‘Oh, come, now!’ I said, nonplussed by her definite reaction. ‘No need for histrionics. A year is only a year. I shall be back again almost before you know I’ve gone. We can make all our arrangements then.’
‘Very well,’ she said. It was clear to me that she had herself in hand, for she put the ring back, but this time on to her right hand. There was not going to be any fuss. She smiled brightly at me, but added, to my dismay, ‘Just so long as you don’t plan to be shut of me altogether. Why don’t you take me to see this ducal mansion of yours? It’s good for the poor to see how a rich man lives.’
‘I’m not going to live there, I tell you,’ I said, exasperated by what seemed a
‘Don’t you want me to see it?’
‘Yes, of course I do, if you’d like to. Not that you’ll think much of it in its present state. It will take thousands to do it up. I wonder really whether it wouldn’t be better to let it maunder into total decay rather than spend all that money on it and then perhaps not be able to sell it.’
(3)
When I had visited my acquisition in company with my benefactor’s lawyer, I had not been surprised when, as we went in through the great iron gates, he said:
‘Of course, Mrs Dupont-Jacobson never lived here after her husband died. She thought the house was unlucky. A superstitious woman in some ways.’
Paint was peeling off the window-frames, a once-ornate portico was battered and damaged and some of the downstair windows were broken. The whole place was grimy and neglected. All the same, a certain grandeur still clung to it in its decay and it was possible to see that, in its day, it had been a fine, generously-built house.
‘A lot will have to be done before I can sell it,’ I said. I had made the same remark to Niobe earlier, and I made it again as she and I stood on its front lawn. She made a statement which the lawyer, perhaps, had been too tactful to utter.
‘You’ll never sell a place this size, Chelion, however much you do to it,’ she said.
‘A school, perhaps, or a nursing-home might buy it,’ I hazarded.
‘I doubt whether it’s suitable for either. I suppose you’ve got a key? Let’s go inside,’ she said.
The interior of the house told the same story as the outside had done. The whole place needed not so much redecorating as renovating. There was a noble staircase with cobwebbed banisters and a grimy sidewall on which had been painted a
An upstair room in the shape of a double cube with what must have been a wonderfully ornate Jacobean ceiling before smoke from the enormous open fireplace had blackened its coloured splendours opened into an ante- chamber which, like the other rooms on the first floor, had hideous Victorian wallpaper and a nasty little iron fire- grate which ruined its otherwise spacious attractiveness. As well as this, cracked and broken windows had allowed the elements to do their worst, apparently for years, and water seemed to have come through the ceiling. The other rooms were similarly affected.
We tried the second floor, climbed to the attics and, when we had descended to the ground floor again, explored what must have been the housekeeper’s room, the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall. We inspected the enormous kitchen and its scullery and then returned to the entrance hall with its stone screen and the dado made up of the coats of arms of previous owners.
‘I’d have to spend thousands,’ I said again, ‘even to make it habitable.’
‘I know exactly what I should do with it if it were mine,’ said Niobe.
‘Pull it down and sell the park for building land? I doubt whether I’d be allowed to do that.’ I was glad to find her ready to talk rationally about the house and what I was to do with it. She had maintained what I took to be a grim silence up to this point. She had not even lived up to her name and wept. She was much given to tears when things went wrong.
‘No, I don’t think you would be allowed to sell the park for building plots,’ she went on. ‘There would be planning permission to get, and all sorts of involvements, I expect, and you never were much of an organiser, were you? No, I can tell you what to do with it, Chelion. In fact, I could do it all for you while you’re in Paris. I don’t want to stay on at the pool. It won’t be the same without you.’
I was afraid she was going to turn tearful at this, so I said hastily. ‘Well, you can’t expect me to go on with a job like that, now I’ve no necessity to earn a living, but tell me what you’ve got in mind, however crazy it is.’
‘You’d have to pay me a salary, of course,’ she said, ‘but I’d be satisfied with the same money as I’m getting at the pool.’
‘Let’s hear this crack-brained scheme of yours.’ But, when she outlined what it was, I said, ‘Good Lord! That will never work!’
‘Of course it will work. You’ll get masses of tenants in no time. There will be a waiting-list. Elderly people who’ve sold up houses which are too big for them will give anything for accommodation they can rent instead of having to buy. There is the park for them to walk or sit about in, a lake you can stock with fish, a seaside town and its shops close at hand—’
‘Only close at hand if you’ve got a car. Elderly people may not be prepared to drive.’
‘Well, get a car. Get two cars, one self-drive and the other chauffeur-driven and charge car-hire prices. They would more than cover the chauffeur’s wages.’
‘Each flat would need its own kitchen and bathroom.’
‘I know that. Look, why don’t you leave everything to me, as I’ve suggested? I’m sure I can manage. I’ll be able to give a good account of my stewardship, I promise you. Now we’ve – how does it go? – said goodbye for ever, cancelled all our vows, done our best and worst and parted, and all that, there could be so easy a relationship between us.’
