Copyright & Information
A Villa In France
First published in 1982
Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1982-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755130456 9780755130450 Print
0755133404 9780755133406 Kindle
0755133714 9780755133710 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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About the Author
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.
In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.
In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.
J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.
Part One
I
‘Our friend Rich,’ the Archdeacon of Oxford had been known to say, ‘is inclined to view his sacerdotal function through somewhat antique spectacles. He might come straight out of Mansfield Park.’ Both these assertions were true, although the second stood in some need of qualification. Henry Rich had taken Holy Orders when the expression ‘the family living’ could still pass entirely without remark, and it was his expectation that his elder brother, Sir Richard Rich, would in due season present him as a proper person to enter into the enjoyment of just such a benefice. But – as not in the case of Miss Austen’s Edmund Bertram – there was some hitch in this convenient arrangement. Henry was not, of course, left out in the cold – there were Rich connections who saw to that – and he suffered no further inconvenience than finding himself, in the year 1933, installed in the vicarage of Mallows in a wholly unexpected part of England. The move brought him, indeed, within reach of his old Oxford college, where he held dining rights of a limited sort; hunting was possible with either the Heythrop or the Old Berks; there proved to be several landowners round about who were benevolently disposed to a parson who was no mean performer with a gun.
Henry was an out-of-doors man and something of an athlete; at Oxford (and this we cannot very readily imagine of Edmund Bertram) he had stroked his college Eight. But he was also quite intelligent after a fashion (it was thus that his tutor spoke of young Rich) and this rendered him occasionally vulnerable to religious doubt. In the main, however, he managed comfortably enough, regarding the priesthood as simply one of the professions open to a gentleman, in which from day to day there is honest work to be done.
When he had been some twelve years at Mallows ill-fortune befell Henry Rich. His wife died, and he was left with their only child, a girl called Penelope, who was scarcely out of her nursery. His physical constitution, which remained exceedingly robust in middle age, for long prompted the expectation that he would marry again, if only for the simplest of carnal reasons. But no such marriage took place. He had been devoted to his wife, and although sexual deprivation was disagreeable it somehow didn’t occur to him not to accept it. Being pestered in the matter by several ladies on either their own or a friend’s behalf, he even made some changes in his clerical attire suggesting the sort of Anglican High Churchiness that flirts with the doctrine and discipline of clerical celibacy. There was an incongruity about this fox-hunting parson in a soutane that many did not fail to remark. It increased a certain distrust of the vicar which, although seldom spoken aloud, was perceptible among a number of his parishioners. But the older cottagers liked him, saying that he reminded them of Squire Winton, who had owned Mallows Hall before it was bought by the Ferneydales.
‘Papa,’ Penelope Rich asked over the breakfast table one morning early in her ninth year, ‘are the Ferneydales good people?’
Here might have been supposed a question very proper to be propounded by a clergyman’s daughter as touching the moral probity of near neighbours. But it was not in this sense that it had been put – a fact indicative of a certain oddity in the notions to which Penelope was being brought up.
‘Well, not exactly, my dear,’ Mr Rich said amiably. (He was commonly a very good-natured man.) ‘They have been respectable people, I don’t doubt, for quite a long time. But in a somewhat humble station.’
‘A station?’ Penelope repeated, puzzled. The word suggested a distant and glamorous region to her, since the nearest railway line was four miles off. On a quiet day, and when the wind was right, you could sometimes faintly hear, romantic as the horns blowing in a tale of chivalry, the long drawn out wail of a steam locomotive.
‘Mr Ferneydale’s father,’ Mr Rich continued, ‘was, I believe, an officer in the Indian Army.’
This seemed romantic too, but was evidently designed as not to be received in a wholly favourable light.
‘But, Papa’ – Penelope spoke as if concerned to vindicate the importance of the Ferneydales – ‘they live in a very big house.’
‘It is certainly bigger than the vicarage.’ Watching his daughter finish her porridge, and helping himself to marmalade, Mr Rich laughed easily at this comical conversation. ‘Mr Ferneydale is in business. He is what is called a business man. Business men are concerned to make money, as people like ourselves are not. And Mr Ferneydale, I suppose, has succeeded at it rather well.’
Mr Rich was far from speaking as one who held his neighbour and principal parishioner in disregard. The Ferneydales were rich (or so it was believed) and the Riches were poor. But it was the Riches who were, beyond cavil, good people, and a knowledge of this was an element in the perfect complacency with which the vicar regarded the family at the Hall. There was nothing wrong with their manners. The men had been at decent public schools. They did their duty – or at least the parents did – by the parish. James Ferneydale himself even read the lessons on Sunday morning from time to time. It was true that the fellow was rather far from professing himself a believer. But Henry Rich couldn’t quarrel with him here, since he had become a little shaky about the Thirty-Nine Articles a good many years back.
‘I like Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale,’ Penelope said decidedly.
‘They appear to be very nice boys – or, rather, young men now.’ The vicar had sometimes wondered how the Ferneydales had come to give their two sons those Christian names. ‘Their father has told me that there is less than a year between them.’
‘So that they just missed being twins?’
‘Hardly that.’ Mr Rich realised that the facts of life would have to be communicated to Penelope quite soon by one means or another. ‘And they are very far from being like twins; from resembling each other, that is, in any way.’
‘I like watching them play tennis. I think I understand the rules now, and the funny way of scoring. I’m going to play tennis in my first term at school. And then they’ll let me play with them sometimes, perhaps.’
‘Do you know, I have enjoyed occasionally watching Fulke and Caspar on the tennis court too?’ The vicar’s voice had changed slightly. There was nobody much in the parish with whom to talk except in the most discouragingly banal fashion. And already, without being clearly aware of it, he was coming from time to time to treat his daughter as an intelligent grown-up. ‘If you know the game fairly well – as I think I do – you see something that bears out what I’m saying: that the brothers are very unlike each other. Fulke’s play is imaginative, at times almost freakish – whereas Caspar’s is logical. Fulke brings off something that surprises himself; Caspar thinks out a rally as it goes along.’
‘What does that mean about which of them is best, and likely to win prizes?’ On these occasions Penelope could herself usually manage a bit of a rally; she felt that when her father became interesting like this it was up to her to try hard.
‘That’s a difficult question. Success in games doesn’t depend entirely on the choice and mastery of one or another technique. There’s the factor of who most wants to win. Which of these brothers is most a games-player at heart? I think it may be Fulke.’
‘You mean Fulke is more determined?’
‘Perhaps more determined about some things, and less determined about others. They’re both said to be clever. But Caspar is possibly something of an intellectual: a highbrow, as the Americans say. Not powerfully so, perhaps. But the inclination is there.’
Penelope was now out of her depth. But she understood that an analytical comparison was still in progress.
‘Mrs Gibbins,’ she said, ‘has told me Fulke used to do funny things when he was younger.’ Mrs Gibbins was the cook. ‘But not as young as me.’
Mr Rich didn’t respond to this information. He disapproved of gossiping with servants. Instead, he reflected that Penelope, being indeed quite young, was likely to prove a heavy and sometimes perplexing responsibility for many years ahead. He even wondered whether it had been part of his duty to make that second marriage, thereby providing her with such sustained guidance and support as a stepmother might afford. But that, as we have seen, hadn’t happened, and he felt it to be too late now. Vaguely in his mind had been the thought that it would do honour to his wife’s memory so to contrive matters that their child would one day be mistress in the house from which her mother had been so untimely taken away. But equally – he told himself in a momentary dejection – some sort of selfishness had been at work. He had entrenched himself anew in bachelor habits, and sunk surprisingly deep in them. In none but the most privy relations of life could he imagine the arrival of a strange woman in his household as other than a discommodity and vexation. So he had worked out Penelope’s immediate future in terms of governesses and a boarding-school. Mrs Gibbins, a most respectable woman, had been given some extra money and the style of housekeeper. Fortunately she already bore unquestioned authority over the two other maidservants in the vicarage.
‘Before you can give the Ferneydales a game,’ Mr Rich said, ‘you will have to play a good deal of tennis at school, my dear. And perhaps at home too.’
‘At home, Papa?’
‘It has been in my mind that we ought to have a tennis court. That we are without one is almost an unsuitable thing. Perhaps it might be a hard court, since they are said to be so satisfactory nowadays.’
‘That would be very nice,’ Penelope said – composedly, although she was round-eyed. She already understood, indeed, that the poverty of the Riches was of a comparative order. Her father kept two hunters – and without any possibility of pretending that they were ‘dual purpose’ horses. She herself had a pony while several of her friends had to put up with bicycles. But that a tennis court might suddenly appear at the vicarage struck her as very wonderful indeed.
‘But, Papa,’ she asked virtuously, ‘are you sure we can afford it?’
‘With some tightening of the belt elsewhere, my dear.’ Mr Rich, who was far from being a slim-waisted man, patted himself humorously on the stomach. ‘I myself would like to play a little more than I am able to do at present. At my age, you know, a man oughtn’t to let himself get too heavy for the saddle.’ The vicar said this with the robust conviction he was accustomed to employ when addressing similar admonitions on the Christian life to his humbler parishioners. ‘Everybody has a duty to keep fit.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘And now let us think of another duty, Penelope. Are you properly prepared for Mrs Martin today?’ Mrs Martin was the current governess, and designed as being the last. She was a vigorous woman who arrived on foot from a neighbouring hamlet every morning, rain or shine, at nine o’clock.
‘Yes, I think so. Except that I still have some sentences to translate into French.’
‘Then go along and see what you can do about them.’
Being at this time a well-conducted child, Penelope Rich did as she was told and withdrew to the schoolroom, leaving her father to consider more fully the project to which he had more or less committed himself. It was true that he would himself enjoy being able to play tennis other than at the invitation of friends, which was how the matter stood at present. The importance of ‘keeping his form’ (and he didn’t mean in the pulpit) was very real to him. His own father had failed in this regard, turned flabby, and taken to the bottle: a course of things which would be even more censurable in a clergyman than a baronet. His brother Richard, the present holder of the title, was certainly not going to go that way. Richard was an abstinent character — except, indeed, in bed, where he had begotten no fewer than five sons, thereby ensuring that nothing short of unspeakable catastrophe would do anything much for their uncle. Richard was set to become an octogenarian — or a nonagenarian, for that matter — only the more assuredly because he didn’t hunt and had therefore almost no chance of breaking his neck. Henry bore no conscious wish to survive his elder brother, and would not have done so even had he been that brother’s heir. But he did feel it would be agreeable to wear as well, even in such a trivial matter as continuing to play tolerable tennis at sixty.
Nevertheless it
was Penelope he was genuinely considering. As she grew older it would be increasingly important that her home should be attractive to her friends; in particular to suitable schoolfellows when she got round to inviting them to come and stay at the vicarage during holidays. Not all children were taught to ride nowadays. There were people of very good family so wretchedly circumstanced that they simply couldn’t find the money for it. But most children played tennis. So a tennis court would be just the right thing, and the cost of its upkeep would be considerably less than that of maintaining the ability to mount three or four young people at a time.
Having finished his breakfast (and after retiring, with a healthy brevity, into what his mother had called private life), Mr Rich went to his study to attend to his correspondence. It was seldom an invigorating task, and the room itself had always struck him as the most depressing in the whole commodiously ugly Victorian house. Architects of that period had felt that clergymen, although entitled to materials and workmanship of the first quality, ought to be so equipped as to afford their peculiar position in society visible embodiment, tangible authentication, in whatever direction they looked or moved. This held especially of an apartment in which sermons were to be composed and godly thoughts entertained. The windows of Mr Rich’s study were of gothic configuration and embellished with blobs and rims of coloured glass; the woodwork was of a vestry-like pitch pine; on the encaustic tiles constituting the floor there were to be distinguished designs of half-hearted and non-romish liturgical suggestion; the two doors swung on massive and ramifying wrought-iron hinges, as if they gave not on a breakfast-room and a lobby respectively, but on some superior line in mediaeval tombs. Mr Rich seldom got through his parochial chores amid these surroundings without some fleeting thought of the elegant Georgian rectory of which he had been cheated through that hitch in the matter of the family living. On this occasion he licked his last postage-stamp with satisfaction and made for the open air.
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