performed at court, in theatres no larger than this would be. And in Russia, you know, many of the noble families who have town palaces in Moscow and Petersburg also own theatre palaces a few miles outside. I was invited to sing in one by Prince Aminov – a private performance for his family and friends. It was a most agreeable experience.'

‘One may reasonably assume that the theatre would have been built by the family's serfs, in the days before their emancipation,' suggested Lord Glanville. ‘And it's my impression that the servants of the Russian aristocracy haven't changed their expectations too markedly since those days. In England, the economics of staging opera privately might prove more daunting.'

‘Certainly it would be necessary to charge admission,' agreed Alexa. ‘To charge a very high price, in fact, so
that to attend a performance became something to boast about. But the casts could be small and the sets modest. Even the orchestra, in such a small building, need not be too enormous. New composers could be found, who would write for a particular place. There's a need for patronage in music.' She realized that she was allowing herself to speak too seriously and made a gesture of insouciance. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I mustn't bore you with my hobby horse. I travel round the world keeping an eye open for my ideal opera house. But I'm in no real hurry to find it, because it would tie me down to one place.'

‘If it would tie you to Blaize, I would willingly give you the barn and the money to adapt it,' Lord Glanville said. Just as Alexa a moment earlier had twirled her parasol in an attempt to pretend that she was only indulging a fantasy, so now he laughed to suggest that he was joking; but Alexa suspected that that was an equal pretence.

The conversation was an unsettling one. Alexa spent so much of each year singing in opera houses abroad that her meetings with Lord Glanville were necessarily infrequent. But at each reunion she was amazed by the ease with which they resumed their friendship as though there had been no gap. It had become a friendship of equals. The time when Alexa had been dependent on the help and protection of the Glanvilles was long past. Every new year and every new success brought her more confidence and, as she grew more mature, so the twenty-year difference in age between herself and Lord Glanville seemed less important.

If only he would be a little less restrained, she would be able to judge whether the pleasure she felt each time she saw him could be transformed into something deeper. But she could hardly expect him suddenly to become passionate when her rejection of his proposal of marriage
four years earlier had been so brusque and unkind. He had chosen the worst possible moment then to ask her to marry him, coming to join her on the ballroom terrace of Blaize while her heart was still breaking with love for Matthew, who had left her for a reason she could not accept and whom she would never see again. She had told Margaret at the end of that evening that she could not possibly love Lord Glanville. Now she was not so sure.

This, however, was not the moment to find out. Without making any comment on her host's suggestion, Alexa turned to lead the way out of the barn and up the steep woodland slope at a pace which left her breathless. Her carefree smile as Lord Glanville caught her up masked an anxiety which she was determined to conceal. He could not be expected to know about the difficulty which she had recently brought upon herself by her own impulsive behaviour. Nor could he guess how frightened she was. The temptation to confide in him was very great, but pride held her back. She had chosen a way of life which placed no reliance on male support, and it would be cowardly to appeal for help when the first small problem arose. The friendship which gave them both such pleasure was built on the foundation of two independently satisfying lives, and nothing must be allowed to spoil it.