A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘I … well, no. I never met any of Uncle Frank’s women friends. I heard talk – I overheard talk, to be absolutely frank – about his having illegitimate children.’

  ‘Quite. But you heard no talk about the mothers?’

  ‘No. I’ve never known anything about them. I assumed they were paid off.’

  ‘Oh, they were. The Fearings are good at paying off people, aren’t they? The point was (I’m told – of course I knew nothing of the women personally) that the mothers were very young. Thirteen in one case, fourteen in another. It was whispered that his taste ran exclusively to very young girls of a … let’s say working-class background. Rural or metropolitan, I believe. There was talk, my husband told me, at the Travellers Club of girls in Whitechapel and suchlike areas of London.’

  ‘But … but … I can see why Uncle Frank had to pick someone very different from the sort of girl he preferred, but I still can’t see why the marriage took place at all, if your sister was so hostile to the idea of matrimony.’

  Lady Talbot-Boothe was silent for a moment.

  ‘I was not there, you understand … I think the marriage was in the nature of a bargain.’

  ‘And what Uncle Frank offered your sister Mary was—?’

  ‘The future as hostess of Blakemere.’

  That certainly squared with what I had overheard and what I had felt by intuition at the time. Mary had not been at all as contemptuous as her sister had imagined of the meretricious appurtenances of a rich banking family, and nor for that matter had her father. I remembered my sight of him in the gallery, costing our pictures.

  ‘I certainly had the impression while your sister was living at Blakemere,’ I said carefully, ‘that she was carving a niche for herself as the future mistress of the house.’

  ‘Mary was a vigorous, enterprising person. She enjoyed exercising power, being responsible for people, places, for things going well. A type not unlike yourself, perhaps.’

  I swallowed, but did not rise to the bait. ‘Go on.’

  ‘She had great drive, ambition, organising ability – she could galvanize people to work for her. She would have made a wonderful chatelaine for Blakemere.’

  More likely she’d have galvanized half of Buckinghamshire into a peasants’ revolt, I thought grimly. And this power house apparently spent most of her days as companion to an elderly relative. I felt great pity for the relative in question.

  ‘What chance would she have had of exercising all those gifts as a spinster, as things were then?’

  ‘Precious little,’ I agreed. ‘You had to make your own chances, as a woman.’

  ‘She did, or tried to. She swallowed her pride, and her distaste, and … came to an understanding with your uncle.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, but getting only a glimmer. ‘And that was—?’

  ‘That she would marry him, but once an offspring had been conceived it would be a marriage in name only, and … relations would only be resumed if the offspring turned out to be female. Once a male heir was born they would cease for good.’

  I wrinkled my nose in distaste. It added a new layer of sordidness to an already self-interested marriage. My informant did not seem to share my distaste – accepted it as a matter of course.

  ‘It suited them both,’ said the onetime Miss Coverdale. ‘Your uncle was explicitly empowered to follow his own interests as long as the marriage lasted.’

  I took her up on one of her words. ‘Explicitly? Do you mean this was all in writing?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They went in secret to a lawyer and had a formal document drawn up. How far it would have had any legal validity I don’t know, but Mary would only marry on those terms.’

  ‘It sounds so … so unlike my uncle Frank.’

  ‘Did you really know him? Can a child ever know anyone with the passions and cares of an adult?’

  It was a fair point, though pretentiously put. ‘I’m beginning to think not.’

  ‘It was an excellent bargain from his point of view. Apart from getting his debts paid by the family, he got a marriage in which he was virtually free to do whatever he wanted. And he had provided an excellent hostess for Blakemere.’

  That set me thinking. If I did not understand my uncle Frank, I at least knew him, which this unpleasant woman probably never had. Distasteful as I found the arrangement, and despite the poor light in which it cast my beloved uncle, I seemed to detect in it a glint of his characteristic humor. Frank wouldn’t have cared a fig about providing Blakemere with a hostess. But I wondered whether, forced to marry by the pressures of his family, he hadn’t got his own back by providing them with the sort of woman who would use her position to boss and blackmail them when it suited her, or ignore them when that was her whim. He – the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of the family – would have recognised that it would have been a takeover of the vulgar Fearings and their ostentatious home by the gentry – and by one of the gentry who possessed all their worst qualities at their sharpest: their snobbery, their ludicrous pride of birth, their rudeness, their arrogance. His parents would have hated her, his brother, too, all Blakemere’s army of staff. It was a clever piece of revenge.

  ‘I think I’m beginning to understand.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t know more yourself,’ she said, the glint back in her malicious, baggy eyes.

  ‘Nobody told me,’ I said simply.

  ‘Well, of course it all had to be kept secret, but I would have thought that you … Anyway, as you know, the marriage went ahead, after my father had laid down stiff financial terms, which meant a good settlement on Mary for life. You were at the wedding, I believe, and by the time they came back from their honeymoon Mary was in the family way.’

  ‘I remember Uncle Frank looking so … jaunty.’

  ‘It was because the bargain was fulfilled, and he was now free to pursue his real interests,’ she said sourly. ‘He was a complete degenerate, your uncle.’

  ‘“Judge not, that ye be not judged,”’ I said.

  The reply came back with the speed of a pistol shot.

  ‘I have no fear of being judged on that sort of score, I assure you!’

  The mouth set in a firm, self-righteous line, but a fleshy pouch wobbled beside it, the sunken remnant of a blooming cheek. I waited. She would tell me what I wanted to know. She herself wanted so much to tell it. My ignorance acted as a stimulant, an aphrodisiac. ‘The pregnancy apparently went well. Mary never was told there was cause for disquiet. I believe the best medical man was called in.’

  ‘Possibly. The most expensive is not necessarily the best.’

  ‘Quite!’ She seized on this as more evidence of my family’s vulgar ostentation. I was perfectly happy to admit it. ‘My sister was in her element those months, I’m told. She was not obliged to have a great deal to do with your family, and she began to get her own people around her … people who were pleased to have a good old local family established at Blakemere. It would have given … legitimacy to the place. When it came, the labour was long and hard—’

  ‘I remember it,’ I said. ‘I think it was then I decided I would never go through that myself.’

  ‘—but the result was satisfactory, at least to all appearances. Things fell apart as soon as it was realised Richard was an idiot.’

  ‘I would rather you did not use that word,’ I said in a hard voice.

  ‘Retarded,’ she said, with a contemptuous wave of the hand. ‘I’m afraid I don’t come from a squeamish generation. I call things by their names. Mary blamed the doctors, of course.’

  ‘She may have been right, though I never saw any evidence.’

  ‘She was determined to have the next one in London, where she could be sure of the best attention. She wanted the boy put away in an institution. But what she wanted above all was another heir to Blakemere. She was by now determined to be its hostess. And there was no reason to think a second child would be anything other than normal and healthy.’

  ‘And my uncle Fr
ank refused to … resume relations.’

  ‘Absolutely. I think maybe Mary didn’t play her cards well. She couldn’t hide her distaste for the boy Richard. She had always hated things that were in any way damaged, imperfect. We mustn’t blame her. It must be terrible for a woman to go through all the horrors of pregnancy and then produce … something like that.’ I left a tingling silence.

  ‘Anyway, your uncle insisted that he had fulfilled to the letter the agreement they had made. And in point of fact he had.’

  ‘The agreement, I suppose, specified “male child”?’

  ‘Yes! Mary had no reason to foresee the awful thing that actually happened. There was no strain of idiotism in our family.’ (Or maybe it had spread itself thinly, I thought.) ‘So she had to find other ways of … persuading her husband. It was a difficult situation, because neither of them enjoyed what needed to be done, if you catch my meaning.’

  ‘Oh, I catch your meaning. It was ironic in a way – almost a punishment for the sordid agreement they had made. But I suppose the situation was not unknown in old families needing an heir. It was a duty rather than a pleasure. I always thought your sister was rather lacking in – let’s call it human understanding.’

  She pursed her lips and fluttered a painted eyelid. ‘Maybe. She had a fine, vigorous will. People like that sometimes fail to see other points of view. She chose to … arouse his spirit, as she described it to my other sister, by emphasising Richard’s state. She thought that would show him how inconceivable it was that he could be considered heir to Blakemere.’

  ‘I’m afraid she misunderstood him entirely,’ I remarked. ‘Uncle Frank couldn’t have cared a fig for Blakemere, or for whether it had an heir. Or for that matter whether it had a hostess.’

  ‘Possibly. I suppose as things turned out you must be right. Anyway, whether it was as a result of Mary’s taunts, Frank Fearing apparently conceived a great love for the boy.’

  ‘He always had it, right from birth,’ I said. ‘The discovery of the brain damage didn’t change anything.’

  ‘It seems to me, I’m afraid, to verge on the morbid,’ she said, with the total self-approval of the very stupid. ‘But, however it was, Mary got nowhere, and was forced to agree to the calling of a family conference.’

  I nodded. ‘That I remember, too. That was also unwise. I’m afraid my family understood Uncle Frank no better than your sister did – and they’d had every opportunity to get to know him. The last thing to get him to change his mind was a gathering of relatives to put pressure on him.’

  ‘He seems to have been very lacking in right feeling and proper respect, especially for his parents. Of course I know more about the family gathering because my parents were there. Papa told me he was obdurate right from the start; sarcastic, rude, and utterly unreasonable.’

  ‘I overheard a little of it,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of unpleasantness on both sides. I suspect family conferences are usually like that.’

  ‘Perhaps. This became very acrimonious. I’m afraid at the climax Mary did something that … that I suspect she may have done often enough when with us, at home with the family, that is, but … probably she had never done it in front of her husband before.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘She … imitated the look of little Richard – the face, the open mouth, the vacant eyes.’ She saw my look.

  ‘I’m not defending her – it was in the worst taste.’

  ‘It was disgusting – for his own mother to do that,’ I said passionately.

  ‘Well, we won’t quarrel about that. It pushed your uncle over the top. I’m afraid he was quite insane with hatred. He grabbed a fruit knife from the table and plunged it into her.’

  ‘He what!’

  ‘She died instantly. We’ve always been glad of that.’

  ‘But – but—’

  ‘You didn’t know? You mean you didn’t know she died? I’ve often wondered how much you were told, thought maybe you didn’t know how she died. But—’ Her pleasure at doing the telling was horrible to see.

  I turned away.

  ‘But that’s quite impossible,’ I said at last. ‘I remember my father receiving a letter from her.’

  She almost laughed. ‘I assure you he could not have. The dead are sometimes said by credulous people to appear to them on earth, but I’ve never heard a claim from anyone that they’ve had a letter from the Other Side. Was your father, perhaps, putting you off the scent?’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘Your father was himself involved in covering up the murder, you know. And you were always very fond of your uncle Frank, weren’t you? I’ve heard that you were very much neglected by your parents. Could he, perhaps, have wanted to preserve your faith in Frank Fearing, partly out of concern for you, partly from a guilty feeling that your uncle had been a better father to you than he ever had.’

  I thought that over, cradling my cold coffee.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘In any case, the fiction had to be preserved at all costs. The Fearings could not be in any way involved with murder. The stability of the Bank, almost of the Country (or so your family would have liked to think) was at stake. They had to concoct a story and stick to it. We were no more happy to have scandal attached to our name than your family was. When both families realised she was dead, they had to sit round and think up what would make the best story. My father said it was a nightmare.’

  ‘And the story they concocted was that the marriage had broken down, Frank had gone to Australia, and Mary had gone back to her family?’

  ‘That would have been in everyone’s eyes the likely outcome if your uncle hadn’t … The first part of it, of course, was true: Frank Fearing went to London that night, and within days he was on a boat to Australia. There was some kind of final pay-off, so he would not arrive there destitute. My parents went home, and the next day they were “called unexpectedly” to London. News was fed back to Tillyards that Mary had joined them in London, her marriage at an end, then that she had gone to stay with an elderly and sick relative on the Scottish Borders.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody wonder? Anybody who knew her well? Your sister was an unlikely sick nurse.’

  ‘Everybody thought she was ashamed. The failure of a marriage was a cause for shame then. And in addition, the wreck of all her hopes … Mary had made no secret of them, to those close to her. It was thought she couldn’t face people.’

  ‘In fact, she was buried in the little copse on the far edge of the Blakemere estate.’

  ‘I don’t know the details. That was taken care of by your papa. All my family knew was that she had been buried, in secret, and that the helpers had been sworn to secrecy and paid handsomely. My father said the how and where of the disposal were immaterial to him. He and my mother had to cope with the appalling shock of a beloved daughter’s sudden death, in terrible circumstances, and before their very eyes. I think they behaved very well.’

  Admirably in character, anyway: they’d pocketed a large lump sum and a subsidy for life and beyond.

  ‘When did you learn all this?’ I asked.

  ‘My father told me in the last weeks of his life. The First War had begun, so Peter’s life was uncertain. In any case, he had never married. My father had begun to treat me as the future head of the family. In fact it will die out with me. I suppose the same will be true of yours.’

  ‘There are more distant Fearings,’ I said, getting up because I did not want to enlarge on the subject to her. ‘I really am most grateful to you. It’s been an odd conversation, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Very odd,’ she said, licking her painted lips with relish. ‘I find it strange that no one had confided the matter to you before.’

  ‘The answer may partly be that as long as my uncle Frank was alive he was liable for prosecution for murder, and my father for a lesser offense. My father died first, so he never broached the matter to me. Also,’ I added, with an attempt at dignity, ‘I was a
n unloved child, as you have hinted. My father and I became quite close by the end of his life, but there was always between us a certain reserve, a sense of areas of the past that we did not care to go into. In business matters we were close, but in personal matters we were … reticent.

  ‘Well, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time with my family affairs.’ That seemed ungracious, so I added, truthfully: ‘It’s been a revelation. Thank you.’

  She shook my hand, mischief and satisfaction mingling in her eyes. She was very pleased to have rearranged my mental landscape for me. Then she walked out of the room, straight-backed, not quite certain on her feet, but looking for all the world as she must have looked when putting an end to a King’s Birthday Party in a foreign embassy, after mixing with dubious émigrés caught in a part of the world they despised.

  Leaving me to my thoughts. Except that I had little time to indulge them. I was due to collect Ed from Fearing’s at half past four, when we would both head back to Blakemere. One of the flunkies summoned me a taxi, and I walked down the grand staircase I had wanted to show off to Ed, and out into the street. Ernie Bevin was being manoeuvred into one of the Foreign Office’s official cars.

  ‘Have a hinteresting talk with the old biddies?’ he called.

  ‘Very interesting with one of them,’ I said, bending down to talk through the open window. ‘I’ll tell you about it one day when you’ve got a couple of hours to spare. But I won’t be recommending any extra loot for them.’

  ‘That’s as well, because we’d hignore it if you did,’ he said, chuckling with pleasure at putting a top banker in her place. ‘We’re not throwing money around on superannuated figure ’eads.’

  As he drove off, I settled myself into my taxi. There was an unexploded bomb alert in the Strand, the driver explained, and we’d have to go to the City via Victoria. It suited me. I had some shifting of psychological furniture to undertake.

  The first thing I had to face was the change in my mental picture of my beloved, charming, ever-fascinating uncle Frank. He was not as I had always seen him to be. He had entered into a really sordid marriage arrangement, and he’d then climaxed that by becoming a wife-killer. The marriage arrangement I could cope with: I had already taken on board the essential nature of the reluctant union. It had diminished my uncle in my eyes, but I had also regarded it with indignation, as something forced on him by his family. The murder was something else. I told myself to think of it as manslaughter, an act of generous rage at the ridicule of his son. I rearranged my ideas of him around that explanation, to try to see if they fitted.