‘Ah.’ Brock noticed the sceptical pursing of Sidney’s mouth. ‘Didn’t I read that he was gay?’ Martha’s nostrils flared again and he hurriedly added, ‘Nothing wrong with that, of course. So,’ he beamed, ‘you don’t think he was making a bit of extra cash selling drugs and bizarre sex to the patients, then?’
Martha brought her fork down so hard it nearly broke her plate. She rose to her feet.
‘How dare you’ — she struggled to keep her voice down — ’suggest such a vile, vile thing, about a Stanhope person you never even met!’
She tossed back her head and marched towards the door. Sidney half rose from his seat as if to follow her, then thought better of it and sank down again.
‘You’re a game sort of chap, aren’t you?’ he said after a moment.
‘Oh dear. As bad as that, eh?’
‘Martha’s very strong on loyalty, especially to the dead, I’ve noticed. And to the clinic, of course.’ ‘I went too far. I’ll apologize to her.’ ‘I’d leave it for a bit if I were you. Just my advice.’ Brock nodded. ‘Thanks.’
‘I never liked him, myself. Couldn’t stand him touching me, for some reason. Wouldn’t really have surprised me if he had been up to something odd.’
‘Could that have had anything to do with the “goats” among the patients that Martha was talking about yesterday, do you think?’
Sidney’s eyes, invariably watery and distant, snapped suddenly into focus, and a worried expression passed across his face. Then he looked away and began to push himself to his feet again. ‘No idea,’ he muttered. ‘Best to drop the subject, old chap, eh?’
Brock smiled and watched him walk stiffly out of the room. Looking round, he saw that Grace Carrington had already gone.
A one-hour rest period was scheduled for the clinic after lunch each day, and Brock, having no postcards to write or good books to read, was uncertain what to do. The nagging deadline of his forthcoming paper in Rome was making him increasingly uneasy, but he found it hard to think about it in the present circumstances. He wanted to visit the Temple of Apollo, but wasn’t sure how to go about getting there across the snowy gardens, dressed as he was. He crossed the hall to the reception desk and asked if he could see Ben Bromley, the Business Manager of the clinic, but was told he was away that day. Brock settled for an appointment on the following day and made his way to the library instead.
This was a much smaller public room, next to the dining room and also facing north across the gardens. It was lined with glass-fronted bookcases, and a leather-topped table occupied the centre. Most of the shelves carried well-worn paperbacks donated by past patients, but one bookcase was marked ‘Reference — Not to be Removed’ and contained a collection of hardback books, among them a black-bound volume with the title A History of Stanhope on its spine. Brock took it from the case and sat down with it at the end of the table.
Though not old — the dedication was dated July 1978 — it belonged to the days just before photocopiers and word processors became ubiquitous, when people still used carbon paper and foolscap sheets, and it had a prematurely dated air about it. It comprised the yellowing carbon-copy pages of the typewritten account of the history of Stanhope House, and more recently of Stanhope Naturopathic Clinic, as compiled by one Felicity Field. It had clearly been a labour of love. Chapter headings such as ‘A Herb Garden is Born’ and ‘The Invalid is Nursed Back to Health’ brimmed with coy enthusiasm, and the text was illustrated by many black-and-white photographs glued into the pages. The first was a picture of the south front of the house, with a small figure of Stephen Beamish-Newell just visible between the columns at the top of the entrance stairs, chin up, like Mussolini surveying a party rally. It accompanied the dedication by the Director, which commended the unflagging efforts of Miss Field to record the past of a great landmark of English social and architectural culture at this moment standing at the threshold of an exciting new future.
Miss Field had begun with Stanhope House itself, originally the home of Sir William Stanhope (1698–1752), a member of Lord Burlington’s circle. Like Burlington, Stanhope had visited Palladio’s buildings in Italy and had determined to promote the revival of his work in England by designing his own Palladian house in the Weald. Where Burlington had taken the Villa Rotonda as the model for his house at Chiswick, Stanhope had chosen the Villa Foscari, known also as the Malcontenta, as Miss Field explained:
Some would have it that the name Malcontenta was local to the site long before Niccolo and Luigi Foscari built their house there. Much more romantic is the story of an ungovernable daughter of the family who was exiled there from the temptations of Venetian society, and whose ghost is said to haunt the house still. Lord Stanhope certainly preferred this latter account. Whichever explanation you choose, the name seems to evoke perfectly the spirit of its setting in the Veneto, so often wreathed in mists and vapours, and it may have been this which persuaded Lord Stanhope when he came to build upon the meadows beside the River Strood.
Stanhope had begun his version of the Malcontenta shortly after Isaac Ware published his translation of Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture (as Miss Field noted, ‘from Scotland Yard, in 1737’), which was dedicated to Richard, Earl of Burlington, and for which Stanhope was one of the original subscribers. After Stanhope’s death, his son commissioned Humphry Repton to landscape the estate in 1796, and followed his father’s taste for things both classical and elegiac by instructing Repton to include in his scheme a series of monuments, ‘modest yet sublime’, on the theme of memento mori. Miss Field helpfully provided a list of these, and a little map showing where they might be discovered about the grounds. One of them was to be a ruin of four Ionic columns standing on a knoll to the north-west of the house, based on Palladio’s drawing of the ancient Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. These columns later became incorporated as the front of the Temple of Apollo, built, along with the west wing, by the architect Albert Fusy in 1910 for the industrialist who then owned Stanhope House. Miss Field obviously relished the quotation which she provided from Pevsner’s Buildings of England series concerning these additions, as ‘unfortunate efforts which, taken with Fusy’s contemporaneous remodelling of much of the interior of the original house, can only be described as mutilations of what had been one of the finest neo-classical houses in the country’.
Brock skimmed to the end of Miss Field’s account of the history of the building, with its decline into neglect after the Second World War, ‘a home for spiders and mould’. At this point the library door opened and a man came in. He nodded to Brock and went over to one of the bookcases. His hair was longish and wavy over a pugnacious, fleshy face, and his dressing gown looked as if it had been tailored in Savile Row, a piece of double-breasted power-dressing which gave him none of that air of comfortable domestication that most patients quickly slipped into. From the top pocket he drew out a pair of spectacles which he brought up to his face with a flourish, accompanied by a frown of concentration and thrust of the chin, all of which looked to Brock more like a display of male dominance than a serious attempt to focus on the paperback titles.
Brock resumed his reading, skipping through the herculean efforts of Dr and Mrs Beamish-Newell to restore the house, to clear the jungle which they found within the walled garden and re-establish the organic cultivation of vegetable and herb beds in soil which had never known modern chemical herbicides or pesticides, and to rationalize the land holdings around the house.
‘Interested in ancient history, eh?’ The voice from behind his left shoulder was deep and sonorous, as if its owner was a heavy cigar smoker or had just woken up. Brock looked at him.