Corpse in a Gilded Cage (2 page)

‘Easy-going,' agreed the Earl placatingly. ‘Takes life as it comes. Never one to make trouble. Too much so, sometimes. That's how a type like Dixie can get the upper hand. But he's popular, that nobody can deny. I bet he's well liked where he is. And you could say the same about Trevor, in a way.'

‘Ye-e-es,' said the Countess, more dubiously. ‘In a different sort of way.'

Their eyes were taking in the trees of the Countess's Mile, their leaves just beginning to lose the brilliant green of spring, but their minds were contemplating the figure of their younger son.

‘If anybody deserved to go to gaol it's Trevor,' said the Earl, without rancour. ‘By gum!—he sails close to the wind sometimes. The sums he's had off the social security people—just lies barefaced and they believe him.'

‘I hate to think what would happen if full employment came back,' said the Countess. ‘He wouldn't know what to do with himself. Not that he
doesn't make money, now and then. But I wouldn't call what he does
work.'

‘More like a sideline. To the social security.'

‘It's embarrassing,' protested the Countess. ‘Downright embarrassing. I wouldn't know where to look if the neighbourhood found out.'

‘You can bet your bottom dollar they know,' said her husband. ‘Trevor's name cropped up in the Prince Leopold just a day or two before all this landed on our plates, and old Fred Jarvis winked at me and nudged me in the ribs. Cheeky old sod! He's just the sort to go to these cinema clubs where they show that kind of stuff. You can bank on old Fred having put it all around Clapham by now.'

The Countess sighed.

‘I don't know how I'll look the neighbours in the face, though Trevor doesn't seem to have any sense of shame. And this girl he's bringing with him, this Michele: she must be a right one if she appears in those pictures. First Prince Andrew, now our Trevor . . . She looked like the sort with only one thing on her mind.'

‘Sex?'

‘Number one. And willing to use whatever she's got to advance it. Bloody cheek, really, isn't it, Trevor inviting her along without so much as a by-your-leave, when we'd only met the girl for five minutes. Not to mention Dixie calmly announcing that she'd bring Chokey along.'

‘That's different, Elsie. Chokey'll have been visiting Phil. That'll buck him up no end. They're pals.'

‘Funny sort of pal. It was Chokey landed him in.'

‘Now that's nonsense, Elsie. I know that's not how Phil sees it, and Chokey'll always be welcome as Phil's friend. It's not as though we haven't got room. We could lodge the whole Eighth Army here and there'd still be beds to spare. At least Joan and Digby won't be bringing anyone along with them.'

‘No,' admitted the Countess. ‘That wouldn't be Joan's way at all.'

‘There's one of our children we don't have to make apologies for,' said the Earl, with a somewhat insecure heartiness. ‘Hard little worker. Really got ahead. Set herself a goal, and achieved it. They're a lovely young couple.'

There was silence in the Green Drawing-Room.

‘It's funny,' said the Countess at last, ‘but I could never really take to our Joanie. I tried, but I couldn't. They say it's sometimes like that with mother and daughter. I don't know if it was me or her, but I think it was
her. There's something . . . I dunno . . . petty about her. Something mean-minded.'

The Earl, who was a kind-hearted man and an affectionate father, felt impelled to enter a protest.

‘Come off it, Mother: Joan's just got her standards.'

‘Oh yes—and doesn't she let everyone know it. I get fed up with her bleeding standards. Do you know, the last time I visited her—
by
invitation, as usual!—I was coming home on the bus, and there were these two women behind me, talking about one of the teachers at the local Junior School, and how fussy she was, and how she went on and on about the kiddies washing their hands after they'd been to the lav. And I sat there thinking: I bet that's our Joan. And it was! They said her name: Mrs Ferguson, they said. I could have sunk through the floor! Isn't that just like our Joan, getting all het up about a little thing like that?'

‘She always was a clean little girl, I remember,' said the Earl. ‘Fastidious, like.'

‘You could call it that. Fussy's my word for it. She didn't get it from me. I'm not pernickety, and I'm not houseproud. She drives me up the wall the way she goes on when she comes round to us.'

The Countess turned from the window, and for the first time she surveyed the Green Drawing-Room with something approaching satisfaction.

‘She'll have her work cut out if she's going to draw her finger along all the dust there is in
this
mauso-bloody-leum. I'll just hand her a duster and I'll say: “You get to it, my girl, and I'll see you next Christmas twelvemonth.” '

‘She does overdo it,' admitted the Earl, grinning at his wife's retreating back as she waddled back to the sofa and took up her knitting. ‘And Digby is a bit the same. Neat. Precise. They're well matched, really. You can't imagine Digby without a tie on or a handkerchief in his top pocket, any more than you can imagine Joanie going round with her hair in curlers. Still, you've got to remember his job. You have to keep up a good appearance in the insurance business.'

‘You don't have to be prissy. And I'd call Digby prissy.'

The Earl turned back to the window, and gazed once more at the cows, flicking their tails at the flies in the Long Meadow.

‘You don't think we went wrong with our kids somewhere, do you, Elsie?' asked the Earl.

If the twelfth Earl of Ellesmere ever felt a sense of history and of his place in it, it was not as a rule in the magnificent residence of his family, whose splendour overawed him and whose distances tired him. It came to him, if at all, out of doors, perhaps when surveying the acre upon acre of his fiefdom, perhaps when walking in the cool reaches of the Countess's Mile. Sometimes in the early morning, when he had made a pot of tea for himself and his wife, had trailed it from the servants' hall, down corridors endlessly winding, across the Great Entrance Hall, up Sir Philip's Staircase, and down the narrow domestics' passage that led him finally to the State Bedroom—after all this (which was a continuation of a duty regularly undertaken at Clapham, where it involved perhaps one-tenth of the labour) he would often calm his nerves with a stroll in the morning cool. And along the Countess's Mile he would sometimes experience some lift of the soul, some message from the ethos of the place, that would make him pause in his track, put his hand on the trunk of an elm, gaze through the trees and across the Long Meadow towards Chetton Lacey, and say to himself:

‘By Jove! These trees have been here hundreds of years. As long as my family has. It makes you think.'

In this the twelfth Earl was quite mistaken, for the elms of the Countess's Mile had been replanted shortly before the First World War. It was not these trees under which the fourth Earl's wife had flirted with Richard Mont, her groom, tapping him playfully with her whip as they swapped innuendoes drawn from the world of horsemanship; nor was it these that had seen the fourth Earl burst in on them and commence that ferocious attack on Richard Mont that had led to his serving three years for felonious assault in the most luxurious apartments in Newgate Prison. But the accuracy of the twelfth Earl's reflections is beside the point, for the Romantic impulse which led to that lift of the heart was of a kind that has never depended on literal truth. The important point was that it was there, even if it did not go very deep, and his man of business could not have
caught him in a better place for his purposes, had he but known it, and had he but known how to make use of it.

But he did not. When Mr Lillywaite was sent thither by the Countess (in an early morning dishabille that was by no means as enticing as that of the first Earl's wife in the portrait by Kneller that dominated the Great Entrance Hall) he merely clicked his tongue at the unbusinesslike character of the place of meeting, and set reluctantly off.

When the Earl saw the cadaverous figure of his man of affairs approaching down the great flight of steps from the Dutch Garden, he roused himself from his mild reverie among times past and strolled to meet him along the leafy shadows of the Mile, his mouth set in a genial smile that involved him in some effort, for Mr Lillywaite did not inspire geniality.

‘Lovely day, eh?' called the Earl. ‘Makes you feel more alive, a day like this. I always love walking down Clapham High if there's early morning sunshine. Shall we take a turn along the avenue here?'

The sunken face of the tall lawyer looked down into the round face of the dumpy peer, and rather bleakly said:

‘Of course. If you wish.'

Mr Lillywaite had long ago given up any attempt to ‘My Lord' or even ‘Sir' the present Earl, faced with the crude ridicule that these formalities excited. Indeed, the whole six weeks of their acquaintanceship had been one series of shocks to Mr Lillywaite's old-fashioned sensibilities, beginning with the new Earl's demand that before he and the Countess come to Chetton his man of business should get rid of every man jack (and every woman jill) of the house's domestic staff. ‘Give 'em their marching orders pronto,' the Earl had said. ‘Me and Elsie don't want spies around us all the time. We're not used to it. And specially we don't want any of the toffee-nosed types you get in these places, watching our every move.' Mr Lillywaite (inspired by notions of decorum rather than of humanity) had protested the length of service, the devotion to the family, of this or that retainer, but—beyond paying the severance pay that the law demanded, and a very little over—the Earl had been adamant. Mr Lillywaite had known from this point that things were not going to go well, and they had not.

‘Well,' he said now, gazing unhappily at his black shoes, which were gaining a patina of sandy dust from the surface of the Mile, ‘we are getting on. There is clearly going to be no difficulty in establishing your title, or indeed your claim to the estate. There is no question that your father's
marriage to your mother was legal, and none of any previous tie on either side.'

‘I should think not,' said the Earl, with a touch of mustard in his tone. ‘They were practically teenagers at the time, weren't they? He was just twenty, and Ma was eighteen and a bit, that's what I heard. It wasn't likely either of them had ever been spliced before.'

‘No. No indeed. The marriage was always recognized by the family, even though, as you no doubt know, it was highly disapproved of.'

‘They were too young. I don't wonder the family were against it.'

‘That was one of their objections,' said Mr Lillywaite, from a great mental distance. The Earl shot him a quick glance that, had it been seen, might have warned Mr Lillywaite that he should not underestimate either the Earl's intelligence or his strength of character.

‘Oh, I get the point,' said the Earl. ‘I know they thought Ma wasn't their class. You don't have to be shy of saying it straight out. She wasn't either. I know that. But you could say we had the last laugh there, couldn't you?'

Mr Lillywaite sighed. Indeed you could. It was something that had not been foreseen. Even the old Earl—a courteous, prudent, private sort of man, an aristocrat of an old-fashioned school—had not foreseen it. He had settled the estate and the bulk of the family fortune on his grandson some years before, his only son being many years dead. The grandson had legally come into the estate on his coming of age, but it had been little more than a formal assumption. Who could have guessed that three weeks after the death of the old Earl, the young Earl would also die—driving up the M1, considerably inebriated, on the way from one celebration of his new independence to another, from one set of well-heeled drinking pals to another. It had all been unimaginably shocking to Mr Lillywaite's nervous system.

‘The old Earl was, alas, never reconciled to his brother,' went on Mr Lillywaite, in a well-practised voice of formal regret. ‘This perhaps explains why he never cared to anticipate the possibility of—of
this
happening.'

‘I'm surprised they never made it up,' said the Earl. ‘After all, the marriage only lasted a year or two. I was hardly crawling when Dad left. Packed his bags and took ship to Australia. I believe he made good there: they say he ended up as a member of the South Australian parliament.'

Mr Lillywaite's upper lip held the suspicion of a curl. That was not his idea of making good.

‘Ye-es,' he said. ‘Well, as I say, there can be no doubt that, on your
father's death three years ago, you became the legal heir after the Earl's grandson. Naturally no arrangements to circumvent death duties could be made. There was every reason to assume that the young Earl would have heirs.'

‘So I've heard,' said the Earl cheerfully, without any suspicion of disapproval. ‘Sowed a fair few wild oats, from what we heard down at the local the other night.'

The idea of the Earl discussing his predecessor in a public house in Chetton Lacey was intensely distasteful to Mr Lillywaite. He would like to have made this clear to the Earl, but could think of no way that was likely to get through to him. After a pause he resumed the walk, the two of them resembling more and more a Victorian private tutor hired to rein in the levity and trivial-mindedness of a high-spirited young charge.

‘Nevertheless, there is no question of any legal heir to the young Earl being in existence. So perhaps we could turn now to the question of the house. I trust you have turned the subject over in your mind since our last conversation?'

‘Oh, I have,' said the Earl, walking confidently, even cockily forward, his hands clasped behind his back, looking very much as Harold Wilson used to look after a particularly triumphant Question Time in the House. ‘The result is exactly the same. Elsie and me have made up our minds, and we're not going to go back on it. Sell out and get out. House, pictures, furniture—the lot. Get what they'll fetch is all we ask. We want to be rid of the whole caboodle.'