A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Search me. He died when I was about five. It’s Mum who has this thing about family. I think you’re what you are, not what your ancestors way back were.’

  Admirable sentiments. But they didn’t explain why, a week after docking at Southampton, he turned up on my doorstep, having done a preliminary reconnaissance of Blakemere.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Taking Over

  The great joy of my early womanhood was not love, not ‘sex’, but learning my trade of banker.

  You will say this was unnatural, you may even say it was contrary to what you know of my early life, so cynical had I always been of the Fearing Family and its self-worship as one of the world’s great banking firms. You may feel that I sold my soul for a mess of financial pottage. I see it quite differently. I was learning to take my place as one of the country’s leading bankers, and I was the first woman who would occupy such a position. I am still the only woman who has done so, and I look like remaining the only one for quite a time. I was also one of the few women in the country in any position of great power and responsibility. Even now I am proud of that fact. To the younger me, bright and determined, it was heady stuff.

  There again, it was a job of intense interest, particularly to someone with my sort of brain and my interests. It was also extremely complex – a many-layered vocation, which it seemed would take a lifetime to learn. Did I take too long learning it, did I labour over details when I should have intuitively got to its heart? I don’t think so. I believe I understood the profession’s complications and reverberations, as my grandfather had done, and as I think my father did not. I should say that I don’t think I was hindered by people putting obstacles in my way. Oh, they did that all right: women were alien beings to most men in the banking world, particularly the older ones. But the more they tried to thwart me, the more they tried to withhold information or advice they would readily have given to a young man, the more I delighted in finding out and deciding for myself – and perhaps subsequently parading before them the fact that I did not need them or their help. It became a sort of game, a battle. I almost always won.

  ‘Sarah has a man’s brain,’ my father used to say, proudly.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I would say, looking round at whatever the company was that was being boasted to, ‘but I don’t think there are such things as men’s or women’s brains.’

  The more competent I became at all aspects of the job, the more my father – I was about to say let go the reins, but it was not quite that. My father got great pleasure out of being Claudius Fearing, the banker – enjoyed being Fearing’s Bank. But the more I mastered one area of the profession, the more he was inclined to leave that area to me.

  ‘See Sarah about that,’ he would say to a colleague or underling, without thinking there was anything unusual (or demeaning to him) in the order. ‘She’s the expert on that.’

  So something of his old dilettante side reasserted itself, and he found he could take life more easily – travel, visit in other great houses, simply relax. Sometimes he would take down a musical comedy star or ‘Gaiety girl’ to Blakemere. It caused no scandal. This was the Edwardian era. The King set the tone, and the King’s penchant for actresses who could mix in Society circles was well known. My father’s ladies were in the lighter branches of the trade, but Aunt Jane always talked to them as if they were serious artists (‘I’m sure the world is waiting for your Juliet’), and at dinner she would question them about what she fondly imagined were the latest trends in contemporary theatre: ‘Is Mr Pinero writing another of his controversial pieces?’

  It was during the Great War that I strengthened my position at Fearing’s Bank, and put the succession beyond question. That was in every way appropriate: with the men away being slaughtered like cattle at the front, women in Britain were learning new skills, taking on heavier labour, finding there were few jobs that absolutely demanded a man’s greater strength. When my father was not in London, and sometimes when he was, I was in charge at the Bank’s headquarters in Watling Street, and whatever was said by the older functionaries behind my back, my authority was unquestioned to my face.

  ‘It’s a completely new world,’ said my father, both admiring and complaining. ‘An old buffer like me doesn’t feel at home any more.’

  The human abattoirs in northern France hit my father very hard. All the younger men he knew seemed to have been taken: clerks from the bank, ingénue young performers from the Doyly Carte, footmen and gardeners and stable lads from Blakemere. For all of them he knew well he shed a tear, until by 1916 the well seemed to have dried up, and when the news of further deaths were brought to him, he just shook his head and went on with his work. My mother’s death, soon after the war’s end, brought even less reaction from him.

  ‘Will you go to the funeral?’ he asked, coming to my office.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not. You’re quite right. I shan’t go myself. The time for these hypocrisies is past. We’ll send Jane.’

  Aunt Jane, he clearly implied, had not outgrown the hypocrisies of the past – and essentially he was right: decent reticence and a covering up of any cause of embarrassment were as much a part of her view of life in 1919 as they had been in 1885. She was most distressed that we both refused to go to the funeral, and the day after my mother was expensively buried (in that respect, at least, we conformed to expectations), she telephoned, greatly daring, to say that she thought of stopping on in Torquay for a few weeks to recoup her strength after the ‘terrible years’ of the War. A few days later, my father wrote to her to tell her that, if she preferred to settle there, that was perfectly all right by both of us, and of course her income was assured.

  ‘Blakemere’s days as a great house are numbered,’ he wrote. ‘It is now a dinosaur of a building.’

  Aunt Jane did prefer the gentilities of Torquay to a reduced Blakemere, and she soon got around her a satisfactory circle of acquaintance, for if Blakemere was a house of the past, the name Fearing still counted for something. The air of her little group was heavy with nostalgia for the Old Days – for standards, courteous manners, people who knew their place. Contrariwise there was a bitterness about the war, about Trade Unions, about universal education, and about anything else that was held to be responsible for the passing of the old way of life. Aunt Jane did not have the sort of brain that might have questioned what lay behind the old facade of standards and courtesies.

  ‘Jane has the mind of a suet pudding,’ said Aunt Sarah, after a visit to her at Torquay. I saw little of Aunt Sarah, but I judged that on balance she had not only the better brain, but had had the better life – quirkiness, oddity, obsessions notwithstanding. I intended to have a better life still.

  My father closed down four-fifths of Blakemere after the war. There was no way such a battleship of a house could be staffed in the 1920’s. He simply had stairways and corridors boarded up, and had curtains hung over the boards. The trouble was, the rooms we still lived in were the same old large, cold, drafty, intimidating rooms we had always lived in – altogether too ludicrously grand, and no less so with the bulk of the house shut down. Since we had almost never gone into the boarded-up sections, it made very little difference. And the reduced number of servants – a regiment, rather than an army – still cooked and cleaned and ministered to us very much as before.

  The end came for my father in 1925. We were by now so close it was almost incredible to think back to my forlorn, unloved state as a child. That was something he never referred to, even when he suspected he had not long to live. He had had a minor heart attack while out shooting, and was brought back to the house by two of the male servants. I think he knew this was only a first warning, and there was more to come. Three evenings later, I sat by his bed, holding his hand in mine, and he said, ‘I was never involved with the Frank business, Sarah.’

  I just nodded, and clutched his hand tighter. He had a second, more serious attack during the night, and died alone.


  After his day in London, Ed spent a few days around Blakemere. After two nights, he asked me if I wanted him to move on, and I told him he could stay as long as it suited him. I liked having him around. And quite apart from that, I was curious. I wanted to find out who he was.

  He made some phone calls the next day to people he had met in London, and talked about the trip they planned to take to poor old war-damaged Europe. He scrupulously left threepence or sixpence by the phone after each call. I quietly accepted them. As my grandfather used to say, without a hint of a smile, ‘If you’re rich, people think you’re made of money.’

  Ed wanted to be of help, he said; he didn’t want to ‘bludge’. I gathered from the context this meant he wanted to pay his way by doing something useful. He didn’t want suggestions, however, and in his roamings around Blakemere with the dogs he decided he wanted to cut the lawns, to see how the house would have looked in its heyday. I wasn’t at all sure this could be categorized as useful. I had had practically nothing done in the Blakemere grounds since September 1939, and I saw no reason to now.

  ‘The grass is practically waist high,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to get at it with a scythe before you can use the mowers.’

  ‘A scythe? I’ve never used one of those.’

  ‘Nobody much does these days. I’ll see if I can find one in the stables.’

  I certainly couldn’t use a scythe myself, but when I had disentangled one from a heap of old garden implements, and when he had sharpened it with a whetstone, I could demonstrate the sort of movements that I had seen the gardeners and farm labourers use with them in the days of my childhood.

  ‘I’ll soon get the hang,’ said Ed, cheerfully. And he did. When I went back at midday with a packet of sandwiches, most of the croquet lawn was down to manageable height, and he was about to get working on the great lawn beside the Terrace.

  ‘It’s a piece of cake once you’ve got the knack,’ he said, sitting down beside me.

  ‘I can’t afford any fuel for the motor mowers, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘If you want them looking as they used to look it’ll have to be the hand mowers or nothing.’

  ‘She’ll be right. I’ve nothing else to do.’

  ‘You should be travelling around, seeing the country.’

  ‘You soon get indigestion if you do nothing but that. You have to have periods in between when you just relax – give the eyes and the mind a rest.’

  ‘I suppose that’s sensible,’ I admitted. ‘I never went much on sightseeing myself.’

  ‘You must have seen the world – done the Grand Tour and all that.’

  ‘I started one, but it was truncated: I got bored.’

  ‘Bored? With so much to see?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Don’t you like Europe?’

  ‘I’ve nothing against it. Before the war I used to go to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam – just for a few days. To eat well, in Paris to go to the theatre, the Opera. To tell you the truth, I was always glad to get home, and back to work.’

  ‘I suppose if you’ve got this’ – Ed waved his hand at the brooding mass of the boarded-up Blakemere – ‘you wouldn’t want to sightsee at other grand places.’

  ‘Possibly having this, as you call it, may have made me a bit sceptical or cynical about “grand places”.’

  He paused in his munching of his egg-and-cress sandwich and looked at me. His face is individual, but rather attractive, perched on the top of his beanpole body. When that fills out, he will break hearts.

  ‘Will you show me round?’ he said suddenly.

  I shot him a glance, I think a suspicious one.

  ‘Blakemere? … I can’t unboard the place, you know.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’

  ‘I don’t know. We have rich people in Australia, but this is something … something way out of our line.’

  ‘Well, I suppose since I had the power turned off, I can turn it on again, for an hour or two. I’ve got the main door keys at the gatehouse …’ I felt I had to warn him. ‘But it’s a terrible barn of a place, you know. Everything overdone: too grand, pretentious, heavy. There was no judgment went into it. Money, but no judgment. Much of it is laughable, in dreadful taste.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I have good taste myself.’

  I shrugged. ‘Admittedly taste changes from generation to generation. But I don’t think Blakemere will ever be admired. In fact, I imagine that in a few years it will be a ruin.’

  ‘All the more reason to see it now. It’s part of my family background. And even if some of it is in terrible taste, it has – I can see from the outside – one thing that you never get in Australia.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Splendour.’

  It was only a week or two after my father’s death that I heard rumours that Bankside School was in difficulties, or at any fate going through a bad patch. I was in the thick of taking over – not of taking over the Bank, where most things had been in my hands for some time, but in taking over Blakemere. Even with a reduced staff, with the shutting off of so much of the place and the decision to let most of the land revert to pasture, there was still much to be done, and it was labour without love. I didn’t think ‘why me?’ where the Bank was concerned, but I did very much think it where Blakemere was concerned. I decided to take an afternoon off, and drive into Wentwood to talk to Edith and Robert.

  I took Richard with me – he was then in the last year of his life. I have not said much about Richard, because there is not much to say. He had grown but he had not grown up. He was the same loving, simple, rather lethargic person he had always been, and I loved him as I loved no one else. He was my link with the past. His day-to-day existence had been transformed by a bright idea in the first year of the war, when he had been given a piece of kitchen garden all his own. Tending it, growing vegetables, lavishing on them all the love he had left over from his small circle of loved ones, became his existence, and a very joyful one it was. He readily agreed to come to Wentwood, though, because Edith and Robert, who both treated him with a brisk and unsentimental affection, had always been among his favourite people.

  I let myself be chauffeur-driven. I drove myself as a rule, and with great pleasure, but so soon after the funeral, in deep mourning, it seemed right to have a chauffeur take us. What odd ideas we had, only twenty years ago, and how the hypocrisies my father spoke of did cling on!

  We all had tea and cakes together, after I had been welcomed at the door by Robert and had looked around a bit, wondering whether the place had outlived its time. When we had eaten (and Edith and Robert always did themselves very nicely in the food line), Robert took Richard off to the gardens, and to watch the girls playing tennis. Robert always realised that Edith and I went so far back we liked to talk alone.

  Edith’s hair was grey now, her figure firm but substantial, and she looked like – was probably seen by the girls as – a typical mid-Victorian headmistress. How very untypical she was, I was one of the few to know, though I’m sure her husband’s job before marriage was still the subject of whisperings in Wentwood.

  ‘You’ll be thinking of selling the school and retiring soon, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘I will not.’ said Edith, in her most emphatic voice. ‘What would we do? One thing about owning your own school is that no one can tell you when you have to retire.’

  ‘Is the school doing well?’

  Her eyes glinted. Edith was never easily fooled. She certainly always saw through me.

  ‘Not as well as it used to do. I suppose you’ve heard that?’

  ‘Yes. I wondered as I came through: is the problem that you’re starting to seem old-fashioned?’

  ‘It is, partly. We’re not old fashioned, not in the things that matter. What we teach, how we teach it, is bang up-to-date, and we’ve several young and enthusiastic teachers here. But we look frowsty and Victorian.’

  ‘People are so silly, judging b
y look.’

  ‘When we started up we had to be absolutely strict, the proprieties personified.’ She looked at me straight, her way when talking around something we would do best not to talk about openly. ‘Because of my marriage nothing else would do. Well, we’re modifying the school uniform, we’re having a complete redecoration of the schoolrooms and the dormitories. But it takes time before the general public becomes conscious of these things.’

  ‘Do you want to advertise?’

  ‘Advertise, yes. But also to pick out the potential patents – I know this town through and through, know all the families with girls of the right age – and write them individual letters, stressing that we unite a modern syllabus with traditional standards and strict codes of behaviour. It will be what a lot of them will want. I really do believe it will work.’

  ‘Do you want a loan? Would a thousand pounds help?’

  She shook her head. ‘Five hundred would be more than enough. And it would be a loan – with appropriate interest.’

  ‘I don’t take interest from my friends. You were a lifeline to me when I had practically no one else.’

  ‘I’m a poor friend to you now. We’ve hardly said anything about your father’s death. You must feel awfully alone, over there in that barn of a place.’

  ‘Not much more than before,’ I said, making light of what she said, though it was true. ‘You know, my father and I had got to be quite close over the last twenty years or so, but it’s more like losing a valued and trusted colleague than a father.’

  ‘Yes. That sounds odd, but I can understand it.’

  ‘He’d had the attack two days earlier, and that was a warning. He knew he might not have long … Do you know what he said to me before he died?’

  ‘No.’

  Was I wrong in suspecting an access of tension in her body? ‘He said: “I was never involved in that Frank business.”’