The Rich Are Different (7 page)

‘Tell me about it – the Cathedral – everything you know,’ I said, automatically checking my pocket to make sure I had my medication, and she started to talk about the number of years it had taken to build the Cathedral and how some of the great pillars were different from the others because the earlier ones had been unfinished. I concentrated on her information and conscientiously noted the features of the chancel, clerestory, nave and choir. We walked around the cloisters, we admired the stonework, and soon I had even recovered enough to smile at my swooningly romantic visions of travelling sideways in time.

Given the chance my good hard Yankee common sense will always triumph over my sloppy Victorian romanticism.

‘Why are you smiling?’ said Dinah curiously.

‘I must have been remembering my far-off foolish youth when I was a romantic idealist … My God, what’s this?’

It was a memorial stone, very old, set in the wall. Below an engraving of a skull ran the morbid rhyme:

‘Can’t you just imagine,’ said Dinah laughing, ‘what a beastly old kill-joy he must have been?’

I turned aside, saw the past, turned back, saw the future, turned aside again and began to stumble away.

‘Paul—’

‘I’ve got to get out.’

I felt better outside. I stood in the sunshine in the Cathedral Close and death seemed a long way away.

‘Sorry,’ I said to Dinah. ‘I’m not usually so disturbed by medieval morbidity. I must have been to too many funerals lately.’

She asked no questions but simply slipped her arm through mine. ‘Let’s go on to Mallingham.’

We left the city and after crossing the river and crawling through the suburbs we emerged once more on to the open road.

I did not speak and Dinah too was quiet. The countryside, pastoral and unremarkable, began to flatten and suddenly I felt the better mood of the Cathedral returning, the sense of time being displaced and bent to form a
different world. Crossing the bridge at Wroxham I saw the hubbub of life on the water, the yachts and cruisers, dinghies and rowboats, and although Dinah said indifferently: ‘This is the commercial part of the Broads. Wroxham is a holiday centre,’ the magic had begun again. This time I made no effort to be hard-headed and practical. I turned to embrace my romantic vision of time, and as the road curved through the marshland I saw the sails across the fields although the water was hidden from my eyes. It was as though the boats were travelling on land, and as I stared at this mysterious mirage I sensed a land where the water was king, and waters where the land was encircled to become a hundred private fiefdoms. We streamed through Horning (‘
Quite
lost its character since the war,’ snorted Dinah), and crossed the River Ant at Ludham Bridge where two windmills, one a skeleton, pointed ghostly fingers to the sky.

We drove on to Potter Heigham.

Somewhere south of Hickling we lost touch with modern times. The reeds swayed on the marshes, the white sails shimmered in distant dykes and enormous clouds dotted the unending sky.

‘More windmills!’ I was sitting on the edge of my seat and speaking for the first time for half an hour.

‘Drainage mills. They keep the land from flooding.’

I stared at the slowly revolving sails of the nearest mill. The sun was still shining. The cattle browsed tranquilly in the fields. Wattle-and-daub cottages basked beneath roofs of an unusually dark thatch.

Beyond Hickling the road ran due north to Palling, Waxham and Horsey but a mile before we reached the coast we found the weathered signpost which read ‘To Mallingham and the Marsh’.

The lane twisted and turned, ran unexpectedly over two hump-backed bridges and without warning arrived in the heart of the village. The church was even bigger than the church at Ludham, and as we passed by its flint walls I saw the cottages across the green. Some of the walls were whitewashed wattle-and-daub, but there were others built of faced flint with stone quoins. The pub, which stood facing the green, was called ‘The Eel and Ham’.

‘Short for “Isle de Mallingham”,’ explained Dinah. ‘The original Saxon settlement was an island when the Normans first arrived here.’

The road curved sharply again; as the village disappeared from sight we started to travel along a causeway above the marshes towards a ruined turreted gatehouse set in walls fifteen feet high.

We crossed the last bridge, passed the gatehouse and entered a short driveway bordered by a ragged lawn and some overgrown shrubbery.

I saw the house.

I had read her description and so knew exactly what to expect but even so I heard myself give an exclamation of amazement. Hardly able to believe that the past could have been so perfectly preserved, I gazed at the traditional medieval house with the hall in the centre and the wings, added later, forming the famous H. The walls were flint, some rough,
some dressed, with the type of stone quoin I had noticed in the village, and although the windows in the wings were small the windows of the great hall were as long and slender as the windows of a church. I was still marvelling that this present hall should date from the thirteenth century when I remembered that the previous hall which had been built on the same site was even older. William the Conqueror’s henchman, Alan of Richmond, had pulled down the Saxon house when he had been granted the manor of Mallingham in 1067, and had built himself a Norman hall to house his retinue during his visits to East Anglia. Later the entire manor had been described in detail in the Domesday Book. In those days there had been two Mallinghams, Mallingham Magna and Mallingham Parva, but Mallingham Parva had disappeared beneath the sea two hundred years ago during the prolonged and continuing erosion of the Norfolk coastline.

Dinah showed me into the great hall, and there I saw the hammer-beamed ceiling and the staircase which had once led to the solar and the fireplace with the stone carving above the mantel of the coat of arms of Godfrey Slade. This first recorded Slade of Mallingham had built the present hall before riding off to the crusades. It was thought that he had been the son of a rich Norwich merchant who had aspired to grandeur by buying the hall when the previous owners, the monks of St Benet’s Abbey, had sold the property to meet increased taxation.

‘This way,’ said Dinah, but I was still looking up at the hammer-beamed ceiling, and it was several seconds before I followed her into the far wing where a large chamber had been furnished as a drawing-room. A modern architect had built some doors which opened on to a terrace, and as Dinah led the way outside I looked past the Victorian urns decorating the balustrade, down the lawn studded with croquet hoops, to the Edwardian boathouse, the jetty and the shining waters of Mallingham Broad.

The glare of the sun on water hurt my eyes. I closed my lids and as I stood listening I heard the birds calling to one another in the marshes and the salt sea-wind humming through the willows at the water’s edge.

Again I felt the past opening up before me, but it was a different past, a past I had never experienced before. In my mind’s eye I could see it stretching backwards into the mist, layer upon layer, time beyond time, time out of mind, and its vastness was not disturbing but comforting to me.

I opened my eyes and walked down the lawn to the water. The walls of time were very thin, and as I walked I became aware of that endless past merging with my own present, and I knew I had come to the end of my journey sideways in time. A great peace overcame me. Tears blurred my eyes, for I knew I was free at last with the blood washed from my hands, free of the prison I had built for myself in another time and in another world far away across the sea.

The sense of having come home was overpowering. ‘This is what I’ve always wanted,’ my voice said. ‘This is what I’ve always been trying to find.’ I turned. She
was there. We looked at one another for a long moment, and then she smiled.

‘Welcome to
my
world, Paul,’ said Dinah Slade.

[1]

‘What about your entourage?’

‘They can wait.’

We went upstairs. Her room faced the Broad, and from the window one could see beyond the trees which fringed the water to the Brograve Level and the sandhills of Waxham. After drawing the drapes I turned to find her waiting for me in the four-poster bed.

Awaking later, I went back to the window and lifted the corner of the drape. The sun was still high in the sky although it was early evening, and the birds were still skimming languidly over the mirrored surface of the Broad. Yet the light had changed. The reeds were darker, the water a deeper blue and far away beyond the sandhills I could imagine a golden sheen beginning to form on the restless waves of the North Sea.

I dressed. The girl was sound asleep, her long lashes motionless against her cheeks. After watching her for a moment I went downstairs to the hall.

O’Reilly was waiting for me. He was sitting neatly in an armchair by the door and reading a guide-book on the Norfolk Broads.

‘Is everything in order?’

‘Yes, sir. We have our accommodation in the west wing. It’s rather primitive by American standards,’ said O’Reilly fastidiously, ‘but I’m sure we’ll manage. I’ve arranged for us to take our meals at the village inn. There are no servants here except for one old woman who appears to be deaf, hostile and a mental defective.’

‘Ah, that must be Mrs Oakes.’ I was remembering Dinah’s report. Twenty years ago when there had still been money in the family six in-help, three daily maids, two grooms, two gardeners and a gamekeeper had been employed at Mallingham Hall, but nowadays the head gardener and the housekeeper, Mr and Mrs Oakes, had the servants’ quarters to themselves. Mrs Oakes had looked after Dinah when she had returned to Mallingham after her mother’s death, and still regarded herself as responsible for running the house. Her husband, who had a Boer War pension, still assumed responsibility for the garden. Neither had been paid since Dinah’s father had died. An old marshman who lived in a hut on the edge of the Broad kept out trespassers, guarded the wild-life and fished the waters to prevent overpopulation among the trout, bream and tench.

The house was dusty and down-at-heel. Most of the first editions had
long since been sold from the library; most of the antique furniture had also gone to pay for Harry Slade’s extravagance. The rooms were furnished in a hodge-podge of styles; the walls needed a coat of paint; the evidence of mice was everywhere. I had learnt that there was one bathroom, one water closet, no telephone, no electricity and no gas. It was not a large house, a mere five bedrooms in each wing of the medieval H, and the galleried hall was bigger than either wing. The kitchens were primitive, the stables little better than ruins, the glasshouses broken and overgrown. There was no yacht in the boathouse, only a sailing dinghy, and a sole pony occupied the stall next to the Victorian trap. Beyond the stables the fifteen-foot walls enclosed an area of three acres, most of which was grass. I was shown a paddock for the pony, a rectangle which could be marked as a tennis court, and the croquet lawn below the back terrace. Once the Manor of Mallingham had embraced an area of several hundred acres including the church, the village and all the farms in the neighbourhood, but in the past fifty years the farms and cottages had been sold so that all that now remained of the estate was the house, the garden and the seventy-five acres of water, reeds and marsh which formed Mallingham Broad.

‘But I shall make it live again,’ said Dinah as we dined that evening. ‘Oh, not in the old way, of course – that’s gone for ever. I don’t expect to be the lady of the manor living on the rents of my tenants. But if – when – I make enough money at my business, I’ll restore the house and grounds and there’ll be a yacht in the boat-house again and a motor car instead of that dilapidated old pony-trap and servants to look after the house properly, and antiques to replace the ones my father sold. And I’ll stock the library with valuable books again, and everything will be as perfect as it was two hundred years ago when William Slade was a member of Parliament and the Slades were a great Norfolk family … Mrs Oakes,
do
stop looking as though the Day of Judgement were about to dawn! I can’t tell you how depressing I find it!’

The old woman had just brought in the summer pudding. ‘No good was ever a-coming out of foreigners stroaming about these parts, Miss Dinah,’ she said, taking care not to look in my direction.

‘And to think I put on my best English accent!’ I said ruefully as she marched out of the room.

‘Oh, never mind her – she doesn’t even trust anyone from Suffolk.’

When we had finished our meal we went for a stroll in the garden. The Broad was golden, flocks of starlings and lapwings flew over the marshes across the pale evening sky and a bittern was booming far off in the reeds.

‘Would you like to see my laboratory?’ suggested Dinah.

‘About as much as you wanted to see the Rouen Apocalypse.’

We paused among the shrubbery. I wondered if Mrs Oakes was watching in disapproval from some hidden window.

‘I actually use the scullery as a laboratory,’ Dinah explained as she led the way into a glasshouse which had a number of panes missing from the roof. ‘I need running water for my experiments, but I store the results of my work
here so that Mrs Oakes doesn’t throw them away.’ She moved to a bench which had been cleared of horticultural impedimenta, removed a tarpaulin and revealed a row of bottles confusingly labelled with such instructions as ‘Percy’s cough syrup: one teaspoon every four hours.’

Dinah’s paternal grandparents had lived in India and on their return to England they had brought with them the Indian nursemaid who had cared for their infant son. The ayah had remained for twenty years in England before dying of homesickness, and it had been her recipes for cosmetics, conscientiously recorded for posterity by Dinah’s grandmother, that had formed the basis of Dinah’s experiments.