‘It’s Ralphie’s venture really,’ Mrs Gregary said. ‘We’ll only ever come on visits.’
‘Oh no, no,’ the son protested.
‘Longish visits, darling.’
‘We’re all in love with Challacombe Manor actually,’ Mr Gregary said. ‘We can’t resist it.’
I wanted to say I loved it too, just to make the statement and by making it to imply that my love was different from theirs. I wanted it to be clear that I had loved Challacombe Manor all my life, that I loved our farm, and the gardens of Challacombe and the lanes around it, and the meadow we used to walk through on the way home from school, a journey which had been boring at the time. I wanted to say that I loved the memory of the past, of the Challacombe Mrs Ashburton had told me about, as it had been before the first of the two wars, and the memory of our family as it had been before the second. I wanted to say all that to show them how silly it was to stand there in a tweed suit and to state you were in love with a house and couldn’t resist it. I wanted to belittle what wasn’t real.
Politely I offered them milk and sugar, not saying anything. My mother told me to get some biscuits and Mrs Gregary said not to bother, but I got them anyway. I put some on to a plate and handed them around while my mother talked about the farmhouse and the farm. The Gregarys’ son smiled at me when I held the plate out to him, and all of a sudden I was aware of a pattern of events. It seemed right that Challacombe Manor had stood there empty for so long, and Mrs Ashburton’s voice echoed in my mind, telling me something when I was nine. I didn’t know what it was, but all the same I felt that sense was being woven into the confusion. An event had occurred that morning in the kitchen, and it seemed extraordinary that I hadn’t guessed it might, that I hadn’t known that this was how things were meant to be.
‘They think we’re peasants, finding us like this,’ my mother said crossly when they’d gone.
‘It doesn’t matter what they think.’
A long time went by, more than a year. Challacombe Manor was put to rights. The garden was cleared of the brambles that choked it; for the second time in my memory the tennis court became a tennis court again; the masonry of the summer-house was repointed. I watched it all happening. I stood in the garden and sometimes Ralphie Gregary stood beside me, as if seeking my approval for what he was doing. I walked with him through the fields; I showed him the short-cut we’d taken every day from school, the walk through the meadow and then through the garden; I told him about the tennis party Mrs Ashburton had given on the Thursday afternoon before the second of the two wars.
One day we had a picnic, one Sunday morning. We had it in the garden, near a magnolia tree; there was white wine and chicken and tomatoes and chives, and then French cheese and grapes. He told me about the boarding-school he’d been to. When he left it he went into his father’s motor-components business and then he had fought in the war. During the war he had slowly come to the conclusion that what he wanted to do when it was over was to live a quiet life. He had tried to return to his father’s business but he hadn’t cared for it in the least. ‘This is what I like,’ he said. I felt quite heady after the wine, wanting to lie down in the warmth of the noon sun. I told him how Dick and Betty and I had collected ladybirds for Mrs Ashburton so that they could eat the aphids that attacked the roses. I showed him the table in the summer-house which had been laden with food on the day of the tennis party. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me, understanding my love of the past.
‘You can’t make it come back, you know,’ Miss Pritchard pointed out to me that same day, in her tiny sitting-room.
‘I hate the present.’
We ate the macaroons she’d made, and drank tea from flowered porcelain. It was all right for Miss Pritchard. Miss Pritchard was too old to belong in the present, she didn’t have to worry about it.
‘You mustn’t hate it.’ Her pale eyes were like ice, looking into mine. For a moment she was frightening, as she used to be when you didn’t know something at school. But I knew she didn’t mean to frighten me. ‘You should love the man you marry, Matilda.’
She didn’t know, she couldn’t be expected to understand. Mrs Ashburton would have known at once what was in my mind.
‘He says he loves me,’ I said.
‘That isn’t the same.’
‘Mrs Ashburton –’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake forget her!’
I shook my head. ‘It’ll be all right, Miss Pritchard.’ He wasn’t like his parents, I tried to explain to her; he was thoughtful and much quieter than either his father or his mother. In all sorts of ways he had been kind to me; he considered me beautiful even though I was not; there was a goodness about him.
‘You’re doing something wrong,’ Miss Pritchard said.
I shook my head again and smiled at her. Already I had persuaded Ralphie to have the drawing-room of Challacombe Manor redecorated as it had been in Mrs Ashburton’s time, with the same striped red wallpaper, and brass lamps on the walls, connected now to the electricity he’d had put in. A lot of the furniture from the drawing-room was still there, stored in the cellars, locked in after Mrs Ashburton’s death so that it wouldn’t be stolen. It was the kind of thing that had happened in the war, a temporary measure until everyone had time to think again. No one knew who’d put it there, and some of it had suffered so much from damp that it had to be abandoned. But there were four upright armchairs, delicately inlaid, which needed only to be re-upholstered. I had them done as I remembered them, in crimson and pink stripes that matched the walls. There were the two small round mahogany tables I’d admired, and the pictures of local landscapes in heavy gilt frames, and the brass fire-irons, and Mrs Ashburton’s writing-desk and the writing-desk that had been her husband’s. The pale patterned carpet came from Persia, she had told me. A corner of it had been nibbled by rats, but Ralphie said we could put a piece of furniture over the damage.
He told me he’d loved me the moment he’d seen me in our farmyard. He had closed his eyes in that moment; he had thought he was going to faint. There was no girl in England who was loved as much as I was, he said shyly, and I wondered if it would sound any different if Roger Laze had said it, or the counter-hand in Blow’s. When I’d handed him the biscuits, I said, I’d felt the same; because there didn’t seem any harm in saying that, in telling a minor lie in order to be kind. His parents didn’t like what was happening, and my mother and stepfather didn’t either. But none of that mattered because Ralphie and I were both grown-up, because Ralphie was getting on for forty and had a right to make a choice. And I intended to be good to him, to cook nice food for him and listen to his worries.
The wedding reception took place in the Hogarth Arms, although the Gregarys suggested the Bower House Hotel, twelve miles away, because there was more room there. They wanted to pay for everything, but my mother wouldn’t agree to that. I suppose, in a way, it was all a bit awkward. You could feel the Gregarys thinking that my stepfather worked in a shop, that it was ridiculous of Ralphie to imagine he could take a girl from a farmyard and put her into Challacombe Manor.
Miss Pritchard came to the service and to the Hogarth Arms afterwards. Betty and Belle Frye were my matrons of honour and someone I’d never seen before was best man. I asked all sorts of people, the Fryes of course and Mrs Laze and Roger, and other people I’d been at school with, and Mrs Latham from Burrow Farm. I asked people from the shops in the town, and the people from the Hare and Hounds at Bennett’s Cross, and the man from the artificial insemination centre, and Joe and Maudie, and Arthur, The Gregarys asked lots of people also, people like themselves.
I kept wanting to close my eyes as I stood in the lounge of the Hogarth Arms. I wanted to float away on the bubbles of the champagne I’d drunk. I couldn’t understand why Miss Pritchard didn’t see that everything was all right, that strictly speaking everything was perfect: I was there in my wedding-dress, married to Ralphie, who wasn’t unkind; Challacombe Manor was as it used to be in its heyday, it was
as Mrs Ashburton had known it as a bride also. Going to live there and watching over it seemed to make up for everything, for all the bad things that had happened, my father’s death, and Dick’s, and the arm that Mr Frye had had blown off, and Roger Laze’s foot. The Fryes had sold their land to Ralphie because farming hadn’t been easy since the losing of the arm. They’d be tenants in their farmhouse now for the rest of their lives, with a couple of acres they rented back from Ralphie: the arrangement suited them because there was no son to leave the farm to and they could enter old age in comfort. With the passing of time our own farm would revert to being the home-farm again, when it became too much for my mother. I couldn’t help feeling that Ralphie knew it was what I wanted, and in his thoughtful kindliness had quietly brought it all about.
‘Bless you, child,’ my stepfather said.
I smiled at him because it was the thing to do on my wedding-day, but when he drew away his narrow face from mine after he’d kissed me I could see in it a reflection of what Miss Pritchard had said: he believed I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love, not even Ralphie, who was good and kind. It was in my mother’s face too when she kissed me, and in my sister’s and Belle Frye’s, but not in the Gregarys’ because none of them knew me.
‘I’m happy,’ I kept saying, smiling.
We went away to a hotel and then we came back to Challacombe. I’d almost imagined there’d be servants waiting, but of course there weren’t. Instead there were the people called Stritch, a man and his wife. I’d always known the Stritches. I remembered Belle Frye and myself singing as we went by their cottage, raising our voices in a song about a bad-tempered woman because that was what Mrs Stritch was. I didn’t like finding them there when we came back from our honeymoon.
There were small, silly misunderstandings between Ralphie and myself. They didn’t matter because Ralphie’s goodness lapped over them, and when I think about them I can’t even remember very clearly what some of them were. All I can remember was that Ralphie always listened to me: I think he believed he needed to be gentle with me because I was still almost a child. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t married someone before. I asked him, but he only smiled and shook his head. I had the feeling that in his mind there was the house, and the estate, and me; that I was part of the whole; that he had fallen in love with everything. All that, of course, should have been a bond between us, because the house and the estate formed the island of common ground where both of us were happy. Our marriage had Challacombe at its heart, and I was only alarmed when Ralphie spoke about our children because I didn’t see that there was a need for them. Children, it seemed to me, would be all wrong. They would distort the pattern I could so precisely sense. They felt particularly alien.
Ralphie was patient with me. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he had said on the evening of our marriage, standing in front of me in the bedroom of the hotel he’d brought me to. The walls of the room were papered with a pinkish paper; Ralphie was wearing a flannel suit. In the hotel restaurant, called the Elizabethan Room, we had had dinner and wine. I’d had a coupe Jacques and Ralphie some kind of apricot soufflé. ‘Yes,’ he said again in the pinkish bedroom, and I talked to him for ages, making him sit beside me on one of the two beds in the room, holding his hand and stroking it. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said, and I really think he did; I really think he understood that there was no question of children at Challacombe. He kept saying he loved me; he would never not love me, he said.
On the evening when we returned from our honeymoon I brought up the subject of the Stritches straight away. I explained it all to Ralphie when we were having supper, but he replied that he’d told me ages ago the Stritches were going to be at Challacombe. The arrangement apparently was that Mrs Stritch would come to the house every day except Sunday, and her husband would work in the garden. Ralphie repeated most earnestly that he’d told me this before, that he’d quite often mentioned the Stritches, and had asked my opinion of them. I knew he was mistaken, but I didn’t want to say so. Ralphie had a lot on his mind, buying the Fryes’ land and negotiating to buy Mrs Laze’s, and wondering how to go about buying my mother’s. He didn’t know much about farming, but he was keenly endeavouring to learn. All of it took time: he couldn’t be blamed if he made little mistakes about what he’d said to me and what he hadn’t.
‘You see, it’s awkward, Ralphie,’ I explained again one night at supper, smiling at him. ‘Belle Frye and I said terrible things to her.’
‘Oh, Mrs Stritch’ll have forgotten’. Darling, it’s donkeys’ years ago.’
For some reason I didn’t like him using that endearment, especially when he put the word at the beginning of a sentence, as he often for some reason did. I don’t know why I objected so much to that. It was how it sounded, I think, a sort of casualness that seemed out of place in the house. There was another thing: he had a way of turning the pages of a newspaper, one page and then another, until finally he pored over the obituaries and the little advertisements. I didn’t like the way he did that. And I didn’t like the way he sometimes drummed the surface of a table with one hand when he was thinking, as if playing the piano. Another thing was, he wore leather gaiters.
‘It’s just that it’s embarrassing for me,’ I said, still smiling. ‘Having her around.’
He ate beetroot and a sardine salad I had prepared because he’d told me he liked sardines. I’d made him wait that morning in the car while I went into a shop and bought several tins. I wouldn’t let him see what they were, wanting it to be a surprise. He said:
‘Actually, Mrs Stritch is very nice. And he’s doing wonders with the garden.’
‘We called her terrible names. She’ be hanging out her washing or something and we’d deliberately raise our voices. “Worst temper in Dorset,” Belle would say and then we’d giggle. “Driven her husband to drink,” I’d say. “Mrs Stritch is a – very nice lady,” we used to call out in singsong voices.’
‘All children call people names.’
‘Oh, Betty would never have let me do that. Going home from school with Betty and Dick was different. But then they left, you see. They left the Grammar when Belle and I were just finishing at Miss Pritchard’s, the same time that –’
‘Darling, the Stritches have to be here. We have to have help.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Ralphie.’
‘Do what?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t begin a sentence like that.’
He frowned at my smile, not understanding what was in my mind even though he was an understanding person. He didn’t understand when I explained that I could manage the house on my own, that I didn’t need Mrs Stritch in the way. I explained to him that Mrs Stritch had once taken a pair of gloves from Blow’s. ‘Please let’s try it,’ he said, and of course I didn’t want to be difficult. I wanted him to see that I was prepared to try what he wished to try.
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling at him.
Like a black shadow she was in the drawing-room. She leaned back in her chair, one hand stretched out to the round table in front of her. It was just a memory, not the ghost of Mrs Ashburton, nothing like that. But the memory would have been better if Mrs Stritch hadn’t always been around when Ralphie wasn’t. Ralphie would go off every morning in his gaiters, and then Mrs Stritch would arrive. She would dust and clean and carry buckets of soapy water about the house. Her husband would come to the kitchen to have lunch with her, and Ralphie and I would have lunch in the dining-room. All afternoon I’d continue to be aware of her in the house, making little noises as she did her work. When it was time for her to go Ralphie would be back again.
‘We’re buying the Lazes’ land,’ he said one evening, crossing the drawing-room and pouring some whisky for himself from a decanter. I could see that he was delighted. ‘I think your mother’ll want to sell too,’ he said.
I knew she would. Joe and Arthur were getting old, my stepfather was always saying the day would come. He’d no interest in the farm himself, a
nd my mother would be glad not to have the responsibility.
‘But you’ll let the Lazes stay on in the farmhouse?’ I said, because it worried me that they should have to move away.
He shook his head. He said they didn’t want to. They wanted to go and live nearer the town, like the Fryes did.
‘The Fryes? But the Fryes don’t want to move away. You said they were going to farm a couple of acres –’
‘They’ve changed their minds.’
I didn’t smile at him any more because I didn’t like what he was saying. He’d explained quite clearly that the Fryes would stay in the farmhouse, and that the Lazes could if they wanted to. He had reassured me about that. Yet he said now:
‘You wanted the estate to be all together again, Matilda.’
‘I didn’t want people driven off, Ralphie. Not the Fryes and the Lazes. And what about my mother? Will she go also?’
‘It’ll be your mother’s choice, Matilda. As it was theirs.’
‘You’ve bought them all out. You promised me one thing and –’
‘We need the housing for our own men.’
I felt deceived. I imagined a discussion between Ralphie and the man he’d hired to look after the estate, a cold-faced man called Epstone. I imagined Epstone saying that if you were going to do the thing, do it properly, offer them enough and they’ll go. I imagined a discussion between Ralphie and his father, Ralphie asking if he could have another loan in order to plan his estate correctly, and his father agreeing.
‘Well, I dare say,’ I said to Ralphie, smiling at him again, determined not to be cross.
‘In the old days on the Challacombe estate,’ he said, ‘it would have happened less humanely.’