The Fountain

by Mary Nichols

  He should never have tried to seduce her at Pen’s party. He had never apologised for that, simply because he had not seen her again until today and putting it in writing was too risky: he did not know if George read her letters. If she had forgotten it or put it out of her mind, it was best not to remind her, but he wished he could forgive himself.

  They turned and walked back to the house side by side. Once there, Dodo claimed him. Barbara went and stood beside George and took his hand, giving him a watery smile.

  George began building the units on the industrial site amid gloomy forecasts from almost everyone that it would be a financial disaster. Gosport openly said he was grateful for the fire: it had stopped him ruining himself as Kennett’s was doing. That George was not ruined was down to his foresight and, to Barbara’s continuing shame, a total lack of business ethics. He spent more time than ever oiling wheels and cultivating anyone who could help him: bribed, threatened, diversified. It was no good protesting, he simply told her he was not doing anything more than hundreds of others were doing to survive. If she didn’t like it, she could always sell the farm.

  To Barbara’s surprise and delight her father had left her the farm with the proviso that Virginia, to whom he had left a small annuity, was to live there as long as she wanted to or until she married again. ‘It’s a white elephant, Barbara,’ George had told her, two months after the funeral. ‘It’s too big for one person.’ He had come home for lunch and they were facing each other across the kitchen table with bowls of soup in front of them. Alison had finished hers and scrambled down to play under the table with some wooden bricks. Nick was asleep in his pram, but would wake soon demanding to be fed.

  Barbara kept one ear open for him as she spoke. ‘I can’t sell it, you know that. It’s Virginia’s home.’

  ‘You can if she agrees. I could find her something smaller, easier to run.’

  ‘But it was my childhood home, where I was born and grew up. My parents loved that old house and so do I. Dad knew that. It’s why he left it to me.’

  ‘That’s sentimental claptrap. You can’t let sentiment interfere with business and Kennett’s could do with a cash injection right now. There’s the industrial site to finish…’

  ‘With businesses going to the wall almost daily, it would be madness to sell the farm to finance that. Go to the bank if you need money.’

  ‘I’ve reached my limit there.’ He was trying to be calm, but she was making it very difficult. Juggling money, handling employees, placating suppliers were the breath of life to him and held no terrors, but Barbara in one of her obdurate moods was a different thing altogether.

  ‘The farm is the only thing I’ve got of my own. Everything else is yours.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that? You know I’ll always look after you. Have I ever begrudged you anything?’

  She wanted to say, ‘Nothing but your time and affection,’ but knew it would spark another, more wounding, argument and she shied away from that. ‘No, but if Dad wanted the farm sold he’d have sold it himself, wouldn’t he? Or left it to Virginia outright.’

  ‘All I’m asking is for you to think about it.’

  Nick woke and his pathetic wails for food diverted her. She picked him up and settled down to feed him. George watched them in silence for a few minutes, then went back to work, leaving her lonely and vulnerable. She needed a friend, someone she could confide in, but there was no one. She couldn’t say anything to Elizabeth who would undoubtedly take her son’s part. She might have been able to talk to Penny but Penny was filming in Spain and, in any case, she knew what her friend would say: ‘Hang onto your assets.’

  Somehow George kept going. He expected his workers to accept lower wages, and though they grumbled, it was better than no work at all. Bonar Law had died and been succeeded as prime minister by Stanley Baldwin but he was soon in trouble and a general election was called. George campaigned as hard as anyone, knocked on doors, spoke at public meetings, harangued and argued. Although Melsham was a safe Conservative seat, the result over the whole country was a victory for the Labour Party and Ramsay MacDonald was invited to head the first ever Labour government, albeit with Liberal support. ‘It won’t last,’ George said and was proved right when another election was held in October.

  The Conservatives swept back into office, helped by a fraudulent letter published in the newspapers purporting to be from the President of the Communist International, calling on British workers to prepare for armed revolution. As far as George was concerned, it meant he could start lobbying for new contracts, but with his capital tied up in the industrial site and Barbara being bloody-minded over selling the farm, all he could do was play a waiting game and hope something would turn up.

  Lady Isobel Quarenton, returning from her weekly visit to Melsham market, discovered a leak in the manor roof. What made her look up as she got out of the car, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was the sun winking on the upper windows or a biplane flying overhead; whatever it was, it was fortuitous because she noticed several slates missing.

  James, her last surviving servant, who was butler, footman, gardener and chauffeur rolled into one, was shutting the passenger door of the Bentley, before driving it round to the coach house. ‘James,’ she said. ‘Had you noticed those tiles were missing?’

  He looked in the direction of her pointing finger. ‘No, My Lady. Had I done so, I would have drawn your attention to them.’

  ‘I’d better go and see what the damage is.’ Maintenance of the once lovely old house was horrendously expensive and getting worse and she simply did not have the money; her only income was a tiny annuity her father, the Earl of Cotterham, had left her and the rents from a couple of cottages which had once been part of the estate. Inflation had reduced the former to next to nothing in value and the cottages also needed repairs.

  Her mother had died when she was a child and her father of influenza in 1918, which was probably a blessing: he would have found the changes in their fortunes impossible to live with. But Melsham Manor was her home; she had never known another. Cosseted and protected all her life, and having no brothers, which might have made a difference, she had had little opportunity to meet young men, certainly none her father approved of. Consequently she had never married and now she lived alone, except for James, whose whole working life had been spent in the service of the family. Given the opportunity to leave, he had refused to budge on the grounds that she needed him. He did everything about the house and garden except the cooking, which she managed herself. One man couldn’t be expected to do so much and so it didn’t get done. But leaking roofs were important.

  The attics, which had once housed kitchen maids, parlour maids, chambermaids and footmen, were now filled with lumber: old furniture; lampshades; toys; an old cradle on rockers; suitcases full of school books which her mother would never throw away; umbrella stands; a stag’s head; a stuffed owl whose glass cover was broken; tennis rackets; board games; a blackboard and a desk put up there when the schoolroom became redundant, all of it thick with dust and festooned with cobwebs. She hadn’t been up there for years and was appalled by the clutter. But she couldn’t ask James to clear it out and she couldn’t face doing it herself. She picked her way carefully through it to the spot beneath the missing tiles. It wasn’t difficult to find because the ceiling had collapsed and the floorboards beneath the hole were wet. If it rained again, it would seep down to the room below. Something had to be done. She went downstairs and rang Kennett’s.

  It was the first time George had been inside the gates of the manor. There was a weed-encrusted gravel drive leading to the front door of a substantial mansion which was mostly Georgian, though one wing, at right angles to the main facade, was older and there was an extension at the back which had been added more recently, but everywhere spoke of neglect. His professional eye roamed over it as he got out of his car and rang the bell.

  He was admitted by the butler and conducted to the drawing room where her ladyship
was waiting for him. It was a well-proportioned room with a high ceiling and long windows which looked out onto a paved terrace. There was an Adams fireplace on which stood an ormolu clock and two small figurines. A display cabinet beside it contained a few pieces of porcelain. Lady Isobel was sitting in a winged chair by the empty hearth. There was a small table beside her on which stood a small vase of flowers and a family photograph.

  ‘Mr Kennett, My Lady,’ the butler said. George noticed that the sleeves of the man’s jacket were slightly frayed, though the creases in his trousers were knife-sharp.

  It was difficult to tell how old her ladyship was, probably in her forties, he decided. She was dressed in a shapeless purple frock and her hair was dragged up into a bun on top of her head which she held very upright.

  ‘Mr Kennett,’ she said, in her precise, well-modulated way. ‘I am afraid I have lost a few tiles from the roof and the rain has penetrated the attics. I need a quote for repairs.’

  ‘That’s no problem, My Lady. If I might take a look.’

  She instructed James to show him the way and sat down to wait for him to come back.

  Following the servant, George climbed an impressive flight of oak stairs which curved up from the marble-tiled entrance hall, then walked the length of a gallery to more stairs at the back of the house. These were narrow and carpeted in cord, which was threadbare. At the top he found himself in a long corridor lined with doors. James opened one of them. ‘In here, sir.’

  George looked round the damaged room, picked up some fragments of plaster and rubbed them between thumb and finger, stamped on the wet floorboards, then asked James for a pair of steps and climbed up through the hole in the plaster to take a closer look at the tiles. Then he went downstairs, out of the front door and down the drive far enough to peer up at the roof, then he wandered round to the back, taking in the old stable block and returning to the front door, where James was waiting to escort him back to the drawing room. In spite of the neglect, the building seemed basically sound and would repay a few thousand spent on it. The trouble was that he didn’t think Lady Isobel had a few thousand and he wondered why she continued to live there in such decaying splendour.

  ‘Well?’ she queried. ‘How much?’

  ‘It needs doing urgently if the first-floor bedroom ceilings are to be saved,’ he said. ‘There are a lot more loose tiles besides those that have already come off and more will come down with the next wind. I can’t be sure how many until we get some scaffolding up and look closer, but it will be almost impossible to match them. If you want the job to look anything at all, you really ought to have the whole roof done. Some of the timbers are saturated and I noticed a bit of woodworm. The wet floorboards need replacing; one or two are downright dangerous. As for the ceilings—’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a catalogue of disasters, Mr Kennett, I asked how much to patch it up.’

  He pretended to consult the notes he had made but the figure he had in mind had very little to do with what he had written. ‘A few thousand, My Lady.’

  ‘How many thousand?’

  ‘Three, at least, maybe more.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ She was shocked. ‘I can’t afford to throw money away.’

  ‘It would be throwing it away not to have a proper job done,’ he said. ‘This is a lovely old house, it deserves to be looked after.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that, Mr Kennett, but I think your estimate is too steep. Mr Gosport would not have been so expensive.’

  ‘No, My Lady, which is perhaps why he is no longer in business. Times have changed. Inflation is higher than it’s ever been.’ He paused, watching her face carefully. ‘I could use some of the tiles from the old wing, which will give you a good match at the front, and then re-roof the back with cheaper tiles. That would bring it down to two and a half thousand…’

  ‘Still too much.’

  He waited, allowing the full horror of what he had said to sink in, before adding, ‘There is another way…’

  ‘What might that be?’ She spoke warily.

  ‘I noticed that there is a triangular piece of land in the corner of your grounds close to Mill Road, which is separated from the main grounds by a copse of trees. I would guess it’s just over an acre. If you let me have that plot free gratis, I’ll do the work for half price.’

  ‘If you want it to build one of those dreadful estates with matchboxes for houses, the answer is no, Mr Kennett.’

  ‘Not an estate, my lady, one house for myself and family. I’ll fence it and access it from Mill Road. You won’t even know we’re there. So what do you say?’

  ‘That land has been in our family for hundreds of years. My father would turn in his grave.’

  ‘Better to part with a tiny piece of land which is useless for anything else, than lose the whole house, don’t you think? You will, if the roof isn’t looked after.’

  She knew perfectly well he was trying to bamboozle her, she could see the gleam of avarice in his eye, but she really didn’t have the money for the repairs and they had to be done. This was a way out, and what was an acre, after all? ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t think too long, My Lady. If it rains again or the wind gets up…’ He left the rest of the sentence in the air.

  ‘I believe the forecast for the next twenty-four hours is fair,’ she said with some asperity. ‘I will telephone you with a decision tomorrow.’

  ‘Very well, My Lady. I look forward to hearing from you.’

  She didn’t take the hand he offered but turned and rang for James to show him out.

  She would come back to him, he knew. All he had to do, he told himself as he walked to his car, was to make sure that the bill for the repairs was double a fair price for the land and that wouldn’t be difficult to fiddle. If the tiles were taken off the Victorian wing very carefully, their second-hand value would cover the cost of the new tiles, even allowing for those he put on the front and a few breakages. It would cost a few man-hours, but that would help to keep his men in employment when he might otherwise have to lay them off. The damage to the roof timbers was minimal, the woodworm was not extensive and could be treated. And a few new floorboards and a bit of plaster wouldn’t break the bank. With luck, the land would cost him nothing at all. He would have the bigger house he had been promising himself on a prime site. But he wouldn’t tell Barbara, not yet. He was still miffed with her over the farm and wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily.

  They were growing more and more distant with each other and Barbara didn’t think it was only because of her attitude over the farm. He was never at home but it was a long time before she admitted, even to herself, that he might have found someone else. The signs were there: the late nights, the vague excuses, the faint smell of perfume that clung to him. Their sex life, once so satisfying, had dwindled to a quick thump every couple of weeks, which left her miserable and unsatisfied. And when she tried to initiate something herself, he was always too tired, or he had a work problem on his mind. He was always polite, never angry, which did nothing to help her accept it.

  She was stagnating, sinking into a mire of household routine which was unshakeable. Get up, take Alison to school, put Nick in his pushchair to go shopping, do the washing, ironing and housework, grab a snack at lunchtime and be at the school gates at four o’clock. Then home, give both children their tea and cook dinner, that was if George was coming home to eat, most of the time he didn’t and then she would sit with a tray on her lap, a mass of nerves and worry. Was her marriage falling apart? If she pretended nothing was wrong, would the problem go away of its own accord?

  She didn’t want the trauma of a broken marriage and the hurt it would cause the whole family. She would have to start again on her own and that wouldn’t be easy: she had no qualifications, no experience, no money and she would be blamed for the breakdown. Besides, she thought, she still loved her husband and she adored her children; they were the most important people in h
er life, more important than her own happiness. And perhaps she was being a dog in a manger over the farm. If she did something about that it might put things right between them.

  ‘George, am I free to sell the land Dad left me, even if I keep the house?’

  They had just finished Sunday lunch and he was sitting in an armchair reading the Sunday Times. Alison was drawing and Nicholas was thumping a drum Elizabeth had given him and making an awful din. Both were attractive children, but he had the sunniest smile and was, even at his naughtiest, adorable. Alison was much quieter, very intelligent, and less prone to tantrums. Given a book or a piece of paper and some coloured crayons, she could amuse herself for hours.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see how that helps,’ he said, carefully laying aside the paper.

  ‘I was thinking. If you’re strapped for cash, why not abandon the idea of building another house? We could move into the farmhouse ourselves and convert the stable block into a self-contained home for Virginia. The structure is perfectly sound.’

  ‘That’s the daftest idea I’ve heard yet,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of man who’d live in a house owned by his wife? People will think I’m on my uppers. I want a modern house with every convenience, and doing repairs and modernising would swallow up all the money the land made, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. You are a builder, after all and—’

  He cut her short. ‘I have already negotiated the land for our new house. I intend to start building as soon as I can spare the cash and the men.’

  ‘You have? Where is it? Why didn’t you say?’