A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  The attitude taken to Blakemere by thirties sophisticates was not one that Ed would have understood. But then, he is young, and colonial. If, as he said, splendour is not something Australia encompasses, how could he have learnt to distinguish bogus from true splendour?

  ‘It’s just … overpowering,’ he said, as we ended our tour. And neither Gabriel nor I would quarrel with that.

  ‘Do you want to go round again on your own?’ I asked. He nodded, wide-eyed still. ‘Well, go on. If you find anything pocketable that you want as a souvenir, just take it.’

  He nodded happily, then his face fell.

  ‘I suppose that means-that this is a once-in-a lifetime experience, and I’m never going to see the place properly opened up?’

  ‘Yes – I think I can promise you that you won’t.’

  He shook his head sadly, but he went off, doubly determined to absorb and fix in his memory as much as he could of this wonderful place. Gabriel and I shook our heads at his naive enthusiasm, then we went to the Great Entrance Hall and sat on the bottom step of the staircase.

  ‘Should you have told him to take something?’ he asked.

  ‘The temptation would have been irresistible anyway. That’s not thieving, that’s souvenir hunting. You know there’s nothing here I value.’

  Then we put the house out of our minds and got on to Labour Party business. It was quite a while before Ed came back, and when he did he stood for some minutes in the Hall, looking up, around and down, taking it in, making it part of his mental landscape. Though I thought he was misguided, I liked him for it. Enthusiasm is always attractive. At last he tore himself away from the sights and came over.

  ‘It’s been the experience of a lifetime,’ he said. ‘I want to thank you, but I can’t find the right words.’

  ‘I’ve quite enjoyed seeing the old place,’ I said briskly, getting up.

  ‘Oh, by the way, I took this,’ he said, pulling something out of his pocket. It was a corkscrew in the typical Blakemere style, with a large knobbly handle of pure silver.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ I said. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Back of a drawer in … well, I’m not sure what: one of the drawing rooms, I reckon.’

  ‘Well, I wish you luck of it, and plenty of good bottles to use it on. Now let’s go out into the sunlight. I think I shall feel like Lord Carnarvon emerging from the tomb of Tutankhamen. Let’s go and turn off the lights.’

  That done, and the place restored to decent darkness, we made a torchlight procession to the Great Entrance Hall. We went out through the main door, and I turned to lock it. The heavy clanking sounded symbolically final to me. It was still a bright, not-too-warm sunlight outside, and the rolling countryside looked green and inviting. We walked down the broad steps and got into the car. Ed was very quiet.

  ‘Well, it was interesting to see the old place again,’ said Gabriel, cheerful but unawed. ‘That’s where my mother became the sort of person she was.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ I agreed. ‘She was the first person who was kind to me. The old place must have taught her something good.’

  ‘Was your mother a Fearing?’ Ed asked Gabriel.

  He laughed. ‘No. She was a sort of upper-parlourmaid here. I don’t know the technical title.’

  ‘She is part of my earliest memories here,’ I said. ‘She was with me when I talked to Mr Gladstone.’

  ‘Mr Gladstone!’ almost shouted Ed.

  ‘Yes. I was a little girl, and I was taken to see him at the very grand dinner we were giving for him. He beckoned to me to go over and was nice to me in his way.’

  Ed subsided into silence. It was as if I’d said I’d talked to Napoleon Bonaparte or Alexander the Great.

  When we got back to the gatehouse I put on the kettle for tea, and began buttering some scones. There had been a letter for Ed in the afternoon post, but he just put it in his pocket and wandered round in a dream, sometimes going outside and looking toward Blakemere, then wandering back in but not settling down to anything. Looking into his face, I understood for the first time the word ‘moonstruck’.

  ‘I still can’t take it in,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘Blakemere’s a house that’s difficult to digest.’

  ‘You’re so cynical about it,’ he protested.

  ‘You would be if you’d lived in it for long,’ said Gabriel, coming to my defence. ‘It’s just a filthy-rich Victorian banker’s folly.’

  ‘Just!’ came back Ed. ‘There’s no just about that place.’

  And there at least he was right. Blakemere is the filthy-rich Victorian banker’s folly magnified to the nth degree. Over tea and scones Ed showed he was still in his dream world.

  ‘Now the war’s over and things are getting back to normal,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘you could open up the house, have house-parties again. People motoring down for the weekend, playing tennis and croquet. You say there’s a golf course out there somewhere. You could have it restored. You could have parties – I bet there’s wonderful wine in the cellars, isn’t there? People will want to have fun again, like in the twenties. And you could host political gatherings. The politicians of all parties, getting together to solve the nation’s problems. And international ones, too. You’d be the ideal person to be hostess, spanning both groups. You’d be good at bringing people together, too. You’ve certainly made me feel at home.’ He faded into grateful silence.

  ‘To take your first point,’ said Gabriel, ‘the war is over, but things are not getting back to normal.’

  ‘No they’re not,’ I said, in agreement. ‘And perhaps you’ll tell me where I’m going to find the gardeners and the greensmen, the chefs and the footmen, the parlourmaids and the skivvies. They were difficult to find between the wars; now they’d be impossible. They don’t exist any more, and they’ll never come back. The world has changed. People have done war work now, and been properly paid for it, so even in the rural districts they’re not going back to being slave labourers at slave rates on the farms and big estates.’

  Ed looked down into his lap, so I added: ‘You’ll understand when you’ve been in Britain longer.’

  As I got up to refresh the teapot he leant forward for a scone, and felt his letter crinkle in his pocket. He took out an airmail envelope and slit it open with a table knife. When I got back from the kitchen he was deep in his letter.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ I asked.

  ‘My father,’ he mumbled. ‘Whingeing on. Says he and Mum are having rows. Tell me something new.’ He read through to the end, then slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Anyway, he’s solved the question of who I am.’

  ‘Who you are?’

  ‘I mean who I am in the Fearing clan. He says that Mum’s father was Frank Fearing. Suppose if you knew Mr Gladstone you must have known him.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ed and I

  I will not seek to justify what I did next. I will just tell you what it was. You are by now in a position to make your own judgments of me.

  The following morning, when Ed had gone on a hiking excursion on public footpaths in the direction of Northampton, I went up to his room. I was glad I didn’t need to rummage through his baggage to find the letter from his father. It was on his bedside table, together with his reading matter, Lost Horizon, by James Hilton. I opened the letter, put on my reading glasses, and scanned it. It was closely typed on an old and dirty typewriter, and it made the most of every square inch of the sheet of wafer-thin paper.

  Dear Ed, it began,

  Glad to have an address to write to, and your mum’s glad she knows how to get in touch. The cold weather doesn’t suit your mother, chilblains as usual, the girls have copped it. Me too! … [I omit here a lot of domestic moans.] Things are changing out here, Ed. The servicemen are coming home, we’ve got a lot of them at the College. They’ve done a lot for the Country, no doubt about that Ed, but they are older and have their own ideas after serving overseas many of them so
they are not easy to teach. As usual I seem to get all the Bolshie ones, just my luck. [I omit a lot of professional whingeing, to adopt Ed’s lovely word.] It was good to hear you and Miss Sarah Fearing are getting on like a house on fire. She is an influential person, quite apart from being a fabulously rich one. I always said to your mum that she ought to make contact with her family, but she accused me of wanting their money, which is daft, but if you’ve got rich people closely related to you it doesn’t make sense to ignore them does it. [I was beginning to hope that Ed’s father did not teach English at that Teachers’ College of his. If he did, I had every sympathy with his Bolshie ex-serviceman students.] So what I say is, get well in there, Ed. It can’t be bad, can it. And if she’s a nice woman like you say it would be a real leg up for you. I think you ought to make a long stay over there now you are there. Would send money but it’s scarce – you know how it is.

  Your loving Dad

  I folded up the crisp paper. I was beginning to get a rather vivid picture in my mind of Ed’s dad, and I didn’t like it much. Mind you, to be fair to Ed, I had the impression that he didn’t like him much, either.

  I was about to put the letter back in precisely the position it had been in on his bedside table when I realised I had not found what I had been looking for. I read the letter through carefully again: nothing about the name of Ed’s grandfather. I was puzzled. If it was not in the letter, why had he only brought it out after reading it? Then I suddenly saw a note on the back of the envelope, beside the boy’s home address in Bathurst. It was a scrawled note in immature handwriting, and it read:

  Tell your cousin your grandfather’s name was Frank Fearing.

  I put the letter back on the little table and went about my work.

  But as I did so, I thought. The note seemed to be in response to a query in a letter from Ed – perhaps one that arrived after his father’s letter had been written and sealed, perhaps one only remembered after it had been. Probably the former, I thought, since his father obviously set great store by ‘getting well in’ with me. On reflection I realised there was an ambiguity in the note: ‘Tell your cousin your grandfather’s name was Frank Fearing’ was decidedly different from saying, ‘Your grandfather’s name was Frank Fearing.’ I mulled over this for some time.

  But as I faced the conundrum in intervals of going over Foreign Office papers, I began to see it differently. First of all, I did not get the impression that Ed’s dad was the sort of person who would have scrupled to tell a lie. Morally grubby was how I would describe him, on the basis of Ed’s description and the letter. The distinction between the two formulas was one that would have been relevant if he was morally finicky, but not if he was morally opaque. Still, the question remained, however he chose to say it: was the claim that Ed’s maternal grandfather was Frank Fearing true or false? That I had no means of judging. The only fact that I had that might be relevant was that Ed had pretty obviously not been primed up with the facts of his ancestry before he set out. I pondered the implications of this, and after a time a further possibility occurred to me: that scrawled postscript could be the result of a late-arriving letter from his son asking him to say that his grandfather was called Frank Fearing. I ran over all our conversations about the family in my mind: could I have given away to Ed my very special feelings toward my uncle Frank?

  I didn’t start cooking dinner till Ed arrived back, brown and sweaty but apparently happy, in the gathering twilight. I had by now procured a ration book for him, but to an Australian appetite the portions were tiny, and the lack of choice dreary. He never said anything, but I had the impression he didn’t care for liver, but liver is what we had. I made up for it with a wildly extravagant cheese soufflé, made with the eggs from our hens and the mousetrap cheese which is all we can get at the local grocer’s – practically all one can get any where. Fortunately it rose like a bird, and was light and scrumptious.

  ‘How did you learn to cook?’ Ed asked, licking his spoon, always the best compliment.

  ‘I got myself a book at the beginning of the war, when I moved down to this place,’ I said, remembering. ‘And of course there are lots of women around here, old kitchen staff at Blakemere, willing to teach me and give me a hand when necessary. Then when I started working at – somewhere I can’t talk about – I was completely on my own and it was a matter of trial and error.’

  ‘Why can’t you talk about this place?’

  ‘Still hush-hush. Code-breaking and suchlike. It was very flattering to be recruited. If I was a private person now I might be cynical about the ban on talking about it, now the war is over, but in my job I can’t afford to be. And then, the question is: is the war over?’

  Ed nodded wisely, but I rather suspected he knew little or nothing about international affairs. He always gives me the impression that the only ties Australians are willing to acknowledge are with the Mother Country.

  ‘Anyway, you learnt,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I learnt. Though trial and error is a bit painful when you’re living on tiny rations,’ I added ruefully.

  ‘My mum couldn’t do anything like this,’ he said, gesturing to the soufflé dish.

  ‘Hardly the sort of thing the mother of a good-sized family is likely to go in for,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your mother.’

  He had given me the opening I had wanted. I didn’t intend the talk to end with his mother.

  ‘Mum? Oh, we just about rub along, but no more. If I try and be fair I can see that she’s plenty to grumble about: she married a no-hoper, then got trapped with three children – end of story. What has she to look forward to when we grow up and escape the nest? No life, no outside interests. Dad had a job in a local school, wasn’t much of a teacher, got the job at the Teachers’ College through having contacts. In these small towns in Australia it’s the people you know … But at least he has a job, and quite a good one. Mum just sits at home and cooks the meals. I can see why it’s not enough.’

  ‘What was her background?’

  ‘Oh, brought up on a property fifty miles out of town.’

  ‘A property?’

  ‘Local sheep station – quite a small one. Not particularly prosperous – just about survived the Depression. But being from a sheep property gives you a certain prestige.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Grandma didn’t help. I remember her quite well – she died just before the war, not that old. Nice woman, sense of fun, but a bit of a stickler. She was from Geelong, and felt rather superior to New South Wales people. Always insisted on good table manners, on being respectfully spoken to. Dad sometimes whispered that she had had to get married – I think that was his revenge for her snootiness.’

  ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s a wedding photograph in our front room. If Mum’s not there, Dad will say: “Taken late 1897; your mother was born March 1898.” If you don’t know, it doesn’t show; but if you look real close it sets you thinking. Not that it’s earth-shattering fifty years on, but Dad likes his little dig.’

  I made a concession, and went along with the presumption of his grandfather’s identity.

  ‘My uncle Frank was said to have one or two by-blows in this area. It’s not something I’ve ever been into. Start to make inquiries and they might be on your doorstep demanding handouts.’

  Ed grinned. ‘I’m surprised they don’t anyway.’

  ‘Knowing my family they probably paid the mothers lump sums and made them sign some absolutely binding declaration forswearing any further claims on the Fearing family … Does your mother make a big thing about being one of the Fearings by birth?’

  He shuffled in his seat. His height made it a long shuffle.

  ‘No … Tell you the truth, I don’t think it would mean much in Australia. I don’t suppose most people would have heard of Fearing’s Bank.’

  ‘That puts us in our place. I should have thought of that. Did your mother tell you to make contact with me?’

  We were straying near to d
oubtful territory. Ed again showed incipient embarrassment.

  ‘No. It was more my father. My mother just shrugged and said, “Can’t do any harm. Don’t expect them to part with any of their money, though. Dad never got anything out of them.” And by the way, I don’t expect you to part with any of your money. It’s the last thing on my mind.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Rich people never part with it readily.’ But what he had said had interested me. ‘I suppose your mother resented her father having to struggle through the Depression without support from his family back home?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘It was my grandmother who pulled the place through those years. He was a lot older than her, of course, and tired. She shouldered the burden, from all I’ve heard.’

  ‘You don’t remember your grandfather much, you said?’

  ‘Hardly at all: sitting on his knee and pulling at this grey beard; and a vague feeling that he was a joker, someone who laughed a lot. He died when I was five, I think.’

  Around 1930, then. My uncle Frank was born in the mid-1850’s. So a good long life – if it was his. A thought struck me.

  ‘But your mother didn’t inherit the … property.’

  ‘Good Lord, no. She’d have been hopeless at running it. It’s not woman’s work, for all my grandmother took to it so well. Though my dad would have been still worse. No, it naturally went to my uncle Jack, her younger brother. He’d helped his mother, and took it over after her death. He’s still running it. We don’t see much of him. He doesn’t get on with my dad – or my mum, particularly. He’s a real outback character – tanned and wrinkled and slow, and full of dry jokes. Has a big family – five sons and three daughters.’

  Sons! Male Fearings! What the family had demanded of Frank, hidden away in the Australian bush. If Grandpapa had not changed his will just before he died they would have been – if legitimate – heirs to Blakemere and to Fearing’s Bank. Unless of course their father was Clare’s Leopold under a false name, or another of her brood escaping from a cloud in the Old Country. The more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed that the explanation lay there. One could see a son of Leopold’s being a bit of a joker, and fathering a large family. Though he would have to have escaped the family curse of unreliability and general hopelessness.