by Mary Malloy
“One of the oldest homes in England to be occupied continuously by a single family, Hengemont House provides an almost textbook illustration of eight centuries of British architecture. Situated above the village of Hengeport on the Somerset coast of the Bristol Channel, the original Norman castle was built ca. 1180 by Jean d’Hautain, who accompanied Henry II to England from France, and who received the property from his royal patron. An ancient stone circle occupied the site in prehistoric times, the stones of which were incorporated into the foundation of the principal walls of the castle. The three largest stones, each reaching twelve feet in height, are visible today framing the main entrance to the oldest part of the house.
In 1356 and again in 1400 portions of the main tower and the three subsidiary towers of the fortification were pulled down and two gothic additions, one on either side of the tower, made Hengemont a more comfortable home for the growing Hatton family.”
Beneath the description of the house was an outline plan of the original castle, with its fortified wall meandering along the top of a hill in a shape that was not quite square. The big Norman tower sat solidly in the middle of the longest wall, and smaller round towers marked each of the four places that could be considered corners. Their locations in the drawing, and the ruins that were indicated in an aerial photograph, clearly showed how the topography of the hilltop had suggested the shape of the castle yard. In color plates of the current house, the three huge stones described as part of the “ancient stone circle” that predated the house on the site were evident around the door. The rest of the Norman stonework was made of fairly small stones; most appeared to Lizzie to be about the size of a man’s fist, and this made it easy to distinguish the oldest part of the building, which was from the original castle, from the cut-stone gothic additions that flanked it on either side.
“In 1580 the size of the house was doubled with the addition of a wing in the Tudor style, adjoined at right angles to the existing structure. Inigo Jones was consulted on the layout of the gardens in 1623, incorporating ruined walls from the original castle fortifications. Jones was recalled by the family in 1650 to build another wing opposite the Tudor wing, and the house at that time took on the shape it maintains today. Running along the back of the original Norman tower and its extensions stands the most elegant part of the house. Designed and built to the specifications of Robert Adam in 1781, this addition includes the double staircase for which the house is justifiably famous.”
Lizzie turned the page to see the additions that grew from either end of the gothic extensions: on the left the older Tudor wing, on the right the more recent Inigo Jones wing. From what Lizzie could tell from the pictures, the place had more or less a U shape, with the open end facing the sea; the Robert Adam wing had doubled the thickness of the bottom of the U. There was a terrace and a large and lush formal garden, with beds of flowers laid in geometric patterns. It did not look like the sort of place where actual people lived in this day and age, but it had real promise as a place to stay for a month as a guest of the owner.
As she closed the book, a passage on the back cover of the dust jacket caught her attention. It was a quote from The Awkward Age, a novel by Henry James, describing a stately home in England, “well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world. . . .”
“Suggestive of panelled rooms, of precious mahogany, of portraits of women dead, of coloured china glimmering through glass doors, and delicate silver reflected on bared tables, the thing was one of those impressions of a particular period that it takes two centuries to produce.”
Lizzie patted the book and took another sip of champagne. That was what she wanted to find in England, that sense of tangible history. That it would be found in an ancient and, she had to admit, elegant and luxurious house, was a huge bonus. She couldn’t help thinking back to the conversation with her friends at Geminiani’s a few weeks before, and wondered if she was justifying an attraction to wealth and nobility by couching it in scholarship.
If there was a conflict that most people of Irish ancestry shared, Lizzie thought, it was a simultaneous rejection of, and attraction to, British notions of aristocracy. In truth, she thought that most Irish peasants held a secret ambition to become English gentry. She thought of Jackie and wondered if she protested too much. Rose did not hesitate to declare that she wanted the fairy tale, and Lizzie loved and respected both of her friends, despite their positions on opposite ends of the spectrum of romantic silliness.
Martin was the only one in her immediate circle who seemed completely oblivious to the attractions of social position. He moved through life with a remarkable confidence that kept him from worrying about many of the notions that buzzed around in his wife’s head. He was not impressed by wealth, fame, consequence, or possessions. He didn’t scorn them; he simply didn’t notice. The fact that he had, since a teenager, been able to command a hefty commission for his murals had, Lizzie acknowledged, probably provided the base for his egalitarianism, and the strange LA agglomeration of celebrities, millionaires, artists, and politicians who took notice of him early had kept him from ever experiencing self-doubt or hardship.
Her thoughts turned from her husband to her father. Lizzie had had a long conversation with him on the phone on New Year’s Day. She told him she had been hired by a man named Hatton to do research in England.
“That’s an interesting coincidence,” he had said cheerfully. (It wasn’t, however, interesting enough to ask for any further details.)
“Tell me about your grandmother’s Hattons in Ireland,” Lizzie pressed. She had asked him about this several times before and, as always, he professed ignorance.
“They were just poor spud farmers, Lizzie,” he said.
“She never talked about her life there?”
“I think her motto was ‘only remember those things that give you pleasure and forget the rest.’”
Lizzie laughed. “Well that’s an interesting twist on the motto of the English Hattons! They apparently remember everything.”
“It’s not that she wasn’t interested in history,” he continued. “She was constantly reading, could talk endlessly about the ancient Romans and Greeks, about medieval Europe, the American Civil War.”
He reminisced for a few minutes about things his grandmother had said or done when he was a child. She had lived with his family when he was growing up, and they had had a close relationship. “You are a lot like her,” he said finally to Lizzie. “She loved history, she just didn’t dwell on her own past.”
Lizzie closed her eyes and tried to remember her great grandmother, now dead more than thirty-five years. She had been an ancient relic when Lizzie was a toddler, but there was still a vivid memory of crawling up into a soft and ample lap. She drifted off to sleep trying to recapture the sound of the old woman speaking, and found herself dreaming of strange soft sounds that seemed to roll around in her great grandmother’s mouth before dropping off her aged tongue. The language merged with the drone of the plane engine as Lizzie slept, and in her dream, as in her childhood, she couldn’t understand a single word.
• • • • •
It was six-thirty in the morning when she arrived at Heathrow Airport. Groggy and bewildered, Lizzie claimed her luggage and proceeded through the green line of customs: “Nothing to declare.” Outside the gate area was a good-looking young man in his early twenties, wearing a suit and cap and holding a sign that said “Professor E. Manning.” Lizzie identified herself and argued with him over who should carry which bags, eventually letting him have his way and carry everything but her purse.
“I’m Jeffrey,” he said affably, slinging two of her bags over his shoulders and taking the third up under his arm. “Sir George sent me to take you to the train.” He began to proceed quickly through the terminal.
“Thanks for meeting me,” she called at his receding back. “I’m Lizzie.”
He turned for a m
oment and gave her a bemused look. When he turned again to continue, he slowed his pace a bit to accommodate her but made no attempt at conversation. At the curb outside, Jeffrey opened the back door of a Bentley sedan and Lizzie crawled in as he put her luggage in the trunk.
As he slid into the driver’s seat, Lizzie noticed that Jeffrey had a ponytail tucked up under his cap in back. Had the cap been less formal and on backwards he could easily have been one of her students.
“Do people call you Jeff?” she asked, giving her voice as cheery a ring as she could at that hour.
“Never,” he answered.
“Oops, sorry,” Lizzie said, the cheery ring gone, “you’ll have to excuse my too-informal American habits.”
In the front seat he adjusted the rearview mirror to look at her.
“Informal people call me Pete,” he said, with a smile.
“Sorry again,” Lizzie said, smiling back, “I thought you said your name was Jeffrey.”
“I said my name was Jeffries,” he responded, with an emphasis on the final syllable, “Peter Jeffries.”
He negotiated the car onto the main highway into London.
“Sir George likes us to preserve those little niceties that distinguish between the classes,” he continued, “like the use of the surname only for household servants.”
Lizzie leaned forward to rest her elbows on the back of the front seat on the passenger side.
“So you work for George Hatton, eh Pete?”
He smiled at her again.
“My family,” he said, “has been what you would call ‘in service’ to the Hattons for generations.”
This was a concept which Pete seemed to accept as very natural, but Lizzie found disturbing. She sat back in her seat again and pondered George Hatton, with his multigenerational family of serfs, and his desire to keep them in their place with an archaic nomenclature.
Lizzie wanted to probe more deeply into the matter, but hesitated. She didn’t want to make the young man uncomfortable. Traffic was increasing as they came closer to London, and Pete’s attention was drawn entirely to the road as it ceased to be a real highway and merged into city streets. As the car slowed she eased into the subject.
“So what do you do besides drive this car around London?” she asked.
“For years I helped around the farm down in Somerset,” he said, glancing at her as he changed lanes, “but now that I’m at University I live in the Hatton’s London house and do the odd job like this one, picking you up at the airport and transporting you to the train station.”
The college professor in her surfaced. “What are you studying?”
“I’m doing a degree in business at the University of London,” he said.
“And will you put that to work for the Hattons when you’re finished?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Oh no,” he said, smiling broadly, “I’m the Jeffries that will break that chain.”
Lizzie sat back again in the comfortable seat and crossed her legs.
“I guess I’m a little surprised that he lets you continue to live in his house,” she said frankly.
“I said I was the Jeffries that would break the chain, not the last Jeffries to work for the Hattons,” he said. “Sir George would be lost without my parents.”
“Ah ha,” Lizzie said, paying more attention now to the world beyond the car window as they left the light industrial sprawl of the airport and began to enter the city itself. She was silent for a few minutes but could not resist following up with Pete on a point that had been bothering her. “Excuse my American lack of class one more time, Pete,” she said, “but am I also expected to refer to him as ‘Sir George’?”
Pete seemed surprised by the question. “It is the form by which he is most commonly addressed,” he said, steering the car through a maze of traffic barriers. “Why do you ask?” he continued. “Are you uncomfortable with these deferences to rank?”
Lizzie thought for a second, wondering how frank she should be with him. He was a stranger, he was an employee of George Hatton, but she liked him. She didn’t think he was the sort of person who would call the big house to report on her as soon as she got out of the car.
“In truth,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “I am somewhat uncomfortable with the whole notion of an aristocracy that is addressed differently than the rest of us.”
“Well, I am too,” Pete shrugged, “but in my case there is the whole parental thing. And I have nothing against Sir George anyway,” he continued. “He’s always been very decent to me and my family.”
“Can I call him Mr. Hatton?” she asked.
“That might work abroad, but as a guest in his house you might be the first. If not ‘Sir George’ then it’s usually ‘Lord Hatton.’”
“Lord!” Lizzie exclaimed. “That’s even worse. I don’t suppose I can just leap right in and call him George?”
“Well, I’m going to have to ask you not to do that because you would certainly give my mother a heart attack!” Pete said, laughing.
“I guess I can call him ‘Sir’ anyway,” Lizzie said, “and think of it as being deferential to age and experience rather than rank.”
She turned this over in her mind several times while Peter Jeffries looked amused in the rearview mirror.
“I’m sorry I won’t be there when you arrive at Hengemont,” he said. “This should be a very interesting meeting.”
They drove on in silence for several minutes until Lizzie asked him where they were going.
“Paddington Station,” Pete answered, expertly negotiating the crowded traffic of the city neighborhoods. “From there you’ll take the train to Taunton, transfer to Minehead, and my father will meet you at the other end.”
“I guess I won’t ask him if he goes by Jeff,” Lizzie joked.
Pete laughed. “He has a very good sense of humor, but strangely enough he also likes to have the distinctions of rank preserved. It solidifies his position in the household.”
They approached the station and Pete pulled the car into the passenger drop-off section as Lizzie pondered his interesting remark.
“Any messages for the folks at home?” Lizzie asked.
“Heavens no,” Pete said, getting out of the car and coming around to open Lizzie’s door. “They’d be horrified to know that we exchanged more than two words on anything other than weather or scenery.” He motioned to a porter to take Lizzie’s suitcases and reached into his jacket to produce a first-class ticket to Minehead.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed our talk,” she said, shaking his hand firmly. “I hope we’ll meet up again when I’m in London.”
He removed his hat to reveal his shoulder-length ponytail and bowed with a flourish. “Likewise,” he said, smiling. “It has been a pleasure.”
He waved one last time as he got back into the car, and Lizzie followed the man with her bags into the station. It was a great steel Victorian cave. Lizzie paused to look at a map of the routes mounted in a glass-covered frame on the wall. Minehead was the last stop on the line headed along the south coast of the Bristol Channel. The small coastal village of Hengeport lay just beyond it.
Chapter 4
The heater on the train worked furiously, and Lizzie took off her coat and scarf and eventually stood up and wrestled with the window to lower it a bit and let some of the cold outside air into the hot compartment. She was glad that she didn’t have to share the space with anyone because it was her impression that English people objected to fresh air on trains.
She settled comfortably into her seat and studied the London landscape trundling by below her. The train was on a high embankment and she could see easily onto the rooftops and into the back gardens of row upon row of brick houses. It reminded her of the opening sequence of the animated version of “Peter Pan,” or of the city as described by Dickens, though now a lo
t cleaner. She thought about Peter Jeffries and wondered that he would share so much information with a stranger, being English and all. But Lizzie knew from past experience that she had an open face that invited confidences, and she had been just as candid with him as he had been with her, maybe more so.
As the city gave way to the suburbs, Lizzie dozed briefly, and when she woke up the countryside stretched out into the foggy distance. She had been to England several times before but never in winter, and the landscape that she knew to be verdant green in summer was bleakly grey through a light mist. She liked the movement of the train and was almost hypnotized by the repetitive pattern of field and hedge, field and hedge, field and hedge. Occasionally a village whizzed by, but so fast that she could not read the town name on the sign. She took Martin’s gift from her bag and read again about the house that was her destination. None of the accompanying photographs showed it in winter. Always the grass was green, the garden in full bloom, the sea visible under a clear blue sky beyond the carefully cultivated landscape.
When she finally saw Hengemont for the first time, it was from the back seat of a Bentley identical to the one driven by young Pete Jeffries in London. She was met at the station by his father, just plain Jeffries, and she was more circumspect about engaging him in conversation than she had been with his son. They drove quickly through the village, past a charming pub and inn called the White Horse. A signboard swinging above the door showed the outline of an ungainly white horse. A moment later, as the buildings of the village gave way to farm and hedge and hillside, she saw the animal after which the pub was named, its Neolithic chalk outline scratched out from beneath the grass on a nearby slope. There were occasional farmhouses and a square-towered Norman church stretched out along the road before they entered the Hatton property.
Hengemont was huge and solid and ancient. The central tower was almost a thousand years old and Lizzie watched eagerly for it, anticipating some imprint of all those years on the big stone face of the building. She saw it first across a vast expanse of lawn, faded from the winter cold and dotted with leafless oak and chestnut trees. As they drove up a gentle slope to the great front entrance, Lizzie instantly recognized the three gigantic stones which framed it.
