Sampson’s courtship of his wife Etta in the early sixties, known as
A la recherche du temps perdu
, had also gone into folklore. Sampson, then in his twenties, was already running his own company, Bancroft Engineering, when on the way out to lunch he had spotted Etta, the latest temp, tearing out her lustrous curls in the typing pool.
Learning on his return that she had just been fired for hopeless incompetence by the personnel lady, Sampson fired the personnel lady.
Arriving home to her parents’ house in Thames Ditton, a tearful Etta, terrified of confessing she’d been sacked yet again, found Sampson’s dark green XK120 parked outside. Such was the brutal splendour of his blond looks and the force of his personality that he and Etta were engaged in a month, to the delight of her elderly parents, who were relieved that their dreamy, unworldly daughter would be so well provided for.
But even during their courtship, Sampson always put Etta down, and frequently quoted W. H. Davies’s ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home’:
I love thee for a heart that’s kind,
Not for the knowledge in thy mind.
It was Etta’s kind heart, ironically, that had most infuriated Sampson over the years. She would slip his money to charities or friends or visiting workmen, and listen endlessly to girlfriends’ problems on the telephone: ‘Oh, you poor, poor thing, how awful.’
Sampson also resented Etta’s passion for animals. As an only child, she had been particularly close to the family fox terriers and to Snowy, the grey Welsh pony, which her parents had scrimped and saved to buy her and whose photograph still adorned her dressing table. Sampson, who gambled thousands daily on the stock market, hit the roof whenever he caught her putting a tenner on a big race.
He was even angrier when he discovered that Roddy Smithson, the local riding master in Dorset, knowing Etta loved greys and hoping she would visit his stables more frequently, had offered her free access to a lovely dapple-grey mare. Sampson promptly forbade any further contact. He also removed his considerable custom from the local garage, on learning that the manager was servicing Etta’s Golf for nothing.
Sampson loathed men who effortlessly attracted women, particularly when, like himself, they were tall, blond, rich and arrogant. Etta’s pin-up, the owner-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black, whom she’d hero-worshipped since his showjumping days in the seventies, was therefore anathema.
Sampson resented his wife for being so lovable. For a start Etta was so pretty, her complexion delicate as apple blossom, her soft curls the glowing light brown of woods before the leaves break through in springtime, and her eyes, the dark blue of clouds ushering in an April shower, were never far from tears or laughter. She also had a lovely curvy figure (which Sampson had
kept in check by weighing her once a week), slender ankles and the natural grace of a dancer.
But it was not just Etta’s prettiness. When Sampson wasn’t around, her natural high spirits and cheerfulness broke in.
She had such a loving smile, indicating she was really pleased to see you, such an infectious laugh, such a gentle voice, interrupted by squeaks of excitement, such a sweet, confiding way of tucking her arm through yours and asking after your wife or your sick grandchild or how your exams had gone, as if she really minded.
The words ‘that bastard Bancroft’ were never far from the lips of those familiar with the set-up. It was common knowledge in Dorset that Sampson not only bullied Etta insensible but kept her very short.
Why hadn’t she left him? For the same reason that birds often don’t escape when the cage door is left open: she had lost the ability to fly. Then she couldn’t leave because disaster struck.
Except for the rare sporting injury, Sampson had never been ill. His superhuman energy had enabled him to work all day and make love all night. Then, during a long winter in the early 2000s, his secretary noticed Sampson nodding off in the afternoon and even during crucial meetings.
In May, the firm’s annual cricket match took place, traditionally held on Sampson’s birthday to provide yet another showcase for his prowess. Even into his seventies he had taken wickets and knocked up the odd forty runs. This year he was bowled first ball and dropped two easy catches.
At the dinner afterwards, Sampson, who never forgot a face, blanked half the distinguished guests, and his normally rabble-rousing speech to the faithful was slurred and rambling.
Leaving the hotel, he had tripped and hit his head on a pillar and ended up in hospital. Here blood tests revealed Howitt’s – a dreaded, degenerative heart disease.
An outraged Sampson turned to the internet. Finding a prognosis not only of blindness and the collapse of organs and muscles but also of searing pain and probable dementia, he rolled up at a board meeting next day and once again collapsed. As his resignation became official, shares in Bancroft Engineering went into temporary free fall.
Back at Bluebell Hill, where he was confined to bed or a wheelchair, Sampson could no longer terrorize Etta by appearing massive-shouldered and six foot three in doorways, his eyes as cold as a lake at twilight.
Instead he bellowed from all over the house but, except for the
occasional very pretty carer allowed in to read or sit with him, he refused to let anyone but Etta look after him.
‘I can understand that,’ cooed an admiring district nurse. ‘Mr Bancroft is too proud a man to let a strange woman see him naked.’
That had never been Sampson’s problem, thought Etta wryly, remembering the serial mistresses he had kept throughout his marriage. But ever kind-hearted, aware that Sampson could no longer walk, was in dreadful pain, felt mocked by the books in his library that he could no longer read, and was finding even children’s crosswords increasingly difficult as his mind and his grasp on reality slid away, Etta felt desperately sorry for him.
Nor did their two children provide much solace. More than forty years ago Etta had nearly died giving birth to two hulking twins, Martin and Carrie, neither of whom she had managed to breastfeed. They seemed to have inherited Sampson’s contempt for their mother. Whenever she had tried to cuddle them they had gone rigid and wriggled out of her arms.
Not that they got on any better with each other, perhaps because when they were children Sampson, with stopwatch poised, had set them constantly at odds, not just on tennis court or sports track or in icy swimming pool but in endless history, geography and general knowledge tests.
As a result both twins were indelibly competitive. Dark, handsome, square-jawed Martin and heavy-faced Carrie, who was even more successful in the City than her brother, gazed belligerently out of silver frames on Sampson’s desk.
Neither child had been assiduous in visiting their stricken father, who admittedly wasn’t keen on his grandchildren and roared with rage when they switched television channels or rampaged across his painful feet.
When five-year-old Drummond managed to bugger both the stairlift and Sampson’s reclining chair on the same morning, his father Martin had threatened to smack him. Whereupon Sampson, to the rapture of Martin’s wife Romy, had growled that nothing could be achieved by smacking children – then spoilt it all by saying the only answer was to shoot them.
Since then, while claiming ‘Dad was such a joker’, both Martin and Carrie had found it hard to tear themselves away from their brilliant careers. To assuage their consciences, however, they encouraged others to descend on Bluebell Hill:
‘Dad’s so desperate for intellectual stimulus and cheering up and Mother’s got nothing to do.’
This led to Etta further exhausting herself cooking and putting
up for the night Sampson’s friends, or his ex-mistresses and their husbands. Street angel, house devil. Sampson managed to be polite, even genial, to them while remaining foul to Etta. Tiredness from continually disturbed nights made her absentminded, groping for names or why she’d come into a room, which irritated Sampson more than ever.
Early on in their marriage they had been nicknamed Sampson and Delicious because Etta had been so engaging. Even now Sampson’s visiting ex-colleagues and friends, many of whom he had cuckolded, squeezed her waist. Like Penelope’s suitors, they appreciated what a rich and charming prospect she would be, if anything happened to Sampson.
‘We know it’s just as tough for the carer,’ they whispered as they thrust ribboned boxes of Belgian chocolates into her hands.
‘So nice to see you relaxing, Etta,’ said their wives tartly. ‘London’s so tiring.’
Etta’s solace throughout her marriage, when Sampson had spent so much time away, had been her girlfriends. Now home all day, Sampson grew increasingly jealous, loathing it when they dropped in or chatted to Etta on the telephone. As she had felt compelled to refuse their invitations, they had drifted away.
Etta’s refuge was her exquisite garden, created over thirty-five years, in which her sense of design and colour had had the chance to blossom. She’d been working on a flame-red rose to be called Sampson when he’d fallen ill. In her greenhouse, she grafted plant on to plant, creating ravishing new species.
Her other comfort, apart from her bird table and reading poetry and novels, was Bartlett, her ancient Golden Retriever, who she took on increasingly slow walks round the countryside, wondering who would go first, Bartlett or Sampson. Was there life after Sampson? she was bitterly ashamed of wondering. A patient could live with Howitt’s, although it would increase its hideous grip, for twenty years.
One March morning, nearly two years after Sampson was struck down, Etta woke in rare excitement. Despite having been roused several times in the night to turn Sampson over and readjust his pillows, she remembered that the guest-free day ahead coincided with the first day of the Cheltenham Festival. If she could settle Sampson in his study with a video of an enthralling Test match or a Grand Prix, she could sneak off to watch the races in the kitchen – particularly as her pin-up and Sampson’s bête noire, Rupert Campbell-Black, had a horse running in a big hurdle race.
After that the day went downhill. Sampson, who insisted on opening the post, discovered a letter from one of her few remaining girlfriends enclosing Etta’s £100 winnings on a horse called Tigerish Tom: ‘Such a brilliant tip, darling, here’s your share. Hughie and I put on a hundred and celebrated with a wonderful dinner at the Manoir last night. Hope Sampson isn’t giving you a horrid time.’
Sampson’s roar of rage, ‘You’re not allowed to bet, Etta,’ rose to a bellow when he opened a receipt for another £100 from SHAC, the animal rights group battling to close down the laboratories in Huntingdon.
‘How dare you support them, Etta! D’you want to kill me? How can they ever find a cure unless they test on animals?’
Worse was to come. As a result of a warm dry spell, spartan Sampson had turned off the central heating. Last night the temperature had plummeted and now he was bucketing around in his wheelchair, demanding the whereabouts of the hot electric pad which eased the pain in his back.
Etta had just said she had no idea when, passing a dog basket
in the hall, Sampson caught sight of the flex of the electric pad coming out from under the tartan rug on which Bartlett was happily snoring.
Sampson exploded. Etta fled to the kitchen. When she crept back later with Sampson’s midday pills and a glass of claret, she found him in a further rage. He’d been ringing some bloody woman all morning but she’d been permanently engaged. Yet when he thrust the number on a piece of blue writing paper towards her, she realized he’d been ringing his own number and her heart went out to him. Then it retreated as the telephone rang.
‘Sampy darling,’ cooed a voice as Etta answered it, ‘just to let you know it’s Cheltenham races and roadworks on the M4 so we probably won’t be with you before one.’
Blanche Osborne was Sampson’s longest-term mistress. Beautiful, self-satisfied, she had been spoilt by Basil, her complaisant husband, who’d been rewarded for the blind eye he’d turned with excellent deals from Sampson over the years.
‘Blanche and Basil will be with us around one,’ Etta told Sampson, then, with a surge of spirit: ‘I wasn’t aware.’
‘I told you last week,’ interrupted Sampson, ‘but you never listen. Why don’t you stop being obstinate and get that deaf aid.’
By the time Etta had chucked a leg of lamb in the oven and defrosted a raspberry Pavlova, lit the fire, laid the table in Sampson’s study and organized drinks, Blanche, who liked to catch her on the hop, had arrived half an hour early, giving Etta no time to change, put on make-up or hardly wash.
Blanche was looking stunning, her sleek silvery-grey bob enhanced by a red suit with a large ruby brooch on the lapel in the shape of a geranium – no doubt given to her by Sampson. Instantly she went into an orgy of plumping Sampson’s cushions, re-buttoning his saxe-blue cardigan, which Etta’s trembling fingers had done up all wrong earlier, and smoothing his hair with a dampened hairbrush.
‘We must make you look as handsome as possible.’
Basil, who had a puce face and a fat tummy, reminding Etta of Keats’s poem about the pot of basil, tucked into a large whisky and the
Financial Times
, while Blanche talked to Sampson. Etta raced back and forth to the kitchen, and throughout lunch, crying: ‘You’ll need mince sauce’, ‘Redcurrant jelly?’, ‘Sorry I forgot the water jug’ and ‘More cream on your raspberries?’