more modest fifteen-room structure built at the turn of the century in the style of an English manor house. This guesthouse along with ten acres of Stanhope's total two hundred acres were deeded to my wife as a wedding present from her parents. However, our mail actually goes to the gatehouse, a more modest six-room affair of stone, occupied by George and Ethel Allard.
The Allards are what are called family retainers, which means they used to work, but don't do much anymore. George was the former estate manager here, employed by my wife's father, William, and her grandfather, Augustus. My wife is a Stanhope. The great fifty-room hall is abandoned now, and George is sort of caretaker for the whole two-hundred-acre estate. He and Ethel live in the gatehouse for free, having displaced the gatekeeper and his wife, who were let go back in the fifties. George does what he can with limited family funds. His work ethic remains strong, though his old body does not. Susan and I find we are helping the Allards more than they help us, a situation that is not uncommon around here. George and Ethel concentrate mostly on the gate area, keeping the hedges trimmed, the wrought-iron gate painted, clipping the ivy on the estate walls and the gatehouse, and replanting the flower beds in the spring. The rest of the estate is in God's hands until further notice.
I turned off Grace Lane and pulled up the gravel drive to the gates, which are usually left open for our convenience, as this is our only access to Grace Lane and the wide world around us.
George ambled over, wiping his hands on his green work pants. He opened my door before I could and said, 'Good morning, sir.'
George is from the old school, a remnant of that small class of professional servants that flourished so briefly in our great democracy. I can be a snob on occasion, but George's obsequiousness sometimes makes me uneasy. My wife, who really was to the manner born, thinks nothing of it and makes nothing of it. I opened the back of the Bronco and said, 'Give me a hand?' 'Certainly, sir, certainly. Here, you let me do that.' He took the flats of marigolds and impatiens and laid them on the grass beside the gravel drive. He said, They look real good this year, Mr Sutter. You got some nice stuff. I'll get these planted 'round the gate pillars there, then I'll help you with your place.'
'I can do that. How is Mrs Allard this morning?'
'She's very well, Mr Sutter, and it's nice of you to ask.' My conversations with George are always somewhat stilted, except when George has a few drinks in him.
George was born on the Stanhope estate some seventy years ago and has childhood memories of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Crash, and the waning of the Golden Era throughout the 1930s. There were still parties, debutante balls, regattas, and polo matches after the Crash of '29, but as George once said to me in a maudlin moment, 'The heart was gone from everybody. They lost confidence in themselves, and the war finished off the good times.'
I know all that from history books and through a sort of osmosis that one experiences by living here. But George has more detailed and personal information on the history of the Gold Coast, and when he's had a few, he'll tell you stories about the great families: who used to screw whom, who shot whom in a jealous rage, and who shot themselves in despair. There was, and to some extent still is, a servants' network here, where that sort of information is the price of admission to servants' get-togethers in the kitchens of the remaining great houses, in the gatehouses, and in the local working man's pubs. It's sort of an American Upstairs Downstairs around here, and God only knows what they say about Susan and me.
But if discretion is not one of George's virtues, loyalty is, and in fact I once overheard him tell a tree pruner that the Sutters were good people to work for. In fact, he doesn't work for me, but for Susan's parents, William and Charlotte Stanhope, who are retired in Hilton Head and are trying to unload Stanhope Hall before it pulls them under. But that's another story.
Ethel Allard is also another story. Though always correct and pleasant, there is a seething class anger there, right below the surface. I have no doubt that if someone raised the red flag, Ethel Allard would arm herself with a cobblestone from the walkway and make her way toward my house. Ethel's father, from what I gather, was a successful shopkeeper of some sort in the village who was ruined by bad investment advice from his rich customers and further ruined by the failure of those customers to pay him what they owed him for goods delivered. They didn't pay him because they, too, had been financially ruined. This was in 1929, of course, and nothing has been the same around here since. It was as though, I suppose, the rich had broken faith with the lower classes by going broke and killing themselves with alcohol, bullets, and leaps from windows, or simply disappearing, leaving their houses, their debts, and their honour behind. It's hard to feel sorry for the rich, I know, and I can see Ethel's point of view.
But here it is, some sixty years after the Great Crash, and maybe it's time to examine some of the wreckage.
If this place doesn't sound quite like America, I assure you it is; only the externals and the landscape are a bit different.
George was talking. 'So, like I was saying the other day, Mr Sutter, some kids got into the Hall a few nights ago and had themselves a party -' 'Was there much damage?'
'Not too much. Lots of liquor bottles, and I found a bunch of those… things – ' 'Condoms.'
He nodded. 'So, I cleaned it all up and replaced the plywood on the window they got in. But I'd like to get some sheet metal.'
'Order it. Charge it to my account at the lumberyard.'
'Yes, sir. Now that spring is here-'
'Yes, I know.' The hormones are bubbling and the local bunnies are in high heat. I used to get into abandoned mansions myself, to be truthful. A little wine, some candles, a transistor radio tuned to WABC, and maybe even a fire in the fireplace, though that was a giveaway. There's nothing quite like love among the ruins. I find it interesting that condoms are back in fashion. 'Any sign of drugs?'
'No, sir. Just liquor. You sure you don't want me to call the police?' 'No.' The local police seem very interested in the problems of the gentry, but I find it awkward standing around a deserted fifty-room mansion with cops who are trying to look sympathetic. Anyway, there was no damage done. I got into my Bronco and drove through the gates, the tyres crunching over the thinning gravel. It will take five hundred cubic yards of crushed bluestone at sixty dollars a yard to get barely an inch of new topping on the winter-ravaged drive. I made a mental note to write my father-in-law with the good news. My house, the guesthouse, is about two hundred yards up the main drive and fifty yards from it, via a single-lane spur also in need of gravel. The house itself is in good repair, its imported Cotswold stone, slate roof, and copper-sheathed sash and drainpipes virtually maintenance free and nearly as good as aluminium siding and vinyl plastic windows.
We have ivy on the walls, which will be in need of cutting as its new pale-green tendrils begin to creep, and there is a rose garden out back that completes the image that you are in England.
Susan's car, a racing-green Jaguar XJ- 6, a gift from her parents, was sitting in the turnaround. Another merrie-olde-England prop. People around here tend to be Anglophiles; it comes with the territory.
I went inside the house and called, 'Lady Stanhope!' Susan answered from the rose garden, and I went out the back doors. I found her sitting in a cast-iron garden chair. Only women, I think, can sit in those things. 'Good morning, my lady. May I ravage you?'
She was drinking tea, the mug steaming in the cool April air. Yellow crocuses and lilies had sprouted in the beds among the bare rose bushes, and a bluebird sat on the sundial. A very cheering sight, except that I could tell that Susan was in one of her quiet moods.
I asked, 'Were you out riding?'
'Yes, that's why I'm wearing my riding clothes and I smell of horse, Sherlock.' I sat on the iron table in front of her. 'You'll never guess who I met at Hicks' Nursery.'
'No, I never will.'
I regarded my wife a moment. She is a strikingly beautiful woman, if I may be uxorious for a moment. She has flaming-red hair, a sure sign of insanity according to my aunt Cornelia, and catlike green eyes that are so arresting that people stare. Her skin is lightly freckled, and she has pouty lips that make men immediately think of a particular sex act. Her body is as lithe and taut as any man could ask for in a forty-year-old wife who has borne two children. The secret to her health and happiness, she will tell you, is horseback riding, summer, fall, winter, and spring, rain, snow, or shine. I am madly in love with this woman, though there are times, like now, when she is moody and distant. Aunt Cornelia warned me about that, too. I said, 'I met our new neighbour.'
'Oh? The HRH Trucking Company?'
