Christmas at Candleshoe Read online

  Autocratic and benevolent, Lord Scattergood disappears. The group remains for a moment in uncertainty, staring at the sledge. But almost at once a less exalted guide sweeps down on them and politely carries them off. Opening Benison Court to the public has proved to be a money-earner. A good deal of efficiency has been mobilized for the job.

  But at Benison even quite a lot of efficiency is liable to get spread out thin. Lord Arthur Spendlove, as he leads his own party round, knows all the closets where chaos and confusion lurk. The very skeletons in the cupboards, he likes to remark, are in a sad muddle. A clever man, seemingly shiftless because profoundly at odds with his time, Lord Arthur wonders if any amount of efficiency could now make much difference. His father, briefed by some soothing old donkey in Chancery Lane, declares that penal taxation is ephemeral, and that of the really big English properties the ownership has not changed. But Lord Arthur is aware of the price of coal and the state of the plumbing; fitfully but with an alert intelligence he conducts inquisitions in the estate office; he has followed certain financial clues through their labyrinth, and it is his conclusion that Benison is a Grace and Favour house, the patronage of which is vested in two or three powerful persons in the City. By an agreement among these, the Spendloves could be sold up tomorrow. But could he, knowing all this, control the situation any better than his father does, or than his elder brother will do, when in the fullness of time he is called home from his endless bird-watchings and other blameless idiocies in Scotland?

  Lord Arthur checks himself in these musings, and turns in negligent ease to face his little flock. He has all his father’s charm of manner, and although he will tire more quickly of this new family game, he is prepared to put greater finesse into it for a time.

  ‘First it is very necessary to apologize to you about one or two things. The truth is that we are not quite straight at Benison.’ And Lord Arthur meets the respectful attention of his group with a gaze the frankness of which must dispel any possible ambiguity lurking in his speech. ‘In the early years of the war we had a government concern quartered on us – quite an important government concern – and after that we had a couple of schools. I didn’t see much of it myself, because I was having a quiet sort of life in the desert and Tripoli and Italy. But it seems that things got pushed around a bit and stowed away and so forth; and we still don’t know quite where we are.’

  ‘Did the schoolchildren cause a lot of damage?’ An elderly woman turns from fingering the long gold curtains of the music-room to ask this question.

  ‘Oh, no – dear me, no.’ Lord Arthur’s glance has travelled over his hearers’ heads – he is inches taller than any of them – to the long line of paintings on the north wall. They no longer correspond with the faded patches on the green silk behind them, and he sees too that Canova’s frigid Aphrodite has been shoved into the corner formerly occupied by Flaxman’s bust of the elder Pitt. He is assailed by the renewed conviction that he and his family are now only camping in Benison, even that they are unlawful squatters who may at any time be evicted by the police; that they may be required to pack up their improvised domesticities and quit – trundling the Aphrodite, and Pitt if he can be found, down the league-long drive on a wheelbarrow. The vision of his father doing this rises before him, and hurtling in the other direction he sees an unending line of motor-coaches, crammed with citizens feeling in their pockets for small change. When the Ministry took over in 1939, he is thinking, my father expected the whole place to be blown sky-high within a week. But it wasn’t to be, and Benison is going to end not with a bang but a whimper.

  Fortunately he is still talking. He hears his own voice insisting on how agreeable the schoolchildren were, revealing that some of them still write, still come back and inquire about horses, dogs, gardeners. Lord Arthur has the inventiveness of his father, into whose head will come nonsense about family ghosts or Noah’s Ark. But he has too a streak of artistry. As he tells how the bigger girls played Sheridan in gowns which had for two centuries been laid away in lavender, or how the smaller girls were allowed to paint with their water-colours the putti that play hide and seek round the tall marble chimneypiece in Queen Caroline’s Drawing-Room, or how, treasured in the library, there is a sound-strip of a hundred young voices echoing in the great gallery: as Lord Arthur tells of these things he makes them golden – as golden as the light now pouring in level shafts across the park – Claude’s light, the light of the great ideal landscapes, glinting on the gold-leaf that sheaths the high windows without, on the gold damask that drapes them within, on the long lines of gilt frames on the walls, on furniture here smothered and here licked with gold. The great room is full of the golden light. But soon it will be fading and everybody will go away. Already from the nearer stretches of the park comes the pulse and throb of engines, as if the pasturing chars-à-bancs were raising their heads and lowing – lowing to be led to some milking-parlour mightier than that erected by the sixth Marquis of Scattergood in the Chinese taste.

  And presently this is answered by another sound. From a distant court of the great building – a court palatial in itself, but here serving for offices and stables – a deep-toned bell is calling the hour in long golden syllables that carry through Benison’s two hundred rooms, roll across its spreading formal gardens, its ornamental waters, and its spacious park, to die finally into a just perceptible vibration in the distant streets and houses of Benison Magna, Benison Parva, Abbot’s Benison, and Candleshoe.

  2

  ‘If that wasn’t a darn queer thing!’ Grant Feather slows down behind a char-à-banc on the Palladian Bridge. ‘What makes them put in time, do you think, taking round a raggle-taggle of tourists like you and me?’

  With her nose still in her guidebook, Mrs Feather absently shakes her head. ‘The Temple of Ancient Virtue’, she reads, ‘was designed by Kent. Now, why didn’t we see that? A graceful but massive structure. The Temple of Modern Virtue was constructed nearby in the form of a ruin, the contrast being allegorical in intention. It was removed by the seventh marquess, who intended to erect in its place a Temple of Progress and Perfectibility. His interests changed however and he built a mosque, now used as a cow-shed. I’d say that folks crazy enough to do things like that are crazy enough to take round tourists.’

  ‘You agree, momma, that it was a mite crazy?’

  ‘Well, Grant, it was courteous too. If you’re good enough to be let in at all, even at half a dollar, you’re good enough to be talked to. Your grandfather would have done the same, if he’d ever felt like collecting half-dollars from people wanting to see round his house at Newport.’

  ‘Nobody would want to see round that house at Newport.’

  ‘They might now. Your grandfather’s house is almost as much a period piece as Benison.’ Mrs Feather turns the page of her guidebook. ‘The chapel is by Wren, and contains a fine statuary group by Roubiliac. We didn’t see that either.’

  Grant Feather sets his foot on the accelerator and chuckles. ‘Perhaps that’s another half-dollar. After all, Benison isn’t just one period piece. It’s several.’ He stops the car. ‘There’s your last glimpse of it.’

  They have driven for two miles through the park, and lodge-gates and the public highway are just in front of them. On their left is a broad sheet of ornamental water, part balustraded and part overhung by dark-foliaged trees. Small islands support obelisks, groups of statuary, miniature temples. Beyond, the river winds gently through a valley whose wooded slopes, artfully converging as the scene recedes, finally form the wings of a theatre in which the backcloth is Benison itself – the great house in all its incredible length and high Ionic elegance planted squarely to the view, with only the open sky behind the bold symmetry of its central mass, its spreading wings, its end pavilions.

  For a moment Mrs Feather contemplates the large assertion of it in silence. Then she snaps shut the guidebook. ‘I was wrong. Period piece isn’t the name for it. It’s a show-place.’

  ‘Well, I guess it�
��s that too.’ Grant is amused by what he discerns as a change of mood in his mother. ‘And grandfather’s Newport mansion is hardly that.’

  ‘Benison was a show-place from the start, and that’s why that old man must go on showing it now. He’d prefer a more time-sanctioned ostentation – big parties of his own sort, with fifty housemaids staggering up and down those great staircases with coalscuttles, and everything very grand and splendid. But that’s no longer possible in England. And rather than have his great house degenerate into something useful – say an orphanage or a convalescent home–’

  Grant Feather lets in his clutch again and shouts with laughter. He is from Harvard; he has finished his first year at Oxford; it pleases him to pretend that his mother is a cosy little woman, much lacking in sophistication. ‘Rather than do that, the old boy continues to show off – but to new classes of society?’

  ‘Just that. You see, Benison isn’t really old – and those Spendloves aren’t really old either, or at least they ain’t old as the biggest sort of aristocrats are. When you get true antiquity–’

  Mrs Feather has again provoked an explosion of mirth in her son. ‘A single thirst for modernity distinguishes the American at home, and a single passion for antiquity grips him when abroad.’

  ‘Grant, you got that from your Oxford tutor.’

  ‘Perhaps I did.’ Grant grins. ‘But it’s true, all the same. “What is the oldest thing you have here?” I heard one of our countrymen fire that at the old marquess an hour ago. Or there was the woman that pointed at a portrait of Margaret Plantagenet and asked if she came of an old family. And now here’s you complaining that Benison Court misses out on the owls and ivy.’

  ‘That’s not quite why I find I don’t like it.’ Mrs Feather settles back comfortably as the car swings into the highway. ‘If it’s a period piece, it’s a period piece of the show-place period. Do you get that?’

  ‘I get the ostentation. Benison makes its gesture half across its tight little county.’

  ‘That’s just it. Rather a blatant gesture. Right at the end of that century – the seventeenth century – the English sense of values deteriorates. They begin putting up big empty vulgar things, and demanding admiration for their mere size and expensiveness. Mind you, Grant, I think it may have been largely our fault.’

  ‘ Our fault?’ Grant takes his eyes from the road to glance at his mother in astonishment.

  ‘For quitting. For crossing the Atlantic, and draining England of the folk with the old, mature sense of values. English society has been kind of raw ever since.’

  ‘Perhaps we should come back?’

  ‘Perhaps we should.’ Mrs Feather considers it seriously. ‘After all, they wouldn’t put us in the pillory any more, or burn our books, or stop us going to church. You might figure it, Grant, that the practical reasons for our exile being past and done with, it’s our business to pack up and come home.’

  ‘You would advocate founding a new England on the western seaboard of this island? You would push back the savages of Lancashire and Cumberland into Yorkshire and Northumberland?’ Grant pauses for a moment to peer at a signpost. ‘But you wouldn’t like it, momma. The immemorial spirit of the place would take charge, and presently you would find that your new England was being run by men. The great American Matriarchy would have perished in the resettlement.’

  Mrs Feather opens her guidebook again as a gesture of scorn. The Matriarchy joke always offends her. For some minutes the car travels in silence, and then she makes a discovery. ‘The church at Abbot’s Benison has long-and-short work.’

  ‘Has what?’

  ‘A stonemason’s technique not found in England after the Saxon period.’

  ‘Sure – Owl-and-Ivy. Do you know, I kind of get it mixed with Decorated and Perpendicular. Well, it’s just too bad we missed Abbot’s Benison.’

  ‘Second on the left, and then left again, will take us straight back to it.’ Mrs Feather is inflexible. ‘There is a three-decker Jacobean pulpit.’

  ‘That’s fine. But these English hotels, remember, believe in something called the dinner-hour. If we miss–’

  ‘And an elaborate marble monument, with curious original iron-work, is believed to be by Gerard Christmas, carver to the navy. I was reading about him only the other day.’

  With a sigh of resignation Grant swings the car left. His mother’s indefatigable antiquarianism at once delights and bores him. ‘You know,’ he says presently, ‘if you lived in this country, you’d never go after all these period pieces and show-places and churches with Owl-and-Ivy work. Your bondage to them would be broken, and you could sit quietly at home, toasting your ten toes before a nice English open fire. Why not settle for a year or two and try it? Your own little experiment in the new New England.’

  ‘Now, Grant, that’s a curious thing. I’ve been thinking as we drove along this morning that Oxford has a great attraction for me. And last week I was shown a very nice apartment there, right opposite the gates of your college. And the society would be attractive, too. Your dear old President and his wife, and your tutor, and a heap of your own friends.’

  With a quick glance Grant assures himself that this devastating idea is a product of his mother’s sense of humour. ‘Oxford has plenty of Owl-and-Ivy, sure enough. But would it give you scope, momma? You’d do better to buy Benison.’

  ‘You think it’s for sale?’ Mrs Feather speaks with the prosaic interest of one who would have no difficulty in finding the money – and she is, as it happens, an extremely wealthy woman.

  ‘They’d jump at a good price, and retire to Corbies and the family ghost with the bagpipes. Or you might rent the place, and bind Lord Scattergood to live in one of the lodges and continue to act as chief guide.’

  ‘Benison isn’t at all what I want. And none of the places I’ve looked at is quite right.’

  Grant stares. ‘You’ve really looked?’

  ‘I went over several manor-houses in the Cotswolds last week. If your sisters follow you over here, a house will be a convenience. But those I’ve seen have all had something – well, subtly wrong with them.’

  ‘Something spurious about the immemorial flavour?’

  ‘That – and their being kind of thrust at you. I want to find a house. That, you know, is what a period piece is – something that you yourself rescue from oblivion, and that quite perfectly recalls its own epoch because it has seen unregarded and uninterfered with ever since… Look out!’

  They are on a winding secondary road and Grant, driving well, is not really in danger of an accident. But he has to brake hard, and the boy who has burst out of a hedge on his near side is lucky to have got across without at least a bad fright. He is through the opposite hedge now, and in a moment he vanishes. Grant changes gear and drives on.

  ‘Wasn’t that rather a queer boy?’ Mrs Feather’s voice is perplexed. ‘Did you notice?’

  ‘I didn’t notice much about him. Reckless little brute.’

  ‘He had a cap.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t think that English country boys much wear them. And it had a long feather in it. And he had long stockings that looked almost like–’

  Grant is aware that his mother has broken off in order to concentrate her attention upon some object, apparently in the middle distance, that lies over his shoulder. He glances in the same direction and sees nothing but a hawthorn hedge, and beyond this a beech copse in which the shadows of evening are beginning to gather. Recalling the celerity with which the less unpalatable dishes are prone to be ‘off’ in English hotels, he accelerates. But his mother lays a hand on his arm. ‘Grant – do stop. It’s Jacobean.’

  He stops, and Mrs Feather at once gets out of the car. He follows and sees rising above the beeches two chimneystacks in cut brickwork, each of them of three grouped shafts. They rise boldly above a scrollwork gable which can just be glimpsed through the tree-tops, and the evening sun catches them so that the mellow red above the
foliage is like flame. Children’s voices can be heard in the distance, but the evening is curiously still and the beech copse has an air of mystery. Mrs Feather is entranced and Grant is apprehensive. ‘If you really want to see the church at Abbot’s Benison–’ he begins.

  But his mother shakes her head. Without taking her eyes from the peeping gable and its clustered chimneys, she feels in the car for her guidebook. ‘If it hadn’t been for that boy, we’d have gone by without noticing it. Did you ever see a place that had such an air of being hidden away?’

  Grant does not audibly assent to this; he sees the looming danger of trespass, barbed wire, torn clothes, detection, embarrassment. He has been through it before. So he reaches for a map and studies it. ‘Three miles to Abbot’s Benison,’ he presently announces. ‘And two miles short of that there’s a hamlet called Candleshoe.’

  ‘Candleshoe?’ Mrs Feather’s delight deepens. ‘Isn’t that a wonderful name?’