A Charitable Body Page 10

  “Here,” said Mary-Elizabeth, slapping down a bundle of paper. “This is all I’ve got so far, probably all there is. It starts in 1929 with the germ of an idea and goes on to 1932. Then it was beginning to be seen as a political statement. That is, ‘No war,’ and you can see how it would have had an appeal after the slaughter of the Great War, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Felicity, and she flicked through the papers. “I can see the appeal to intellectuals and artistic people. Lots of names who rang bells then, including some that still ring bells today. Siegfried Sassoon, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Robert Graves, William Walton, Edmund Blunden, and so on. No guarantee that all, or any, of these people came to Walbrook. Ivor Gurney is mentioned here, but he was in an asylum by then. Looking at the lists you’ve got a pretty good selection of the political, the bien-pensant, and the artistic. You’ve got to admit that Timmy Quarles did a pretty good job.”

  “I can’t see how he solved his financial problems through raking in the fairly small sums mentioned here,” said Mary-Elizabeth, dismissive as usual of the Quarles branch of the family.

  “No,” said Felicity. But she skipped through the remaining mountain of material in the peace-seminar file. “It was still going great guns in 1938 and ’9. You’d think it was a lot of hard work for very little return—very little good, solid financial return, I mean. Unless—”

  She regretted the word as soon as it was out of her mouth. She remembered Charlie’s strictures about amateur investigators who acted on the assumption that one lot of people were the good guys leaving the other lot of people as the bad guys. Really she knew very little about Rupert Fiennes’s cousin. But she needn’t have worried. Mary-Elizabeth had made a minor discovery.

  “Well, I didn’t know that Timmy Quarles had an illegitimate daughter.”

  This seemed to give her more pleasure than any suggestion from Felicity was likely to do. She threw Felicity an ambiguous smile, but was soon submerged once again in her papers, and Felicity decided to ignore the intriguing statement and let her mind go back to the possibility she had been toying with. Unless, she had come close to saying, the seminars were being subsidized by a fairly hefty rake-in from some foreign power.

  Felicity had been working for two hours and was thinking it was time to pack up and go home. As she reached to close her exercise book, a name that had already been mentioned jumped out from the collection of letters she had been working on.

  “Oh, I say . . . Good heavens, it’s the song cycle again. The one we heard before Christmas in the concert here.”

  “I’ve never been quite sure what a song cycle is,” said Mary-Elizabeth.

  “It’s a series of songs that are connected in some way; usually they either have a story or they illustrate some theme. Like the one here was on the subject of wars, and the poems were mostly by First World War poets.”

  Mary-Elizabeth pouted. “I’ve no time for music. I think I’ve got a defective ear for it.”

  “This is interesting though,” insisted Felicity. “It’s a carbon copy—do you remember them?”

  “Just about. More trouble than they were worth.”

  “Anyway the letter’s to a man called Maurice Matlock, and it hails the fact that the cycle is nearly in its final form, says it could be enormously influential, says how good it will be to have a contribution from ‘the late Ivor Gurney,’ and asks if it would be possible to give a premiere—or at least a preview so to speak—of the cycle at the October seminar. ‘I know Peter Pears is interested in singing one of the parts, though Ben has not come up with a contribution as yet.’ Then the letter is signed ‘Timothy Quarles.’ ”

  Mary-Elizabeth gave an uninterested nod and was turning back to her accounts and receipts when the pair of them heard a creak. They looked at each other, Felicity frowning. Faint footsteps continued to the top of the stairs, then were heard, louder, on the attic floor. Slowly the handle of the door turned, then the door began slowly to open.

  It was Lady Quarles.

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry, Mary-Elizabeth. I had no idea you were up here. And, er, Felicity.”

  “Just getting down to the archives,” said a now-rather-pert Mary-Elizabeth. “I said to the people when I went onto the board that I had not got many qualifications for being on the Trust governing body, but I could be the unpaid archivist because I’d put the records together in the first place. I’d just continue with the work, dividing it into subject matters, putting the papers in chronological order and so on. Felicity is helping me out—the academic brain, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Well, you mustn’t let me . . . I’m sure Stafford will be delighted that you’re doing this. He’s been saying ever since we moved into the house that it needed attention, but every moment of his day gets used up by the house and rooms and the Great War exhibition. . . . So on his behalf I’ll say thank you. We’re so grateful. I’ll leave you to get on with it.”

  She backed out of the little cubbyhole, where she had been standing too close to the pair for comfort. Her footsteps were heard again, this time going downstairs. The pair looked at each other.

  “Not her usual rather grand self,” said Felicity.

  “By no means. I’m usually in awe of her, but today she seemed rather fearful of us.”

  “I must be getting along.”

  “Oh, by the way, before you slip off: what was the date of the letter you read out to me? About the cycle thing.”

  Felicity picked up the carbon copy. “Oh, it’s August . . . August 1939.”

  They looked at each other, both of them frowning.

  CHAPTER 8

  Past History

  “Well, young feller me lad, you seem to have three hands full.”

  Charlie had not been called a feller me lad since he was in single figures, but he rather liked it, and the man who used this dated cheeriness. Rupert Fiennes had from the first struck him as an utterly genuine man, with a strong vein of mercy in the judgments he made—Charlie got this view from Felicity, who had by now had several chats with him. Of course Charlie reserved judgments, in the way that policemen were bound to, but he was impressed that Felicity felt she could assure him that Rupert bore no malice against Sir Stafford, nor did he seem to feel that the family was divided into hostile wings that needed to work against each other as a matter of principle and in the family tradition. Charlie hitched his one-year-old-at-a-pinch farther up on his shoulder.

  “I do, don’t I? I imagined the second child was going to be easier than the first, but it doesn’t work out like that, does it? Thomas is an angelic kid, but still . . .”

  “I get your point, though I’ve no experience,” said Rupert. “Any chance of us having coffee together, or something stronger, at some other time if not now?”

  “Sure. I must say now sounds rather inviting. Carola, Thomas, you’d like an orange or something, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” chorused both children, Carola supplying comments for Thomas. She put up her hand to be led to the watering hole.

  When they had adopted a table in the saloon bar of Halifax’s White Heifer and Carola was going in and out to the play area under the eye of a benevolent barmaid, Rupert came back with two pints of Landlord’s and set them down at the table. Nobody mentioned coffee again. When Rupert Fiennes sat back in his chair, pulled out his pipe, and put it on the table as a sort of protest, Charlie felt he had suddenly been adopted and become a part of an England that had nearly vanished.

  “Landlord’s,” he said. “Couldn’t be better. You must want something out of me.”

  “Not at all,” said Rupert Fiennes, stroking his mustache. “I thought you might want something out of me. Your wife is obviously very interested in the past of the house I once called home, and it occurred to me that I might find it easier to talk to you, tell you what I remember about things in the past—or at least tell you what I’ve been told. Until the 1930s the house had very little to interest anyone in its past or its present. Later on .
. . Well, as I say, Felicity has been asking questions, and there’s every reason why she should. It’s part of her job, as a board member.”

  “So you’d like to put your side of this past?” said Charlie cheekily.

  “There is no side,” said Rupert, smiling comfortably. “I hated living in Walbrook and eventually got out. Stafford loved and still loves it. Far from bearing him malice, I’m enormously grateful, and I acknowledge my luck: I was keen to get rid of Walbrook, and there was Stafford waiting and eager, like an elderly puppy.”

  “Not exactly to buy you out, though.”

  “But I’d settled for any solution other than that years ago. There was no acceptable way of selling Walbrook as it was. Stafford was the ideal solution.”

  “So in a way—” Charlie stopped, wondering how to put this. “Though Stafford’s only chairman of the board, and he’s only chair as long as his board wants him to be, yet in a way he has taken over the old roles of his wing of the family, the roles they had lost in—was it 1939?”

  “Yes.” Rupert’s voice took on Churchillian overtones. “A fateful year, and I was not yet alive to give it even a baby’s attention. Stafford was, though. He was about three or four when war broke out, and—in his babyish way—he knew Walbrook, and especially the Dower House. He had lived there while his mother went for treatment to the Leeds General Infirmary.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Charlie, not wanting to cross that bridge and ruin the atmosphere. “We’d wondered about that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves if the reason the house changed hands was a financial crisis in the Quarles wing of the family.”

  Rupert nodded and stroked his pipe. “Yes, we are. That was the reason, though there were complicating factors. The pressures on the landed gentry went back to the nineteenth century, so they had been getting poorer and poorer over a long period, and the slaughter in the First World War had left many families like ours impoverished of talent or a nose for money. Timothy did his best, I’m sure, when he inherited the place from his father in 1921, but he wasn’t the son his father would have chosen, and his best wasn’t nearly good enough. He knew very little of how to run a place like Walbrook Manor, nor how to get money out of it. He was at sea, and he knew it.”

  “Who was it who suggested the weekend seminars on peace?”

  “Nobody knows, but some of us suspect it was a man called Maurice Matlock, minor—very—composer, interferer in any artistic project going, general busybody, and one fascinated by the politics of the right-wing movements in Europe—Mussolini in Italy, Salazar in Portugal, later Hitler, Franco, and all sorts of gray and dubious figures in Eastern Europe. More of him later. Timothy may have thought up the peace seminars himself or had them suggested by a stranger in a pub, but Maurice Matlock is a prime candidate because he was a born mover and shaker behind the scenes—rather like Lord Mandelson today.”

  “But Timothy lived long enough after the sale to tell someone the tale, didn’t he?”

  “It would have been a sanitized version. My father threatened him: if he tried to misrepresent those seminars as purely pacifist in aim and tone, he would make public the truth.”

  “Which was?”

  “That over the years they had become a front movement for the fascist forces that were sweeping over Europe.”

  “Guaranteed, if there was evidence, to blacken any attempt to whitewash the past?”

  “Absolutely. After 1939, everyone involved was careful to forget those fabulous weekends at Walbrook. And of course the peace movement did begin as a legitimate cause: this—anything like the slaughter of the Great War—must never happen again. An understandable and legitimate cause. A lot of the activity sprang from that feeling, and one would use the word well-meaning of the whole movement if the word had not become rather suspect. Artists and intellectuals were attracted to the cause in great numbers.”

  “People like the composers who contributed to the song cycle?”

  “Exactly. We think the man who had the idea for the cycle was Ivor Gurney, minor poet and composer, one of the many fighters in the trenches who lost not his life but his sanity there—his balance is perhaps the best way of putting it. He suggested the song cycle, we think, to Maurice Matlock, and the thing took off from there. Gurney was in an asylum, so he could not really drum up contributors. The job went to Matlock, and he did a superb job. He got a whole list of names from the older generation of composers—Bax, Vaughan Williams, Elgar—and as the thirties’ drift to war gathered pace, the younger generation as well: Walton, Britten, Tippett. I’m talking about agreements to take part, not actual music written. That was much more difficult to bring about. These were the middle-aged and current generations of English music. They had to be left alone with their inspiration. That was why very little had been finalized by the time Gurney died in 1937. Matlock took the enterprise over entirely after that, tried to make the project into something practical and concrete, something that would soon be ready for performance, but it never came to that.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I begin to see. It may be a red herring. The main thing was that for the moment the financial state of the family and house were improved. Except that by 1939 the policy of appeasement was a busted flush and everyone was prepared for—mentally, I mean—the war that came in September.”

  “That’s right. No more peace seminars then.”

  “And is this when your father entered the picture?”

  Rupert grinned. “I’d say he pushed himself into it, rather than just entered. He was a determined man, who thought in terms of simple moral choices. He had always been suspicious of pacifists, as most middle- or upper-class people were at the time. Gradually he became aware of what was going on at Walbrook, and he was livid with rage. Where Timothy Quarles thought the slaughtered millions of young men in the First war had earned a better fate for the next generation, my dad, Montague Fiennes, thought they deserved beatification: their cause was still my dad’s. He was already very suspicious of the Quarles branch, due to something that happened in 1790 or thereabouts—a dubious legitimacy I seem to remember. He was ready by 1938 to try to take over the house.”

  “How? Was your father rich? What did he do?”

  “He was owner and managing director of a chain of hotels. His genes must have inherited the family’s founder’s genes. We were very nicely off is probably the best way of putting it. He was still a youngish man in 1938, with a glamorous second wife. I wasn’t born until 1946. He went along to Walbrook and put it to Timothy, and Tim laughed in his face. Ten years before he might have accepted, my father was told, but now the financial stability of house and family were looking rosy. ‘No thank you very much’ was the essence of what was said. He added, ‘And don’t come back.’ ”

  “But your father did?”

  “Oh, he did—dramatically. In the train going back to London, he read the headline of the paper he’d bought at the station: ‘Hitler’s unalterable decision on Czechoslovakia.’ He got out at the next station and took the train back to Halifax. He burst in on Timothy, pointed out that the situation was completely changed, and his offer was reduced by three thousand pounds.”

  “Doesn’t sound much,” said Charlie.

  “At that time, and talking of stately homes, it was a lot.”

  “So, a determined man,” judged Charlie. “Unforgiving.”

  “Yes. I don’t know where all that determination went when I was made,” said Rupert. “I won’t give you all the ins and outs but by the summer of the next year Timothy was convinced of what was staring him in the face: if he didn’t sell up to his second cousin, his name and the seminars he hosted would be blacker than oily mud. He sold up, bought an unwanted vicarage in Essex, and that was the last Dad saw of him, though there were some acrimonious contacts by post.”

  “And your father took over as Lord High Everything else at Walbrook?”

  “Not quite. He knew that in wartime he could not hope to run a hotel chain and even a modest-sized gentry r
esidence. He offered the house at a peppercorn rent to the government as a home for those with mental troubles—living in the community was not an option back then. They jumped at the idea, and Dad in one fell swoop established the Fienneses’ patriotic commitment of family and home in wartime. No one brought up the peace seminars, and the new dispensation was even welcomed in the village. Dad was no Croesus, but he was more generous than your average country gentleman with a financial problem that was near insoluble.”

  “Then at the end of the war,” said Charlie, “your dad took the house back?”

  “That’s right. Nineteen forty-seven it was. Dad was lord of the manor, in his own eyes at least. The title doesn’t exist in fact, but people could flatter him by using it.”

  “You came into the world.”

  “I was just a baby when we moved. Symbolic, at least in intention. In fact the family finances were stretched, as Timothy’s had been, though the house was run much more efficiently, as you’d expect. While I was growing up, there was a bit of ‘One day, Son, all this will be yours.’ But I never really felt it or wanted it. It didn’t feel like mine, didn’t feel like a home, though maybe it did to Mary-Elizabeth.”

  “Your attitude must have been a blow to your dad.”

  “Oh, I never told him. He was pleased enough when I went into the army, and he just assumed that when he died, I would buy myself out of the army and take over. He had all sorts of things to occupy his mind. In the sixties he got rid of the hotels, then he worked for the Conservative Party in the Halifax area—a hard-pressed bunch. He had the knighthood but he was promised a life peerage in the early eighties; the coming of Margaret Thatcher got him all excited, and so did the fact that I was ingloriously employed in the Falklands invasion, which he thought was appropriate. He was just thinking over what to call himself—Lord Fiennes of Walbrook I’d guess—when he dropped down dead. Collapse of stout party.”