The Last Baronet Read online

  ‘We shall miss you though, Norman,’ Genevra ventured. She turned a little pink as she said this, and kept her eyes on the catalogue in front of her, the cover of which featured an artist’s impression of an Edwardian Christmas with a laughing family, a blazing fire, a tree with real candles, and a spaniel with a ribbon around its neck. In her imagination, Genevra placed Norman in the wingback chair by the hearth with the pile of beautifully wrapped presents at his feet. She tried to feel glad for him but could only feel her own disappointment. ‘I shall miss your violin recital especially. It won’t be the same without you.’

  Norman felt mean. He was fond of Genevra. He had opened up to her once. Unusually, he had talked about his early life. He had been a professional fiddle player with a well-known band. They had played all over the country in dance halls before settling themselves in London, playing the clubs and the big hotels including the Ritz and the Savoy. They had played for a dance or two at Buckingham Palace. They even had a regular spot on the radio. He had been happy then, in the years before his life had fallen apart. He had been in love with their pianist and vocalist, Lilly Lamont, from the moment he first saw her. But Norman had been a humble and inexperienced third violin, obliged to worship from afar, watching enviously as the first violin played duets with his beloved, plotting and practising so that he could take his place, imagining himself sharing the limelight as an equal; respected, noticed. Norman had worked his way up to second violin when war broke out. To his dismay the band had been split in two. Norman’s half were sent to entertain the troops. Lilly Lamont sang and played with the other half in town halls and barracks across the country and, as the war progressed, in convalescent homes, performing sentimental, patriotic songs that broke your heart. When the band reassembled after the war Norman had found himself, at last and deservedly, first violin. By now he was skilled and played with a passionate and artistic intensity. Through his playing he wooed and won Lilly Lamont, and the painful desperation of it, the piercingly sweet agony of their affair, had haunted him ever since. It had ended when he had been loaned to another band whilst their first violin had his appendix removed. When he returned, the love of his life had gone; left to get married they had said; replaced by another vocalist. Just like that. It had felt as if his heart had been torn out of his chest. He had drawn a veil over that part, of course.

  After leaving the band, he had trained for a new career as an accountant. Numbers rather than people. Rows of figures that taxed the brain but left the heart untouched. Norman was damaged goods. He avoided emotion. Now he was disturbed to find himself the cause of it. He opened his mouth to tell Genevra he had changed his mind, that he no longer wanted to stay with his friends but would much prefer to spend Christmas day at Elsie’s house, but Elsie was having none of it.

  ‘Now don’t you go putting him off, Genevra,’ she said sharply, ‘not when he’s been invited. At his age he’s got to strike whilst the iron’s still hot; he’s got to take his opportunities whilst he’s still got his health and strength. Take no notice of her, Norman. You’re going, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘These friends you’re going to stay with...’ began Yvonne.

  ‘The Fletchers,’ said Norman, a little wildly. ‘Fletcher-Smyth. Hyphenated. Spelled with a “y”.’

  ‘These Fletcher-Smyths that you’re going to stay with,’ said Yvonne. ‘Do they live in London? I hope you don’t think I’m being nosey, Norman. Tell me to mind my own business, if you like.’

  ‘Oh no, they don’t live in London. They live in the country, in Suffolk, actually; miles from anywhere and very rural, very quiet. I expect I shall find it rather boring.’ Norman was amazed at his own inventiveness.

  ‘My mum lives in Suffolk,’ said Yvonne, ‘and you’re right, it is boring. I suppose it’s all right if you like peace and quiet and that, and the views are very nice, just miles and miles of nothing with a few trees dotted about and the odd cottage. I expect your friends live in a cottage, do they, Norman? I hope you’ve got some wellies, because you’ll need your wellies if you’re going to Suffolk; it can be ever so muddy in the country.’

  ‘I expect I’ll have to get some.’ Norman wished they would change the subject. ‘I haven’t thought much about it yet, to tell the truth.’

  ‘You’ll have to get yourself one of those nice waxed jackets to keep the rain out as well,’ Elsie advised. ‘Everybody wears them in the country, and you’ll need some thermal underwear and some good, thick socks and corduroy trousers for warmth; we can’t have you catching pneumonia, can we? You’ll need warm pyjamas and I’d take a hot water bottle if I were you because it’s several degrees colder in Suffolk due to being that much closer to Siberia: I read an article about it recently in one of my magazines. You could even be snowed up, and then what? We shall have to get you organised, Norman, I can see it coming. I bet you haven’t even got a nice woollen pullover to your name!’

  ‘I don’t think I have,’ admitted Norman. ‘I doubt if I have ever really needed one.’

  ‘Well, you need one now,’ declared Elsie, ‘so we shall have to take you shopping; we shall have to take you in hand. I’ve noticed a new shop open in the precinct called Country Cousins, we shall have to go there and fit you out. They’re sure to have all the gear. We’ve got to send you off looking the part, Norman; we can’t have you letting the side down!’

  ‘It’s a lovely shop,’ Genevra offered. ‘Although I’ve only ever looked in the window, I’ve never been inside.’

  ‘I think I’d better come as well,’ said Yvonne. ‘That is, if you’ve no objection, Norman. You don’t want to look too smart in the country; you don’t want everything looking as if you’ve just walked out of a shop. You need to be careful what you buy; you need to look comfy and a bit lived-in, like, otherwise you’ll just end up looking daft.’

  ‘Now, just you watch it, young lady,’ warned Elsie. ‘There’s no way we’re going to send our Norman off looking daft. He’ll look every inch the country gentleman by the time we’ve finished with him, won’t you, Norman?’

  Norman smiled weakly and bent back to his statements. Wellingtons. Thermal underwear. Thick socks. Christmas in the country with the Fletcher-Smyths. Oh, what a tangled web we weave...

  FIFTEEN

  ‘...and so we thought we could hold the carol service in our own little chapel,’ Nicola said, adding (in a doomed attempt to forestall the inevitability of argument) ‘Of course, I realise it looks a bit bleak.’

  ‘Bleak!’ Rupert looked around in disbelief. ‘The place is bloody derelict!’

  ‘Watch your language,’ Anna warned. ‘We are in a church.’

  ‘We are not in a church; we are in a bloody ruin! You can’t be serious about this! We can’t have a service for our guests in here; it’s madness to even suggest it. It just isn’t possible.’

  It was true that the prospect was not encouraging. The tiny Rushbroke chapel, almost hidden from view amongst a tangle of undergrowth behind the rose garden, was in a perilously dilapidated state. The sky was visible through the timbers of the roof, the pews had almost rotted away, the leaded windows were broken and bowed. Brambles flourished in the aisle, a few saplings had thrust up in the apse, ferns flattened themselves against the walls, fungus sprouted in the corners, commemorative shields had slipped down the crumbling walls, flagstones heaved. Two once imposing family tombs complete with effigies and weeping angels were suffocated by ivy.

  ‘It would please my father more than anything to have one last service in this chapel,’ Nicola said. ‘I don’t need to tell you that his health is failing. Is there no possibility that we could do it for his sake?’

  Rupert sighed. Didn’t they understand anything? He placed an elbow resignedly upon the corner of the solitary pew which remained in an upright position. It sank to the ground immediately with a splutter of protest accompanied by a puff of decay. He looked at Anna in mute appeal.

  Anna looked away. Common sense told her that it was impossibl
e to save the chapel but she was not ready to acknowledge it, not yet. With her foot she scraped leaves and debris from a memorial flagstone. Rufus Algernon Lawrence Percival Rushbroke, she read. HE DIED AS HE LIVED. She scraped a little further in the expectation of something more but HE DIED AS HE LIVED was all there was. She wondered how he had lived, this particular Rushbroke; how he had died. She wondered who had been responsible for choosing such an evasive epitaph; if they had realised that every word was imbued with disapproval; steeped in disappointment. She wondered if it was possible for anyone to live a life without accomplishing anything which might count in his favour at the end of it. Poor Rufus Algernon Lawrence Percival, thought Anna, surely if someone had cast around a little wider they could have come up with a better recommendation to accompany him into eternity.

  ‘We do need to hold a service for our guests,’ Nicola continued, ‘and we can hardly take them to St. Saviours, not when my father has been barred for interrupting the Reverend Beresford-Barnes.’

  ‘If Vivian’s fallen out with St. Saviours then you either have to travel further afield or forget about the service altogether. Let the guests make their own arrangements. Not everyone goes to church at Christmas anyway.’ The set of Rupert’s jaw indicated that he was not to be swayed by emotional blackmail. ‘Even with God in my team, I can’t work a bloody miracle on this place, Nicola. I just can’t do it. The place is falling down; you would have to be blind not to see it. I’m already working with a budget strained to bloody breaking point.’ He shot a vengeful glance at Anna who responded with a tight little smile. ‘Anna knows,’ Rupert said heavily, ‘that there are things we should do to the house that have had to be put on hold because we don’t have the money to do them.’

  Yes, Anna did know. Looking around now, she could actually feel the hopelessness of the chapel; the weakness of their case. Her eyes strayed to the roof as she drew in the breath of resignation, prepared at last to admit defeat. She saw that each miniature hammer beam ended in a pair of cherubs and that their arms were wrapped around each other. She noticed that the cherubs had no pupils to their eyes and appeared to be blind. ‘What did you say about being blind?’ she asked Rupert.

  ‘I said the bloody place is falling down, you would be blind not to see it.’

  Anna looked thoughtful. ‘Rupert, is there absolutely no way we could patch up the chapel, just as a temporary measure?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No way at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And if I said that it had to be done?’

  ‘I’d say that if you think I can patch this place up without money, materials and manpower, you are out of your sodding mind!’

  Anna looked up. The cherubs looked down; their tiny mouths wide with anxiety. ‘Nevertheless, I do say it has to be done,’ Anna said decidedly. ‘You will have to find a way.’

  God, she was impossible. Why could she never take no for an answer? Rupert gritted his teeth. ‘We are standing here looking up at the sky! There’s no bloody roof! You wouldn’t be allowed to bring people in here; the place is unsafe.’

  ‘The roof timbers are still here. You could make it safe for one day. You could make it safe for one service. You wouldn’t have to buy anything. You have the labour. It’s so tiny, surely you can patch it up with materials salvaged from the house?’

  ‘Anna,’ Rupert turned to her furiously. He might have taken her by the shoulders to shake some sense into her had not Nicola moved quietly to her side and met his eyes with her own level gaze. He looked from one to the other, at their still faces, their blue-grey eyes and felt a curious feeling of unease, of disquiet. They were separate people but they stood before him as one. Somehow he knew there was no point in further argument. ‘OK. Let’s be realistic about this. Say I agreed to do what I could without spending any money. Say I sheeted the roof with a tarpaulin, put in a few props to support the beams. Say I put some plain glass in the windows and re-laid the floor. Say I patched up the walls and cleaned up the place. All you would have is a shell! There’s no light! There’s no heat! There are no pews! There’s no bloody vicar!’

  ‘There has never been light, other than candles,’ Nicola said. ‘The sconces are still here.’

  ‘People can sit on chairs,’ Anna said. ‘Chairs are more comfortable than pews.’

  ‘And there are two fireplaces,’ Nicola pointed out. ‘We can burn logs. People will be wearing outdoor clothing. Nobody expects to be warm in church.’

  The lack of a vicar was not to be dwelt upon. The fact that the chapel had been deconsecrated decades ago was not even worthy of discussion. They looked at him expectantly.

  Rupert closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were still looking at him. He stared back at them in exasperation. Had they any idea what a colossal amount of work there was to do; how impossibly tight the schedule was; how short of money they were going to be? Now, as if he hadn’t already enough on his plate, he seemed to have this bloody wreck of a chapel to deal with as well. But Anna was the boss; it was her project; her money. Finally he said ‘As long as you realise that all you are getting is the shell. The rest is down to you. You have to organise the seating, the lighting, the heating, the sodding vicar and everything else!’

  He would have slammed the door as he left but it had fallen off its hinges years ago. Now it leaned heavily against the wall, barely leaving enough room for him to squeeze through the gap. Brambles snagged at his overalls. It was difficult to leave with dignity.

  *

  The chimneys had been repaired, repointed and rebuilt where necessary according to the original twisted Tudor design, supervised both by the council and English Heritage who had passed them as satisfactory and fit for purpose. The chimney sweep had departed leaving behind a respectable mountain range of soot and rubble and twigs and a line of rooks laid out in the courtyard arranged like biological specimens in strict order of decomposition from full-feathered to skeletal. Now Anna, Rupert, Len and Sadie stood inside the mighty armorial fireplace in the great hall and peered upwards at the tiny circle of blue sky far above them whilst, at their feet, emanating from a few smouldering twigs and charred twists of paper, swirled an indecisive fog of grey smoke.

  Rupert picked up a smouldering twig and held it aloft. They watched as the smoke fanned out and curled around them. He said ‘I can’t understand why there isn’t any draw. The smoke would rather go anywhere than up the chimney.’

  ‘Maybe the brickwork is just too cold and damp,’ suggested Anna. ‘Maybe it needs to be warmed up gently.’

  Vivian appeared from the garden. ‘Trouble with the chimney?’ he wheezed hopefully. ‘Anything I can do?’ He put his head inside the fireplace. ‘Not till the fire is dying in the grate, look we for kinship with the stars,’ he intoned.

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like Mavis,’ Anna said.

  ‘A fine woman, Mavis. Price beyond rubies. I’m introducing her to the Old Testament. As a matter of fact, as I remember, there’s another chimney up there. There are two of the blighters. Hang on. I’ve just the remedy.’ He tottered off across the hall in order to rummage in a cupboard along the brick passage. He returned with a salmon fishing rod and manipulated it into the fireplace, pointing it upwards. ‘See that shadow?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Well, it isn’t a shadow at all, it’s an elbow. It’s another chimney.’ So saying, Vivian gave the elbow a vigorous poke with the rod, as a result of which the whole chimney appeared to move. Only Sadie, reacting to some canine sixth sense and making for the front door like greased lightning, managed to escape. The soot fell with a soft, prolonged whooshing sound liberally coating them all and landing with a gentle thud about knee height, from whence it overflowed in a steady avalanche into the hall, flooding the flagstones.

  ‘There you are!’ spluttered Vivian in triumph. ‘What did I tell you? Two chimneys!’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘We don’t listen to music at the table, thank you.’ Mary Pomeroy pluck
ed the earphones from her son’s head.

  ‘Oh, Ma,’ he complained, ‘do you have to?’

  ‘I do,’ said Mary. ‘Somehow I have to cling to the last vestiges of civilised behaviour otherwise I am lost.’ She sat down at the table and began to serve fish pie.

  ‘No fish for me,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t eat fish.’

  ‘Since when?’ her mother demanded.

  Emily shrugged. ‘I just find the idea of eating anything with a face totally repugnant now, that’s all. No fish. No meat. No animal derivatives.’

  Mary sighed. She scraped off the fish and handed Emily a mound of potato crusted with cheese. ‘Help yourself to vegetables. You are still eating vegetables, I suppose? They’re not contaminated with pesticides? They’re not radioactive?’

  Tony Pomeroy came into the conservatory dressed in a track suit and trainers. His hair was wet, his skin was pink and his face shone. ‘You started without me,’ he said accusingly.