Page 33 of Last Letter Home
Only a few minutes later they were admitted to a large sunny living room looking out onto the back garden of the hall, and when Briony shook hands with Mrs Clare she recognized her at once as the stooped old lady with the pug she’d seen walking past her window. The dog had risen with effort from its basket under the window, waddled over and was now issuing croaky yaps at the visitors from the shelter of its mistress’ skirts.
‘You would like to see the plan of the garden, I gather? It’s all right, Lulu, they’re friends, friends, I tell you. Go back to your bed.’ She spoke gently as though the pug were a toddler, and back in its basket it sat glaring and snorting at these foreign invaders.
‘Are you sure it’s convenient?’ Briony asked politely. ‘We didn’t expect to be able to see you so quickly.’
‘It’s really no trouble.’ Mrs Clare must be at least ninety, Briony realized. Probably once tall, she was now frail and shrunken. Her sparse silvery-grey hair was arranged into flattering curls around her face. Her eyes, the palest of watery blues, were sunk into hollows in an oval face as wrinkled and careworn as her dog’s, and yet those eyes were guileless, dreamy, and there was something about her of the girl she must once have been. It was there in the delicacy of her bone structure, the lightness of her movements.
Mrs Clare drew her visitors across to a framed chart hanging in a shadowed part of the room and fumbled at the cord of a light set above it. ‘It’s pen-and-ink and watercolour, you know, and one must be careful of sun damage,’ she explained.
‘And this is the walled garden?’ Luke asked, leaning in to examine the picture.
‘As it was in 1910, we think. Before the Great War, certainly.’
‘This is amazing,’ Briony whispered as she and Aruna gathered close to Luke to look.
It was a hand-drawn plan of the garden whose overall shape Briony recognized, delineated by its wall. The growing area was divided into four main sections, labelled variously as flowers, vegetables and fruit bushes in tiny, but readable calligraphy. There was a greenhouse against the south-facing wall, where Briony remembered seeing the metal struts, and an octagonal herb garden lined with low box hedging in the centre of the garden. A key drawn in the left-hand corner of the page referenced some of the different crops.
‘Gooseberries,’ Aruna said, ‘I’ve never eaten them.’
‘Really?’ Briony wasn’t sure whether to be surprised. ‘My granny grew them. They’re sharp, need loads of sugar. Look, damsons. Granny had plum trees, too.’
‘There used to be a splendid grapevine in the greenhouse,’ Mrs Clare said beside them, ‘and the grapes were delicious. I’ve no idea what type, but they really had a wonderful purple glow.’
‘You must have lived here a long time then. Well, of course you did, with your husband . . .’ Briony coloured at her clumsiness.
Mrs Clare didn’t seem offended. ‘Longer even than that. I was born here. Unwin was my father’s second cousin, though we didn’t meet until we were both grown up.’
‘Oh, and your father was . . .’ When were they talking about? Briony was even more confused.
‘Sir Henry Kelling, of course. I was born Robyn Kelling and I was the last of the direct line, but because I was a girl I couldn’t inherit Westbury Hall and so it passed to Unwin. Sir Henry’s father and Unwin’s father were first cousins, you see.’
Briony was amazed. This lady was a Kelling! She couldn’t stop herself wondering whether the marriage was one of love or convenience, but of course she couldn’t ask. She felt Robyn Clare’s clear-eyed gaze upon her, as though she could read her thoughts. Something else occurred to her, too, which was that Unwin Clare’s surname would surely have been Kelling, too, if one followed the male line, but that seemed nosey to ask on first acquaintance, as well. ‘It must have been a relief that you didn’t lose your home,’ she settled for finally.
‘It was. I grew up here between the wars,’ Mrs Clare continued. ‘Did the girl on the desk not explain anything at all? I was born in 1921. I’m ninety-five this year, you know.’
What age did a woman have to reach before she began to be proud of it? Briony wondered, as she and Luke made noises of congratulation. Aruna, however, had lost interest in the conversation and instead crossed the room to where a display of photographs were set out on a console table.
‘Are these your family, Mrs Clare?’ she asked brightly.
‘The one on the right is my son Lewis,’ Mrs Clare said, with new warmth in her voice. ‘He and his wife live in London. I find it strange to have a child who’s an old-age pensioner!’
They moved over to inspect the photographs. ‘This one’s my dear Unwin with Digby, taken some years ago, but it’s a favourite of mine.’ A mild-looking country squire in his seventies, wearing a Barbour jacket, held a scruffy terrier that peered out through a curtain of rough hair.
‘And this one?’ Aruna reached toward a large old black and white print in a dilapidated frame, propped against the wall.
‘Careful with that. Here, let me.’
Mrs Clare lifted the frame with both hands and Briony craned to study the group of figures lined up in sombre rows before what was clearly the frontage of Westbury Hall. The women sat on chairs, the men standing behind, all except for a distinguished-looking gentleman with a handsome moustache, who occupied the chair at the centre next to a lady with a disdainful expression, wearing a neat, elegant hat at a fashionable angle.
‘My ma and pa, Sir Henry and Lady Kelling,’ Mrs Clare said, quietly.
‘And that’s you?’ A much younger version of Lady Kelling sat next to her mother in the picture, her expression startled as a fawn’s.
‘You are clever. Yes, that’s me. I always hated being photographed.’
‘Who were all these other people?’ Briony continued. ‘I mean, I know they must be staff.’
‘That’s Mrs Thurston, the cook,’ Mrs Clare murmured, ‘and Jarey, the butler, he was a sweetie. I don’t remember everyone’s name.’ There was a housekeeper, several maids, a terrified waif of a kitchen girl, seven or eight men and boys, two with smart jackets and short hair trained into side partings identifiable as house servants, and four more muscular outdoor types of varying ages including a callow lad Mrs Clare said was Sam, the apprentice gardener.
