‘Then he told us that, with great regret, Sir John had decided it was time for us to move on. Neither Jack nor I grasped exactly what he was saying at first. I didn’t anyway. Time to move on? What the heck did that mean? “I am afraid Sir John feels that he no longer has need of your services,” he went on, cool as you like. Jack looked at me and I looked at Jack. “You mean he’s bleddy well giving us the sack, after all these years?” Jack said. “Well, Sir John wouldn’t put it like that,” he said. “I bet he bleddy wouldn’t,” Jack said. “But that’s what it bleddy well amounts to, isn’t it?”
‘I know I started to cry. I couldn’t take it in really. I remember saying, But we live here, this is our home. Where are we going to live? It was then that he told us about the settlement. Basically, this cottage, and one hundred thousand pounds. Afterwards everybody said how generous that was. But we were just in shock. Blackdown Manor was our home for nearly thirty years. And Jack had always been Sir John’s right-hand man, from when he was only a lad, really. It was far more than a job, you see. Far more. For both of us. We looked after Sir John, and his family, proper looked after ’em. That’s how we saw it anyway.’
For an awful moment Vogel thought Martha was going to burst into tears in front of him and Saslow. But she didn’t.
‘Us couldn’t believe it really,’ she continued. ‘All that time. And The Gatehouse. Didn’t matter that us was given another place. The Gatehouse was ours. Sir John let me do what I liked with it. Everything belonged to Sir John, of course. Even the furniture, although we were allowed to take what we liked when he chucked us out. But not a lot of it would fit in here anyway.’
Vogel thought about the floral curtains, the pink wallpaper, the big chintzy sofa. So, they had been Mrs Kivel’s choice, just as he’d suspected. It somehow had never seemed likely that these would be the work of the Greys.
‘Not that we’re not happy here now,’ Martha Kivel continued. ‘Lovely little cottage. Sir John had it done up for us an’ all. And we only need the two bedrooms with the boys being married with their own families. But at the time, well, ’twas terrible. And then they tells us the settlement is conditional on us packing up and moving by the end of the month. We had sixteen days to get out. We agreed to it all, of course. Straightaway. Didn’t have any choice. And with what he gave us and what we’d put away all them years we were living rent free, well we’m not badly off. Jack still does a bit of gardening and a few odd jobs here and there, and I have a couple of ladies I clean for, and I makes cakes and puddings that they sell in the Cheese and Wine Shop down in Wellington, so we keep busy and have a bit extra coming in...’
Vogel felt his eyes beginning to glaze over. Martha Kivel’s words came pouring out in a torrent with barely a pause for breath and little or no opportunity for interruption. She certainly had more to say for herself than her husband. It seemed she was not an unobservant woman though.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Vogel, you didn’t come here to listen to all that, did you,’ she said eventually.
Vogel blinked rapidly behind his spectacles. He didn’t often lose control of an interview. He really needed to get this one back on course. Local gossip and background information were always useful of course, but there was a limit.
‘So, when did you hear that the Greys had moved in and taken over?’ asked Vogel.
‘Oh, only a couple of days after we left,’ said Jack Kivel.
‘We moved out on the Wednesday and they moved in on the Thursday,’ Martha interrupted, not for the first time. ‘That was the final straw really. Sir John must have had it planned well in advance, must have done. Colin the postie saw all the comings and goings. That hurt as much as anything. Like we was disposable. All that time being told we was family, living like family, we thought, with the Fairbrothers, and then we was out on our ear and this couple from London shunted in almost before we’d shut the door to our home behind us. Outsiders, they were. But then, that’s what we must always have been, really, we reckoned. The way we was treated.’
‘Did you ever hear anything about how the Greys were appointed?’ asked Saslow. ‘Whether or not Sir John knew them before he hired them, perhaps, or anything like that?’
‘Nope, us don’t know nothing about them Greys. Nor do us want to,’ said Martha vehemently.
‘So, when did you hear about Sir John’s illness?’ continued Saslow.
‘Well, I’m not sure us can tell ’ee that exactly,’ said Martha. ‘Must have been a couple of months or so after us was chucked out, I suppose. Obviously, Sir John was keeping it quiet. But that’s hard to do round here, very hard. There was nothing, then the word got out, and it just went around everywhere locally. Someone said there’d been a story in one of the papers. But we never saw it. Seemed to come on quite suddenly, his illness. We thought so, anyway. There was a few local tradesmen still went up there at first. And they saw him shuffling around on sticks, apparently. Didn’t speak to anybody and kept out the way. Proud man, Sir John. We could understand that. Course we could. But it hurt all the more, you see. We’d have taken care of him. And we wouldn’t have told nobody nothing. We never gossiped about the Fairbrothers, not even when Sir John suddenly decided to get rid of his first wife, Caroline, and move in that Italian trollop, Antonia.’
‘I take it you didn’t approve?’ said Vogel, this time unable to suppress his smile. Martha Kivel and Bella Fairbrother clearly had very similar opinions of Sir John’s second wife.
‘No, us didn’t,’ said Martha. ‘We thought Sir John had taken leave of his senses, to tell the truth. Brains in his trousers. We stuck by him, of course, and tried to make Antonia welcome. Never liked her though. And she didn’t last, thank God. They married as soon as he could get a divorce from Caroline, then she walked out on him four or five years later and took him for a pretty penny by all accounts. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened. We were just glad to see the back of her to tell the truth. I think Sir John would have liked Caroline back, but she’d found someone new and didn’t want anything more to do with him. He treated her very badly. Sad for the children though.’
‘But they stayed with Sir John at the manor, didn’t they?’ queried Saslow.
‘Yes, Sir John had somehow managed to arrange to have principle custody, which surprised us,’ Martha continued. ‘We’d never have thought Caroline would have let them go. I mean they spent a lot of time with their mum, of course, but it wasn’t like living with her. They didn’t just have to put up with the trollop, there was all this shuffling between their mum and dad. There were constant rows about it, too. Freddie was fifteen at the time, and Bella was thirteen. Difficult ages. I don’t think Freddie ever got over it. Reckon that’s what pushed him off the rails. I expect you knows about him being the wild one?’
‘Yes, although we might like to hear more about that another time,’ asked Vogel. ‘Meanwhile, can I ask, did you ever have any contact at all with Sir John after you were asked to leave? A phone call, or a letter perhaps?’
‘Nope,’ said Jack. ‘We were in touch with his solicitor for a bit, of course. But once we’d agreed to the settlement and signed all the papers to get this cottage made over to us and that, we never heard from any of ’em again. When we learned that Sir John was ill we tried to phone him. We thought, well, if he was poorly, maybe that explained things a bit. But his mobile didn’t even go to answer service any more. And when we called the house, the number had been changed. All the time we was living there we had the same number at Blackdown, but suddenly that had gone along with everything else.’