Ashenden (36 page)

Reggie took a couple of steps across the floor and stopped, greatly moved. The walls were bare and scrawled with the usual graffiti, but overhead was an ornate ceiling composed of recessed painted panels and surrounded by an elaborate frieze. The three windows, set into adjacent sides of the octagon, didn’t have an unbroken pane among them, but the central one was arched and flanked by two pairs of slender columns. She could sense the house poised on a precarious equilibrium, willing itself to survive. She could feel it waiting for a verdict or a judgment to be passed on it.

Bunny, who had stopped twirling and reassumed his forensic role as damage inspector, was now crouching down under the central window. He beckoned her over. “Come and see this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Just come and see.”

“Not more scribbles,” she said.

“Not exactly.”

She crossed the room and bent down next to him.

“This portion of wall must have been paneled at one time,” he said. “You can tell where the wood’s rotted away.”

“I can smell it too,” she said. “What am I looking at?”

“Initials,” he said, pointing them out. “M. G.”

“Oh yes, so there are.” The letters, incised in the plaster, were crisply made and finished with a flourish of serifs as fine as pen strokes.

“They weren’t put there recently.”

“No,” she said. “I can see that they weren’t.” She rubbed her fingers across them.

“The paneling must have protected them,” said Bunny, and she could hear the thrill of discovery in his voice. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they didn’t date back to when the house was built. A maker’s mark of some kind. Kenneth would know.”

*  *  *

They walked back down the central axis of the house, from the octagonal room to the staircase hall, and from the entrance hall out to the portico. The elevated vantage point of the terrace allowed them to see more of the scarring the war had left behind, rolls of barbed wire and the remains of huts, scrub taking the place of what had still been grassland the last time she saw it. Part of the balustrade was succumbing to ivy. She stood there, trying to work out the contours of the landscape, the bones that lay beneath, and didn’t want to leave.

Bunny, who had been quiet and reflective since he’d shown her the initials under the window, laid a hand on her sleeve of her coat. “I’m glad we came.”

“So am I.”

The atmosphere of the house had made such an impression on her that she realized she had not given a single thought to what the doctor had said for the entire time they had been inside.

Bunny began picking at the ivy, easing its tendrils away from the stonework. “Hugo told me that you two are looking for a place in the country.”

“We are.”

“In the Home Counties.”

“Yes. Preferably near London.”

“A manor house or rectory is what he said.”

“Something of the kind.”

“Sensible,” said Bunny, “considering the rationing of building materials and all the red tape these days. Anything more ambitious would be quite an undertaking.”

“An uphill struggle, I should think.”

“An expensive uphill struggle,” said Bunny, glancing at her. “To rescue somewhere like this, for example, one would need a great deal of money and a great deal of time, as well as patience, knowledge, and sensitivity, if one were to do it properly.”

She tore her eyes away from the landscape and smiled. “Wouldn’t this be a marvelous place for horses?”

“For
horses
?” said Bunny, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, undoubtedly.”

*  *  *

Afterwards, things seemed to happen rather quickly. Many times in the weeks and months that followed, Reggie found herself apologizing to the house, explaining in her head, as the clearing and stripping and probing went on, that it must get worse before it could get better. There was something almost surgical about the restoration, at least in those early days. One wondered, always, whether the patient would survive.

The dry rot was extensive. Its treatment was brutal, a hacking away and a dosing with foul chemicals. Materials were in short supply and permissions took ages. Reggie had never been happier.

On her birthday, 12 September, they had a little party, sitting in deck chairs in the staircase hall, with candles in saucers. Bunny and Kenneth, Hugo’s sister, Winifred, and her husband, Jeremy Minton, were there.

“Cheers,” said Hugo. “To Reggie and the house.”

“To Reggie and the house.”

Glasses were raised.

“I must show you something,” said Bunny to Kenneth. “You will be interested in this.” He took up a candle and led him through to the octagon room.

“Top up?” said Winifred. She had been a nurse in the war, which was where she’d met her husband, who was a doctor.

Reggie shook her head. “To be honest, I’ve a headache. Probably all these chemicals we’ve been spraying everywhere. They are really rather oppressive.”

“Well, it is quite a white elephant you’ve taken on, I must say.”

“Do you mind? I think I’ll go outside for a moment.”

Out on the loggia, Reggie drank the air and rejoiced. The deep drag of tiredness like a tidal undertow, the odd metallic taste in her mouth, the strange and unsettling revulsions that toothpaste and bacon aroused in her: even though she had never experienced such symptoms before, she knew what they were and gave thanks. To the house, primarily, for she had no doubt this child had been its gift. Three periods she’d missed now.

L
avender clings to laundered sheets folded on the cedar shelves of the linen closet. Vases of velvety roses sit on tables polished with beeswax. On summer evenings, the sweet perfume of night-scented stocks drifts through open windows, blended with the astringency of cut grass, the sharp acid twist of lemon in a gin and tonic. From the kitchen come warm savory aromas of bread, coffee, and roast chicken, which mingle with a faint hint of wood smoke and damp dog.

Contentment, order, and well-being: the house smells of it. Breathes it in. Inhales and exhales.

*  *  *

“Who rang?” said Reggie, sipping her coffee. “I heard the telephone.”

“Did you?” Hugo came into the room with his copy of
The Times
. “It wasn’t anything important.”

“Bit early for a call.”

“Just someone from the office.”

“What did they want?”

He squeezed her shoulder and avoided her eyes. “The usual nonsense.”

She buttered her toast, reached across the breakfast table for the marmalade, and knew that he was lying. If you’d been married as long as she had been married and your husband was habitually
truthful, you gained an instinct for such things. He was a poor liar: good ones could be specific on the spot, but he could only retreat behind vagueness whenever a fabrication was called for. The intelligence work he’d done in the war had not required him to lie, simply to keep the official secrets to himself, and keeping a secret and lying were not always one and the same thing.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

While she poured him a cup, he unfolded the paper to the crossword, took out his fountain pen, and began inking in the squares, as he had done every morning of their life together. For him, it was a necessary prelude to the day, as much a part of the ritual of rising as brushing his teeth or combing his hair, and she knew better than to disturb him while he put his mind in working order. Instead, she watched him across the table, her heart wrung with love and unease. He was so very much himself, she thought, and becoming more so.

Hugo had always been distinguished-looking rather than handsome and had the type of features you grew into, the type that tended to improve with age, which he wore as well as the knighthood he’d received in the Birthday Honours five years ago. Despite his reassurances, she was conscious that it could never be the same for women, who must always be rubbing cream into their faces and worrying if fashion had left them behind, or whether to color the gray. She wondered what he had been lying about and who had been on the telephone. For a moment, anxiety seized her by the throat and it was hard to swallow.

He finished the crossword, checked his watch, and capped his pen. “Twelve minutes, not bad going. Got a little held up in the southeast corner.” He helped himself from the toast rack, the toast stone cold by now, she would have thought. Toasting bread and then airing it in racks so that it cooled again was a strange English custom to which she had never grown accustomed. (“Better cold than soggy,” Hugo always explained.)

“What are you doing today?” he said.

“Well, first of all, there’s the interview this morning.”

Hugo, who had a sweet tooth, chose the strawberry jam over the marmalade.

“Oh yes. I’d completely forgotten about that. When is it?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Do you think you could make a start without me? Only I’ve arranged to see Beckmann about the pavilions at half ten. I shouldn’t think we’ll need more than forty minutes or so, but you know how thorough he is and it could run over.”

They had wanted a local firm to carry out the work on the Park and had chosen Freeman’s on the grounds of their reputation and because they were, in Hugo’s words, “small enough to care and big enough to cope.” Beckmann, who had been the foreman at that time, had almost single-handedly been responsible for rooting out all the dry rot, pursuing it through the timbers of the house as if it were his own mortal enemy. He had been the head of the firm ever since Freeman retired six years ago and so much part of the fabric of the house and its restoration that they no longer found it surprising to think that he had once been a prisoner in its grounds, and had to rely on the reaction of people who heard the story for the first time to remember how unusual the association was. They knew they had been very lucky to have Beckmann on their side in the battle against decay.

She laid her napkin beside her plate. “And then this afternoon I thought I’d go to see Bunny.”

He gave her a sad smile that she interpreted, correctly, as equal parts sympathy and concern. “I must run over there myself later on in the week.”

Out of the windows of the drawing room she could see the sunlight in the summer garden. This room was where they always had breakfast, and they now knew enough about the previous inhabitants of the house and pattern of its occupancy to understand that they were following a long custom. It was among the first rooms they had completed after the dry rot was dealt with, and the pink-and-green ceiling, Greek gods depicted at each end, was the only
example of original eighteenth-century paintwork in the house. She had tried to be guided by its faded delicacy when it came to selecting the furnishings, and she thought she could remember every country-house sale and auction where she had bought them, if she put her mind to it.

Tonight, when Hugo’s cousin was coming to dinner, they would eat here as well. Three was too few for the dining room. One might argue, thought Reggie, pushing back her chair to get on with the day, that two was too few for the house.

“Reggie?” said Hugo, as she was getting up. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

He looked perturbed, she thought, and she felt unease pulse in her throat again.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking about what to buy Charlie for his birthday.” Charlie was their nephew, the son of Hugo’s sister, Winifred. He was about to turn thirteen.

Reggie considered for a moment. “Well, he’s at school most of the time, so it’s probably best not to buy him something too valuable that he might mislay. It’s not very imaginative, I know, but boys his age like to have a bit of extra pocket money.”

“I was thinking about a camera.”

“A camera?”

“When they were over at Easter, he was showing me some of the pictures he’s been taking. He’s got a good eye, but not a very good camera, I’m afraid. I thought about getting him a proper one.”

“A proper one?”

“A Nikon F, perhaps. I hear they’re very good.”

“Are they very expensive?”

“Quite.”

“Mmm,” said Reggie. “I think you’d better ask Winifred.” On that side of the family there was a certain degree of sensitivity on the subject of money, which was not always disguised. It sometimes made for an atmosphere at get-togethers. “We wouldn’t want to outshine anything they are thinking of getting him.”

*  *  *

A little after eleven Panton came to tell Reggie that the journalist and photographer had arrived and were waiting in the entrance hall. She and Hugo had agreed to be interviewed for the article, which was for one of the new Sunday supplements, on the basis that it would provide them with the opportunity to encourage people in their position to save other houses in danger, and to demonstrate what could be done. The commissioning editor had assured them that there would be nothing personal about the piece and that it would run in the arts or design section, or possibly as a special feature on Britain’s historic heritage, depending on how the photographs turned out. For that reason, she was somewhat surprised to find that the journalist was a young woman in her mid to late twenties, wearing a sleeveless cotton gabardine shift with an optical print and a hem four inches above the knee, and that the photographer was a similar age with a long Beatles fringe and a number of lenses slung from his shoulder. Then she told herself to stop thinking like a middle-aged woman and showed them both into her sitting room, explaining that her husband would be joining them shortly.

“Would you care for coffee or tea?” she said, after they had identified themselves as Lucy Costello and Paul Parker.

“No, thanks,” said Lucy Costello, taking a spiral-bound notebook and a sharpened pencil out of her bag. Her hair, which was blue-black, skimmed her cheekbones at angles that made you think of the scissors that had cut it.

Paul Parker said that if no one minded, he’d wander about and take a few snaps while they were talking, and left the room. Panton, sending Reggie a signal that indicated
he
very much minded, followed him.