Ten Lords A-Leaping Read online

  ‘I feared you had gone to the wrong platform for, most confusingly, there is, at the same time, a slow train which also goes to Market Harborough and who knows, you might have forgotten my precise instructions. You’ve cut it very fine indeed, I must say. Will we get a seat, I asked myself?’ He plunged through to the platform, and Amiss had to accelerate to catch up with him, surprised at how fit the old fool appeared to be. They rushed down the platform and, rather to Beesley’s disappointment, found an empty first-class carriage, where he managed through dither to spin out to five minutes much carry-on about where the luggage would be most safely and conveniently stowed and whether they should sit beside each other or opposite. When they settled, some of the worry disappeared from Beesley’s face, only to return as Amiss got up and said firmly, ‘I’m going to get us a drink.’

  ‘But they won’t serve you yet. The train has not yet started to move.’

  ‘I want to be at the front of the queue. Now what would you like?’

  It took no more than four minutes for Beesley to decide that Scotch and ginger was the wisest choice of those most likely to be available. The queue was already long when Amiss joined it. He didn’t care. Standing in a packed corridor reading Whyte-Melville’s Market Harborough was pure joy compared to consorting with the Lord Beesley.

  By the time they reached The Bottoms, between the fuss over changing trains and his near-hopeless attempt to elicit useful information, Amiss was almost exhausted. For Beesley was expansive only on such subjects as the likely disaster should there be a hold-up, as there often was on Fridays, and they missed the connecting train. More strategic worries like what would become of the whole hunting fraternity if the battle was lost were interspersed with reminiscences of happy boyhood hunts accompanied by incredible detail about which horse, which hounds, which huntsmen, which hunt, and the rest of it.

  ‘How many will there be at Shapely Bottom?’ cut in Amiss, when Beesley drew breath.

  ‘Oh, just a small family party, I suspect. Reggie doesn’t entertain much since his wife died.’

  ‘I didn’t realize he was a widower.’

  ‘Oh yes, very tragic. Splendid woman. Broke her neck taking a hedge. Turned out to have wire in it.’

  ‘Wire? How disgraceful.’ Amiss had read enough hunting literature by now to know there was no more ghastly deed imaginable, short of shooting a fox, than lacing your hedge with wire.

  ‘Dreadful, dreadful. I was there, and I saw it and shouted, “Ware wire!” But it was too late. Elsie had already taken off.’ Then he brightened up. ‘Still, it was the way she would have wanted to go.’

  ‘Didn’t it put you or Reggie off hunting?’

  Tommy looked at Amiss as if he were crazed. ‘No more than it put me off breathing. If hunting is in your marrow, nothing puts you off. That’s why though I’m not allowed to hunt deer any more. I go to Reggie’s as often as I can to hunt foxes.’

  A reluctant admiration for the old fellow overtook Amiss. Fusspot he might be, but he was a brave fusspot.

  ‘When was Lady Poulteney killed?’

  ‘Five years ago.’

  ‘So Reggie lives alone?’

  ‘Jamesie Bovington-Petty visits, of course, with his family. Perhaps they’ll be there. Maybe even Jennifer.’

  ‘Jennifer?’

  But he had lost his companion. ‘Oh my goodness, look at the time. Only five minutes until we get into the station, and we might even be early. Quick, quick, we must get ready. Where are our coats? We must get the suitcases. Which door should we leave by? I hope you’ve given that some thought.’

  Amiss took on the expression of a man bent on a task of deep significance. He whiled away the ensuing minutes by counting the hours until he would be home again.

  Chapter Ten

  The dark-blue Shapely Bottom trap was a very fine affair, adorned as it was with a coat of arms on each side, buttoned-down light-blue leather seats, gleaming brass fitments and an aged but very smartly kitted-out multi-caped retainer whom Beesley hailed warmly.

  ‘Hawkins, how good to see you. Now this is Mr Amiss. Robert, this is Hawkins.’

  Amiss held out his hand but Hawkins pretended not to see and instead touched his cap: feudalism was clearly alive and well in Shapely Bottom. Yet there was nothing subservient about Hawkins. He dealt crisply with Beesley’s attempt to elevate into a major problem the placing of two suitcases inside a trap.

  ‘No, my lord. They will go here, my lord, as they always do. It is the best place for them. Now in you go. You first, my lord.’

  His passengers followed his instructions obediently. Hawkins took the reins and the pony took off at a stately trot. Beesley, however, being a man to whom worries came in droves, for the entire journey addressed anxious questions to Hawkins’ back about the condition of the horse he kept at Poulteney’s, the weather prospects, the likelihood that the countryside might prove to be fox-free and whether the new virulent strain of canine gastroenteritis was likely to have hit the kennels. Amiss sat happily, relieved of the need to listen and pretend interest, gazing around him in pleasure at the countryside and enjoying the discovery that an open trap proceeding at exactly the right pace was an unsurpassable way to see the landscape. If it was true, he reflected, that fox-hunting had something to do with the richness of the hedgerows and the ubiquitousness of copses and woodland, then that was another one up to the utilitarian argument in favour of hunting.

  Within fifteen minutes or so they turned left through ornate, iron gates, twenty feet high, passed a small lodge of lowering granite and trotted up along straight drive, flanked on either side by regularly spaced young trees. Curiosity led Amiss to interrupt as Beesley came to the end of his eighth worry and was about to embark on his ninth.

  ‘Why are the trees so recently planted?’

  ‘The great hurricane of ’eighty-seven, of course. Poor old Poulteney lost the whole driveway. A tragedy, it was, wasn’t it, Hawkins?’

  ‘Indeed it was, my lord. Those limes were his lordship’s pride and joy, next to his hounds and horses, that is. His old grandfather had planted them in eighteen seventy-five. Should have had another good century or so out of them. Now it’ll be about twenty-five years before they make any kind of a show at all, and I won’t be here to see it.’

  ‘Nor will I,’ said Beesley, and they both fell into reflective silence.

  By then Amiss had been distracted by his first sight of Shapely Bottom Hall, a vast edifice that seemed to be a haphazard mixture of neo-Georgian and Victorian Gothic. As they drew up in the forecourt in front of a door large enough, calculated Amiss, to allow a platoon of spear-carriers to march through without breaking step, it opened to reveal—to Amiss’ slight apprehension—what looked like a butler of the old school. Too grand to carry their bags—a footman was shooed out to do that—he greeted Beesley with a slight inclination of the head and a ‘Pleased to see you again, my lord.’ Amiss received a ‘Mr Amiss, sir, I presume,’ in a tone polite, if hardly warm. ‘I am Hooper. Please follow me.’

  Hawkins drove off and the visitors entered a hallway that might have become uncomfortably full had it been peopled by a swing band and three hundred dancing couples. Hooper was setting a steady pace, so as he loped obediently after him, Amiss could take in only a confused impression of animal heads and skulls and weaponry of various kinds, all put into relief by a vast mural of a hunt in full cry which covered a wall fully fifty yards long. You certainly, thought Amiss, knew where you were with the Poulteneys.

  ‘I’ll take you by the short cut,’ said Hooper, leading them out of the hall by a side door, down several long corridors and up a dark staircase. Beesley and the footman were deposited first. ‘Palgrave will be along shortly to unpack for you, sir.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Amiss was unusually firm. ‘I prefer to do it myself, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘As you wish, sir.’ Amiss was ready to bet that Hooper knew very well that his reluctance to be ministered to had to do with uncertainties
over the tipping etiquette.

  ‘You will have plenty of time to bathe and dress, sir. We gather for sherry in the library at seven-forty-five.’ Pausing only to give a series of complicated directions, Hooper abandoned Amiss to a bedroom which was pretty modest by comparison with what he had so far seen. True, the four-poster could comfortably have accommodated three couples, the wardrobe could have hidden half a dozen escaped convicts, and a string quintet could have carried out its duties without difficulty in the fireplace, but otherwise there was room for no more than a full-sized tennis court. The bathroom, on the other hand, was a tight squeeze for one, having been constructed out of what appeared to have been a priest’s hole and being almost full with an aged and groaning geyser and a rusty bath which, like the washbasin and high pedestal lavatory, had not been at its best since about 1923.

  Both rooms were icy cold, the only form of heating in evidence being a one-bar electric heater beside which stood the dispiriting notice: ‘Do not use for more than half an hour or you may blow a fuse’. While the carved wooden bed, the chintzes, watercolours, and rugs had once been grand, there was a threadbare, shabby quality about the decor, not improved by damp patches in several places on the ceiling and some rather alarming-looking fungus over the bath. Nor were there any of the signs of the gracious living that glossy magazines would have one believe went with such surroundings. There were no flowers, no decanters, no biscuit barrel to ward off the perils of midnight starvation. The only luxury was a dog-eared copy of Lady Apsley’s Fox-Hunter’s Bedside Book. And in the wardrobe, there were only two wire hangers to take all his borrowed clothing.

  A bath proved to be a non-starter, for although the only water available in the washbasin was scalding hot, the bath taps could produce only cold, which Amiss, owing to having missed out on the delights of boarding school, had never in his life had to endure. He washed perfunctorily and fast and then contemplated the challenge of changing in a temperature only a few degrees above zero. A swig from Pooley’s hip flask and a crouch in front of the tiny heater gave him the necessary courage and, after stripping off so fast he pulled off one of his shirt buttons, he dressed himself without disaster.

  The next daunting task was to make sense of Hooper’s authoritative but half-forgotten instructions, which had become a confused jumble of lefts and rights leading to a staircase below the great window, left—or maybe right—at the bottom and onto the fourth door past the suit of armour. For ten minutes Amiss wandered up and down dimly lit corridors with a closed door perhaps every twenty-five feet or so, suggesting that within lay further giants’ bedrooms. Ultimately, after a series of false starts, he came to a huge window and a well-lit staircase beside which were hung serried ranks of sporting Poulteneys, this one on horseback, that one with his foot on an expired stag, another with gun cocked, some with hounds. Here and there a regimental uniform demonstrated that their animal-slaughtering duties did not prevent Poulteneys from taking on martial duties also.

  At the bottom of the staircase, Amiss turned right, and although he could see no armour, tried the fourth door along the corridor and gamely turned on the light. As he gazed incredulously at a room full of African masks and assagais, a voice hailed him from behind with a long, rather lazy, ‘Hi. I expect you’re lost.’ She was around forty, slim, goodish-looking, well-groomed, expensively but unostentatiously dressed with an Alice band in her fair shoulder-length hair. She had the voice of one who had always known she would marry someone at least as well-heeled as Daddy. Amiss had seen and heard dozens like her, older and younger, in wine bars and shops in Kensington and Chelsea.

  ‘I think I am. This doesn’t look like the library. I’m Robert Amiss.’ She shook his proffered hand rather limply.

  ‘I’m Vanessa Bovington-Petty—wife to Jamesie.’ She accompanied this piece of information with a rather harsh laugh. ‘You a friend of Daddy-in-law?’ she asked, in a tone which seemed to mingle suspicion and incredulity.

  ‘Just an acquaintance. We’re working together on this antihunting bill.’

  Her faced cleared. ‘Oh. Well, jolly good. I mean, it’s just too, too obscene. Ghastly plebs can’t keep their hands off anything.’

  ‘Well, it’s not so much the plebs we’re worried about, Lady Bovington-Petty. More the lords.’

  ‘But the plebs are at the bottom of it. Really frightful people trying to mess everything up for us. Anyway, come on, you must tell me all about it. And do call me Vanessa.’ She escorted him back to the hall, down the opposite corridor and past a suit of armour into a room which by Shapely Bottom standards was small, presumably because the Poulteney family had not regarded reading as a high priority. In a couple of moments’ scrutiny, Amiss spotted rows of bound volumes of Country Life, The Field, and Hunting and shelf after shelf of hunting reminiscences.

  True to form, the room was dominated by a vast equestrian painting, this time of a top-hatted woman in hunting jacket and skirt sitting side-saddle on a huge white horse. The background showed the Hall, the drive, and a few hounds dotted around the place for effect.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, as thankfully he joined her in front of a huge fire.

  She looked at the picture carelessly.

  ‘Oh, that was Mummy-in-law. Dead now, poor old thing. Sherry?’ She jerked her head at the silver tray.

  ‘Is it dry?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s Oloroso.’

  ‘Please.’

  To Amiss’ relief the sherry was superb—nutty and rich but without a hint of sweetness.

  ‘Mmm, delicious.’

  ‘Glad you like it, can’t say I do. I’ve been at Daddy-in-law to give people what they want.’

  Which means you, thought Amiss to himself.

  ‘I mean, actually, I say to him, actually, you know, a lot of people don’t like sherry. They prefer champers, or gin, or martinis. But he’s such a stick-in-the-mud, one simply can’t get through to him.’

  Amiss tried to look sympathetic. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Even Vanessa realized that that sounded a little crude and proceeded hastily, ‘That is, we come down as often as possible to keep an eye on Daddy-in-law, but we have our lives in London. Have to earn the money for the school fees. Jamesie slogs away in the wine trade. An absolute slave. I can’t tell you.’

  To Amiss’ relief they were interrupted by the arrival of the Lords Poulteney and Beesley, and shortly afterwards by a middle-aged, anxious-looking man, an expressionless adolescent and a much younger boy in a purple velvet page-boy suit with matching bow in which he looked ill at ease. These were introduced respectively as Jamesie, James, and Timothy. They seemed to get on their mother’s nerves even more than her father-in-law.

  ‘Actually,’ she explained when James’ response to being introduced to Amiss was to utter a monosyllabic grunt. ‘Actually, that isn’t the way to greet strangers. What you’re supposed to do, if you’ve been brought up properly, and gone to a proper and very expensive school, is to say, “Hello, sir, I’m pleased to meet you.” To say, “Huh”, is actually not on.’

  The youth gazed at her with indifference, took a glass of sherry and disappeared to the far corner of the library to study the bookshelves. Timothy performed better. His mother had no occasion to rebuke him until a few minutes later he dropped with a resounding crash a fire-iron with which he’d been fiddling.

  ‘Ghastly child, really ghastly, can’t take one’s eye off him for a moment. Nothing but trouble. Where have I gone wrong? I work my fingers to the bone and this is what I get by way of thanks. Get over there to the corner with your brother, you little nuisance, and don’t let me hear another sound out of you.’

  As the child skulked away, Bovington-Petty essayed an ‘Oh really, darling, aren’t you being a bit…’ only to be shot down with a glare so icy that it stopped him in his tracks. Glassy-eyed with embarrassment, Amiss edged into the Poulteney/Beesley conversation, which—though incomprehensible because it concerned some recent hound-breeding disasters—w
as amicable and devoid of tension.

  As Beesley absorbed the frightful news that the most junior breeding hound appeared to have passed on to its entire litter a suspect near hind leg, a gong sounded and the gathering proceeded into a dining hall the size of the chamber of the House of Lords and sat at the end of a table that would comfortably have seated sixty.

  Poulteney moved to the head of the table, beckoned Beesley to sit on his right, Amiss on his left and ignored his family. Vanessa immediately made a beeline for the seat beside Amiss and with a jerk of the head directed James to sit by her.

  ‘Sit over there beside Lord Beesley,’ she instructed Timothy, ‘and remember not to speak unless spoken to.’ Having thus put everyone at their ease, she sat down and began interrogating Amiss about possible mutual acquaintances.

  Amiss was no novice at the sticky social occasion. As a private secretary to a head of department, for instance, he had often found himself marooned below the salt with people who resented being stuck with someone so junior and unimportant. But he had never, he was to complain later to the baroness, been so simultaneously bored, appalled, and nervous, for Vanessa’s forceful and voluble discontent with her lot meant that quite frequently it was all too obvious that, during her complaints about Bovington-Petty (just no get-up-and-go/absolutely won’t stand up to those vile people in his firm/doesn’t realize how much everything costs), James (sullen little brute/no gratitude) and Timothy (careless/messy/cheeky), the objects of her attack could hardly have avoided hearing every syllable. Poulteney—who had quite clearly offended all the laws of seating etiquette in order to save himself—was far too busy with Beesley to hear anything she said.

  On went Vanessa, complaints interspersed with what she regarded as conversation, which was moans about inconveniences, followed by rhetorical questions. Dully, Amiss grunted assent to such inanities as ‘I always feel there’s nothing worse than underdone fish, don’t you?’; ‘You simply can’t trust anything decent to dry cleaners these days, can you?’; ‘Can you believe it, Harvey Nicks was quite out of that matching fabric?’; and ‘I mean, you’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that simple gratitude would make Filipinos reliable?’