The Chandelier Ballroom (8 page)

He was found next morning by his hired gardener. The police were sent for, their findings that he must have slipped while under the influence of alcohol, had probably sunk like a stone, feet probably caught for a time by weeds on the lake bottom, the body later rising to the surface where it was discovered.

Millie Butterfield didn’t cry when she was told the news. She was sad, of course, recalling the good days, blaming herself a little for not standing by him as people who have lost someone often find themselves beset by whatever guilt their heart can conjure up – for not doing what they think they should have done, or doing something they shouldn’t have done while the bereaved was alive.

She was, however, consoled by the fact that her husband’s money was now hers. She was a rich woman and she planned to take full advantage of it, and in time maybe settle down and start again with someone else – who knows. But her first thought was to get rid of that blasted hateful house. Her solicitor was surprised to hear that she didn’t want to keep it.

‘Think, my dear, what you could do with it. Turn it into a small hotel, or more modestly a bed and breakfast establishment, or even hire it out for parties.’

Parties! She’d had enough of parties. How could he know the heartbreak that bloody awful place had brought her? She wasn’t going to tell him. Let him carry on thinking her odd. She was quite content. She had friends, lots of places to go with them, pubs, cinemas, the odd theatre, holidays of course, even abroad maybe, spend whatever she liked so long as she was discreet about it so as not to isolate herself from friends with less cash in their pockets. In the same manner she would find herself a better house, but not too grand and still in the area she loved.

She wasn’t like Race had been, with his expensive tastes and his flamboyant need to show off. She’d never been one to show off and she wasn’t prepared to let people know just how much she was worth. Let them believe her husband had gambled away most of his money, leaving her just enough to live on comfortably and maybe a little besides, in case they got too suspicious and took her as seeing herself better than them, though she knew they wouldn’t, not her sort of friends, good friends, the absolute salt of the earth.

Within a couple of months she’d put the place he had striven to make so impressive on the market, to be sold with all its contents, lock, stock and barrel. Being so large it had taken almost a year to sell, but by the spring she had a bite – an offer from a pair of young newly-weds, admittedly for a little less than she’d hoped, but she was only too glad to accept it, happy to see the bleeding place go.

Within another six weeks the contracts had been signed, leaving her pleased and relieved to see the keys handed over, her only thought, good riddance to bad rubbish. They were bleeding welcome to it. She wouldn’t be surprised if the damned place was haunted. It had never bought no bugger any luck and that was the truth!

In awed silence the young couple stared around the immense room they’d entered from a door off a narrow passage. The man consulted the brochure he held. ‘It says this is the chandelier ballroom.’

The girl gave an explosive laugh. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

He didn’t look up from the page as he pointed to the ceiling above them. ‘I suppose it means that.’

Together they glanced upwards to study the hugely elaborate object, he with awe, she grimacing. ‘What a stupid thing to have in any house.’

‘I suppose it had its uses,’ he said, looking down at the brochure again. ‘It says here that the room was used as a ballroom.’

‘How silly! It’s nowhere near large enough for a ballroom.’

‘That’s what the people selling this house called it. They probably held big parties here.’ He gazed about him then up at the chandelier again with its two-tiered branches of gleaming brass arms and its beautiful crystal shades. ‘Actually, I think the thing finishes this room off perfectly. It must be worth quite a bit. I wonder what possessed the woman who’s selling the place to leave it here?’

The girl shrugged. ‘The agent said she was leaving everything here, just as it is. So she must know what she’s doing. Odd though. Anyway, we don’t want her old rubbish. We want our own decent stuff.’

‘Everything she has left here is decent – expensive. I don’t think we could match it, not for some time yet. So while it’s here we might as well make use of it – if we buy the place that is. Do you like it?’

She ignored the question. ‘Another thing, we’d have to replace the wall to the hallway. I don’t like stairs in a room, there’s no privacy.’

‘There are the back stairs.’

‘And you saw the state of them,’ she countered, grimacing. ‘A lot of the house at the rear would need modernising if we do buy it.’

He had to agree, though it was only certain areas. The kitchen and utility room had been modernised, as had the five bedrooms, the walk-in bathroom/toilet off the master bedroom and the second bathroom and toilet along the hall, but he knew what she meant. He had to admit that parts of it
were
a bit old-fashioned, though for him that was the charm of it.

Entering by the rear door, having for the moment mislaid the key to the front door, they had gone straight up the old stairs to look at the views, Joyce more interested in them than the layout of the house.

Living with her parents in Surrey, leaving a beautiful home with extensive views across the Surrey Weald to be his wife, the last thing she wanted was to live somewhere crowded on either side by houses. His home on the other hand had been in South Kensington, cheek-by-jowl with other buildings, albeit of the finer sort. He just hoped he would soon get used to living in the country.

They had looked at places around where she had lived but most were too expensive. Both their parents had money, but hers having forked out a huge sum for the upcoming wedding of their only daughter, in fact their only child, as well as paying for the honeymoon in the south of France, felt they had given enough.

His father, on the other hand, although a stockbroker in the City, as he himself was, was a tight-fisted old devil and would have thought it outrageous to be asked to put down a mortgage for his son, one of three, who if he didn’t keep an eye on them would have drained him dry given half a chance, according to him.

So, even with both sets of parents pretty comfortably off, finding the down payment for this place had been a bit of a struggle. Arnold felt they had come across a snip with this house, despite it being in Essex, if a better part of Essex. And if Joyce liked it, then this was what he would settle on.

Every one of the five bedrooms was large, the windows imposing, the décor needing nothing done to it. And there was the furniture. What had possessed the widow whose home it had been to sell it down to the last stick of furniture, even to the last knife and fork, he’d never know, but the woman’s eccentricity, if that’s what it was, was to his advantage.

‘It’s such a good price she’s asking. It would be silly to turn it down,’ he’d said as they came back down the main stairs leading straight into this huge room, with its elaborate chandelier which he now switched on just to see how it looked, the room immediately flooded with light despite the bright sunshine flowing in through each of the five tall, beautifully curtained windows.

‘I suppose,’ Joyce replied a little begrudgingly, still staring about her. ‘I must say I do like the house. But we’ll definitely have to wall off these stairs. And,’ she added as he switched off the chandelier, ‘we’ll have to get rid of that ridiculous thing – it’s far too garish for my liking.’

He made no comment but secretly knew he was going to leave that lovely thing exactly where it was no matter what she said, as they went on through what would become a hallway again if they bought the house, to look at the lounge, then into the narrow wood-clad passage with its doors to the sitting room, the library, the dining room with the kitchen and utility room at the far end.

‘We’ll have to do something about this passage too,’ she remarked as they entered it. ‘Not much natural light at all.’

It was the only drawback, but impossible to alter. ‘We’ll put doors between the lounge and the three other rooms, make them interconnected,’ he offered, ‘so you won’t have to use the passage except to go to the kitchen, the downstairs cloakroom and the main hall when we rebuild that wall.’

For the first time since coming in, Joyce smiled. He was encouraged.

‘Shall we put a deposit on it then?’ he asked as they came out to the trim Morris he had left standing in the wide drive, gratified to see her nod in agreement.

The house was theirs. It hadn’t been easy reaching a mutually agreeable price. Loathing any kind of haggling, Joyce had left it to Arnold to do the talking, the vendor, Mrs Butterfield, a forbidding adversary, small in stature though she was.

In her mid-fifties, tight-faced, tight-lipped, as if having gone through a hard time of some sort, she had probably once been quite plump, the sagging flesh of her forearms conveying that fact. Now she was thin rather than slim. Her blue eyes brittle, she had glared up at Arnold as if bearing him an intense grudge. It almost turned Joyce off, she only wanting for the negotiation to end and for them to walk away, except that she had fallen in love with the place, other than the need for a few alterations.

She was glad Arnold had taken charge of haggling and hadn’t once included her in the negotiations, assuming her to be in full agreement with everything he’d said. Indeed she had been. There’d been more on her mind at the time with her wedding drawing ever nearer, all the arrangements still only half complete. Nor was she one to enjoy standing out, which as the bride she would have to, and the nearer the day approached, the more her nerves had mounted.

Now the wedding was behind her, her nerves had fallen back into their rightful place. Yesterday the keys had been handed over and today they’d finally moved into their new home.

Some of the furniture belonging to Mrs Butterfield having been taken out and their own installed this very morning, everything placed exactly where it should go, the van men having left, it felt that the house was theirs at last. And at a far lower price, Arnold said, than he had expected.

To celebrate he suggested taking a stroll around the area, maybe ending up in one of the two local pubs in the village for a quick drink, and later that evening they’d go out for a celebratory meal somewhere nice.

In the Baker’s Arms, the middle-aged couple at the next table, each with a half pint of light ale in front of them, kept glancing their way until finally the man whose complexion was almost nut brown, addressed them directly, a broad, cheerful smile lighting up his large face.

‘Forgive me for asking, you must be our new neighbours,’ his tone was jovial. ‘We have the house on the corner to Rye Lane, you know. We wondered who’d be buying Crossways Lodge, didn’t we, Pat?’

Pat nodded, smiling across at Joyce, who immediately inclined her head then looked away, saying, ‘I need to just go and tidy my face,’ before getting up and walking off.

Arnold wanted to apologise for her. She could be a little offhand at times. People were apt to take it as unsociable but it was only that she was of a rather retiring nature, unable to make friends as easily as some might.

They had met by sheer chance, in a library, he asking if she knew where the history section was, she saying she had no idea but returning his smile, an unusual response for her, he was to discover much later. They’d bumped into each other again after he’d found the section he’d been looking for, waving his book at her, saying brightly that he had found what he wanted. To his delight she held up her own book saying that she too had found what she’d been looking for. He’d asked what it was and she said it was on gardening, prompting him to say that living in Chelsea his family had no garden but that one day he hoped to have a place of his own with one. They’d got talking and it had developed from there. That had been two years ago.

He’d found that Joyce wasn’t an easy person to get on with – full of self-doubt and discomforting indecision – but by then he was in love. When he finally proposed she’d almost recoiled, but eventually she accepted his proposal. The families met and hers harried her to set the date. At first she had agreed but then had a fit of uncertainty, saying he wasn’t the steady partner she’d have preferred. True he liked to have fun, tried coaxing her into having fun too, aware that she didn’t enjoy the sort of pleasures he did, going to parties, meeting new friends, having lots of holidays. It had been a blow until she confessed that she suffered such collywobbles about the whole business of weddings, finding herself forced into the limelight perhaps for the first time in her twenty-one years.

Her whole life had been a sheltered one – coddled, protected, educated at a college for young ladies, her friends vetted, her movements watched by doting parents who feared her getting into mischief or hurting herself. They had even vetted him, checking his background, his upbringing, before ever allowing things to get serious.

With arrangements for the wedding fixed a second time, her excuse to back out had been that she felt she wasn’t ready to fly the nest and settle down to married life. The third time, she again wanted to back out, this two days before the wedding, with everything in place. Her parents finally informed her that she couldn’t let guests down, everyone having bought expensive wedding presents, and she had a duty to go through with it. This time she had capitulated without a murmur.

Only on their honeymoon did he discover how frigid she could be, but slowly she had melted to him, and now, having moved into her own home, she seemed ready to unwind and behave like a true wife, maybe not as much as he would have liked but at least to some extent.

‘Is your wife all right?’ the man was saying. ‘She seems to be a little on edge.’

It was a rather forward question and Arnold replied hastily, jerked back to the present. ‘No, she’s fine. It’s all the business of buying the house, getting settled in, that sort of thing.’