“I told you to keep to the centre of the track.”
Sir George was small and wet and bristling. He had laced leather boots with polished rounded calves, like greaves. He had a many-pocketed shooting jacket, brown, with a flat brown tweed cap. He barked. Roland took him for a caricature and bristled vestigially with class irritation. Such people, in his and Val’s world, were not quite real but still walked the earth. Maud too saw him as a type; in her case he represented the restriction and boredom of countless childhood country weekends of shooting and tramping and sporting conversation. Rejected and evaded. He was not carrying a gun. Water stained his shoulders, shone on his footwear, stood in drops on the furry ribs of the socks between his breeches and his boots. He considered his wife.
“You’re never content, are you?” he said. “I push you up the hill and then you’re not content to take it steady on the track, oh no. Any harm done?”
“I do feel a bit shaken. Mr Michell came in time.”
“Well, you weren’t to expect that.” He advanced on Roland, his hand held out. “I’m very grateful. My name’s Bailey. The idiot dog is meant to stay with Joan, but he will not, he will go off on his own little expeditions in the gorse. I expect you think I should have stayed up there, ha?”
Roland demurred, touching his forthright hand, stepping back.
“So I should. So I should. I’m a selfish old blighter. There are badgers, though, Joanie. Not that I should say so, encourage trespassers, wildlifers, terrifying the poor brutes out of their wits. The old Japanese juniper’s in good fettle, too, you’ll be glad to know. Quite recovered.”
He advanced on Maud.
“Afternoon. My name’s Bailey.”
“She knows,” said his wife. “So’s her name, I told you, she’s one of the Norfolk Baileys.”
“Is that so? They aren’t seen about here very often. Less than badgers, I’d say. What brings you here?”
“I work in Lincoln.”
“You do, do you?” He did not ask at what. He considered his wife with some intensity of observation.
“You look clammy, Joan. You aren’t a good colour. We should get you home.”
“I should like to ask Mr Michell and Miss Bailey to c-come to t-tea if they would. Mr Michell needs a wash. They are interested in Seal Court.”
“Seal Court isn’t interesting,” said Sir George. “It isn’t open to the public, you know. It’s in a bad way. My fault, indirectly. Lack of funds. Coming down round our ears.”
“They won’t mind that. They’re young.” Lady Bailey’s large face took on a set expression. “I should like to ask them. For courtesy.”
Maud’s face flamed. Roland saw what was going on. She wanted proudly to disclaim any interest in penetrating Seal Court: she wanted to go there, because of Christabel, because, he guessed, Leonora Stern had been turned away: she felt, he assumed, dishonest in not saying straight out why she had an interest in going.
“I should be very glad of a brief chance to wash,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
They drove in convoy round behind the great house, on a sopping weed-infested gravel drive, and pulled up in the stable-yard, where Roland helped Sir George to disembark the wheelchair and Lady Bailey. The short day was darkening; the back door swung in heavily under a Gothic porch over which a rose, now leafless, was trained. Above, rows of dark windows, with carved Gothic frames, were dark and blank. The door had been elongated to remove steps, so that the wheelchair could go in. They progressed along dark stone corridors, past various pantries and flights of steps, arriving eventually in what later turned out to have been the servants’ hall and was now superficially, and partially, converted for modern living.
At one end of this dim room was an open fireplace, in which a few huge logs still smouldered in a bed of white ash; on either side of this were two heavy, curved and padded armchairs, covered in velvet, a dark charcoal colour, patterned with dark purple flowers, a kind of glamorised fin-de-siècle bindweed. The floor was covered with large red and white vinyl tiles, rubbed in ridges that betrayed the presence of flagstones underneath. Under the window was a heavy table, thick-legged and partly covered with an oilcloth patterned in faintly tartan checks. At the other end of the room, which later proved to lead out to the kitchen and other domestic offices, was a small two-barred electric fire. There were other, slightly threadbare chairs, and a collection of extremely glossy, lively pot plants, in glazed bowls. Maud was worried by the lighting, which Sir George turned on—a dim standard lamp by the fire, a slightly happier lamp, made from a Chinese vase, on the table. The walls were whitewashed, and bore various pictures of horses, dogs and badgers, oils, watercolours, tinted photos, framed glossy prints. By the fire was a huge basket, obviously Much’s bed, lined with a stiff and hair-strewn navy blanket. Large areas of the room were simply empty. Sir George drew the curtains, and motioned Roland and Maud to sit down by the fire, in the velvet chairs. Then he wheeled his wife out. Roland did not feel able to ask if he could help. He had expected a butler or some obsequious manservant, at the least a maid or companion, to welcome them into a room shining with silver and silk carpets. Maud, inured to poor heating and the threadbare, was still a little disturbed by the degree of discomfort represented by the sad lighting. She put her hand down and called Much, who came and pressed his body, trembling and filthy, against her legs, between her and the sinking fire.
Sir George came back and built up his fire with new logs, hissing and singing.
“Joan is making tea. I’m afraid we don’t have too many comforts or luxuries here. We live only on the ground floor, of course. I had the kitchen made over for Joan. Every possible aid. Doors and ramps. All that could be done. I know it’s not much. This house was built to be run by a pack of servants. Two old folk—we echo in it. But I keep up the woods. And Joan’s garden. There’s a Victorian water garden too, you know. She likes that.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Maud cautiously.
“Have you now? Keep up with family things, do you?”
“In a way. I have particular family interests.”
“What relation are you to Tommy Bailey then? That was a great horse of his, Hans Andersen, that was a horse with character and guts.”
“He was my great-uncle. I used to ride one of Hans Andersen’s less successful descendants. A pig-headed brute who could jump himself out of anything, like a cat, but didn’t always choose to, and didn’t always take me with him. Called Copenhagen.”
They talked about horses and a little about the Norfolk Baileys. Roland watched Maud making noises that he sensed came naturally, and sensed too that she would never make in the Women’s Studies building. From the kitchen a bell struck.
“That’s the tea. I’ll go and fetch it. And Joan.”
It came in an exquisite Spode tea service, with a silver sugarbowl and a plateful of hot buttered toast with Gentleman’s Relish or honey, on a large melamine tray designed, Roland saw, to slot into the arms of the wheelchair. Lady Bailey poured. Sir George quizzed Maud about dead cousins, long-dead horses, and the state of the trees on the Norfolk estate. Joan Bailey said to Roland, “George’s great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. He keeps them alive. They’re not fast conifers, they’re mixed woodland, some of those rare trees are very old. Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We’ve lost acres and acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things.”
“Do you know,” said Sir George, “that up to the eighteenth century the major industry in this part of the world was rabbit-warrening? The land wasn’t fit for much else, sandy, full of gorse. Lovely silver skins they had; they went off to be hats in London and up North. Fed ’em in the winter, let ’em fora
ge in the summer, neighbours complained but they flourished. Alternated with sheep in places. Vanished, along with much else. They found ways to make sheep cheaper, and corn too, and the rabbits died out. Trees going the same way now.”
Roland could think of no intelligent comments about rabbits, but Maud replied with statistics about Fenland warrens and a description of an old warrener’s tower on the Norfolk Baileys’ estate. Sir George poured more tea. Lady Bailey said, “And what do you do in London, Mr Michell?”
“I’m a university research student. I do some teaching. I’m working for an edition of Randolph Henry Ash.”
“He wrote a good poem we learned at school,” said Sir George. “Never had any use for poetry myself, but I used to like that one. ‘The Hunter.’ Do you know that poem? About a stone-age chappie setting snares and sharpening flints and talking to his dog and snuffing the weather in the air. You got a real sense of danger from that poem. Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying. We had a sort of poet in this house once. I expect you’d think nothing to her. Terrible sentimental stuff about God and Death and the dew and fairies. Nauseating.”
“Christabel LaMotte,” said Maud.
“Just so. Funny old bird. Lately we get people round asking if we’ve got any of her stuff. I send them packing. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Joan and I. There was a frightful nosy American in the summer who just turned up out of the blue and told us how honoured we must be, having the old bat’s relics up here. Covered with paint and jangling jewellery, a real mess, she was. Wouldn’t go when I asked her politely. Had to wave the gun at her. Wanted to sit in Joan’s winter garden. To remember Christabel. Such rot. Now a real poet, like your Randolph Henry Ash, that’d be something different, you’d be reasonably pleased to have someone like that in the family. Lord Tennyson was a bit of a soppy old thing too, on the whole, though he wrote some not bad things about Lincolnshire dialect. Not a patch on Mabel Peacock though. She really could hear Lincolnshire speech. Marvellous story about a hedgehog. Th’otchin ’at wasn’t niver suited wi’ nowt. Listen to this then. “Fra fo’st off he was werrittin’ an witterin’ an sissin an spittin perpetiwel.” That’s real history that is, words that are vanishing daily, fewer and fewer people learning them, all full of Dallas and Dynasty and the Beatles’ jingle jangle.”
“Mr Michell and Miss Bailey will think you are a frightful old stick, George. They like good poetry.”
“They don’t like Christabel LaMotte.”
“Ah, but I do,” said Maud. “It was Christabel who wrote the description I read of the Seal Court winter garden. In a letter. She made me see it, and the different evergreens, and the red berries and the dogwood and the sheltered bench and the silvery fish in the little pool.… Even under the ice she could see them suspended—”
“We had an old tom cat who used to take the fish—”
“We restocked—”
“I’d love to see the winter garden. I’m writing about Christabel LaMotte.”
“Ah,” said Lady Bailey. “A biography. How interesting.”
“I don’t see,” said Sir George, “that there’d be much to put in a biography. She didn’t do anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn’t a life.”
“As a matter of fact, it isn’t a biography. It’s a critical study. But of course she interests me. We went to look at her grave.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Sir George’s face darkened. His brows, which were sandy, drew down over his plummy nose. “That unspeakable female who came here—she had the impudence to hector me—to read me a lecture—on the state of that grave. Said its condition was shocking. A national monument. Not her national monument I told her, and she shouldn’t come poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted. She asked to borrow some shears. That was when I got the gun out. So she went and bought some in Lincoln and came back the next day and got down on her knees and cleaned it all up. The Vicar saw her. He comes over once a month, you know, and says Evensong in the church. She sat and listened in the back pew. Brought a huge bouquet. Affectation.”
“We saw—”
“You don’t have to shout at Miss Bailey, George,” said his wife. “She’s not responsible for all that. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be interested in Christabel. I think you should show these young people Christabel’s room. If they want to see. It’s all locked away, you know, Mr Michell, and has been for generations. I don’t know what sort of a state it’s in, but I believe some of her things are still there. The family has occupied less and less of this house since the World Wars, every generation a little less—Christabel’s room was in the east wing that’s been closed since 1918, except for use as some kind of a glory-hole. And we, of course, live in a very small part of the building, and only downstairs, because of my disability. We do try to have general repairs done. The roof’s sound, and there’s a carpenter who sees to the floors. But no one’s touched that room to my knowledge, since I came here as a bride in 1929. Then we lived in all this central portion. But the east wing was—not out of bounds exactly—but not used.”
“You wouldn’t see much,” said Sir George. “You’d need a torch. No electricity, in that part of the house. Only on the ground-floor corridors.”
Roland felt a strange pricking at the base of his neck. Through the carved window he saw the wet branches of the evergreens, darker on the dark. And the dim light in the gravel drive.
“It would be marvellous just to have a look—”
“We should be very grateful.”
“Well,” said Sir George, “why not? Since it’s all in the family. Follow me.”
He gathered up a powerful modern storm-lantern and turned to his wife. “We’ll bring you back any treasure we find, dear. If you wait.”
They walked and walked, at first along tiled and bleakly lit corridors under electric lighting, and then along dusty carpets in dark shuttered places, and up a stone staircase and then further up a winding wooden stair, cloudy with dark dust. Maud and Roland neither looked nor spoke to each other. The little door was heavily panelled and had a heavy latch. They went in behind Sir George, who waved his huge cone of light around the dark, cramped, circular space, illuminating a semi-circular bay window, a roof carved with veined arches and mock-mediaeval ivy-leaves, felt-textured with dust, a box-bed with curtains still hanging, showing a dull red under their pall of particles, a fantastically carved black wooden desk, covered with beading and scrolls, and bunches of grapes and pomegranates and lilies, something that might have been either a low chair or a prie-dieu, heaps of cloth, an old trunk, two band boxes, a sudden row of staring tiny white faces, one, two, three, propped against a pillow. Roland drew his breath in minor shock; Maud said, “Oh, the dolls”—and Sir George brought his light back from a blank mirror entwined with gilded roses and focussed it on the three rigid figures, semi-recumbent under a dusty counterpane, in a substantial if miniature fourposter bed.
They had china faces, and little kid-leather arms. One had fine gold silken hair, faded and grey with the dust. One had a kind of bunched white nightcap, in white dimity edged with lace. One had black hair, pulled back in a circular bun. They all stared with blue glassy eyes, filled with dust, but still glittering.
“She wrote a series of poems about the dolls,” said Maud, in a kind of dreadful whisper. “They were ostensibly for children, like the Tales for Innocents. But not really.”
Roland turned his eyes back to the shadowy desk. He did not feel the presence of the dead poet in the room, but he did have a vague excited sense that any of these containers—the desk, the trunks, the hat-boxes—might contain some treasure like the faded letters in his own breast-pocket. Some clue, some scribbled note, some words of response. Only that was nonsense, they would not be here, they would be wherever Randolph Henry Ash had put them, if they had ever been written.
“Do you know,” Roland said, turning to Sir George, “whether there w
ere papers? Is there anything left in that desk? Anything of hers?”
“That was cleared, I suppose, at her death,” said Sir George.
“May we at least look?” said Roland, imagining perhaps a hidden drawer, and at the same time uncomfortably aware of the laundry lists in Northanger Abbey. Sir George obligingly moved the light across to the desk, restoring the little faces to the dark in which they had lain. Roland lifted the lid on a bare casket. There were empty arched pigeonholes at the back, fretted and carved, and two empty little drawers. He felt unable to tap and tug at the framework. He felt unable to urge the unbuckling of the trunk. He felt as though he was prying, and as though he was being uselessly urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity—not greed, curiosity, more fundamental even than sex, the desire for knowledge. He felt suddenly angry with Maud, who was standing stock still, in the dark, not moving a finger to help him, not urging, as she with her emotional advantage might well have done, further exploration of hidden treasures or pathetic dead caskets. Sir George said, “And what in particular might you expect to find?” Roland did not know the answer. Then, behind him, chill and clear, Maud spoke a kind of incantation.
“Dolly keeps a Secret
Safer than a Friend
Dolly’s Silent Sympathy
Lasts without end.
“Friends may betray us
Love may Decay
Dolly’s Discretion
Outlasts our Day.
“Could Dolly tell of us?
Her wax lips are sealed.
Much has she meditated
Much—ah—concealed.
“Dolly ever sleepless
Watches above
The shreds and relics
Of our lost Love
Which her small fingers
Never may move.
“Dolly is harmless.
We who did harm
Shall become chill as she
Who now are warm
she mocks Eternity
With her sly charm.”