The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  The significance of the warning was not lost on Todd, suggesting as it did that if Faith had not found such potential tenants, the apartments were open to offer.

  ‘Who?’ Sally asked. ‘I haven’t heard this.’

  ‘A couple called Brandon. Isabella and Eric. She’s something to do with fashion. He’s a book illustrator – mainly for children. Does the odd spot of writing, too. They’re coming at the weekend – I meant to tell you.’

  Todd glanced at his watch.

  ‘Yes – sorry,’ Felix said. ‘There’s only one more to look at.’

  They took him to the upstairs flat in the old Tudor part of the house.

  ‘We refer to this as the smallest flat,’ Willard said, ‘but, in fact, it has the same number of rooms as Tony and Nicole’s, and Adam and Sally’s . . .’

  ‘And more than my cottage,’ Felix added.

  They showed him the hallway, which was long enough and easily wide enough for a generous kitchen; then the sitting room, which was quite large, and the two bedrooms, small by Dower House standards but as big as any in a modern suburban house.

  ‘And we could make a third bedroom if we took out that old slate water tank, which is huge – come see.’

  The tank, bone dry and filled with cobwebs, measured some six foot by five by almost five foot high.

  Todd gauged it with a knowing eye; the slate floor and walls were almost two inches thick. ‘Take some shiftin that would,’ he said.

  ‘It would need some organizing,’ Willard agreed.

  ‘It’d suit a man who’s fond of organizing, though,’ Marianne added.

  Todd looked from one to another. ‘You blokes serious?’ he asked.

  ‘Never more so.’

  Felix nodded, Sally nodded; they turned to Nicole, who said, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Blimey! Stone the crows!’

  They arranged for him to bring his wife, Betty, out that same evening.

  Felix knew he should have started on the carving at once; instead, he went out to the walled garden and dug a whole barrow-load of comfrey roots. With every thrust of the spade he could almost hear Faith saying, ‘What on earth d’you think you’re doing, man? You know how impatient Fogel is getting.’ He dithered over lunch – he even washed up his plate, cup, and fork. But at last he could postpone the long-awaited moment no further. He opened the box from Tiranti of Charlotte Street and took out his new mallet and his set of new carving tools – with tungsten-carbide tips – and laid them out on the whatnot (as Faith called it) beside his carving stand. And only then did he dare even look at the block of marble.

  He had imagined this moment so many times over the past three days but now that it had come he was completely at a loss. He knew why, of course, but was loath to admit it, even to himself. His last effort at stonecarving had been in the sheds at Mauthausen – just before the guard had dug him in the back with his rifle barrel – ‘Du! Jude! Kom!’ – and led him to where they did the medical experiments. Now came the leap from that to this.

  He spun the stone gently round, watching the interplay of light and reflected light. Soon it began to seduce him. Marble is chalk that has been to hell and back. Tempered and purified by Vulcan, it has gained an inner luminescence that gives its surface a depth no other stone can equal. Let the merriest sunlight fall upon granite and it immediately sobers down and returns to the eye, all dour and forbidding; it moans grim sermons at you from every granite chapel in the land. But let the merest shaft of that same light play upon the gentle face of marble . . . and back it dances, full of invitations to touch, to caress, to behave like an Italian.

  He caressed it with the lightest touch of his widest chisel. Feather-gentle, it nonetheless left a mark; there would be no room for mistakes here. But what would constitute a ‘mistake’? He certainly didn’t want to produce an egg-shape that looked as if it had simply been turned on a mechanical wheel; it had to be carved. And yet, when the viewer saw it first – that premier coup de l’oeil, as Bonnard always called it – he must think that that was how it was made: mechanically perfect upon a turner’s wheel.

  But close-to, after, say, half a minute’s inspection, its subtlest of imperfections must reveal that a human hand had made it so. A perfect circle drawn with the aid of a compass has a dead sort of beauty; a perfect circle drawn by a Leonardo has the same beauty but is vibrant and passionate as well.

  He laid the tools down again, took up his drawing board, and pinned a half-imperial sheet of conté paper to it – Barcham & Green’s best quality, hand made. Then with charcoal, 6B pencil, and conté crayon he covered it with egg-shaped spheroids – eggs inside eggs . . . eggs overlapping eggs . . . eggs correcting eggs . . . and in this way he arrived at last at the perfect – no, the only possible or permissible shape for this particular block of marble. And with that he picked up his mallet and chisel once more and whacked off one of the square corners with some panache.Then the kitty corner.

  Then the other two corners. And so he continued until, within the hour, he had the intimation toward which he had been groping ever since he began – the conviction that his egg, the one he was going to carve, had actually taken form already, just beneath the surface where his chisel was presently making its bites – so that he was not so much carving it as liberating it from an encrustation of stone.

  By the time Faith returned that evening he had the upper half of the egg roughly formed. The ringing tap-tap of mallet and chisel told her he was working at last, so the sight of him standing there, carving away, came as no surprise. But as for the object itself . . . ‘Ah!’ she cried. And then, ‘Oh!’ And finally, ‘Well!’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I was going to carve it into a perfect egg-shape. If I cheated slightly and cut a flat surface at the very bottom – no more than a penny in size – I’m sure it would stand without props, if it was completely symmetrical all round. But then I got to thinking of Michelangelo . . .’

  ‘As one does.’

  ‘As anyone carving marble does, and I remembered his Slave. Do you know it?’

  ‘Only in photographs. God – we must start visiting in Europe again now they’ve lifted the ban. Florence! The Uffizi! Rome! Venice! This bloody socialist government with its five-quid limit! What about the Slave? It’s the one he never finished, no?’

  ‘Yes – and no. He thought each one of his sculptures already existed inside the marble. All he did was liberate them – or half-liberate in the case of the Slave. I think I’ll do that with this egg – only in a more advanced state of liberation. It will be a perfect egg except for this corner, at the bottom. I’ll leave it so that that bit of the egg still must be liberated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if I make the work complete, then it is just another work of art among thousands in the series – and probably inferior to most of them. And because it is repeated, again and again at the start of every chapter, it would soon begin to intrude. So instead it will take one step back from completion. It will say, “Over-to-you, Señor Picasso, Monsieur Derain, Herr Klee . . .” all the artists whose finished work will fill the pages around.’

  She started to laugh.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Remember what I told you about the difference between artists and designers? You began this morning as an artist – but you end the day as a designer!’

  He thought it prudent to let her think so. In fact, a cheap unfinished Felix Breit would have no cachet in Fogel’s Hampstead circles. Not while the artist himself was alive and well and working in London.

  Wednesday, 11 June 1947

  Eric and Isabella Brandon’s Morris Ten wove a careful path among the potholes along the drive. It drew up, dead centre, in front of the house. The engine died and the cooling exhaust pinged in the silence – or what would have been silence if Isabella had not said, ‘Didn’t I ask you to get that spider out of the speedometer window?’

  Her voic
e, fruity and penetrating, carried across the carriage sweep in front of the house to the welcoming delegation of Adam, Tony and Nicole, and Faith; it was Faith who had suggested to Eric that he and Isabella might like to join the Dower House community. She had run across him at several launch parties and other publishing haunts in Soho, for he was the author and illustrator of a string of successful children’s books; his wife, Isabella, was . . . well, that remained to be discovered. ‘In the rag trade,’ was all Eric had told her when she met the couple casually in the Hay Hill Bookshop in Curzon Street, near where they lived.

  And now his flatter London tones proved quite as penetrating as his wife’s. He wound down the window and stuck out his head. ‘How d’you call spiders – anyone? It’s not “kitty-kitty”, is it?’ He retreated inside the car again. ‘No, my pet, we are adrift in a sea of ignorance.’

  She closed her eyes and said, ‘It’s a simple question, darling. Did I ask you or didn’t I? A yes or no will suffice.’

  ‘You undoubtedly did. A-a-and if you will tell me how to seduce spiders out from behind immovable glass, I shall evict him forthwith. Or her. Dead flies don’t work, by the way. Nor worms.’

  ‘Worms?’

  ‘Well, they work with fish.’

  To the waiting delegation their voices were clearer than their images, cowering in the dark tomb of the car and part-obscured by wipers that seemed to be stuck at half-quadrant. Isabella’s face loomed forward until her nose almost touched the windscreen. ‘Oh, hello!’ she cried, apparently seeing the welcome party for the first time; they were dwarfed by the Ionic pillars that flanked them. ‘I say! How grand!’ She retreated back into the gloom and they heard her say, ‘Which one is Miss Manningham-Buller?’

  ‘It’s Bullen-ffitch – and she hasn’t changed much since we met her in Curzon Street.’ Eric leaped from the car, shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie. ‘Good afternoon to you all.’

  As he slammed the door the trafficator hoisted itself out of its pocket in the door pillar, almost hitting him in the neck. ‘Not tonight, Josephine!’ he said, pushing it back into place.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open my door?’ his wife asked.

  ‘If I could achieve it from the driver’s side,’ he said as he strode around the car, ‘I would. But this –’ he arrived on her side to open her door and assist her out – ‘is quite a bit easier.’

  Like Aphrodite rising from her seashell, Isabella Brandon rose from the tiny car on a cloud of Chanel bouclé. As she smoothed her white lace gloves her eyes took in – in fact, possessed – the grandeur of the portico and the restrained elegance of the pale brick façade; almost as an afterthought she turned her attention once again to the quartet who waited to greet her. And to greet her husband, of course. She wobbled slightly on ultra-high heels as she negotiated the gravel between them. ‘Isabella Brandon,’ she said, extending her right arm along a ballistic trajectory toward them; then, with a sidelong glance, she added, ‘. . . and my husband, Eric.’

  ‘What a splendid place,’ he remarked when they had all introduced themselves. To Faith he added, ‘Your description didn’t really do it justice.’

  Faith was too engrossed in studying Mrs Brandon to reply that her parents’ home in the Cotswolds was a good deal more grand than this.

  ‘Is that American person here?’ Isabella asked.

  ‘Willard Johnson?’ Faith was surprised. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He called on us last week,’ she replied but did not elaborate.

  ‘Country air!’ Eric said, inhaling deeply through his nose.

  ‘Well there’s a surprise!’ his wife exclaimed.

  ‘The place has seen better days,’ Adam said. ‘Er . . . I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to slip out of your shoes. The pine floors in this part of the house are a hundred and sixty years old and . . . ah . . . haha . . . your heels, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen heels so . . . sharp.’

  She corrected him, ‘Delicate. They are next year’s fashion so I sincerely hope you won’t have seen any such thing as yet.’ She looked daggers at Eric. ‘You never mentioned the floor. You can get my gumboots out of the car.’

  As he walked back to it, he said, in a kind of sing-song, ‘So many things I forgot to ask before we came . . .’ On his return, bearing a pair of lavender-coloured gumboots, he began to enumerate, ‘Are the interior walls of plaster or gesso? Are the pillars Doric or Ionic? Is the soil acid or alkaline? What is the prevailing wind? To tell the truth, I thought it more important to get the right directions.’ Handing the boots to his wife, he said to the others, ‘Just try getting a map of any part of England nowadays. Stanford’s offered me the entire Hindu Kush at six inches to the mile but Hertfordshire? Not a hope. The Ordnance Survey seems to think there’s a war on.’ Then, noticing how violently the lavender boots clashed with Chanel’s pastel, he added, ‘How delightful, my darling! It’s utterly you!’

  Their bickering almost ceased and they were almost well behaved while the four residents showed them over the apartment that was on offer. ‘This entrance hall is communal,’ Adam explained. ‘But yours would be these two rooms—’

  Isabella interrupted him, ‘Why is it communal?’

  ‘Because this is the only access from the front of the house to the main staircase – which leads up to the Prentices’ flat.’

  ‘And to our flat,’ Tony added. ‘Unless you walk right round the back.’

  ‘You mean there’s no back door to this entire house?’

  ‘The entrance is communal because we make it so,’ Nicole said.

  Adam resumed his usher’s role: ‘Yours would be these two big rooms on either side. Each of them is actually big enough on its own to accommodate the average council house.’

  He flung open a door and let them marvel.

  ‘The fireplace is by Barry,’ Tony said.

  Sally added, ‘And the plasterwork is Italian – by the same people who did the plastering in Sir John Soanes’s house in Lincolns Inn Fields. It’s very fine.’

  ‘The house was taken over by a Catholic boys’ school evacuated from Jersey during the war,’ Adam told them. ‘They put in lots of extra lavatories, which suits us perfectly, of course. And they treated the place pretty well.’

  Isabella shot him a glance, taking this as a veiled comment on her heels. ‘Does the central heating work?’ she asked, running a glove lightly over a painted cast-iron radiator of Edwardian vintage.

  ‘We were told it takes a ton of coke every twenty-four hours, so we haven’t tried it. Most of us have paraffin heaters.’

  ‘Except that one in the attic,’ Nicole insisted.

  ‘Now, now!’ Tony warned her.

  Faith saw that Isabella’s eyes darted eagerly between Nicole and her Tony, eager for more.

  ‘Has anyone lit a fire here?’ Eric was prodding a heap of twigs in the grate.

  ‘It’s what fireplaces are for,’ Isabella told him.

  ‘There’s a crow’s nest up there,’ Tony admitted, ‘but we’ll get some rods and fetch it down.’

  ‘This was the butler’s pantry.’ Adam moved them on toward the back of the apartment. ‘That’s the door to the silver safe – which is big enough for a child’s bedroom. Have you got any children?’

  ‘Isabella has a delicate throat,’ Eric explained.

  ‘Oh, cork it!’ she snapped. To the others she added, ‘It’s the punchline of an extremely tasteless joke – so-called.’

  Tony, remembering the joke from his army days, suddenly vanished into the silver safe. ‘Yes, quite big enough,’ he managed to say without corpsing.

  ‘We shall be starting a family very soon now,’ Isabella went on.

  ‘How interesting!’ Eric said.

  Nicole suddenly noticed that his shirt was buttoned up askew, leaving a bulge of cloth and an unused buttonhole at his throat, mostly hidden by his tie. Isabella had just noticed it, too; she drew breath to tick her husband off, thought better of it, and, saying loudly,
‘What’s at the bottom here, then?’ pushed him ahead of her down a short flight of stone steps. At the foot of it she thrust him round the corner, out of sight of the others.

  Adam, still at the top, complained that they’d missed the room that could be turned into a kitchen, but Nicole tripped lightly down after them. Isabella was jerking and tugging at Eric’s shirt and tie, getting each button in the right hole. But, most unexpectedly, the look in her eyes was one of pure love – angry, yes . . . exasperated, yes, but love for all that. ‘Do you have such trouble?’ she asked Nicole.

  ‘Since the Garden of Eden, I think,’ she replied.

  ‘Talking of which,’ Eric said affably, ‘d’you know the first animal Adam took as a pet, after they were expelled from the Garden?’

  Nicole shrugged.

  ‘The serpent.’ He raised his voice and called out to Faith, ‘Does any room in this apartment have a north light? I need a north light for painting.’

  ‘Did you say kitchen?’ Isabella asked suddenly. ‘Where?’

  Adam took her back; most of the others followed. ‘It was the staff dining room when the school was here,’ he said.

  Isabella turned to her husband. ‘What colour curtains should we have, d’you think?’

  ‘Blue,’ he said at once. ‘Flies can’t abide blue. And chromium-plated taps.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’ll reflect the blue.’

  She turned to Adam. ‘I’m sure you give more sensible answers to your wife than that!’

  Adam smiled feebly and, avoiding Sally’s eye, said, ‘North light, old chap?’

  ‘This way!’ Tony was still at the foot of the steps. ‘Just follow me. You’re now entering the ground floor of the original Tudor Hall. One room of it goes with this apartment. It’s the only one with a north light.’

  ‘And very little else,’ Isabella said. ‘What’s above?’

  ‘The smallest flat of all – in terms of room size, anyway. It’s been taken by the manager of the LNER depot in Garden City – Todd Ferguson and his wife Gracie. They’ve not moved in yet because they’re building a new kitchen in their hallway.’