Landed Gently (8 page)

‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, in
Society and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’

But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue entirely in support of a masquerade grown loathsome to him. It could not be Marxism, nor even socialism; the most he dared do was to proclaim himself a Liberal. And this, unfortunately, was enough to set him at odds with his father, to whom it appeared as a betrayal of the great Tory tradition of the Feverell family.

Jepson had graduated during Somerhayes’s second year, and with the removal of the irritant the young nobleman began to recover some of his lost
equilibrium
. To justify a step that had only been a
compromise
, he threw himself energetically into the cause of liberalism, seeking to find there a creed that would strike a balance between the implacable opposites of competitive industry and social justice. He learned many of the answers to Jepson’s furious logic. He discovered that the problem could not be stated in terms of pure black and pure white. When he emerged from the university he felt that to some degree he had achieved a balanced view of the contemporary social situation, and that, holding on to it firmly, he might proceed to his career with sufficient confidence. He had been admitted to the Foreign Office, and in due course was attached to the Paris Embassy.

‘At that time, although I did not know it, Leslie Brass had just forsaken the Latin Quarter for the tapestry factory at Aubusson.’

‘You didn’t meet him in Paris?’ enquired Gently, breaking the long monologue.

‘No. How should I have done? Our circles were hermetically sealed from each other. But it has always seemed significant to me that he and I were young men in Paris together.’

‘How do you mean … significant?’

Somerhayes’s eyes dwelt on him wistfully. ‘One of us a young artist, just beginning to find the channels for his creativity, the other … I won’t insist, Mr Gently. And now he and I are together.’

‘You wanted to be an artist too?’

‘In a way, I suppose, though I understand its impossibility.’

‘Could you explain?’

Somerhayes shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll go on trying.’

Eighteen months after he had gone to Paris
Germany
had invaded Poland. Back in London he had received quick promotion, and was engaged first in the tortuous relations that existed with the Vichy
Government
, and later in the endless negotiations and exchanges with Washington. Soon after the war his father had died, and Somerhayes succeeded to the title and a seat in the House of Lords. He had also been considerably impoverished by death duties, as a result of which he had been obliged to offer Merely Place to
the National Trust. He now lived as a tenant in the petrified glories of the house that the second lord had built with the money that the first lord had ravished from the country at the time of the Bubble.

‘In effect I have become a curator … I am doing public penance, perhaps, for the sins of my ancestors.’

On his succession, Somerhayes had resigned from his post in the Foreign Office. His father had had a large town house in Mayfair, but this was much too big both for the tastes and the revenue of the new lord, so he had sold it and bought a smaller one in Chelsea. There, for several years, he had lived a rather solitary life during the parliamentary terms. The political climate of his father’s circle had made it uncongenial to him, and he was not a man who made new
acquaintances
easily. His predilection for art, however, had brought him into contact with several painters, among them Leslie Brass, who had now settled in Kensington and was making quite a stir with his pictures and tapestry. It was easy to detect Somerhayes’s almost reverent admiration for the man. Perhaps nobody but the plebeian Brass with his buoyant self-confidence and cynical shrewdness could have aroused it so strongly. Here was Jepson again, but better than Jepson. Jepson had been a mere revolutionary, a stormbird, an iconoclast; Brass was a creator, an artist, a visionary. Once more, Somerhayes had found all he was not enshrined in another man. Once more, he was shaken from an apparently secure spiritual perch, and driven to put himself agonized questions.

‘And then my cousin and her husband came to live in Chelsea. Previously I had seen very little of her, since her home had been in Northamptonshire.’

Janice, like himself, was now an orphan. Her father, the late lord’s youngest cousin, had been killed in an air accident in the Thirties, leaving not much behind him, and Janice had passed from Girton to a library appointment in Edinburgh. There she had met her future husband, Desmond Page. Their courtship had been interrupted by the death of Janice’s mother, but Desmond, in the interim, had passed his final exams, and now he had an appointment in a London hospital under the eye of a distinguished surgeon. He was thought by many people to have a great career in front of him.

Two years later he died, a victim of a post-mortem infection.

‘Mrs Page was cut up?’ suggested Gently, as Somerhayes’s voice faltered to a stop.

The nobleman nodded silently. His face in the firelight looked drawn and puckered.

‘A very expressive phrase, Mr Gently … yes, she was
terribly
cut up. She had nobody in the world to turn to. It was a godsend that I was there to help her through it.’

‘She stayed in London, did she?’

‘Yes, she stayed in London. She continued to live in their Chelsea flat in a state of – how shall I put it? – suspended animation. It was as though for a time she couldn’t believe it had happened. She tried to continue
her existence as though Desmond had just gone away, perhaps, and one day she would hear his car pull up again in the mews down below. Grief is a terrible thing, Mr Gently.’

But the months had passed, and Janice began to emerge from the shadow that had fallen across her path. In the meantime Somerhayes’s political life had gone from bad to worse. He could not forget his early brush with Jepson. So much of what the young Marxist had flung at him seemed to be illustrated by the workings of the machine of which he was a part. He witnessed the persistent operation of self and class interests. He saw how truth could be muzzled, facts distorted, justice mocked in the name of expediency. And he made a bad name for himself by some very peculiar speeches. He was distrusted by both sides equally, and rated as being ‘unsound’. The crisis came when the Silverman bill for the abolition of capital punishment was presented to the Lords. As a life-long abolitionist he had seen in this a charter for a new and better phase of civilization. He could not believe it would be rejected. There were no class interests at stake, it touched nobody’s pocket. The question was entirely a
humanitarian
issue, to be decided on humanitarian grounds. And yet, it was rejected. More, it was rejected in a way that made Somerhayes feel it impossible for him to remain longer a member of that betraying convocation.

‘One learns to forgive selfishness in politics, and dishonesty, and passion; but inhumanity one cannot forgive, or forget, or silently condone.’

He had made a bitter speech and left the House determined, he had said, never to set foot in it again while men were made of stone. The heart of politics was corruption, and he must turn his back on them. He knew what he would do. If he was not permitted to serve humanity as a law-giver, he would serve it by way of art. Himself a dying branch on a dead tree, he could yet provide the means for a genuine creator to express his vision. And so he had made his proposition to Brass, and Brass, having looked all round it to make sure that his independence wasn’t threatened, had consented. Janice had also been approached and had agreed to join in the venture. The looms and equipment were purchased, six weavers assembled, and now, eighteen months later, Merely Tapestry was a name beginning to be conjured with by interior decorators.

Gently sat in silence as Somerhayes, by the change in rhythm natural to an orator, indicated that he had come to the end of his long relation. What was it this man had been trying to tell him? What was the implied relevance of this excursion into autobiography? There had been no further mention of Earle, none at all. Presumably, from his knowledge of subsequent events, Gently should now be in a position to elucidate the significance of what he had been told …

‘A winter’s tale, eh, Mr Gently?’ Somerhayes was regarding him with his strange, sad little smile.

‘An assembly of factors.’ Gently heaved his bulky shoulders.

‘You begin to see my point?’

‘Perhaps … I begin to see something.’

‘As things have turned out, how can one believe that your presence here was simply an accident?’

Gently grunted, and felt around for a match. ‘Mind if I put a question?’

Somerhayes nodded slowly.

‘In this assembly of factors … would Mrs Page be an important one?’

Somerhayes continued to nod.

‘In fact, you’re in love with her?’

‘Yes … I have been for a very long time.’

‘And she with you?’

‘No. I do not think so. Naturally I have never mentioned it to her, and she was greatly in love with her husband.’

‘Then you don’t think’ – Gently struck a match fiercely – ‘that she was interested in Earle?’

A flicker passed over the crimson-lit face. ‘Of that I could not be certain …’

‘You saw what I saw – more, probably.’

‘I saw she was amused by him.’

‘More than amused.’

‘It might have appeared …’ Somerhayes broke off, raising his hand. From the far distance of the night had come a sound of singing, accompanied by what sounded like a bassoon, a trombone and a trumpet. Clearly it came to them in the book-lined room, the words if not distinct, distinguishable by virtue of their familiarity.

Somerhayes rose from his chair. ‘You must excuse me, Mr Gently. Those are the carol-singers from the village. They pay a visit to the Place every Christmas … I must go and put in an appearance.’

Gently shrugged and blew out his match.
Somerhayes
left the room, not by the main door but by a smaller one concealed to look like an open-fronted bookcase. Outside, the carol-singers continued with their second verse:

Gently sat up suddenly. A sound other than that of singing had struck his ear. Softly, furtively, the latch of the main door had been released … the door he clearly remembered Somerhayes closing when they had entered. He was across the room in a moment. Outside the hall was empty, but at the far end of it another door was just closing. He rushed to it and threw it open. It gave an icy blackness. He fumbled along the wall for a switch, but there was no switch to find, and hearing a door open further on, he gave up the attempt and made for the sound. He was in the state apartments … obviously. Heavy, carved furniture under dust-sheets met his groping hands and sent him stumbling. It seemed an age before he got to the end of the room.
The door was ajar, and once again he felt for a light switch that wasn’t there. He stood quite still, listening. From very far away he could still hear the carol-singers and their brass accompaniment. Otherwise there wasn’t a sound. He was alone in the dark with his breathing. Or was the breathing all his … ? Was there another pair of lungs just a few feet away?

He may have heard something or it may have been pure instinct that sent him leaping and sprawling and tumbling away from the spot where he had been standing. At almost the same moment there was a violent crashing sound, and something ponderous and irresistible went trundling along the parquet floor. He fought desperately with the tangle of objects into which he had fallen. Footsteps sounded, running towards the lighted hall. Scrambling up on his feet, he chased after them towards the distant slit of light, but when he arrived there the hall was conspicuously and bafflingly tenantless.

A moment more, and Somerhayes came hastening round the corner of the corridor, alarm on his face.

‘Good heavens, Mr Gently, what on earth was that appalling noise?’ he exclaimed.

‘I don’t exactly know.’ Gently threw a keen glance at him. ‘Perhaps if you can get some lights on down there, we’ll be able to find out.’

Somerhayes darted to a switchboard concealed behind a sliding panel, and immediately lights blazed in the great state room beyond the door. Gently led the way through it to the chamber where the disturbance
had taken place. It was a long, comparatively narrow gallery lined with antique busts on pedestals. And the cause of the crash was not far to seek. An enormous marble bust, about three times life-size, lay gazing eyelessly at the ceiling from its resting place on the floor. Lying prone by the wall, its finial almost flush with the side of the doorway, was the ten-foot alabaster pedestal on which the bust had lately resided.

‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Somerhayes, going down on one knee by the bust. ‘It’s the Merely Euripides – no wonder there was a din!’

‘It’s not damaged, I trust?’ observed Gently
ironically
.

‘No, it’s not damaged – in any case it’s only a late Italian copy.’

He got to his feet and came back to the doorway. In the parquet floor was a welted bruise that had been made by a cannon-ball.

‘But think – if anyone had been standing there. They would have been killed in an instant.’

Gently nodded his mandarin nod. ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ he replied, poker-faced.

Through the state room came running Mrs Page with Brass and one of the weavers. Somewhere out on the terrace the carol-singers were giving the final chorus of their hymn.