A Charitable Body Page 9

  “Nothing scandalous in them? Things Sir Stafford might not want me to see?”

  “Nothing scandalous for the last I-don’t-know-how-long. As a family we just didn’t go in for scandalous doings. You’ll be hard put to it to find anything at all, apart from Sir Richard and his Arabella in the 1760-somethings.”

  “So you think Sir Stafford will let me see the files?”

  “No idea. If he doesn’t, I can tell you how to get a look at the documents about the house.”

  “Really?”

  “If they’re still where I left them, I can.”

  “In the attic.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But the doors will be locked, surely?”

  “They will, almost certainly. They were when I left the house. Stafford asked about the keys and I gave him the duplicate set.”

  “And the other set?”

  “Just ask and I’ll tell you. I may even come with you for a look around the old place. Cheery pip!”

  And she raised her hand and marched off to the small Honda car that had nothing to distinguish it from the other cars in the car park except that it was much more dirty. Felicity got into her car with nagging feelings of dissatisfaction. Why had Mary-Elizabeth seemed so eager to get away? She had taken flight—had she also taken fright? Why? What was there in the—

  Then Felicity remembered. She had started to talk about keys to the offices in the attic when she should not have shown any sign of knowing about the unusual setup there in the top of the house. Yet Mary-Elizabeth had seemed so willing to lead her to the main set of keys, even if Sir Stafford objected. Felicity shook her head and started the car: she was not in a position to understand the strange proclivities of the landed gentry of Yorkshire. And in the normal course of events she would not have felt any need to make herself au fait with them. Now, however, she felt a certain shiver of excitement at the prospect of discovering family secrets.

  As she drove out into the open road, she heard music and thought it came from a nearby cottage. She reminded herself that there were members of the Fiennes family whom she had yet to meet.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gossip

  A few weeks after the board meeting Felicity made her next real advance. She had driven to Walbrook with some paperwork needed to make her appointment to the board official—having decided that delivering it at HQ in person had the advantage that it would also provide opportunities to sticky beak on what was going on, only a week or so ahead of the longer opening hours of the manor. She left the car in the stables’ car park and began a leisurely walk up to the old house, which looked wonderful in the watery sun.

  The lawns also looked wonderful—stretching from house to road and to the stables and the Dower House below. They were dotted with visitors, but also by a little group of men not far from Felicity’s path, each one presumably master of a dog—because there were six dogs to the six men. Felicity recognized a rottweiler, a Weimaraner, a border terrier, and assorted mongrels who made no apology for their lack of a family tree. The dogs were making a great concerted rush every time a ball was thrown from an owner’s experienced arm, traveling farther than she would have guessed possible. The dogs’ only respite from this joyful race was when they went off to do a squat followed by their rightful owner, with a little black bag. Felicity decided that if she stayed long enough, she would be able to pair each dog and each owner.

  The owners were mostly pensioners, many with the swaying paunch of the insufficiently occupied. The youngest, in his fifties or sixties most probably, was as wide as he was short, as a result of taking steroids in his teens. He looked as if he would thoroughly enjoy anyone’s daring to kick sand in his face. Another was trying to stir into action his chocolate-colored Labrador, who refused to join in the game and would only sit on the luxuriant grass, paws out front and head on paws, seeming to be shaking his head at the spectacle of dogs making gigantic fools of themselves. The beautifully groomed Weimaraner with a pink collar was being encouraged to run faster by its owner—tattooed arms and head, pink trousers, and a general air of wanting to be acknowledged as the natural heir to the character created by Kenneth Williams.

  “Lovely day,” shouted Felicity.

  “All the better for seeing you, my love,” said Pink Trousers. Felicity laughed and started over toward them.

  “It’s nice to see that you can use the grounds,” she said. To her surprise there was a general burst of laughter. “What’s funny about that?”

  “It’s no thanks to them that run this place,” said the bodybuilder, whom Felicity christened in her mind Cockles. “Old Stafford wanted the grounds restricted to people who’d paid the entrance fee to the house.”

  “You’d pay a fortune to police a regulation like that,” said Felicity.

  “Ah! A girl with brains. Course you would. It’s just not worth trying, and as we mobilized the village against it, he didn’t stand a chance. Typical rich man, all that fuss was, always looking for new ways to fleece the poor they are, and Old Stafford’s no different.”

  “I thought Sir Stafford’s branch of the family were pretty poor,” Felicity said. “That’s why they had to sell the house.”

  “Sell the house, my arse,” said an elderly owner of a Doberman/rottweiler cross who, sleek, groomed, authoritarian, was competing to be the Warren Beatty of the dog world. “They sold it all right, but not because they were hard up.”

  “Why then?”

  The question embarrassed the man. “Ah. The village never quite found out the details. Will here’s dad was one of the lawnsmen back then, later head gardener, so what he learned he got from visitors who were willing to stroll in the grounds and gardens and spill the beans on what they’d heard in the house. That was pretty sensational, but not things you could pin down. Lots of people told him that the Quarleses were being blackmailed.”

  “By whom? About what?”

  “By the Fienneses. Who else? They bought the house for a pittance and set themselves up here as soon as the war was over. What it was all about Will’s dad never found out. All these old families have their guilty secrets, don’t they? And not just one. It must have been something the Quarleses didn’t want revealed and the Fienneses didn’t care a damn about.”

  “Don’t quote me on this,” said an elderly man with a mongrel biting his shoelaces, and a red face that suggested that the pub tradition in Britain was not entirely dead, “but my grandmother was a housemaid at the manor, and the indoor servants all believed that there was something queer about these schools, or seminars, or whatever they were called. Something not quite right. You know about the seminars, before the war, young lady?”

  “I’ve heard of them,” said Felicity.

  “What exactly do you mean by queer?” asked the owner of the pink-collared dog.

  “Oh, nothing you could lose your cool over,” said the elderly man, “though there was a contingent of your sort at most of the weekends. No, it was how the seminars were presented and the contrast with what they were actually intended to do.”

  “I don’t get your drift.”

  “They were advertised as sessions for concerned people devoted to preventing what had happened twenty years before—the mass slaughter of the Great War.”

  “And what were they really?”

  “A fifth column of Nazi sympathizers.”

  Felicity blinked. “But were there all that many of them?”

  “Enough. Terrible things were heard by us villagers—welcomes for people who wouldn’t stand any nonsense from ‘those confounded Jews’ and so on. A lot of the speakers at the seminars were literary people, artists too and musicians. They knew how to put across these people’s aims, giving them a favorable and attractive coating, if you get my meaning. So it looked like a desperate plea—‘Don’t let’s go back to that terrible time’—when in fact the seminar would be softening the attendees to go along with Hitler, give him all he demanded, including the mass murder of the Jews. Genocide wasn’t y
et the policy of Germany, but apparently it was in the air, and it came along pretty soon. And the fact that the First World War was a terrible waste of human life led people to listen.”

  “Sir Stafford was around all this time,” said Cockles, the square man with the muscles and tattoos. “He was here with his family all the time, in the lead-up to war.”

  “I know,” said Felicity. “But he was about three years old when the war broke out. I don’t think he can have been crucial in weakening Britain’s resolve.”

  “His mother must have led to half the desertions from the British army,” said Cockles. “She’d weaken any man’s resolve, or so they said. A real Mata Hari, the oldies round here always maintained.”

  “I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick,” said Felicity. “I was told she was an invalid, and she was here so she could go for treatment at Leeds General Infirmary. I think someone told me she died soon after the family went back to wherever was home for them.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” said the man with the biggest paunch. “She may have been desperate to have a good time while she had the strength to enjoy it. There were rumors she was a patient of Dr. Owen Winstanley. Name doesn’t mean much nowadays, but at the time he was notorious.”

  “Oh, aye, he were,” said the elderly man. “I remember after the war he was giving the National Health Service a bad name. They retired him quietly, so that he did his philandering as a private citizen.”

  “I heard she went to him once or twice a week while they were here,” said Pink Trousers. “Apart from that, her time was her own. She used it well.”

  “Goodness!” said Felicity. “I have been learning things. I hope it’s all a hundred percent reliable.”

  “Oh it is,” said Paunch. “Walbrook village gossip is as near to cast-iron proof as you can get. The pope doesn’t come near it for infallibility. And the 1930s was a first-rate vintage. You could take your oath on it.”

  “You’re having me on,” said Felicity, smiling. “I’ll label it all in my mind as needing confirmation.”

  “As you please, lady,” said Cockles, smiling back at her with—what was it? Felicity wasn’t quite sure, but as she saw them all looking back at her and smiling, she thought it meant that they’d held back on one or two really appetizing morsels.

  Up at the house the usual trickle of visitors was going from room to room, mostly in silence, but now and then breaking into cries of “Oh, look, Bill: it’s a crystal set complete with earphones” or “My mother used to bake her scones in one of these.” A museum such as Walbrook was a great feeder of nostalgia. She walked with a thoroughly proprietorial step up the stairs to the first floor. Nobody around. Too early in the morning for them to have exhausted the ground floor. Though the number of visitors was not so far impressive, their interest and absorption in the exhibits was cheering: she could see the audience appeal of Walbrook being deep and lasting.

  She went along to the poky staircase and tiptoed up to the attic. The same dim light was on, and in it she saw Mary-Elizabeth waiting patiently, as she had promised to do on the phone. Her posture was friendly, as if she was pleased to be part of the action—whatever the action might be. She was part of the continuing story of the house, and a sort of historical guide.

  “I didn’t open up the doors,” she said, “so you can see how to do it.”

  “I’m very grateful. You don’t object if I come up here on my own if the opportunity presents itself?”

  “Not at all. After all, we won.”

  Felicity blinked. “Sorry—who’s ‘we’?”

  “The Fienneses, of course. I’m one of them by adoption. We were the goodies, there’s no question of that. The Quarleses were up to all sorts of chicanery, but we were Persil white all along.”

  Felicity noted her dated partisanship and her equally dated vocabulary. She watched as Mary-Elizabeth unrolled a page of a glossy magazine, nicely stiff, and pushed it under the door marked W.

  “I thought we’d want to start with the house,” said Mary-Elizabeth. “I hope you agree?”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely,” said Felicity, noting Mary-Elizabeth’s assumption that Felicity had already been up to the attic and guessed the significance of the initials on the doors. She watched as a small key emerged on the glossy pages of fashions and nightlife.

  “Eureka!” said Mary-Elizabeth. “Who would have guessed?”

  “Why did you need to do this? You said you have a key yourself.”

  “I thought we should change the system” was the reply, in a rather lady-of-the-manor voice. “I had the impression that Sir Stafford hadn’t got a hope of investigating the archives yet awhile, and that we should have equal easy access. Just so that you, if you find you have one or two hours with nothing to fill them, can drop by and do a bit of snooping, without having to get a key from me and ask permission or anything.”

  “That sounds ideal,” said Felicity, who was wondering if the mother of a ten-month-old ever had unexpectedly free time. “I appreciate it.”

  Mary-Elizabeth switched on the light in the tiny room. “Eureka! Or should that be abracadabra? More English.” She giggled, like a schoolgirl.

  Two small tables and chairs had been put against the sloping far wall, the inside of the roofing. At a gesture from Mary-Elizabeth, Felicity sat down and found herself sitting cheek by jowl with the representative of the Fiennes dynasty. They could look over each other’s documents and their handling of them. She was not, Felicity thought, going to get much privacy today. Perhaps neither of them needed it. Perhaps they could work together.

  “Now then: heigh-ho, heigh-ho, and all that,” said the older woman. “I’m going to start with the financial situation of the Quarleses in the thirties. I’ve been wrestling with it for Rupert for the last few years, and I’d like to go deeper into how they got into their fix and how they got out of it. What will you take?”

  “I’d like to see how the peace seminars came into being, and how they started being a moneymaking concern for the family of country-gentry folk who were almost on the rocks.”

  “Good-oh. We’re on related topics so we can chuck over papers that relate also to the other’s subject. Let me see . . .”

  Mary-Elizabeth got up, nearly bumping her head, and peered along the rough shelves where a series of bulging files were stored, each one labeled with an ill-written description of its contents: her filing system was as disorganized as she had said. She took out two files from the motley collection and banged down one on Felicity’s table and a second one on her own. Then with a grunt she started reading from her own a series of bank statements detailing the amounts of ready cash the family had to play with in the thirties—not very much, so far as Felicity could gather. She turned back to her own file, which rejoiced in the label THE ROAD TO PEACE.

  From the file’s beginning, she knew she was not getting the facts behind the early years of the seminars. No doubt that at some time Mary-Elizabeth had decided the seminars deserved a file to themselves, but had not got down to transferring the early filed documents.

  “This file starts some way in,” Felicity murmured to her fellow worker. “After the first seminar.”

  “I thought it might, though I wasn’t sure. For a while I thought the whole thing was bogus and nonsensical, but I was quite pleased to have a subsection where I could file some things.”

  “Well, bung anything you get to me and I’ll start afresh,” said Felicity. Mary-Elizabeth grunted.

  The first item in the file was a letter, one of four, which thanked Timothy Quarles for the “tremendous success” of the first seminar: “Bang-on as far as content was concerned, masses of things to make us think afresh, and plenty of like-minded people. I feel I’ve been talking nonstop for five days, and could start another seminar tomorrow with plenty left to say. Thanks again!”

  The other letters were on similar lines, but one sentence caught Felicity’s eye in the last letter she read: “Most important of all you had a sensible discussio
n of the new government in Germany and the importance of not making harsh judgments of Hitler and his cabinet before they have revealed their real (and possibly justified) aspirations for their country.”

  The letter was dated April 23, 1933.

  Next was a jumble of bills, including meals served, domestic service rewarded, jobs for six or seven local women, then some records of payment sent to national and local newspapers for publicity. A memorandum noted that a request from a teachers’ union that it be included in the house’s mailing list had been rejected, on the ground that it involved the seminars’ organizers becoming too close to one of the national political parties. The people putting together the seminars wrote a circular explaining why this policy was in place: it put them in a position not attached to any party but above them. They argued persuasively until you looked closely at some of the lecture titles and some of the topics covered in discussion. The jumble of paper then shifted to autumn 1933 and the explanation of the organization’s aims: they projected three seminars, in spring, summer “during the school holidays,” and autumn. Some names even eighty years later rang bells, and the organization was getting its feet under the table at Walbrook. The motive force was, insofar as it was spelled out, Timothy Quarles, and he had recruited a large pool of antiwar activists—most of these participated in the aims of the seminars and lectures, but one or two of them raised eyebrows even among the organizers: Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists was one such, and against his name were the words “No, or not yet.” The financial basis of the seminars was illuminated by a draft letter to political speakers. Expenses would be paid, and of course meals and bed on the day of the talk. If the speaker wished to stay for the whole four-day conference (Friday to Monday) each extra meal was 17/6, the bedroom and bed was £2.10 a night, and it was hoped that all speakers would feel able to donate a little more of their time so as to participate in the delegates’ chat after sessions, which was often the most stimulating part of the event.