lawyer, instead of someone who knew what they were doing. I cannot swear to the truth of this, but it sounds very likely. The net result was that Andrew was left with far too little land to support the house, a situation exacerbated by his almost chemical lack of brainpower, which ensured that no outside income would come to his aid. Serena may have had something to look forward to from her father, but families like the Greshams do not stay rich by enriching all the siblings and it would never have been much.
The house itself was a fairly large but unremarkable pile. There had been a dwelling there since the 1660s but all that remained of this period was the cantilevered staircase, the nicest thing to look at in the place. The entire building had been enveloped twice, well in the 1750s and badly in the 1900s, by the newly arrived and gleeful Beltons. A burst of optimism in the late 1940s on the part of Andrew’s grandfather had swept away the service wing, relocated the kitchens to the site of a former morning room and converted the great hall to a library. The effect of this was to pull the entrance round the corner, away from the main portico, so the existing front door led one through a sort of tunnel towards the stairs, arriving at them from the back, at a slightly peculiar angle. It never works to fight a house’s architecture and Waverly was no exception to the rule. The rooms had been tossed this way and that in the changeover, swapping their roles as they went, ending with dining rooms full of sofas and drawing rooms stuffed with tables and chairs. Huge fireplaces found themselves warming tiny studies, and dainty bedroom detailing adorned the walls of a semi-ballroom. None of which was improved by the timing of the work, during those post-war years when building materials were rationed, so almost everything had been contrived from plywood and painted plaster. Not all of it was bad. The loss of the hall was hopeless and dislocated the whole ground floor, but the library that replaced it was a great success, and the breakfast room was pretty, if too small. In truth, the house had a lost, bewildered feel, like a private home too quickly changed to a hotel, where the rooms have not been allowed a period of adjustment to get used to their new jobs. Naturally, Andrew thought it a palace and every visitor as lucky as a peasant from Nan Cheng allowed entry for a few, sacred moments to the glories of the Forbidden City.
The drive out of London on Friday afternoon was as murderous as ever, and it was after six when I finally arrived and staggered down the passage with my case. Serena emerged from a doorway and stood there in welcome, dressed in a shirt and skirt, casual and marvellous. ‘Dump that there. You can go up later. Come and have some tea.’ I followed her into what proved to be the library and a few faces turned to look at me. There were others besides Candida and what I perceived was an already grumpy Andrew, making a great show of being absorbed in Country Life.
One pair, the Jamiesons, I’d met a few times in London and the others, a sporty couple from Norfolk called Hugh and Melissa Purbrick whose life seemed to consist of farming and killing things and not much else, were some sort of connections of an old friend of my mother, so I didn’t anticipate much trouble. ‘Do you want tea? Or a drink to take upstairs?’ said Serena, but I refused both and sat on the sofa next to Candida.
‘I feel very guilty,’ she said. ‘I came back to my answering machine flashing like the Blackpool illuminations. I thought I must have won the Lottery. Either that, or somebody was dead. But they were all from you.’ She had not aged well, certainly nothing like as well as Serena. Her hair was grey and her face was rough and lined and even redder than it used to be, although I would not speculate as to the cause. On the whole, unlike her cousin she looked her age, but her manner was very different from what it had been when I knew her and at first encounter considerably improved. She seemed much calmer, no, not calmer, calm. As the French say, she was bien dans sa peau, and as a result I found myself warming to her in a way that I never really had done when we were young.
‘I’m afraid I was a bit eager. Sorry.’
She shook her head to free us from the need to apologise. ‘I should switch it off when I go away. At least people would know I hadn’t got the message instead of having to deduce it.’
‘What were you doing in Paris?’
‘Oh, just larking about. I’ve got a grand-daughter who’s mad about art and I persuaded her parents to let me take her to see the Musee d’Orsay. Of course, once we were there we spent about three minutes in the museum and the rest of the time shopping.’ She smiled, curious now to get to the bottom of it. ‘So what’s the big thing? Serena said that you were coming as an envoy of the mighty Damian.’
‘In a way. No, I am.’
‘You’re looking up his friends from the old days.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m rather flattered to be included. Whom have you seen?’ I told her. ‘Now I’m less flattered. What a peculiar list.’ She pondered the names again. ‘Weren’t they all in Portugal that time?’
‘All except Terry.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Of course, that evening was another story.’ She stretched her eyes silently at me, sharing the memory. ‘Have we ever talked about it?’
‘Not properly. We’ve hardly met since we got back.’
‘No. I suppose that’s right.’ Again she thought over what I’d been telling her. ‘Terry Vitkov…’ she grimaced. ‘I’m quite surprised she was a pal of Damian’s. I thought he had better taste.’
‘Ouch.’ I was amused by this as plenty of people from those days would probably have said something similar of her.
‘Is she the same as ever?’
‘She is the same, if you add the effects of forty years of disappointment. ’
Candida absorbed this for a moment. ‘Do you remember her dance?’
‘No one who was there could forget it without medical intervention.’
She laughed. ‘It was the first time I’d been in the papers since the announcement of my birth. My grandmother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.’ I considered Candida’s subsequent career of sexual profligacy, illegitimate motherhood and the more recent tragedy of 9/11, and pondered what the grandmother in question would have made of any of that. Presumably death had spared her. Candida was still at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘I know she did it. Whatever she said at the time.’
‘She says not. She says it was Philip Rawnsley-Price.’
‘He might have helped her. He was stupid enough. But she must have known. The choice of brownies for a start. We were all so innocent.’
