The Caverel Claim

by Peter Rawlinson

  On Saturday she stayed in bed. He came to her room in the morning and said he’d be with friends all day. ‘They have promised to help,’ he said.

  On the Sunday morning he knocked on her door. ‘When you are ready, I shall be waiting for you in the hall. We go to a restaurant to celebrate. I’ve found what we were looking for.’

  He led her down Praed Street to a small restaurant and handed her a newspaper, opened at the centre-spread.

  ‘Read,’ he said. ‘It is interesting.’

  On the left-hand page was a large picture of the singer, Dukie Brown, in his prime, with his guitar and his hair down to his shoulders. Beneath – ‘Pop Star Killer Freed’.

  ‘I went to a concert of his once,’ she said, ‘years ago, in Budapest. He was good.’

  On the opposite page was a picture of Dukie looking older, his hair short, walking between two men; one carrying a briefcase, the other smoking a cigar. ‘Dukie with his new manager, Willoughby Blake’ was the caption.

  She looked up. ‘Well?’

  He took the newspaper from her and read out: ‘“On Dukie’s right, Michael Stevens, lawyer to the rich and famous.” He ran Dukie’s defence when Dukie beat the murder rap. My friends spoke to me about him, and here he is in the newspaper. Isn’t that remarkable? They tell me to go to him, and now I read about him. He is the one for us.’

  ‘If he’ll take it on.’

  ‘He will. My friends say tell him we pay as they do in America, on results. He looks very clever.’ He smiled. ‘But not very handsome.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She pushed back her chair. ‘I don’t want to eat.’

  He leaned across the table and put his hand on hers.

  ‘Please, my dear, do not get…’ He struggled for the right word. ‘Do not get agitated. Do not slip into one of your moods. You will if you do not eat.’

  ‘I am not agitated and I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Listen, my dear. What we have to do will take patience and courage. You must be sensible and stay calm and strong.’

  She looked at him. ‘I know. But I get frightened and today I have one of my headaches.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll see you later at the hotel. You arrange about the lawyer.’

  She picked up her bag and left. When she had gone, he sighed and shook his head. It would not be easy to keep her calm and determined.

  Fleur walked in the park. By the Round Pond, she sat on the grass, plucking at the clover, watching the kites flying high above her and the children playing around her.

  So now it had really begun. Once it was in the hands of lawyers, there could be no turning back. Although it was warm in the sun, she felt cold.

  5

  Andrea Caverel threw back the bedclothes and lowered herself from the canopied, four-poster bed. When she’d found her slippers she crossed the room to the tall, high window and pulled back the curtains. The early morning sun was shining brightly on the neat, clipped lawn which ran down to the walled flower garden. Beyond the pleasure garden, on slightly rising ground, was the Folly, a strange mass of shafts of stone formed into a grotto, built at the end of the eighteenth century when the house itself was not a hundred years old. The near part of the flower garden was full of red and yellow roses. Beyond was her own blue and white garden, which she’d planted when she’d first come to Ravenscourt the year before Robin had been killed. She’d been working in her garden when she’d heard the sound of people running and the voices calling her and the shock of what they had to say. By then it was autumn, and with a sudden morning fog swirling in thick banks across Salisbury Plain, Robin had crashed head-on into the back of a lorry and died instantaneously. Francis was three. Not many hours of any day passed when she did not remember, and every time she felt a stab of pain. After nine months, the pain was no duller.

  She heard Alice and Francis passing along the corridor outside her door on their way to breakfast. Alice was the girl from County Wexford Andrea’s cousin had found to help with Francis. She was twenty-three, stumpy, with round, red cheeks and straggly red hair to match. She laughed a lot and sang, and treated Andrea like an elder sister. Already Andrea loved her. She was chattering away now to Francis in her soft, sing-song voice as they passed Andrea’s door on their way to the great staircase where they’d go down to the hall and along the side corridor past the dining-room to the kitchen. It was quite a distance from kitchen to dining-room; in the old days the meals were brought by a file of footmen and kitchen maids. Now it was rarely used. Francis and Alice ate their meals in the kitchen; if Andrea was with them, next door, in what had been the butler’s pantry.

  Andrea went into the bathroom. While the bath was filling, she looked at herself in the glass above the basin, pulling back her pale, fine blonde hair from her forehead. Soon she would be thirty-two. There were dark rings under her eyes. I look forty, she said to herself.

  It was Sunday and lying in the bath she thought of the day ahead. It was to be the first time she’d entertained since she’d been widowed and it was going to be quite an occasion. It had been her idea to revive what had once been an old tradition, the annual family cricket match and summer party which had been abandoned at the start of World War II and not restarted when Robin’s father, Walter, had inherited in 1946 and shut the house and gone to live abroad. But today Ravenscourt was to be on show. There was to be a lunch in a marquee for the teams and special guests, followed by tea for everyone and a reception in the Long Gallery at the end of the game. It was to be her way of announcing to the county that she was going to stay on, that the Caverels were going to live at Ravenscourt as they had for over three hundred years. It was also her way of trying to make some amends for the trouble caused recently by the present manager of the estate, Robin’s older cousin, Nicholas Lawton, the son of Walter’s sister.

  She was drying herself when she heard Alice at the bedroom door.

  ‘Telephone, Lady Caverel. It’s himself, Major Lawton, fussing and worrying as usual.’

  ‘What does he want? I’m not dressed.’

  ‘He says he’s done the seating plan for your table for lunch. If you want to change it, you must let him know as soon as you come to the ground.’

  Andrea groaned. They’d settled all that yesterday. He was to do the seating. He knew the neighbours better than she.

  ‘He says please be at the ground before eleven.’

  ‘Tell him I shall.’

  When Robin had died, Andrea had turned to Nicholas. He was Robin’s nearest relative and he lived in the dower house on the edge of the estate. A retired soldier and a widower with a stiff and self-conscious manner but he was good-hearted and meant well. Above all he cared – about the family, of which he was a part, and about Ravenscourt where the Caverels had lived for centuries and where he himself had been born. When he had taken over the management of the estate, he was determined, as he said, to put it to rights and make it pay. He dismissed the incompetent land agents who had been in charge since Walter’s day and kept on by the easy-going Robin. With the lawyers and accountants, he negotiated with the Revenue, until by the sale of some pictures and outlying farms, much progress had been made in settling death duties. He had installed a tea-room and shop in the stable-block and arranged for the house to be opened to the public on two days a week from Easter to the end of September. By careful management he had staunched the haemorrhage of capital which had been going on for years as in his crisp, military fashion he had overhauled every department of the estate. Within a few months he had made such economies and improvements that if there was no further drain on resources, the accountants and lawyers considered the future of Andrea and Francis in the family home was assured.

  But it had been at a cost. Men from families who had worked on the estate for generations were laid off; work schedules were tightened; tenants’ obligations were enforced. And as Alice – who had heard it from the women from the village who came to clean – passed on to Andrea, he had gone about it in such a way that there were now groups
who met regularly in the local pubs, and grumbled and criticised. The Major, they were saying, was a bloody dictator, too much the soldier, too hard-headed. Because of him, Alice told Andrea, the family was not popular.

  It was in an attempt to still some of the local feeling that she had planned the revival of the cricket match and the reception which would enable her to invite many of the locals to the house. She had told Nicholas he must include in the home team several from the village eleven and he was to make sure that all the players, their families, the spectators, the neighbours and the tenants were given tea and invited to the Long Gallery after the game was over. Andrea prayed that the weather stayed fine and that all went well.

  It was past nine o’clock when she came to the kitchen, a cavern of a room in which she had recently installed an Aga. There still remained the long deal table running almost the length of the room and the hooks in the walls and the tall dressers. As she drank her coffee, she listened to Mrs Mason’s morning catalogue of woes. It was the same day in and day out – too much fetching and carrying in such a barrack of a house, too much difficulty trying to cook in such a vast, old-fashioned kitchen.

  Andrea resisted the temptation to snap at her. There was only herself and Alice and Francis, while two women came daily from the village to clean. Nor was Mason, her husband, over-worked. He was meant to be a handyman-houseman, but she hadn’t entertained since Robin’s death and Mason refused to do any outside work, and sometimes even found excuses not to drive her in her car. He had his own, which he was forever tinkering with and polishing. I must find another couple, Andrea said to herself as she listened to Mrs Mason’s grumbles, but today wasn’t the day to quarrel. The reception in the evening was being done by caterers but necessarily it involved the Masons.

  She took Francis out to play in the rose garden and looked up at the clear blue sky. It was going to be a fine June day: Ravenscourt would be looking its best.

  * * *

  Nicholas Lawton, grey hair, grey military moustache, his back straight as a ramrod like the Guardsman he had been, was standing on the steps of the pavilion. He was already in his white flannels and blue blazar with brass buttons, a panama hat perched on his head. From his pocket he took out his check list and a pencil.

  Wet weather drill. He could cross that off.

  The pitch. It seemed well prepared and properly marked. Peachey the head gardener had seen to that.

  The catering. The previous evening a white marquee had been erected close to the small pavilion. He’d check that in a minute.

  Finally, the team. He glanced at his watch.

  ‘The cars from London will be arriving soon,’ he called out to Peachey who was carrying deck-chairs from the pavilion. ‘Eleven o’clock start, sharp.’

  Peachey nodded. Nicholas turned and looked back towards the house, a great pile of rose-coloured brick two hundred yards from where he was standing, separated from the park and the cricket ground by an iron rail. He had been born there in his grandfather’s time and his first memories were of the nursery on the top floor. When he was a child his mother used to bring him back to her home every holiday. When he was small, he used to stand before his window on summer evenings, watching the house martins skimming and diving under the eaves, looking out across the park and pretending that one day, when his old grandfather died, it would all belong to him. The two were very close, the old man often leading the child around the garden and the estate, telling him stories of Caverels of long ago. But it had not been long before he understood that his name was not Caverel; that he was only the son of the daughter, and that his Uncle Walter, his mother’s older brother, would inherit; and after Walter, Walter’s family. But when Walter had succeeded, he had preferred his villa near Antibes and wintering in the sunshine of the Cape, and Ravenscourt had been shut. A series of surly caretakers had been installed in a few rooms above the stable-block and agents from Salisbury brought in to manage the land.

  Fifteen years later and five years ago, Nicholas, by then a widower, had retired from the army and come to live in the dower house at the edge of the park which had been left him by his mother. Walter had always been jealous of the relationship between grandfather and small grandson and the agents had been instructed that Major Lawton was to be kept away from the closed and shuttered house. He was to have no business with the estate. But eighteen months after Nicholas had left the army and come to live in the park, Walter had died in his villa in France. His son, Robin, had resigned from the Foreign Office and returned from Rome with Andrea and their small son, Francis. The house had been reopened.

  Robin was easy; he got on well with everyone but he was no manager so he kept on the Salisbury agents and the neglect of the estate continued. When Robin had been killed Nicholas found he had been named as an executor, and Andrea had turned to him. So for a time, even if only as steward, Nicholas saw the fulfilment of part of his childhood’s dream. Until Francis reached his majority, he was effectively the master of the Ravenscourt estate.

  He looked again at his watch. Soon people would be arriving to settle into the deck-chairs and, for those not invited to lunch in the marquee, eat their picnics. It was going to cost a packet, he reflected grimly, as he wandered across to the marquee. The lunch, and the tea with strawberries and cream, then the reception. But Andrea had insisted.

  The waitresses were laying the round tables with the catering manager in his white shirt-sleeves and black trousers.

  ‘Serve Pimms and beer to the spectators in the deck-chairs at twelve thirty,’ Nicholas said. ‘We’ll break for lunch at one fifteen.’

  Up the drive was coming a procession of cars, being directed to the field set aside as the car-park.

  * * *

  It had been only on the previous evening that Greg Rutherford had been asked if he was free to play. The visiting team were one short, and someone he’d played against the week before had given his name. He’d be picked up, he’d been told, and given a lift.

  In the car on the way down, Greg asked Sandys, who had collected him, where they were heading.

  ‘Donhead St Philip, on the borders of Wiltshire and Dorset. I was sent a sketch map for the last few miles.’

  Just outside Tisbury, Sandys handed it to Greg. ‘You’ll have to direct me from now on,’ he said.

  It was then that Greg saw the name – Ravenscourt.

  ‘Isn’t that where a family called Caverel live?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Do you know them?’

  ‘I’ve heard of them. Lord Caverel and all that?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Lords and ladies and scones and tea. I suppose it’ll be pretty stuffy. Do you think we’ll play with a tennis ball?’

  Sandys looked at him. ‘It’s a game of cricket,’ he said. ‘And we’re their guests.’

  ‘I was only joking,’ Greg replied. They drove on in silence.

  Later, at lunch at the centre table, the Lord Lieutenant’s wife leaned across to speak to Andrea who was seated opposite her, next to the Lord Lieutenant.

  ‘How is Francis?’ she enquired.

  ‘Very well,’ Andrea replied. ‘He’s becoming quite a handful.’

  ‘Is he four yet?’

  ‘Last month.’

  ‘I hope we’ll see him later. I’m so glad you’re staying on. It’s good to have the family back in Ravenscourt.’

  Greg, at his table towards the edge of the tent, was next to Eve, Nicholas’ secretary.

  ‘Is the wife here?’

  She looked at him coolly. ‘The wife? Do you mean Lady Caverel?’

  ‘I guess I do.’

  ‘She’s at the centre table, opposite Major Lawton and next to the tall man with the glasses.’

  Greg saw the back of the blonde head. A moment later she turned and he saw her full face. A very English face, he thought, with the English complexion beneath the fair hair. But there were dark rings beneath her eyes and her hand fluttered repeatedly to her neck, playing with a plain gold n
ecklace as she talked and listened, mostly listened. She was sitting very straight in her chair. She reminded him of a thoroughbred, fine-boned, nervous, a world apart from the vivid, dark-skinned American from whom he’d first heard about the Caverels.

  In the afternoon and towards evening, it looked as if the home team were going to win until Greg came in. Eventually he made the winning hit for the visitors, a boundary high above the bowler’s head.

  The guests assembled for the reception in the Long Gallery, a tall narrow room running the length of the south face of the house, with two bow windows overlooking the rose garden and opposite a great fireplace surrounded by carvings by Grinling Gibbons. Greg wandered into the hall, glass in hand.

  ‘My name’s Oliver Goodbody. You, I’m told, are Greg Rutherford, from Sydney.’

  Greg had been joined by a tall, thin elderly man with aquiline features and a full head of white hair, formally dressed in a dark grey flannel suit, walking with a stick.

  ‘You won the game for the visitors.’

  ‘It wasn’t too difficult,’ Greg replied.

  ‘You certainly looked as if you were enjoying yourself.’

  ‘The bowling wasn’t up to much.’

  ‘Not for you at any rate. Well, we all enjoyed watching you, even those of us who wanted the home team to win. Are you over here for long?’

  ‘For a year. I’m working as a sort of assistant in a law firm in London until I go home, although I’m not a lawyer myself.’

  ‘Which law firm is that?’

  ‘The one my dad uses, Lesley and Payne. Jason West, the senior partner, is my uncle.’

  ‘I know him well. I have a meeting with him tomorrow. I’m a lawyer too. I look after the family’s affairs.’

  Oliver Goodbody gazed up at the portraits lining the walls. ‘It’s a fine collection, isn’t it? Up there above the staircase are two Reynolds, a Gainsborough, and a Ramsay. They’re a handsome lot.’