The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Corvo was taken aback. He had expected a torrent of plans and wishful thinking from the man – something that would let him find a small niche for himself. Instead, he, who had never thought of television as having the remotest connection with serious art, was being forced to extemporize.

  Faith, seeing him about to flounder, inclined her head toward the Dower House behind them.

  ‘Stately homes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. The military are starting to hand them all back now. I personally know scores of places . . . written them up for Country Life – including the Dower House here, indeed. You could do a splendid series of documentaries on restoring them, reviving the gardens, getting the treasures back out of storage . . .’

  ‘And,’ Faith added, ‘apart from being a feast for the eye – which is surely another definition of television? – it would also be an elegant reminder of the things we fought for in the war.’

  ‘Fought for the stately homes of England?’ Bob Ambrose picked up the fag-end of the conversation as he approached them. ‘I’d have signed on as a conshie if I’d o’ known that. You’re the boss of television, right?’

  Reluctantly, Faith introduced them.

  ‘What I want to know is are you going to put your cameras actually on the racecourses and football pitches and cricket grounds . . . places like that?’

  ‘Live broadcasting, we call it. Yes, indeed, young man, we certainly shall. We’re working on all the systems now. And the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, of course. There are a few technical problems still to solve about getting the signal back to the studio – but we’ll master them before too long.’ He turned back to Corvo. ‘Mister Ambrose here has voiced an objection to your sort of programme that would find quite a bit of support at the BBC, I fear.’

  Felix joined the group.

  ‘Ah! Mister Breit!’ Wellington welcomed him and pointed to Faith. ‘I’m talking with your agent here – as you see.’

  ‘Pay no attention to Mister Bob Ambrose and his prejudices.’ Faith distracted Wellington to allow Felix time to adjust to the news. ‘He’d simply adore to sit in front of his television set, shouting insults at poor Corvo as he shows us around the glories of Blenheim or Hatfield House or Castle Howard. Besides, Corvo’s tour wouldn’t be all interiors. There are our glorious landscape gardens, too. His programme would combine the English love of gardening with gloating over antiques and the lure of inaccessible places, to say nothing of fantasies of wealth and noble birth. It has everything to make the Ambroses of this world cancel their pub-crawl and stay home to watch.’ She winked at Bob, hoping he’d have the sense to shut up.

  Wellington looked her shrewdly up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘You are very persuasive, Miss Bullen-ffitch. One begins to see all sorts of possibilities.’

  ‘You were talking to Wolf Fogel, the publisher, earlier,’ she said. ‘He’s produced dozens of books with a British heritage theme. Did he mention them to you?’

  He shook his head. ‘He told me about this encyclopedia of modern art and Mister Breit.’

  ‘Oh! He should have mentioned the heritage books, too. I’ll go and get him.’ She smiled at Felix, who pretended to shoot her with his finger.

  As she turned to go Wellington asked, ‘Are you by any chance this Mister Fogel’s agent, too?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Who is she?’ he asked Corvo after she’d gone.

  Felix said, ‘I think she’s using us – all of us – to find the answer to that very question.’

  Evening was drawing on into night. Marianne, having recovered from her ‘migraine’, had put together a final plate of smörgåsar – home-made cheese and off-points anchovies, this time. She took a small selection of them over to Nicole’s table and left them with a smile – which Nicole did not return. Later she saw Tony offering them around. He brought the plate back to her with a rueful smile. ‘Give it time,’ he murmured.

  Alexander Griffith, one of the architects who did occasional work for the gravel company, approached her. ‘I hear your father’s a steel maker,’ he said. ‘Does he know any wheezes for getting round import controls? This damn socialist government is so dead set on building council houses for the masses that we in the private-building business can hardly get a bag of nails.’

  Angela rose from her seat and, drawing a deep breath, started toward her.

  May Prentice put Sam and his younger sister, Hannah, to bed – knowing very well they’d fall asleep with their heads on the window sill – and went to look for Arthur, to remind him it was his turn to stoke the boiler. She went down bravely enough though she hated the musty dark of those subterranean corridors and cubbyholes. She was sure they were all overrun with ghosts – which was why she went on tiptoe. Which, in turn, was how she came to hear the unmistakeable sounds of a man and a woman rising to the climax of an act that would have been singularly inappropriate, not to say impossible, for a pair of ghosts.

  ‘Eve! Oh Eve!’ the man cried in a loud, hoarse whisper.

  As she backed off she heard Eve say, ‘Hurry up! This coal is bloody uncomfortable.’

  She found her husband washing the coke dust from his hands. ‘It’s going to burn a ton before the night is out,’ he said. ‘We’ll never afford it for the whole house – unless we can cut down half a forest somewhere.’

  She told him what she’d just heard.

  ‘I believe you, pet,’ he replied. ‘He’d shag anything in knickers, would our Adam.’

  ‘Oh dear! D’you think we did the right thing – coming to live here?’

  ‘It’s going to be what we used to call a bomber’s moon,’ Angela said.

  ‘I remember,’ Marianne replied. ‘Let me show you round the place before the light completely goes. Or is that something Felix was looking forward to doing?’

  ‘Oh . . . never mind him.’

  ‘I’ll just tell my husband, so. He worries – because of . . .’ She patted her stomach and turned toward Willard, who was now clearing up at their buffet table.

  But Angela did not move. ‘When is it due?’

  ‘Not long now. Sooner than we calculated.’

  ‘Your first?’

  Marianne darted her a look of surprise. ‘Yes!’

  ‘In the war . . . so many things happened. Anyway, I told your husband I was in that film crew for the Speer propaganda film – and, of course, noticed you. Nothing about meeting you after that.’

  ‘You didn’t mention . . . you know – the party?’

  ‘I said you were Danish but he didn’t correct me.’

  ‘He wouldn’t see any reason to, but that’s good. You said nothing about the party?’

  ‘I told him I was a member – and that I was—’

  ‘But why?’ Marianne cried.

  ‘To see his reaction – which was a surprise. He said that if he’d been a German, in Germany, during the war, he’d probably have been a secret communist, too – a communist inside the Nazi party.’

  For a moment Marianne could only stare. ‘That can I hardly believe,’ she said at last. ‘Just so? He said that, just so?’

  ‘Honey?’ Willard, who had been watching them closely, called out.

  ‘I must go. He’s calling. Shall you come too? Please?’

  Angela followed her some way behind.

  ‘Old times, eh?’ Willard said.

  ‘Hardly.’ Marianne laughed briefly. ‘I was a fool to run away. Just panic. You know she’s a friend to Felix?’

  ‘So she said.’

  ‘She’s asked me to show her around the place. Can you manage here? Shall I ask Sally to help?’

  ‘She’s gone hunting for Adam. If I were her, I’d go loaded for bear. Sure I can manage here. Off you go!’

  Marianne linked arms with Angela and steered her around the end of the Wilsons’ annexe and into the narrow lane that led into the back yard. ‘D’you want to talk in German?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘OK, OK! I have to say I got a shock t
o see you. Never I thought you would have survived.’

  ‘Felix and Miss Bullen-ffitch have told me about Nicole Palmer – you and Nicole . . .’

  Marianne halted and hung her head theatrically. ‘Too many people know. It’s not good. It’s not good.’

  ‘Are you now wishing I didn’t survive?’

  ‘No!’ She hugged Angela’s arm to her. ‘No – I’m absolutely delighted. I started to make an inquiry – after the liberation – except I didn’t know your real name. And then I thought it might stir trouble for you if you had survived – me asking for a communist who was also an ex-SS officer . . . if you hadn’t told them . . .’

  ‘And I just wanted to get out of Germany and come to the BBC as fast as possible.’

  They were now strolling through the back yard, in front of Felix’s cottage. The old car chassis, liberated from the pheasant run, had been pushed onto the grass beneath the weeping ash and people were sitting on it, pushing it gently back and forth as they drank beer and chattered. Everything was silvered by the rising moon.

  ‘It is extraordinary,’ Angela murmured. ‘You and I, we share an experience that we could never begin to describe to any of these English – even the ones who fought the war from Normandy to Berlin. It was like a tourist war for them.’

  ‘All English wars for the last nine hundred years have been “tourist wars”. Always they have fought on other people’s lands. That’s why they will never understand Europe. They will never be European. I have discussed this with Felix.’

  ‘Me, too. And I agree. But I feel safe here, too – which I never felt in Germany, not once in all my life. London is my Heimat! Not Vaterland but Heimat. You have the same difference in Sweden?’

  ‘In Sweden we say hembygden. Not our motherland but our native –’ she pointed at the ground beneath their feet – ‘earth? Soil? It’s true. I feel more safer here, also, than anywhere and any time before. Poor old Europe is a million miles away.’

  They meandered up the side drive to the front gate and then turned back toward the house along the main drive. ‘Those transcripts you left with me,’ Marianne said. ‘I think they’re safe. In fact, I’m rather sure they’re safe. The embassy didn’t want them hanging around – obviously – so they entrusted them to the embassy’s German chauffeur, Hermann Treite, a communist who works in the docks. He lives in Reiherstieg now. I can give you his phone number.’

  ‘Is he still in the party?’

  Marianne shrugged. ‘Like me – still a believer, but disillusioned with the Russians. It’s a difficult time for us – head going one way, heart the other.’ After a pause she added, ‘And you?’

  ‘The same, I suppose.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘Enough of all that! Tell me about Faith.’

  Coming up to midnight Marianne lit a bonfire she had assembled in the basin of the dried-up fountain. In Sweden, the midsummer bonfires reached fingers up among the stars; this was the feeblest imitation – but still bright enough for one wag to parody the wartime cry of ‘Put that light out!’ Marianne and others of the community linked hands and danced around it – sedately because of her condition. After a couple of circuits she dropped out and sang the old Swedish Midsummer songs for them to dance by. Soon, however, they switched to ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, and ‘The Hokey Cokey’. And as the flames died they formed a conger line and retreated toward the house to the strains of ‘I kissed her on the lips, ’ow ashamed I was . . .’

  ‘Have you ever heard the songs they sang in the war?’ Marianne asked as Angela left the line and the others dispersed.

  ‘All about marching against Germany?’ Angela guessed, fanning the opening of her blouse.

  ‘No! Exactly the opposite. “The Quartermaster’s Stores” and “You’d be Far Better Off in a Hole”. They’re all about mocking the army, the officers . . . the government. And the BBC used to broadcast them, too!’

  ‘Germany isn’t even a hundred years old yet,’ Angela mused. ‘Maybe you need to be an old country to be relaxed and mock yourself like that.’

  Come one o’clock, there were people lying on the lawn like silvered logs, staring up at the sky, remembering how many more stars they had been able to see during the blackout.

  ‘If you could shrink the entire solar system, right out to Pluto, down to the size of your wedding ring,’ Eric said to Betty Ferguson, ‘the next nearest star to us would be somewhere in Ware – about four miles away. And the centre of our galaxy would be up there on the moon.’

  She considered this a moment in silence and then said, ‘Funny – I didn’t want to move here when Todd come home that night and told me he thought we should up sticks. But tonight I see what it’s all about. True, we do get all Sally Palmer’s cooking smells up through our bathroom – especially the fried onions – and I know if Isabella comes down to your studio and you two start on at each other, we get the benefit of your opinions, too . . . but still and all, this is better than everyone living in their own little boxes.’

  ‘It’s a form of love, you know – the way Isabella goes on at me.’

  Betty laughed quietly. ‘It’s gotta be, hasn’t it – otherwise you’d never still be together. Also she admires your painting.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘’Cos she never says a dickey bird about them – which she surely would if she didn’t like them.’

  ‘Hmmm. The truth is she knows I’m not a real artist – like Felix Breit.’

  She turned over and propped herself up on her elbows, to see if he were serious. ‘You reckon he’s an artist? I think your paintings are . . . well, they’re real. Anyone could carve a bleedin’ egg out of a block of marble if they was careful enough about it. What’s the art in that?’

  ‘You’ve put your finger on it there, Betty. We must all try our best to pity today’s artists. They’re in a terrible fix. Everything that can possibly be done with line, colour, shape, and what have you – either on a flat surface or in three dimensions has already been done. The sort of painting I do was done more than a century ago by a man called Samuel Palmer. He’d have absolutely revelled in this moonlight, by the way. And the sort of sculpture Felix is doing was done before the war by sculptors like Arp and Brancusi. It’s just not possible now to imagine anything new. From now on, all art is like copying – call it pastiche for a few quid more.’

  ‘You could stand with your back to the canvas and just chuck the paint over your shoulder,’ she suggested with a giggle.

  ‘Sshhh! Someone’ll hear you – and then they’ll go and do it. And they’ll give it some fancy name like random-structured painting and Corvo and his crowd will wet their knickers in ecstasy and American millionaires will fall over each other to buy it up. I’ll make you a prediction, Betty – and you can hold me to this – are you listening?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m also wondering what your wife is saying to Felix Breit over there.’

  ‘Probably about fashion in Paris before the war. She’s doing a feature on Schiaparelli for Marie Claire. Anyway – my prediction is this: Sometime in the next ten years someone calling himself a painter is going to exhibit a gallery full of blank canvases and call it art.’ A refinement occurred to him. ‘And he’ll refuse to sign them because it would spoil the purity of the canvas. And – this is the point now – the exhibition will be a sell-out.’

  Betty laughed – a melodious, silvery laugh that carried across the lawn.

  Isabella broke off her conversation with Felix. ‘What nonsense is he talking now?’ she called out.

  ‘Just the usual, my pet,’ Eric assured her before continuing in a lower key to Betty, ‘The interesting question is – will it happen in Paris or London or New York? Because that will determine which city will become the new art-capital of the world.’

  ‘So you knew Schiaparelli before she moved to the place Vendôme?’ Isabella asked excitedly.

  ‘Not really,’ Felix assured her. ‘But I used to pass her place in the rue de l
a Paix. I met Dali on the street outside once.’

  ‘When he was designing that outrageous costume, all covered with lobsters, for the Duchess of Windsor – actually before she became the duchess? That must have been a wonderful time to be in Paris.’

  Felix drew breath to reply but, in the end, said nothing.

  ‘No?’ she prompted.

  ‘Superficially, yes. They used to tell me it was even gayer in the twenties, before the Depression, before all the rich Americans became poor and had to leave. But it was still pretty dazzling when I arrived in the thirties.’

  ‘Only superficially?’

  Felix wondered if it was worth the effort – trying to explain to yet another uncomprehending English person what had happened between the wars, a million miles away over the Channel. ‘There were . . . undercurrents,’ he said. ‘The Great War didn’t end in peace – just exhaustion. And you could see it clearly in Paris at that time.’

  ‘Paris?’ Nicole turned aside from the gravel path at the word and glided across the lawn to join them. ‘What about Paris?’

  ‘You must be exhausted,’ Felix told her. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

  She laid her hand on her stomach. ‘This beast wakes when I sleep and sleeps when I wake. This is good. I relax now. You spoke about Paris?’

  ‘I was talking about her in the thirties, when I moved there from Berlin after a quarrel with my father. I missed the big riots of nineteen thirty-four but you could feel the aftermath. The right wing and the royalists just smouldering with hatred and waiting their chance for revenge – which they got soon enough.’ He turned to Isabella. ‘Didn’t the English ever wonder why France fell so swiftly in nineteen-forty?’

  ‘I was a bit young . . .’ she began. ‘But wasn’t there something about the Germans simply walking around the top of the Maginot Line?’

  ‘But why did it collapse so quickly after that? I’ll tell you – because the right wing and the royalists wanted the Nazis to win. They thought they could all be fascists together, standing shoulder to shoulder, cleaning out the liberal-socialist-communist-decadent-homosexual-Jewish filth. And by the time they learned what the Germans meant by Übermensch, it was too late. Then they had to collaborate or be cleaned out themselves.’ He looked at Nicole. ‘Right?’