The Last Baronet Read online

  Sir Vivian was mute. Over Francis’ shoulder he watched his wife walk through the entrance to the Supersave Supermart.

  ‘I think I need hardly mention the rabbit breeding enterprise, or the extensive and expensive plantation of spruce trees intended for the Christmas market.’

  Sir Vivian shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He looked uneasy.

  ‘But I would be failing in my duty if I neglected to remind you,’ Francis continued, ‘that every single one of the aforementioned ventures was unsuccessful. That all served only to plunge the Rushbroke estate deeper into debt.’

  Still Sir Vivian made no reply, although he looked deeply troubled.

  ‘Sir Vivian,’ Francis was not cad enough to kick a man when he was down, ‘I can see that you do fully comprehend the perilously vulnerable position you are in, and I would not like you to think that we at the National Westminster are in any way unsympathetic to your predicament. I can assure you that the very fact the bank have not elected to take any precipitate action until now is entirely due to our very real concern for your welfare.’

  With an expression of mounting anxiety, Sir Vivian watched as Lady Lavinia emerged from the supermarket. She was followed by a blonde woman in a green tabard. The blonde woman in the green tabard was immediately followed by a dark-haired young man in a suit. After a short but urgent consultation they followed Lady Lavinia across the road. Sir Vivian jumped up out of his chair and made for the door.

  In a remarkably swift and quick-witted manoeuvre, Francis Sparrow managed to get there first. ‘Sir Vivian,’ he said hastily, ‘the situation is indeed grave, but I hope I have not been guilty of overstating the case, of inducing panic.’

  Sir Vivian made no reply but reached for the door handle.

  ‘There are, as I have indicated, always ways and means,’ said Francis in a conciliatory tone.

  Sir Vivian was not listening. He pulled open the door.

  ‘And so what I am about to suggest...’ having managed to insinuate himself between his client and freedom, Francis was now most anxious to conclude the interview on his own terms, ‘...was that I should arrange for our valuations officer to make a renewed appraisal of the estate.’

  But Sir Vivian appeared to have lost interest and, brushing Francis off as if he was a minor irritant, of no more importance than a horsefly, he walked quickly away across the crowded floor of the bank towards the entrance.

  Ruffled and a not a little disorientated by the unexpected turn of events, Francis ducked back into his office noticing with a little dip of dismay that his next client was an another elderly man with well-polished shoes, cavalry twill trousers and a Norfolk jacket in a particularly disagreeable tweed the colour of pond slime.

  *

  ‘Oh, Vivian, there you are! Thank goodness! I had no idea where you might be. You could have left me the keys.’

  ‘Lavinia, I didn’t leave you the keys because last time you drove home without me and I had to catch a taxi.’

  Standing beside the ancient Rover in the Park and Pay (the Rover being conspicuous as the only vehicle bereft of a ticket attached to the windscreen; it being Rushbroke policy to park but not to pay) Sir Vivian cast an apprehensive eye over the contents of his wife’s shopping basket.

  ‘Well, now that you are here, are you going to open the car, Vivian? Or are we both to stand here indefinitely, I wonder?’

  Sir Vivian felt in his pockets, produced keys and unlocked both front and back doors of the Rover. ‘Lavinia, I suppose you did... er... you did...?’ He gestured towards the shopping basket.

  Lady Lavinia smiled. Taking up her accustomed position on the back seat, she placed her basket by her side, folded her hands in her lap and began to hum softly.

  Sir Vivian sighed heavily as he climbed into the driving seat. He slammed the door. Almost immediately a face appeared at the window. Sir Vivian wound it down with reluctance.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind me mentioning it, Sir Viv, but...’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well, two pink candles, a bunch of watercress, a jar of apricots in brandy, and the pickled dill cucumbers; just twenty-one pounds ninety-five, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Take a cheque?’

  ‘I’d prefer cash, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘I suppose you would.’ Sir Vivian produced a dried and flaking wallet and proffered three notes with resignation. ‘Better keep the change until next time. Very decent of you to keep an eye and all that...’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Sir Viv. All part of the Supersave service.’

  Sir Vivian wound up the window and jabbed the key into the ignition. ‘Ingratiating little fool!’ The Rover wheezed into life. ‘All part of the service; ways and means; for your sake as well as ours...’ The Rover coughed and jumped forward out of the parking space causing a passer-by to leap sideways in alarm. ‘A few dining chairs of early Chippendale; some little pocket you may have overlooked...’ Sir Vivian, looking thunderous, drove straight out of the Park and Pay without a glance to the left or to the right, directly into the path of a Royal Mail Parcel Force van. The driver, standing on his brake, his rightful progress arrested in a welter of squealing tyres accompanied by the smell of burning rubber, slid back his door in a fury. ‘Ever fucking well considered looking where you’re going, you geriatric old turd?’

  ‘Darling I am growing old

  Silver threads amongst the gold...’

  Lady Lavinia waved graciously from the back seat.

  TWO

  Without any warning at all, the grey horse burst through the hedge, bringing with him a good deal of dry blackthorn, half falling, half leaping down the bank onto the lane and landing almost, but not quite, on the bonnet of Rupert’s precious Porsche 924. He was wild of eye with flaring nostrils showing red inside, and trailing reins, and dripping sweat, and exceedingly lucky not to be hit.

  Rupert, whose reflexes were faster than one would expect from knowing him, stamped on the brake pedal and, braced against the back of his seat, hung onto the steering wheel whilst the car bucked and stalled and skated on its locked wheels across the modest verge, made slippery by its long, flattened grasses. The brakes shrieked, the horse wheeled, and a stirrup swinging out on the end of its leather smashed into a headlight. The car lurched sideways as its nearside front wheel sank slowly, but inevitably, into the bramble-filled ditch.

  Anna had often doubted the efficacy of safety belts, but hers saved her from a violent confrontation with the windscreen, slapping her backwards in an uncompromising way she could only in retrospect feel grateful for, temporarily depriving her of speech. In the breathless, shocked interval which followed, Rupert uttered a string of obscenities, somehow managing to end with ‘...merciful God in Heaven’ (which He certainly had been to save them from catastrophe by a hair’s breadth) but already Anna had released her safety belt and was out of the car and through the brambles and had taken the horse by the rein. She had always loved a grey and was sick for horses and he seemed to her to have been sent by providence.

  The rider appeared almost at once, running down the lane towards them in old-fashioned jodhpurs with a garter strap and a tweed jacket worn to the thread. Her cheeks were flushed, her pale hair flew, and the slate grey eyes that Anna was later to know as being calm and steady in almost every circumstance, were wide with anxiety. Good manners clearly bred in the bone, she held out a hand to Anna. ‘Nicola,’ she gasped. ‘Please say you didn’t hit him! Do tell me he isn’t hurt! He doesn’t belong to me and I don’t have any insurance!’

  Anna was ready to sympathise at once, but Rupert raised his head from the steering wheel and his expression was painful to behold. With difficulty, he managed to force open the car door in order to inspect the damage to the paintwork and headlight that must now be paid for out of his own pocket. He was Assistant Manager at the small, quayside hotel in Orford, where Anna had worked since leaving catering college, and his wages were not large.

  ‘Never mind th
e bloody horse – just look what it’s done to my fucking car!’ Directing a savage glare towards Nicola and the grey horse he reached into the well of the driving seat and retrieved his mobile phone. After which, muttering the most bitter and violent invective against the entire equine species, he clambered up out of the ditch and stalked off up the lane in search of a signal, his mobile phone clamped against his ear and trailing a wickedly long bramble attached to his trouser leg.

  The grey horse (who could not have anticipated the explosive potential of his reception) would have set off to accompany him at once, his progress swiftly arrested by a restraining hand on his bridle. Nor was Rupert to know that Anna had already resolved to pay for the damage to his car herself since this jaunt in the country had been on her behalf. Rupert, tall, lean, with hair like a raven’s wing and a worrying pallor from which no razor in existence (and he had tried them all) could quite remove the blue shadow, seemed to Anna to be constructed of some highly combustible material which required careful handling at all times and rendered him a tiring companion. By now accustomed to his mercurial temperament, she was unmoved by his departure and turned to the rider; to Nicola. ‘Don’t worry about Rupert – he’ll get over it. We didn’t hit the horse though, I promise you; the stirrup smashed the headlight.’

  In relief, Nicola took the horse by the bridle and, in between examining a few superficial scratches occasioned by his encounter with the blackthorn, lamenting his broken rein and removing a briar from his tail, explained that the gelding was prone to hysteria in traffic, and described in graphic terms his consternation upon meeting an oil tanker in the narrow lane. The driver of the vehicle had been sympathetic and stopped at once, but the whoosh of his compressed air braking system had sent the horse straight up the side of the bank and through the hedge. Nicola had not so much fallen, as been swept out of the saddle, and there had followed a tiresome chase around a plantation of Christmas trees which had ended only when the gelding had dived back through the blackthorn.

  ‘The pity of it is,’ said Nicola in a rueful tone, ‘that he was coming along beautifully, and now all his confidence will be lost and we shall have to begin all over again.’ On hearing this, the grey horse, who had obligingly lowered his head to enable Nicola to extract a thorn which had perforated his ear, gave a deep and gusting sigh, for all the world as if he was fully conversant with what had been said, and was utterly fatigued by the prospect.

  Reassured as to the wellbeing of her equine pupil Nicola turned her attention to the rescue of Rupert’s car. ‘But here am I thinking only of the horse when both of you could have been badly injured and all of it my fault. You stay with the car,’ she decided, ‘and I’ll fetch the Rover and pull it out of the ditch.’ Gathering up the broken reins she mounted the grey gelding, who threw up his head and slid his front feet to attention. With typical equine perversity he now chose to regard the lop-sided Porsche as a wild and dangerous beast, snorting and sidling and rolling his eyes at it before plunging round in a spirited volte and setting off along the lane at a rib-rattling trot. ‘I’ll be back in ten!’ Nicola shouted above the crash of shod steel on tarmac. ‘Don’t go away!’

  ‘As if we could!’ Rupert, having gained higher ground and achieved a signal only to find his battery had run out, was not in the mood for conciliation. ‘As if we’re in any sodding position to go anywhere!’

  But Anna stood watching until the grey gelding’s tail twitched out of sight, listening as the hoof beats grew steadily fainter. ‘She will come back?’ she said almost to herself, and then ‘Of course she’ll come back. She wouldn’t just ride away and leave us here.’

  ‘And you would know about that, would you? You’re quite familiar with the superior classes?’ Rupert was now prepared to become properly incensed. ‘The fact that she’s the sort of person who rides a crazy horse on the roads with no bloody insurance, with no consideration for other road users, doesn’t alter your opinion of her one bloody iota, I suppose? Well, if she thinks all she has to do is apologise and that’s all there is to it, she’s bloody well mistaken; she can bloody well think again, because when she comes back, if she comes back, she’s going to pay for repairing my bloody car. Patronising little snob!’

  ‘I’ll pay for the repairs.’ Anna said. ‘Rupert, do you have to swear quite so much?’

  ‘Yes, I bloody do! I’m upset. I’m bloody upset!’

  ‘I appreciate that. But the car isn’t badly damaged. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with it; nothing that can’t be mended, anyhow.’ But Anna knew that Rupert would not be so easily mended. That after stimulation would come recrimination; that the entire mishap would have to be endlessly and tediously analysed and, in the end, judged to be her fault. As indeed, strictly speaking, it had been.

  ‘I still don’t know why we had to come this way, why you were so bloody insistent. We could have gone to Lavenham or Woodbridge. We could have gone to Southwold, but no! You wanted to go somewhere, but you didn’t actually specify anywhere, so in the end we finish up in the back of beyond with a bloody horse on the bonnet! You can see now where your bloody aimless meanderings have landed us – stuck in a sodding ditch God only knows where!’

  Anna could have said that her meanderings had been anything but aimless, but from past experience knew it was futile to argue with Rupert when he was upset. Instead, she peered into the Porsche and saw that her beautiful fruit and vegetables were in disarray. She picked her way gingerly through dried and wickedly spiked brambles in order to rescue them. Opening the boot she placed tenderly back into their tray delicate pink sticks of forced rhubarb; a punnet of fat raspberries, a trio of perfectly round turnips, their deep purple tops fading to a bone whiteness ending with a surprising little tail like a mouse; huge handsome leeks, fresh and fragrant, tied up with rough, hairy twine. Under Rupert’s disapproving gaze she rescued freshly dug Jerusalem artichokes, cool and moist and knobbly, still stuck with damp earth. Arranging them carefully on the tray, admiring them, Anna imagined herself turning them into sorbet and hearty soups for the staff of the Harbourmouth Hotel, none of whom could ever bear to eat the unrelenting seafood specialities they served to their diners; fish dishes which called only for the inevitable wedge of lemon, the token garnish of a handful of mixed leaves, the ubiquitous frozen pea.

  There had been altogether too much fish in Anna’s life recently. Those working hours not spent spreading mountains of ready-sliced brown bread with livid yellow catering margarine, were spent skinning salmon, decapitating prawns, sorting winkles and whelks, dropping live lobsters into a cauldron of boiling water (closing her heart to the waving of their banded claws and the whistle of their departing breath), dressing crabs, opening oysters, gutting squid (removing the spilling ink sac and the plastic backbone, searching out the sharp little beak from amongst the flaccid crown of tentacles), impaling scallops on skewers, de-bearding mussels. Working at the Harbourmouth Hotel involved not so much cookery as oceanic crustacean genocide and Anna had endured enough of it.

  What she particularly disliked about it was that she was never completely able to remove the smell of fish from her clothes, her hair, her skin. In her cramped little room in the eaves of the hotel even her bed linen smelled of fish. Anna imagined that however often she bathed in floral, fragrant oils, a piscine aroma must invisibly surround her like an aura. She fancied that people sniffed the air as she passed by, wrinkling up their noses, grimacing with disgust. Even the Porsche, immaculate as it was, regularly shampooed and valeted as it was, and now smelling blissfully of country market vegetables, usually smelled of fish. I am impregnated with fish, Anna thought, I am contaminated. One day I shall look in the mirror and I shall see a cod’s head wearing a striped Laura Ashley blouse with a piecrust frill around the neck, and I shall not be surprised.

  Disturbed by the thought she negotiated her way back through the brambles and made her way up the bank in order to stand on a rise overlooking a vast field of stubble, widening her nostrils and pulling into
her lungs great gusts of fish-free air. I have to do something about my life, she told herself firmly. I have to list my priorities. I have to make a plan.

  On the way to this (according to Rupert) unspecified destination, they had called at Framlingham, where there had been stalls on the market square and, after a perusal of what was on offer and the purchase of the vegetables, they had called into the Crown Hotel for coffee. Anna had liked the Crown; the market-day bustle of it, the scrubbed tables, the Labradors flopped on the stone floors, the waitresses threading cheerfully though the crowded rooms balancing trays of latte and toasted sandwiches. She had warmed to the murals of friendly cows in the ladies’ and the unexpected luxury of hand cream from The White Company. She had imagined the guest bedrooms; heavily beamed with half tester beds, plump pillows and Egyptian cotton sheets; cold and smooth and as soft as rose petal. She had wondered if she should ask if they were in need of a chef, but then remembered that now she could quite easily afford (quite suddenly and unexpectedly she could afford) to have her own kitchen. She reminded herself that she actually could buy a restaurant of her own, and, for a few moments, she imagined herself in an ancient lime-washed building with pammets on the floors and original bread ovens in the brickwork, somewhere in a village like Lavenham, in a street full of crooked, half-timbered houses.

  But there was something more pressing, something else she had resolved to deal with first. And when I have come to terms with this, she thought; when I have dealt with whatever it is I have to deal with now, then maybe I shall find the courage to do something on my own. And so that I might not be completely alone (the devil you know being generally a better bet than the devil you don’t) perhaps Rupert might be persuaded to leave the Harbourmouth Hotel if I offered to make him a partner. Thinking of Rupert, she glanced back and down into the lane and saw him leaning against the tilted bonnet of the Porsche with animosity apparent in every line of his body. And then again, she thought, as she turned back to the altogether more congenial view of the cornfield, perhaps it might be preferable to be alone.