A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (7 page)

“Looks like it was originally built in the late 1500s,” I told him. “But I would say that it was redeveloped and extended in the midnineteenth century, because there’s a definite Victorian influence here in the windows. But it’s all made of very good materials—local stone and wood that would have been precious even back then. So, no, it’s not too far gone.”

“Thought so. Foundation looks solid,” Jeremy said, walking across the front of the house, squinting.

Suddenly the door opened, and a moment later Harriet stepped out, smiling encouragingly. “Hallo there!” she cried out. “You made it!”

Jeremy was still standing in the tall grass, looking up at the house with a typically English expression of horror mixed with hilarity at the sheer awfulness of the situation.

“Watch out for vipers,” Harriet teased him. “Haven’t seen one yet, but they do exist in the West Country, and they love tall grass.” Turning to me she said cheerily, “Don’t be put off by the ‘wear and tear’. This house is still a gem and we can’t wait to fix it up again.” I found myself wondering if she was, perhaps, a bit crazy after all. I took a deep breath of apprehension as we walked inside.

“Now, mind the floors as you come in,” Harriet warned, still cheerful, “for the interior
does
want a bit of looking after. But fear not. The Legacy Society has restored bigger wrecks than this.”

We paused in the entrance hall, where I had an even stronger sensation of having been here before, yet in some ghostly, parallel world. For there was Grandmother Beryl’s central staircase, and to the left was her dining room with its mahogany swinging door in the back that led to the kitchen; and to the right of the stairs was the beloved parlor and the window-seat where I’d curled up with a book on that rainy day when Great-Aunt Penelope found me teary-eyed over a sad story. Yet now, everything was covered in a film of cobwebs or spiderwebs or ghost-webs, making it look truly haunted, as if someone had done this on purpose to entertain kids for Halloween.

It was when we reached the parlor that Harriet said to me, “Your grandmother sold the house with these furnishings in it. I don’t know if anything has sentimental value for you, but if it does, better let me know soon,” she advised. “Because the town administrators are already talking about getting rid of the furniture to make it easier for whoever buys the house.”

I suddenly pictured a bunch of house-hunters pussy-footing all over the place, snooping in Grandma’s cupboards and laughing at her old-fashioned curtains and possessions. Despite the ramshackle condition of the house, something inside me felt ferociously protective and I wanted to barricade the doors and windows, and fire back at all invaders with a rifle, like a hillbilly refusing to vacate the old homestead.

So, Jeremy and I dutifully examined the pieces of furniture that Grandmother Beryl had left behind. I recognized the teakwood credenza in the entryway, and the faded chintz sofa in the corner where the ladies had congregated to gab after dinner by the fireplace. Grandfather Nigel’s favorite sea-green upholstered club chair was worn out quite beyond the pale, but I admired the matching beaux arts globe lamps that stood on either side of the parlor’s doorway. Still, everything seemed coated in sad-dust, and smelling vaguely of damp.

“We just couldn’t pay for the heating of the place,” Harriet said apologetically, as if reading our thoughts. “ ’Specially in the winter, when the north wind blows in from the cold sea, well, you can’t keep office workers warm with only a fire in the fireplace.”

“So, where are your group’s headquarters these days?” Jeremy asked. He sat down on the window-seat cushion, and a
poof
of a dust-cloud rose in response, as if it were part of a magic act and he might disappear. Warily, he got up again.

“In town,” Harriet answered. “In the old theatre.”

“Oh, yes, we saw it on the way in!” I exclaimed.

“The theatre’s been closed for years, but we use the offices upstairs,” Harriet said. “In the mid-1800s it was mainly an opera house, where the world’s finest divas and tenors came to sing. Now we’ve got sparrows singing in the rafters, doing Hamlet’s soliloquy, I expect,” Harriet said, laughing at her own joke. Jeremy and I exchanged a look of amusement mingled with despair.

“Right this way, there’s more to see!” Harriet trilled determinedly, leading us around the first floor’s rooms. Jeremy wore a deliberately neutral expression which he maintained for the duration of the tour.

As we continued, I noted that the long hallway leading to the back of the house had good hardwood floors, but a few of the panels had buckled, like the roof. At the end of this dark corridor was the sitting room, with Grandma’s old-fashioned black sewing machine still parked in the corner; but this room more than the others bore signs of being an office for Harriet’s group, because there were now metal file cabinets that I had never seen before, and a rickety desk and chair and lamp, and a disconnected telephone so old that it required dialing instead of punching in the numbers.

We paused at the last room in the back of the house, the kitchen. I recognized the matching cream-colored stove, refrigerator and dishwasher that Grandma must have bought all at once, circa 1965. There was even an old tea towel, neat and unsoiled but coated with dust, folded as Grandma had always folded it near the sink.

This little item suddenly brought back my grandmother’s presence with a force I didn’t expect, and now I vividly remembered her standing at the table, holding out a basket of assorted berries that my grandfather had picked in honor of my arrival. I could see myself as the little girl I’d been, eagerly reaching out and gobbling the fruit, with the juice dripping on her floor; I had expected a scolding, but Grandmother had only laughed and patted me on the head.

So without warning I found myself winking back the tears that had taken me by surprise. Jeremy saw the expression on my face, took my hand and squeezed it.

Harriet either didn’t notice or tactfully pretended not to. “Things really look a lot worse than they actually are. The plumbing is still intact,” she offered. “The electric isn’t so bad now, but of course it’s been turned off. There’s a small basement, but it’s empty.” I was only half listening to her; my eyes were taking in all the signs of mice in the corners, and the sound of those impudent squirrels on the roof above us.

Then I heard another noise—the voices of men calling to each other. Harriet peered out the window and grimaced. “The surveyors,” she reported. “For the developer. They’re here early. Well, let’s ignore them.”

But I couldn’t. All through the rest of the tour, I peered through every window I passed, watching the men carrying their surveyor’s tools as they tromped around, setting up their tripods and squinting into their instruments, shouting out measurements to each other.

When we ascended the staircase, it creaked but held firm. On the second floor there was more evidence of spiders spinning their own complicated tapestries in various corners of the two bathrooms and six empty bedrooms. The big green-and-white bedroom was where Grandmother Beryl and Grandfather Nigel had slept in a huge four-poster bed that was no longer there; the two yellow guest rooms were where my parents and Jeremy’s had stayed; and the very feminine violet-colored bedroom with the poufy gauze curtains was where Great-Aunt Penelope had often smoked into the night.

That left two remaining bedrooms, one pink and one blue, which were little wood-panelled affairs, tucked into opposite sides of the house, each with sloping ceilings since they were both under an eave.

“I slept in this one,” Jeremy said, smiling as we paused at the blue room where there was a very big, charming, old-fashioned rocking-horse and a complete wooden croquet set. “Penny, you were way down the hall in the pink room on the east end of the house. I used to lie here at night thinking that you would get to see the sun rise before I did.”

Finally, we went up to the small attic, which contained only some wicker furniture that was too far gone to keep. As we went back downstairs, Harriet said brightly, “Let’s go outside so I can show you the property we added on to this parcel.”

We walked out the front door and back down the driveway where the surveyor’s car was now parked near ours. Directly across from Grandmother’s original property were green, gently undulating meadows dotted with old, disused stone outbuildings, barns and silos. In the distance was a long line of tall dark evergreen trees, to which Harriet was now gesturing.

“We helped the town acquire this parcel all the way to those evergreens,” she explained as we tromped forward to get a better view.

It was an impressive amount of land, and Harriet gazed at it with some pride. “We wanted to build our new-home clusters ’way over there, where you see the barns and silos,” she said, pointing east.

Jeremy had been sizing the whole thing up, and now asked, “Who owns the property to the west, on the other side of the stone wall?” He indicated an area just beyond Grandfather Nigel’s free-standing garage that was half hidden in the trees, near a low, crumbling farmer’s wall that seemed to mark a boundary between the end of Grandmother Beryl’s property and someone else’s fields.

“Ah!” said Harriet. “The earl! Actually, for centuries, ALL of this property—including your grandmother’s house, Penny—and most of the other houses up and down this part of the coast were part of one great estate belonging to the earl’s ancestors. Goodness, they were a long line of earls. But over the years, bit by bit, each earl sold off parts of the estate.”

Jeremy said slowly, “I remember now. Isn’t there a manor house out on the headland?”

“Exactly,” Harriet said. “And it still, to this day, has an earl in it.”

Something about the way she said that struck me as funny, as if the earl was an owl stuck in the rafters of some drafty old stately home. “He shows up at county fairs,” Harriet mused. “Likes to see the animals. He’s about thirty-four years old.”

“But I remember a much older man living there,” Jeremy said, puzzled. “He rode his horse across the meadows. He carried a whip, and if we crossed his path he was pretty terrifying.”

“Ah, that would be the
tenth
earl,” Harriet explained. “He was the grandfather of our current earl, but the old man died years ago. The current earl—he’s the twelfth—has his hands full just keeping the manor going, because the upkeep is staggering. I hear that he lives in only one small suite of rooms, and rents out the rest of the manor house to movie companies, big corporate events, and weddings whenever he can. And, the main floor of the manor is open to the public once a week.”

Harriet pointed to the section of the earl’s property that abutted Grandmother Beryl’s area. “The Mosley brothers want to buy a serious chunk of the earl’s land, too, for their development. They want to combine all this”—Harriet made a grand sweep of her arms to indicate Grandma’s house, the town’s land and the earl’s meadows as far as the eye could see—“to make one big real-estate package. They won’t buy it in bits. They want it all, and everything at once. And I must tell you that we fear the earl is very close to signing on the dotted line.”

“Ohh,” I said, finally understanding what was at stake. I glanced apprehensively at the surveyors, who were still marching around with that annoying proprietary air.

“Would you like to see the backyard?” Harriet asked, moving us away from the land at the front of the house and back toward the yard in the rear. “The garden is really still quite lovely.”

The area behind Grandmother Beryl’s house had a wide lawn and garden, bordered at the far end by a much higher, more decorative stone wall. I instantly recognized this lovely spot where we once all gathered in the afternoon to have iced tea and play badminton and croquet. But now the patio was carpeted with fallen leaves and branches, and the iron chairs and table were rusted.

“Grandfather Nigel would have a fit if he saw this,” I whispered to Jeremy, who nodded.

The lawn was no longer the neat, fastidiously clipped yard of my memory, and the grass had grown so tall that Jeremy had to gallantly hack a path across it with one of the fallen branches. Ahead, a short flight of stone steps led to a lower, terraced area where Grandfather Nigel had kept his flowers.

“Look!” I cried. “Grandpa Nigel’s garden.”

For, despite all the neglect and time gone by, and all the storms and animals and insects that had overtaken some of it, a tangle of honeysuckle had survived, and I could make out masses of climbing roses and shrub roses. The azalea and forsythia was already flowering, and there were promising buds on the hollyhock and hydrangea. Hazel, hawthorn, bluebells and elder were still growing sturdily here.

“There’s Grandfather Nigel’s gardening shed!” I said nostalgically, pointing to the little hut at the right.

“Actually,” Harriet said, “that was originally a kippering shed. To cure or smoke fish.”

Now, as we walked to the very edge of the garden and peered over the wall, we could see the little private sandy cove below, and the great grey-green-blue sea that came crashing in, depositing foamy curls of water that swirled around the rocks and skittered across the patch of sand, looking like white lace. Gulls were swooping overhead in the open sky, which was bright with streaks of blue and milky white clouds that muted the yellow sun. I inhaled deeply and tasted the invigorating salty sea breeze that rippled my hair teasingly, like a friend.

“See that house over there?” Harriet said, pointing to a white Edwardian structure sitting high atop a distant hill to our right. “That belongs to our resident theatre expert, Trevor Branwhistle. He’s a wonderful actor who worked for years at BBC radio. What a voice that man has! Anyway, he’s the man for you to see about the history of your grandmother’s house. He says that, way back in the late 1500s, Beryl’s house had some interesting tenants—a group of performers known as ‘The Earl’s Players’,” Harriet said with a twinkle in her eye.