‘In England, joining anything takes about week to process, then you wait for a letter of invitation by second-class mail.’
‘Bugger.’
‘Would you let me handle this?’
‘How?’
‘Just stay here,’ she said, and went inside. She returned a few minutes later and beckoned him.
The interior of Hampton Cottage was cool; its size belied the quaint outside appearance. There were high ceilings and shelves filled with books and folios. Walls were covered with photographs of the town in times past: there was an impression of breweries, tanning factories and a timber yard on the banks of the River Mole.
‘This is Mr Goldsworthy, director of the society,’ Claire said, introducing him. Patrick shook hands with an amiable-looking man in his forties. Mr Goldsworthy had thinning hair and wore hornrimmed glasses. ‘I explained you’re here to do a film with the BBC, and I’m your production assistant, factotum, gofer and whatnot. And you want to recreate a house that existed here thirty years ago.’
‘Absolutely right,’ Patrick agreed, trying to participate in this charade she’d concocted. Not just a pretty face, he thought, and turned to the director. ‘I had hoped to find the original, and shoot the scenes here in Leatherhead. But designers can do just about anything these days with computer imaging. Did Claire mention the place?’
‘No, she said you’d explain.’
Patrick decided something akin to the truth was best.
‘It’s what we call a docudrama, Mr Goldsworthy. Based on a real event, with moments of dramatic licence. My own grandfather was a part of the story, as it happens. During World War One he apparently met a nurse serving in France. A Miss Rickson —’
‘Rickson,’ Goldsworthy interrupted him, ‘if you mean the family who owned the Rickson Brickyard, you must be talking about the Lodge in Shepherds Green.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘One of the finest old homes in this part of Surrey. Quite dreadful, the way it went. Modernising, people tried to call it.’
‘Vandalising,’ Claire remarked. Goldsworthy nodded agreement. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have any details —’ Patrick started to say, and the director smiled.
‘If you’d like to begin with a photograph of the house, it’s there on the wall behind you.’
They drove home leisurely by what Claire called the nostalgia route. First the Thames-side road at Kingston Lock where she had once lived, followed by a detour past the studios at Teddington where Patrick had worked. Then to Ham Gate and Richmond Park, where herds of deer still roamed and a memorial marked the palace where Cardinal Wolsey had lived and Elizabeth I had died. After a beer in Richmond itself, a jewel of a town but congested with traffic, they walked to its classic theatre which they had both attended, though in different years; the familiarity of these places bonding them, like the day had.
Mr Goldsworthy had been a find, obliging and eager to help. After showing them the photo of the Lodge that occupied pride of place on the society’s wall — a classic Georgian manor house, photographed in its prime with a collage of miniatures that illustrated huge sweeping lawns, tennis court and stables — he had returned with a thick folio of very different pictures. These were an unframed assortment: some of them glossy prints, others aerial shots and photographs cut from newspapers that recorded the demolition.
‘Terrible,’ Goldsworthy said, and they agreed. It appeared as if a bomb had dismantled the slate roof and everything below it. There were other devastating images, not all of it mechanical destruction. Neglect over years had left its forlorn imprint. On the tennis court weeds grew wild, and the perimeter netting sagged with rust. There were the remains of a stable block that had once been home to sturdy shire horses; its walls crumbled and lost to rot or termites.
Patrick studied the demolition pictures again. In several of them was a glimpse of an elderly woman standing in the grounds, who seemed to be watching the wrecking crew. Grey hair, erect; a handsome woman, he felt, but which of the sisters it might have been he had no way of telling.
‘Do you think there’d be any details about the occupants?’ he’d asked, and Mr Goldsworthy felt sure there would be. He made a note of Patrick’s hotel number, promising to search. They left with the director’s assurance he’d be in touch. A few days at most.
‘A paper trail,’ he remarked, ‘I enjoy that sort of thing. And I look forward to seeing the end result. But I gather the making of films is rather like the mills of God — it grinds exceeding slow.’
‘I’m afraid it does,’ Patrick agreed, feeling guilty about the deception after receiving such cooperation. If this produced a positive result, he might have to explain his real quest and apologise to Mr Goldsworthy.
They went home by Fulham and stopped at Claire’s flat for her to collect some clothes. It occupied half the upper floor. Patrick liked the way she had furnished it sparsely but with style. Only her spare room that she’d turned into a study was a clutter: filled with computers and their components, it was clearly a workshop. Half her salary, she told him, went on new technology. The other half took care of the mortgage, but it was better than paying London’s exorbitant rents, or moving to the country and spending hours in train travel.
‘Besides, it has a view of the Thames,’ she told him with her radiant smile. All Patrick could see were chimneypots on the roofs opposite. ‘Not from this room. In the loo, on tiptoe, at high tide, you can see the river. At low tide all you see is mud flats. In the world of real-estate speak it’s called “occasional water glimpses”.’ She laughed. ‘This flat cost more than the one downstairs, but I’m told my asset is appreciating. One day if I move out and live in a tent, I could be almost rich.’
Claire packed sufficient clothes for a week. By then, she said, he would be busy with the BBC and, after all, they both knew this was transient; she had an ex-boyfriend who hoped they could revive their relationship if he returned from New York, and more importantly, Patrick had a wife in Australia. A week — and if no one knew there’d be no harm done. Some lovely private memories, and then it would be over.
THIRTEEN
After the weekend, to no one’s real surprise, the weather changed. Thick clouds brought a drop in temperature, and some relief from the heat, although the forecaster on the BBC mourned the end of such a superb Indian summer. Too good to last, he declared with routine pessimism. Occasional showers and cool winds were now the promise, and viewers were advised not to leave home without a brolly. The British preoccupation with their climate never changes, Patrick thought.
They had spent a wonderful two days together, but this morning Claire was due at work. She selected a smart linen skirt and a matching shirt, and did a model’s pirouette for his inspection.
Patrick said if she kept twirling like that, he’d try to persuade her to stay, and leave the rest to her imagination.
‘My imagination,’ she replied, ‘is already working overtime. Which is why I’m out of here.’
‘One more twirl,’ Patrick suggested.
She told him to cool it and fled. Soon afterwards Patrick had a call from Mr Goldsworthy. The files relating to the family had proved to be worth a look.
‘One or two items,’ he said in his dry and courteous way, ‘if you could spare the time, Mr Conway, I feel sure you’d be interested.’
Patrick spent most of the day at the Leatherhead Historical Society, in a quiet room Mr Goldsworthy had arranged for him, reading through the folder of cuttings about Georgina Rickson and her fore-bears. It was a bulky, informative file. He learnt that the Ricksons had become one of the wealthiest families in Surrey, an affluence that derived from an event in the eighteenth century when a young man, a carter, chanced upon the village of Leatherhead. His horse had broken down, forcing him to take lodgings for a few nights. His landlady was a buxom widow, and the young man found her responsive to his advances. He sold his cart and stayed with her, marrying and establishing a small back-street brickyard.
During his lifetime it remained a modest business; it was to be his children and grandchildren who reaped the benefit. In the industrial surge of the nineteenth century the tiny firm became a prosperous enterprise as London spread southward across the Thames into burgeoning suburbs. Bricks were essential for this expansion. The middle classes were in search of a better lifestyle, demanding fresh air and green fields in which to raise their families. They could not find this in the clustered terraces of Chelsea, nor afford the spacious luxury of Hampstead. So they came south, where Albert Rickson, after inheriting the firm and marrying a young woman from Hampshire with a good dowry and wide hips for child-bearing, set about creating his own dynasty.
By the early years of the twentieth century, at the age of forty, Rickson was an influential and patriarchal figure. He and his wife had five healthy children: three boys sent to Cranley College near Guildford (a good, no-nonsense school he called it, dismissing Eton and Harrow as overrated snob factories) and two younger daughters, the girls having a private education and being nurtured in the graces of gentility. He was the owner of the district’s finest house, with twelve acres of river land. He was admired and widely known. The prime minister Lloyd George came to visit, creating a minor scandal by bringing one of his mistresses, and he asked Albert Rickson to stand for parliament.
Rickson declined. His aptitude for business told him there was far more benefit being elected to the local council, where he became a leading figure and, in due course, the mayor. He had no desire to be a backbencher at Westminster, or to spend valuable time in London away from his work and his family. He took great pride in his sons, bringing them into the business as soon as they left school. ‘Bricks,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘are the backbone of Britain. My lads are best working at their trade, not reading up at university. Let others study the books. We’ll build the future.’
He had big plans for expansion, and vigilant ones for the preservation of his family wealth. Lawyers structured his estate so that all three sons would each inherit a section of his empire; he had no liking for the ‘eldest takes all’ philosophy of the upper classes. As for his daughters, they’d be suitably provided for, and would doubtless marry well.
Less than ten years later this utopian dream was in ruins and the family had been devastated. All three sons, who’d promptly answered the call to the colours — as Rickson so proudly declared in 1914 amid the first flush of patriotic fervour — were dead.
Bertie, the first born, was killed by a sniper at Ypres; the second son died of wounds received in the battle of the Somme, and the youngest, after a year in the trenches then invalided out with an extreme case of shell shock, was hit and killed by a bus while drunk and trying to cross Piccadilly.
Patrick was hardly aware of the day passing, engrossed in these bleak fragments of tragedy from long-ago newspapers. The two daughters were rarely mentioned. There was a tiny paragraph taken from the Surrey Gazette that Miss Rickson, eldest daughter of the Mayor and Mrs Rickson, who had suffered grievous family losses as their readers would know, had joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was shortly to leave for service in France. It gave no first name, nor did it say if the eldest daughter was Georgina or Henrietta. Patrick could find no mention in the same newspaper of her return when the war ended.
One thing was clear from the press reports: Albert Rickson had never recovered from these crushing blows. He had resigned from the local council after a speech reported as ‘unusual’, in which he declared the wild and irresponsible recruiting campaign — the ferocious demand for men not to be shirkers, and the strident call for enlistment — had led half the country’s best young men to untimely deaths. It was a scandalous waste, akin to murder, and he blamed the government. He blamed Lloyd George.
On another occasion, termed ‘an unruly public incident’, he made an angry speech in the main street of the town and blamed others also. He was scathing about Lord Kitchener, angry at the erratic campaigns of Winston Churchill and scornful of the tactics of Sir Douglas Haig. As for the vigilante mobs of women indiscriminately handing out white feathers, he asserted that they were deranged, and not fit to look at themselves in their own mirrors.
Rickson sold the brickworks, and after that rarely left the grounds of his home. He died a still-wealthy recluse in 1925, and apart from a formal death notice, Patrick could find no community tributes — not even an obituary. It seemed strange he could have been so utterly forgotten after his retreat from public life. Patrick felt sure it was the angry tirade, the ‘unusual’ speeches that had made him a pariah for the rest of his life, and even pursued him to the grave.
His wife’s death came ten years later, and according to a notation made beside this by Mr Goldsworthy, records showed the two daughters had jointly inherited the Rickson wealth and the Lodge. The same handwriting added a footnote regarding another branch of the family: Albert Rickson had one sibling, a younger brother who had moved away from Leatherhead after the war. Apparently neither brother nor their families had ever been close.
The research had been painstakingly gathered at considerable trouble, and Patrick went to offer his thanks.
‘Glad to have been of help,’ Goldsworthy said. ‘Got quite absorbed myself. Awfully sad the way things happen to families.’
‘Especially this family.’ Patrick was still stunned by the extent of their tragedy. ‘I’d say Rickson died of a broken heart.’
‘I’d agree. There must have been a great many broken hearts at that time, Mr Conway. All those fine young men dead, the best part of a generation, and a lot of widows as a result. So many young women with no one to wed, and no choice but to remain spinsters or maiden aunts.’
‘Which is my next job, I guess. Find out if either sister married… and any other details I can.’
‘I hope you don’t mind but I took the liberty of telephoning the General Registry Office,’ the older man said. ‘Amazing how the mention of your BBC venture gets such a quick result,’ he added slyly. ‘I usually have to wait days for an answer to enquiries like this. But here it is, a fax came through just half an hour ago.’
He took it from his pocket and handed it to Patrick, who read the birth certificates of both sisters and the death certificate of one, and could not help showing his disappointment.
‘Not what you were hoping for?’
‘Not quite. This says that Henrietta Rickson was the older sister, by six years. So it looks like she’s the one who went to France as a volunteer nurse.’
‘In view of the gap in ages, she has to be.’
‘But according to these records she died in 1956.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘It’s a puzzle, Mr Goldsworthy. Our family was sent a letter eight years after that. From Georgina Rickson. I assumed she was the nurse and that’s how they’d met. An elderly neighbour who knew both sisters thought so too.’
‘The neighbour’s mistaken. Look at her birth date. Georgina had only just turned sixteen when the war ended. The VAD were strict — they would never have accepted a girl that age.’
‘No possibility?’
‘None. But I did notice there’s no date of death on this. Which has to suggest that Georgina is still alive.’
Patrick stared at him. ‘Is that likely?’
‘Very likely, I’d say. Or it would have been listed. They’re most meticulous about any personal detail, particularly that one.’
‘She’d be a hundred!’
‘Not quite.’ Goldsworthy chuckled. ‘After all, the Queen Mother’s a good example of longevity. Perhaps your Miss Rickson is of the same calibre.’
‘It’d be impossible to find her.’
‘Difficult, I imagine. Not necessarily impossible.’
‘How?’
‘The estate agent, Tom Rutledge, who handled the sale of the Lodge is still in business. He has an office in Church Street.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I bought my house from him. We meet occasionally and h
ave a pint together. Shall I give him a call?’
They met an hour later. Patrick said no one was to put his hand in his pocket; this was his shout. He’d have a light beer as he was driving, but how about a couple of large scotches for his guests?
‘A pint’s my tipple,’ Tom Rutledge said. He was a robust man with alert blue eyes and neatly cropped grey hair. ‘Here’s the only address I had for Miss Rickson after the estate was sold.’ Patrick took it, with a nod of thanks. ‘Mind you, I haven’t heard from her in years, so I can’t say where she might be now. She was very upset about the demolition. So was I. We had no idea the buyer would go to the council, and that they’d allow that development.’
‘I’d say money changed hands,’ Mr Goldsworthy offered.
‘Very likely,’ the agent agreed. ‘Nothing we could do to stop it, but at least Georgina did get a good price for the property.’ He turned to Patrick. ‘I hear you’re working on some story about the family, for a film?’
The barman came with their drinks, which gave Patrick time to carefully consider his answer.
‘I’m hoping so. But like property sales, Tom, we never know about films until the cheque is in.’
‘Too true,’ Rutledge said.
‘And I don’t mean in the mail… I mean firmly in the bank.’
‘Even truer!’ Rutledge chuckled, and downed the rest of his pint. Patrick bought them each another round.
‘Also,’ Patrick added, ‘it depends if I can find Miss Rickson.’
‘If she is alive, her niece would know.’
‘Niece?’
‘Her only living relative. That address I gave you. It’s the niece’s house in Esher. Georgina went to live there.’
Helen West was a thin woman in her fifties, with hair that had been dyed blonde too often and was now a nondescript beige colour with black roots. She was far from welcoming, and reluctant to even talk about her aunt. Her house was outside the town, from where they could hear the drone of traffic on the bypass to Portsmouth.
Barbed Wire and Roses Page 15
