The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘First choice?’ Felix queried.

  ‘First refusal, first choice – they mean the same.’

  ‘Choice and refusal mean the same in England!’ Felix glanced at Marianne and raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

  She laughed but was more interested in Adam’s offer. ‘You’ve rented this place, too?’ she asked.

  Adam jumped down and scrabbled aside some ivy near the top of one of the gate columns, revealing the barely legible word, cut in the stone: Dower. ‘It’s the gatelodge to . . . our future. The Dower House. It was originally called Dormer Hall, when it was a Tudor manor. Then the Grenfells of Panshanger bought it – before one of them was created the first Lord Desborough and turned it into a dower house, which is the Georgian mansion we’re about to visit.’

  Since they were all dismounted now, they walked up the avenue of limes, past open parkland on their right and woodland to the left. Carpets of bluebells stretched under the trees, pheasants rose from the undergrowth with a harsh clatter of feathery alarm, and every now and then the white scuts of stamping rabbits flashed in panic, too. The woods were choked with volunteer saplings of ash and beech, none more than ten years old and all struggling in the mighty shade of beeches, chestnuts, and firs that were hundreds of years older. The limes, Adam noticed for the first time, were riddled with mistletoe.

  Here and there, deep in the shade, loomed the iridescent purple of bursting rhododendron buds. Other shade-tolerant shrubs abounded, too – Portugal laurel, Acuba japonica, bamboo, and many others he could not name. Yet.

  ‘How I’d have loved to build dens and play games here as a boy!’ he said apropos nothing.

  After a furlong or so of twisting drive the random pattern of trees became more organized until, at last, the avenue, now straight, was flanked on both sides by matched pairs of limes – old limes, even older than the woodland all around, limes with elephantiasis, amputated and paraplegic from centuries of storms, yet still standing. One was actually hollow, being no more than a cylinder of living bark and sapwood, with yet more bark on the inside, too; even so, it supported three fairly solid branches that rose thirty feet or more.

  However, they soon had no eye for trees, nor for anything other than the house itself, to which the ancient limes provided a living triumphal arch of an entrance.

  ‘Wow-ee!’ Willard exclaimed as they emerged from beneath the last branches of the final pair; even Marianne, who had grown up in an elegant château in south Sweden, was a little taken aback. She grabbed his arm as if she did not trust herself to stand unsupported. For there, a couple of hundred paces ahead of them, crowning a slight rise in the ground, stood one of the most elegant Georgian country houses they had ever seen. Larger than a rectory, smaller than a palace, modestly opulent, assertively reticent, there it stood in the afternoon sun, as confident of its ground as any mountain in the kingdom – and more sure of its place in history, too.

  ‘Welcome to our country cottage!’ Adam said as he unhitched the pony and turned it loose onto what had once been the main lawn.

  They stood and analysed the house. It rose three floors on a semi-basement, the tops of whose windows could be seen over the ex-flower beds around the foot of the house. A flight of four shallow steps led up to a grand entrance, guarded by two pairs of simple Doric columns, which rose to support a large triangular pediment that formed the front wall of a balcony. The walls, of pale Hertfordshire brick, were symmetrical on either side. Each half had three large windows on the ground floor, echoed on the first floor above in lights of medium size. All were rectangular, though those on the ground floor were set back in shallow, semicircular arches of brick. At the moment they were blinded from inside by their once-white shutters. It made the house seem somehow fake, like a construction on a film lot waiting for the painters to darken the glazing and paint in the bars.

  Felix wondered where the stables were. ‘Which is your bit?’ he asked Adam.

  ‘See the Tudor gable just peeping out beyond? Well, the Victorian Desboroughs built a mock-Tudor annexe to it, to balance it. On the far side from here. We’re in that.’

  ‘And Tony and Nicole?’ Willard asked.

  ‘They have the back of the main house – three rooms on the ground floor and three above. You can just see one of their windows looking out on the lawn. And the bedrooms above that are theirs, too.’

  ‘And who has the top floor?’

  ‘Untenanted as yet. So is the genuine Tudor bit, and the main-house ground floor on this front side, and the floor above it. And the stables – with the cottage across the yard, which you might consider, Felix.’

  ‘And the gatelodge,’ Marianne said. ‘Seven family units, five which not yet are uptaken.’

  Felix noticed a tap set back a little from the drive. He turned it on but no water emerged, only a spider, which abseiled to the grass on one fine thread. There had been only one working tap in the Vélodrome d’Hiver that day. One tap for more than a thousand Jews.

  Sally Wilson opened the high front doors and stepped out to greet them. She was a tall, slender, platinum blonde; her features were rosy, even babyish, but there was nothing babyish about her manner.

  ‘Where are Tony and Nicole?’ Adam asked.

  At the mention of Nicole, Marianne’s heart skipped a beat.

  ‘They went down the fields to inspect the septic tanks. Apparently we have two for alternate months. You must be Mister and Mrs Johnson – and Herr Breit?’

  ‘Mister, please! Or just Felix.’

  ‘Of course.’

  When the introductions were over, and first-names agreed on, Sally took Willard and Marianne to explore the main house while Adam showed Felix over the coach houses and stables, which would be ready-made studios or garages.

  ‘Maybe the cottage across the yard would suit you better?’ he suggested, pointing out a two-storey red-brick building beyond a huge weeping ash. ‘The locals call it the gardener’s cottage but we think it must originally have been for the head stable lad.’

  ‘Lad?’

  ‘Well . . . that’s what they always called them, no matter how old. Anyway, those big French windows are much later. Once there were double doors there, to what was a coach house.’ He nudged Felix. ‘Big enough for a sculptor’s studio, I’d say. You could get a Henry Moore in and out by that door.’

  ‘I don’t intend living alone,’ Felix said as they crossed the yard.

  ‘Quick work!’ Adam said admiringly.

  ‘Oh, I’ve not found anyone yet.’

  Adam pushed at the cottage door with his foot; the wood scraped the floor. ‘Tell me to mind my own business, if you like,’ he said, ‘but are you really as . . . I don’t want to say indifferent . . . forgiving, perhaps, about . . . you know . . .’ He jerked his head vaguely toward the big house.

  ‘Indifferent is good,’ Felix said.

  He saw at once that the big room Adam had mentioned would, indeed, make a fabulous studio. The French windows looked west, so the sunlight would steal inward each evening to caress his day’s work and congratulate him. His fingers longed to begin working.

  ‘It’s odd.’ Adam went to one of the windows and drew Euclidean shapes in the dust on one of the panes. ‘I suppose we ought to stop trying to guess what your feelings and attitudes must be?’

  ‘It would be best to assume that I have none.’ After a pause he added, ‘I had to learn certain techniques in order to survive. At least, I hope I learned them. I hope they weren’t always there inside me, waiting to blossom, because they are not attractive.’

  Adam said, ‘I was amazed to see you eating peas at the club last week.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sorry, did it show? I mean, you were eating with relish.’

  ‘I owe my life to peas and beans. And lentils. Why should I dislike them?’

  ‘I know. It’s all very logical. But even so . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about watching another prisoner being cl
ubbed to death and thinking, Gott sei dank it’s not me! Or stealing a crust from someone so close to death that it wouldn’t help him anyway. Thinking only me-me-me! I had to learn to think like them – to think that the life of another human being was worth any sacrifice if it preserved my own.’

  ‘I’ve tried to imagine it so often since that day . . . the unbelievable horrors of that day . . . wondering if I could have tolerated even one hour of it. Objectively, of course, I know I could have, probably – since so many obviously did.’

  ‘They killed a hundred and eighty-five of us a day, every day – average – someone told me.’

  ‘But thousands also survived – you among them, thank God. Even so, I still can’t imagine how. We must never let ourselves forget it.’

  ‘That’s your problem. You’re right, of course – for you. For me, it’s opposite. Art saved me for a purpose. When I first went into the camp they put me carrying quarry stones up those famous steps. One hundred eighty-six of them. Nobody ever lasted more than six weeks there. If you fell, they shot you. And they left your body there until sunset, pour encourager les autres. Then they needed skilled masons to shape the stones and the Kapo volunteered me. It was good of him. He was a communist and normally they only looked after their own. I’d done some stone carving but not much – only little things. Bagatelles. Clay modelling, metal welding – that was me. I had a one-hour apprenticeship between dawn and the time the head mason started work. He was an Austrian civilian. A Nazi, of course. By then I was rival to Bernini, believe me!’

  ‘But that’s admirable.’

  ‘So? That’s my point. And by the way, when it comes to Marianne Johnson . . . just assume . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Felix hesitated and then said, ‘Just take it that I have every reason to sympathize with her predicament when her parents sent her to work in Germany at the age of seventeen.’

  Adam sighed. ‘In a way, much as I’m fond of Willard, I hope they decide to go back to Boston. I don’t think Nicole will accept her in the same generous spirit. She spent all those years pretending to be nice to Nazis while she hated them from the bottom of her heart.’

  ‘Well – that’s what Marianne must always remember and Nicole must try to forget.’

  ‘Easily said.’

  ‘She must, though, for her own sake.’

  ‘Maybe you can get her to do it.’

  ‘Tell me something about him – Willard. Is he a good architect?’

  Adam hesitated so long that Felix had to laugh.

  ‘No, no!’ Adam protested. ‘He probably is quite good. It’s just that you’ve made me realize I don’t think of old Willard in either category – good or bad. He has a nose for what’s important. For what’s powerful. For the movers, as he calls them. I saw him once walk into a room full of two-star generals and yet he headed straight for a mere colonel. It seemed so out of character but afterwards we learned that the generals were all has-beens on their way out while the colonel was the rising star. That’s Willard. So to ask if he’s good misses the essential man. He’s certainly going to be successful. I guarantee that within five years his office will contain at least a hundred drawing boards. Well!’ He rubbed his hands and, looking about them, said, ‘What d’you think? Will it do?’

  ‘It will do very nicely. I will be grateful—’

  ‘You will be no such thing! It’s the very least we can do. When I told my father you were possibly coming here, it was all I could do to stop him coming down to meet you this afternoon. Yet until now he’s had absolutely no sympathy with our project.’

  ‘I was going to say I will be grateful if I could leave paying the rent until . . .’ He saw no reason to be too specific.

  The old servants’ quarters and lumber rooms in the attics formed a square around the dome that gave light to the main stairwell of the house. Originally the parapet, which disguised the sloping roof and produced the architecturally correct Georgian box, had obscured the attic windows; but during the wartime occupation by the school, when the attic rooms had been converted to boys’ dormitories, they had cut part of the parapet away in front of each window for fire escapes. It opened up views on all four sides that were spectacular – east to Bramfield, west to Bull’s Green, north to Watton-at-Stone, and south across the Mimram Valley (which Cowper called the loveliest in all England) to Welwyn Garden City.

  Sally left the Johnsons to talk it over in private.

  ‘Lavender glass,’ Willard said. ‘Hand blown and flattened. They’d pay a fortune for just this one window back home.’

  ‘Home?’ Marianne took Willard’s hand. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Think so?’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘We could be very happy here – starting right now.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘There’s a key in the door. Shall we test the floorboards for squeaks?’

  Adam and Felix had rejoined Sally in the Victorian-Tudor annexe to the genuine Tudor remnant.

  ‘How much does Nicole know about . . . Marianne?’ Sally asked as soon as they came in. ‘Don’t look so surprised. She told me when I was showing them over the attic rooms.’ Then to Felix: ‘Can you really just shrug it off?’

  ‘Felix thinks we must all draw a line across history,’ Adam said. ‘Not just us – everyone in England.’

  ‘Or even . . . dare I mention the word – Europe?’ Felix suggested.

  ‘Yes, there too, of course.’

  ‘I must say, Felix, that’s very Christian of you . . .’ Her voice trailed off in dismay. ‘I mean . . . of course . . . oh, dear!’

  Adam sought to repair the damage. ‘She just means you’re a real white man.’

  Felix let her flounder until a small debt was created; dear friends of his who had been unable to make such cold calculations were now dust and ashes in Austria. Then he laughed and squeezed her arm reassuringly. ‘Let’s agree it’s very humanist, eh? From this point in history onwards, God must take lessons from the humanists, I think, don’t you?’

  ‘Why not?’ Still embarrassed, she turned to her husband. ‘Has Tony told Nicole? About Marianne?’

  Adam bit his lip. ‘Marianne wants to be the one.’

  ‘So neither of you has told her!’ Sally was shocked.

  ‘Frankly, I saw no reason to. I thought they’d give this place the once-over . . . maybe enjoy a few moments of pleasant fantasy . . . then wake up to stern reality and take the next boat to America. I still think they’ll do that. Marianne certainly has no ties to keep her on this side of the Atlantic.’

  ‘Well, you can think again, my darling. They’ve fallen in love with the attic unit. And how d’you think they’ll get access to it? What’s the only staircase that leads up there?’

  She turned to Felix to explain but he said, ‘I imagine it’ll be through Tony and Nicole’s unit?’

  ‘You’re quick!’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, we’ll know soon enough. I think you’re playing with fire.’

  Adam looked at his watch and said, ‘They should be back by now – unless they’ve fallen into one of the septic tanks.’

  ‘Let’s go and see.’ Sally led the way through the communal labyrinth to the front portico, where they arrived in time to see Tony and Nicole climbing out of the ha-ha that divided the front lawn from the parkland beyond. The lawn was flanked on either side by a rotting oak pergola, paved in red brick and so sunken in places that it would have been safer to walk on the lawn – if that wasn’t a riot of weeds and volunteer saplings. Nicole stopped to pick a small bunch of bluebells. Tony halted, too, beneath the two overarching roses, where he tapped the ashes and dottle from his pipe against his upturned left heel.

  ‘Ha!’ Felix relished the complex arabesques of his silhouetted arms and legs.

  ‘What?’ Adam asked, startled.

  ‘That day. In Mauthausen. He tapped his pipe on his heel just like that.’

  ‘He set fire to some GS stores once,’ Adam said. ‘“Ju
st like that.”’

  ‘Felix!’ Tony called out, having noticed them at last. To Adam he shouted, ‘Is he going to take one of the flats?’

  Nicole joined him and they trotted across the weed-littered carriage sweep; she had all the right attributes for a Mata Hari, Felix thought admiringly. Her hair had grown well again, lustrous, and raven-black – so black, indeed, that its highlights held a bluish sheen.

  ‘Monsieur Breit?’ Rather shyly she offered him the bunch of bluebells from several paces away.

  ‘Pour moi, Madame Palmer?’ He swiftly descended the steps to their level. ‘Vous êtes vraiment charmante!’

  ‘Ongley, cherry,’ Tony muttered.

  She gave him a look that would have served for mustard and passed the bouquet to Felix.

  ‘Do the septic tanks look as if they’ll work?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Nothing’s broken down above ground,’ Tony said. ‘It’s the sort of engineering an Ancient Egyptian would understand.’

  Nicole said, ‘My husband has told me your story, Monsieur Felix. I heard your name back in the war, when I was visiting Paris. You were arrested and then released?’

  ‘The first time, yes. Tiens!’ He held the bluebells up beside her cheeks and said to the two men, ‘The colour! It matches her eyes perfectly, see!’

  An English girl might have blushed, but not Nicole; her gaze remained as cool as the blue of her eyes – even when he brought the bouquet to his lips and gave it a playful kiss. ‘Sartre told me,’ she added.

  ‘You knew him well?’ Felix asked, though he had never liked the man much.

  ‘None of us knew him until after the Normandy landings,’ she sneered. ‘Then, tout d’un coup, we got to know many great artists and intellectuals who discovered overnight how anti-Nazi they had been all those comfortable, well-rewarded years.’

  ‘Thank God it’s all over and done with, eh!’

  She sniffed. ‘Is it?’

  They drifted up the steps and indoors.

  ‘I think I’ve found another interested couple,’ Tony said. ‘Name of Prentice, Arthur and May.’

  ‘Not two more bloody architects, I hope,’ Adam said.