Music at Long Verney Read online

  “Come to me? My dear good Sib, what should I do with it? Hand it on to the National Trust? No, you must get me out of it somehow. You’ve got a lawyer, I suppose. Ask him.”

  Threatened by inheritance, Gilfred became quite alert and clear-headed. His last words, as they stood waiting for his train, were an assurance that if she and Oliver got it all drawn up and sent him the forms, he’d make a point of signing them.

  Gilfred signed his renunciation; the entail was cut. Long Verney was now their unqualified own. Oliver was seventy, Sibyl was sixty-eight. At intervals they agreed that they must discuss what to do about it. Discussion between them was almost impossible. They were first cousins, they had known each other from infancy; their tastes, their views, their upbringings were similar. There was no flint in their joint mechanism to spark off a discussion. They agreed that they really must, that they really ought, and left it at that. When anyone else ventured a suggestion, they instantly and as one disagreed with it. The cost of living was going up. The upkeep of Long Verney was a drain on their income. But since Noll’s death they were that much richer, and could manage. It was not as if they spent money on doctors or other such expensive tastes. They were healthy and abstemious; their chief pleasure was reading and Oliver was a life member of the London Library.

  “They’ll never leave till they go out in white stockings,” said Jane Elphick to Lionella Crew, who replied, “I don’t know that I really want them to leave. They’ve been there forever. It would be like seeing Long Verney without its chimneys, seeing it without its Furnivals.”

  Then Sibyl had the car accident. She had always been a good driver, was still a good driver; but she was unequipped for a generation of bad drivers. Dawn Conkling, daughter of a newly arrived farmer, was unequipped to encounter an antiquated Rolls-Royce appearing in majesty at the summit of a rise in a narrow lane. They met head on. Sibyl’s car was so much the heavier that Miss Conkling’s car got the worst of it. Sibyl cracked her knee. Miss Conkling broke her nose. Miss Conkling’s injury was so much more demonstrative and her feelings so much younger that she brought action. The magistrates gave the case against her, but they could not give Sibyl back her knee. It stiffened.

  While Oliver was acclimatising his mind to the prospect of talking German at meals to an au-pair person, while Jane and Lionella were coming in to cook and make suggestions, Sibyl had privately made up her mind. No, not a hotel. No, certainly not a modern house in the village. The gamekeeper’s cottage was empty, had long been empty, needed repairing. The gamekeeper’s cottage must be repaired and they would move into it. “But the books?” said Oliver. She had thought of that; while the house was being repaired, the gamekeeper’s shed, large and airy because of the stink of former ferrets caged there, could be made over into a library. Part of her, the part that wrote poetry, had always wanted to live in the gamekeeper’s cottage, solitary in the North Wood. And Long Verney could be let. Indeed, they would need to let it, to pay for the alterations to the gamekeeper’s cottage. No part of Oliver wanted to write poetry, though he enjoyed reading it aloud. But he was fond of trees, he always carried a few acorns in his pocket; he had pleasant recollections of stopping for a cup of tea at the cottage after shooting partridges; it stood on a gravel soil, the only bit of gravel soil on the estate; it would be healthy (old Jennings never had a touch of rheumatism about him); he and Sibyl would still be living in a place of their own; altogether it was an excellent scheme, couldn’t be bettered. And how much wiser to find a tenant instead of selling the old place. Less abrupt.

  A tenant was found. He was a London man who had been told to live in the country for his health’s sake. He made no bones about the rent. His references were impeccable; he seemed literate. He had a wife and a son. His name was Simpson.

  The swallows were gathering, the owls hooting in the first chilly nights, when Oliver and Sibyl settled into the gamekeeper’s cottage, burrowing in as if for a hibernation. The Gamekeeper’s Cottage, Credon, near Dittenham, Oxon was on their new writing paper. Circulars addressed to Long Verney were redirected at the post office, and at first the old address stared through the new one, and as time went on grew inconspicuous, an appurtenance of envelopes. Long Verney was less than two miles away by road, and under a mile if one took the track through woods. But it lay in a hollow and even when the trees were bare could not be seen. On very still and frosty days an aigrette of smoke was visible. It was Sibyl who thought of it more frequently, because it was she who had dictated the move and so was more conscious of it. But in the main she thought of it as a stranger’s house, since strangers were living in it.

  “They sound quite awful,” she said to Lionella Crew. “Quite awful.” Her voice was tranquil.

  “But haven’t you seen them?” said Lionella.

  “Oliver saw them. I don’t suppose I ever shall. They don’t go to church.”

  “But there they are living in your grounds – or should I say you are living in theirs? Anyhow, the same grounds. Suppose you met them out walking?”

  “They never walk. They’re the sort of people who have to go everywhere in a car.”

  Oliver added that the Simpsons were not the sort of people one would meet in a wood. “No dogs,” he added, explanatorily.

  No dogs had been a stipulation in the lease, because of the frailty of the gilded Regency staircase. It was said at one time, quite untruly, that rows of slippers lay in the Long Verney hall, as in a mosque.

  “I expect you are glad to be tucked in among your trees,” said Lionella. “What a rough night it was!”

  With their move, Oliver and Sibyl suddenly became a matter for public concern. It was as if they had been brought out into the light of day and revealed as much older, thinner, dimmer, than was supposed; as if Long Verney were an attic in which they had been stored – inventoried, known to be there, hereditary objects on their quiet way to becoming two more family portraits. They were also Oliver Furnival, J.P. and Rector’s Warden, Mrs Furnival, a member of the Parish Council, the Women’s Institute, the Gardeners and Beekeepers Association; but they had been all this for so long that it passed unnoticed. Their son’s death had briefly illuminated them but nobody wanted to stress it. Sibyl’s accident made her momentarily notorious but nobody wanted to stress it. With the move to the gamekeeper’s cottage they fell into the public domain; everybody was interested in them, well-wishing and helpful. The curator of the Dittenham Museum stored family papers; the rector’s son hung their curtains; Rudge the postman transported Sibyl’s house plants in the Royal Mail van; when Mrs Veale, the charwoman, refused to follow Sibyl to the new house (she had been rejected by the Simpsons, who brought servants of their own, and she looked on this as a deliberated insult), five notables of the Women’s Institute offered themselves as replacements. With so much assistance abounding, it had been quite difficult to carry out the move.

  The encompassing trees gave a sense of shelter, but in reality their creaking boughs and swooping shadows emphasised the change from a low-lying house to one on a rise of ground. The New Year was blown in by a series of gales. Every house has its particular orchestra. The gamekeeper’s cottage was full of drummings and fifings; it acknowledged every change in the wind’s quarter. But it was sturdy and tightly built, the drummings and fifings, blusterings and rumblings were companionable and somehow animating.

  “It’s like being in Sicily,” Sibyl commented.

  “Sicily?”

  “Yes, Sicily. You remember how our holidays in Sicily were like being in another world. It was so different one couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.”

  “Yes, Sibyl, I believe you’re right. It’s certainly very pleasant being here. Here’s another bastard.” In his fine sloping calligraphy Oliver wrote: July ye 7th. Job Hazzle inf. Base. He was transcribing the Parish Registers, a winter occupation. With this he was combining a personal research into the prevalence of bastardy, which varied interestingly from decade to decade. He hoped to establish that bastards were m
ore frequent in the Puritan epoch. Job Hazzle had not been baseborn in vain.

  “1652? They’re mounting up nicely, aren’t they – poor little creature!” said Sibyl, reading over his shoulder. “I suppose he was one of the Hassalls. You know, that fat family at Lower Duckett.”

  The keen-sighted gaze of their small grey eyes directed on the parchment page was identical; identical the long straight noses, the narrow heads. They were first cousins, they might have been twins. It was an animal resemblance, as though they were dog and bitch out of the same litter. They shared with those comparable animals the expression of pedigree chasers and killers trained through centuries in obedience – now gentle, undestroying, and of limited intelligence.

  “But don’t you ever see them?” asked Sally Butcher.

  “I saw the man,” said her host. “He was quite unbelievable. Dead from the feet up. But a harmless old stick.”

  “I feel rather romantic about them,” said Mrs Simpson. “I hoped they’d call. They belong to that date, you know.”

  “Mother-of-pearl card cases, engraved cards, two from the caller’s husband, for the Mr and the Mrs, and one from herself, stay for fifteen minutes,” Sally Butcher supplied.

  “Quite long enough,” said Anthony Simpson.

  “Why only one from her, Sally?” inquired her husband.

  “Dames don’t call on gents.”

  “Isn’t Sally marvellous?” Nicky Butcher turned to Naomi Simpson. “I swear one day she’ll write a book.”

  They were sitting in the Long Verney hall, now converted to a lounge. Sally gazed at the Regency staircase. “And did those feet’?” she said.

  “‘In ancient time,’” Nicky Butcher finished. “I don’t believe there’s a poem in the English language Sally can’t quote.”

  A car drove up. In came the Holbeins, exclaiming at the amplitude of the hearth, the linen-fold panelling, the distance from London.

  But Naomi was fond of Penny Holbein, who had been kind when her second boy was found to be a Mongolian and had to be put away in a very special and exclusive institution. She lingered in the bedroom, explaining her rather romantic feeling about the Furnivals, her sense of having ousted them, her suspicion that they hadn’t called because they had taken offence, her silly inability to make the first move. Did Penny think she could ask them to a meal?

  “Not too easy.” Penny cocked an eyebrow. “In their own house, you know. What about Anthony? Did he like them?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then –”

  Anthony put on a Monteverdi record. He still hadn’t found the right music for Long Verney. So far, Handel had fitted in best – but Handel fits anywhere. A great deal of Chopin must have been played in the house at one time. But what house hasn’t had Chopin played in it? It ought to be something more home-grown: Arne, perhaps. Best of all, maybe, the counterpart music of the Church of England: Greene, Pelham Humfrey, Battishill. He must find records; if there were none, commission some. He liked the house well enough to intend on a longer lease, so it would be worthwhile taking a little trouble. Music and finance were his interests. He had an exquisite ear for both. Oliver and Sibyl had a gramophone too, with records of Noël Coward and Duke Ellington.

  It was three months before Naomi could win Anthony’s consent to an invitation to the Furnivals. It was a week before she could frame an invitation that would sound neighbourly while acknowledging that she had never met them – the Long Verney daffodils afforded a link. When no answer came, her feeling that they were rather romantic intensified into a feeling that they had the poetry of the unobtainable. She would have left it there (unobtainables were what she normally expected) had she not learned from Jane Elphick that the Furnivals were at Amélie-les-Bains, where they had gone for a course of treatment for Sibyl’s knee. Anthony had struck up a flirtation with Jane Elphick, so the second invitation was written with more confidence, the likelihood of Miss Elphick’s company replacing daffodils. For the third man she had hopes of Basil, her creditable son. But the invitation was rejected, with the knee as a reason. “I never know from one day to another what it will let me do.”

  In actual fact, the knee was so much better that Sibyl was walking about much as usual. She was also writing poetry again, which the stiff knee had made impossible. She could only compose satisfactorily when curled up on her bed.

  The trees were heavy with summer, pigeons cooed all day, and a continuous mild buzz of insects filled the woods with a sound of piety. None of this was new to Oliver and Sibyl, but it was gratifying because it was familiar. Wild strawberries were plentiful in the North Wood because of the dryer soil.

  “Not so many nightingales as there used to be,” said Oliver. “We can thank Simpson for that.”

  “Horrid man! But why?”

  “One of those companies he’s a director of makes weed killer.”

  “He would. And that silly woman, that wife of his, wishing I could have seen the daffodils. Who told you about the weed killer?”

  “Grigson. He’s got a nephew who’s a chartered accountant.”

  Here a little and there a little they were learning something about their tenants. Anthony Simpson was hand in glove with the Labour Party. He was not a Jew, but his wife was. They bought nothing locally; they had sent away old Jules the onion man. Their son drove through the village at a hundred miles an hour, wore bracelets, had been sent down from Cambridge for peddling cannabis. They filled the house with ballet dancers, opera singers, photographers, and intellectuals. They were never at home for two weeks running.

  As Oliver said, it was a matter for thankfulness, for if they had been modest and tolerable, they might sooner or later have had to be accepted as acquaintances.

  The atoning merit of the Simpsons was that they were so often away. This was ascertainably true, for Rudge, being the postman, could be relied on. Oliver and Sibyl consulted Rudge as they consulted their barometer, and shaped their walks accordingly. No Simpson had ever been seen in the woods, no Simpson was likely to be seen there. Even if seen, they need not be met. They were the sort of people who could be heard a mile off. But naturally, one preferred to walk with an easy mind, assured that no Simpsons would start up from behind a beech tree or out of a holly brake. It was the sultry end of summer. The gamekeeper’s cottage got rather stuffy towards evening. If one sat reading indoors with open windows, sooner of later it grew too dark to read; when one turned on the light, moths and blundering cockchafers flew in.

  “Shall we go for a stroll?”

  When Rudge pointed to Set Fair, they strolled more extensively, going beyond the North Wood, following the track downhill, skirting the wet patch where the spring oozed up among rushes and meadowsweet and trickled away to join the River Thames. The spring was a boundary point. Beyond it the track wound through the remnants of Great-Granny’s ambition of an arboretum: startling occurrences of Wellingtonias, thujas, cork trees and evergreen oaks, monkey puzzles, Norway spruces, and Monterey pines. Oliver could just remember her, sitting in a Bath chair with her sketchbook, and her crow of laughter when he pointed out that she had drawn the Wellingtonia too tall. After the arboretum one came to the thickets of rhododendrons, still called the American Garden, and then the track ran into the drive and one saw the house. Sibyl’s knee was so much better that she could walk as far as this and back again without feeling any the worse for it. It became a favourite walk – known so long that they seemed to be walking through themselves. They had no sense of trespass. Their woods. Their house. They had no sense of trespass when they came out into the drive and saw the house lit up within; only of trespassers, when they noticed the row of cars drawn up in front of it. They had started their walk later than usual because they wanted to walk by moonlight, and at first sight Oliver took the lighted windows to be reflecting the moon. But only a few of the upper windows shone; it was the row of ground-floor windows, the seven windows of the long drawing room, which were lit up.

  “They must have come back. H
ow odd of Rudge!”

  “They can’t have needed all those cars to come back in. It must be one of their parties.”

  “Funny kind of party. There’s no-one there.”

  For the windows were uncurtained and showed that the room was empty.

  As they watched, they saw the colour of the illumination change. The electric lights had been switched off. The room was illuminated by candles, glowed instead of shining, was mysterious and withdrawn.

  “Come on,” said Sibyl. “Since we’re here, we’ll see what’s going on.”

  “A trifle undignified, perhaps?”

  A poem had begun to flicker in Sibyl’s mind and she wanted to make sure of it. “Come on.”

  They walked towards the house, made their way among the cars. The candlelight strengthened in the empty room. Apparently the Simpsons had respected its furnishings, except for adding more chairs and a grand piano. At one end, they had rigged up a low platform on which were four chairs and four music stands.

  “Grigson said something about their being musical.”

  At that moment, people came laughing and talking into the room, sat down. Among them were several people the Furnivals knew; this, for some reason, made everything more improbable and dreamlike. A moment later, three men and a woman, three fiddlers and a cellist, came in, mounted the platform, poised their instruments, glanced at each other . . .

  For it had dawned on Anthony Simpson that Haydn – who is always there, whom one always forgets – might be the solution. The few friends had been invited, Naomi’s secretary rung up, and that evening he and Naomi had driven down from London, bringing the Maria Teresia Quartet with them.

  All but one of the seven long windows had kept its original thin glass. None of them fitted very well, for in the course of time the woodwork had shrunk. Standing outside, Oliver and Sibyl could hear every note of the music. It seemed to be having a great many notes, though not saying much to the purpose with them. But the candlelit room and the listeners, all well attired and many of them young, made a pretty sight. Music to hear, thought Sibyl, but rejected it, as being Shakespeare.