Theirs Was The Kingdom (108 page)
The lake would be a straightforward job. All that was necessary was to dig a canal behind a group of willows, linking the backwater to a natural depression in the left-hand paddock, a place that had always cried out for a sheet of water. Lilies and water-iris would do well down there, and fish too, no doubt, with a fountain on the islet but no provision for a boathouse. What he was seeking, what he meant to have from here on, was tranquillity, of a kind that had escaped him all his life. Beauty and colour certainly, but the singular beauty he had always associated with English landscapes. Order imposed on natural contours that were predominantly green all the year round.
He turned then to the herbaceous borders nearer the house. He had never liked laurels or, indeed, the Teutonic formality McCready, the gardener, had brought to the circular and half-moon beds fronting the house. To his mind they were beginning to look like part of a city park and he had other, more ambitious plans, that included a small forest of rhododendron, any number of lilacs, forsythia, clematis, camelia, acacia, magnolia, and flowering cherry. In the spring, say from late March until early June, there would be a riot of colour out here, supplementing the carpet of yellow provided by the primroses, daffodils, and narcissi that already ranked themselves by the thousand under the copper beeches of the drive. He half-closed his eyes and had a swift, satisfying vision of the place ten years from now. “By God,” he said aloud, “I’ll make ’em sit up around here, just the way I did thirty-odd years ago! I’m not done yet by many a long sea-mile, and they’ll all have to acknowledge it… George along with the rest of them, although I doubt if George knows the difference between a Japanese maple and an Irish yew!” For a pleasurable moment he conjured with a string of names in the pages of his notebook devoted to imported trees—giant silver fir, Korean fir, and Algerian fir; bitter nut, king nut, and cow’s-tail pine; Leland cypress, Sawara cypress, Monterey cypress and Arizona cypress, red spruce, Honda spruce, Norway spruce, and weeping spruce; cider gum, spotted blue gum, and white Sallee.
He made his approximate dispositions and turned his steps to the wooded spur. Ever since he had lived here, this had been the rendezvous of wildflowers of every species, but dominating throughout the summer were the serried ranks of foxgloves, his favourite periwinkle, and wandering convulvulus wreathing itself among the spires of rosebay willow herb that marched all the way up the slope to the heavy timber at the summit.
He would not disturb this overmuch, despite old McCready’s annual grouse that it was a source of weeds that bid fair to ruin his kitchen garden below. He knew that Henrietta liked this corner of the estate and the old Colonel had liked it, too. All that was needed was a careful rearrangement of rocks and the cultivation of rock plants in all the crevices. He went down again and into the house, where Henrietta was hearing young Margaret at a lesson. “Turn her loose and do the rounds with me,” he said. “I’ve finished planning outside and I’m about to make a start in here.”
She came willingly enough. It had taken her a month or two to get accustomed to seeing him about at all hours of the day, but now that she had she liked it well enough, for he never interfered in her domestic schedules.
It was mid-June then, with sun flooding the whole southern façade of the house and exposing corners where the maids had scamped their dusting. He said, moving into the big drawing room, “I never did subscribe to this passion for clutter in rooms one uses as much as we use this one, the study, and the big bedroom upstairs. Most of the houses I’ve entered in the last twenty years have been crammed with furniture and trumpery knick-knacks. Rubbish, most of it, and dust-traps galore. Nowadays it’s the fashion to embellish everything. I don’t know why, unless it’s the trademark of the Johnny-Come-Lately. The English once had a reputation for clean, straight lines and spaciousness, and kept their rooms in period. Mind you, one can be too pedantic. This place, built in the 1580s, was once furnished almost exclusively with black oak, but this eighteenth-century mahogany, walnut, and rosewood I’ve introduced looks at home here.” He trailed off, stopping here and there to make notes, for he had plans to buy more furniture and pictures and porcelain, so that she could see herself enlisting another maid or two to keep it waxed and gleaming.
Aside from clothes, she had no kind of taste herself and freely admitted it. She was content to leave the arrangement of the rooms to him, not only because he had always been deeply interested in English craftsmanship but also because it gave him a lasting excuse to stay at home and keep her company. She needed his company more than ever now. All but two of the children had flown, and three of them—Alex, Joanna, and Helen—were as good as lost to her, together with the offspring they had produced and were likely to produce. Alex and Lydia appeared occasionally, for he was back in the Western hemisphere now, with a roving commission to Imperial garrison posts queueing up to be initiated into the mysteries of that new gun Lydia had foisted on the British army. Joanna, based on Dublin, came less often, and none of them had seen Helen since the week of her wedding. Young Hugo drifted in from time to time, sometimes once or twice a week between business trips and athletic meetings, and George had returned to his mill-house so that she had the company of Gisela and the babies. Stella she saw once a week, and Stella’s tribe were always in and out of the place, borrowing ponies, building wigwams, and fishing down by the islet that she always thought of as Shallott. Giles, and that handsome wife of his, lived nearer London and spent their holidays in Wales, a part of Wales she had never visited, although Giles said it was the most spectacular part of the British Isles. Young Edward was here throughout his school holidays and Margaret was here all the time, but she was a solitary child and not much company to a fifty-year-old woman whose main interest, apart from the family, was in clothes.
Henrietta said, as she trailed after Adam, “You don’t really want my opinion, Adam. It isn’t worth having, anyway, not about this kind of thing. I can run a house as well as any woman alive, but I can’t re-create one, the way you seem bent on doing. Won’t that landscaping, added to what you intend doing in here, cost a great deal of money?”
“Practically all we have to our private credit,” he said, cheerfully, “but it will appreciate, mark my words. One or other of them will doubtless reap the benefit. There’ll come a time when connoisseurs will pay very high prices indeed for some of these oils and pieces I’ve picked up in my travels. The rubbish most cabinetmakers are turning out now will be used for firewood, as it richly deserves.” He stood back and looked at her whimsically. “Are you telling me you really can’t appreciate the difference between the kind of furniture your father has in that red-brick monstrosity of his in Wythenshawe, and that Derby comport over there, or the Pembroke table it’s standing on?”
“Not really,” she admitted, “to me it’s just a pretty bowl and a nice table, and Sam’s house is stuffed with china and tables, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “it is indeed. Mostly Staffordshire fairground prizes, and great bulbous-legged pieces tortured into fantastic shapes and smeared all over with layers of varnish. To say nothing of yards of drapery tacked up everywhere. The place has no kind of welcome for anyone but a junk-dealer.”
“Well,” she said, “Sam never cared for anything but money-making, and you’ve done your share of that. Like it or not, you left me to run this great place single-handed for long enough.”
“I’m not complaining,” he said, smiling, and gave her one of his playful but heavy-handed slaps on the bottom, so that she skipped nimbly away from the bed and slammed the door on Phoebe Fraser, who happened to be passing down the corridor.
“Complaining? I should think not indeed! But while we’re on the subject, do have some regard for the servants about the place. I’m sure I don’t know what you’ll say or do next since you came home and left George to get on with it. Just then, for instance, whatever will Phoebe think…?” But he only threw back his head and laughed, so that she felt a little spurt of pleasure that he was so content here and showed no signs of pining for the business that had absorbed him so completely over the years.
All their married life they had been adjusting and readjusting to one another and this, she supposed, was no more than another phase in their relationship. He beckoned her over to the window and stood to limn for her the southern vista he planned, but she was less concerned with his prattle of ponds and pine plantations than the fact that he put his arm round her waist and then, almost absentmindedly, turned his head and kissed the back of her neck. It was all at one with his mood these days, as if, finally off-loading that fearful burden he had carried, he felt younger and more hopeful of the future. He showed it in the way he talked about George and George’s impending spring-clean, about Lydia’s salutary effect on Alex, about Joanna’s young Jack-o’-Lantern (he invariably referred to Clinton by this name) currently reorganising the Irish sector, about the regeneration of “poor old Giles” since he had taken the bit between his teeth and finally married that madcap, Romayne. But, above all, it showed in his attitude to her, for although he was in his early sixties he made love to her more than occasionally, and always with the same gusto. It established beyond any doubt that he still found her personable, was still able to find extreme pleasure in her body, as he had from the earliest days of their marriage. Standing here, his arm about her waist, she had one of those sudden insights into the girl she had been when he had dumped her at his father’s lakeside house and rushed south on his very first foray. She remembered then how she had been assailed with doubts as regards her appeal to him as a bride, wondering, as she stood looking at herself in Aunt Charlotte’s swing mirror, whether a man of his worldly experience would find her as pretty as she found herself as she playfully measured her eighteen-inch waist with a blue hair ribbon. Well, there was nothing to worry about on that score, even at this late stage. Only a few hours before he had held her in his arms and made her feel like a bride again.
She said, unable to restrain her exultation, “You do just whatever you’ve a mind to do with the place. I’m sure I won’t care, so long as you don’t go traipsing off again.”
He took her at her word. By midsummer the place was a hive, with seemingly every labourer for miles around making inroads into the paddocks and coppices. McCready, poor man, was dragged from his beloved vegetables, saddled with a couple of boys, and set to work on the rockery behind the house. From the oak and beech clump west of the right-hand paddock came the sound of hammer and saw as the Hermitage took shape, and almost every day one of his pinnaces or frigates arrived to unload something he had picked up somewhere and dumped in a warehouse to await collection. A brace of carpenters invaded the house to make brackets and niches in unadorned corners, and when he unpacked his crates and shook the shavings from a piece of Rockingham or Spode, or a statuette of an armless Venus or a dying gladiator, he reminded her of one of the children opening presents on Christmas morning.
The fine weather broke in August and the violated left-hand paddock, where they were deepening the depression and digging the feed channel for the lake, took on the appearance of a field under the walls of a besieged town, with trenches, sapheads, and ramparts connected by plank runways for the stream of barrows. Autumn, however, was dry and sunny, so that the ground soon hardened again and progress speeded up. By late October the transformation could be seen, if only in outline, and she could make some kind of sense out of a master plan spread out in her sewing room, confound him, where she had once grappled with administrative work during his absence after the imminent arrival of Giles had compelled her to abandon the yard.
By a happy chance everyone save Helen and her missionary husband was on hand for Christmas, Gisela’s third son (christened, to Henrietta’s delight, Adam) having been born in early autumn. At supper that night, when they were all gathered at the long table set in the drawing room where there was space enough to accommodate them, she had one of her Queen-Empress impressions, especially when George, bottle-merry by then, proposed a toast to her and the eight grandchildren asleep in various parts of the house. There were now nine, in fact, but Joanna’s daughter, Valerie, had been left in charge of a nurse at home, “too young to take her chances with the Irish sea” as Jack-o’-Lantern put it. And soon, if her observation was as accurate as it usually was in this respect, there would be ten, for Giles’s wife, Romayne, was looking tubbier and a good deal more complacent than Henrietta recalled, in the days of her long, stormy courtship. She never had known what to make of that young scapegrace but Giles, poor wight, was obviously enslaved by her, and the best of luck to them. If Giles was anything like his father, it wouldn’t be the first and last, and a tribe of children would steady her down. From what Henrietta recalled of her, she needed steadying.
Deborah, and that nice young man Milton she had married, turned up on Christmas Eve to Adam’s special delight, and Henrietta, calculating her age, wondered if it was too late now for her to present “proofs of affection” as they used to say. She hoped not. Any child those two produced was sure to be biddable, and they were clearly as pleased with one another as the besotted Giles and that sensual little baggage he had tracked down and married.
All in all it was less of a family than a clan, and she wished very much that Helen and her husband could have been here to complete the tally. She found herself hoping that the earnest young doctor who had come asking for her so unexpectedly (and at once whisked her off to Papua of all places) would soon have a change of heart, abandon what must surely be the unrewarding task of teaching headhunters the creed, and buy a nice, comfortable practice in Sevenoaks or Tonbridge.