Take No Farewell - Retail (2 page)

5A Frederick’s Place has been the hub of my professional life since Imry and I set up there together in 1907. Whenever I climb its rickety stairs, whenever I smell again its aroma of old paper and older wood, I think of Imry and me as we were then: short of work and scarcely able to summon the rent, but young, energetic, richer than now in every way save one, determined to make a show in the world, intent upon building well and being known for what we built. Such are
the
painful ephemera of youth, for Imry will never bound up those stairs again, nor will I sketch grand designs on discarded envelopes. Life is what we make it and middle age the time when what we have made can no longer be ignored. That morning last September, I eyed the brass plate – Renshaw & Staddon, A.R.I.B.A. – with a curious distaste and ascended the stairs preparing stratagems in my mind to cope with the hours that lay ahead.

‘Morning, Mr Staddon,’ said Reg Vimpany, when he saw me enter.

‘Good morning, Reg. Where is everybody?’

‘Doris will be late. Her teeth, you remember?’

‘Oh yes,’ I lied.

‘Kevin’s gone for some milk.’

‘Aha.’

‘And Mr Newsom,’ he added with heavy emphasis, ‘is not yet with us.’

‘Never mind. Remind me. What’s on?’

‘Well, I need to go through the Mannerdown tenders with you. You’ve Pargeter to see this afternoon. And you told Mr Harrison you’d slip out to the Amberglade site at some point.’

‘Ah yes. Mr Harrison may have to wait. As for the tenders, shall we say eleven o’clock?’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘Thanks, Reg.’

I retreated to my office, well aware that poor Reg would be shaking his head in disapproval of my slackness. He was fifteen years older than me and the only chief assistant we had ever had: dependable, unflappable and content, it seemed, to preserve a certain level of efficiency in our affairs however scant our gratitude.

Once I had closed my office door, a sense of refuge closed about me. There was time and peace in which to think, an opportunity to apply reason to what little I knew. Consuela had been charged with Rosemary Caswell’s murder. And Rosemary Caswell was her husband’s niece. I could not
even
remember the girl. There was a nephew, certainly, an unpleasant little boy of eight or nine who must be twenty-odd by now. But a niece? The boy’s sister, presumably. What was she to Consuela? And why the additional charge of attempted murder? Flinging my coat and hat onto their hooks and gazing through the window at the red-bricked flank of Dauntsey House, I realized how much worse than a terrible truth was the hint of half a story.

‘Watch’er, Mr Staddon!’ With a theatrical rattle of the door handle, Kevin Loader, our irrepressibly disrespectful office boy, had entered the room. Sometimes I welcomed his jaunty, cocksure breath of vitality, but this was not such a time. He made a spring-heeled progress to my desk, deposited a bundle of mail in the in-tray and treated me to a lop-sided grin. ‘One o’ yer ’ouses in the news, I see, Mr Staddon.’

‘What?’

‘Clahds Frome. Read abaht it in me
Sketch
on the bus this very mornin’. Murder most foul, seemingly. Ain’t you ’eard?’

‘Oh, yes. I believe I did … read something.’

‘What’s the truth of it, then?’

‘I’ve really no idea, Kevin.’

‘Come on. You must know the family.’

‘It was a long time ago. Before the war. I hardly remember.’

He moved closer, the grin still plastered to his gossip-hungry face. ‘This Conshuler. Bit of a looker, is she?’ I shook my head, hoping he would desist. ‘They always are, aren’t they?’

‘Who are?’

‘Murderesses,’ he hissed gleefully. ‘Specially the poisonin’ kind.’

After throwing Kevin out, I sat down and forced myself to smoke a calming cigarette. As matters stood, I was under no obligation to intervene in whatever had befallen the Caswells. No obligation, that is, that the world would
recognize.
Far less did I have any right to interfere. Such rights as I might have had I had forfeited, long ago. Yet I had to know more. That much was certain. To pretend nothing had happened, to keep a weather eye open for a further report of court proceedings but otherwise remain sublimely indifferent, was beyond me. So, remembering the name of the local newspaper from my many visits to Hereford all those years ago, I telephoned their offices and prevailed upon them to send me copies of their last two weekly editions. I did not tell them why I wanted them and they did not ask. Only my guilty conscience suggested they might guess.

Where do the lines begin to be traced that lead two people together in this life? How far back lies the origin of their convergent destinies? Some time between disposing of the Mannerdown tenders and tolerating a peroration by the tireless Pargeter on a new range of emulsion paints, I dug out my earliest office diaries and computed, as I had never before, the date and time of my first meeting with Consuela Caswell. It was on my second visit to Hereford, in November 1908, after the commission for Clouds Frome had been settled and the site selected. Tuesday 17 November, as I now learned, around four o’clock in the afternoon. That, at all events, was when I had recorded that I was expected to take tea with Mr and Mrs Caswell, wealthy client and wife. But such precision did not for an instant deceive me. Our meeting was not the rushed contrivance of a diary jotting, but the inevitable product of the innumerable conjunctions and connections that govern all our lives.

It would be possible, for instance, to settle the responsibility on Ernest Gillow, the charming and tolerant man to whose architectural practice of music halls and taverns I was articled upon leaving Oxford in 1903. Gillow was himself a Cambridge man and took me on as a favour to my father, whose stockbroking services he had often employed. It was to transpire that a contemporary of his at King’s, Cambridge, was none other than Mortimer Caswell, eldest son of the
founder
of G. P. Caswell & Co., cider-makers of Hereford. When, in due course of time, Mortimer Caswell’s younger brother, Victor, returned from ten or more years in South America with a fortune in rubber behind him and a Brazilian wife on his arm, it was only to be expected that he would deem the construction of an impressive country residence an appropriate mark of his success. Mortimer suggested Gillow as the obvious man to recommend a young and enthusiastic architect, and it was only a year since I had left his practice, so Gillow no doubt thought he was doing me a considerable favour by putting my name forward. As indeed he was, in every sense that he could be expected to understand.

It was on 21 October 1908 – so my diary records – that I travelled to Hereford to view the site of Clouds Frome with my prospective client. London was fog-bound, but in the west all was sun-bathed contentment. As the train neared Hereford in the early afternoon, I gazed through the window with growing enchantment at the golden woods, the busy orchards, the deep green pastures and rolling hills of a landscape I hardly knew. My hopes rose as high as the clear blue sky, for this, surely, was the opportunity any young architect dreams of, the chance to match style and place in a form for which he will always be remembered.

I had by this time exchanged several letters with Victor Caswell and had spoken to him once by telephone. There was therefore no doubt in my mind that he was one of the two tall, slim, well-dressed figures waiting near the ticket-barrier at Hereford station, but which one was not clear. Facially there was little to tell them apart. Both were lean-faced and moustachioed, one adorned in morning suit and top hat, the other in flecked green tweed and a rakish cloth cap. It was the latter, in fact, who identified himself as Victor.

‘My brother Mortimer,’ he explained over handshakes. ‘He’s come along to give us the benefit of his opinion.’

There was much fraternal good humour on Victor’s part but little sign of reciprocation by Mortimer. Their close physical similarity seemed designed to compensate, in fact,
for
otherwise contrasting character. Victor was eager to set off, and even a brief detour to my hotel frustrated him. He owned a gleaming green and gold Mercedes tourer, quite the most splendid motor-car I had ever travelled in, and attracted many admiring glances as he drove through Hereford, where horse-drawn traffic was still the norm. Out along the dusty by-roads west of the city, he worked up what seemed a furious pace whilst shooting questions back at me over his shoulder about architects I respected, styles I liked and materials I favoured. His face and voice were animated by something midway between pride and pleasure, an impatient, consuming urge to celebrate all that he had achieved.

As for Mortimer, who sat beside me in the rear, hunched down amidst the polished leather and clasping the brim of his hat, he seemed all that his brother was not: glum, silent and deeply pessimistic. When I ventured a platitudinous enquiry about the cider trade, he countered with the humourless observation: ‘It’s just a business, young man, like any other.’

We crossed a river which I took to be the Wye (and later learned was the Lugg), then began to climb into wooded hill country, acre upon acre of somnolent Herefordshire stretching away behind us. Before long, Victor pulled off the road by a field gate and there we left the car, striking out across sloping pasture-land fringed by wood till we reached a hedgerow stile and halted to admire the gentle fall of the land west towards the flood plain of the Lugg and Hereford beyond.

‘That’s the site below us,’ Victor announced, as soon as Mortimer and I had caught up with him. ‘These three fields, the orchard further down and the farm between. You can see the farmhouse roof there.’ His arm pointed towards a distant wedge of thatch half-hidden in a fold of the land. It was the first I had heard of an existing building and, anticipating the questions I might ask, he added: ‘The tenant has notice to quit next Lady Day, Staddon, so have no fear
on
that score. I shall have a demolition gang in the yard the very next day.’

‘The Doaks,’ said Mortimer in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘have farmed Clouds Frome for six generations.’

‘Time for a change, then,’ said Victor with a grin. ‘Except for the name. Clouds Frome. Yes, I like it. What do you think, Staddon?’

‘Perfect, I should have thought.’

‘And the site, the prospect, the lie of the land. What do you make of them?’

‘They’re all perfect.’ And I was not lying. I was not even exaggerating. What I saw before me, taking shape amidst the autumnal fields, was a house to crown Victor’s success and launch mine. ‘I can build you a fine home here, Mr Caswell.’

‘I don’t want an artless pile, Staddon. I don’t want a mausoleum.’ He slapped the stile with his gloves for emphasis. ‘I want a house to breathe in, a house to glory in. I want the best.’

‘Then you shall have it, Mr Caswell.’ Suddenly, his greed was mine too, my ambition as boundless as his.

‘You’re paying Paston over the odds for this land, aren’t you?’ put in Mortimer, but already I sensed that nothing could restrain his brother’s enthusiasm.

‘What if I am?’ Victor countered with another grin. ‘I can afford to.’

‘It’s no way to do business.’

‘I daresay not, but this isn’t a question of business. It’s a question of vision.’

And that, it seemed, settled the matter. Mortimer fell silent, Victor lit a cigar and I climbed up onto the stile to gain a wider view. Clouds Frome Farm stood in a hollow, open to the south and west but backed to the north and east by the hill we had climbed. There was a stream audible in the hanger of trees to our right, descending towards the farm, and a breathtaking panorama beyond it of rolling pastures, with the Black Mountains forming a distant western
horizon.
A grand house, reached by a winding drive from the high road below, with water nearby and a sheltered yet open setting: it was scarcely possible to imagine anything better. My brain raced to embrace the opportunity.

‘Well, Staddon?’ said Victor when I had climbed down.

‘I’d be proud to build a house for you here, sir.’ It was the simple truth and all, for the moment, that I could think of to say.

‘And would it be a house I could be proud of as well?’

‘Oh yes.’ I glanced back at the view. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Then set to work.’ He shook my hand firmly. ‘Set to work with a will.’

I meant what I said that day when I stood with the Caswell brothers on the breezy heights above Clouds Frome in the thin October sunlight. That house became and still remains the best I was capable of and the best, I believe, any architect, whatever his fee, could have achieved in the circumstances. I returned to London the following day with most of the outline already formed in my head and half of it sketched out on a sheaf of hotel notepaper. Something elegant yet rural, restrained yet wholly original. That was my intention and that, as the plans took shape, was what seemed to lie within my grasp. A happy blend of manorial and domestic, rooted in the landscape and formed of local materials, serving the practical needs of its occupants yet assuring, by deft touches, its own self-confident novelty.

Victor Caswell was not, I already knew, a man to quibble over money. Once my drafts of what he might have had commended themselves to him, he was prepared to pay whatever it cost to implement them. With five months at our disposal before the tenant quit Clouds Frome Farm, there was moreover time in which to tailor every detail to his satisfaction. It was with this in mind that he invited me down to Hereford a few weeks later, mentioning in his letter that he wished me to meet his wife in order to explain my ideas to her and to take note of any decorative preferences she might
wish
to express. So it was that on 17 November I travelled to Hereford once more, bubbling over with enthusiasm for what I proposed and little knowing that I would encounter there something very different from anything I could imagine. For I was to encounter Consuela.

I had asked the
Hereford Times
to send their back copies to Frederick’s Place rather than Suffolk Terrace, having no wish to remind Angela of a subject which she seemed to have forgotten by the evening of the same day. They arrived on Thursday, anonymously parcelled, and I immediately found an excuse for immuring myself in my office in order to study them.