Wickham Hall, Part 2 (4 page)

‘Not exactly . . .' I was trying to conjure up a reply that didn't make me look odd when my phone rang. I grabbed it gratefully and mouthed an apology to him.

It was a call from a coach operator confirming details of a coach tour for the next day. I scribbled some notes and rang off. Ben was engrossed in the
Wickham and Hoxley News
, laughing to himself, reading out snatches of headlines and holding up pictures of big eighties perms for me to see.

I whizzed off a quick internal email to Nikki, Jenny and Jim to let them know the details of the coach party. I confirmed their time of arrival, lunch and departure and I booked in Nikki's garden tour, hoping that by the time I'd finished, Ben would have forgotten what he was going to ask me.

I was feeling a bit less stressed about Mum's hoarding now that she had finally admitted that that's what it was, but it didn't stop me being embarrassed about it. Ben had grown up in an Elizabethan manor house; I couldn't even begin to explain to him what it had been like growing up in Weaver's Cottage.

Having an untidy house hadn't bothered me at all when I was small. All families are the same, I'd thought: stacks of mail in the hall, a pile of washing on a chair, an assortment of things at the foot of the stairs waiting to be taken up. There never seemed to be enough room for things but I didn't notice anything different about my home.

I must have been about twelve when I realized Mum's piles of stuff weren't normal. I saw it on the faces of friends when they came round. The way they eyed each other as they inched past a stack of newspapers in the narrow hallway; the way they turned in slow circles in our living room, looking for a place to sit.

‘Let's go up to my room!' I'd suggest, knowing that at least there they wouldn't be able to find fault with the clean surfaces, the lack of ‘stuff' and the collection of posters, symmetrically Blu-tacked to the walls. But the damage had been done and after a while friends stopped coming round, or I stopped asking them, I can't remember now.

Mum kept everything, although paper was her weakness: newspapers, magazines, all sorts of literature, but anything to do with Wickham Hall was special. Now I knew that she had had an affair with a mystery man there, that part sort of made sense. But I'd already revealed far more than I should have done to Ben thanks to my faux pas in Joop on Sunday; I certainly didn't want to explain why my mother had kept every brochure and newspaper with a mention of the Summer Festival in it since 1984—

‘Look at this,' cried Ben triumphantly, breaking into my thoughts.

He was holding up a double-page spread of photographs taken at Wickham. I went round to his side of the desk to read it over his shoulder.

‘Wickham Hall Summer Festival 1989. And it's part of a four-page supplement. Look.' He tapped a picture of a dark-haired boy beaming at the camera in front of the coconut shy.

My eyes scanned the caption. ‘Benedict Fortescue enjoys the fun and games at— that's you,' I squealed. ‘Oh, how cute were you in those little shorts!'

He pulled an injured face. ‘Do you mean I'm not cute in shorts any more?'

I opted to ignore that question on the grounds that I could either fan his ego by admitting that he did look cute. Or lie.

‘The photographer is Steve Selby,' I read from the copyright notice underneath Ben's picture. ‘So all you need to do now is to see if he covered all the earlier years of the show that you want too.'

Ben grinned. ‘He did, I've already checked. I just wanted you to see that picture of me and go weak-kneed at my cuteness.'

I rolled my eyes and went back to my laptop. ‘Let's see if Mr Selby appears on a Google search. And then I really must send out some press releases and check on the printers to see if the new calendar is ready and then try to source some giant pearls for your new and improved treasure hunt. Ben?'

But he was already sprinting down the corridor.

My ‘Steve Selby' search threw up thousands of results but the most likely candidate was a lecturer at Hathaway Arts College in Stratford. Where Esme used to study. I reached for my mobile and tapped out a text message.

You heard of Steve Selby?

Her reply came back immediately.

Yeah, my old photography lecturer. Used to be press photographer, covered all local stuff. Nice bloke, about Mum's age.

Result! I sent her a thank-you message and by the time Ben came back, lugging his easel and paints, I'd put a sticky note with Steve's mobile number on his desk.

‘Excellent work, Sherlock,' said Ben, peeling the note off the desk.

He called the number immediately and after a very short conversation ended the call, stood up and rubbed his hands together.

‘He can see us in an hour. Are you coming?'

I blinked at him. ‘What, now? But . . .' I glanced down at my diary; there was still so much to do for the festival and I had planned to start a Facebook competition this afternoon to win a VIP package including tickets for four, a garden tour and lunch from Jenny's newly devised thirty-pound menu.

‘Yes, of course now,' said Ben impatiently. ‘If I'm going to mount this photographic retrospective, I need to get a move on or it'll be a disaster.'

It crossed my mind that if he didn't let me get any work done, the whole festival would be a disaster. But . . .

Admit it, Holly, you want to go. Forget your plan. For once
.

He punched my arm playfully. ‘Come on, Swifty, I'll even let you feed the swans on the river after we've been to the college.'

‘I'm not eight, you know,' I said, trying to keep a straight face.

He stopped suddenly and slapped his forehead with his palm. ‘You have to be eight years old to feed swans? Why didn't anyone tell me?'

I was giggling so much that he had to put an arm round my waist to propel me through the door, down the stairs and back out into the sunshine.

Hathaway Arts College was a brightly coloured modern building only a short hop from Stratford-upon-Avon's famous Swan Theatre and was in a stunning location right on the River Avon.

‘Lucky students,' Ben commented, striding ahead. ‘My school was as isolated as Hogwarts and twice as ancient.'

He pushed his way too fast through the revolving doors, leaving me to play Russian roulette with a spinning plate-glass door.

‘But despite such hardships, look how well you turned out,' I retorted sweetly, when I finally joined him on the other side of the doors. ‘Such a gentleman.'

Water off a duck's back
, I thought, eyeing up the swans pecking at the some unseen titbit at the river's edge while Ben went to reception to get directions.

‘Do you think that might be him, by any chance?' Benedict murmured, nodding towards a man who had appeared from a doorway, a large camera hanging from around his neck.

The man extended a hand and darted forward, arms wide. ‘Welcome, welcome. This is a pleasure, I must say.'

Steve Selby was a wiry, energetic sort with a trimmed silver beard and grey hair tied back roughly in a ponytail.
Pale blue eyes shone out from a tanned and leathery face. He looked the sort who might spend his free time running up and down muddy hills for the sheer hell of it.

Ben shook his hand. ‘It's kind of you to see us at short notice, Steve; and please call me Benedict.'

Ben introduced me and Steve led us into a photographic studio.

It was a large white space with black-out blinds at the windows. An oversized roll of red paper was fixed to one wall and flowed down to the polished concrete floor to form a backdrop and more rolls in every shade from lavender to lime were stacked on their ends on one corner. A tall workbench lined one wall and tripods, lights, silver umbrellas and a wind machine took up much of the floor space. Ben was entranced and I could tell that he was itching to pick up a camera and start playing around.

‘Your students are lucky kids, Steve,' he said with a whistle. ‘This is better than professional studios in London.'

Steve grinned and folded his arms across his chest. ‘You're telling me. And it's a damn sight better than the cubbyhole I used to work in at the
Wickham and Hoxley News
, too. So you mentioned you had some old editions?'

Steve gestured for us to sit at a small white table and we each pulled out an orange chair and sat down while he fetched us all coffee from a machine. Ben explained about this year being his parents' thirtieth at the hall and his idea of doing a photographic exhibition to commemorate their achievements at this year's festival.

‘As I mentioned on the phone, I've got CDs of photographic images dating from 1990, which I've brought with me, but it's those earlier years I was having trouble with. According to the newspaper, you were the photographer then.'

‘The Summer Festival was one of my favourite jobs.' Steve sat back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Always such a good atmosphere. I'd have only been early twenties when your parents first arrived in 1984. I'd photographed the festival the year before, but, I dunno,' he shrugged and smiled at Ben, ‘there was a new buzz about it. No disrespect to the previous Lord Fortescue, your grandfather, but it was great having young blood at the hall. And your mother . . .' He whistled. ‘What a stunner!'

Ben and I exchanged looks.

‘I'll pass that on.' Ben grinned.

‘I seem to remember her being a bit nervous that first year,' Steve continued, offering us sachets of sugar for our coffee. ‘But then I suppose, it's a lot to get used to, isn't it: moving into Wickham Hall and holding that event for the first time, and you and your little sister would only have been tiddlers.'

‘She did have her hands full,' Ben agreed. ‘And my father was just as busy trying to get to grips with his father's business affairs. He'd always known he was going to inherit Wickham Hall at some point, of course, but my grandfather was taken ill so suddenly and then passed away that they had no time for a handover.'

I sat up straighter in my chair; I hadn't known any of that. No wonder Lord and Lady Fortescue wanted Ben to work at Wickham Hall now, before they retire. It would be far easier to take over the reins if he already knew how the estate ran. Which was a luxury they hadn't had.

‘Getting to know the business now is a good idea then, isn't it?' I murmured, catching Ben's eye over my coffee cup.

A cloud passed across his face and I could have kicked myself; it was Tuesday, I'd only met him on Saturday at his sister's wedding. It was wrong of me to comment on a situation I didn't fully understand. I opened my mouth to make some sort of apology but he winked at me.

‘It does have its advantages, I admit.' He grinned and tipped Mum's old newspapers out of a plastic bag. ‘Now, Steve, wait till you see what everyone was wearing in the eighties. Talk about crimes against fashion.'

‘Oh right,' said Steve, clapping his hands together. ‘Better go over here, where there's more room.'

I smiled to myself as he made some space on a cluttered workbench, pushing piles of photographic prints, a box of cables and stacks of old magazines to one side; Steve Selby would get on famously with my mother.

‘Blimey, it's good to see these again,' said Steve once Ben and I had spread out the relevant pages across the workbench. He pored over the earliest one, stroking his beard and shaking his head. ‘Rolls and rolls of film I used to get through. Then I'd have to wait for them to be developed and only then could I sift through to see if I'd got anything worth using. Amazing to think it all gets stored on a tiny memory card these days and photographers can see straight away whether they've got the shot or not.'

‘And do you still have them?' I asked, crossing my fingers under the table.

‘I should be able to lay my hands on them; I rarely throw things away, especially negatives. Most things are in my attic at home. Just as well because there was a fire at the paper, you know, in the late nineties. Most of the archive went up in smoke. The days before digital, eh?' He tutted.

I flicked through the old newspapers, half hoping to spot a picture of Mum and me – it wasn't that out of the question: we had attended the show often enough – but I didn't see anything. Ben stretched his arms over his head,
circled his shoulder as if limbering up for a cricket game and started jiggling one leg. I suppressed a smile; Steve was enjoying the trip down memory lane but Ben was already getting restless.

‘Shortly after that the paper went the way of many smaller presses – swallowed up by a bigger one. So old issues like these are nigh on impossible to get hold of. Where did they come from? Do you have an archive at Wickham Hall?'

Ben shook his head. ‘We archive financial records and I believe we hold historical documents about Wickham Hall, but no newspapers, I'm afraid. These all belong to Holly.'

Two pairs of eyes looked at me.

‘Yes, I . . . we had them at home, my mum, she . . .' I waved my hands around in the air, going redder and redder, my voice getting faster and faster. ‘Well, she's a collector. Of newspapers. Mostly those that covered Wickham Hall events and some other events. Like county shows. That sort of thing.'

Now I've made her sound odd. I eyed their expressions: Ben looked intrigued, Steve looked like he'd found a winning lottery ticket.

‘Really!' Steve whistled through his teeth. ‘What I wouldn't give to see them. Do you think your mum would mind if I came round to your house for a look?'

‘Me too,' Ben added. ‘I'd like to thank her for letting us borrow these.'

Oh crumbs, what had I started? Coming round to the house was a big no-no. The last man I'd taken home was someone I'd been sort of seeing, a fitness instructor from Eden Spa called Simon. It was our second date and we'd been for a drink in Henley and had come back to Weaver's Cottage for coffee. It hadn't gone well. He'd been a bit freaked out about the state of the house, even though I'd tried to warn him; Mum had flapped around clearing stuff off the sofa so we could sit down and I had been hideously embarrassed. There hadn't been a third date.