The Last Houseparty

The Last Houseparty

A Crime Novel

Peter Dickinson

I

O
ne cannot say for certain that there was something in the Snailwood genes to cause the men of that family to become partially stuck in their childhoods. In any case the tendency was not strongly marked, and was further obscured by the difficulty of discerning where the games of childhood end and the pursuits of adult life begin among people whose wealth and station have meant that they have never had to do anything serious by way of earning a living, or serving their country in peace or war. Even the practicalities of procreation seem to have presented difficulties, estate and title only once having passed directly from father to son. The estate had been engendered by an almost accidental speculation in the South Sea Bubble, and the title had been bestowed on the first earl because, though without any real interest in politics, he happened to own three or four rotten boroughs necessary to the survival of one of Newcastle's administrations.

On the other hand, frivolities often turn out to have their practical side. The two most obvious examples of this came with the third and fifth earls, the former having built Snailwood Castle in all its romantic extravagance, and the latter having played with trains. The castle in our own time justified its existence to the extent that visitors paid to see it, and the narrow-gauge railway round the park swelled their numbers to the point where, taking in also those who came mainly to look at the gardens, the whole enterprise almost broke even.

The castle was perfectly habitable, indeed many rooms not open to the public were still used, but from the beginning it had somehow possessed the feel of being primarily a toy. This was most marked on first sight, as it was meant to be. The third earl had employed a family of boatmen to bring all his important visitors up the Thames from Marlow, and despite the exorbitant charge for the launch trip this is still much the best way to begin.

At any season and in any weather the first sight of those crenellated turrets rising irregularly above the beeches and chestnuts of the parkland sward and the more varied specimen trees of the gardens proper produces in almost any visitor the genuine romantic thrill the third earl had demanded—and this though most visitors are instantly aware that they are seeing not “the true rust of the Barons' Wars”, in Horace Walpole's phrase, but a fake specifically built to evoke that thrill. They are quite conscious of being got at, but the trick is so effectively performed that it would be over-fastidious, even mean-minded, to object. Still, a house designed with that as its primary purpose, rather than keeping the rain out, is definitely a toy.

The guide taking the first party of visitors round on a Wednesday afternoon in April 1980, made the point rather less directly. She gathered her group beneath the portrait of the third earl and told them that he had inherited the title at the age of eleven, his uncle the second earl having been killed by a bullet while watching a duel in the Bois de Boulogne during the brief lull that followed the Peace of Amiens. She did not draw any moral from this incident, though it could well be thought to exemplify another Snailwood tendency: to stand (though not to do much else) in what will turn out to have been in the eyes of history the wrong place. Instead she told them how a few years later the young earl had been trying to duplicate some of Sir Humphry Davy's experiments with flammable gases and had burnt the previous house to the ground. Forced by his own folly into positive action he had determined to build something that would do honour to his hero, Lord Byron—not, of course, the rounded, sardonic, mature and genuinely heroic Byron of
Don Juan
and the Greek liberation, but the young, glum, intense
poseur
presented in
Childe Harold
.

The party of visitors stirred, not impolitely restless—it was too early in the visit for that, and the guide, though she kept her tone on the dry side, spoke with clarity and knowledge—but because this era of the Snailwood story was not to them its main interest. Also that lift of the heart which visitors experience on seeing the towers of Snailwood, and which they retain and probably enhance on a tour of its marvellous gardens, tends to lose its power the moment they step into the deliberate gloom of the vaulted entrance hall. Most still gazed at the portrait of the third earl—school of Thomas Lawrence but with more than a dash of Haydon—wearing the black dressing gown he had ordered on hearing the news from Missolonghi. The dressing gown itself hung in a glass case to the left of the portrait, strangely more imbued with personality than either its painted representation or that of its wearer. The guide pointed to the book the earl was holding and recited the lines displayed:

The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine

Whose breast of waters broadly swells

Between the banks which bear the vine …

and so on. The artist had done his damndest to endow with a craggy look the steep but rounded slope of hill on which Snailwood Castle frowned in the background. The guide explained that for a while the earl had actually insisted on the castle being called Drachenfels, though no one knew whether this was because the coincidence of names had originally persuaded him to build in this style, or whether he had chanced on it after making his grand decision. At any rate he had been unable to impose his will on the customs and insularity of his neighbours, and long before his death in 1868 he had accepted that he was George Daniel Pollixer Digges Hillaby Snailwood, Lord Snailwood, of Snailwood in the County of Buckingham. Even the word “castle” became less and less frequently used.

By the time the guide had moved on to the portraits of his great-nephew the fourth earl, and of his second cousin once removed, the fifth earl—the one who had installed the railway line—though she gave only brief accounts of them, the attention of the party had dissolved still further. Three children were fingering the joints of an unlikely-looking suit of armour, while a young couple in matching anoraks and T-shirts were peering inquisitively into a mahogany and glass booth which jutted from between fluted pilasters on the wall opposite the portraits. Suddenly these two found themselves in the front row of the audience as the guide switched attention to the booth, explaining that yes, indeed, it was a coin-operated phone-box, installed in the early nineteen-thirties by the sixth earl as a defence against the extravagant use of his telephone by the innumerable guests of his second wife, the Countess Zena.

Magically at the name of Zena the mild ennui of the party lifted. This was what they had come for. Perhaps the guide had actually spoken of the telephone booth in order to produce this effect before leading them into the Great Hall, which she now did, and there Zena was.

A few years before, guides on leading one into the Great Hall would often begin with the story of the third earl in old age endlessly pacing its length each evening, as if to prove to himself that he still had what he had asked his architect for, the largest private room in Buckinghamshire, and muttering as he did so, “I was a fool when I built this.” But even in so apparently static a subject as the history of a so-called Stately Home tastes change, and Snailwood had at last been fortunate in this respect. Because of the fire in 1820 it had never possessed any crowd-compelling ancient treasures, so since it had been opened in the mid fifties it had really been the gardens most visitors had come to see, with a tour of the house something to take in if the afternoon turned nasty. Now, though the gardens remained the chief attraction, the revival of interest in the thirties meant that it had been worth re-furnishing the Great Hall as far as possible exactly as it had been when Zena had plummeted into these near-stagnant waters with such a notorious splash, and had for a start insisted on making this monstrous room—through which the family had previously tended to scurry, even in summer-time when its Boreal draughts were lulled, in search of smaller and cosier quarters—the place where the life of Snailwood was chiefly lived, the hearth round which she gathered for her week-ends that amalgam of guests whose nucleus came to be known as the Snailwood Gang, but whose occasional members included names as disparate as Frank Buchman and Noel Coward, Dennis Wheatley and Herr Ribbentrop, Herbert Morrison and Constant Lambert. It was still apparent to these latter-day sight-seers that all Zena's drive and confidence had been unable to convert the Great Hall into a comfortable living-room.

“You'd hardly know they were the same woman,” said somebody.

“No,” said the guide, still gently shepherding the hinder end of the group towards the two portraits to the left of the fireplace. “But as a matter of fact they're both very good likenesses. She should have been an actress, really. She was very changeable.”

“You knew her?” said a voice with mixed surprise and doubt, as if speaking to a stranger who claimed to have encountered a hippogriff.

“Oh yes,” said the guide. “I lived here. I was only a child, of course.”

They gazed at her as if she too had now become an exhibit—a square, confident, shortish woman with a smooth, pale face which looked a little too young for her tidily permed white hair. There was nothing in her appearance to tell them what her position in Countess Zena's household might have been—relative, dependant, child of servants—and her voice gave no clue either, educated and brisk, but lacking any residual arrogance of status. She did not seem to object to being looked at in this manner, but perhaps she would have given a similar impression in almost any circumstances, being one of those people who without obtrusively radiating self-confidence still seem to be so at one with themselves that one feels the outer world cannot ever really jar their inward balance. As soon as her party had gathered beneath the portraits she started her formal talk, beginning with the room itself and the rich armorial stained glass which filled the top half of the six high lancet windows and gave the Great Hall its peculiar atmosphere of dark rich shadows above and plain daylight below. She compressed the first century of its existence into a couple of minutes in order to tell in closer detail of the notorious nineteen-thirties, to reel off a score of famous names who had sat on these chairs and sofas, and to end with an unassailably non-committal account of the accusations, made both before and after the war, that certain members of the Snailwood Gang had been more than mere sympathisers with the ideals of Nazi Germany. This particular group of tourists contained no hotheads, still anxious to argue and accuse. They were more interested in gossip, and the Countess Zena.

“She looks a lot younger than the earl, doesn't she?” said a woman, almost as soon as the guide had finished.

“She was his second wife, of course,” explained the guide. “In fact the difference was a few more years than you can see because the earl was painted by Birley before he had met her. She wanted a pair for the Birley, but she insisted on it being done by John, because she said that Birley was an embalmer, not a painter—that's a typically Zena remark, by the way. She was pleased with the John, but then she wanted something to show that that image wasn't the only one, so she commissioned the Rex Whistler. I don't imagine she told him to make it different—she wouldn't have to. She'd just see to it that the difference was there for him to paint.”

She moved a little away, leaving them to look at the three portraits, while she herself unobtrusively studied their reactions, perhaps attempting to gauge some first faint gust of change in public taste which might soon need to be catered for. It is curious in any case how such things go, how what had originally been the most obviously effective of the portraits was now well on the way to becoming the least successful, while the less pretentious wore rather better. The Birley on the far side of the fireplace had never made much claim to being a masterwork. It was a craftsman's piece—the earl at his front door, wearing gaiters and with a gun over his arm, nearer sixty than fifty, his narrow but florid countenance not exactly vacuous, but at the same time not one on which the eye would rest for long out of interest in the character there expressed. The weapon and the background architecture gave a strong impression of the Englishman whose home was his castle. The portrait—as seems often to have happened with pictures of our aristocracy during periods when it was the normal thing to have oneself painted and as one knew nothing about art one went to the fellow who'd made quite a decent stab at old Jouncer—was now in the process of becoming quaint, and attractive at least for that.

If the Birley was coming up in the market, the John was definitely slipping, despite its announcement, the moment one set eyes on it, that here was a great artist re-creating for posterity the transient beauty of a famous woman. Though indoors, Zena had her arms full of roses and was wearing one of her huge hats. The effect was far from calm. She was striding. The gauzes of her dress swirled with her speed. John, as if determined to show that he was not taken in by the sentimentality of the subject—a pretty woman on her way to arrange flowers—had modelled the face and the bare arms with streaks of a pale but chemical green and denoted the shadows in the carroty hair with a darker green. The brim of the hat, worn almost vertical on the side of the head, was a mauve halo round the beaky profile. This was Zena as hawk-goddess, the roses seeming to struggle helplessly in her grip, her captive prey. The effect was still theatrical, but the mode of theatre had changed. Tosca had become the witch in Disney's
Snow White
.

Time had done less to one's appreciation of the Rex Whistler, which remained what it had always been, a very decorative little piece, its charm enhanced by the slight chill the artist's favourite palette gave to all his work. Zena, in pale blue slacks and a yellow Aertex shirt, sat bareheaded on the stone lion at the eastern end of the Snailwood terraces, very much to one side of the picture so that her body became part of a frame for the fanciful traffic on the Thames below. She was looking over her shoulder at the viewer, as though startled by his sudden appearance in the solitariness she had been sharing with her stone protector. Her dark eyes were misty, the predatory profile of the John turned to show a classic oval. You would not, as the visitor had said, have known it was the same woman.