Standing in the middle of the huge hall, I turned about and then looked upwards. On the long high wall behind me, beneath a row of stag’s heads, interspersed with shining swords and breastplates, to either side of the last flight of a great oak staircase, were the principal pictures in the house, I thought, eight or nine of them, in recesses, large canvases, all from the pre-Raphaelite school. I looked at them more carefully. One of them was the romantic figure of a young knight, in dark medieval armour, kneeling at the feet of some quite ethereal woman with long, golden tresses, holding a haloed chalice: Sir Galahad or Sir Launcelot, I thought, reaching for the Holy Grail. A second picture was of a shepherd in a smock with a wispy but minutely rendered red beard, on a hillside filled with highly coloured, almost photographically real wild flowers, walking towards another kneeling woman in the foreground. She had just laid out some bread and cheese for him on a red check handkerchief. The food was painted in such detail it brought my own hunger back as I gazed at it.
‘That’s a Ford Brown,’ Alice said. ‘It’s called “Noon”.’
‘The food’s real enough. But were wild flowers ever as colourful as that, in England?’
‘Of course. Why not? Before all the pesticides, before they ploughed everything up and tore the hedges out. And do you see?’ she went on, with sudden sparkling enthusiasm, ‘Look! Down here in this corner: he’s painted in a Ghost Orchid, right behind where the woman is kneeling. Look! She’s almost sitting on it, as if she hadn’t seen it. It’s the rarest of all the wild orchids in England. It’s only been sighted fifty times or so in a hundred years! And only by women, for some reason. So he put it in there. As a bit of spite, I think.’
She was smiling radiantly once more as I turned to her. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You know about flowers, English wild flowers, do you? Past, present?’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprised at my surprise. ‘I’ve always known. But then I’ve had a thing about England.’
Above us, on the first-floor level, heavy banisters ran right round three sides of the hall, forming a gallery. And above that, very high up, was a dark hammer-beam roof, the beams picked out in faded circles and diamonds of colour, like old Red-Indian totem poles. To the left, at the opposite end of the hall from the great fireplace, was an intricately carved wooden screen, completely dividing the space, with a Gothic entrance arch in the middle, that led to a library beyond. And further on were stone arches in an identical style, but with plateglass screens set between them, and a glass door that led into the tall conservatory beyond where I could just see a green jungle of shrubs, small trees and hanging plants dangling in the bright sunshine coming through the glass.
The hall was warm, almost breathless, filled with a dry smell of old wax polish and the remains of great log fires burnt here long ago. It was calm, dark, heavy. Yet for all its impeccable tradition, there was something antiseptic about it. The space here had been filled once, or waited for fulfilment. But meantime, in the present, there was no life in it. With a few tactful signs and velvet ropes it could have been turned into an art gallery or museum straight away.
‘You don’t seem to do much here,’ I said, ‘do you? It’s as big as a football pitch. Or a tennis court.’ And then, thinking of such games, of youth, the question suddenly struck me, and I wondered why I hadn’t asked her before.
‘With all this space,’ I said. ‘Do you have children? It’s the sort of place, ideal …’
‘Yes, a son. He’s nineteen. Touring Europe now. In Italy, I think. But that was an earlier marriage.’
‘He’s not interested, in all this?’ I looked about me and then out the windows, thinking of the great parkland, the home farm beyond.
‘Not very,’ she said, turning away, moving over to the fireplace now, looking up at the great plaster frieze above her. She touched one of the little figures. I joined her.
‘It’s a moral story. Do you see?’ she said, her voice regaining an interest which it had not had in speaking of her son. ‘It’s called “Art and Industry”. Full of good works.’
I could see now how the frieze was divided into a series of intricately linked rectangular and diamond frames, with inset stucco figures: a group of men scythed corn in one; barrels rolled from a warehouse in another towards where a fully-rigged clipper lay at unlikely anchor in a third; in a fourth a half-draped woman, ample as a pastrycook, cradled a lyre. It was all executed in the most literal manner and the conjunctions were absurd. But as a piece of madly idealised Victoriana it was superb.
‘It was specially commissioned for the Great Exhibition in 1851,’ Alice said, admiring it with loving surprise, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘We bought it from another house. But it suits. Don’t you think?’ Again she made the enquiry as if something vital hung on my response.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s … splendid. A bit overpowering perhaps, if you were just sitting here trying to read the paper.’
‘Of course. But this isn’t the library. Of course it’s showy, pompous, self-righteous. But it’s practically the ultimate in all that, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ I had to agree with her. It was.
‘And do you see this man down here?’ She touched a little bowed figure down to one side of the frieze. ‘He’s dressed as a footman, or a waiter, I can never be sure which.’ She fondled the plaster man lovingly. ‘Well, he’s a bell pull. If you pull him —’ she pulled him — ‘he rings a bell!’ I heard a bell go off somewhere faintly in the back regions. She laughed then, another joyous laugh. And I thought how much more at ease she was among these purchased, inanimate objects, these figures in plaster relief or pre-Raphaelite paint, than she had been in the matter of her own nameless son, flesh and blood that really belonged to her.
I pulled the little man myself then and heard him tinkle away in the distance once more. ‘The whole place is wired up, I suppose,’ I said. ‘With all these … valuables. Alarms, I mean?’
‘Yes. What had you in mind?’ She smiled. ‘I think you’d need a truck to take anything out of here.’
‘It rings in the local police station, does it?’
‘It can do. If it’s turned on that way.’ There was a moment’s uneasiness between us. But Alice didn’t let it last.
‘Anyway,’ she said brightly, ‘You’ll have time enough to see the whole place. Why don’t you come upstairs?’
I’d wandered away from her as she spoke and gone over to the great hall door. Idly I turned the big plaited metal ring that formed one of the two handles. But it wouldn’t turn. It didn’t move. I realised the great doors were locked.
‘Of course,’ she said, seeing my attempts, ‘I keep it shut. As you said, with all these valuables here.’ She stood in the half gloom on the other side of the great hall. Was she staring at me? She might have been. In any case, hands on her hips, there was something impatient in her stance.
‘Well?’ she said, seeing me hesitate. ‘I’ll show you to your …’ she hesitated herself then, ‘your quarters!’ She smiled, making light of a description that might otherwise have sounded ominous. And I wished then that I’d never met this woman, never come into this great closed house of hers; that I was back safely hidden among the leaves of my tree-house. But instead of my oak tree, I climbed the great oak staircase behind her.