‘So you’re a Matilda?’ the woman said, smiling her bony smile. ‘What an enchanting name!’
She’d sat down at the table. The two men were poking about the place, trying to work out what the kitchen had been like when the house had first been built. They murmured about an open fire and an oven in the wall. They glanced up the steep back stairs that led straight out of a corner of the kitchen. They even opened cupboards.
‘There’d have been a wheel there,’ the son said, pointing at the Aga, ‘which you turned to operate the bellows.’
His father wasn’t listening to him. ‘Structurally in splendid nick,’ he was saying. ‘Not a dodgy wall, I’d say.’
‘More than you could claim for the manor!’ the woman cried, her sudden shrillness making my mother jump. ‘My God, the damage!’
‘It’s been a long time empty,’ my mother said.
‘Dry rot, wet rot, you name it!’ cried the woman. She had four rings on the fingers of her left hand and two on her right. It seemed a mistake of some kind that she was coming to live in Challacombe Manor, like an absurdity in a dream.
‘We’ll be interested in buying land,’ Mr Gregary revealed. His head was very neat, with strands of hair brushed into its baldness. His face had a polished look, like faintly pink marble. The flesh of his chins didn’t wobble, but was firm and polished too. His eyes had a flicker of amusement in them.
‘It’s Ralphie’s venture really,’ Mrs Gregary said. ‘We’ll only ever come on visits.’
‘Oh no, no,’ the son protested.
‘Longish visits, darling.’
‘We’re all in love with Challacombe Manor actually,’ Mr Gregary said. ‘We can’t resist it.’
I wanted to say I loved it too, just to make the statement and by making it to imply that my love was different from theirs. I wanted it to be clear that I had loved Challacombe Manor all my life, that I loved our farm, and the gardens of Challacombe and the lanes around it, and the meadow we used to walk through on the way home from school, a journey which had been boring at the time. I wanted to say that I loved the memory of the past, of the Challacombe Mrs Ashburton had told me about, as it had been before the first of the two wars, and the memory of our family as it had been before the second. I wanted to say all that to show them how silly it was to stand there in a tweed suit and to state you were in love with a house and couldn’t resist it. I wanted to belittle what wasn’t real.
Politely I offered them milk and sugar, not saying anything. My mother told me to get some biscuits and Mrs Gregary said not to bother, but I got them anyway. I put some on to a plate and handed them around while my mother talked about the farmhouse and the farm. The Gregarys’ son smiled at me when I held the plate out to him, and all of a sudden I was aware of a pattern of events. It seemed right that Challacombe Manor had stood there empty for so long, and Mrs Ashburton’s voice echoed in my mind, telling me something when I was nine. I didn’t know what it was, but all the same I felt that sense was being woven into the confusion. An event had occurred that morning in the kitchen, and it seemed extraordinary that I hadn’t guessed it might, that I hadn’t known that this was how things were meant to be.
‘They think we’re peasants, finding us like this,’ my mother said crossly when they’d gone.
‘It doesn’t matter what they think.’
A long time went by, more than a year. Challacombe Manor was put to rights. The garden was cleared of the brambles that choked it; for the second time in my memory the tennis court became a tennis court again; the masonry of the summer-house was repointed. I watched it all happening. I stood in the garden and sometimes Ralphie Gregary stood beside me, as if seeking my approval for what he was doing. I walked with him through the fields; I showed him the short-cut we’d taken every day from school, the walk through the meadow and then through the garden; I told him about the tennis party Mrs Ashburton had given on the Thursday afternoon before the second of the two wars.
One day we had a picnic, one Sunday morning. We had it in the garden, near a magnolia tree; there was white wine and chicken and tomatoes and chives, and then French cheese and grapes. He told me about the boarding-school he’d been to. When he left it he went into his father’s motor-components business and then he had fought in the war. During the war he had slowly come to the conclusion that what he wanted to do when it was over was to live a quiet life. He had tried to return to his father’s business but he hadn’t cared for it in the least. ‘This is what I like,’ he said. I felt quite heady after the wine, wanting to lie down in the warmth of the noon sun. I told him how Dick and Betty and I had collected ladybirds for Mrs Ashburton so that they could eat the aphids that attacked the roses. I showed him the table in the summer-house which had been laden with food on the day of the tennis party. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me, understanding my love of the past.
‘You can’t make it come back, you know,’ Miss Pritchard pointed out to me that same day, in her tiny sitting-room.
‘I hate the present.’
We ate the macaroons she’d made, and drank tea from flowered porcelain. It was all right for Miss Pritchard. Miss Pritchard was too old to belong in the present, she didn’t have to worry about it.
‘You mustn’t hate it.’ Her pale eyes were like ice, looking into mine. For a moment she was frightening, as she used to be when you didn’t know something at school. But I knew she didn’t mean to frighten me. ‘You should love the man you marry, Matilda.’
She didn’t know, she couldn’t be expected to understand. Mrs Ashburton would have known at once what was in my mind.
‘He says he loves me,’ I said.
‘That isn’t the same.’
‘Mrs Ashburton –’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake forget her!’
I shook my head. ‘It’ll be all right, Miss Pritchard.’ He wasn’t like his parents, I tried to explain to her; he was thoughtful and much quieter than either his father or his mother. In all sorts of ways he had been kind to me; he considered me beautiful even though I was not; there was a goodness about him.
‘You’re doing something wrong,’ Miss Pritchard said.
I shook my head again and smiled at her. Already I had persuaded Ralphie to have the drawing-room of Challacombe Manor redecorated as it had been in Mrs Ashburton’s time, with the same striped red wallpaper, and brass lamps on the walls, connected now to the electricity he’d had put in. A lot of the furniture from the drawing-room was still there, stored in the cellars, locked in after Mrs Ashburton’s death so that it wouldn’t be stolen. It was the kind of thing that had happened in the war, a temporary measure until everyone had time to think again. No one knew who’d put it there, and some of it had suffered so much from damp that it had to be abandoned. But there were four upright armchairs, delicately inlaid, which needed only to be re-upholstered. I had them done as I remembered them, in crimson and pink stripes that matched the walls. There were the two small round mahogany tables I’d admired, and the pictures of local landscapes in heavy gilt frames, and the brass fire-irons, and Mrs Ashburton’s writing-desk and the writing-desk that had been her husband’s. The pale patterned carpet came from Persia, she had told me. A corner of it had been nibbled by rats, but Ralphie said we could put a piece of furniture over the damage.
He told me he’d loved me the moment he’d seen me in our farmyard. He had closed his eyes in that moment; he had thought he was going to faint. There was no girl in England who was loved as much as I was, he said shyly, and I wondered if it would sound any different if Roger Laze had said it, or the counter-hand in Blow’s. When I’d handed him the biscuits, I said, I’d felt the same; because there didn’t seem any harm in saying that, in telling a minor lie in order to be kind. His parents didn’t like what was happening, and my mother and stepfather didn’t either. But none of that mattered because Ralphie and I were both grown-up, because Ralphie was getting on for forty and had a right to make a choice. And I intended to be good to him, to cook nice food for him and listen to his worries.