Pomfret Towers

CHAPTER ONE INVITATION TO THE TOWERS-1

CHAPTER ONE

INVITATION TO THE TOWERSNutfield is quite the most delightful town in that part of England. Most of the land round it is owned by families who have remained rich enough not to be obliged to sell their estates, so the speculative builder has been kept at bay and the town is very little larger than it was in the eighteenth century. In 1847 a branch line of the railway was indeed, after terrific opposition, brought to Nutfield, but the station is so inconveniently situated, far away on the north side of the rising ground upon which the town is built, and has so poor a train service, that it is hardly ever used by the townspeople, who prefer to drive to the junction.

The town itself is on the estate of the seventh Earl of Pomfret, who refuses to allow chain stores or cinemas, and exercises a personal and terrifying supervision over the exterior of shops and garages. The principal inhabitants of Nutfield are occasionally invited to dine at Pomfret Towers, but without their wives, as Lady Pomfret, who is an invalid, mostly lives abroad. These evenings are celebrated for their appalling tedium, but no one has been known to refuse an invitation. Respectable heads of families have been heard comparing notes about his lordship’s dullness and rudeness, even boasting with some complacence when he has signalled out one of them by some special neglect, or deliberate want of courtesy. Anything that is one’s own property tends to acquire lustre in one’s eyes. People can find a matter for pride, and even boasting, in a set of false teeth, or an artificial leg, while a glass eye can make them almost unbearable. So did the inhabitants of Nutfield boast about Lord Pomfret’s rudeness, looking down with condescending pity upon their less fortunate neighbours.

Nutfield High Street is a wide thoroughfare, running gently downhill southwards to the river, with fine elms on each side. The red brick Georgian houses lie back from the pavement behind walls or handsome iron grilles, and all have large gardens at the back. At the bottom of the hill the road makes a sweeping curve to the right and crosses the river on a fine stone bridge, dating from the fifteenth century. The turn of the road and the narrowness of the high-arched bridge are distinctly dangerous, but Lord Pomfret, to the great inconvenience and yet greater pride of his loyal tenants, has so far successfully resisted all efforts to have the corner straightened out or the bridge widened.

In the large, irregular piece of land between the turn of the road and the river stands Mellings, once a dower house of the Pomfrets, now tenanted by a prosperous local architect, Mr. Barton, senior partner in the firm of Barton and Wicklow, which has an excellent county connection and a good reputation for handling old buildings with care and discretion. The only fault that a critic can find with Mellings is that it is so near the water, but the foundations and cellars are in excellent condition, and the river-bank along the south front is so strongly embanked and terraced that no complaint of damp has ever been heard, and the house is excellently heated.

Mr. Barton had had a hard struggle with Lord Pomfret before he could install central heating, his lordship having the firm conviction that only foreigners liked their houses warm. When Mr. Barton had at last overruled these patriotic objections, his lordship brought forward the unanswerable argument that his grandfather never did that sort of thing. Mr. Barton had enough self-control not to point out to his landlord that the fifth earl’s early death at twenty-one, due to drinking damnation to his trustees for a week on end when, after a long minority, he came of age, had hardly given him a chance to show his feelings about central heating, a science then in its infancy. He bided his time. A month later Lord Pomfret, growling with fury, was ordered abroad for his rheumatism. His agent, Mr. Hoare, was empowered to act for him in his absence; Roddy Wicklow, son of Mr. Barton’s partner, had just gone into Mr. Hoare’s office, and Mr. Barton got his way.

When once the heating was installed, Mr. Barton had no fault at all to find in his house. The fine original Jacobean building on the north, where the kitchen and servants were now housed, the large dignified south front which was added about 1760, were described in every guide book, though not all of them mentioned what was perhaps in its master’s eyes its most peculiar beauty. This was a two story gardener’s cottage which the genius of Repton had changed, in or about 1803, from an uncompromising but comfortable brick house to a small scale model of the Parthenon, with pillars and portico that cut off all light and air from the interior. Of all this Mr. Barton was a passionate lover and faithful guardian, finding it of infinite comfort when his wife seemed farther away than usual.

Mrs. Barton was well known as the author of several learned historical novels about the more obscure bastards of Popes and Cardinals, with a wealth of documentation that overawed reviewers. Owing to living so much in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, she sometimes found it difficult to remember where she was. She was an excellent housekeeper, who never failed to care for her family and give them good food, and all the servants adored her, but though she never obtruded her work, or spoke of it as if it mattered, she only had to go into her sitting-room and take up a paper or a book, to be at once engulfed in the ocean of the past, reliving with intensity the lives of people about whom little was known and whose very existence was dubious. When the tide ebbed, leaving her stranded upon the shores of everyday life, she would emerge in a dazed condition to preside at her own table, or take a fitful interest in her neighbours. Her own son and daughter she treated rather as amusing guests who happened to be making a prolonged stay, though her anxiety for Alice, a delicate girl, the younger by several years, pursued her even among her books and research.

Her husband had long ago given up any hope of competing with the illegitimate offspring of poisoners and intriguers. He was a successful and busy man and his life was a full one. When, at rare intervals, he allowed himself to feel that something was wanting, he took refuge in the beauty of his house. If Mrs. Barton had been abroad too long collecting material, her husband might be found at odd times in the drawing-room, filling his eyes with the charm of the exquisitely-proportioned white panels, or on the stairs, affectionately fingering the carved balustrade, absorbing from their quiet beauty something that restored him to his usual outward calm.

On a cold morning in January, as Mr. Barton sat at breakfast in his warm dining-room, he congratulated himself for the hundredth time on having got the better of Lord Pomfret in the matter of the heating. On the previous night he had been dining at the Towers and had listened unmoved to his host’s gloomy though hopeful prediction that a beam would begin smouldering and the whole Barton family be burnt to death.

He was joined almost immediately by his son Guy, a junior partner in his own firm, who had narrowly escaped being christened Ippolito. Guy, who had inherited his mother’s good looks, together with his father’s peaceful temperament, found life a very straightforward, pleasant affair.

‘Morning, father,’ he said, helping himself to a large bowl of porridge and walking about professionally while he ate it. ‘Hideously cold, isn’t it? Mother’s on her way. She said something about Pirandello or Piranesi or something and said she’d be down in a moment,’ said Guy, who like most children made fun of his mother’s work and was genuinely surprised when he found that real people in London spoke of her books with respect. That she earned a good deal of money by them seemed to him quite fantastic and a little unfair, but he bore her no grudge.

‘If you must walk round the table, do speak to me when I can see you,’ said his father good-naturedly. ‘I can’t eat my breakfast with my head twisted round and I can’t speak out of the back of my neck.’

‘Sorry, father. It’s a kind of affectation that I have to do. I got it in Scotland last autumn and it hasn’t quite worn off. It will soon though. Did you have the usual hilarious evening at the Towers?’ said Guy, at last sitting down with a plate of eggs and bacon.

‘Much as usual,’ said his father. ‘Hoare and I were the only guests. Pomfret was not quite so rude as usual, because Lady Pomfret was there for once. I don’t wonder she prefers living in Florence. She looks more of an invalid than ever, and the Towers is bitterly cold. I’ve got some news for you and Alice. They want you to come for a week-end before the hunting is over.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Guy. ‘When you think that we, by which I mean you, have been paying rent regular for the last seven years, and it’s the first time our landlord has asked me and Alice to his hospitable board, it comes as a bit of a shock. Alice,’ he said to his sister as she came in, ‘what do you think of staying at the Towers?’

‘At the Towers,’ said Alice. ‘Why?’

‘Because Lord Pomfret asked you,’ said her father. ‘Lady Pomfret is down, and they are having a big house party and want some young people.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t feel safe,’ said Alice, backing nervously against the sideboard.

‘Safe about what, you great silly?’ asked her affectionate brother. ‘Old Pomfret chucking you under the chin in the corridor? Here, get yourself some breakfast and you’ll feel better.’

‘No, not Lord Pomfret,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t think he knows me. I meant nightgowns and housemaids and tips and all that sort of thing. I’d be terrified.’

Mr. Barton considered his daughter with a mixture of concern and affectionate annoyance. A delicate child, she had never been able to go regularly to school, so that a natural timidity had been fostered by her semi-invalid life. Her health had improved so much of late that there was no longer cause for anxiety, and her father hoped that she would make friends among the young people of her own age in Nutfield, but she held aloof, painfully conscious that she could not compete in their sports and interests. The wish of her heart had been to study architecture and go into her father’s office. Failing this she found solace in painting. The old nursery from being her sitting-room gradually became her studio. There she worked happily by herself, but if anyone asked to look at her work she went through such agonies of shyness that she could not paint for several days. Her father and mother, understanding something of her difficulties, never came to her studio without an invitation. Guy’s usual criticism of ‘Top hole, but a bit queer, isn’t it,’ she did not mind. The only other visitors welcomed in the studio were Roddy Wicklow and his sister Sally, who felt the combined kindly contempt and almost superstitious respect that the sporting have for the artist. Of her own want of good looks she was fully conscious, accepting this with the humility which was almost a vice in her. A thin girl, with a sallow complexion and dark, lifeless hair, no stranger would have looked at her twice, though her father’s eye could see in her a certain grace of movement and elegance of bone which gave promise for the future. Her only assets at present were her long sensitive hands, her large anxious brown eyes, and a smile whose sudden brilliance flashed in gratitude for any kindness shown to her. At this moment the mere thought of two nights away from home with strangers was making her suffer such anticipatory pangs of homesickness as none of her family could quite understand.

‘Tips, I admit, are terrifying,’ said Mr. Barton, ‘but why nightgowns?’

‘Oh, they despise one,’ said Alice. ‘I mean the housemaids despise the kind of nightgowns one has, and they hide all one’s things. Oh, father, need I?’