Change For The Worse Read online

  The car ran through the village and turned in at the drive gates. The lodge was just inside on the right. As Francis Peck drew up, the front door opened, and a small white and tan dog erupted with a continuous high-pitched yodel of welcome. A young girl in blue jeans and a scarlet pullover dived after him, grabbing him just in time to save the car door from delirious scrabbling.

  ‘Shut up, Terry,’ she adjured him as he struggled in her arms. ‘Did you have a puncture or something? You’re frightfully late.’

  ‘No mishaps,’ Francis Peck said, getting out and going round to open the passenger door for Katharine. ‘It was the meeting. It just went on and on.’

  ‘On and on,’ Katharine reiterated, extricating herself and her belongings. ‘I’m sorry we’re so late, Alix darling. You must be starving. We both are, and stunned into the bargain. I’ll tell you all about it over lunch. No use asking you in for a quick one, I suppose, Francis?’

  ‘Thanks awfully, but as we’re so late I’d better push on before Hilary and Kit have scoffed all the lunch.’

  ‘Kit?’ Alix Parr asked quickly. ‘Is he down for the weekend?’

  ‘Just for tonight, and a bit hipped at finding himself involved in the Gilmores’ gathering. By the way, can we give you two a lift, Katharine?’

  ‘That would be marvellous. Really, I’m becoming a transport parasite these days, but it does seem silly to take two cars, and it would be such a squash in mine.’

  ‘Wait till I pass my test next year,’ Alix said. ‘I’ll develop my road sense by giving everybody lifts.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ Francis Peck told her, getting back into his car. ‘Will a quarter to seven do you, Katharine?’

  He drove off up the drive with a parting wave. Alix slipped her arm through her grandmother’s and they went into the house. A pleasant smell of hot food greeted them.

  ‘Lunch is all lined up,’ she said, with a touch of conscious competence. ‘I’ve concocted a casserole. Lamb chops, onions, carrots, potatoes — the lot. Apple charlotte to follow. Shall I bring it in?’

  ‘Marvellous!’ Katharine sniffed appreciatively. ‘Yes, do, darling. I won’t be a second.’

  The lodge had been solidly, if unimaginatively rebuilt at the turn of the century. Katharine had enlarged the living room by extending it at the back. The result was a good-sized pleasant room with its main window overlooking the Spire valley. Here, with a selection of furniture and pictures from the Manor, she had felt unexpectedly at home from the start.

  Today Alix had put up a gate-legged table in the window through which sunshine was streaming in.

  ‘Much nicer than eating in the kitchen on a day like this,’ she said, depositing hot plates in front of her grandmother. ‘Now do tell me what’s up. Nothing dire about the Manor, is it?’

  Katharine peered into the casserole.

  ‘Darling, you’ve done this beautifully... Let me help you, first... Well now, the whole thing really is that HOB says we simply must step up admissions next summer. They’re spending the earth on the house, as you know. I had a sudden rather wild idea in the middle of the meeting, and suggested some sort of art exhibition in the library as an extra draw. Well, to cut a long story short, they all leapt at the idea, and a resolution was passed nem. con.’

  Alix paused, a laden fork halfway to her mouth, and whistled briefly.

  ‘But Gran, who’s going to run it?’

  ‘Francis and myself, as far as I can make out — in the first place, anyway. These are the main ideas at the moment.’

  Alix listened with the detached critical air of the intelligent adolescent, interrupting with a query from time to time.

  ‘But are people going to want to lend pictures they like? I mean, the whole thing depends on that, doesn’t it? Suppose there was a fire, or a burglary or something.’

  ‘It seems that you can insure things in exhibitions,’ Katharine replied. ‘There are people on the Area Committee who know all about that sort of thing, and they said it would be all right. We aren’t likely to be offered priceless Old Masters, of course. As to persuading people to lend their pictures, I’m banking on getting Hugo Rossiter involved. If he puts in some of his own, I’m pretty sure the idea will catch on.’

  Alix glanced across the room at the portrait which hung over the fireplace.

  ‘What about “The Young Heir”?’ she asked with a grin.

  ‘Of course we shall lend him. He’ll be the centrepiece of the whole show if I have any say in the hanging. We might have you sitting underneath,’ Katharine added teasingly.

  ‘What, me be a gimmick? Not even for HOB.’

  Frederick George Matravers Ridley had inherited the Fairlynch estate in 1800 at the age of eighteen. Now removed from his ancestral home to the lodge, he contemplated his new modest surroundings from a massive ornate frame with an appraising air. Copthorne had painted him in the typical garb of a member of the landed gentry of his day. His rich crimson waistcoat and snowy muslin neckerchief showed to advantage under a short black coat. His faultlessly styled wig had two neat rows of curls over the ears. The papers in his right hand had been a subject of speculation to his descendants, some maintaining that they were the Fairlynch rent roll while others suggested a draft of a proposal of marriage to the heiress whom he ultimately and very profitably led to the altar.

  The resemblance between Alix and the portrait was remarkable, and the subject of frequent comment which tended to irritate her. She had his broad face with its slightly pointed and determined chin, his deep brow and fine wide-set eyes. In addition, her face in repose had the same thoughtful and questioning expression of the young Ridley of the portrait. All these were Ridley characteristics, and although sometimes dormant for several generations, they tended to recur with remarkable fidelity.

  ‘All right, we’ll let you off that,’ Katharine said. ‘Heaven knows, there’ll be enough to do in dozens of different ways. Now, I haven’t told you about the Wellchester Art Club idea. The Committee think it would arouse a lot of interest if we let them have some hanging space, and told them they could sell anything they exhibited. Of course Hugo would be invaluable... Alix, you’re miles away. Not even listening.’

  ‘Gran, I’ve just had a super idea!’ Putting down her spoon and fork with a clatter Alix pushed her empty plate to one side. ‘Let’s have a St Crispin section. The kids do masses of art to liberate their hang-ups, you know. It’d be a terrific boost for them to have something on show. Kit Peck’s school had an exhibition last year, and he says it did marvels for duds and anti-social types.’

  Katherine reacted with instant exasperation.

  ‘My dear Alix, the idea is to attract more visitors to Fairlynch. Maladjusted children’s daubs are hardly likely to do that, are they? We need money.’

  ‘Everything’s always money when it’s people who ought to count. They’re what matters.’ Alix relapsed into an adolescent sulk, her elbows on the table.

  ‘Is that fair?’ Katharine demanded, her impatience gaining the upper hand. ‘Running places like St Crispin’s costs the earth, and who foots the bill? People like us out of the exorbitant taxes we have to pay... Have some more apple charlotte,’ she went on, steadying herself, and heartily wishing that the argument had never started. ‘No? Well then, shall we clear up lunch? I’d better get on with the herbaceous border while the light’s good enough. What are you doing this afternoon?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll come and lend a hand,’ Alix mumbled after a brief pause. ‘I got my history essay done while you were out.’

  As she collected plates and cutlery Katharine thought unhappily that while each of them had made a gesture it was once again merely an agreement to differ. Over the past year or so, while coming to realize that living without John could still have meaning and even times of happiness, she had for the first time encountered life's irony. Now, while busy in the kitchen, she struggled to keep normal conversation going, but at a deeper level her mind moved restlessly between her daughter Hele
n, Alix’s mother, who had utterly rejected her home and its values and died tragically, and Alix herself, already showing disquieting symptoms of rejection on quite different grounds. And this in spite of an upbringing planned to avoid a repetition of Helen’s disaster... She surfaced to find Alix staring at her with a puzzled expression.

  ‘Are you feeling O.K., Gran?’ she asked awkwardly.

  ‘Quite, thank you, darling. Just a bit tired after that endless meeting in a hot stuffy room. Let’s get out into the fresh air.’

  The garden of the lodge was sheltered and felt pleasantly warm in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Both keen gardeners, they relaxed as they worked, watched by Terry from a supervisory stance on the wall, but Katharine was pursued by memories, sharp and vivid like brief shots on a television screen. Helen’s note in her sprawling handwriting, announcing her departure to have a life of her own. The squalor of the London flat in a dubious neighbourhood shared with three other girls. The series of casual visits to Fairlynch, usually with young men whose appearance, manners and general attitude to life had left John and herself gasping. Finally Geoffrey Parr, introduced as a posh car salesman, better bred and mannered than his predecessors, but so blatantly amoral and on the make that Helen’s infatuation for him was utterly beyond comprehension...

  ‘Are we going to divide up this clump of phlox?’

  Alix’s voice broke in on the sequence of memories, and Katharine concentrated with relief on making a decision. A fresh planting was carefully sited, and the clearance of the border taken a stage further.

  ‘I’d better hump this lot to one of the Manor bonfires,’ Alix said presently, forking Michaelmas daisies onto a laden barrow. She trundled it away up the drive, purposely followed by Terry with nose to ground.

  Katharine watched her go but unseeingly, as the procession of memories relentlessly resumed its course... The long silence and the last telephone call, announcing an imminent departure for Paris, where Geoff had landed a marvellous job. The casual reference to a baby due in the summer. Then the final silence, John’s abortive enquiries, and the last telephone call of all from the British Consulate... Madame Parr had died in giving birth to a daughter in a convent hospice... Monsieur Parr? But did not Monsieur Ridley know of his death two months ago?

  Distant sounds of Alix’s return cut into the agonizing recollection of it all. Seizing a spade, Katharine began to dig furiously.

  ‘Do you know, I think we’ve done about enough for today,’ she said, as the wheelbarrow reappeared with the terrier as a passenger. ‘Don’t you think some tea would be...’ The telephone was ringing in the lodge, and she felt the sharp inner constriction that the sound still caused in her, even after all these years.

  ‘I’ll go.’ Alix flung down a fork and was off in a flash. Almost as if she had been expecting the call, Katharine thought uneasily. Could it be Kit Peck? She mistrusted the Pecks’ twenty-three-year-old schoolmaster son’s influence on Alix: a do-gooder, throwing away a public school and Oxbridge education to teach in some appalling comprehensive school in a slum area. Always talking about the ‘underprivileged’...

  After a short interval Alix returned, grinning broadly.

  ‘For me. My boyfriend, Charles Hindsmith.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Katharine asked, conscious of relief.

  ‘You know, Gran. The lad who comes out to the village once a week to the Bank branch. He wanted me to go to a disco in Wellchester this evening, and was all lined up to collect me in a borrowed mini.’

  ‘Really, Alix!’

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t he take me out, Gran? I mean, all this county stuff is out these days. The trouble with him is that he’s an awful snob himself. What the HM calls the inverted sort. He keeps on about my having posh friends he knows I’d rather go out with. You know. He’s an awful bore, really. I wish I’d never changed cheques for you in the village. That’s how he fell for me. He was even lurking outside school one afternoon, but I dodged him.’

  ‘You seem to be coping with him all right,’ Katharine said. ‘I’ll be suitably discouraging if he turns up here. Where’s the small fork?’

  As they cleared their gardening tools and put them away her natural resilience began to reassert itself. Perhaps after all she was worrying too much about Alix, especially in the Kit Peck context. She realized that she was looking forward to going out to drinks at the Gilmores.

  Chapter 2

  Malcolm and Lydia Gilmore were a prosperous and sociable pair in their early forties who lived at Weatherwise Farm, a couple of miles beyond Fairlynch Manor. They had bought the farm, sold off most of its land to neighbouring farmers, modernized the house and moved out to it from Wellchester. Both worked hard. Malcolm had built up a successful construction firm, and Lydia’s knitwear boutique, Tops, had a more than local reputation. They enjoyed good living, entertained freely, and were generally voted decent sorts.

  Two cars were drawn up at the front door when Francis Peck and his contingent arrived.

  ‘Whose?’ Katharine said as she got out.

  ‘Hugo’s, and Lady B-C’s vintage Rolls. How old does a car have to be to qualify as vintage?’

  Before anyone could give an opinion the door opened, and Malcolm Gilmore appeared under the porch light, a tall well-built man with a narrow face, thick fair hair and an assured manner.

  ‘It’s you lot, is it?’ he said. ‘Good. I’ve a bet on with Hugo that I’ll identify arrivals by the sound of their engines. Come right in. Lydia told you it wasn’t a party, didn’t she? Just a few of us for a glass and a gossip.’

  He kissed the women, slapped Kit Peck on the back, remarking that it was luck he was down for the weekend, and led them all into a large room where a log fire to scale blazed on the hearth, and there was an impressive display of drinks and snacks.

  ‘Fairlynch,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a shake. I can hear the Rectory Morris Oxford chugging up the drive. Get out your wallet, Hugo.’

  He disappeared. Lydia Gilmore came forward, comfortably plump in black slacks and an embroidered mandarin jacket from Tops, her head tilted back to keep the smoke from her cigarette out of her eyes.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Nice of you all to turn out. Come and find somewhere to sit. Everybody knows everybody, of course. Just a cosy little parish pump get-together.’

  ‘Katharine,’ an authoritative elderly voice demanded, ‘What’s all this I hear about...?’

  Malcolm Gilmore’s reappearance with James Preston, Rector of Spireford, and his wife, cut short the questioner.

  ‘My score’s one hundred per cent,’ he announced. ‘I identified the Rectory Morris before it even turned into the drive.’

  The Rectory car was a perennial parish joke. Katharine asked if it could be called a genuine vintage model.

  ‘Not vintage,’ James Preston said. ‘To me, vintage suggests class. Valiant veteran would be more apt, I think.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Malcolm, give people some drinks,’ Lydia broke in. ‘We may as well use up what we’ve got in the house as we’re heading for the bankruptcy court... He took delivery of a Jag yesterday,’ she explained to the company, ‘and is car-drunk.’

  There were excited exclamations on all sides. Derisory laughter came from the depths of an armchair where Hugo Rossiter reclined at ease in slacks and pullover.

  ‘Bankruptcy my foot,’ he commented. ‘It’s ostensibly a Gilmore Constructions Limited company car, you innocents. That’s how it’s done. No problem!’

  Malcolm Gilmore grinned. ‘So what? All’s fair in love and war, and I’m for non-stop war with this bloody government — sorry, padre — which never stops thinking up new ways to prevent you making a profit... I’d like to see your tax returns, Hugo… What are you all drinking? Lady B-C?’

  ‘Can I do anything about the eats?’ Alix Parr asked Lydia.

  ‘That would be super, love. Push a couple of trolleys round a bit, and then park them where everyone can grab.’

  As conversatio
n rose, it was suddenly checked by sharp rapping on a table with Lady Boyd-Calthrop’s beringed hand. An imperious dowager, she stared fixedly at Katharine Ridley.

  ‘I absolutely insist on knowing what you’re up to, Katharine,’ she said raspingly in the sudden silence. ‘What is this about an exhibition of paintings at Fairlynch next summer? Melville Bonnington rang me up about it, but as you well know, he’s quite incapable of making a plain statement.’

  Katharine, taken unawares, mentally blasted Melville Bonnington and the ill luck which had brought her into contact with Lady Boyd-Calthrop before the vitally important move to secure Hugo Rossiter’s co-operation had been made. She felt herself going tiresomely pink.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘This is frightful. Melville is a menace: I can’t think why he’s ever put on committees. The plan for an exhibition only saw the light of day at this morning’s meeting, and I haven’t seen Francis since we got back. Naturally, the first thing we were going to do was to discuss the whole thing with you, Hugo.’

  There was nothing for it but to try her personal charm. She directed an appealing semi-whimsical glance at the figure in the deep armchair. Hugo Rossiter’s observant dark eyes were regarding her with quizzical amusement. So far, so good, she thought.

  ‘Come clean, my girl,’ he invited. ‘Why the sudden plunge into showbiz?’

  ‘Why, Fairlynch. The HOB top brass say we’ve simply got to step up admissions and make more money. So I thought an exhibition of pictures or something next summer when the gardens are open might bring in more people,’ she concluded simply.

  Hugo Rossiter gave a shout of laughter. ‘Pictures or something! Anything that’ll bring ’em through the turnstile, in fact! What a woman!’