A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (22 page)

She turned the pages, lovingly.
Carex acutiformis
,
Carex riparia
. Tomorrow she would get to grips with the sedges. There were still plenty left, at the far end of the paddock, in the difficult corner by the overhanging alder. Tomorrow she would go and pick some specimens. And maybe, when she went back to Cambridge, she would enrol for that autumn course on Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture. She didn’t really know much about iconography, but she could see that it had its interest. Well, so did everything, of course. Everything was interesting.

She began to wish she had not been so mean, so unfriendly. She really ought to have offered that old man a cup of tea.

(1989)

11

The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance

It is not always easy to distinguish attachment to person from attachment to property. I know it is widely held that Elizabeth was joking when she declared that she fell in love with Darcy when first she saw Pemberley. I used to think so myself. Now I am not so sure. Let me tell you my story, and you may make your own judgement. I have yet to make mine.

They call it the Dower House, but really it is nothing of the sort. It once fulfilled the function of a dower house, some time in the last century, the period at which the façade looking down over the pleasure gardens had been refurbished. One of the always more or less unfortunate Lady Elliots (or had it been a Lady Bridgewater?) was said to have been secluded there, and the improvements had been made for her benefit. The terrace with its Gothic alcoves, the urns and the sundial, the rounded finials on the roof had been added at this time, but it was no more a dower house than nearby Uppercross Cottage was a cottage. Both were renovated farmhouses. Uppercross Cottage, incidentally, is now known as The Elms, after the unfortunate whim of an early twentieth-century owner who decided the word cottage was inappropriate for so substantial a residence. The elms are all dead, of Dutch elm disease, but the name remains. It is a happy house and well maintained. It belongs to an architect
from Taunton. His children and grandchildren play table tennis on the verandah in the summer evenings.

The Dower House is neither happy nor well maintained. But it is beautiful.

I fell in love with it at first sight. I was taken there by my friend Rose with whom I was staying at her farm on Exmoor. I did not know Somerset well, and we had spent a pleasant few days, walking, swimming in the icy River Barle, looking at churches and country houses. Rose was working on the illustrations for a book of European pond and river plants, and we collected specimens. On the whole we kept our own company, talking over our own affairs – I was still giddy with relief at having not long left my cad of a husband, she was involved with a philandering philosopher – but one evening she arranged for us to go over to Kellynch for dinner.

As we left the chalky uplands and descended into the red deeps, driving through increasingly narrow, high-banked purple-flowering lanes of foxglove and rosebay, Rose told me its history. Ever since some early Elliot had been obliged to let the Hall, at the beginning of the last century, the property had been hedged with difficulties. There had been a scandalous liaison round the time of Waterloo, which had scattered illegitimate children through the country, followed – or perhaps accompanied – by a marriage which had promised well, the bride being a Bridgewater and wealthy. But it had ended in long drawn out disaster. The Bridgewaters figured well in Debretts but not in other organs of record. They were, not to beat about the bush, said Rose, barmy. The duties and dignities of a resident landowner had appealed neither to Elliots nor to Bridgewaters. But they had hung on there, as the estate fell to pieces. During the Second World War Kellynch Hall had been requisitioned as an Officers Training Centre and it had never recovered. It was now a Field Study Centre.
She herself occasionally taught a course of botanical drawing there.

Yes, she said, slowing to avoid a pheasant, accelerating to overtake a tractor, there had been dramas. There had been suicides and incarcerations. The men drank and the women wept. The cold blood of the Elliots had mingled disastrously with the black blood of the Bridgewaters. One bride had thrown herself from an upper storey of Kellynch Hall on her wedding night: she had been caught in the arms of the great magnolia tree and had lingered on, an invalid. A daughter had taken her brother’s shotgun and blown out her brains on Dunkery Beacon. A son had drowned himself in the pond. When the pond was drained, in the 1920s, said Rose, it was found to contain a deposit of bottles of claret both empty and full: old Squire William, the one who had sold off Parsonage Farm and the woods beyond Barton, had been in the habit of wandering down there of an evening, sometimes drunk, sometimes in a frenzy of remorse. In either state he had thrown bottles. The tench had thrived on them: never had such vast fish been seen. There was one stuffed on show in the Hall.

With such legends she entertained me as we drove westward. The present owner of the estate, Bill Elliot, with whom we were to dine, was now in his late thirties. His father, Thomas Elliot, had been a military man and had fought in the desert with Montgomery of Alamein, but the peace had disagreed with him and he had come home to drink himself to death, dying of cirrhosis of the liver in his sixties. Bill had inherited a property that was mortgaged, entailed and ill starred. Oppressed by this legacy, he had made a brief stay of execution by hiring the house, parkland and pleasure gardens to a film company for a costume movie. This venture had turned out well, for his dowerless sister Henrietta had insisted on
appearing as an extra in the hunting sequence, had taken a nasty fall and had been wooed on her sickbed in Taunton Hospital by one of the film’s more portly and substantial stars, who had married her. Did I know Binkie? Maybe I had seen him as a bishop in the latest Trollope series? He was really rather good.

But one cannot live off one windfall. And so Kellynch Hall had been let to the Field Study Centre on a 99-Year Maintaining and Repairing Lease. The Elliots had washed their hands of it. Bill was now camping out in the Dower House. I would like him, she hoped.

I wondered. As I struggled with the heavy metal latch of a broken-down five-barred gate – for it seemed we were to drive down a cart track to Kellynch – I struggled also with my feelings about the English land and its owners. I come, though I trust you cannot detect this, from the lower middle classes, to whom property is important – but by property we mean the freehold of a suburban house with a garden where you can hang out the washing, not farms and tenancies and arable acres. The Elliots of old would not have acknowledged the existence of my category of person. To them we did not signify. And now it was they who hung on by a thread. Kellynch Lodge, which had once belonged to the Russells, was owned by an absentee Canadian newspaper proprietor, and the Vicarage by a designer of computer software. Trade and the middle classes had triumphed.

Even Rose, who had done her best to declassify herself, sometimes annoyed me. She worked for her living, after a somewhat haphazard manner, but she carried with her the assumptions of a gentlewoman. She assumed I knew things I did not know, people I did not know. She lives in a world which I know largely through literature. I am the second-hand person, the ventriloquist. She is the real thing.

I relatched the gate with difficulty, got back into the car, and we edged carefully down what I now realized was not a cart track but an avenue of oaks leading towards Kellynch Hall. This had been the grand approach, and the trees, though some were stag-crested, were grand still: but they had returned so much to nature that the formality of their planting, ordained by some Elliot four centuries ago, was not at once apparent. They had been reabsorbed into the landscape, as had the great sweet chestnuts of the park boundary. Soft lumps of honey fungus sprouted from the old wood. The gold of a field of barley rose to our right. There was a hint of autumn fullness in the August air.

We descended, past the Big House, down the curved drive, through what had been the stable courtyard, to the Dower House. The melancholy deepened and tears stood in my eyes. I had never seen anywhere so beautiful in my life. Pink peeling walls, grey-yellow lichen-encrusted stone, single white roses, white doves. It had reached the moment before decay that is perfection.

Bill Elliot, too, was in his own way perfect. Decay had hardly touched him, though perhaps his hair was very slightly receding. He was extremely good looking – the Elliots are famed for their good looks. He was of no more than middle height, with the blue eyes, fair tanned skin, fine blond hair, regular features and open yet quizzical look of the beleaguered late twentieth-century English country gentleman. He was wearing a pair of moss-stained trousers rolled up to the knee and a limp blue shirt lacking most of its buttons. He put himself out to charm me, and I was charmed. I felt that it was a privilege to meet him. It was fortunate for me that he was not my type, I told myself.

It was a memorable evening. Bill’s estranged wife Penny, who now lived with a trout farmer at Winthrop, had come
over to join us. She had not brought the trout farmer. There was one other couple, a doctor who worked in Bristol and her husband, an ornamental blacksmith. Bill did the cooking, on an old-fashioned temperamental solid-fuel kitchen range which I was to get to know all too well. He made us a risotto, with a mixture of field mushrooms and slices of sulphurous yellow growth called Chicken-of-the-Woods. He said he would show me where it grew. It was delicious. We ate Somerset cheese, and salad, and blackberries and cream.

The Dower House was derelict. Patterned curtains hung tattered and drooping from bare rails, broken-springed chairs sprouted feathers, and feathers drifted under the kitchen door from a vast woodshed full of nesting doves. The wiring dated from between the wars. I had not seen such Bakelite plugs, such furred and twisted flex since my childhood.

We talked of the difficulties of the landed gentry as we sat around the scarred paint-stained seventeenth-century kitchen table. What should one do? Turn the stately homes into venues for pop concerts, into miniature zoos, into hotels? The Big House at Uppercross was now an expensive retirement home. The National Trust would not accept properties as gifts unless they were heavily endowed. I knew of these problems, but I had never met anyone who faced them in person. I had never felt much sympathy with them. But there was something touching about Bill Elliot, rinsing out a glass and drying it on a tea towel covered with garish pictures advertising Lyme Regis and its dinosaurs.

I said I had never been to Lyme. We wandered back into the drawing-room with our coffee, and Bill showed us his grandfather’s battered dusty cabinet of treasures. There were little drawers of fossils and minerals, all labelled, and drawers full of pinioned butterflies and moths, and dried leaves from
the rare trees in the pleasure gardens. Bill said he preferred the minerals. He had added specimens of his own, some of them collected at Lyme. He loved Lyme. He said I should go there one day.

At Bill’s suggestion, we took a turn in the gardens. It was hardly dark, but Bill courteously took my arm as we stumbled through the undergrowth. There were nettles waist high, overgrown rhododendrons, Himalayan balsam, wild garlic. It was a wilderness. The mild air was heavy, rank, lush, erotic, sad.

We went back to the house for a last glass of wine. Bill told us that he was leaving the country. There was, he said, no freedom for him here. Penny, who was not hearing this news for the first time, said nothing. She watched a spider walk along the wall. They had two daughters, both at boarding school in Exeter. There would be no more Kellynch Elliots. A Shropshire Bridgewater Elliot was next in line, would inherit the title and the debts. Bill said he was off to Alaska, to a place called Anchorage. I asked why. ‘Because it sounds safe there,’ he said, and we all laughed. He said that he had been there once, briefly, changing planes on the way to Japan. He had liked it. It was as far from Kellynch as you could get. It was all snow and minerals. He would study minerals there in the long nights. He had sold a couple of paintings – a flood-damaged Hudson, a doubtful Reynolds – to finance his expedition. You could live for ten years in Anchorage on a gentleman in brown velvet, a lady in blue satin.

I did not know whether he was being whimsical or speaking the truth. It is difficult to know the difference with that kind of person.

On parting, he kissed my hand. The gesture was more intimate than a peck upon the cheek. ‘Dear girl,’ he said. ‘Goodbye. Wish me well.’

Rose was very quiet on the way home. I think she had once been a little in love with him.

I heard no more of Kellynch for seven years. I somewhat lost touch with Rose: she sold her farm and took off to the South Seas to do a book on tropical flora, and this broke the rhythm of our friendship. In those seven years much happened. My imprudent early marriage came to a final end in divorce, but my career prospered. I had been no more than a promising actress in those early days, and not even I had thought I would be able to do more than scratch a living: but a lucky break in the form of a film role – as Juliet in a freely adapted version of Fanny Burney’s
The Wanderer
– had come my way and since then I had been able to pick and choose. Tragic heroines from rustic romances were offered to me regularly, and most of them I declined. I had become well known and lonely.

I was sitting one evening in my flat off the King’s Road reading a Thomas Hardy screenplay when the phone rang. I picked it up – which I might well not have done – and an unfamiliar voice said ‘Is that Emma Watson? Emma? You won’t remember me, but this is Penelope Elliot. Do you have time for a word?’

Of course I remembered her. I could see her face as though it were yesterday – her silver-yellow hair, her pale high brow, her girlish Alice band, her freckled nose, her little breasts, her faded jeans, her long thin bare feet.