A Mansion and its Murder Read online

  I got quite annoyed, for once, at those eyes twinkling at me in the gloomy half-light.

  ‘Don’t play with me! What is she like?’

  ‘Ah – you tax my powers of description …’ Uncle Frank pretended it was hard to remember. ‘Quite tall, for a young lady … excellent figure, just the right balance between slim and full … dressed with taste – even I could see that …’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned her face.’

  ‘Have I not? Exquisite complexion, like fine china, rosebud mouth, hazel eyes – quite the English rose.’ I considered.

  ‘I’m not sure I like the English rose type.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ said Uncle Frank brutally, ‘not being the English rose type yourself.’

  ‘Oh? And what type am I?’

  ‘The rose of Sharon, I should say.’

  And while I was considering what he could mean by this, he made his escape.

  Later that evening, as the hour for bed approached, Miss Roxby noticed something about me and commented, ‘You seem very excited this evening, Sarah.’

  ‘Excited, Miss Roxby?’

  ‘Well, tense. As if there is something on your mind.’

  ‘I don’t know why that should be.’

  I had all the stonewalling arts of a politician, you notice. I did not, at that stage in my young life, confide in Miss Roxby. But I did feel a debt of gratitude to her, and I did not like to snub her. Some minutes later, I said, ‘What is the rose of Sharon, Miss Roxby?’

  ‘“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.” It’s the Bible, Sarah.’

  I often wondered where Miss Roxby got her knowledge of the Bible from, since she often confided in me that neither her papa nor her mama was religious. I conjectured an affaire with a student of theology.

  ‘I see. And what would that mean if someone compared you to a rose of Sharon?’

  Her eyes twinkled. ‘Your Uncle Frank, I presume? Well, I suppose he means you are a Jewish sort of rose – more like your grandmama than some of the other members of your family.’

  I considered the idea and felt pleased by it. I admired my grandmother. She wasn’t particularly kind to me in any way, paid me no special attention, but I knew instinctively that she was clever, and it pleased me to be thought clever, too. I did not think that English roses were clever.

  ‘What part of the Bible does that come from, Miss Roxby?’

  ‘The Song of Solomon.’

  ‘Can we read it together?’

  ‘When you are older, Sarah.’

  I digested this piece of information, too, but with difficulty. This was the first time I had had any intimation that there are parts of the Bible that one does not read until one is older. I knew that was true of novels such as Jane Eyre and Tom Jones, but – the Bible? It made me intensely curious as to what Solomon was singing about.

  After that day, Uncle Frank’s courtship proceeded – but it would be wrong to suggest that it proceeded ‘apace’, or smoothly, or in any other of the ordinary ways that would be expected from a dull, everyday young man. Uncle Frank enjoyed tormenting his family too much to behave conventionally. Days would pass without his taking a step in the direction of the Coverdales’ manor house, Tillyards. Or he would disappear for a whole day, and when he caught an expectant eye on him on his return, reveal that he had been over to a friend’s for a spot of shooting. Or he would make derogatory remarks about Mary Coverdale – her literary tastes, her frocks, even her person (‘her shoulders are like a brewery drayman’s’ he said once, and even I was shocked).

  ‘Don’t you like Miss Coverdale?’ I asked, unable probably to keep the hopefulness out of my voice.

  ‘She is Mary Coverdale,’ he said, prevaricating, and puffing a great cloud of cigar smoke in my direction. ‘Her elder sister is Miss Coverdale.’

  I waited, but there was no continuation. ‘Don’t you like Mary Coverdale,’ I was forced to ask. ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt she’ll do well enough,’ he replied. ‘And that’s all the reply you’re getting, little rabbit.’

  ‘I’m too old to be called “little rabbit”,’ I objected.

  He gave me a long look.

  ‘I rather think you are right,’ he said.

  But in spite of that long look, he took himself over to the Coverdales’ next day.

  Eventually, in spite of the lackadaisical nature of my uncle Frank’s wooing, things inevitably started working toward an understanding between the two families. I heard of the next stage from Beatrice, my best friend in the house.

  ‘A visit is to be paid,’ she said significantly.

  I considered the matter.

  ‘By us or by them?’

  ‘By them. Her father, mother, brother, and her younger sister.’

  ‘And her.’

  ‘Of course and her. On Saturday week.’

  ‘What will they do, Bea?’ I wondered. ‘Family visits are all very well in summer, but in the middle of February?’

  ‘A dinner would be easier,’ agreed Beatrice. ‘But this is going to be an all-day visit.’

  ‘Will they bring their servants?’

  ‘Some,’ said Beatrice. She felt my eyes on her. ‘And curiosity killed the cat, Sarah Jane.’

  I knew that Tom, the coachman at Tillyards, the Coverdale manor house, was ‘sweet’ on Beatrice. At that date, the lower orders, when moving toward marriage, were always said to be ‘sweet’ on each other. I didn’t get the impression that Tom was in any way sweet – his appeal to Beatrice was that of a manly man with decisive ways. He was also some years older than she was.

  My doubts about Blakemere as a setting for a family visit were beyond my years, but perfectly natural. Though it was the sleeping and eating place of so many of the Fearings, it did not have the feel of a family home. It was more a sort of mansion branch of Fearing’s Bank, a financial rather than a familial centre. Its marbled, over-decorated immensity could never in any circumstance comprise the intimacy which is a part of the general understanding of the word ‘home.’ There are royal palaces which are cosier.

  Blakemere was not a place where adults amused themselves either, but it did have the capacity for amusement. There was more than one billiard room, for example, and in the Green Drawing Room there was a quite remarkably ugly ormolu chess set, which normally functioned as an occasional table, but the top of which could be swung over, to reveal a checkered board and a collection of aggressive figures like malignant dwarfs, of which the Queen was quite the most hideous.

  I was not, of course, part of the preparations for the Coverdale visit, but I was to be part of the event, and lessons were to be suspended for the day. The Coverdales had had three girls, the eldest of whom was now married to a minor functionary in the Diplomatic Service and was currently with him in St Petersburg. They had then had a boy, and decided to call it a day. Two boys would have been more prudent. Peter, the son, joined the Army and was killed in the early months of the Great War. Tillyards, a beautiful Elizabethan manor house, became a school when Peter’s father died, and is now little better than a ruin.

  ‘You, Sarah Jane, go to the end of the line with Miss Roxby behind you,’ said my grandfather, gesturing.

  ‘It’s Sarah,’ I muttered, under my breath. It sounded much more grown up, but so far I had persuaded only Miss Roxby and Uncle Frank to adopt the shorter version.

  We were all standing on the magnificent low steps at the main entrance to Blakemere Manor, looking as if we were posing for a photographer in the manner we chose to send down to posterity. It was not the way I would want to be welcomed to a house, I thought. Once we were in position there was little we could do but wait. Collectively we had very little conversation. The servants, standing to the side of the steps (out of camera range, so to speak), had duties assigned to them when the Coverdales arrived, so they were more natural. We shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Eventually two carriages were sighted, a mile away down the endless drive, and we watched in silence as the two spectr
es gradually assumed recognizable shapes and finally drew up before the grand entrance to Blakemere. In the first carriage were Sir Thomas and Lady Coverdale, with a maid and a man; in the second, the three members of the younger generation, with a maid for the girls. There was no doubting the friendliness with which my grandparents and my papa greeted the senior Coverdales, but I was interested only in the second coach, and only in the girls therein. They were both well-grown, attractive young women, and one could not tell who was the youngest from their looks alone. But one was kissed by my grandfather as a valued neighbour, the other was kissed as a future member of the family.

  ‘Mary!’ he said. ‘It does my heart good to see you here.’

  It didn’t do my heart good, but I did look at her as dispassionately as possible. The initial, fleeting impression was much as Uncle Frank had suggested: flawless complexion, beautiful auburn hair, rosebud mouth with a little bow top to it, charmingly simple dress under her handsome coat with the fur collar.

  Then Uncle Frank came forward, shook hands with her coolly, and they started together into the house.

  ‘Sarah Jane, I’m sure Peter would like to see the grounds,’ said my grandmother.

  I looked up at Peter Coverdale’s face. He was fifteen, and probably bitterly resented being entrusted to the care of a twelve-year-old girl. But he shrugged a sort of agreement, and we began the long trek round to the side of our monstrous pile, then on to the formal gardens at the back, with their close-clipped hedges, their graded terraces filled with regimented shrubs, and beyond that, the (artificial) meadows that sloped down to the river. As we mooched around the top terrace, speechless, Peter stopped at one point and turned to look at the house.

  ‘I say, isn’t it horrid!’ he said.

  ‘Hideous!’ I agreed. We both laughed. It was a defining moment, a sort of liberation for me. None of the gardeners’ children would have said that. From then on, Peter and I got on quite well, in spite of that terrible three-year age gap. ‘I’m sure Tillyards is much nicer,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not bad. I’m going into the Army.’

  This suggested a new idea to me.

  ‘You mean you don’t want to inherit it?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Could you refuse it?’

  ‘More or less. I could just let it out to someone. Plenty of rich Jews wanting country houses.’

  I tactfully did not point out our Jewish connections. ‘If Uncle Frank doesn’t have a son, this will be mine.’

  ‘Yours? But you’re a girl.’

  I nodded, unrebelliously. ‘But that’s what grandpapa’s will says. We only have quite distant cousins who are boys – apart from Aunt Clare’s, and she married beneath her.’

  Peter Coverdale looked at the pile again, and whistled. ‘Well, if I were you I’d emigrate to Patagonia before I took on responsibility for a dump like that.’

  ‘I think you’re probably quite right,’ I said.

  But I enjoyed greatly showing him round, and hearing his derogatory comments on everything. If my grandmother’s aim was to get us interested in each other, she certainly failed (he was not Uncle Frank, or even like him in temperament), but I came to like him a lot, was always interested in his career, and wept at his death. We sat together at lunch, and he whispered to me about the massed battalions of servants, the assertively beflowered china, and the hideous, twisted silverware: ‘like two elderly wrestlers grappling with each other’ was how he rather daringly described a fruit stand with myriad bowls of pineapples, apricots, and grapes from the hothouse.

  But my main interest at lunch was his sister Mary, of course. She was sitting five places down on the other side of the table, next to Uncle Frank, naturally. He was paying her an attention that was a long way short of assiduous but rather more than casual. He could do that sort of thing with an off-hand charm that was part of his nature. She was accepting it coolly for what it was, though with the occasional flirtatious gesture that showed she knew what the marriage game was, and perhaps had played it before. There was a confidence about her, about her way of looking around the Dining Room as if she already had a part stake in it that repelled me. But then, I was very ready to be repelled.

  She was lovely, I had to admit, with the loveliness one saw on biscuit tins, on postcard series of ‘British beauties’, or in pictures in the Illustrated London News showing Society ladies in the Prince of Wales’s circle. But there was one occasion during lunch when she looked in our direction – not at me, for I had no place in her scheme of things, was to be annihilated by it – and I caught the expression in her eyes; it was one of cold, hard calculation.

  ‘Is your sister nice?’ I asked Peter, with assumed childishness.

  ‘She’ll save you from this,’ he said significantly.

  After lunch, which was ostentatiously simple (no rich, elaborate dishes, but everything out of season yet of supreme quality) the party separated for various pursuits – several of the ladies forming a card party around my grandmother, men playing the inevitable billiards, Frank and Mary going for the standard tour of the grounds, and so on. I told Peter about our new acquisition of a Ping-Pong table, and he was wild for a game.

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never even seen it played.’

  It was while I was going for the bats and balls that I caught a glimpse of Peter’s father, Sir Thomas. He had been left on his own for a moment by Grandpapa, and he was walking along the picture gallery, surveying the Italian paintings which were our most prestigious acquisition, rubbing his hands the while. He clearly appreciated the value, if not the beauty, of pictures. He had a little goatee beard and a watery but rapacious eye. He reminded me rather of the unsalubrious last Emperor of the French, whose widow had visited Blakemere two years before. I thought that Peter’s instinct to get away from his family was a wise one. I thought that our growing involvement with them was a terrible mistake – though how terrible I could not then guess.

  I was marginal to the visit, and so was Peter. Most of what I remember from the rest of the day was the Ping-Pong, and Peter’s joy at the fastness of it, and the glorious sound of the ball on the table. Though I had played often with one of the gardeners’ sons of my own age, Peter soon beat me, from his superior height and quickness.

  ‘If only I could persuade my father to buy a table,’ he lamented, as we paused between games.

  ‘He doesn’t look as if he likes buying things like that,’ I said.

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘You can come here and play whenever you like,’ I said expansively.

  He looked around disparagingly.

  ‘It’s not the sort of place you can descend on with a party of your chums, is it?’

  That summed up Blakemere, and also put me in my place. But I already knew the place of twelve-year-old girls, however filthy rich, in the world view of fifteen-year-old boys.

  That day made two marriages and sealed the fates of four people. One marriage was actually agreed and arranged that day. I saw my friend Beatrice and Tom South the coachman at Tillyards walking hand in hand in the kitchen garden – he large and wreathed in smiles, she pensive but not unhappy. Soon she was to go out of my daily life, though certainly not out of my life as a whole, for she visited and I visited whenever we could, and I knew the story of her marriage from its hopeful start to its dismal end.

  I was talking the other day to Gabriel South, her youngest son, about his parents’ marriage. He is the Labour Party’s agent for Bedford, and likely to be an MP as soon as there is a seat vacant in the area.

  ‘You mustn’t think the faults were all on the one side,’ he said. ‘You think that because you only ever saw my mother, and you loved her. I sometimes think she only married him to have children, and thought his proposal might be her last chance. They had nothing at all in common, lived in separate worlds. He was all physical, loved horses and shooting and playing cricket and football. She was for reading and self-education, as y
ou know, and thank God for that. But there was nowhere for them to come together. It was a mismatch from the start.’

  That last judgment could be made on the other pair whose fate was sealed that day. Uncle Frank did not actually propose during the visit – that wasn’t his way, to do the expected or the hoped-for. It was a full month before he proposed, was accepted, and the engagement was announced in the Morning Post. But the die was cast that day, the match became for him inescapable. I was watching from the library as they came in from their promenade around the grounds. Mary Coverdale’s cold eyes were aglint with triumph as she surveyed the magnificent expanse of her future domain. Uncle Frank seemed somehow smaller, and his eyes were entirely blank.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Wedding

  In the four months between the announcement of the engagement and the wedding I behaved abominably. Someone observing me today would assuredly diagnose a bad case of sexual jealousy. My generation heard excitedly of Sigmund Freud, discussed fragments of his theories as they were ignorantly reported in polite society, and developed a terrible mishmash of ideas based on them. The generation succeeding mine swallowed him wholesale. We live in an age of Freudianism reduced to cliché.

  Nevertheless, I would contend, even at this date, that the diagnosis would be wrong, at least as far as the predominant strand of my feelings about the marriage was concerned. I had a child’s passionate feelings for justice (I hope and believe it has never left me), and it seemed to me simply wrong that Uncle Frank should be pressured into making a marriage that was against his inclinations. My views of marriage were a good deal more romantic than the prevalent view in either the banking or the aristocratic circles in which we moved. The idea that, in allowing himself to be pressured into marriage as he had been, my uncle cut a less than heroic figure was not one that occurred to me, or that I would have admitted if it had.

  The fact that, three weeks before Uncle Frank’s marriage, I was to lose Beatrice to her coachman only increased my desolation and worsened my behaviour. My life was dominated by a dreadful sense of loss.