Corpse in a Gilded Cage Read online

‘Dear God!’ breathed Mr Lillywaite. ‘Does this mean the reporters are on to this at last?’

  But as he spoke the car emerged from the Mile and drew up beside them—actually drew up beside the splendid fountain designed by Auriol Jukes for the second Earl. The front window of the car was down, and from the driver’s side emerged the head and shoulders of a heavily built and heavily made-up woman, with partially blonded hair and false eyelashes. She smiled a smile that was meant to be jovial but turned out to be ferocious, and waved a plump arm in the direction of the house.

  ‘Hey, Dad, is it semi-detached or detached?’ she yelled, and let out a yelp of laughter in self-congratulation at her wit.

  ‘Get out, you lot,’ she shouted over her shoulder, and the back opened and a quartet of children began to jump stiffly down. The driver’s door opened briskly and the woman herself emerged. Her imposing bust was draped with a pink nylon blouse, and across her large hindquarters were stretched a pair of brilliant orange slacks.

  ‘What a place, eh, Dad?’ she shouted, against the waters of the fountain, once more with that ferocious joviality. ‘What rent’s the Council rushing you for this little lot, then? It’s a real giggle, isn’t it: you and Elsie all on your tod in this great barn.’ She turned to the figures emerging from the front part of the car. ‘Chokey came with us to visit Phil. And you remember Sam, don’t you, Dad? We won’t interrupt.’

  And smiling a wide, ingratiating smile in the direction of Mr Lillywaite, she marched up the steps to the Dutch Garden, in the wake of her children who had scampered up before and were now gazing raptly at the great house.

  ‘Take your fingers off that flower, Karen. You pick that and I’ll scalp you. Pull your bleeding socks up, for Christ’s sake, Gareth. You’re mixing with the gentry now.’

  And the orange slacks proceeded in the direction of the Queen’s Entrance, followed more slowly by one middle-aged man of watery eye and distinctly unreliable appearance, and by a large and amiable young West Indian. Even when she disappeared from view, her voice could be heard, shouting instructions to the children and accompanying them with threats of dire repercussions.

  ‘Get along in, you lot, and if one of you puts smudges over the furniture, I’ll have the hides off the lot of you—got that?’

  Finally, as the two men stood there, the voice faded into the distance, and it all seemed very quiet.

  ‘That was Dixie,’ said the twelfth Earl.

  CHAPTER 3

  SIR PHILIP’S STAIRCASE

  The normal mode of approach to Chetton Hall was through the main gates, past the lodge, then along a drive of over a mile, past the Dower House, then finally into a courtyard formed in the right-angle where the Blenheim Wing intersects with the original house. Here steps would be found leading to the Great Entrance Hall (for the imposing Queen’s Entrance on the West Front led to nothing more than a dingy ante-room, whatever it may have opened up to in the Danish Queen’s time). In the courtyard and the lawns around it, making no impact on their manifest need for gardeners’ attention, the Earl pottered on the afternoon of his family’s arrival, trying to conceal a broad grin at the humour of it all. Friday afternoon was well advanced before Joan and Digby drove carefully into the courtyard and parked the car neatly and unobtrusively under the windows of the Blenheim Wing. Joan got out first, closed the door carefully, patted at the creases in her skirt, then finally looked around at the time-mellowed brick glories of the Jacobean house, and the more stately splendour of the wing, executed by Leoni in the early years of George I’s reign.

  ‘Very nice, Dad,’ she said, and set her mouth into a self-satisfied smile of the kind that was habitual to her.

  The Earl kissed her, roaring with delighted laughter.

  ‘That’s the understatement of the year!’ he shouted. ‘Sounds as if you were visiting us in our retirement bungalow!’

  ‘Actually, Dad, it’s not any great surprise,’ said Digby, emerging from the car and proving that it was possible to drive all the way from Wandsworth to Chetton without rumpling your natty pinstripe suiting. Joan wore a navy skirt and a frilly blouse that did nothing to disguise her incipient dumpiness; Digby was grey-suited, taller, with a boring little brown moustache and an irritating air of knowing rather more than the next man. ‘We’ve been doing our homework on Chetton, Joan and I. Getting books out of the library. It’s a famous house, you know: there are several books on it. So we knew exactly what it would be like, didn’t we, Joan?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said his wife calmly. ‘It’s so lovely. I do think you and Mum are privileged, just to have lived here for a while.’

  ‘That’s not how your mum looks at it, I can tell you. You should hear her on the subject. Which you probably will—here she comes.’

  The Countess had been passing through the Great Entrance Hall and had seen the car through the open door, otherwise she very likely would not have exerted herself to greet her daughter. As it was, however, she waddled through the massive double doors, down the steps, and over to the car.

  ‘Hello, Joanie,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Joan, pecking her cheek.

  It was a very English family reunion.

  ‘Did you have a good trip down?’ Lord Ellesmere asked Digby, who was busy humping from the boot of the car enough suitcases for a fortnight’s stay at least.

  ‘Absolutely splendid!’ he said, with an enthusiasm unusual for him. ‘And then the sight of the house from the road, and to see the Countess’s Mile—’

  ‘Knows the place already,’ muttered the Countess.

  ‘—just as we’d seen it in books—fantastically exciting. You’ve no idea how we’ve been looking forward to this.’

  ‘Oh well, no accounting for tastes,’ said the Countess disparagingly, as they turned towards the East door. ‘I know there are people who go for this sort of thing, but give me the Ideal Home Exhibition any day. I tell you, Joanie, you’re going to have to muck in and help with the cooking—you and Dixie and that other one. I’m doing a turkey for tonight, because you’ll need something after the travelling, but I’m not slaving away over a hot stove all the bleeding weekend, not on your life.’

  ‘Of course I’ll give you a hand, Mum,’ said Joan, with a bright smile. ‘I’ll enjoy it. I bet the kitchens are fabulous.’

  The Countess emitted a bitter laugh.

  ‘Ha! Wait till you see, my girl. Chamber of Horrors isn’t in it!’

  ‘I’m doing the stuffing,’ said the Earl, trotting along beside them, and up the steps to usher them in. ‘I’m proud of my stuffing. And I’ll get a few bottles up from the cellar.’

  ‘Better than you’d pick up at the off-licence, I bet,’ said Digby. But they had passed into the Great Hall, and Digby suddenly caught his breath, put down the cases, and with a low whistle looked at the oak-panelled magnificence of it, and up the confident sweep of Sir Philip’s Staircase.

  ‘Like it, eh?’ asked the Earl, with puppyish pleasure. ‘Why don’t you look around the house while your mum and I are busy? If you find a bedroom with a bed made up, just plonk yourselves down and call it your own.’

  ‘We’d like that,’ said Joan.

  ‘Make yourselves at home, as far as you can in this great hole,’ said the Countess. ‘Trevor and that creature he’s brought with him have already. Found a room with a lot of jazz records in, and they’re up there playing Felonious Monk or something.’

  Digby cast a look of covert contempt at the retreating backs of his noble mother and father-in-law, and then—without speaking, but with a quick look at each other—he and his wife separated and began to prowl around the Great Hall, gazing intently at everything there was to see. To the casual eye they might have seemed no different from the tourists who came to the house on the rare days when it was open to the public: she earnestly intent on taking in everything, he with his more casual glances, designed to suggest effortless discrimination. But a closer attention might have marked them off from the usual tourist or tripper,
for in both their eyes there was a sharp glint—of intelligence, of cupidity, of an unusual kind of lust. And as they neared the door of the Dining-Room, and were about to go through, Digby lightly touched Joan on the arm and gestured towards an object in the shadows beside the foot of the great staircase.

  ‘Bernini,’ he whispered. ‘One like that went at Sotheby’s last month. Fetched sixty thou.’

  Joan’s eyes became round as saucers. And together they went through the door and admired the superb but less portable Grinling Gibbons carvings round the portrait panel over the fireplace.

  ‘That would have to stay,’ said Digby regretfully.

  • • •

  Digby and Joan could not have known it, for Chetton is a huge house, but in another part of the Hall, in the Long Gallery that opened off from the stairwell, Dixie’s friend Chokey was engaged in a comparable assessment of the house’s contents. Chokey was fiftyish, slightly grubby, his considerable bulk enclosed in loose, cheap, brown suiting. Chokey’s eyes were watery but cunning, but since he very seldom looked at anyone he was talking to they were not often remarked on. From time to time in his progress along the gallery Chokey placed nicotine-stained fingers on the frame of a picture, or on a marble bust. Chokey was much less subtle than Digby and Joan, and nobody who watched him would have been in any doubt that, like them, he was pricing things, though he probably had in mind considerably less reputable outlets for the objects he was pricing.

  In fact, Chetton Hall was so large—practically, as Mr Lillywaite had said, a palace—that all the Spenders and their friends could settle themselves in and look around and yet be quite unaware of each other. In the suite of rooms that had been the young Earl’s in the lifetime of his grandfather, the present Earl’s younger son Trevor had made himself at home, and so had his current girlfriend. Trevor was fair, slim, with an expression on his mildly good-looking face of weak goodwill, which might only become operative under stress. Michele was dark, with a lithe, slim body—they would have gone well together horizontal in cinemascope—but her mouth was hard and her eye determined. Trevor, it would have needed little perspicacity to guess, would at a crunch be putty in her hands.

  The pair had been at Chetton several hours, and, wearying of the Countess’s doom-ridden disapproval, they had early on discovered the young Earl’s suite. They had lighted on a cabinet of jazz records, as well as a wardrobe of fascinating clothes, a bed with green silk sheets, a silver casket of odd-flavoured cigarettes, a private bar, and a stock of contraceptive equipment for emergencies—not that Trevor or Michele were ever caught out unprepared. All in all, the young Earl’s suite gave the pair a definite feeling that this house was something.

  ‘It reminds me,’ said Michele, gazing up at the elaborate raised design of the ceiling, ‘of the house we used when we made Evie and the Mad Marquis. Sort of derelict manor it was—Dorset, or Devon, or somewhere—and we more or less commandeered it, you know: film was finished before they knew we were there. You weren’t in that, were you?’

  ‘No, before my time,’ said Trevor, getting out of bed and fetching himself a cigarette. ‘Was it any good?’

  ‘Usual stuff,’ said Michele, resting her dark head against the green pillow and screwing her mouth into a pout of boredom. ‘Usual stuff, only with a lot of whips and branding-irons and things. They used harpsichords and that in the background, to get in the class customer. The sado stuff attracts the class, as a rule. I say, you don’t half look sexy with that black cigarette, and all naked on the green sheets. Some director ought to use that.’

  ‘I look sexy with my clothes on,’ said Trevor. ‘Nobody’s ever given me a chance to show it.’

  ‘Trevor,’ said Michele pensively, ‘have you ever thought what difference all this will make to your career?’

  ‘I’m not sure I have a career. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you having a title and that. It gives you a certain cash-ay, you know. If you could capitalize on it, it could do a lot for you—get you bigger parts and all. We could move into the big time together.’

  ‘I’m not sure I have a title,’ said Trevor. ‘And I wouldn’t have thought it was much of a qualification for our kind of film. Talking of which, I’m feeling sexy again. Didn’t know I had it in me, not without the cameras being there. Must be the sheets. So if you—’

  But his eye caught something outside the window, and he hopped out of bed to take a look.

  ‘Lumme, look at that,’ he said. Michele swanned out from between the sheets in a practised way, and together they stood at the window as if posing for an artistic shot for The Naturist. Down below in the Long Meadow a black man was walking among the cows, taking shot after shot of the matchless West Front of Chetton with expensive photographic equipment. From time to time he would turn round, and take close-ups of the cows, who clearly regarded him as an interesting variation on the monotony of their daily routine. Finally, when he had taken enough photographs, he turned his attention wholly to them, patting their necks, pretending to ride them, and finally throwing himself into a crazy dance in and around the beasts, his feet making frenzied patterns among the daisies, his hands clapping over his head. He laughed and cried out, and the cows stood regarding him in intense absorption.

  ‘It’s that spade of Dixie’s,’ said Trevor. ‘Lives down the street from us. She sure knows how to pick ’em.’

  ‘It reminds me of Caribbean Orgy,’ said Michele. ‘There was this scene—’

  ‘I know. I was in it,’ said Trevor. ‘All blacked up. Come on, I’ll put on a Johnny Dankworth and we’ll go back to bed.’

  ‘Regard it,’ said Michele, ‘as a rehearsal. For our future in the big time.’

  • • •

  A couple of hundred yards down the corridor from this paradisal couple, in the doorway of the State Bedroom, where the Earl and Countess had settled, out of sheer exhaustion, on their first arrival (it was the first bedroom they had come to), four small figures were standing, gazing at its faded, dusty immensity with eight large eyes.

  ‘It’s bigger than our whole house,’ said Karen softly.

  ‘No, it’s not, silly,’ said Gareth, the eldest. ‘But it’s very big.’

  ‘It’s not big, it’s eNORmous!’ said Cliff, his voice rising.

  ‘It’s tremenjous!’ yelled the littlest.

  ‘Shhh!’ hissed Karen. They all fell silent, then took their heads out of the doorway and peered both ways along the corridor.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Who?’ asked the baby, who did not yet know who ‘she’ invariably was.

  ‘Old Mother Slap,’ said Cliff.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Karen again. She was a child who made nods at the conventions.

  ‘The purple-toed monster from outer space,’ said Gareth, who was not. ‘She’s not around. We’d have heard if she was. I expect she’s yelling at those little boys on the fountain to pull their socks up.’

  Karen giggled louder than anyone at this. Gareth pulled them all inside the room and, heaving somewhat, closed the door. It seemed to act as a signal. All three older children flung themselves on each other with Red Indian whoops, and in an ecstasy of liberation began fighting all over the floor. The smallest chortled with joy, and joined in to the limits of his strength by gamely tugging at any shoe or hand that projected itself from the mêlée of whirling bodies. The game lasted a delirious five minutes, for the children had a mighty load of energy to release. At the end Karen and Gareth extricated themselves, panting and laughing, and sat up to look around them again.

  ‘I say,’ said Gareth, ‘do you realize—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Karen.

  ‘What?’ demanded the baby.

  ‘That in a house this size,’ said Karen, taking him on her knee, ‘with all these thousands and thousands of rooms and corridors and things, we’d never have any trouble getting away from—from her.’

  ‘From old Big Bum,’ said Cliff.

  ‘Cliff!’ said Karen.

&nbs
p; ‘From old Floppy Bos,’ said Gareth.

  ‘From the old witch!’ screamed the baby.

  ‘You are terrible,’ said Karen. But she joined with all the rest, looking at each other, their eyes afire with wonder and surmise.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be just wonderful!’ Karen said.

  • • •

  The children had been in error when they decided that their mother could not be anywhere near them because she could not be heard. She was, in fact, less than fifty yards away, though she, in her turn, had heard nothing of their uproar. She was standing at the top of Sir Philip’s Staircase, and was looking about her. She had changed into a flouncy dress, three-quarter length, with a blue and purple design and yards of gauzy drapes. She had bought it to celebrate her last wedding anniversary and, notwithstanding the inability of her husband to be with her, she had celebrated regardless. Dixie had brought it with her as the grandest thing she owned. She had remade her face into a mask of pink, beige and black. She was, for once, not in the middle of a whirl of noise and activity. Leading off from the staircase was the Long Gallery. Dixie gazed carefully down that—heavy with the portraits of her husband’s ancestors. Then she peered into the murk of a stubby little corridor off to her left, then down into the panelled dignity of the Great Hall. When she was quite sure she was alone, she inspected the carpeted expanse of the staircase, nodding as she counted the steps. She squared her fine shoulders, fixed her eyes straight ahead of her, and then, at first uncertainly, but with growing expertise, began descending the stairs with a step that could only be described as regal.

  Anyone seeing her at that moment might well have concluded that Lady Portsea was beginning to scent enticing future possibilities.

  • • •

  ‘Turkey’s sizzling,’ said the Earl, rubbing his hands. ‘If you nip through the hall and half a mile down the corridor to your left you might get a whiff. Blimey—think of my lot never getting the smell of turkey in the oven.’

  They had all gathered in the Dining-Room. The Earl had stationed himself by the fireplace, under the portrait of Sir Rupert Spender. His face was enclosed by the riot of fruit and flowers within which Grinling Gibbons had enclosed the portrait, so that he looked like nothing so much as an amiable greengrocer peering out from among his wares. At his right hand, on the marble fireplace, he had placed an enormous can of beer.