Ashenden (30 page)

A
t night, when the rain beats on the roof and clouds chased by the wind scud across the sky, fear grips like a vise. The storm lifts slates and shatters them down below, where they’ll be swept up and worried about in the morning, mows down the flowers that wave like brave flags. Worse is coming. The certainty waits round the corner.

Neglect’s one thing, and almost expected; mutilation’s another. In the dining room the walls are flayed. The doorways are open wounds. Drafts whistle down chimneys, where fireplaces have been torn away from their hearths, and rattle the loose sash frames. Unhappiness and dread spread through the empty rooms like an infection.

*  *  *

An afternoon in late October and Ferrars was watching a group of hikers from an upstairs window of the north pavilion. Half a dozen or so of them, all in plus fours, climbing up the hill towards the stand of trees on the horizon. Their intrusion wasn’t so unusual. From time to time people wandered through the park or drove past the house, curious or simply lost; sometimes they even knocked on the door. Ferrars had sold off the entrance gates a few years ago and there was nothing to stop them.

“Love in Bloom” warbled on the gramophone next door in the
sitting room. If Ferrars had once been indifferent to Noël Coward, he thoroughly detested the man now. These days his wife kept playing the bloody song over and over and over again, until he thought he would go out of his mind. Perhaps that was her intention.

“Amanda,” she had introduced herself to him when they met at the Chelsea Arts Club, shrieking over the roar. “As in
Private Lives
.” Little did he know that seven years later Noël Coward would be torturing him by the hour, that he would be married, let alone to Amanda, and that their marriage would be every bit as fractious as those depicted in the play, only a good deal less amusing.

She wasn’t his type: that was his first impression. Too brittle, one of those voices that cut glass, long cigarette holder, penciled eyebrows. Half an hour in her company and it was obvious that she reveled in the attention of men, women, an aspidistra given half the chance. He thought she was tiresome.

He was unable to locate the man he had come to the club to meet, someone who had expressed an interest in buying the plasterwork decorations at the Park, and he allowed her to drag him out to the garden to hunt for the famous tortoises. The light was leaving the sky, but they found one—“Isn’t it simply divine?”—motionless like a dull green boulder on a mossy paving slab.

“I hear you’re in property,” Amanda said, exhaling extravagantly. All her gestures were extravagant, as if she were semaphoring her intentions to the back row of the stalls.

“I dabble a little.”

“A little bird tells me you have a great big house in the country. Clever you.”

Since the Crash, Ferrars had lost confidence. Partly it was the timing—to buy a bloody big house just before Wall Street collapsed was bad timing, if anything was, and of course he was suffering financially and had given up the London flat as a consequence. Mostly it was some sort of unease that he couldn’t identify but which made him wonder if he was losing his touch or had wandered so far off the road map of his life, he would never find his way back again.

Yet despite the unfavorable impression Amanda first made on
him, over the course of the evening he found that he was enjoying being with her. She made him laugh, she made him feel better; she made him feel like he used to feel, which, among other things, was younger. He began to see that she might be
fun
. For a while.

He never intended the affair to last once it started and gave it a few months before he tired of it or she did. Instead, day after day, week after week, he found he grew to depend upon her view of him, the possibilities she seemed to see in him. It made his previous successes, such as they were, less remote, the future more alive and promising. One thing led to another. And one of those things, in due course, was his daughter, Pudge. Amanda was four months pregnant when they married. Pudge was nearly seven now, and if anyone was the love of his life, she was.

So here they were, the three of them, at the Park, where they had set up a home of sorts in the north pavilion. A roof over their heads; others were not so lucky. These days he rarely went over to the main block, except to check no one had broken in. As a tangible reminder of the failure of his grand scheme, it depressed him; stripped of its doors, doorcases, a couple of fireplaces, and eventually the plasterwork decorations in the dining room (which had ended up, via a dealer in architectural antiques, in a hotel in New York), it made him feel guilty and small. It made him feel, in fact, as if he had turned into Connor.

He had already begun the process of making the pavilion habitable before he met Amanda. Cleared all the old rubbish out of the Victorian kitchen, moved some of his furniture down from London, knocked a couple of small rooms together upstairs at the back to make a sitting room with views towards the river, turned a small room downstairs into an office. It was more or less sound, tolerably warm if you kept the paraffin heaters going, and spacious enough for the pair of them after they married, for the three of them once Pudge came along. Yet Amanda complained ceaselessly—about the poor facilities (the freezing bathroom and lavatory in particular), the isolation, the lack of staff. Although a succession of slow-witted, obstreperous girls from the village cleaned the place after a fashion,
and they’d managed to hang on to Len Stubbs, the head gardener, and a couple of other boys to help out in the grounds, it had been a while since they’d had a cook. Amanda could make a cocktail, but she couldn’t boil an egg, so he’d taken on most of the cooking. It was either that or eat out of a tin.

In other circumstances, he supposed he and his wife would have gone their separate ways by now. But for him, divorce, separation, living apart were unthinkable so long as there was Pudge. He didn’t trust Amanda to look after Pudge properly on her own—she was far too selfish—and if they had parted on bad terms (and on what other terms would they part?), he wouldn’t have put it past her to refuse to let him see his own daughter. His great dread was that she would run off anyway and one morning he would wake to find them both gone.

It began to rain and the hikers Ferrars had been watching out of the window were nowhere to be seen. Next door, “Love in Bloom” started up on the gramophone again. He went down to the kitchen to fix himself a drink.

Pudge was sitting at the deal table, swinging her legs. She was making something with snippets of yarn, hard to tell what, watched by the cat, a large tabby, who was batting at the loose threads.

“Shoo the cat off the table, Pudge,” said Ferrars. He disliked cats, but he tolerated this one because there were so many mice.

“He likes sitting on the table.” His daughter was an eager little thing, with the self-containment of an only child. She was wearing a blue corduroy tunic, and her light-brown hair was cut in a bob just under her ears and in a fringe straight across her forehead. It pleased him that she resembled neither himself nor Amanda, only herself. She had round cheeks and thickly lashed eyes. “It’s his proper place.”

“No, it isn’t, darling. He’s a cat.”

“Cats can go where they like.
Everywhere
are their proper places.”

Ferrars put the cat on the floor and the cat leapt back on the table again in one fluid movement. Washed a paw.

Pudge said, “Can we go to the glasshouse, Daddy?”

“It’s raining, darling.” He fetched a clean glass from the draining board and uncorked the whisky bottle.

“I’ll put on my mac.”

“Maybe later, when the rain stops.”

“But it might get dark. Please, Daddy, I haven’t been for ages and ages and ages.”

Not since the day before yesterday, in fact. Only one of the glasshouses was still in use; for some reason he couldn’t fathom, it was Pudge’s favorite place. She could play there happily for hours. Ferrars took a sip of the whisky and let it roll round his mouth, which didn’t improve the taste. Then he set the glass back on the draining board. He couldn’t afford the good stuff these days.

“All right, then. Just for a short while.”

*  *  *

Pudge wanted to go to the glasshouse because she wanted to see the people. She couldn’t tell anyone about the people because the people were secret. Very small and very secret. She had been making some food for them. They must be hungry because she hadn’t been to the glasshouse for ages and ages and ages.

Her father fetched her mac and she put it on. It was navy blue and had a belt that you buttoned up. It wasn’t her favorite coat. It was just a coat. Her best coat was fawn and had a dark-brown velvet collar.

Len was in the glasshouse. Len had hair growing out of his ears, and his fingernails were very dirty. Rain tapped on the glass roof like it wanted to come in.

Pudge walked down the slatted floor between the rows of seed trays to the place where the ferns grew. Her father was talking to Len. Len was washing out plant pots.

The glasshouse had a special smell, which she liked. The smell was stronger the closer you got to the beds at the back. Under ferns in the corner the little people were waiting for her. She crouched
down and gave them their dinner. They didn’t have very good table manners. They talked with their mouths full. They put their elbows on the table.

Her father was still talking to Len. Len was still washing out plant pots. She was talking to the people very quietly in her head.

*  *  *

“Pudge, darling. Didn’t you hear me calling you?” said Ferrars. “It’s time for tea.”

His daughter peered up at him and shook her head. She had squeezed herself in among the ferns, where she had arranged her tiny snippets of yarn in the dirt.

“What are you doing down there?” he said.

“Playing,” she said.

“Well, you’d better pick up those bits and bobs,” said her father. “You don’t want to leave them for Len. He likes to keep the glasshouse tidy.”

The people had finished eating. Pudge picked up the bits and bobs and put them in the pocket of her mac. Her fingernails were dirty, just like Len’s.

*  *  *

Six weeks later, a fortnight before Christmas, carols on the wireless and frost in the park. One of the paraffin heaters had packed up. It was a little after eight in the evening and winter gloom had settled in the sitting room.

“Who was on the telephone?” said Amanda.

“You mean this afternoon?”

“Obviously.” These days the telephone rarely rang.

“A chap who saw the advert in the
Times.
Seems he’s interested in the garden urns. Coming out to have a look at them tomorrow.”

He had placed the notice in the classifieds:
For sale. Antique garden furniture, statuary, ornaments, urns. Price negotiable
.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Some people have to work.”

“They do,” said Amanda pointedly. “Well, I suppose you might make half a crown if you’re lucky.”

Ferrars winced and nursed his glass of whisky. “Hark! the Herald Angels” sang.

“Pudge said the funniest thing this morning. I meant to tell you earlier. She said there are people living in the glasshouse. Tiny people.”

Amanda was perched on the settee, one leg tucked under her, sewing in the lamplight. A cigarette burned in the ashtray. She was working on a little white shirt. More little white shirts and a couple of navy sweaters banded in emerald green were nestled in an open parcel beside her.

“Tiny people in the glasshouse. I see.”

He had only mentioned it as an uncontroversial topic of conversation. There were few enough of them.

“It explains why she’s always so keen to go over there all the time.”

He took a sip of his drink.

“She has far too much imagination for her own good.”

“I wasn’t aware one could have too much imagination,” said Ferrars.

His wife didn’t answer.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Amanda bit the thread with her teeth. “Sewing in name tapes.”

“Name tapes. For school?”

“Of course for school. Why ever else would one need name tapes?”

Pudge, his daughter, his beloved daughter, was asleep in her bedroom next door.

“That isn’t the uniform for St. Mary’s.”

St. Mary’s was the infants’ school in the village, which Pudge had been attending for a term.

“How observant you are, George.”

It had reached the point where Ferrars and his wife were sleeping
apart. There were no spare bedrooms in the north pavilion, so Ferrars was bunking on a camp bed in the office downstairs, the same camp bed where he had slept when he was plotting the sale of the house, when he still had a flat in London to go back to.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about? Or am I supposed to guess?”

Amanda pulled another little white shirt out of the paper wrapping, smoothed it over her lap, and turned back the collar. Threaded a needle.

“She’s starting at Silcott House next term.”

“Silcott House? What’s that?”

Amanda raised her eyes wearily. “It’s a boarding school in Windsor.”

“What?”
Ferrars got up, crossed the room, and turned down the wireless. “But we agreed no boarding school, at least not until she’s older. She’s only six.”

“She’s nearly seven. And she’s learning nothing at St. Mary’s, which is hardly surprising, since it’s chock-full of children with nits.”

As a boy, he had had nits on numerous occasions. He didn’t recall them interfering with his education.

“She likes it there. She has friends.”

“If she had proper friends, there would be no need for imaginary ones.”

Ferrars tried not to raise his voice. It rose all the same. “Pudge is
not
going to boarding school. It’s out of the question. She’s far too young.”

“Her name,” said Amanda, “is Dinah, not Pudge. And it’s all arranged. My mother has very kindly agreed to pay the fees, so you needn’t concern yourself on that account.”