Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  He and I once had a conversation where he told me he found me alarming.

  “You are smart and charming when you want to be,” he’d said. (I let that “when you want to be” slide.) “You have something that makes people want to open up to you, to spill all their secrets. Don’t abuse it. Don’t abuse that power.”

  “You’re talking to a journalist and telling me not to get people to open up?”

  “I’m telling you to be more careful how you go about it. I’m telling you not to lie to them. It’ll come back to bite you.”

  “But schmoozing is okay,” I said. “Got it.”

  A fine distinction, but whatever. I’m sure he meant well. Finally the suits sent him to that elephant’s graveyard where old newspaper editors stagger off to drink Mojitos and pretend they could have been Hemingway—if only.

  And then—just as I was beginning to taste freedom, then they promoted this girl-child in Mike’s place, and I was asked for several months to endure life under this teenage potentate. It was like building pyramids for a female King Tut. Until finally, mercifully in fact, they let me go, too.

  Whenever I relived these job memories, I was overcome by waves of special loathing for Eric, who had assured me not three weeks before canning me that my job at the BBC was safe. Probably safe. But he was so busy by then shagging the married copyeditor (Coleen, Our Lady of the Possessive Pronoun), I should have known this man’s word was not his bond.

  18

  The night before Anna’s funeral the kitchen phone rang, just as Will was saying, “Jillian, we need to talk,” in the deep, dramatic voice he’d honed in local theater.

  It was his mother on the line. Of course it was his fucking mother. It was the only component of disaster missing from that evening. Will and I had quarreled and I had ended up slamming down a plate of spaghetti Bolognese that splattered all over the tablecloth. I forget exactly what the fight was about, but it didn’t take much anymore to get us started.

  I signaled to Will (a sort of begging gesture with my hands) to call his mother back later. He ignored me. But given the threat I felt looming behind his “need to talk,” it was just as well. It may have been the first time I was grateful for one of Rossalind’s interruptions.

  The Dowager White detests me, of course. She is the biggest snob since Queen Victoria and her son’s taking up with an American nearly did her in. I didn’t even bring great wealth into the marriage in the time-honored tradition set by the Vanderbilt girls. I brought nothing but myself, and she quickly made it clear that wasn’t enough.

  They say men fall in love with their mothers, but Rossalind and I were nothing alike. Nothing. She was very tall, although she’d shrunk an inch or two with age and was tubby around the middle. Her large bones were spaced wide apart at shoulders and hips, and she had that rather equine look that seemed to go with liking horses and always being around horsy people. She wore her hair in the same style she’d adopted in her twenties; going by the family photo albums, what had once been blonde strands had lightened to gorgeous white hair that she wore tightly curled around her ears. The Queen Mum had probably been her model for that. She had crooked teeth, in the way of people of her generation, even those who could have afforded a good dentist. What was it with the British, anyway? Are the Middletons the only millionaires in Great Britain with a private dental plan? But she had kept all her teeth, it appeared; in fact she seemed to have more than the allotted thirty-two, slightly bucktoothed and buckled as they were.

  She could talk all day about what bulbs she was planting and where she’d got them and what kind of soil was best and on and on until you just wanted to kill yourself but she never seemed to notice her audience had tuned out. She simply took it for granted I’d be fascinated, as her friends were. It was another thing that was a fence between us, my lack of interest in mucking about with bulbs. Ascot was different; here and there I could inquire intelligently about Ascot. She went every year. Only Will was invited to accompany her. Not me. The excuse given was how difficult it was to get an invitation. Maybe for the run-of-the-mill masses it was. Not for someone with her connections to that world. It was bullshit and even Will acknowledged it.

  “What can I do?” he would say.

  “You could call her on it. You could say if Jill can’t go, I can’t go. Try that.”

  But that only drove him into a sulky silence. You do see, I couldn’t win and I decided to drop it. She couldn’t live forever, after all. Fingers crossed.

  When Will took me to meet her for the first time, it was a fiasco—from her standpoint. The meeting was a sure sign Will and I were an item, that Will was looking at the long term. He was crazy about me. It didn’t really matter—then—that his mother seemed to dislike me on sight: I would prevail in this contest for her son’s heart. And perhaps that realization is what made her so hateful.

  And maybe that’s why Will’s kowtowing manner with his mother always drove me batshit. I could only hear his side of the conversation when she phoned, but still. His little heh-heh laughter at whatever she was saying—so unlike him with anyone else. This guy did not suck up to anyone—not me, not anyone. Whatever I said, however hilarious, seldom earned the heh-heh, but everything she said was apparently straight out of a comedy skit. If she happened to interrupt us during a fight, which was more and more likely to happen, he was perfectly capable of stopping his rage, as if he had a pause button, and continue to rage at me when the call ended. And she never once asked after me or asked to speak with me. Never. It was like I didn’t exist.

  Things rapidly went downhill with Her Loathsomeness after that initial frosty meeting. Before too long I’d misspelled her name on a birthday card, and I never heard the end of it. She completely overlooked the fact that I had paid too much for a hand-painted silk scarf I thought she’d like. Instead she went into a decline over the inscription on the card. You tell me: Wouldn’t anyone else in the world spell it Rosalind? Was it not in fact rather common to spell it Rossalind with that extra S ? And no, I didn’t do it on purpose, which was what she implied. Will at least pretended at the time to believe me incapable of such a petty revenge.

  Anyway, she would much have preferred some gift for her horses, unless I miss my best guess. Hay or a bridle or something. She kept four horses in a stables on the grounds; in the early days, Will and I used to travel to Wiltshire on a weekend to ride.

  But, that house. I could not believe my first sight of Will’s ancestral home. I thought we had made a wrong turn into one of those safari parks like Longleat. The place was an Anglophile’s dream come true. I felt like Rebecca seeing Manderley for the first time.

  You couldn’t take in all of White-Ashby Hall at once; you sort of swept up to it. Rather than sitting exposed to the world, like Highclere Castle of Downton Abbey fame, it was shielded by trees. Much better that way, because when you rounded a corner, just as you were wondering if you were ever going to get there, there it was, on a slight rise of the ground. And it was stunning: it literally took your breath away.

  Palladian in style, it grew out of the footprint of a much older Tudor house dating back to 1548. It was huge, sprawling, and open to the public five days a week in peak season. Even the dower house where Her Wretchedness now lived, effectively pensioned off by the National Trust, was a five-bedroom behemoth that could have housed far more people than the acidulated, poisonous lady it did house. Once she was gone, Will had explained to me, his last ties with the house would likewise be gone. The arrangement with the trust was that she be taken care of for her lifetime. I wondered if they rued the deal, because she seemed likely to live to be a hundred and haunt the place thereafter.

  The progenitor of the Whites came over if not with William the Conqueror then in the next wave. And from that point on they tended to pick the right side in any war or political struggle. They were savvy enough to keep their heads down in the religious skirmishes while others were l
osing their heads over which books of the Bible were apocryphal. I suspect this was because none of the Whites were particularly religious to begin with. They were also very lucky their lack of devotion did not, in and of itself, invite uncomfortable scrutiny. That they did all this while continuing to amass a fortune is miraculous, and it wasn’t until wars and taxes began to chip away at their fortunes that, like the Crawleys, they lost some of their luster.

  The magnificence of White-Ashby Hall did beg the question: What was posh Will doing with an American mutt like me?

  It was a question I’d asked myself a lot. A question Rossalind, needless to say, had asked from the very beginning.

  I was such a thorn in her paw, the unlooked-for sorrow of what would otherwise have been a golden retirement from doing nothing to a retirement of doing more nothing, only with titled grandchildren. She was appalled that Will had not married someone of his own kind, and came very near to saying so to me on more than one occasion. But that would be common and Rossalind was many things, but never that.

  In my own defense, I never pretended to be other than I was. This scored me no points with Rossalind, who had had several titled young women lined up for Will when I’d come along and snatched him from her clutches. My lack of pretense only made her more convinced my family and I were beneath her. She seemed to have gained her knowledge of North Americans via a cursory reading of Fanny Trollope and regarded most of us as one step up from slave-owning pig farmers.

  What really got me was that Will never defended me to her, not once, despite the many opportunities that presented themselves. It’s not as if she would cut him off without a penny for taking my side, for in her widowhood especially she worshiped him. Besides, the terms of the trust under which they all thrived prevented that sort of dramatic renouncing gesture—he’d have to be a complete wastrel in nineteenth-century fashion for the trustees to cut him out. But his real security lay in the fact that he was the adored son—the only son—and much like my sainted brother he could do no wrong.

  So even though there would be no consequences, Will never spoke up for me. I came to believe he was afraid of her—possibly because she saw through him. She had few illusions about her son. She saw through most people but in Will’s case she didn’t seem to mind what she saw.

  Of course I made a point of calling her by her first name because really, what else would I call her? Mother? Not even. Lady White? She was lucky I didn’t call her Rosie. We were family now (like it or not, and despite her energetic attempts to prevent the marriage, including hiring a private eye to have me checked out—truly) and she was not, as I explained to Will after one icy visit, going to get away with making me feel inferior, even if I didn’t descend from landed gentry. (My father did own the rundown farm in Maine, but that was decidedly not the same thing.)

  While I was always introduced to Rossalind’s friends with my university tags attached (“Say hello to Jillian, she was at Lincoln in Oxford, however she did not matriculate in the same year as your Biffy”), it was awkward to toss all that into a conversation. Even she barely managed it. Often she would wedge in the fact that my room overlooked the Garden Quadrangle, which was a thing that seemed to thrill her to her very core—never mind the fact that I was only housed there a few months when my actual “outside walls” room was flooded by broken pipes. Had she been as familiar as I was with the equally appalling state of the plumbing in the quad she might have been even less thrilled. Her horses lived better than I had in that freezing pile but it was, I had to admit, as historic as could be. When I had first moved in I spent a certain amount of time trying to pry the wood off the walls to make sure a student from the Middle Ages had not been walled up alive in there. It had that sort of atmosphere, riddled with ghosts of the past. Rumor had it that a student had hanged himself in the room when he failed his exams and I totally believed it.

  At least my Oxford degree was something I’d done right in her view, Will’s choice of me being so inexplicable otherwise. I made sure to tell Rossalind my father had served honorably in the military, since the men on both sides of Will’s family had some tradition of that sort of thing. I left out the part where he fell apart later.

  Sometimes I wondered: Was I Will’s one stab at rebellion from his upbringing, even though it was a rebellion quickly crushed? Because the more I thought about it, the less I could see what he had seen in me in the first place, compared with the Debrett’s debutantes he could have had. Obviously, his mother had the same problem.

  Will’s father was seldom mentioned, however, and it was a significant omission. He had been sent away for some unspecified treatment to clinics a few times over the years. Whatever was wrong with him—drink, mental illness—it apparently killed him in the end.

  My employment with the BBC, of which I had been rather proud, also was a source of embarrassment for Rossalind in the stately circles in which she ran. It was akin to being in trade, like being a fishmonger or a saddler. The fact that Will and I had met in a bar, a fact he mentioned to her in some careless moment, sealed my fate in her eyes. I thought of telling her that was how my parents met also. She was set against me, anyway. If I had rescued a train full of orphans it was not going to change her views one jot.

  But. You could tell what really, really bothered Rosie was that her grandchild, the heir to the throne, would be a mongrel. That’s how she would look at it. Of course, that only made me redouble my efforts to get pregnant. And it tripled my dismay when I failed. Any idiot can get pregnant, I told myself; look about you for the evidence. The gynecologist said there was nothing physically wrong. Will refused to get tested, but it was early days yet. I would wear him down: he could not be the one to let the family tree die out.

  I tried every folkloric cure: ginseng sprinkled on my cereal, tanking up on folic acid (me) and caffeine (him). For a while, I practically hung upside down after sex to give Will’s sperm every chance to survive their swim north. Or south, in this case. Nothing happened, month after long month of anxious waiting. There was a miscarriage early on but the doctor assured me that was common and normal and nothing to worry about. But I did not get pregnant and it became a thing, the way these things do. The more I tried the more I cared the more worried I got the smaller my chances seemed to be. It did not help that Rosie’s relief at my failure to conceive as time went on was palpable. I grew to loathe our visits. I grew to loathe her. I considered faking a pregnancy just to piss her off—clearly too short-term a revenge, though.

  It really did not help that Will’s impatience—at first—grew along with mine. I was starting to identify with Anne Boleyn.

  I used to wonder if Rosie had the power to make her son leave me. If, like a steady drip-drip on a rock, she could recall him to his privileged roots, to long summer days playing cricket, to boarding in public schools with all the other privileged fluffy-haired toffs. Never mind that he claimed to despise the memories of those days. I didn’t, for one thing, believe him. He was the head boy, not some scrawny weakling tormented by the other boys or molested by some pervy headmaster with a whip. It was possible Will had been a main tormentor, in fact. The ringleader. The one they all looked up to. A leader of men, even at a tender age.

  I wondered often what it would have been like to take for granted that sort of upbringing. The old-boy and old-girl networks. The unthinking wealth. The tea parties on the lawn in summer, with the dogs and children running about, the swarms of bees after the honeypot. The instinctive knowing what to wear—there was never a frantic moment in Rosie’s life of picking out what she would call a “frock”—buying something on sale at the last minute, to regret it ever after. She just wore the same dress or suit that had been tailored for her years before. Not Chanel—I think Chanel had become so common she regarded it as off the rack. Something bought at some secret atelier in Paris. Somewhere in a Paris attic there might still be a tall, wide dressmaker’s dummy with her name on it.

  I
had wanted so much for her to like me, until it became apparent that was never going to be. It was not so much jealousy I felt, this I know. It was fear.

  One of us was going to die on that hill and I was afraid it would be me.

  It was odd how a visit to Rossalind made me wish I still had some sort of relative left who might have defended me. It could have made all the difference. But my brother died one sunny fall day and—well, the difference to me. To all of us. It was like a curtain dropping between acts. My parents never got over the loss; in fact they dined out on it the rest of their lives. No one is ever going to hold you to the same standard as the rest of the world once they hear you’ve experienced such an unfathomable heartache. You can walk in and set fire to someone’s living room carpet and people will say, “It’s understandable. They lost a son, you know.”

  The same went for me. My high school teachers tiptoed around me from the day he died until I graduated. It was my first experience of being apart, of being special. “She just lost a brother, you know.”

  My parents never met Will, of course, which was too bad. He could have been their son restored to them, clothed in glory, hallelujah.

  19

  The funeral for Priscilla Anna Marie Monroe was held at St. Chrysostom’s Church. It is doubtful she ever set foot in the place apart from the occasional wedding. She had long since abandoned the vestiges of a Catholic upbringing and become the most non-religious person I ever met. Most people believe in something, if only in a superstitious way. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. A lucky charm or necklace; a lucky dress you wear on a first date. But Anna believed you made your own luck. I guess that didn’t really work out, in her case.