‘Last night, I think. His bed wasn’t slept in, and all his things are gone. I expect he’s gone to London.’
It seemed politic to agree. ‘I expect he has.’
‘Powerful fond of London Mr Frank is, for all he’s a married man now.’
This was said with what for Bertha passed for cunning.
‘Many men find the attractions of London increase after they are married,’ I said. I think I had been reading Oscar Wilde.
Mention of his ‘things’ made me regret that Uncle Frank had no valet, and used none of the Blakemere servants in lieu of one when he was at home. But her words did suggest to me a course of action I might have followed earlier. Uncle Frank’s rooms, his bachelor rooms, were perfectly well known to me, both from visits there while he was at Blakemere, when I was fascinated by their exclusively masculine feel and smell, and from more surreptitious poppings in when he was away, when I was looking for signs that he was expected.
Of course none of the rooms or suites of rooms at Blakemere were kept locked. They might be locked on occasion from inside, for example by people engaged in a blazing row, though not necessarily even then. The desire for privacy is middle class, and we were determinedly no longer middle class. The fact that Uncle Frank had left Blakemere meant that, once the room was done, there was unlikely to be a servant in its vicinity.
It was the second morning after the night of the furious row that, in a break between lessons, I betook myself on the long walk to Uncle Frank’s rooms and – my heart thumping, not with fear but with dread of making an unwanted discovery – pushed open the door.
Nothing.
No signs of Uncle Frank at all – not a remnant of his occupancy. The rooms were shiny clean, bare and anonymous. It might have been a luxury suite in a first-class hotel. All the things that Uncle Frank would normally leave here – binoculars, fishing tackle, old overcoats, bottles of his favourite tipples – had been removed. It was almost spiteful in its comprehensiveness. As I stood there I imagined it being done with a sadistic relish: Francis Fearing, it seemed to say, belonged to the house’s past; he had no place in the house’s future.
I told Miss Roxby what I had discovered later the same day. She received my news without comment; she had these fits of being the faithful, discreet servant of the Fearings. A governess – any servant – had often to act against her own nature.
‘It’s not fair!’ I said passionately. ‘We lose Uncle Frank forever, and we keep Mary who is not one of us at all!’
‘I believe Mrs Francis has left Blakemere,’ she said quietly.
That stopped me in my tracks.
‘That will please everyone in the servants’ hall,’ I said at last. ‘And practically everyone above stairs as well.’
Miss Roxby said nothing. How I would love to have gone on to talk about the visitor to her room on the fateful night! But I had already trespassed on doubtful ground, on that border territory between the acceptable and the forbidden, and in fact it was many years before that matter could be discussed between us.
But if Miss Roxby was being the loyal servant of popular fiction (a role that did not sit easily on her), with whom could I discuss the fate of Uncle Frank? The memory of that blazing row, of those men in the night, above all of that shape on the stretcher, did not become less vivid as the days passed. It was impossible to imagine discussing Uncle Frank’s fate with either of my grandparents, or indeed Aunt Jane, who still talked to me as if I were in the nursery. With my mother I never had anything that could be called conversation, and indeed I very much doubted if she knew what had happened on the night in question. That left my father.
My father had taken up golf. I spied him from the Library one afternoon a fortnight or so after Uncle Frank’s disappearance practicing his putting shots on the croquet lawn. Later he would have his own nine-hole course in the Blakemere grounds, involving more enormous shiftings of earth and creations of artificial hills and woody clumps. How the Fearings did love to improve on Nature’s plans! It is now a wilderness, and people wandering there must think that is how that corner of Buckinghamshire has been since the beginnings of time.
On an impulse – thinking it odd I hadn’t done this before – I went outside through the obscure door below my bedroom and a little to the left. Once outside I looked around. At the edge of a nearby flower bed there was a heavy stone, such as might be used for propping open a door. I gulped. One more little piece in place. Then I went over toward the croquet lawn and sat on a little wall, watching my father. He made few efforts to talk to me if I did not put myself in his way, but when I did I pricked his conscience. Eventually, as I knew he would, he interrupted his putting and came over, rubbing his hands.
‘Capital game,’ he said. ‘Absolutely capital. You must take it up. Women can play golf, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Mary, Queen of Scots, for example. She played the game when it was in its infancy.’
‘I wonder how she found the time,’ I meditated, genuinely interested in the question. I think I imagined her as fully occupied with love affairs and murderous plots. My father failed to understand my meaning. Uncle Frank would have caught the drift of my thoughts immediately. Papa just stood there rather awkwardly.
‘Perhaps you could teach me,’ I said, to help him out of his embarrassment. ‘Now that I don’t have Uncle Frank to teach me games and things.’
He nodded, seemingly pleased.
‘Yes, that’s a good idea. I know that you and I—’
‘Where has Uncle Frank gone?’ I interrupted him to ask, at least partly to spare shame-making personal stuff.
‘Well, I think – Frank has gone to Australia.’
‘Is he on another expedition? Is he going to cross the Great Australian Desert?’
He rubbed his chin. ‘Well, not that I know of, but I suppose knowing Frank he might – yes, it would be like him.’
‘Why else would he go to Australia?’
‘I think he aims to stay there quite a while.’
‘You mean settle?’
‘Well, yes. I believe that is his intention.’
I digested this slowly. I did not believe it was true, but I was careful how I should react.
‘He was driven to it,’ I said at last, passionately. ‘He should never have been forced to marry.’
‘He wasn’t exactly forced … But I think you’re right. It was never something I approved of.’
‘I know.’ My father was preoccupied, otherwise he might have wondered how I knew.
‘Frank and I were never close,’ he mused, ‘but I always liked him.’
‘You couldn’t not like Uncle Frank.’
‘No … I bitterly regret what happened. They were mismatched from the start. Mary was wronged as much as Frank. I know all about mismatching, about marriages that should never have taken place. But no one put pressure on your mother and me. We were quite willing. And things weren’t too bad until …’
‘Until I came along and was a girl, and she was told she couldn’t have any more,’ I supplied.
‘Something like that. You’re old enough to understand now.’
‘Oh, I’ve always known that. So won’t Uncle Frank ever come back to this country? Come back here?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘But that’s disgusting!’ I cried, trying to be my younger, more innocent self. ‘He belongs here.’ My father shook his head.
‘I don’t think that’s true, Sarah Jane. He never belonged here.’
And smiling sadly he went back to his putting. It seemed to me that my father was right, and that it was an unusually perceptive remark. Frank had never belonged here. Not at Blakemere, not in nineteenth-century England. I wondered whether Papa had been forced by recent events to think long and seriously about Uncle Frank. I only realised later that where I had said ‘belongs’ he had said ‘belonged’. Even when I realised it, I couldn’t quite decide on its significance: he might have been drawing a
line not under Uncle Frank’s life, but merely under his life at Blakemere.
I watched my father practicing his finishing putts for a few minutes more, then wandered off into the slope beyond the croquet lawn. It was only when I saw him go off toward the house that I directed my feet toward the little wood – the direction I had seen the men walk with the stretcher on the night of Uncle Frank’s disappearance. I did not find that day what I was looking for – looking for, yet dreading to find. It was only three visits later, when I had educated myself to spot signs of disturbance, that I found it. It was covered with leaves, branches, and bracken, yet they did not look like the natural ground cover of woodland, such as surrounded them on each side. They were easy to pull away.
Underneath the ground had been dug, and later the earth replaced. The hole had been about six feet by two feet. I gazed at it, then started to cry. After a minute or two I feverishly pulled the bracken and branches back across the bare earth. Then I ran from the place as if pursued, down to the river. It was hours before I went into the house again.
I have never been back to that little wood. I lived at Blakemere all those years until the Second World War, apart from three years at Cambridge, yet in all that time I never went back. If that seems strange, remember that the Blakemere estate is very large – is, indeed, enormous. If I was ever tempted when I was lady of the house to put some kind of memorial there, I restrained the temptation: I am not religious, and in any case I doubted whether I would be able to find the place again. And the memorial would have had to remain blank. Uncle Frank’s gravestone was in my heart. Whether he was remembered in anyone else’s heart I never knew. Nobody mentioned him, except occasionally the servants – and then, as often as not, only because I was questioning them about him.
I realised soon after this that Grandpapa was failing. Not so much losing his mental powers as physically dying slowly. It was visible in his face, his stance, his grip on what was going on around him – not that he couldn’t be alert to what was happening, but that he no longer wanted to be. He was still fiercely independent, but he had to assert his independence against the general desire of those around him to minister to his growing weakness, relieve him of all possible cares and duties. I have seen in dogs a similar phenomenon: the loss of any desire to go on living. With them the cause is often a build up of physical ailments, allied to a sense that they’ve done everything, seen everything, smelt everything, many times.
Grandfather’s loss of the will to live I associate with the events of Uncle Frank’s last night at Blakemere.
I watched his decline over the two years or so following that night: his increasing difficulty in walking, his use of the bath chair, his needing help even with cutting up his food. And eventually, in the last months, his confinement to his own rooms, with Robert as attendant.
Before that happened, I had one conversation with him that remains in my mind. It was a warm summer’s day, and he had been left in his chair on the terrace. His old face was as baggy and blotchy now as Mr Gladstone’s had been ten years earlier, and his body was very much less active. I was playing with Richard, who was on one of his fortnightly visits, where the meadow begins, just down from the terrace. When I first noticed Grandpapa he was looking into the distance, vacantly, but as I came up the steps to talk to him some little signs of life came into his eyes.
‘It’s a curse, old age, Sarah Jane,’ he said.
I considerately refrained from correcting his version of my name. ‘I can see it is, Grandpapa.’
‘That’s obvious, is it? Well, I suppose if you see an old man in a bath chair with nothing to occupy his mind, it must be pretty clear what an abomination old age is.’
‘If you ever want me to read to you, Grandpapa—’
‘Read? What use is reading now? You read to store up information for the future. I have no future, more’s the pity.’
‘I read for enjoyment, Gra—’ He interrupted me angrily.
‘That sort of reading is nothing more than time-wasting … You know, I used to worry about the future. Not any more. The future will have to take care of itself.’ He looked at me hard. ‘Maybe you’re the future, Sarah Jane.’
‘I don’t want to be, but I suppose if there’s only me … Grandpapa, has anybody heard from Uncle Frank in Australia?’
‘No! And no one’s likely to, or wants to!’ His eyes looked fiercely at me, and I nearly quailed, but didn’t quite.
‘What is Uncle Frank doing there? Is he crossing the Great Australian Desert?’
He cleared his throat loudly. ‘For aught I know. He may do what he likes.’
‘Because Papa thought he was going to settle there, and if he met a lady whom he liked, he might divorce Mary, or she him, and he could have an heir for Blakemere.’
Grandpapa looked down to the meadow, and at Richard’s desultory play, then looked back at me, his eyes dim but angry.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Frank will have no more heirs to Blakemere. Robert! Robert! Where is the man?’
And Robert came out and wheeled him into the house. I went back to Richard, but I looked across the river to the little wood in the distance. Oh, Frank was Down Under all right, I thought, only he wasn’t ten thousand miles away. It was the first time I remember having a thought of such a grimly humorous turn. My life at Blakemere, my experience of the Fearing family, generated many such thoughts in the future.
I found out later that, some months before, my grandfather had changed his will again: minor bequests apart he left everything to my father and then, failing male heirs to him, to me. No mention was made of the estate’s or the Bank’s future after me. That was left entirely in my hands. I don’t know if that was an expression of confidence in me, or one of total bemusement as to what was for the best. But certainly it bound me, tight.
My grandfather’s decline was longer than he or anyone would have wanted. He died in March 1896, and my father was head of Fearing’s Bank and master of Blakemete. And I was his heir.
CHAPTER TEN
The New Broom
My father decidedly took to running the Fearing empire.
He did not, in those early days, significantly change the routines followed year after year by my grandfather. He spent Monday to Thursday in London, staying at a suite in the Savoy, attending diligently to bank affairs by day, dining lavishly and attending light theatrical performances (that was the appeal of the Savoy) in the evenings. On Thursdays, after the bank closed, he came down to Blakemere and stayed till early Monday morning – enjoying shooting, golf, and the traditional hospitality for people who mattered that the Fearings had always gone in for. I remember from that time Mr Asquith (as the coming man) and Joseph Chamberlain, as well as an awkward evening with Thomas Hardy and H.M. Stanley, who seemed to have little in common except a love of vast, unpopulated places. I began to attend, you notice, these dinners, though I resisted any attempts to make me Blakemere’s hostess. I intended to go to University. I was becoming a serious, purposeful young lady.
My grandmother decided that she had done her duty by Blakemere and Fearing’s Bank. It had always, I suspect, been duty, intermixed with little pleasure. She decided to spend her last years in charitable work in London, and in pleasure in the south of France and Italy.
My father asked Aunt Jane to be his hostess at Blakemere. It was an uninspired choice but a wise one. Aunt Jane was used to a place some way down the table, but she knew all the routines of the house and its hospitality: its aims and purposes were clear to her and unquestioned, and if she never sparkled she also never put a foot wrong. My father gave her a dramatically increased dress allowance, and if to modern eyes she would look comically frumpish – like, though one can’t say so, Queen Mary today – in the 1890’s she looked dignified and right.
Who persuaded my mother to leave Blakemere I do not know. Maybe Jane, maybe Grandmama, maybe even my father. Anyway, the embarrassment of her presence was removed: she was set up in an independent establishment in Torquay,
and left with a simple ‘goodbye’ to me. She occasionally indulged in whist with other elderly ladies, was now and then wheeled along the Front, but mostly, I believe, she cosseted her invalidism. She was looked after by a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, who I hope was not unkind to her. On the other hand, I can think of no very good reason why she should have been especially kind.
So my father, Claudius Meyer Fearing, the third of his dynasty, rather flourished in his new state. At the Bank, or with other bankers, his opinion was respected – not perhaps as much as my grandfather’s, but respected as that of one who knew what he was talking about. At Blakemere he was assured of automatic respect and obedience, but I soon became aware, through my network of relationships below stairs, that he received a good deal more than that. He was an example of the position making the man. He no longer had the air of being somehow superfluous. I have just returned from visiting Edith – Miss Roxby that was, Mrs Beale as she became. She is a sad case now, rambling without sense of purpose, now proposing to expound on the Corn Belt in North America, now conjugating irregular French verbs, sometimes sliding on to matters of a more embarrassing kind. This came on quite quickly after Robert died – they were for many years an odd but devoted couple. Seeing her in that nursing home, which tries to be cheery but has an inevitable underlying grimness, sent my mind back to the announcement of her proposed marriage. Now she is eighty-eight, then she was in her late thirties. It was by no means a conventional match – in fact, at the time it was potentially scandalous.
I did not fully understand this in 1896, soon after the death of my grandfather. When Edith told me privately, my comment was unintentionally tactless.
‘I suppose you’re married in all but name already,’ I said.
I was sixteen, but I think I had only very vague ideas about what ‘married in all but name’ might imply. Miss Roxby bit her lip (I think with amusement rather than annoyance) and went on with her explanation. Not a great deal was needed. I knew, and the whole of Blakemere knew, that she and Robert saw a great deal of each other on their free days; and I knew, and below stairs at Blakemere knew, that even in the house they saw a great deal more of each other than a footman and a governess would normally do. It seemed to me perfectly natural that they should decide to get married.
A Mansion and its Murder Page 9
