The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘That was another me, another person,’ Alice interrupted sharply. She spoke with great finality and confidence – as if such various and totally assumed personalities had been as freely available to her as her family’s money had obviously been, as though a profligacy in both had not yet begun to satisfy her.

  *

  We walked up a laurel-bordered path, which shut out most of the sun, towards the back of the house. It was gloomy here even at midday, the thick green branches arching, linking completely overhead.

  ‘A typical Victorian idea,’ Alice remarked as she walked easily ahead, pointing upwards at the greenery. ‘This laurel-covered way was so that the household wouldn’t have to see the tradesmen or the servants coming and going. It leads to the back sculleries and kitchens. I left it as it was. Some Victorian houses actually had stone tunnels underground for the lower orders to come and go by. This was a compromise, a refinement on the part of the Hortons who built the place, because they were great horticulturalists, too, planting things everywhere – laurels, trees, shrubs, bog gardens.’

  ‘Yes. And burying themselves out on that island. They seem to have been eccentric generally.’

  ‘Eccentric? Hardly. Little family mausoleums somewhere on the estate? It wasn’t uncommon then, especially after the Queen had Frogmore built for Albert. It was quite the fashion.’

  She pushed the latch down on an old, heavily studded, red door that led into the back of the house, and my bare feet were suddenly chilled on the big flagstones that led away up a dark passage, with similarly heavy, red-painted doors leading off to either side. A big, black old-fashioned woman’s bicycle, with cord skirt-guards forming a fan over the back wheel, stood propped against one wall. A patent gas cycle lamp of the same Edwardian period, with a bulbous magnifying lens, rested on the handlebar bracket. The whole thing looked in exceptionally good order. Yet it was no museum-piece. It had been used recently. There was mud on the front tyre, which had splashed up onto the fresh, gleaming black paintwork.

  ‘We found several of these in one of the old coachhouses,’ Alice said casually, taking the bike up. ‘I had them put in order.’

  She got onto the machine suddenly and rode away up the long stone passage on it, before trying to turn back by some steps at the far end. She nearly succeeded, losing her balance only at the last moment. ‘Sometimes I can get right round and back again in one,’ she said joyously, the child working in her again.

  As she wheeled the bike back towards me I noticed that it left an intermittent trail of white tyre-marks on the flagstones. Then I saw that each of the half-dozen steps leading up at the end of the passage had a bright rim of whitewash along their edges, and that the front bicycle wheel, pushing against the lowest step as she’d tried to turn, had then repeated the whitewash in a series of broken lines back down the passageway.

  ‘It’s to make sure they cleaned the steps every day,’ she explained, when I asked her about the fresh paintwork. ‘They painted them first thing every morning, so that all the dirt would show up quite clearly at the end of the day. Though of course the official reason was that it made the steps stand out more clearly at night, in the lamplight.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why do you still have them painted? There’s plenty of light here now, isn’t there?’ I looked upwards then, along the roof of the passageway. There were no light fittings anywhere and no switches on the walls.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘All this part of the house on the ground floor, I’ve made it over, exactly, I think, as it was. Just with oil lamps. Here, I’ll show you.’ She opened one of the heavy red doors leading off the passage. ‘This is the lamp room.’

  And so it was, as I could just see now in the faint light. There was a sudden sharp breath of paraffin oil, and on the dim shelves inside I saw a considerable collection of old Victorian oil lamps, of every shape and sort. Some were merely serviceable, kitchen lamps, with pewter-coloured metal oil reservoirs and sensible white globes. Others were much more elaborate, cut-and-coloured glass affairs: tulip-shaped red shades perched on top of fretted brasswork; or heavy brocade cloth pierced through by delicate clear-glass chimneys. Some were small and easily held, the sort to light you to bed with. But a few were very large indeed, three and four feet high, formidably decorated Gothic illuminations, made to stand on pedestals, lighthouses for a baronial hall.

  ‘But you don’t use any of these now,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, some of them. Why not?’ Alice looked at me in surprise. ‘We have electricity, of course. But this sort of light, lamplight, it’s far nicer, softer. Isn’t it?’

  My feet were getting cold on the dark flagstones of the lamp room. I shivered now, with just a towel round my waist.

  ‘Come on up to the kitchen and get warm,’ she said.

  She closed the door behind me and we walked up the steps at the end of the passage.

  By now I almost expected it, I think, the big room we entered next, with its half-dozen arched clerestory windows along either side, high up; and the white scoured wood of the ancient cloth dryers, anchored far up by ropes to the ceiling; the long double lines of heavy cast-iron pots and pans on the shelves above the immense, black-leaded kitchen range which ran along most of one wall, with the legend ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ picked out in Gothic-lettered tiles above it. A coal-fired range, I assumed, with projecting hobs and brass hot-water taps, hummed softly, warming the whole room.

  Yes, I had half-expected this Victorian kitchen, with its vast scrubbed pinewood table down the centre; an oak dresser eight or nine feet tall, filled with heavy old kitchen crockery at one end; a huge flour-barrel with a wooden scoop in a corner; the high-backed chair with its patchwork quilted cushion by the grate where Cook might have relaxed after a hard day’s work; a kitchen complete in every Victorian detail as far as I could see, right down to the heavy cast-iron meat mincers on the shelves and the rectangular wooden kitchen clock, each corner cross-hatched in the Gothic manner. There was, I noticed, some modern equipment: a big refrigerator, an expensive Moulimix, a long line of contemporary glass spice jars, an electric toaster, a waffle grill. But these were just incidental scratches on this Victorian masterwork.

  ‘Warm yourself by the range.’ Alice seemed terribly out of place in the old kitchen, in her smart blue cotton jeans and open shirt, like a guide in a museum.

  ‘Arrested development’: I remembered the phrase she’d told me her husband had used of her. And I thought now how he might quite easily have left her, at first impatient and finally contemptuous of her decorative Victorian obsessions: this apparent need she had to translate each of her fantasies into exact fact, and the fortune she did this with. It was enough to bemuse, and finally annoy any spouse.

  Yet I didn’t want to leave this woman, who seemed just about to help me, though I was wary of her again now, standing in this perfectly restored kitchen, looking at her. For it was obvious that she saw nothing unusual at all in so meticulously recreating the past in this manner – old Edwardian bicycle lamps, whole Victorian lamp rooms and kitchens – and using these things, quite casually, it seemed, as if time had not moved forward at all in the intervening years.

  She seemed to be living in the past of eighty, a hundred years before, and yet she seemed quite unaware of any contradiction: a sort of Queen Canute, I thought, defying time, living alone in this vast house, moving backwards into the years, not forwards. There was something eerie about it all. And yet there was nothing the least sinister about Alice herself: she was no Miss Havisham. Indeed she looked as fresh and contemporary just then as a woman in a telly commercial for some space-age kitchen. I couldn’t follow it.

  ‘Come upstairs. Get shaved, washed if you like. There’s all Arthur’s stuff. He had rooms to himself.’

  Beyond the kitchen was another brighter, cream-painted passage leading into the body of the house, with doors, open this time, leading off into various smaller service rooms on either side. There was a butler’s pantry, with row upon row of perfec
tly carpentered silver drawers beneath a green-baize worktop; there were wine coolers, a partly filled bottle rack with the necks of some old vintages up from the cellars poking out; there was an old brass cork-puller screwed to a table-top, such as pubs had on their counters long ago. Further on was a footman’s room, with two braided uniforms on a pair of tailor’s dummies, white waistcoasts, navy-blue cutaway jackets with tails and gold buttons, knee-breeches and white stockings hanging beneath them.

  At the end of this corridor, to the right, giving out through a hatch into an invisible dining-room, was a serving pantry, with long silver-gilt plate warmers, methylated-spirit chafing dishes and two huge carving trolleys with great half-globes of brilliantly polished silver closed over the tops. On shelves behind, someone’s family dining plate was stored – heavy crested dishes with a green pattern, rimmed in gold, in every shape and size, for the most varied foods, on the most formal occasions.

  Immediately in front now was a sombrely panelled Gothic Baronial Hall, which ran for a hundred feet or more at right-angles to the passage we had just travelled along: a dozen tall, indented windows, hung on either side with great brown plush curtains, gave out onto the front of the house, with the parkland and cricket pitch, brightly green, just visible beyond.

  In the middle of this vast space, immediately opposite, was an inner hall door, two wooden half-arches, glass-paned, so that one could see out into a large porch beyond, with formal columns and steps leading down to the gravelled drive beneath. Between each of the front windows, in a long line, were Corinthian pedestals, and on each of these was a white marble bust: Victorian worthies, all of them, to judge by their beards and mutton-chop whiskers, but here masquerading as Roman noblemen, each with a creamy stone toga thrown casually over one shoulder.

  The floor was polished wood throughout the long hall, except at one end, where there was a thick, rather grim Aubusson carpet, and on it a vast horsehair sofa together with a collection of equally large high-backed brocade armchairs, all of them camped like an invading army round a fireplace as big as a tunnel-opening. Around and above the grate here, to a height of ten feet or so, a most elaborate stuccoed mantel frieze had been set in the wall. It told a story of some kind, I could see: there were figures active in various pursuits, carefully moulded in the plasterwork.

  Standing in the middle of the huge hall, I turned about and then looked upwards. On the long high wall behind me, beneath a row of stag’s heads, interspersed with shining swords and breastplates, to either side of the last flight of a great oak staircase, were the principal pictures in the house, I thought, eight or nine of them, in recesses, large canvases, all from the pre-Raphaelite school. I looked at them more carefully. One of them was the romantic figure of a young knight, in dark medieval armour, kneeling at the feet of some quite ethereal woman with long, golden tresses, holding a haloed chalice: Sir Galahad or Sir Launcelot, I thought, reaching for the Holy Grail. A second picture was of a shepherd in a smock with a wispy but minutely rendered red beard, on a hillside filled with highly coloured, almost photographically real wild flowers, walking towards another kneeling woman in the foreground. She had just laid out some bread and cheese for him on a red check handkerchief. The food was painted in such detail it brought my own hunger back as I gazed at it.

  ‘That’s a Ford Brown,’ Alice said. ‘It’s called “Noon”.’

  ‘The food’s real enough. But were wild flowers ever as colourful as that, in England?’

  ‘Of course. Why not? Before all the pesticides, before they ploughed everything up and tore the hedges out. And do you see?’ she went on, with sudden sparkling enthusiasm, ‘Look! Down here in this corner: he’s painted in a Ghost Orchid, right behind where the woman is kneeling. Look! She’s almost sitting on it, as if she hadn’t seen it. It’s the rarest of all the wild orchids in England. It’s only been sighted fifty times or so in a hundred years! And only by women, for some reason. So he put it in there. As a bit of spite, I think.’

  She was smiling radiantly once more as I turned to her. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You know about flowers, English wild flowers, do you? Past, present?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprised at my surprise. ‘I’ve always known. But then I’ve had a thing about England.’

  Above us, on the first-floor level, heavy banisters ran right round three sides of the hall, forming a gallery. And above that, very high up, was a dark hammer-beam roof, the beams picked out in faded circles and diamonds of colour, like old Red-Indian totem poles. To the left, at the opposite end of the hall from the great fireplace, was an intricately carved wooden screen, completely dividing the space, with a Gothic entrance arch in the middle, that led to a library beyond. And further on were stone arches in an identical style, but with plateglass screens set between them, and a glass door that led into the tall conservatory beyond where I could just see a green jungle of shrubs, small trees and hanging plants dangling in the bright sunshine coming through the glass.

  The hall was warm, almost breathless, filled with a dry smell of old wax polish and the remains of great log fires burnt here long ago. It was calm, dark, heavy. Yet for all its impeccable tradition, there was something antiseptic about it. The space here had been filled once, or waited for fulfilment. But meantime, in the present, there was no life in it. With a few tactful signs and velvet ropes it could have been turned into an art gallery or museum straight away.

  ‘You don’t seem to do much here,’ I said, ‘do you? It’s as big as a football pitch. Or a tennis court.’ And then, thinking of such games, of youth, the question suddenly struck me, and I wondered why I hadn’t asked her before.

  ‘With all this space,’ I said. ‘Do you have children? It’s the sort of place, ideal …’

  ‘Yes, a son. He’s nineteen. Touring Europe now. In Italy, I think. But that was an earlier marriage.’

  ‘He’s not interested, in all this?’ I looked about me and then out the windows, thinking of the great parkland, the home farm beyond.

  ‘Not very,’ she said, turning away, moving over to the fireplace now, looking up at the great plaster frieze above her. She touched one of the little figures. I joined her.

  ‘It’s a moral story. Do you see?’ she said, her voice regaining an interest which it had not had in speaking of her son. ‘It’s called “Art and Industry”. Full of good works.’

  I could see now how the frieze was divided into a series of intricately linked rectangular and diamond frames, with inset stucco figures: a group of men scythed corn in one; barrels rolled from a warehouse in another towards where a fully-rigged clipper lay at unlikely anchor in a third; in a fourth a half-draped woman, ample as a pastrycook, cradled a lyre. It was all executed in the most literal manner and the conjunctions were absurd. But as a piece of madly idealised Victoriana it was superb.

  ‘It was specially commissioned for the Great Exhibition in 1851,’ Alice said, admiring it with loving surprise, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘We bought it from another house. But it suits. Don’t you think?’ Again she made the enquiry as if something vital hung on my response.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s … splendid. A bit overpowering perhaps, if you were just sitting here trying to read the paper.’

  ‘Of course. But this isn’t the library. Of course it’s showy, pompous, self-righteous. But it’s practically the ultimate in all that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I had to agree with her. It was.

  ‘And do you see this man down here?’ She touched a little bowed figure down to one side of the frieze. ‘He’s dressed as a footman, or a waiter, I can never be sure which.’ She fondled the plaster man lovingly. ‘Well, he’s a bell pull. If you pull him –’ she pulled him – ‘he rings a bell!’ I heard a bell go off somewhere faintly in the back regions. She laughed then, another joyous laugh. And I thought how much more at ease she was among these purchased, inanimate objects, these figures in plaster relief or pre-Raphaelite paint, than she had been in the matter of her own
nameless son, flesh and blood that really belonged to her.

  I pulled the little man myself then and heard him tinkle away in the distance once more. ‘The whole place is wired up, I suppose,’ I said. ‘With all these … valuables. Alarms, I mean?’

  ‘Yes. What had you in mind?’ She smiled. ‘I think you’d need a truck to take anything out of here.’

  ‘It rings in the local police station, does it?’

  ‘It can do. If it’s turned on that way.’ There was a moment’s uneasiness between us. But Alice didn’t let it last.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said brightly, ‘You’ll have time enough to see the whole place. Why don’t you come upstairs?’

  I’d wandered away from her as she spoke and gone over to the great hall door. Idly I turned the big plaited metal ring that formed one of the two handles. But it wouldn’t turn. It didn’t move. I realised the great doors were locked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, seeing my attempts, ‘I keep it shut. As you said, with all these valuables here.’ She stood in the half gloom on the other side of the great hall. Was she staring at me? She might have been. In any case, hands on her hips, there was something impatient in her stance.

  ‘Well?’ she said, seeing me hesitate. ‘I’ll show you to your …’ she hesitated herself then, ‘your quarters!’ She smiled, making light of a description that might otherwise have sounded ominous. And I wished then that I’d never met this woman, never come into this great closed house of hers; that I was back safely hidden among the leaves of my tree-house. But instead of my oak tree, I climbed the great oak staircase behind her.

  *

  Upstairs, in Arthur’s suite of rooms, and what I glimpsed of her own room through an open door across the corridor, the fixtures and fittings were rather different. Indeed they could not have been more opposed to the meticulous Victoriana of the ground floor. Alice’s large bedroom, looking inside briefly as she pointed it out to me, was sparsely white; light and airy, with cushions on the floor and a very few bits of delicately modern furniture: a low bamboo, glass-topped table, and a dressing-table even lower, so low down by the big French windows looking over the formal gardens that a person, I thought, would have almost to kneel down to see themselves in the glass.