A Company of Swans (5 page)

Stavely was long and low, built of a warm and rosy brick: a house which had no truck with fortifications and moats and battlements, but proclaimed itself joyously as a place for living in—for music and banquets and the raising of fine children. Sheltered by a low wooded hill, the Hall faced serenely south into the sun and with its stone quoins, mullioned windows and graceful chimneys most gloriously avowed the principles of the Tudor Renaissance; "Commoditie, Fitnesse and Delight."

"Out we get, girls!" cried Mrs. Belper. "We have just ten minutes to stretch our legs and then we meet at the front door at twelve o'clock sharp for a tour of the house."

The "girls" got out. Mrs. Transom was lowered down and tottered away on the arm of her daughter, while—followed at a discreet distance by their conscientious chaperones—Edward and Harriet made their way through the gatehouse arch toward the formal gardens.

If Harriet's first impression of Stavely had been of overwhelming beauty, her second was of neglect. The fine trees of the beech avenue were indestructible, as was the parkland where clumps of cattle moved slowly over a sea of grass. But here, close to the house, where everything depended on a careful husbandry, it was clear that something was wrong. Weeds straggled over the gravel paths; the yews in the topiary, the formal lines of the knot-garden were blurred for want of trimming. This was a sleeping house, its decline masked by the tenderness of the green creeper hiding a garden door, by the young leaves of an unpruned rose laying its tendrils across a window. A house awaiting the kiss of a prince—a rich prince, Harriet corrected herself, guessing at the multitude of gardeners and groundsmen that would be needed to succor Stavely's loveliness.

"Was it like this when you used to come here, Edward?" asked Harriet. "So overgrown and neglected?"

"No, I don't think so. But remember I was very small and after Colonel Brandon died we never came again. His son—the present owner—was not at all friendly to Mama."

By the main door where all the ladies were now assembled, a disappointment awaited them. Although Aunt Louisa, who acted as the Circle's secretary, had specifically mentioned Edward Finch-Dutton's presence in the party in her confirmatory letter, there was no sign of Mrs. Brandon. Instead a gloomy, ancient and cadaverous-looking individual with a bald and liver-spotted pate introduced himself as Mr. Grunthorpe, the family butler, and leading them into a huge, panelled room he immediately began his patter.

"The room we now find ourselves in is known as the Great Hall. You will please observe the outstanding examples of Elizabethan plasterwork and panelling. Above the archway we see a carving of the twelve apostles…"

"Very fine," said Mrs. Belper.

"Note also the chimney-piece surmounted by the Brandon arms impaling those of Henrietta Verney, who was united to the family by marriage in the year 1633," droned the patently uninterested Mr. Grunthorpe.

Harriet noted them… but noted too the dust that lay on the backs of the carved chairs, noted the dull streakiness of the long refectory table… the cold creeping through the room as though it was years since a fire had burned in that splendid grate.

They moved on down a corridor and into the Drawing Room—a delightful room filled with Hepplewhite furniture—but here too was the same neglect. One yellow damask curtain was half-drawn across the window as though the effort of pulling it back had been too much for some indifferent housemaid. The fender was unpolished, the crystal chandelier lacklustre and dull.

In the Dining Room, with its walls of dark Cordoba leather, there was an unfortunate diversion.

"I want to go to the lavatory," announced the ancient Mrs. Transom in a surprisingly loud, firm voice.

"No, you don't, Mother," hissed her daughter. "Not now, you don't—you've been."

"What do you mean, no, I don't?" said the old woman angrily. "I may be old, I may be useless, I may be someone whom everyone would like to see dead and laid out on a slab, but I still know when I want to go to the lavatory and I want to go to the lavatory now."

A hurried consultation followed. The butler, more bored than pained, issued instructions, holding out his mottled hand in case the information rendered might produce a tip. Mrs. Transom was led away on the arm of her unfortunate daughter—and the party trooped into the Library.

Oh, the poor books, thought Harriet, running her handkerchief surreptitiously along the dusty, calf-bound volumes on an open shelf. Here was Horace who had so loved the foolish Lesbia and Sappho who had turned loneliness into the most moving verses of the ancient world—and here Harriet's own special friend, the emperor Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations she now pulled out and opened at random, to read:

Live not as though a thousand years are ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

Only, what is good? wondered Harriet. She had thought of it as submission, virtue, not setting up her will against others. But might it mean something else? Might it mean making yourself strong and creative? Might it mean following your star?

The butler glared at her and she replaced the book. However poor I was, reflected Harriet, I would always dust the books. And I would always find flowers, she thought, remembering the drifts of wild narcissi she had seen as they came up the drive. And once again she wondered what ailed this marvelous house.

They trooped up the grand staircase, admiring the carved newel posts, while from below came the anguished baying of Mrs. Transom's daughter who had taken a wrong turning and lay becalmed in a distant hallway. Here were the private apartments of the family—the upper Drawing Room, the bedrooms—past which the cadaverous Mr. Grunthorpe, enjoining silence, now led them bound for the Long Gallery on the top floor.

Harriet had fallen a little behind the others, weary of the absurd antics of her "bodyguard" and planning, if a side staircase could be found, the rescue of the Transoms.

She was thus alone when a door was suddenly thrown open and a woman's voice, high and imperious, cried out, "No! I don't believe it! It cannot be as bad as that!"

Involuntarily, Harriet stopped. The luxurious room thus revealed, framed in the lintel of the door, might have come from a painting by Titian. There was a four-poster hung in blue silk, a dressing table with a silver-trimmed mirror, a richly embroidered chair… The covers of the bed were thrown back and beside it stood a woman in a white negligee with a river of dark red hair rippling down her back. She had brought up one of her arms against the carved bedpost as though for support, and a little silken-haired papillon lay curled on the pillow looking at her with anxious eyes.

"Even my idiot of a husband could not have gone as far as that," she continued. "You are trying to frighten me."

A maid moved about the back of the room, laying out clothes, but it was to someone unseen that the woman spoke—a man whose low-voiced answer Harriet could not make out.

"Oh!" The rapt exclamation came from Louisa who had returned to admonish her loitering niece. Her long face was transfigured; her mouth hung slightly open with awe.

A sighting! Here without doubt was the lady of the house, Isobel Brandon, in whose veins flowed some of the bluest blood in England. For while Harriet saw a beautiful and imperious woman driven to the edge of endurance by some calamity, Aunt Louisa saw only the granddaughter of the Earl of Lexbury whose wedding some ten years earlier at St. Margaret's, Westminster, had required a double page of the Toiler to do it justice.

But Mrs. Brandon now had seen them.

"For God's sake, Alistair, shut the door! You can't go anywhere until those wretched women have stopped trooping through the house. And anyway, I sent all the documents to—"

The door closed. Harriet and her aunt joined the others. Mrs. Transom's daughter had discovered another stairway and pushed her mother up it—and the party entered the Long Gallery.

A long, light room with a beautiful parquet floor… The walls nearest the door were taken up by family portraits of the Brandons. Among the dull paintings, varnished into uniformity, only two caught Harriet's attention: a likeness of the old General, almost comical in the obvious boredom and irritation shown by the sitter at being compelled to sit thus captive for the artist; and one of Henrietta Verney who had linked the Brandons to her illustrious house—a vivid intelligent face defying the centuries.

"Is there no portrait of the present owner?" inquired Mrs. Belper.

"No, ma'am. The present owner is abroad a great deal and has not yet sat for his portrait."

And is not likely to either, thought Mr. Grunthorpe with gloomy satisfaction as he pointed out a view of Stavely's west front by Richard Wilson.

Harriet wandered for a while, not greatly interested in the conventional landscapes and battle scenes. Then right at the end of the gallery she came across an entirely different group of pictures—chosen, surely, by someone outside the family. Light, sun-filled modern paintings: a Monet of poppies and cornflowers; a Renoir of two girls in splendidly floral hats sitting on a terrace… and one at which she stood and looked, forgetting where she was, forgetting everything except what she had lost.

No one has understood the world of dance like Degas. The painting was of two ballet girls in the wings of the Paris Opera: one bending down to tie her shoe; the other limbering up, one leg lifted on to the bane, her head bent over it to touch her ankles. This painter who all his life was obsessed by the beauty of women at work had caught perfectly the weariness on the girls' faces, the pull of their muscles, the fierce, unending discipline that underlies the tawdry glitter of the stage.

And even Edward, coming up to Harriet with his usual proprietary air, saw her face and left her alone.

Ten minutes later the tour was completed and the ladies back in the entrance hall. It was here that Mr. Grunthorpe met his Waterloo. Aunt Louisa, the Circle's secretary, advanced toward him and thanked him on behalf of her group for showing them round. Mr. Grunthorpe, his rapacious hand curved in expectation, murmured that it had been a pleasure. He was still staring at his empty hand in total disbelief as Louisa, following the other ladies, disappeared through the front door.

There now followed the selection of a suitable site for the picnic. This was not a simple matter, but at last they were settled in a sheltered spot in the sunken garden, the hampers brought from the charabanc, rugs spread and parasols arranged, and the ladies fell to.

Edward was at first pleased to sit beside Harriet enjoying the excellent food they had prepared. Though exceptionally quiet even for her, she looked very pleasing in her blue skirt and white blouse and he particularly liked the way she was wearing her hair: taken back under a velvet band and loose on her shoulders. But after a while he grew restive; he was, after all, an entomologist and here not only for pleasure.

"Come, Harriet," he said presently. "I want to replenish the laboratory teaching specimens. Will you help me?"

She nodded and rose and they moved off in the direction of the croquet lawn, while at a discreet distance the stalwart Millie Braithwaite, eschewing her after-luncheon nap, pursued them.

For nearly half an hour Edward, bent almost double, moved absorbedly across the grass, flicking the heavy sweep-net to and fro over the ground.

"Pooter, please, Harriet!" he would say from time to time, straightening up, and she would hand him the little glass tube with its rubber pipe into which he would suck the hopping, wriggling, jumping little creatures; then, "killing bottle!", and that too Harriet would put into his hand so that the miniature flies and bright bugs and stripy beetles could find, among the fumes of potassium cyanide, their final resting place.

As they moved slowly toward the terrace Edward suddenly perceived, on a blossoming viburnum bush, a large and golden Brimstone butterfly. At once he became transformed and the heavy cumbersome sweep-net, the crouching position were abandoned. Plucking the gossamer butterfly-net from Harriet, he almost danced up the steps. This was a new Edward: a lithe and entomological Ariel. For a few moments he hovered, measuring his prey—then, with a magnificent sideways sweep of the net, he struck!

"Got it!" he announced with satisfaction and as Harriet approached, he pinched the fluttering creature's thorax between his forefinger and thumb.

A neat and expert movement: an instant and humane death. But it made a noise which Harriet had not expected—a small but distinct "crack"—and it was now that she told Edward he must excuse her for a while and left him.

Walking unthinkingly, she found herself in a small copse through which there ran a stream, its banks carpeted with more primroses than she had ever seen.

If the first butterfly you see is a yellow butterfly, then it will be a good summer, Harriet knew that. But if the first butterfly you see is a dead butterfly, what then?

She had come to an orchard. The lichened pear trees were in blossom, the apples still in pink-tipped bud. What a heavenly place, thought Harriet, for here Stavely's neglect only added to its loveliness, and as if in echo to her thoughts she found herself on a wide track which must have branched off from the main avenue, in front of a sign saying: "To Paradise Farm."

She hesitated, not uninterested in the idea of Paradise, but the glimpse of tall chimneys and tiled roofs half-hidden in the trees suggested a house far more important than an ordinary agricultural dwelling and, not wishing to trespass, she retraced her steps. Finding a door in an ivy-covered wall, she entered a walled garden and here for the first time encountered a gardener—a bent old man pottering among the broken frames who acknowledged her greeting so ill-temperedly that she went out again, walked through the stable yard, passed an overgrown tennis court—and saw behind it a curiously shaped clump of yew hedges, irregular and dark.

Or course. A maze… She had heard the maze at Stavely mentioned: a famous one, as intriguing and clever as that at Hampton Court. Jokes had been made about it on the bus and Mrs. Brandon, in her letter, had forbidden the ladies to enter it.