I turned on my heel and followed Colin into the library.
‘Colin,’ I said, boldly, interrupting Mr Percy mid-flow, ‘I need to speak with you.’
My brother flushed with annoyance but stood up from where he had been bending over some papers on the table.
‘I am amazed at you,’ he said, coldly, when Mr Percy had withdrawn. ‘I thought you wanted to keep your distance. Considerable trouble has been gone to in order to maintain your façade of obscurity.’
‘That was as much for your benefit as mine,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to embarrass you by claiming relationship, that was all. And Mr Percy knows full well who I am. But there is something you need to know about a member of your entourage. Mr Ratton. He is a thief.’
Colin gave a sort of snort. ‘A thief?’
‘Yes. When the news came through about George, he did a moonlight, taking all the valuables from the house. He would have abducted me, but was prevented. He behaved in an outrageous manner towards me.’ I was shaking, but it was as though a geyser had opened up in me, filling up the space where, only moments before, my assurance had been, with anger and indignation. ‘He drugged me. He molested me, Colin.’ I collapsed into a chair, weeping. Colin looked on, coldly. I remembered, now, his cruelty as a child, his lack of compassion. By odd chance, following the rearrangement of the furniture in the room, he was standing on the exact spot which Ratton had occupied that night when I had found him waiting for me in the dark. The memory brought a shudder which almost convulsed me. Ratton, then, had been the author of my misery, and now Colin… I felt a terrible foreboding grip me.
Out in the hallway, beyond the double doors of the library, there was much bustle and activity.
‘You ninny,’ Colin spat out, at last. ‘Ratton wasn’t stealing those things, he was saving them.’
At his words the doors of the library flew open. Without a knock, without a nod, without a gesture of deference of any kind, Ratton strode into the room with a crate in his arms. ‘Here we are,’ he boomed, placing the box onto the desk, ‘back where they belong.’ He dusted his hands together as though he had accomplished a great feat of work, and, turning, appeared to notice me for the first time. ‘Oh!’ he cried, mock-startled, ‘Miss Eve… Forgive me, Mrs Johns,’ he spoke the name with derisive emphasis, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
‘Evelyn is just telling me, Sylvester,’ Colin said, smoothly, ‘about your heroics. She’d got quite the wrong impression. Seems she thought you were making off with the family silver!’
‘Really?’ Ratton guffawed. ‘What a poor opinion she must have of me.’
‘Indeed, I have,’ I croaked, rising to my feet. For all I wished to present an image of wounded dignity and pride, I must have failed. Both men howled with laughter.
‘Sylvester brought all the valuables straight to me in London,’ Colin said, as though explaining something to an imbecile, or a child. ‘As far as he knew the house was going to be closed up. Naturally he could not have left them here. I must say he’s made himself very useful, since then. Now he’s one of us. Quite on equal standing.’
‘I never dreamed you’d stay on here,’ Ratton put in, wandering over to the mantelpiece and taking up his old position with a self-possession which astounded me. ‘Not when you had other more attractive options to pursue. How is Mr Cressing, by the way?’
‘He is well,’ I said, stiffly. ‘In Berlin, just now.’
‘Indeed?’ This seemed to interest both men to an extra-ordinary degree. ‘To what purpose?’
‘On business,’ I stammered. ‘A possible exhibition…’
My explanation seemed to puncture the balloon of their curiosity. Colin turned away from me and began to rummage through the box Ratton had carried in. I glimpsed items of silver and crystal. ‘I hope you can remember where all these things belong,’ he muttered. ‘Damned if I can.’
I nodded. ‘Yes. I can restore them all to their rightful places,’ I said, heavily.
‘So you and Ratton are on the same page, after all,’ Colin declared, losing interest in the trinkets in the box.
‘There should be a lot more,’ I remarked.
‘There are. The van is full of them,’ Ratton smirked. He lit a cigarette and threw the match onto the hearth. We both looked at it. Did he expect me to pick it up?
‘And what about the money,’ I re-joined. ‘The money you took from the estate office safe?’
Ratton made a moue, narrowing his stony, reptilian eyes against the cigarette smoke. ‘One had expenses,’ he murmured, before going on ‘In Berlin, you say. With Madame Cressing, I presume? I’m surprised. My information was she rarely leaves her villa in St Germain-en-Laye.’
I could not hide my surprise. I had had no idea John’s mother was alive, let alone living in France. In spite of so wishing to appear mistress of myself, I stammered ‘His mother?’
Colin and Ratton exchanged a mischievous look. ‘Dear me, no, Evelyn,’ Colin said, crossing the room and taking my arm. He began to steer me towards the door. ‘His wife. Now you must excuse us, we have business to attend to.’
His words disarmed me entirely and I ran to my rooms and locked the door. In the house all was bustle and busyness; I could hear the occasional grunt and shout of men as they re-organised things, the shriek and scurry of women as they struggled to accommodate the changes and tidy up the mess. In my little enclave everything was still, my few belongings secure in their accustomed places but the same could not be said for my thoughts. They jostled and jockeyed; ideas and solid rocks of fact which had stood immoveable for as long as I had known John were reconfiguring themselves and I, in my turn, twisted and tortuously recalibrated my feelings to take account of them.
John. Married?
This, then, was the impediment he had referred to all those years before. How stupid I had been not to guess it.
How unnecessarily secretive he had been not to mention it. A wife married in haste and repented of would not have disturbed me; I had been too far gone in love to care. I could have assuaged my conscience with images of a shrewish harridan, a mindless doll or an anaemic invalid, any of which would have been wholly unsuitable for a man of John’s humour, intelligence or vigour. I would have told myself that I had saved him as he, in reality, had saved me.
But a wife not repented of but only substituted as need and opportunity had presented itself? What about that? An agreeable, competent, warm-blooded, wife? A compatible wife? A wife who welcomed him home warmly to their villa in St Germain-en-Laye, who regretted but graciously coped with the many mysterious weeks her husband had to spend in England? An advocate for his work, a companion for his travels? This would have been a circle very difficult to square by any moral parameters I could have summoned, and provided an object of consuming envy neither reason nor integrity could have supported. I was jealous now, I realised, mad with it; I wanted John all to myself. If she had materialised in the room I would have scratched her eyes out. I pictured her beautiful, of course, and sophisticated, worldly-wise and modern. She was au fait with current political and philosophical thought, a tour-de-force of informed and interesting opinion on any subject under the sun. She was up to the minute in fashion and yet coquettish in French lace and the kind of underwear designed to shock women and titillate men. She was athletic and inventive in bed... Before my eyes she slipped a frilled robe from a shapely shoulder and fluttered come-to-bed eyes at John, my John, who stepped towards her and ran his hands over the milky mounds of her balconied bosom… The thought of it made me retch, and I dashed into the little bathroom and lost my breakfast down the bowl of the earth closet.
I had more reason than ever to keep in the shadows, after that; my humiliation was wretched. I could barely look any of the servants in the eye, let alone Colin or Sylvester Ratton. How glad I was of Colin’s Butler and footmen, who would supervise things upstairs, and of Mr Percy, with whom I could communicate anything of importance if necessary. I had no need to encounter Ratton or Co
lin at all, I told myself. They were the last people I wanted to have anything to do with apart, perhaps, from John, towards whom I nursed a bitter, burning antagonism.
After dinner on that Friday everyone retired early both upstairs and down, but I found Mr Ratton loitering in the kitchen after midnight. It was a shock to find him there. He was uncomfortably close to my little suite of rooms. I felt vulnerable and afraid, also stupid and embarrassed.
‘Just refreshing my memory,’ he said, helping himself to a leg of chicken from the refrigerator. In the meagre light from an oil lamp which we kept burning all night in the kitchen, his face was as pallid and greasy as the skin of the chicken in his hand, his ugly nobble of nose like a piece of revolting gristle.
‘You’ll have no business down here,’ I said, stiffly, ‘not now you’re “quite on equal standing.’’’
‘One never knows,’ Ratton remarked. ‘Do you occupy your old rooms in the north wing?’
I shook my head. ‘Others entirely.’
‘The place has gone to pot,’ he observed. ‘A shadow of its former self. I am embarrassed by the squalor.’ Although ostensibly referring to Tall Chimneys I could not help thinking his comment masked an underlying observation about myself. Is that how I appeared to him? A shadow of my former self? Squalid? An embarrassment?
‘I have done my best,’ I said, bitterly. ‘Alone, without income.’
‘You have not been entirely alone,’ he said. He sauntered from one end of the kitchen to the other, gnawing on the chicken, occasionally lifting the lids of dishes Mrs Bittern had left semi-prepared for breakfast, running his finger along the window ledge and inspecting it for dust. I remained rooted to the spot, unwilling to yield up possession of the room to him, less willing still to indicate to him the direction in which my rooms might lie. At last, with much sucking and slobbering, he finished the chicken and laid the bone on the table, a greasy imposition on that otherwise pristine, scrubbed surface. He smiled at me, showing shreds of chicken in his teeth, and licked his lips with deliberate and sickening intention. Then he gave me an odd, stiff little bow before leaving the room.
I could not sleep that night, hearing footsteps in the passageway outside my room, thinking the door handle was turning. At three or four a.m. I even considered throwing on some clothes and climbing up to the gatehouse, where I had always felt safe. But the idea of allowing him to intimidate me that far rankled. In any case I feared the gatehouse would be tainted for me, now, its haven in some way invaded and compromised by John’s secret wife. I held fast until dawn glimmered through a chink in the thick curtains, and I heard the first blackbirds in the kitchen garden.
The following day I unpacked the boxes and restored Tall Chimneys’ treasures to their rightful places, as far as I was able. Most of the silver went back into the strong room but some few pieces were allowed to adorn the dining room. Usually decisions of this kind, as well as overall responsibility for the household silver, should fall to the Butler, but as he was only temporarily in authority at Tall Chimneys I undertook the task myself. Colin, Ratton and Mr Percy spent the morning ensconced in the library, calling for a buffet luncheon at one. In the afternoon the telephone rang and we had news the rest of the party had arrived at the station - cars were sent to collect them. I went through the baize door and down the stairs as though down to my lair, intent on remaining there no matter what, for the duration of the house party.
Of course it was an impossible plan. My assistance was required at every juncture. Some of the gentlemen who arrived brought their own valets, who had to be accommodated. There was more bed-making to be done, towels to be distributed. Some gentlemen arrived without valets, declaring themselves quite able to manage, but then rang the bell every five minutes, and I was up and down the stairs repeatedly. The demand for hot water was inordinate – I had no notion men could demand so many baths. The furnace needed constant attention and in the end I sent for a lad from the village to tend it night and day. Then there was a rush and scuffle for the boot room and the press as valets tried to get their gentlemen’s evening attire prepared.
Of course they talked, they let names drop and it was impossible not to know who we had under the roof, as much as I might try to distance myself from them. The guests of honour were Mr Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and William Joyce, his right hand man. The novelist Henry Williamson, writer of Tarka the Otter, fresh from his recent visit to Germany also formed one of the party, and Neville Chamberlain, Colin’s great advocate, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Several other men, minor satellites of Mosley’s or governmental flunkeys made up the numbers. Chamberlain was already being tipped as the next Prime Minister; everyone agreed Baldwin had had his day. It seemed the Fascists hoped to convince Chamberlain to join them, stop the drive for rearmament and to seek to make stronger links between the British Government and those in Spain, Italy and Germany. To this end a number of foreign emissaries also formed part of the company, in particular three very austere German gentlemen, resplendent in military regalia, high boots and peculiar trousers very wide around the thigh and tight around the knee. There were two dark, shifty-looking Italians and a portly Spaniard who seemed to speak very little English - certainly, his valet spoke none - and, in any case, was suffering from a terrible cold for which his servant had to prepare a number of noxious-smelling remedies during the course of his stay.[7]
We sent tea up to the music room at four and then sat down to our own meal, a hurried affair under constant threat of interruption by the company above. The loud guffaw of male voices, the thick waft of cigar smoke, a cacophony of accents and the sound of someone playing the piano quite execrably emanated through the hallway and down to us in the servants’ hall, drowning out most conversation. After tea they called for whisky. The heat and volume of the discussions above reached a climax only just equalled by the furore in the kitchen as Mrs Bittern prepared the various courses for dinner more hampered than helped by the well-meaning but perhaps misguided assistance of the village women. I had to soothe over one volatile outburst after another, smooth ruffled feathers, placate and mollify at every turn. At last the crisis passed and the dishes began to assemble themselves on the table; dressed salmon, roasted game, golden pies and glossy syllabubs in splendid array. In spite of the drama, they looked, to me, at any rate, really excellent, and my mouth watered even though I had eaten a few mouthfuls along with the rest earlier. The homely fare, plain stews and simple accompaniments I had served up for so many years seemed paltry, now, and unappealing. I suddenly wondered what John was eating, perhaps with his wife, what delicacies of German cuisine, rich sauces and fine wines they had had laid before them. Thoughts like these had distracted me throughout the day. I was beginning to doubt everything he had told me in his letter - the mysterious ‘Jean’, sculptor would be unlikely to make a third, wouldn’t he? Unless it was a ménage à trois … Really my opinion of John was such at that moment I would have put nothing past him, there was no excess of depravity or dishonesty of which I could not believe him capable.
The dressing bell rang at six thirty and the men all repaired to their rooms to bathe and change. I took the opportunity to visit the music room in order to ensure everything was in order, the tea things cleared, the fire well-stocked with fuel, and to supervise the lighting of the candles in the dining room. I busied myself around the rooms, plumping cushions, drawing curtains, straightening chairs, the kinds of task which few men would notice had even been done, but I felt a kind of pride in my home, especially now it had been restored to an order as good as any I could ever remember. I felt vaguely uncomfortable about Colin’s political leanings although, from what John had said, the situation in Germany under Chancellor Hitler was better than it had been for many years, industry booming, standards of living good, national pride at an all-time high. In comparison Britain was all depression and gloom. There was something about the Fascists which did not sit comfortably with me, but if Colin was going to keep Tall Chimn
eys up, use it, maintain and improve it, and would allow me to continue living there, I thought I might tolerate his political leanings. What impact could they have on me, here, I reasoned, so many miles from London? And if John - well, I hardly dared think about John; perhaps he did not intend to return. In that case, I considered, I would need my home here at Tall Chimneys more than ever, regardless of my brother’s politics.
My thoughts were interrupted by a slight sound behind me. I turned, instantly defensive, expecting Sylvester Ratton to be lurking, but in fact it was Giles Percy, flushed and animated as I had not seen him before, his blond hair rather tousled, the collar of his usually immaculately pressed shirt askew. It was obvious to me he was tipsy. I found this rather appealing, a welcome change to the precise and very proficient automaton he usually presented.
‘I thought you were all dressing for dinner,’ I said, ‘so I risked coming up, to make sure everything is in order.’
He grinned; a boyish, charming grin which utterly erased his habitual implacable façade. ‘It’s going awfully well,’ he said. ‘Everyone is very pleased.’ His eyes, in the candlelight, shone. ‘How are things down below?’
Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Page 8
