As she wheeled the bike back towards me I noticed that it left an intermittent trail of white tyre-marks on the flagstones. Then I saw that each of the half-dozen steps leading up at the end of the passage had a bright rim of whitewash along their edges, and that the front bicycle wheel, pushing against the lowest step as she’d tried to turn, had then repeated the whitewash in a series of broken lines back down the passageway.
‘It’s to make sure they cleaned the steps every day,’ she explained, when I asked her about the fresh paintwork. ‘They painted them first thing every morning, so that all the dirt would show up quite clearly at the end of the day. Though of course the official reason was that it made the steps stand out more clearly at night, in the lamplight.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why do you still have them painted? There’s plenty of light here now, isn’t there?’ I looked upwards then, along the roof of the passageway. There were no light fittings anywhere and no switches on the walls.
‘No,’ she said, ‘All this part of the house on the ground floor, I’ve made it over, exactly, I think, as it was. Just with oil lamps. Here, I’ll show you.’ She opened one of the heavy red doors leading off the passage. ‘This is the lamp room.’
And so it was, as I could just see now in the faint light. There was a sudden sharp breath of paraffin oil, and on the dim shelves inside I saw a considerable collection of old Victorian oil lamps, of every shape and sort. Some were merely serviceable, kitchen lamps, with pewter-coloured metal oil reservoirs and sensible white globes. Others were much more elaborate, cut-and-coloured glass affairs: tulip-shaped red shades perched on top of fretted brasswork; or heavy brocade cloth pierced through by delicate clear-glass chimneys. Some were small and easily held, the sort to light you to bed with. But a few were very large indeed, three and four feet high, formidably decorated Gothic illuminations, made to stand on pedestals, lighthouses for a baronial hall.
‘But you don’t use any of these now,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, some of them. Why not?’ Alice looked at me in surprise. ‘We have electricity, of course. But this sort of light, lamplight, it’s far nicer, softer. Isn’t it?’
My feet were getting cold on the dark flagstones of the lamp room. I shivered now, with just a towel round my waist.
‘Come on up to the kitchen and get warm,’ she said.
She closed the door behind me and we walked up the steps at the end of the passage.
By now I almost expected it, I think, the big room we entered next, with its half-dozen arched clerestory windows along either side, high up; and the white scoured wood of the ancient cloth dryers, anchored far up by ropes to the ceiling; the long double lines of heavy cast-iron pots and pans on the shelves above the immense, black-leaded kitchen range which ran along most of one wall, with the legend ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ picked out in Gothic-lettered tiles above it. A coal-fired range, I assumed, with projecting hobs and brass hot-water taps, hummed softly, warming the whole room.
Yes, I had half-expected this Victorian kitchen, with its vast scrubbed pinewood table down the centre; an oak dresser eight or nine feet tall, filled with heavy old kitchen crockery at one end; a huge flour-barrel with a wooden scoop in a corner; the high-backed chair with its patchwork quilted cushion by the grate where Cook might have relaxed after a hard day’s work; a kitchen complete in every Victorian detail as far as I could see, right down to the heavy cast-iron meat mincers on the shelves and the rectangular wooden kitchen clock, each corner cross-hatched in the Gothic manner. There was, I noticed, some modern equipment: a big refrigerator, an expensive Moulimix, a long line of contemporary glass spice jars, an electric toaster, a waffle grill. But these were just incidental scratches on this Victorian masterwork.
‘Warm yourself by the range.’ Alice seemed terribly out of place in the old kitchen, in her smart blue cotton jeans and open shirt, like a guide in a museum.
‘Arrested development’: I remembered the phrase she’d told me her husband had used of her. And I thought now how he might quite easily have left her, at first impatient and finally contemptuous of her decorative Victorian obsessions: this apparent need she had to translate each of her fantasies into exact fact, and the fortune she did this with. It was enough to bemuse, and finally annoy any spouse.
Yet I didn’t want to leave this woman, who seemed just about to help me, though I was wary of her again now, standing in this perfectly restored kitchen, looking at her. For it was obvious that she saw nothing unusual at all in so meticulously recreating the past in this manner — old Edwardian bicycle lamps, whole Victorian lamp rooms and kitchens — and using these things, quite casually, it seemed, as if time had not moved forward at all in the intervening years.
She seemed to be living in the past of eighty, a hundred years before, and yet she seemed quite unaware of any contradiction: a sort of Queen Canute, I thought, defying time, living alone in this vast house, moving backwards into the years, not forwards. There was something eerie about it all. And yet there was nothing the least sinister about Alice herself: she was no Miss Havisham. Indeed she looked as fresh and contemporary just then as a woman in a telly commercial for some space-age kitchen. I couldn’t follow it.
‘Come upstairs. Get shaved, washed if you like. There’s all Arthur’s stuff. He had rooms to himself.’
Beyond the kitchen was another brighter, cream-painted passage leading into the body of the house, with doors, open this time, leading off into various smaller service rooms on either side. There was a butler’s pantry, with row upon row of perfectly carpentered silver drawers beneath a green-baize worktop; there were wine coolers, a partly filled bottle rack with the necks of some old vintages up from the cellars poking out; there was an old brass cork-puller screwed to a table-top, such as pubs had on their counters long ago. Further on was a footman’s room, with two braided uniforms on a pair of tailor’s dummies, white waistcoasts, navy-blue cutaway jackets with tails and gold buttons, knee-breeches and white stockings hanging beneath them.
At the end of this corridor, to the right, giving out through a hatch into an invisible dining-room, was a serving pantry, with long silver-gilt plate warmers, methylated-spirit chafing dishes and two huge carving trolleys with great half-globes of brilliantly polished silver closed over the tops. On shelves behind, someone’s family dining plate was stored — heavy crested dishes with a green pattern, rimmed in gold, in every shape and size, for the most varied foods, on the most formal occasions.
Immediately in front now was a sombrely panelled Gothic Baronial Hall, which ran for a hundred feet or more at right-angles to the passage we had just travelled along: a dozen tall, indented windows, hung on either side with great brown plush curtains, gave out onto the front of the house, with the parkland and cricket pitch, brightly green, just visible beyond.
In the middle of this vast space, immediately opposite, was an inner hall door, two wooden half-arches, glass-paned, so that one could see out into a large porch beyond, with formal columns and steps leading down to the gravelled drive beneath. Between each of the front windows, in a long line, were Corinthian pedestals, and on each of these was a white marble bust: Victorian worthies, all of them, to judge by their beards and mutton-chop whiskers, but here masquerading as Roman noblemen, each with a creamy stone toga thrown casually over one shoulder.
The floor was polished wood throughout the long hall, except at one end, where there was a thick, rather grim Aubusson carpet, and on it a vast horsehair sofa together with a collection of equally large high-backed brocade armchairs, all of them camped like an invading army round a fireplace as big as a tunnel-opening. Around and above the grate here, to a height of ten feet or so, a most elaborate stuccoed mantel frieze had been set in the wall. It told a story of some kind, I could see: there were figures active in various pursuits, carefully moulded in the plasterwork.