The Small Hand (2 page)

Three

as there ever a June as glorious as that one? I had missed too much of the late spring but now we were in the heady days of balmy air and the first flush of roses. They were haymaking as I drove down and when I arrived at my client’s house, the garden was lush and tumbling, the beds high and thick with flowers in full bloom, all was bees and honeysuckle and the smell of freshly mown grass.

I had been invited to stay the night and we dined on a terrace from which there was a distant view of the sea. Sir Edgar Merriman was elderly, modest of manner and incalculably rich. His tastes were for books and early scientific instruments and he also had a collection of rare musical boxes which, when wound and set going, charmed the evening air with their sound.

We lingered outside and Sir Edgar’s blue-grey coils of cigar smoke wreathed upwards, keeping the insects at bay, the pungent smell mingling with that of the lilies and stocks in the nearby beds. His wife, Alice, sat with us, a small, grey-haired woman with a sweet voice and a shyness which I found most appealing.

At one point the servant came to call Sir Edgar to the telephone and as she and I sat companionably in the soft darkness, the moths pattering around the lamp, I thought to ask her about the White House. Did she know of it? Could she direct me to it again?

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t heard of such a place. How far were you from here?’

‘It’s hard to tell … I was hopelessly lost. I suppose I’d driven for forty-five minutes or so? Perhaps a bit longer. I took a byroad which I thought I knew but did not.’

‘There are so many unsigned roads in the country. We all know our way about so well, but they are a pitfall for the unwary. I don’t think I can help you. Why do you want to go back there, Mr Snow?’

I had known them both for some four or five years and stayed here overnight once or twice before, but to me they were always Sir Edgar and Lady Merriman and I was always Mr Snow, never Adam. I rather liked that.

I hesitated. What could I have said? That a deserted and half-derelict house and overgrown garden had some attraction for me, had almost put me under a spell so that I wanted to explore them further? That I was drawn back because … how could I have told her about the small hand?

‘Oh – you know how some old places have a strange attractiveness. And I might want to retire to the country some day.’

She said nothing and, after a moment, her husband returned and the conversation turned back to books and to what he had a mind to buy next. He had wide-ranging tastes and came up with some unusual suggestions. I was always challenged by him, always kept on my toes. He was an exciting client because I could never second-guess him.

‘Do you know,’ he asked now, passing me the decanter, ‘if another First Folio of Shakespeare is ever likely to come up for sale?’

I almost knocked over my glass.

IT WAS HALF an hour later but the air was still warm as we gathered ourselves to go inside. I was fired with enthusiasm at the same time as I was coolly certain that no First Folio was likely to come my way for Sir Edgar. But even the speculative talk about it had made me think of his wealth in quite new terms.

As I was bidding him goodnight, Lady Merriman said suddenly, ‘I think I have it, Mr Snow. I think I have the answer. Do just give me a moment if you would.’ She went out of the room and I heard her footsteps going up the stairs and away into the depths of the house.

I sat in a low chair beside the open French windows. The lamp was out and a faint whiff of oil came from it. The sky was thick with stars.

And I asked in a low voice, ‘Who
are
you?’ For I had a strange sense of someone being there with me. But of course there was no one. I was alone and it was peaceful and calm.

Eventually, she returned carrying something.

‘I am so sorry, Mr Snow. What we are looking for has always just been moved somewhere else. But this may possibly help you. It came to me as we were sitting there after dinner – the house. The name you gave, the White House, did not register with me because it was always known as Denny’s House, to everyone locally – it is about twenty miles from here, but in the country that is local, you know.’

She sat down.

‘You really shouldn’t have gone to any trouble. It was a passing whim. I don’t quite know now why it affected me.’

‘There is an article about it in this magazine. It’s rather old. We do keep far too much and I have quite a run of these. The house became known as Denny’s House because it belonged to Denny Parsons. Have you heard the name?’

I shook my head.

‘How quickly things fall away,’ she said. ‘You’ll find everything about Denny Parsons and the garden in here.’ She handed me a
Country Life
of some forty years ago. ‘Something happened there but it was all hushed up. I don’t know any more, I’m afraid. Now, do stay down for as long as you like, Mr Snow, but if you will excuse me, I am away to my bed.’

I went out on to the terrace for a last few moments. Everything had settled for the night, the stars were brilliant, and I thought I could just hear the faint hush of the sea as it folded itself over on the shingle.

IN MY ROOM I sat beside my open window with the sweet smell of the garden drifting in and read what Lady Merriman had found for me.

The article was about a remarkable and ‘important’ garden created at the White House by Mrs Denisa – apparently always known as Denny – Parsons and contained photographs of its creator strolling across lawns and pointing out this or that shrub, looking up into trees. There was also one of those dewy black-and-white portrait photographs popular in such magazines then, of Mrs Parsons in twinset and pearls, and holding a few delphiniums, rather awkwardly, as if uncertain whether or not to put them down. The soft focus made her look powdery and slightly vacant, but I could see through it to a handsome woman with strong features.

The story seemed straightforward. She had been widowed suddenly when her two children were nine and eleven years old and had decided to move from the Surrey suburbs into the country. When she had found the White House it had been empty and with an overgrown wilderness round it, out of which she had gradually made what was said in the reverential article to be ‘one of the great gardens of our time’.

Then came extensive descriptions of borders and walks and avenues, theatre gardens and knot gardens, of fountains and waterfalls and woodland gardens set beside cascading streams, with lists of flowers and shrubs, planting plans and diagrams and three pages of photographs. It certainly looked very splendid, but I am no gardener and was no judge of the relative ‘importance’ of Mrs Parsons’s garden.

The place had become well known. People visited not only from miles away but from other countries. At the time the article was written it was ‘open daily from Wednesday to Sunday for an entrance fee of one shilling and sixpence’.

The prose gushed on and I skimmed some of the more horticultural paragraphs. But I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what had happened next. Mrs Parsons had found a semi-derelict house in the middle of a jungle. The house in the photographs was handsome and in good order, with well-raked gravel and mown grass, fresh paint, open windows, at one of which a pale upstairs curtain blew out prettily on the breeze.

But the wheel had come full circle. When I had found the house and garden they were once again abandoned and decaying. That had happened to many a country house in the years immediately after the war but it was uncommon now.

I was not interested in the delights of herbaceous border and pleached lime. The house was handsome in the photographs, but I had seen it empty and half given over to wind and rain and the birds and was drawn by it as I would never have been by somewhere sunny and well presented.

I set the magazine down on the table. Things change after all, I thought, time does its work, houses are abandoned and sometimes nature reclaims what we have tried to make our own. The White House and garden had had their resurrection and a brief hour in the sun but their bright day was done now.

Yet as I switched out the lamp and lay listening to the soft soughing of the sea, I knew that I would have to go back. I had to find out more. I was not much interested in the garden and house. I wanted to know about the woman who had found it and rescued it yet apparently let it all slip through her fingers again. But most of all, of course, I wanted to go back because of the small hand.

Had Denny Parsons stood there in the gathering dusk, looking at the empty house, surrounded by that green wilderness, and as she made her plans for it felt the invisible small hand creep into her own?

Four

othing happened with any connection to the Merrimans or the part of the world in which they lived, and where I had come upon the White House, for several weeks. My trade was going through a dull patch. It happens every so often and ought not to trouble me, but after a short time without any requests from clients or phone calls about possible treasures I become nervous and irritable. If the dead patch continues for longer, I start wondering if I will have to sell some of my own few treasures, convinced that the bottom has dropped out of the business and I will never be active again. Every time it happens I remind myself that things have never failed to turn round, yet I never seem able to learn from experience.

I was not entirely idle of course. I bought and sold one or two complete library sets, including a first edition of Thomas Hardy, and even wondered whether to take up the request from an American collector to find him a full set of the James Bond first editions, mint and in dust wrappers, price immaterial. This is not my field, but I started to ask about in a desultory way, knowing I was probably the hundredth dealer the man had employed to find the Bonds and the one least likely to unearth them.

The summer began to stale. London emptied. I thought half-heartedly of visiting friends in Seattle.

And then two things happened on the same day.

In the post I received an envelope containing a card and a cutting from an old newspaper.

Mr Snow, I unearthed this clipping about the house, Denny’s House, which you came upon by chance when getting lost on your way to us in June. I thought perhaps you might still be interested as it tells a little story. I am sure there is more and if I either remember or read about it again I will let you know. But please throw this away if it is no longer of interest. Just a thought.

Sincerely, Alice Merriman.

I poured a second cup of coffee and picked up the yellowed piece of newspaper.

There was a photograph of a woman whom I recognised as Denisa Parsons, standing beside a large ornamental pool with a youngish man. In the centre of the pool was a bronze statue at which they were looking in the slightly artificial manner of all posed photographs. The statue was of a young boy playing with a dolphin and a golden ball and rose quite beautifully out of the still surface of the water, on which there were one or two water lilies. There might have been fish but none was visible.

The news item was brief. The statue had been commissioned by Denisa Parsons in memory of her grandson, James Harrow, who had been drowned in what was simply described as ‘a tragic accident’. The man with her was the sculptor, whose name was not familiar to me, and the statue was now in place at ‘Mrs Parsons’s internationally famous White House garden’. That was all, apart from a couple of lines about the sculptor’s other work.

I looked at the photograph for some time but I could read nothing into the faces, with their rather public smiles, and although the sculpture looked charming to me, I am no art critic.

I put the cutting in a drawer of my desk, sent Lady Merriman a postcard of thanks and then forgot about the whole thing, because by the same post had come a letter from an old friend at the Bodleian Library telling me that he thought he might have news of a Shakespeare First Folio which could conceivably be for sale. If I would like to get in touch …

Fifteen minutes later I was in a taxi on my way to Paddington station to catch the next train to Oxford.