Page 82 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
I said he’d probably be expecting a proper tea at that time of day, not just a cup of, with a biscuit, so in the early afternoon I left Ivan and the workmen to get on with it and baked a batch of sultana fairy cakes, which are something I enjoy making … and eating … Then I cut a plate of triangular sandwiches spread with Gentleman’s Relish. Carey had developed a taste for it after a grateful client sent him a Fortnum & Mason hamper some years previously, and now seemed unable to live without it.
When the solicitor arrived Carey took him into the studio to see the cartoons we’d found, while I made the tea and carried the tray through to the sitting room.
They soon followed me and when Mr Wilmslow was seated in front of a blazing log fire with his cup and plate on a small pedestal table next to him, he said, ‘This is remarkably nice of you!’
‘We should have tea like this every afternoon, Shrimp: it’s very civilized,’ Carey said.
‘I’d usually be working away and forget the time – and so would you. But maybe we could get into the habit of having a proper afternoon tea on Sundays?’ I suggested. ‘That would be fun!’
‘It’s a date,’ he agreed, and when the inner man had been slightly satiated with sandwiches and fairy cakes, he described to our visitor how the Parrys had taken the news of the changes to their employment, not to mention the way Ella had cut us dead ever since, while still haunting the old wing at increasingly random times.
‘How difficult!’ he said. ‘As you know, she lived here only briefly as a child and her mother was sickly, so the girl spent much of her time with the old nanny. I’m told she was so gaga by then that she filled the child’s head with all the stories about ghosts, hidden treasure, lost jewels and priest-holes, so perhaps that was when Ella’s interest in the Elizabethan wing was first awoken?’
‘You could be right,’ Carey said. ‘Though you’d think it would have given her nightmares and put her off that part of the house instead!’
‘Some of it probably sounded romantic, like that Cavalier ancestor who was killed fighting for the King, while his young widow waited for news that never came,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, sad indeed. As was the untimely death of Ralph Revell, the husband of the Jessie Kaye you are so interested in, my dear,’ he said to me.
‘That was an accident, wasn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a fall from the terrace outside these very windows.’
‘I didn’t realize it happened here!’
‘It did indeed, and it was a double tragedy, for his friend tried to stop him falling when he lost his balance and was pulled over with him.’
‘How horrible – it’s quite a drop to the next terrace from the first.’ I shuddered. ‘Did you know about this, Carey?’
‘No, no idea,’ he said. ‘Another fascinating snippet of history to tell Nick!’
‘His wife, who was expecting their first child, witnessed the fatal fall.’
‘Poor thing! It’s no wonder she based herself back in London after that,’ I said.
‘I believe the boy’s aunt, Honoria, had most of the care of him and, of course, he went to boarding school and then university. He was sickly and bookish, and though he outlived his mother, married and had children, he didn’t make old bones.’
‘I suppose he’d be my grandfather,’ Carey said. ‘Dad was so much older than my mother, it feels as if there should be another generation in between, somehow!’
‘It’s all a bit sad,’ I commented. ‘Aren’t there any happy stories about Mossby?’
‘Well, the estate nearly passed out of the family after Ralph Revell’s death, because he’d spent almost his entire fortune on the rebuilding. But by a stroke of wonderful luck, his widow unexpectedly came into a large inheritance and put the estate back on a solid footing again.’
‘She must have had some feeling for the place, then?’ Carey said.
‘Or for her son’s legacy and out of affection for her husband?’ Mr Wilmslow suggested. ‘She did not marry again.’
Having studied her body of work and what little information there was available about her private life, I had a strong suspicion that she had been solidly wedded to her craft after the accident, but the solicitor seemed to have a surprisingly romantic streak, so I didn’t disillusion him.
Later, some friends of Carey’s just turned up, like the first swallows of summer heralding the arrival of the rest, and spent two days happily removing the ghastly dark brown paintwork on the upstairs landing, appearing only at mealtimes and for snacks. Carey did some of it, too, but having found a large wall clock in the attic, he became occupied in taking it to pieces on the kitchen table, cleaning it and then began putting it back together again. I don’t know why it had to be thekitchentable.
I spent most of my time in the workshop, though it was still full of men shouting, hammering, whistling and generally pulling things about. Ivan appeared to have shed ten years and was energeticallyscrubbing the grime of ages from worktops and tables, when he wasn’t nailing sheets of tin inside cupboards.
It was a far remove from the normal working atmosphere that I loved, with only the dull thud as a horseshoe nail was driven in to hold the pieces of the panel together as it was leaded up, or the fine scrunch of the cutting wheel incising the surface of a sheet of glass, followed by the sharp tap underneath and the crisp snap as the piece of glass divided.
But that would come – and soon, the way things were going – so I felt positive and happy.
The only slight fly in the ointment came when Grant rang me to say that Nat had finally gone to look for something in the locked cupboard in the loft and discovered that several of my cartoons and cutlines had been removed.
