The Earl himself was not idle. He made breakfast, assisted, rather to his surprise, by Dixie. Dixie made several attempts to ‘have a word’ with him, but always at the crucial moment the frying-pan would spit, or he would have to sprint across the kitchen to the ’fridge for eggs. Soon others began coming in and Dixie’s chance was over. Presents began to pile up on the table. The Earl’s birthday had not been so lavishly celebrated for years, but, being a modest and an unsuspicious man, he attributed this to his special invitation of them all to Chetton, and felt guilty for putting them all to such expense.
At last everything was ready, and the Earl sent Gareth up with a tray for Granny, and then sat down at table with his own plate to open his presents. He liked them all: the Pagan Passion talc and aftershave that the Countess had picked up in the village store; the box of chocolate liqueurs from Trevor and the warm but tasteful dressing-gown from Joan and Digby, the bandana neckerchief (just a trifle loud) from Dixie and the Kermit soaps from the children; the tin of tobacco that Sam had picked up in Bristol, and the table lighter that Chokey had picked up in a little-frequented room in the Blenheim wing. The children’s present touched him most, for he knew how short Dixie kept them. After breakfast all four went to the bathroom with him to watch him wash and shave.
The sun was well up by the time the Countess rose. The Earl had set up a deckchair in the Dutch Garden by the steps to the fountain, and he lay there, snoring lightly, his trousers rolled up and a knotted handkerchief over his head. The Countess, her rather sparse hair gathered into a couple of curlers over each ear, her bulk enveloped in a grubby blue dressing-gown that had seen (and bore evidences from) better days, gazed at him balefully, his evident contentment pricking her hyper-active sense of grievance.
‘Doesn’t he look a sight?’ she said.
Sam, who was in the Dining-Room with her, photographing the Gibbons carvings, merely grinned and went on clicking the shutter.
Not long after this Dixie disappeared. She had made her arrangements with some stealth, by telephone, and then all of a sudden she was marching past her father-in-law down to the fountain where the car was parked.
‘Ta-ta,’ she called. ‘Just going to do some shopping in the village.’
‘Best of British,’ he said cheerfully, opening one eye. ‘There’s only four shops. They’ve got what you want provided you want what they’ve got.’
But Dixie merely bared her teeth and drove off. Any shopping she did would simply be a cover for the interview she had arranged with Mr Lillywaite. When she returned it was nearly lunch-time, and she bore some brightly coloured cakes from the local baker’s. This time she drove round to the courtyard and parked her car by Digby’s. Try as she might to hide it, anyone who watched her walk back into the house would have gained the impression that Dixie was as pleased with herself as a cat who has upset the cream jug.
During the morning Lady Joan had cooked a beef stew liberally laced with wine, and they ate in the kitchen. ‘Much more cosy,’ said Joan brightly. But in fact the kitchen—great, high-ceilinged barn of a place that it was—was far from cosy, unless, perhaps, one had an ox roasting on a spit in the centre of it. The Earls of Ellesmere’s consideration for their servants was a matter more of profession than of practical measures. By the late afternoon everyone was gravitating back to above stairs. One advantage of Chetton’s vastness was that even on the hottest day a fire was possible, so the Earl lit one in the Green Drawing-Room, and toasted bread for tea. Then with some ceremony he cut the cake that the Countess had made, they all sampled it and the garish buns that Dixie had brought back from Chetton (which did nothing for the reputation of small country bakeries), and eventually, with tea swilling round inside them in great quantities, they all settled down for a typical family get-together.
Like most family get-togethers, this one had its bumpy patches.
‘That’s nice,’ said the Earl, patting his stomach. ‘I always said that Elsie’s fruit cake was second to none. Did you like it, Karen, love?’
‘It was lovely, Grandad.’
‘Makes my day, having the children here,’ he said, looking around at them all. ‘That’s what makes it a real family party. Who knows, Joanie: by next year you could have a little addition.’
‘You know we’re waiting, Dad,’ said Joan, rather tight-lipped. ‘Till we can really afford it.’
‘Well, go to it, Digby,’ said the Earl coarsely. ‘There’s money and to spare from now on.’
Joan cast at him the sort of look she gave to little boys who farted in class. Dixie didn’t look too pleased either. Since her talk to Mr Lillywaite she had become a firm convert to the idea of primogeniture, and was preparing to arrange battle-lines accordingly. Still, she could congratulate herself on the four high cards that her brood represented, and was beginning to view with new eyes what she had always regarded as the Earl’s fatuous devotion to them. All day Dixie had been quite motherly.
‘You shouldn’t leave it too long, Joan,’ she said, with a tender throb in her voice. ‘It’s when you’re young that you really enjoy children. I tell you, I don’t know what I’d have done without them these last few years on my own.’
‘I’m not expecting to be without Digby,’ said Joan, and added cuttingly: ‘especially not like that.’
‘Now, Joanie, I’m not having that,’ said the Countess, cudgels instantly raised in defence of her favourite. ‘You’re being smug, as per usual. You know as well as I do there’s not an ounce of harm in Phil. The worst anyone can say is that he’s easily misled.’
‘Here, I say—’ protested Chokey.
‘Naming no names,’ concluded the Countess significantly.
‘Who okayed the whole plan?’ demanded Chokey, his barrow-boy protestations of integrity marred by his gazing at the cornice, the fire-tongs, anywhere but at the Countess. ‘Who found out the caff where the drivers always stopped for early breakfast? Who detailed me to get ’em talking and keep ’em there?’
‘I said I made no charges,’ said the Countess bleakly. ‘The fact remains: one gets four years and a record he’ll never live down; the other goes scot free. That’s not what I call justice.’
‘They nabbed Phil when he was just beginning the job,’ protested Chokey, his hands fluttering in the agitation of his grievance. ‘I hadn’t more than passed the time of day with the drivers before the police came and called them out. They couldn’t pin anything on me.’
‘Seems to me you make a speciality of that,’ said the Countess, unmollified.
‘Come off it, Mother,’ put in the Earl. ‘Nobody’s blaming you, Chokey, least of all Phil himself. You’ve been a good pal to Phil, and I know he appreciates you going to see him. I blame myself we haven’t been more often.’
‘I went when he was in Maidstone,’ said Trevor virtuously. Then he spoilt it by adding: ‘Just for the giggle. Christ, what a pong in there. Worse than the loo in Piccadilly Underground. Turned me right off.’
‘Just you take warning, then,’ said the Countess, who was at her most doom-ridden tonight.
‘I don’t think it’s a place to take children,’ said Dixie. ‘I said to Phil, I said: “You get caught and I’m not bringing the kids to see you.” It’d give the little buggers nightmares.’
‘It wouldn’t,’ protested Gareth. ‘We wanted to see Dad.’
‘Don’t you stick your oar in, my lad, or you’ll get what-for on your b.t.m.’
‘Anyway, no point in poking at old wounds,’ said the Earl, beginning to feel uncomfortable. ‘He’ll be out in three weeks, and I know he won’t be bearing any grudges.’
‘We could have another party for him,’ said Trevor. ‘There’s this bloke—film producer, actually—that Michele and I would like to get down here. He’d go bananas over this place. He could use it for one of the class-trade films.’
‘Evie and the Merry Monarch,’ said Michele, who only really perked up when her own career was involved. ‘Charles the whatever-it-was. All those dreamy
wigs and ruffles and things.’
‘Over my dead body,’ said the Countess. ‘I’m not having that kind of filth filmed anywhere near me, thank you very much.’
‘He’d only need three or four rooms,’ said Trevor, ‘We could be at the other end of the house, and you wouldn’t hear a thing.’
‘I’d imagine,’ said the Countess.
‘In three weeks’ time we’ll be so far away you wouldn’t even imagine,’ said the Earl optimistically. ‘Any party for Phil will be in dear old Clapham. We could get up some kind of street party, like for the Coronation or the Silver Jubilee.’
‘I do think, Dad,’ said Dixie, speaking carefully, ‘that you ought to give Phil a chance to see this place. It’s silly to make a decision in a hurry, isn’t it? When Phil comes out he could come straight here and you could talk it over, face to face. At your leisure, so to speak.’
The Earl frowned.
‘ ’Ullo, ’ullo, ’ullo,’ he said.
‘Where did you go this morning, Dixie?’ asked Trevor. ‘Could it be you popped in on old Lillyprick, or whatever the name is?’
‘I knew it,’ said the Countess, swathed in still deeper gloom, like Cassandra on a bad morning. ‘We’re not going to be allowed to do what we want with our own. I’m going to be condemned to spend my old age in this rotten dump.’
‘That’s not it at all, Mum. It would be Phil and me and the kids who stopped here. Look, all I’m suggesting is that you wait till Phil gets out, and talk it over with him. After all, he’s the one most concerned.’
‘We’re the ones most concerned,’ amended the Countess.
‘Not to mention us,’ said Trevor.
‘I do think,’ said Joan, with the infuriating primness she had learned at an evangelically-inclined teachers’ college, ‘that Dixie’s got a cheek. I mean, this is something that only concerns the family.’
‘What the bloody hell do you think I am, then?’
‘Not family,’ said Joan, firmly.
‘Here, that’s enough of that,’ said the Earl. ‘Let’s all have a drink. This is a birthday party.’
And much though some of the family would have enjoyed bringing the thing out into the open, they all looked at each other, swallowed, and trooped towards the bottles. After all, it was his party.
Against all the odds, the rapidly diminishing contents of the old Earl’s cocktail bar did wonders for the family party. The present Earl played his part, for he was temperamentally sunny, and a born smoother over of awkwardnesses. Dixie slowly put her claws back in, pleased that she had put the question of Phil’s rights on the agenda, if no more. Joan and Trevor, though still in suspense, had been reassured by their father’s obvious sense of the fairness of things: they would not, if he had his way, be crushed under the chariot wheels of the elder son’s rights.
So before very long things became quite jolly. Clutching their glasses, and talking at the tops of their voices, it became possible to ignore the fact that some were not talking to others. Sam, it was discovered, could play the piano, and play he did—blues numbers first, then some popular songs of the ’thirties.
‘That brings it all back,’ said the Countess when Sam launched into ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’, throwing the whole of the upper half of his body into the song, wooing the ill-humour out of his audience. What it was that the tune brought back for the Countess nobody liked to ask (the Earl said it had no particular message for him), but before long she was smiling benignly at the figures of Trevor and Michele, dancing at the far end of the Drawing-Room. And not long after that she was deep in conversation on the green satin sofa with her old antagonist Chokey.
‘I well remember,’ she reminisced, ‘when you and Phil were planning your first job—what was it, seven years ago?’
‘Eight,’ said Chokey.
‘Plans all over the table, stopwatches everywhere, everything timed down to the last second.’
‘You never quite recapture the thrill of your first job,’ said Chokey, his eyes more watery than ever.
‘I thought it was all a big joke,’ said the Countess disingenuously.
‘Go on.’
‘I did. Like boys, planning the raid of the century, all on paper. I never thought you meant to do it.’
‘Didn’t think we had it in us, eh?’ said Chokey, getting up the courage to look her straight in the eye.
‘I wish to God you hadn’t had it in you.’
‘Can’t keep a good partnership down.’
‘Only pity was, you got caught.’
‘Yes, well—’
‘Seems getting caught was all you ever were good at.’
‘We weren’t always caught. Not on the—not on several of the jobs. Otherwise we wouldn’t have stayed in business.’
‘Hmmm. What are you doing now?’
‘Me? I’m going straight.’
‘What are you going straight at?’
‘Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that.’
Chokey did not mention that one of the bits of this and that had been a house not twenty miles from Chetton, which he and a new partner had tried to relieve of its collection of eighteenth-century china. In any case, the Countess’s attention was distracted. Digby and Joan had decorously taken the floor, but Trevor and Michele had got tired of dancing and were slipping out of the far door. The Countess’s good mood seemed in danger of evaporating.
‘Look at those two. What a trollop that girl is. Where do they think they’re going?’
‘To get themselves a bite to eat?’ hazarded Chokey charitably.
‘Ha! I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking.’
‘Chokey!’ came a roar from Dixie. Dixie was never happy for long when other people were getting too much of the action. ‘Come and dance.’
Dixie, in her own circle, had only to command. She and Chokey danced smoothly, professionally, beside Digby and Joan’s more inhibited performance. Chokey being pear-shaped and Dixie decidedly top-heavy, they fitted very snugly together. The Countess watched them with narrowed eyes. She refused when the Earl asked her to take the floor with him, and went on grimly observing. She hardly brightened when Dixie tired of Chokey and called on Sam to dance with her.
‘Man,’ said Sam, who seemed to use the word with a nice disregard to sex, ‘you tell me the way to dance and play the piano, and I’ll dance with you like a shot.’
‘There’s records in our room,’ said Trevor, appearing at the door of the Drawing-Room, somewhat flushed in the face. ‘All sorts of old stuff. Seventy-eights and that.’
‘Christ,’ said Dixie, ‘What are they?’
‘Come on, man, let’s have a look,’ said Sam.
So now the party really did begin to go with a swing. Everyone swarmed into the hall, up the staircase, along the Long Gallery, through further corridors to Trevor’s suite. Here they were almost at the furthest extent of the old house, where it joined on to the Blenheim Wing. Trevor gleefully began putting on the heavy old records. Even the Countess, heaving her bulk up the stairs well in the wake of the rest, felt her old heart stir again when she heard the strains of long-forgotten tunes; and the children, who had been playing leap-fog in the State Bedroom, felt drawn along too, keeping a weather eye all the while on their mother.
Sam and Dixie danced languorously to ‘Slow Boat to China’, drifting along the dark, picture-lined corridors. Later they all sang ‘Shrimp Boats Is A-Coming’ and ‘Looking for Henry Lee’. All the older generation seized on the pile of records and shuffled through them with cries of rapture.
‘Anne Shelton,’ breathed the Earl. ‘They don’t make singers like her any more.’
‘Guy Mitchell,’ said Chokey with reverence. ‘And Nellie Lutcher.’
‘Here—look, Perce. The hokey-kokey! Remember when we did the hokey-kokey on VE night?’
The Countess was rapturous, and jigged experimentally.
‘What in God’s name is the hokey-kokey?’ asked Michele.
‘If you haven’t
danced the hokey-kokey you haven’t lived,’ laughed the Earl, rubbing his hands with glee. ‘Here, Trevor: put on the hokey-kokey and we’ll show you how it goes.’
So they put on the hokey-kokey, and the Earl and the Countess demonstrated. Then the children tried it and got the hang of it at once. Then Chokey taught Dixie, and soon the others—who had been watching as if at some aboriginal rite—began tentatively to ‘do the hokey-kokey and turn around’. Trevor put the record on again, and again, and they formed a snake, twisting and turning round his bedroom and sitting-room. Then, as the laughter rose to new heights, the snake wound out of his sitting-room and into the corridors. By now the tune was making its own momentum, and soon they were out of earshot of the gramophone, dancing through the corridors and the high-ceilinged rooms of the Blenheim Wing (built by the first Earl with money accumulated when he was Provisioner General to the British Army in France, in which post he displayed a single-minded rapacity equalled only by the great Marlborough himself). Into the marvellous Clock Room they weaved, designed to house the fifth Earl’s collection of timepieces; then out the far door, through the Library, almost unused, whose heavy Victorian furnishings failed to dampen their glee. Then finally they hoked and koked upstairs to the top floor, their singing sometimes interrupted by sneezes as the dust got into their noses. Down the dim, small-windowed corridor they went, laughing and singing.
‘We could film here,’ shouted Trevor to Michele, ‘and not a soul would know.’
‘Right!’ shouted the Earl, who had come to a full stop at the end of the corridor. ‘About turn, all!’
‘Where’s this, Grandad?’ asked Karen, gazing at the door.
‘Just another room, my darling. We’ve got more than enough of those,’ shouted the Earl, and began his about-turn.
But Trevor, his mind full of filming, idly turned the handle of the door. All of a sudden the dingy corridor and the revellers were bathed in light.
The door had swung open to reveal a substantial room, converted to serve as a bed-sittingroom. Heavy curtains were tacked up close against the windows. By the far wall two single beds had been pushed together, and opposite were a table, two chairs, and a small oven. Under the window were placed a couple of easy chairs. In one of them sat a portly, putty-faced man, in open-necked shirt and casual trousers, smoking a cigar. In the other was a handsome woman, past her first youth, with a confident manner. The man looked disconcerted, but the woman looked defiant.
Corpse in a Gilded Cage Page 6
