A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Tea would be fine. This doesn’t really count as a fine day for an Australian.’

  Preparing tea gave me a chance to regain my cool. In the little kitchen, clattering cups and jugs and sugar bowls, I shook off the grip of the chilly hand. Clare’s son had gone to Australia, hadn’t he? Now which one was it? The second one, I thought. What on earth was his name? Her children had become a sort of blur in my mind over the years – they were people of whom one heard vague rumours from time to time, either funny or disquieting ones. Round about 1903, I thought, this one had emigrated. This young man could be his son – or even his grandson. He had not been married at the time he left England, after the affair of the bogus share certificates. Ed could well take after him. He was not good-looking, at least not yet, but his smile suggested he would one day be able to charm the birds from the trees.

  ‘I just realised,’ said the boy’s voice from the kitchen door, ‘I suppose tea is rationed, isn’t it? Is there something I could have that isn’t?’

  ‘Tea is fine,’ I assured him.

  ‘I suppose you can fiddle a bit in your position.’

  ‘In my position I can’t fiddle at all. The newspapers would be down on me like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ the boy conceded. ‘It would be the same in Australia. Tall poppies and all that.’

  ‘Tall poppies?’

  ‘People in authority getting above themselves.’

  ‘Quite right, too. That’s a very healthy attitude. We are the sort of people who should be watched. I rather like the idea of being a tall poppy. Milk? Sugar? Please don’t say no to spare my rations.’

  ‘Yes, then, to both.’ He grinned. His voice, twang and all, was rather attractive, his grin even more so. ‘Can I carry the tray through?’

  When we had gone through to the little sitting room, he put the tray carefully on a small side table over by the window, then stood up to his beanpole height and looked around. ‘Must be a change after the place up there,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘A comedown.’

  I shook my head vigorously. ‘Not at all. Just somewhere where it’s much pleasanter and more comfortable to live. The war gave me the opportunity to do what I’d always wanted: shut up that great barn.’

  ‘What I couldn’t work out,’ he said seriously, ‘walking round it, is: what was it filled up with? What were all the rooms for?’

  ‘It never was filled up. Oh, almost, I suppose, if there was a very large houseparty, or if the Prime Minister and his entourage stayed there at election time. But normally only a fraction of the place was used. Furnished, but not used.’

  ‘I couldn’t see the rooms, of course. Are they the normal size?’

  ‘No. Inflated. Most of them were the normal size times three or four.’

  ‘Upward as well?’

  ‘Upward as well – at least on the ground floor.’

  ‘Not real cosy.’

  ‘Not cosy at all. Cold, drafty, and somehow … dwarfing. You felt small there. Irrelevant. Good for the soul maybe. But I hated it.’

  ‘Why good for the soul?’

  ‘Because it was built to glorify the Fearings, and all we did in it was feel small.’

  ‘But not when you were entertaining those grand houseparties, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘I never did. Luckily by the time I took over they were a thing of the past.’

  Even my father had not been the sort of man to relish playing Master of Blakemere at large, lavish houseparties. We had a medium-sized one once a year in the years before what I think of as the Great War. This was the only piece of entertaining Aunt Jane had to do where she felt slightly out of her depth, or at least out of her element. During those weekends, and reluctantly, I took on some of the hostess’s duties.

  Richard loved these parties, and I always insisted he be introduced to people, allowed to play a part in the games and other activities when he could. Most of the guests were polite and friendly toward him. Those who were not, and especially those who had to hide a revulsion, I noted down, and they were not asked to Blakemere again.

  I was by now working at the Bank. I had had a few months at home after University, then embarked on a continental tour, with a chaperone. I should have chosen someone like Edith, someone with backbone, but I didn’t. Two months in, at Vienna, I found my companion intolerably insipid, the foreign cities tedious in bulk, travel itself distasteful. I cancelled the rest of the tour, returned to Blakemere and told my father he had to find something for me to do at Fearing’s Bank.

  So when we had these (by our standards) modest houseparties they were busy weekends in the midst of a busy but challenging working life in London. One didn’t always know precisely who would be there. This was particularly so when, as often happened as I took over more of the work from my father, I left the business of receiving the guests to Aunt Jane and only came down to Blakemere on the Saturday morning.

  I remember one such party, in the heyday of Asquith, before the suffragette agitation became really violent, when I came down late in this way, greeted Richard, who was waiting for me on the stairs as I used to wait for Uncle Frank, and then, when we had hugged and laughed ourselves into a state of weariness, went out with him and Bertha on to the lawns and watched some of the guests playing croquet, with a little knot of spectators standing around them.

  ‘Everything going well?’ I asked Bertha.

  ‘Oh, yes, miss. Everyone very happy as usual. Many of the gentlemen are out shooting.’

  ‘Of course.’ I suddenly stiffened. ‘Who’s that?’

  My eye had been caught by a shape in one of the little knots of spectators – the set of a woman’s shoulders, a glimpse of her profile. Mr McKay, still butler, though becoming a touch arthritic, had come up behind us.

  ‘That’s Mrs Louisa Brackenbury. Louisa Coverdale as was, Miss Sarah,’ he said quietly.

  ‘For a moment I thought—’

  ‘The resemblance to her sister is striking.’

  ‘I would not be happy if her sister Mary was invited here.’

  He shot me a kind of look that people describe as ‘old-fashioned’.

  ‘I’m sure your father and your aunt Jane would understand your feelings on the point, Miss Sarah.’

  ‘And of course she wouldn’t want to come,’ I said, feeling I’d been foolish.

  I did not manage to speak to the former Louisa Coverdale in the course of the weekend. Or rather, I did not try very hard. The Coverdales were rarely at Tillyards in those days, and the place was already beginning to have a decrepit, unloved appearance. Peter was in the Army, the elder sister was with her husband on the Diplomatic Corps round of foreign cities, Louisa was married, and the parents seemed to prefer living in London on the fashionable fringes of Society. When I went to Tillyards, I rarely went beyond the coachman’s cottage, where Bea and her growing family were still a light in my life, and in Richard’s. I had to ignore, because she insisted that I did, the occasional bruise or cut on her face. She never, I should add, expressed regret at her marriage. That would have meant regret for having her children, the rich delight of her life. They were part of a contract she had entered into with her eyes open. The bruises, nevertheless, made me rage inwardly.

  The sight of such evidences of mistreatment meant that I never recanted on my decision not to marry, never thought wistfully about what it would be like to have children. In any case I had a child: I had Richard.

  The boy Ed was tired that night, and after eliciting from me the assurance that putting him up for a night or two would be no trouble, and after conspicuously holding himself back from eating too much for dinner (he obviously felt that the English were living on iron rations, like an Antarctic expedition), he took himself amiably off to bed, expressing enormous gratitude for it – ‘first for three months, because I don’t call a ship’s bunk a bed’ – and leaving his knapsack and most of its contents in an untidy heap in the corner of the gatehouse’s little living
room.

  I hope I have not given the impression of being a sly, devious, underhand sort of person – at least not more so than a lonely, under-occupied childhood tended to make me. Nevertheless, I have to admit that the first thing I did when I was satisfied he had finished in the bathroom and settled in bed (splendid sound of ancient bed-springs creaking – the bed was from the servants’ quarters at Blakemere, the ones from the house proper being too large for the gatehouse bedrooms) was to go over to the pile of dirty clothes, paperback books, guides, and heavy boots which formed the pile in the corner and rummage in it for the boy’s passport and travel documents. Remember he had arrived out of nowhere, I hadn’t the slightest idea who he was, and he had marked me down as a person of ‘position’ though owning the empty hulk that is Blakemere makes me that, I suppose.

  His name was Edmund Fearing Clements, and he had been born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1925. In an emergency the authorities were requested to contact Paul Edmund Clements of 25 Jacaranda Avenue, Bathurst. The photograph and description of him told me nothing I did not already know. His ticket told me that he had sailed from Sydney on the Stratheden on July 2nd.

  When he came down the next morning, his sleep seemed to have released splendid resources of energy. He glowed.

  ‘Is that for me?’ he asked, seeing me at the stove, and smelling traditional smells. ‘Jeez, I’d rather you didn’t. I feel indebted. I can fill up on toast.’

  ‘Nonsense, toast doesn’t make a breakfast,’ I said. ‘And there’ll be plenty of that, too. This is scrambled egg. It won’t be the best you’ve ever tasted, because I only learnt to cook when the war started and I moved here.’

  ‘Won’t it use up your egg ration?’

  ‘Hens. We’ve always had them at Blakemere. Now we just have a few, over by the stables. A nice woman from the village cycles up every day to feed them and collect the eggs. Here we are.’

  I spooned the eggs on to the toast, handed him his plate, and set some slices of bread in the toaster. Then I sat down at table with the strong coffee I preferred to start the day, and looked at the endearing young man.

  ‘Good sleep?’

  A broad smile illumined his face, like a lopsided crescent moon, and his fair hair flopped down over his forehead as he nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Wonderful! Don’t remember a thing about it.’

  ‘Where have you been staying before?’

  ‘Youth hostels, camping sites, places that did really cheap bed and breakfast. I only docked eight days ago.’

  ‘You didn’t lose much time in coming over when the war ended.’

  ‘Why would I? I decided to take a year off before going to Uni. Where else would I go? I’m going to take in Europe as well.’

  ‘Currency may be a difficulty. And some parts where there’s been heavy bombing are best avoided.’ I watched him spreading marmalade over two slices of toast and launch into the first of them. His activity didn’t stop him taking in everything I said. ‘Did you do any wartime service?’ I asked. He shook his head.

  ‘No, only civilian backup. Unfit.’

  ‘You don’t look in the least unfit to me.’

  ‘Asthma. Anyone can have it – athletes, and that. The physical standard’s very high in the Australian army.’

  ‘I’m sure it is. What does today hold?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Not much you can do in a day.’

  ‘’Course not. I’m prospecting – finding the sorts of places I can stay – youth hostels and that. Can’t bludge on you for long. When I leave here I’ll use a week or so to really do London over.’

  ‘That sounds wise.’

  ‘I’ll try and get some good advice. The Aussies are starting to come back here this summer – not that many, because the papers back home go on about it still being pretty grim in the Old Country. But they say if I head for the Aldwych I’ll find plenty of people my age in the hotels around there.’

  ‘Pubs, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, pubs. They’ll all have tips. We’re good at taking care of ourselves. I thought I’d head for the station at that little place near here.’

  ‘Melbury. Not all the trains stop there. There’s one in half an hour, otherwise you’ll have to get one of the little local trains to Wentwood and take a London train from there.’

  He looked at his watch and got up.

  ‘Half an hour. I can just make it if I run.’

  ‘No – have another piece of toast and another cup of tea. Then I’ll drive you there.’

  He accepted, saying, ‘Just this once,’ and stressed in the car that I wasn’t to make a meal for him that night. When I got back to the gatehouse I took his knapsack and all his stuff up to his bedroom, and systematically went through it. I wondered why I did it, and decided it was the war that had made us all suspicious. Children all had a field day in those years spotting ‘spies’ (usually picking on anyone who was in any way odd or outside the common herd), but in a milder way adults were the same. I was being visited by someone who said he was related to me, but who was news to me. He had not even volunteered so much as a surname when he claimed kinship. I wanted – and I suppose here I was reverting to a sort of Fearing tribalism – to know what he was to me.

  But I found nothing that was in the least revealing as far as personal papers were concerned – no letters from his family, no half-written letters to them, no address book. I would have to ask him.

  Ed got back about ten o’clock that night, and we sat up for an hour or so, drinking a milky nightcap and swapping events of the day.

  ‘Met an old mate of mine, in a … a pub in the Strand,’ Ed said. ‘Used to live in Bathurst, just dropped out of Uni at Sydney to come over and see the Old Country. He and a few cobbers are going to buy an old car if that’s possible – he says we’ll have to pay over the odds – and take off for Europe in it. I think I’ll be in on that. Too good an opportunity to miss.’

  ‘Much too good,’ I agreed. ‘But as I said, there’ll be currency problems.’

  ‘Too right. Nothing but regulations. Suppose it’s normal, all things considered. But we’ll take tents – that way, the only expenses will be fuel and food.’

  ‘How long are you planning to stay over here?’

  The boy frowned. ‘As long as I can, within reason. That will mean getting a job. What prospect of that, would you say?’

  ‘Not too bad. There’s none of the unemployment there was after the Great War, so you wouldn’t be taking a job an ex-serviceman might have had.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Ed admitted. ‘I suppose people would resent me if I did that.’

  ‘They would, but with full employment there’s no problem. What sort of job were you thinking about?’

  ‘Anything – labourer, farmworker, barman, commercial traveller. I can turn my hand to most things.’

  ‘It sounds as if you won’t have much difficulty in getting fixed up with something. Won’t your mother miss you?’

  ‘She wanted me to come. It would be pointless to come for just a few weeks. And she’s got the other two … Wouldn’t mind betting you see them before too long.’

  He was watching my reaction.

  ‘I can cope if it’s the English summer. Brothers? Sisters?’

  ‘One of each.’

  ‘And what does your father do?’

  ‘He’s a lecturer at the local teachers’ college. He’ll miss me more than Mum will.’

  ‘Oh. Why’s that?’

  Ed shifted uneasily in his chair, as if any kind of personal analysis or dissection was foreign to him.

  ‘Dad’s not a happy man. Not too good at his job, not too happy with Mum – it’s like he gets nowhere. People don’t dislike him, they just … don’t think much of him. Take him for granted, switch off when he speaks. It’s not a real happy home.’

  ‘I know all about homes like that.’

  ‘Do you? Anyway, he sort of fixes his hopes on me. Carol’s Mum’s favourite
and I’m his.’

  ‘At least you have some kind of relationship. What are his hopes for you?’

  ‘Oh, maybe champion athlete – runner, footballer.’

  ‘Are you that good?’

  ‘No. To be perfectly honest, I’m not. I’m not built for a footballer. Football to us is what you call Rugby – Rugby League.’

  ‘I’ve dimly heard of it.’

  ‘And I’m not quite fast enough to be a champion runner. I suppose the asthma doesn’t help.’

  ‘Athletes have pretty short careers. It’s not a job for life.’ Ed looked worldly wise.

  ‘In Australia, sport opens doors. Dad would settle for my being a really successful businessman or a top civil servant. Or even going into politics.’

  ‘Politics is pretty dirty in Australia, isn’t it?’

  ‘One degree up from the sewage farm.’

  I smiled.

  ‘We had your man Menzies over here in the war. Seemed to think he ought to be asked to take over the country. We settled for Churchill instead. What about your mother? What does she want for you?’

  The boy smiled.

  ‘Oh, anything that would make me famous, paying good money, anything involving a lovely home, beautiful wife, healthy kids. Do you know what she had me christened?’

  ‘Edmund?’ I said cunningly.

  ‘Edmund Fearing Clements. She sets great store by the connection with the Old Country. I get it from her, calling England that. And she also calls it “home”, though she’s never been here.’

  ‘Hasn’t she? Why not?’

  ‘Married too early, I suppose. There’s a sense of – I suppose you’d call it frustration in our house.’

  At least he was opening up. I was pleased.

  ‘So we’re related through your mother, are we?’

  ‘That’s right. Dad’s family have been Aussies for as long as you like, but Mum’s always been very conscious that her father was born over here.’

  ‘That would be my aunt Clare’s son, I suppose. We were never close. I think his name was Leopold.’