Music at Long Verney (2 page)

Valentine as a child had no solid person to hang on to. On a whim she married a callow young man, found she did not like to be touched by him, and by swearing falsely that she was a virgin, got the marriage annulled. She was highly promiscuous, preferred women to men, but slept with both. She became pregnant, by whom Claire Harman could not discover, and miscarried. She was a secret drinker. She wore trousers, in a period when no other women did. As the result of a series of events so complicated that they might almost have been devised for a novel by Thomas Hardy, the two women shared a cottage in Dorset for a night. A forlorn remark by Valentine, from one darkened bedroom to another, propelled Sylvia into her arms. And was perhaps meant to.

Sylvia was in her late thirties, Valentine thirteen years younger. For the next forty years they lived together in what was to all intents and purposes a marriage. Sylvia cooked and gardened, Valentine was handy with an axe and dealt with their car. They lived in various places and then settled down permanently in a plain-faced house on a very small island in the River Frome, near the village of Maiden Newton, in Dorset. They shared this property with fishermen, swans, herons, a badger, a moorhen, turtles – all the water-loving creatures. When the water rose in flood time it did not always stop at the doorsills.

In 1937, because they thought Britain was on the verge of becoming a fascist state and they believed that the only alternative to Fascism was Communism, they joined the Party and attended demonstrations and Sylvia sometimes wrote for Party magazines. They were briefly in Spain during the Civil War. Eventually Valentine realised, and with some difficulty persuaded Sylvia, that Stalin was not the benign figure they had believed him to be.

Sylvia admired Valentine's poems, and together they published a volume of poetry,
Whether a Dove or Seagull
, in which they did not specify which poems were by Valentine and which by Sylvia. Valentine was always aware of how much greater Sylvia's talent was.

Sylvia was not distressed by Valentine's casual infidelities, but when she fell in love with a spoiled American woman who thought she might (and then again thought she might not) want to live permanently with Valentine, Sylvia suffered deeply and even made herself homeless until the crisis had passed. As she wrote a friend, “I was grey as a badger and never at any time a beauty but I was better at loving and being loved.”

They drove through the Scottish highlands. They rented a house on the wild coast of Norfolk and were driven from it abruptly by abnormally high tides. They travelled in France and Italy.

People came for tea or on a visit – some ordinary people, some distinguished. Among them Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Nancy Cunard, David Garnett. Cutting the cake on his eightieth birthday, Ralph Vaughan Williams said, “In my next life I shall not be making music, I shall be being it.”

Then a lump in Valentine's breast was found to be malignant and she had surgery, was pronounced free of cancer, and resumed her normal life, until once more she found herself a patient in Guy's Hospital, London.

After her death Sylvia lived on in the house, alone and permanently bereft.

Her lifelong publisher, Chatto & Windus, also published the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust's
A la recherche du temps perdu
, which badly needed revising. They wanted Sylvia to do this with Andreas Mayor, but the Scott Moncrieff heirs balked – fortunately, because in her early eighties she had a great spurt of creative energy and wrote the stories about fairy-life collected in
Kingdoms of Elfin
. They have an eerie authenticity that suggests first-hand knowledge, and contain some of her finest writing.

In the winter of 1978 old age finally caught up with her. Her swollen legs obliged her to take to her bed. When her secretary, Susanna Pinney, saw that the sheets were not being changed often enough, she took over. Sylvia had an Irish nurse, whom Claire Harman says she did not like, and Colin House, a young man who had been her yard boy and was devoted to her, also helped out. She died in his arms on May Day. Her funeral service was held in the little church at East Chaldon and her ashes were buried in the churchyard, in the same grave as Valentine Ackland's.

DURING THE EVENING
of the day after his twenty-first birthday their son said to them, “I might as well tell you now and get it over. I shan't go on with the place, you know. I shan't live here. England's sinking under lovely old houses with lovely old paupers creeping about in them like maggots in nutshells too large for them. Do what you like with it” – his mother arched her neck – “break the entail, let it go to old Gilfred to sit and sozzle in. Anything you please. But count me out. If you'll take my advice, you'll sell it and spend the rest of your days in comfort, for a change.”

“Well, thank you for telling us,” his father said mildly.

Two years later he was killed in Cyprus.

They were still at Long Verney when the news came. Oliver wrote immediately to tell Gilfred. A memorial service was held in the parish church and Gilfred travelled from Guernsey to attend it, wearing a fur-lined coat, and wept and belched through the ceremony. Age and alcoholism had given him a baroque magnificence. A very white toe protruded from his left boot. It distressed Gilfred to see how Oliver and Sibyl had aged. After dinner, to cheer them up, he told stories about the manageress of his residential hotel. “Shan't marry her, though,” he confided. “Great-Grandfather Pusey settled in Dublin and married his landlady. But he was a very different fish. Had a
walrus moustache and played the guitar.”

Oliver shared the Pusey ancestry with Gilfred. This tie of blood designated him as the one to take up the subject of the entail; but Sibyl did it.

“Do you mean to say there was no-one between young Noll and me? Not on your side, either? Poor young chap. Silly business, all this keeping the peace among dagos and getting shot at for your pains. No-one between him and me? We
are
getting thin on the ground, aren't we? Not like the old days.”

“So it will come to you at Oliver's death.”

“Come to me? My dear good Sib, what should I do with it? Hand it on to the National Trust? No, you must get me out of it somehow. You've got a lawyer, I suppose. Ask him.”

Threatened by inheritance, Gilfred became quite alert and clear-headed. His last words, as they stood waiting for his train, were an assurance that if she and Oliver got it all drawn up and sent him the forms, he'd make a point of signing them.

Gilfred signed his renunciation; the entail was cut. Long Verney was now their unqualified own. Oliver was seventy, Sibyl was sixty-eight. At intervals they agreed that they must discuss what to do about it. Discussion between them was almost impossible. They were first cousins, they had known each other from infancy; their tastes, their views, their upbringings were similar. There was no flint in their joint mechanism to spark off a discussion. They agreed that they really must, that they really ought, and left it at that. When anyone else ventured a suggestion, they instantly and as one disagreed with it. The cost of living was going up. The upkeep of Long Verney was a drain on their income. But since Noll's death they were that much richer, and could manage. It was not as if they spent money on doctors or other such expensive tastes. They were healthy and abstemious; their chief pleasure was reading and Oliver was a life member of the London Library.

“They'll never leave till they go out in white stockings,” said Jane Elphick to Lionella Crew, who replied, “I don't know that I really want them to leave. They've been there forever. It would be like seeing Long Verney without its chimneys, seeing it without its Furnivals.”

Then Sibyl had the car accident. She had always been a good driver, was still a good driver; but she was unequipped for a generation of bad drivers. Dawn Conkling, daughter of a newly arrived farmer, was unequipped to encounter an antiquated Rolls-Royce appearing in majesty at the summit of a rise in a narrow lane. They met head on. Sibyl's car was so much the heavier that Miss Conkling's car got the worst of it. Sibyl cracked her knee. Miss Conkling broke her nose. Miss Conkling's injury was so much more demonstrative and her feelings so much younger that she brought action. The magistrates gave the case against her, but they could not give Sibyl back her knee. It stiffened.

While Oliver was acclimatising his mind to the prospect of talking German at meals to an
au-pair
person, while Jane and Lionella were coming in to cook and make suggestions, Sibyl had privately made up her mind. No, not a hotel. No, certainly not a modern house in the village. The gamekeeper's cottage was empty, had long been empty, needed repairing. The gamekeeper's cottage must be repaired and they would move into it. “But the books?” said Oliver. She had thought of that; while the house was being repaired, the gamekeeper's shed, large and airy because of the stink of former ferrets caged there, could be made over into a library. Part of her, the part that wrote poetry, had always wanted to live in the gamekeeper's cottage, solitary in the North Wood. And Long Verney could be let. Indeed, they would need to let it, to pay for the alterations to the gamekeeper's cottage. No part of Oliver wanted to write poetry, though he enjoyed reading it aloud. But he was fond of
trees, he always carried a few acorns in his pocket; he had pleasant recollections of stopping for a cup of tea at the cottage after shooting partridges; it stood on a gravel soil, the only bit of gravel soil on the estate; it would be healthy (old Jennings never had a touch of rheumatism about him); he and Sibyl would still be living in a place of their own; altogether it was an excellent scheme, couldn't be bettered. And how much wiser to find a tenant instead of selling the old place. Less abrupt.

A tenant was found. He was a London man who had been told to live in the country for his health's sake. He made no bones about the rent. His references were impeccable; he seemed literate. He had a wife and a son. His name was Simpson.

The swallows were gathering, the owls hooting in the first chilly nights, when Oliver and Sibyl settled into the gamekeeper's cottage, burrowing in as if for a hibernation.
The Gamekeeper's Cottage, Credon, near Dittenham, Oxon
was on their new writing paper. Circulars addressed to Long Verney were redirected at the post office, and at first the old address stared through the new one, and as time went on grew inconspicuous, an appurtenance of envelopes. Long Verney was less than two miles away by road, and under a mile if one took the track through woods. But it lay in a hollow and even when the trees were bare could not be seen. On very still and frosty days an aigrette of smoke was visible. It was Sibyl who thought of it more frequently, because it was she who had dictated the move and so was more conscious of it. But in the main she thought of it as a stranger's house, since strangers were living in it.

“They sound quite awful,” she said to Lionella Crew. “Quite awful.” Her voice was tranquil.

“But haven't you seen them?” said Lionella.

“Oliver saw them. I don't suppose I ever shall. They don't go to church.”

“But there they are living in your grounds – or should I say you are living in theirs? Anyhow, the same grounds. Suppose you met them out walking?”

“They never walk. They're the sort of people who have to go everywhere in a car.”

Oliver added that the Simpsons were not the sort of people one would meet in a wood. “No dogs,” he added, explanatorily.

No dogs had been a stipulation in the lease, because of the frailty of the gilded Regency staircase. It was said at one time, quite untruly, that rows of slippers lay in the Long Verney hall, as in a mosque.

“I expect you are glad to be tucked in among your trees,” said Lionella. “What a rough night it was!”

With their move, Oliver and Sibyl suddenly became a matter for public concern. It was as if they had been brought out into the light of day and revealed as much older, thinner, dimmer, than was supposed; as if Long Verney were an attic in which they had been stored – inventoried, known to be there, hereditary objects on their quiet way to becoming two more family portraits. They were also Oliver Furnival, J.P. and Rector's Warden, Mrs Furnival, a member of the Parish Council, the Women's Institute, the Gardeners and Beekeepers Association; but they had been all this for so long that it passed unnoticed. Their son's death had briefly illuminated them but nobody wanted to stress it. Sibyl's accident made her momentarily notorious but nobody wanted to stress it. With the move to the gamekeeper's cottage they fell into the public domain; everybody was interested in them, well-wishing and helpful. The curator of the Dittenham Museum stored family papers; the rector's son hung their curtains; Rudge the postman transported Sibyl's house plants in the Royal Mail van; when Mrs Veale, the charwoman, refused to follow Sibyl to the new house (she had been rejected by the Simpsons, who brought servants
of their own, and she looked on this as a deliberated insult), five notables of the Women's Institute offered themselves as replacements. With so much assistance abounding, it had been quite difficult to carry out the move.

The encompassing trees gave a sense of shelter, but in reality their creaking boughs and swooping shadows emphasised the change from a low-lying house to one on a rise of ground. The New Year was blown in by a series of gales. Every house has its particular orchestra. The gamekeeper's cottage was full of drummings and fifings; it acknowledged every change in the wind's quarter. But it was sturdy and tightly built, the drummings and fifings, blusterings and rumblings were companionable and somehow animating.

“It's like being in Sicily,” Sibyl commented.

“Sicily?”

“Yes, Sicily. You remember how our holidays in Sicily were like being in another world. It was so different one couldn't imagine being anywhere else.”