The Dower House (6 page)

‘Ideals aren't crazy,' Marianne said. ‘If we can't succeed, what hope for the United Nations? What hope for the world? There must be
community!
' She turned to Adam as she said the word. ‘Community among all peoples like us. Ordinary peoples. We do it now, the world does it tomorrow.'

Willard cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘But you miss the point, sugar. I've never acted out of
idealism
in my life – not when there were good, solid reasons for doing the other thing.'

‘You want good, solid reasons, too?' Adam said. ‘I'll give you a good, solid reason for staying this side of the pond. Which country has suffered more war damage, England or America? Where will you find the more desperate need for architects?'

‘Where will the architect be king?' Felix asked.

Willard had his eyes shut in a parody of pain. ‘You're hitting me where it hurts,' he said.

‘And where better than with a couple of fellow architects who are working on the Greater London Plan, eh?' Without waiting for an answer, Adam turned to Felix. ‘Listen, old chap. When we met at the Lansdowne in the week, Tony and I desperately wanted to suggest that you join this little community. One of the old stables would make a wizard studio for you. But we had this absurd rule, you see, and, being English, we obeyed it.'

‘Rule?' Felix echoed.

‘It was Sally's idea, really, but we all agreed to it. She pointed out that if we overwhelmed people with our enthusiasm and they joined us against their better instincts and then regretted it later, it would cause a lot of ill feeling. So the rule was that would-be joiners had to ask directly; we would never be the first to suggest it.'

‘It sounds like good sense,' Marianne said. ‘Why are you breaking it now?'

‘Because of the fickleness of women, if you must know. The minute I told Sally about it, she called me every sort of fool and said of
course
I should have broken the rule at once and asked Felix if he'd like to join us. Her own rule! Anyway, Felix, that has now become the point of your visit today. If you like us and like the house and think the stables would make a good studio . . . just say the word. When we're up to full ration strength, each rent will be about sixty quid a year including insurance. If you took one of the stables, it would be even less.' After a pause he added, ‘Say?'

‘I'll say yes now, please,' Felix replied. ‘What is your English saying? A sculptor should never look three gift-architects in the mouth! Five if these two join as well.'

Adam had one more pearl to cast: ‘I know we're all supposed to be working class now . . . certainly we're all workers. But we want some of the families – one or two – to be
real
working-class people. That's also part of the new order.'

‘You English and your class system!' Willard began.

But Marianne cut in: ‘It won't work! That bit of it won't work.'

‘I don't mean the lumpenproletariat – the erks. But people in skilled trades – people who made sergeant in the skilled support corps –
REME
 . . . the Service Corps – we all met them. We all got on with them pretty well. Anyway, Marianne – how d'you know until it's been tried?'

Marianne clearly had a stack of counter-arguments but all she did was smile and say, ‘This beautiful, unspoiled countryside! Is America as cosy as this, darling?'

‘This is very like New Jersey – Mercer County . . . the country round Princeton—' he began.

Felix interrupted, ‘What happened there?' He pointed to a large patch of bare earth beside the road.

‘Ammo dump,' Adam said.

‘Please?'

‘It was probably an ammunition dump. During the war they dispersed small piles of ammunition all over England, mostly in little roadside heaps – all secure in locked metal boxes and under cover, of course. Safer than keeping it all in one huge arsenal. There are thousands of them still, not yet dismantled – all over the countryside.'

Felix whistled in amazement. ‘And they weren't afraid of revolutionaries?'

‘Not really. We don't go in for that sort of thing. What revolutionaries, anyway? The communists? They were all on our side.'

‘Not any more!' Willard said vehemently.

But Marianne had a different agenda. ‘It would be so easy to forget the war here.' She smiled at Felix and added, ‘To draw a line.'

‘Talking of which' – Willard switched tracks effortlessly – ‘you're right! I could draw a lot of lines right here in England. There's something about all those hundreds of thousands of bomb-damaged acres that appeals to an architect's eye. How about work permits . . . stuff like that?'

Adam's only response was a withering look. ‘You couldn't
fix
that?'

Willard shrugged. ‘I still can't believe I'm taking it all seriously.'

‘Try it for a year,' Adam suggested. ‘What does that cost at our age? Just give it a year. It'll be an experience if nothing else. Something to tell your grandchildren.'

The road curved away to the left among coppiced trees that had run wild again. It increased the sense of enclosure and the snug, tunnel-like ambience. The curve proved to be the first half of an S-bend, with the road swinging back to the left again – toward Bull's Green, as another newly repainted fingerboard told them.

But it was what stood on the far side of this second bend that made Marianne and Willard catch their breath. ‘What a little beauty,' he said.

She agreed. ‘A jewel!'

The object of their wonder was a gatelodge. It stood inside and to the left of an impressive stone entrance way, which had once, no doubt, been furnished with equally impressive railings and gates in wrought iron; but, like most such ironwork, they had been melted down in 1940 for ‘the war effort'. The lodge, however, was intact. The gable ends were concave, like those on a Chinese pagoda; the bargeboards were carved, not simply sawn; the windows were gothic; the chimneys were in fluted spirals and walls were of red brick.

The Johnsons dismounted and crossed the road, pressing against the sheep hurdles that had replaced the wrought-iron railings.

‘D'you think we could?' Marianne asked hesitantly.

‘What?'

‘Have a peep inside?'

Adam laughed. ‘You can live there if you like – unless Felix wants it, of course. He's got first refusal.'

‘First choice?' Felix queried.

‘First refusal, first choice – they mean the same.'

‘Choice and refusal mean the same in England!' Felix glanced at Marianne and raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

She laughed but was more interested in Adam's offer. ‘You've rented this place, too?' she asked.

Adam jumped down and scrabbled aside some ivy near the top of one of the gate columns, revealing the barely legible word, cut in the stone: Dower. ‘It's the gatelodge to . . . our future. The Dower House. It was originally called Dormer Hall, when it was a Tudor manor. Then the Grenfells of Panshanger bought it – before one of them was created the first Lord Desborough and turned it into a dower house, which is the Georgian mansion we're about to visit.'

Since they were all dismounted now, they walked up the avenue of limes, past open parkland on their right and woodland to the left. Carpets of bluebells stretched under the trees, pheasants rose from the undergrowth with a harsh clatter of feathery alarm, and every now and then the white scuts of stamping rabbits flashed in panic, too. The woods were choked with volunteer saplings of ash and beech, none more than ten years old and all struggling in the mighty shade of beeches, chestnuts, and firs that were hundreds of years older. The limes, Adam noticed for the first time, were riddled with mistletoe.

Here and there, deep in the shade, loomed the iridescent purple of bursting rhododendron buds. Other shade-tolerant shrubs abounded, too – Portugal laurel,
Acuba japonica
, bamboo, and many others he could not name. Yet.

‘How I'd have loved to build dens and play games here as a boy!' he said apropos nothing.

After a furlong or so of twisting drive the random pattern of trees became more organized until, at last, the avenue, now straight, was flanked on both sides by matched pairs of limes – old limes, even older than the woodland all around, limes with elephantiasis, amputated and paraplegic from centuries of storms, yet still standing. One was actually hollow, being no more than a cylinder of living bark and sapwood, with yet more bark on the inside, too; even so, it supported three fairly solid branches that rose thirty feet or more.

However, they soon had no eye for trees, nor for anything other than the house itself, to which the ancient limes provided a living triumphal arch of an entrance.

‘Wow-ee!' Willard exclaimed as they emerged from beneath the last branches of the final pair; even Marianne, who had grown up in an elegant château in south Sweden, was a little taken aback. She grabbed his arm as if she did not trust herself to stand unsupported. For there, a couple of hundred paces ahead of them, crowning a slight rise in the ground, stood one of the most elegant Georgian country houses they had ever seen. Larger than a rectory, smaller than a palace, modestly opulent, assertively reticent, there it stood in the afternoon sun, as confident of its ground as any mountain in the kingdom – and more sure of its place in history, too.

‘Welcome to our country cottage!' Adam said as he unhitched the pony and turned it loose onto what had once been the main lawn.

They stood and analysed the house. It rose three floors on a semi-basement, the tops of whose windows could be seen over the ex-flower beds around the foot of the house. A flight of four shallow steps led up to a grand entrance, guarded by two pairs of simple Doric columns, which rose to support a large triangular pediment that formed the front wall of a balcony. The walls, of pale Hertfordshire brick, were symmetrical on either side. Each half had three large windows on the ground floor, echoed on the first floor above in lights of medium size. All were rectangular, though those on the ground floor were set back in shallow, semicircular arches of brick. At the moment they were blinded from inside by their once-white shutters. It made the house seem somehow fake, like a construction on a film lot waiting for the painters to darken the glazing and paint in the bars.

Felix wondered where the stables were. ‘Which is your bit?' he asked Adam.

‘See the Tudor gable just peeping out beyond? Well, the Victorian Desboroughs built a mock-Tudor annexe to it, to balance it. On the far side from here. We're in that.'

‘And Tony and Nicole?' Willard asked.

‘They have the back of the main house – three rooms on the ground floor and three above. You can just see one of their windows looking out on the lawn. And the bedrooms above that are theirs, too.'

‘And who has the top floor?'

‘Untenanted as yet. So is the genuine Tudor bit, and the main-house ground floor on this front side, and the floor above it. And the stables – with the cottage across the yard, which
you
might consider, Felix.'

‘And the gatelodge,' Marianne said. ‘Seven family units, five which not yet are uptaken.'

Felix noticed a tap set back a little from the drive. He turned it on but no water emerged, only a spider, which abseiled to the grass on one fine thread. There had been only one working tap in the
Vélodrome d'Hiver
that day. One tap for more than a thousand Jews.

Sally Wilson opened the high front doors and stepped out to greet them. She was a tall, slender, platinum blonde; her features were rosy, even babyish, but there was nothing babyish about her manner.

‘Where are Tony and Nicole?' Adam asked.

At the mention of Nicole, Marianne's heart skipped a beat.

‘They went down the fields to inspect the septic tanks. Apparently we have two for alternate months. You must be Mister and Mrs Johnson – and Herr Breit?'

‘Mister, please! Or just Felix.'

‘Of course.'

When the introductions were over, and first-names agreed on, Sally took Willard and Marianne to explore the main house while Adam showed Felix over the coach houses and stables, which would be ready-made studios or garages.

‘Maybe the cottage across the yard would suit you better?' he suggested, pointing out a two-storey red-brick building beyond a huge weeping ash. ‘The locals call it the gardener's cottage but we think it must originally have been for the head stable lad.'

‘Lad?'

‘Well . . . that's what they always called them, no matter how old. Anyway, those big French windows are much later. Once there were double doors there, to what was a coach house.' He nudged Felix. ‘Big enough for a sculptor's studio, I'd say. You could get a Henry Moore in and out by that door.'

‘I don't intend living alone,' Felix said as they crossed the yard.

‘Quick work!' Adam said admiringly.

‘Oh, I've not found anyone
yet
.'

Adam pushed at the cottage door with his foot; the wood scraped the floor. ‘Tell me to mind my own business, if you like,' he said, ‘but are you really as . . . I don't want to say
indifferent
 . . . forgiving, perhaps, about . . . you know . . .' He jerked his head vaguely toward the big house.

‘
Indifferent
is good,' Felix said.

He saw at once that the big room Adam had mentioned would, indeed, make a fabulous studio. The French windows looked west, so the sunlight would steal inward each evening to caress his day's work and congratulate him. His fingers longed to begin working.

‘It's odd.' Adam went to one of the windows and drew Euclidean shapes in the dust on one of the panes. ‘I suppose we ought to stop trying to guess what your feelings and attitudes must be?'

‘It would be best to assume that I have none.' After a pause he added, ‘I had to learn certain techniques in order to survive. At least, I
hope
I learned them. I hope they weren't always there inside me, waiting to blossom, because they are not attractive.'