A silence fell between them… How complete were the silences in that great house! In this room there didn’t even seem to be a clock to break the cloistered stillness. Gently felt in his pocket for Dutt’s pipe, and finding it unemptied, rose and tapped it out against the smouldering log.
‘Suppose we start at the beginning?’ he suggested. ‘Just tell me how you came to start this tapestry business.’
Somerhayes repeated his soft laugh. ‘You realize, then, that the tapestry workshop was the beginning?’ he asked.
‘It’s where you gave up politics, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes… though it goes back further.’
‘Well, go back as far as you want… I’m here to listen.’
Somerhayes nodded and set down his glass on the table.
‘When I was in my teens — that would be in the Thirties — the world was still something of a place to live in. For me, I mean. For the prospective sixth Baron Somerhayes.’
Gently returned the nod… He remembered the Thirties!
‘My father continued to do things in Edwardian style, even up to the war. One was only vaguely aware that a world had changed and a world was dying, and that the standards to which one was born and bred were gravely suspect. Before I went to Oxford I never had any doubt. The social unrest that went on before my eyes did not belong to the world I inhabited. More important, perhaps, were the political events in Europe. They were certainly ominous, and more directly affecting the career of diplomacy for which, following the family tradition, I was being prepared…’
Gently filled his pipe from his magnificent quarter-pound tin and settled himself in the comfortable wing-chair. Somerhayes was not watching him now. Retired into his shadow, his eyes were on the sinking fire, his low, balanced, cultured voice seeming to flow from him without effort or conscious direction. Had he ever talked like this before, this enigmatic man with his lost and wistful eyes? Had he ever before drawn in words the pattern of his bewildered life? He was doing it now, talking, talking. Like a film that had never been unwound, it was coming off its spool.
He had gone up to Oxford, certain and sure of himself. The world had been his, wealth, rank and power to come. He was one of the elect. He was one of a chosen race. Far away had been the rotten tooth of envy and the jealous anger of the mob. And there he had met — whom? A young man, working his way through college. An angry young man, an arguing young man, a young man who thrashed the pretensions of the callow nobleman with the scorpions of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Shaw. And Somerhayes had had no answer to those scathing propositions. His naive Weltanschauung had taken no notice of such perverse logic. His defences were scattered, his arguments flattened, his comfortable assumptions buried under an avalanche of vicious, destroying fact. And what was a thousand times worse, he was obliged to admire the person who had bowled him over. Jepson, as his name was, appeared to Somerhayes as the epitome of all he would like to be but was not. In despair he made the comparison — himself, the spiritually bankrupt descendant of a family of social bandits; Jepson, the blazing prophet of a robbed and wrathful people. Could he fail to see that one was a dead branch, the other a new and irresistible shoot, in the tree of history?
‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, in Society and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’
But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue entirely in support of a masquerade grown loathsome to him. It could not be Marxism, nor even socialism; the most he dared do was to proclaim himself a Liberal. And this, unfortunately, was enough to set him at odds with his father, to whom it appeared as a betrayal of the great Tory tradition of the Feverell family.
Jepson had graduated during Somerhayes’s second year, and with the removal of the irritant the young nobleman began to recover some of his lost equilibrium. To justify a step that had only been a compromise, he threw himself energetically into the cause of liberalism, seeking to find there a creed that would strike a balance between the implacable opposites of competitive industry and social justice. He learned many of the answers to Jepson’s furious logic. He discovered that the problem could not be stated in terms of pure black and pure white. When he emerged from the university he felt that to some degree he had achieved a balanced view of the contemporary social situation, and that, holding on to it firmly, he might proceed to his career with sufficient confidence. He had been admitted to the Foreign Office, and in due course was attached to the Paris Embassy.
‘At that time, although I did not know it, Leslie Brass had just forsaken the Latin Quarter for the tapestry factory at Aubusson.’
‘You didn’t meet him in Paris?’ enquired Gently, breaking the long monologue.
‘No. How should I have done? Our circles were hermetically sealed from each other. But it has always seemed significant to me that he and I were young men in Paris together.’
‘How do you mean… significant?’
Somerhayes’s eyes dwelt on him wistfully. ‘One of us a young artist, just beginning to find the channels for his creativity, the other… I won’t insist, Mr Gently. And now he and I are together.’
‘You wanted to be an artist too?’
‘In a way, I suppose, though I understand its impossibility.’
‘Could you explain?’
Somerhayes shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll go on trying.’
Eighteen months after he had gone to Paris Germany had invaded Poland. Back in London he had received quick promotion, and was engaged first in the tortuous relations that existed with the Vichy Government, and later in the endless negotiations and exchanges with Washington. Soon after the war his father had died, and Somerhayes succeeded to the title and a seat in the House of Lords. He had also been considerably impoverished by death duties, as a result of which he had been obliged to offer Merely Place to the National Trust. He now lived as a tenant in the petrified glories of the house that the second lord had built with the money that the first lord had ravished from the country at the time of the Bubble.
‘In effect I have become a curator… I am doing public penance, perhaps, for the sins of my ancestors.’
On his succession, Somerhayes had resigned from his post in the Foreign Office. His father had had a large town house in Mayfair, but this was much too big both for the tastes and the revenue of the new lord, so he had sold it and bought a smaller one in Chelsea. There, for several years, he had lived a rather solitary life during the parliamentary terms. The political climate of his father’s circle had made it uncongenial to him, and he was not a man who made new acquaintances easily. His predilection for art, however, had brought him into contact with several painters, among them Leslie Brass, who had now settled in Kensington and was making quite a stir with his pictures and tapestry. It was easy to detect Somerhayes’s almost reverent admiration for the man. Perhaps nobody but the plebeian Brass with his buoyant self-confidence and cynical shrewdness could have aroused it so strongly. Here was Jepson again, but better than Jepson. Jepson had been a mere revolutionary, a stormbird, an iconoclast; Brass was a creator, an artist, a visionary. Once more, Somerhayes had found all he was not enshrined in another man. Once more, he was shaken from an apparently secure spiritual perch, and driven to put himself agonized questions.
‘And then my cousin and her husband came to live in Chelsea. Previously I had seen very little of her, since her home had been in Northamptonshire.’
Janice, like himself, was now an orphan. Her father, the late lord’s youngest cousin, had been killed in an air accident in the Thirties, leaving not much behind him, and Janice had passed from Girton to a library appointment in Edinburgh. There she had met her future husband, Desmond Page. Their courtship had been interrupted by the death of Janice’s mother, but Desmond, in the interim, had passed his final exams, and now he had an appointment in a London hospital under the eye of a distinguished surgeon. He was thought by many people to have a great career in front of him.
Two years later he died, a victim of a post-mortem infection.
‘Mrs Page was cut up?’ suggested Gently, as Somerhayes’s voice faltered to a stop.
The nobleman nodded silently. His face in the firelight looked drawn and puckered.
‘A very expressive phrase, Mr Gently… yes, she was terribly cut up. She had nobody in the world to turn to. It
