A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

“I’ve never heard anything about the personalities involved. It was just before war broke out, wasn’t it?”

  “Just after, I think. Anyway 1939. The Quarleses had been heads of the family for centuries. The elder son of the house was killed in the trenches in the First World War, and Timothy, the other son, was the survivor and he took over. He was mean, he was incompetent.”

  “I see,” said Felicity thoughtfully. “Of course a lot of aristocratic and gentry families did give up the unequal struggle with the tax man about that time.”

  “Yes. But people say it would have been better if Timmy had done just that, rather than struggling and sinking deeper and deeper into the mire.”

  “Was he a wastrel—breaking the family mold?”

  “Oh, no. He was typical. He had a variety of clever wheezes to make money, most of them dismal failures. The last one was started in the thirties, and it was a series of seminars, as they called them—making it sound very respectable and intellectually stimulating.”

  Felicity was for the first time puzzled. “What do you mean? English-literature seminars? A sort of adult-education thing?”

  “No. Much more specialized than that. Today we’d call them peace studies. Lectures on the economic consequences of the peace treaty of Versailles, on the theory and practice of pacifism, and so on. I think the really important thing was the people they attracted. The seminars took place at least twice a year. They attracted names and money, and also creative people—poets, painters, musicians—so there was a highly prestigious blend of intellectual brilliance and simple dosh. It worked, for once in Timmy’s little life.”

  “But what’s the connection—”

  “Between that and the sale? Heaven only knows. Country manors and stately homes were going on the market all the time, so my mother says. It could just be a normal transaction: Timmy found that the peace seminars were not enough to keep his head above water, in spite of all the names and the moneybags, and he found that the junior branch, the Fienneses, were interested in buying. It may have been as simple as that.”

  “Simple is the best,” said Felicity.

  “Agreed,” said Joan. “People in Walbrook, however, don’t associate either the Fienneses or the Quarleses with simplicity. They are both looked at with—well, I think suspicion is the right word.”

  “Interesting.” Felicity tried a long shot. “You say you still have good contacts at Walbrook?”

  “Pretty good. Of course the generation that knew it in the thirties is dying out. But there are plenty of people who knew the situation at what we might call good secondhand. I mean the sort of people who heard a lot about the two branches of the family from their parents, friends, and so on.”

  “So you could give me a list of likely contacts I could talk to—starting with your mother, maybe?”

  “I could make a list, but I’m not sure I’d start with my mother. Her memories are going—you know, I’m sure, that names and dates are among the first things to go, as often as not, and it’s certainly so in my mother’s case. She would be bewildered by a strange face, and that would drive more things out of her mind. I think it would be better if I tried to get memories out of her: she’ll be less flummoxed. I could concentrate on the seminars and the transfer of power to the Fienneses, maybe.”

  “Brilliant. I’ll be in your debt. I look forward to seeing the list of possible contacts too.”

  Felicity felt highly satisfied with her morning’s work. That evening over dinner (rendered even later than usual by their daughter’s demand to be taught how to do joined-up writing), Felicity and Charlie went over all she had learned that day about the peace seminars, the people at Walbrook, the transfer of the house, and so on. Charlie didn’t let the conversation interfere with his healthy appetite, but he cataloged and arranged in his mind all the information Felicity gave him.

  When he had finished eating, he sat looking at the tablecloth. “Those seminars.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m probably going off on a tangent. I remember reading, probably in the Guardian, or maybe History Today—”

  “When do you see History Today?”

  “DC Portland subscribes, and his desk is next to mine. I sometimes pinch it during lunch break. They had an article about a historian—a pretty well-known one, I think, maybe even a popularizer—who wrote a book about Hitler in the thirties, praising him to the skies. I think it was published sometime in 1934, and when war broke out, he went to some lengths to retrieve any copies that could be bought back and destroyed. He also used his influence to prevent newspapers and journals printing any reviews—favorable or unfavorable. He wanted to turn it into a nonbook, and he largely succeeded.”

  “You’re beginning to ring a few bells.”

  “The book was never to be mentioned in interviews, which would be a natural thing to do: ‘How did you come to be fooled by an obvious murderous lunatic’—so why the kid-glove treatment? What had he done to earn it?”

  “Bryant,” said Felicity. “Sir Arthur Bryant. That was his name. Interesting that. The why and the when need to be looked at. I have the impression he went on writing books with a true-blue Englishman slant for years—decades—after the war. Books with titles like English Saga and Unfinished Victory. But before that it was The Man and the Hour—and you can guess who ‘the man’ was.”

  “That’s the historian I read about. Bryant. Not perhaps holier-than-thou but definitely more patriotic-than-thou. A very good vanishing trick with the book. It may be hardly anyone knew anything about it, except close friends.” Charlie paused for a second helping of Irish stew. “And then there’s Neville Chamberlain,” he said at last.

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Went to negotiate with Hitler over his virtual annexation of a large part of Czechoslovakia. Flew to Munich in September 1938. Came back waving a bit of bog paper and pronouncing ‘Peace in our time’ with ‘Guess who done it’ as a silent addendum. Massive crowds in the Mall shouted their enthusiasm, and the king and queen took him out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony.”

  “Rather unwillingly on their part, I would guess,” said Felicity.

  “Yes, because war came within a year and he stayed on as prime minister, but his conduct of the war and of the civilian response was so feeble that people wondered which side he was on. Eventually one of his own MPs told him, ‘In the name of God, go,’ and that’s what he did, conveniently dying soon after, so everyone could forget him and concentrate on Churchill.”

  “The moral of all this is?” asked Felicity.

  “That what in 1937 or ’38 was commendable, even patriotic, by 1939 or ’40 seemed close to treason.”

  Felicity nodded gravely. “I get your point. And in 1939, around the time war broke out, the manor house of Walbrook changed hands.”

  “Staying within the family,” said Charlie, nodding in his turn, “but going to a minor branchlet who had at that time enough money to buy it outright and later to expunge ‘Hitler’s pal’ Timmy Quarles.”

  “What were they afraid of?” Felicity wondered.

  “Or what was the man who bought it afraid of? In its way the disappearance of the seminars from popular—or even historians’—consciousness was as big an achievement as the vanishing trick the historian Bryant played with his book.”

  “It reminds me of Sir Anthony Eden,” said Felicity. “After the Suez invasion he resigned as prime minister ‘for medical reasons,’ and also did a disappearing act, while Harold Macmillan became prime minister. He stayed on until he had his own medical reasons for going, then remained in the national consciousness as a sort of upper-crust music-hall act.”

  “The frustrating thing is that nothing seems to connect,” said Charlie thoughtfully. “We have a plan to write a song cycle with an antiwar twist and several composers. Good publicity, good appeal to the sort of pacifist who calls on patriotic as well as conscientious motivations: the slaughter was terrible; would anyone really want to inflict that on
our exhausted country for a second time twenty years later? And when the answer turned out to be yes, a swift about-turn had to be executed.”

  “Politicians are used to doing that. Probably that’s why people are staying away from the polls at election time. You don’t know what you’re voting for.”

  “True. Now there’s one thing worries me,” said Charlie, sitting back in his chair, his meal finished.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re on the way to getting a list of local people who might have information on the house and family, stretching back to the thirties. But you can’t guarantee the truth of local gossip. Any policeman could tell you that much of it is rubbish—one person after another getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised. How, after all, would the locals know, if the family at the manor was congenitally secretive?”

  “There you are—spot-on. That’s why I’d be sad to see you concentrating too much on local yokels—to put it rudely.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Well, you’ve got two possible alternative sources. You’ve got Sir Stafford, and you’ve got everyone’s favorite grandee.”

  “Rupert Fiennes, do you mean? Yes, I’d like to talk the whole business over with him. He strikes me as basically reliable.”

  “Don’t,” said Charlie emphatically. “Don’t go into this with preconceptions about people, particularly people you hardly know. And remember that each of those two people has an accompanying figure. Sir Stafford has a wife, and Rupert has—what is she, a sort of cousin? Or a niece, or great-niece?”

  “Don’t know. Never met her.”

  “Lived with the Fienneses for years, so presumably she’s one of them rather than one of the Quarleses. Presumably good relations between Rupert and Mary-Elizabeth—”

  “Is that her name? How did you know?”

  “I put my policeman’s hat on. We’ve got a rookie constable at the Leeds HQ who was brought up in Walbrook. Anyway, let’s get this straight: if you go into this on the assumption that Rupert is straight as a die and Stafford is a crook, you’re asking for a fall. It’s the amateur cop’s first lesson. And similarly, don’t get the idea that the jaundiced interpretation of the locals is bound to be more reliable than the family’s own version of what happened. ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’ ”

  “ ‘The things that yo’ li’ble to read in the Bible.’ That’s all very well, but we haven’t actually got a Bible version of events yet.”

  “One piece of information, possibly true, possibly of interest: it’s said around Walbrook—according to my infant PC—that Mary-Elizabeth Fiennes is going to join the board of the Walbrook Trust.”

  “Really? She and Rupert both. Is Sir Stafford agreeable?”

  “Apparently. So that knocks on the head any idea that this is a last battle of the Fienneses and the Quarleses.”

  “Perhaps there never was a battle,” said Felicity.

  “You’ll be able to judge when you go to your first board meeting. It could be a revelation.”

  “It could be. But I doubt the revelation will come from Sir Stafford.”

  Charlie sighed. “You haven’t been listening to me, Fel.”

  Felicity remembered this the next day when she was pushing her son, Thomas, through the main street of Halifax and saw coming toward her Maya Tyndale similarly encumbered with little Theo. They stopped outside the Public Library and settled down for a natter.

  “Ready for Saturday?” asked Maya.

  “I suppose so,” said Felicity. “I don’t know what the meeting of a Trust should be like. I’ve read all the papers we’ve been sent, and there doesn’t seem to be anything of any great importance.”

  “The oldest trick in the book. You then smuggle the vital thing you want to have decided your way into the committee’s discussions under Any Other Business and say it’s just come up and a decision needs to be taken at the meeting, and here is some more paperwork on it . . .”

  “Yes, I know that kind of crookery from university meetings. Can’t we demand that we be given the papers before lunch and read them over the break so we’re alert to what he’s doing?”

  “You can try. I met Mary-Elizabeth Fiennes, and she said Stafford was hoping to get away before lunch. You knew Mary-Elizabeth was coming on the board, didn’t you?”

  “I did, on the grapevine. But I don’t know her.”

  “She’s okay, I think. Knows a lot about the family—too family-orientated on the whole, but at heart I think she’s a fairly good egg.”

  “If matters before the board relate to the past—the family’s past, the house’s past—then someone with a lot of knowledge could be valuable. I don’t get any sense of history from Rupert.”

  “Oh, no. I’ve always found that. No interest there at all. In fact I’ve seen the tape of an interview he gave on television—Look North—and when he talks about the house’s history, the family’s importance in the district, I could just hear Mary-Elizabeth’s voice coming through over and over again. She’d been feeding him. They were her words.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, apart from the known facts of the family history, there wasn’t much to the point. It came through that he was jolly keen to get rid of the estate.”

  “Didn’t mention the seminars in the thirties?”

  “No. I don’t know much about them myself. He did mention that the house had strong connections over the years with the world of music, and as the new Trust had decided to have a small, unpretentious music festival there, the record of the earlier times, the seminars, would be invaluable.”

  “Really? I shouldn’t have thought that things that happened seventy-odd years ago could be very relevant today. Most of the performers and composers would be long dead by now.”

  “I suppose so,” said Maya, wrinkling her forehead. “Except the organizers would probably have gone for the younger people in the music world back in the thirties. Cheaper. They could be still around, or some of them.”

  “True. And it would be the younger people in the world of politics that they’d have wanted to attract to the seminars too. Ah, well—wait and see. Charlie says I’m too prone to take a side and assign all the virtues to my side and all the vices to the other.”

  “I suppose he’s got all the virtues of a policeman.”

  “Oh, absolutely. When the good fairy came to his christening one of the gifts she gave him was that of being totally noncommittal. Invaluable for a policeman, infuriating for everyone else.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Charitable Trust

  The January meeting of the Walbrook Trust Board took place as usual in the house’s stable block. Attractive from the outside, it turned out to be of the utmost mediocrity inside: a table, chairs, a little kitchen extension—that was about it. A modest plaque said that the conversion of the building was made possible by a generous donation from Barland Woolf Biscuits Ltd. On the table by the door to the kitchenette were tea- and coffeepots, cups and saucers, and a large plate of biscuits, no doubt a generous donation from Barland Woolf Ltd.

  Felicity was beginning to get to know the existing members of the Trust Board. She was ready-armed when Janet Porritt steamed up, her face showing a mask of false friendship identical to that she had worn at the reception weeks earlier. She was one of a body of people Felicity had long ago identified: those who believed Anglo-Saxons should only marry Anglo-Saxons. The more boring the world could be, the better they liked it. Smile, damn you, she said to herself.

  “Oh, Mrs. Peace. Good to see you again, and among us too—one of us! I hope your husband has forgiven me for wondering why he was at our little concert.”

  “Of course he has. He gets such questions all the time.”

  “I suppose all policemen do.”

  “Yes, they do. It can be useful if people come to him with things that are relevant to his job. But he was off duty that night, and nobody came to him with anything.”


  “No, I’m sure they didn’t. We are utterly open in everything we do . . . So young to be an inspector. He must be very talented. He’s not from Yorkshire of course?”

  “No, London—he’s really a Cockney, but there’s not much left of it in his accent or language. That’s because he lives with me, I suppose. I’m mostly West Country, and only the people he works with are for the most part Yorkshire men and women.”

  “Well, maybe you could both learn a bit of the brogue, and you’ll soon be accepted and naturalized. Please do remember me to him!”

  She steamed off, obviously satisfied that she had double-stamped the Peaces as foreigners, and not likely to become honorary Yorkshiremen unless considerable changes were made.

  “Silly old cow!” said a voice to Felicity’s left.

  She turned around. “Oh—we met at the concert, didn’t we?” she said, smiling at someone she thought of as a kindred soul. “Teacher—am I right? And an Irish name—Hooley, wasn’t it? And Ben? Irish, but not particularly Irish. Long residence here? Or maybe a feeling it’s best not to flaunt it?”

  “Don’t let Poisonous Porritt influence you too much. All sorts get on pretty well together here. I’m Ben because my parents liked the name. And because I was the youngest in the family—a late mistake.”

  “Ah. I’m not too good on the Bible.”

  “The Irish are. Not that they take much notice of it.”

  “My father’s only religion was the worship of himself. I had my work cut out resisting that without troubling myself with the Bible.”

  “Yorkshire not so long ago was a county of the Bible-thumper, but my parents were at the end of that movement, and by the time they died they couldn’t be dragged to church, except in a coffin.”

  “So what sort of trick is our revered chairman going to pull today? I’ve been warned about matters that he introduces at the last moment.”

  “Oh, that’s a trick that every chairman keeps up his sleeve. Some of the craftier kind have follow-ups to the last-minute ploy. Oh, there are all sorts of games you can play when it’s you is running the meeting.”