The Northern Clemency (47 page)

Nick saw none of the embarrassments of the estate as he turned off the main road to Salworthy on to Torcombe’s drive. He saw only his own colossal embarrassment. It had never seemed worthwhile, in Sheffield, acquiring another car when Reynolds’s van did perfectly well. You could get your shopping in it, or drop in on Rose, his new girlfriend, in her cottage in the Rivelin valley, or go out to the pictures or the theatre or even a pub in Derbyshire in it. It was perfectly serviceable, even a little bit jaunty to go about with your business advertised on the side. He hadn’t thought of this aspect when Jimmy had said, a couple of years ago, “Got myself a big new place in the country,” or, a fortnight ago, “Well, if there’s something you want to discuss, you’ll have to come down to my place in the country for the weekend. Nice idea. Show you over.” If he’d envisaged it, he’d probably thought of a prosperous farmer’s house, but not this. It was the sort of place you glimpsed in passing and wondered who the hell managed to keep up a pile like that, these days.

Steeling himself, and certain that the van, his shabby suitcase and the two changes of clothes inside it wouldn’t do, Nick drove up the overgrown drive and round the circle of dry, unkempt grass in front of the massively windowed façade. He’d misjudged, badly. The worst of it was the last horrible thought: that the van’s gold Roman lettering on deep purple, to match the shop front, always had the effect, in Sheffield, of
class
.

It was extraordinarily hot. He’d set off in a T-shirt and shorts, quite cheerful in the early-morning sunlight, but by Derby and after breakfast, he’d had to peel off the T-shirt. His back and thighs had been clinging to the plastic seat, despite the wide-open windows; his hands, gripping the steering-wheel, were almost wrinkled with sweat. His hair, drenched with sweat, dried in the breeze. Outside this huge and alarming house, he put on his T-shirt again, at any rate. He was rather hoping it had occurred to him to put his summer jacket into the bag as well as a pair of summer trousers.

He got out, hanging his head, and slammed the van door. What the
hell did you do when you came to a place like this, anyway? Did you ring the doorbell, or just walk in? He was getting his shameful bag out when the vast door opened, and there—oh, Christ—was what could only be a butler. Nick steeled himself to explain, before the bugger could send him round to the tradesman’s entrance, that he’d been invited, that, yes, he sold flowers in a shop, but he was—Christ, these days, how did you say, “I am a gentleman”? The bloke came over, not at all butler-like in his demeanour, but slouching and shuffling his shoes through the gravel. Maybe he was just one of Jimmy’s, but then he said, ludicrously, “Welcome to Torcombe. The master’s expecting you.” He was suppressing some kind of accent in a kind of gurgling yodel. He took Nick’s bag, hardly hesitating, and led the way in his crisp uniform, Nick following in his shamefaced 10CC rock-concert T-shirt, bright red shorts and sandals. The butler still looked cooler, in this heat, than Nick did.

Miranda was long gone—divorced and, by all accounts, making a success of her own business on the pay-off. She had a keep-fit studio, a gym they were calling them now, in Covent Garden “and good luck to her,” Jimmy always said, as if they really were, as he went on to claim, “on the best of terms.” Gone too, the next wife—Susie, or stupidly-spelt Soozie, it had been, one of the girls Jimmy had always picked up from time to time but on that occasion, light-hearted and released from Miranda’s minatory supervision, had unaccountably gone and married. Eighteen months of trying to meet Soozie’s showbusiness demands, culminating in a disastrous week when she’d played a cat in a musical before being rudely sacked, and that had been that. The one who came forward now to meet Nick in the cigar-box entrance hall, glaucously lit by stained-glass windows and fragrant with mould, was the latest trading-up; gentry, Jimmy’d said or, more exactly, “Posh tea-head. She’s over the needle, all that, now. Name of Laura.”

“You must be Nick,” Laura said, bonily attractive, her voice low and grand, leaning forward as if she might put out her hand to be shaken. She was wearing a simple white dress, hung with two straps over her buttered-toast-coloured bosom. It looked as if it had cost nothing, had come from Marks & Spencer, but something about the way it swung as she came forward, some suggestion of asymmetry in the cut suggested immense expenditure of a sort not visible to people such as Nick. She smelt deliciously of jasmine-scented soap, and no perfume.

“And you must be Laura,” Nick said, smiling, wondering what on earth he must smell like. “What an amazing house. I had no idea.”

“No?” Laura said, her smile now chilling a little. Nick understood. There was to be no reference to the acquisition of Torcombe, anything to suggest that it hadn’t been in Jimmy’s family for generations. “You’re just in time for tea—”

Tea?

“—and I think he’s in the library. Thank you. Take Mr. Reynolds’s luggage up to his room.”

Library?

It was, of course, to be expected that Jimmy would obstinately hunker down in some baronial spot, waiting for a supplicant like Nick to be ushered into the presence. In fact, given what Nick had come here to say, he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t as frightened as Jimmy wanted him to be. But the idea of Jimmy in a library was a new one; Nick could remember when he had said “front room,” and he wondered what slips from Jimmy and well-mannered corrections from Laura had edged him into the state where he had tea—real tea, not tea-head tea, presumably—in the library in the afternoon, and perhaps even describing it in that exact way.

Laura led him from the hallway, not into the library but into a sort of long gallery, gloomy and heavy with mahogany, but here and there, recognizably, a piece of furniture from the old Fulham house. Hardly any of the day’s fierce sunlight filtered through to illuminate these rooms; their atmosphere was as of undergrowth in which familiar objects nested. Here was a white sofa placed where no one, surely, could want to sit on it. Further along, surely, a white polar-bear rug, bought, if he remembered, at little Sonia’s insistence. It had overwhelmed even the generous spaces of the Fulham sitting room, but here it looked sadly isolated, as if it expected to greet a yawning mate at the far end of the gallery. The rest of the furniture, the paintings, the shabby carpets, you couldn’t imagine Jimmy choosing them, or even owning them.

“Shouldn’t I go and change first?” Nick said, gesturing at his
déshabille
with an apologetic hand.

“Oh, nonsense,” Laura said, hardly looking at what he was wearing. “It’s only Jimmy.” He understood her to mean “It’s only you.” “The other thing is,” she went on, “you can send a guest off to his room and then you never see him again.”

“Are your guest rooms as irresistible as that?” Nick said heartily.

“It’s not as much a rabbit-warren as it seems at first,” Laura said, ignoring his comment, turning into another room with the height of a
cinema and in much the same grottily gilded style, also not the library. “We only really live in about a dozen or fifteen rooms. Heaven alone knows what goes on in the rest.”

A
dozen?

“And here he is,” Laura said, pushing open a pair of double doors into the library. “I told you he’d be in time for tea, darling.”

Against Nick’s expectations, the library really was a library; one whole wall lined with sets of bound books, up to the ceiling. The case was ecclesiastical, Gothic, with pendentives and ogives and, with a shock, Nick recognized that the whole construction was a huge scale model of St. Pancras railway station. No, not quite that, but almost. The shelves went up to the twelve-foot ceiling, encrusted with more doomy Gothic plasterwork, but the single ladder had at least four rungs missing, and the top shelves must be more for show than use. Nick wondered what could be up there: mice nesting in antique pornography, probably. In any case, a few of the bottom shelves had been cleared out for what books Jimmy owned, and among the ranks of bound sermons, fat paperbacks screaming
LUDLUM
, coffee-table volumes of illustrated popular anthropology and
Learning to Paint With Nancy Kominski
were closer to hand. The windows here were floor-to-ceiling, giving on to a long vista of terrace, sad, intricate, twiggy garden with blackened statuary and leaf-filled dry fountain bowls, a grizzled pepper-and-salt meadow where sheep piled up in the shade of the Cedars of Lebanon. Beyond, the railway line, the glistening meander of the river, the glistening lines of the pylons, and a flash of mirrored windows as the London–Bristol traversed the valley. Inside, the room was dense with the flight of dust-motes, the long torn red velvet curtains, their cream lining poking through, in a collapse over the windows like a two-day-old pudding.

“And you were right,” Jimmy said, rising from the heavily padded green leather sofa. He greeted Nick with a wave that just failed to become a handshake, and a showy kiss for his new wife, who patted him reassuringly on the back, detached herself and left them alone.

“You’d have told her to shut up and piss off once,” Nick said, “if she’d said that to you.”

“Who? Laura?” Jimmy said. “Never.”

“Not Laura,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean Laura, I meant, I don’t know, Miranda.”

“Why’d you say Laura, then?” Jimmy said, but mildly, curiously.

“What I meant was if, in the past, Miranda had said to you even ‘I
told you he’d be here for tea,’ like, ‘I told you I was right and you were wrong,’ you’d have said, straight away, ‘Piss off and shut up.’ It must be the country life.”

“Christ, it’s hot,” Jimmy said. “One of the hottest. Went out this morning, thought about walking down to the lake, see how the trout are coming on. Twenty feet out of the door, couldn’t stand it, too fucking hot. Ten thirty in the morning, mind. Not hot travelling down?”

“Very hot,” Nick said. A silence fell.

“She’s a fantastic woman,” Jimmy said miserably. “I bought it for her, you know.”

“The—?”

“The house, you berk,” Jimmy said. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Oh, I noticed all right,” Nick said. “Going it a bit, aren’t you?”

“You’re telling me,” Jimmy said.

The last move of Jimmy’s was only a mile or so westward, but in its own way a colossal one. There’d been a rationale behind Fulham; Jimmy, he let you know, could have afforded something flasher but you’d be running a risk, making yourself conspicuous. Nick wasn’t convinced, and the Fulham house was flash enough. Sure enough, in time there was a new house overlooking a Chelsea square with nannies in uniform and old generals in scarlet frock-coats, most of the first and second floor interrupting the splendid stucco with a vast studio window. Some painter had lived there when painters could afford Chelsea. Soozie had wanted to keep it as a studio, Nick remembered, with a barre and a mirror and a white grand piano, but Jimmy’d refused. There he’d stopped, and Torcombe was a new addition rather than a replacement for the Chelsea house.

“You must be doing all right,” Nick said.

“I’m doing all right,” Jimmy said. He reached over to the table by his side, where there was a plate of sandwiches and a cake, but instead of tea, a glass of whisky. “Some of it was mine, and some of it was Laura’s. You know her husband died? Just died, when I met her. Another tea-head. Usual story. She’d cleaned herself up, found out she’d got more money than she expected, met me.”

“Did you know her before?”

“Knew the husband a bit. Everyone knew the husband. Lord, wasn’t he? Viscount or something. She’s all right, Laura. Educated. Knows about all this stuff—” a wave of the hand at the Victorian age “—and I reckon it makes her laugh, cleaning up and then marrying into the business when it don’t interest her no more, the goods. Makes me
laugh, too. Never thought I’d marry a customer, despised them. She’s all right.”

“She seems great.”

“I tell you what,” Jimmy said. “It’s just us this weekend, but there’s a fan of yours coming down. Might be here already, don’t know. Remember Sonia? Thrilled to bits when she heard you were here too. Remembers you.”

“Little Sonia,” Nick said. “I haven’t seen her since she was eight. I didn’t know I made such an impression on her.”

“She’s nearly twenty now,” Jimmy said. “Bought her a house, too, in the—get this—in the East End, Spitalfields. My old mum’d never in a million years contemplate living in Spitalfields. Sonia, she’s studying art, I bought her this mouldy old house falling down round her ears and she loves it. You never know about kids. I think it’s mostly floorboards and plaster falling off the walls still. Didn’t cost much, or I’d have had a job stretching to this monstrosity. Did I tell you about it?”

“No, not at all,” Nick said.

“Do you want the guided tour?” Jimmy said. “Laura’ll give you that—she knows all about it, where Mata Hari slept and the pisspot King Edward used in 1906 and which Chinese emperor made what vase and all that. So we get married and I thought Laura, she loves the country, so I’ll surprise her. I’ll buy a house in the country. Now I was thinking rectory, five bedrooms, couple of acres, rose garden, that’ll do me. But I went out and looked and rectories, that’s exactly what you can’t find any more, they’re all done up and twice what they should be costing. And then, suddenly, I was driving round this neck of the woods with a local estate agent and he mentions that the family here are thinking of selling up after I don’t know how many generations. And no one in their right minds wants a place this size, so it’s going for a song.

“You should have seen them. There was just an old brother and sister left, and one housemaid who I think had been their nanny, she must have been eighty, and they lived in three rooms, just a bedroom each and a little room they sat in and watched an old black-and-white telly. Poor as church mice. All the money had gone, and they’d sold all the land they could sell. But I looked around, and, you can see, it’s not in first-class nick, but there’s nothing much wrong with it—it doesn’t leak much. So I took it off their hands and they’re living in a nice little cottage in the village with central heating for the first time in their lives, and four hundred thousand pounds in the bank. Happy as Larry. They
left most of the furniture, too—they hadn’t seen it for thirty years. It’d been under dust sheets. I don’t say I like it much, but it fills the house, and you can’t fill a house this size straight off. Do you know how much it costs just to put curtains up in one room?”