Andrew Taylor - The Judgement of Strangers

‘Is there much land left?’

‘Just the strip along the drive, plus a bit near the house. Most of it was sold off for housing.’

‘Sometimes it all seems so pointless. Spending all that time and money on a place like that.’

I glanced at the gates. ‘How old are they, do you think?’

‘Turn of the century? Obviously made to last for generations.’

‘Designed to impress. And the implication was that the house and the park would be in your descendants’ hands for ever and ever.’

‘That’s what’s so sad,’ Vanessa said. ‘They were building for eternity, and seventy years later eternity came to an end.’

‘Eternity was even shorter than that. The Youlgreaves had to sell up in the nineteen-thirties.’

‘I remember. It was in Audrey’s book. And they hadn’t been here for very long, had they? Not in dynastic terms.’

We walked across the bridge. A lorry travelling north from the gravel pits splashed mud on my overcoat. Vanessa peered down at the muddy waters beneath. The Rowan was no more than a stream, but at this point, though shallow, it was relatively wide.

We came to the Old Manor House, a long low building separated from the road by a line of posts linked by chains. This side of the house had a two-storey frontage with six bays. The windows were large and Georgian. At some point the facade had been rendered and painted a pale greeny-blue, now fading and flaking with age. There were darker stains on the walls where rainwater had cascaded out of the broken guttering.

Between the posts and the house was a circular lawn, around which ran the drive. The grass was long and lank, and there were drifts of leaves against the house. Weeds sprouted through the cracks of the tarmac. In the middle of the lawn was a wooden bird table, beneath which sat Lord Peter, waiting. Hearing our footsteps, the cat glanced towards us and moved away without hurrying. He slithered through the bars of the gate at the side of the house and slid out of sight behind the dustbins.

‘That cat’s everywhere,’ Vanessa said. ‘Don’t you find it sinister?’

I glanced at her. ‘No. Why?’

‘No reason.’ She looked away. ‘Is that someone waving from the window? The one at the end?’

An arm was waving slowly behind the ground-floor window to the far left. We walked towards the front door.

‘How do you feel about dogs, by the way?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘Lady Youlgreave has two of them.’

I tried the handle of the front door. It was locked. There was a burst of barking from the other side. I felt Vanessa recoil.

‘It’s all right. They’re tied up. We’ll have to go round to the back.’

We walked down the side of the house, past the dustbins and into the yard at the rear. There was no sign of Lord Peter. The spare key was hidden under an upturned flowerpot beside the door.

‘A little obvious, isn’t it?’ Vanessa said. ‘It’s the first place anyone would look.’

We let ourselves into a scullery which led through an evil-smelling kitchen towards the sound of barking in the hall.

Beauty and Beast were attached by their leads to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Beauty was an Alsatian, so old she could hardly stand up, and almost blind. Beast was a dachshund, even older, though she retained more of her faculties. She, too, had her problems in the shape of a sausage-shaped tumour that dangled from her belly almost to the floor. When she waddled along, it was as though she had five legs. When I had first come to Roth, the dogs and their owner had been much more active, and one often met the three of them marching along the footpaths that criss-crossed what was left of Roth Park. Now their lives had contracted. The dogs were no longer capable of guarding or attacking. They ate, slept, defecated and barked.

‘This way,’ I said to Vanessa, raising my voice to make her hear above the din.

She wrinkled her nose and mouthed, ‘Does it always smell this bad?’

I nodded. Doris Potter, who was one of my regular communicants, came in twice a day during the week, and an agency nurse covered the weekends. But they were unable to do much more than look after Lady Youlgreave herself.

The hall was T-shaped, with the stairs at the rear. I led the way into the right-hand arm of the T. I tapped on a door at the end of the corridor.

‘Come in, David.’ The voice was high-pitched like a child’s.

The room had once been a dining room. When I had first come to Roth, Lady Youlgreave had asked me to dinner, and we had eaten by candlelight, facing each other across the huge mahogany table. Then as now, most of the furniture was Victorian, and designed for a larger room. We had eaten food which came out of tins and we drank a bottle of claret which should have been opened five years earlier.

For an instant, I saw the room afresh, as if through Vanessa’s eyes. I noticed the thick grey cobwebs around the cornices, a bird’s nest among the ashes in the grate, and the dust on every horizontal surface. Time had drained most of the colour and substance from the Turkish carpet, leaving a ghostly presence on the floor. The walls were crowded with oil paintings, none of them particularly old and most of them worth less than their heavy gilt frames. The exception was the Sargent over the fireplace: it showed a large, red-faced man in tweeds, Lady Youlgreave’s father-in-law, standing beside the Rowan with his large red house in the background and a springer spaniel at his feet.

Our hostess was sitting in an easy chair beside the window. This was where she usually passed her days. She spent her nights in the room next door, which had once been her husband’s study; she no longer used the upstairs. She had a blanket draped over her lap and a side table beside the chair. A Zimmer frame stood within arm’s reach. There were books on the side table, and also a lined pad on a clipboard. On a low stool within reach of the chair was a metal box with its lid open.

For a moment, Lady Youlgreave stared at us as we hesitated in the doorway. It was as though she had forgotten what we were doing here. The dogs were still barking behind us, but with less conviction than before.

‘Shut the door and take off your coats,’ she said. ‘Put them down. Doesn’t matter where.’

Lady Youlgreave had been a small woman to begin with, and now old age had made her even smaller. Dark eyes peered up at us from deep sockets. She was wearing a dress of some stiff material with a high collar; the dress was too large for her now, and her head poked out of the folds of the collar like a tortoise’s from its shell.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is a surprise.’

‘I’d like to introduce Vanessa Forde, my fiancée. Vanessa, this is Lady Youlgreave.’

‘How do you do. Pull up one of those chairs and sit down where I can see you.’

I arranged two of the dining chairs for Vanessa and myself. The three of us sat in a little semi-circle in front of the window. Vanessa was nearest the box, and I noticed her glancing into its open mouth.

Lady Youlgreave studied Vanessa with unabashed curiosity. ‘So. If you ask me, David’s luckier than he deserves.’

Vanessa smiled and politely shook her head.

‘My cleaning woman tells me you’re a publisher.’

‘Yes – by accident really.’

‘I dare say you’ll be giving it up when you marry.’

‘No.’ Vanessa glanced at me. ‘It’s my job. In any case, the income will be important.’

Lady Youlgreave squeezed her lips together. Then she relaxed them and said, ‘In my day, a husband supported a wife.’

‘I suppose I’ve grown used to supporting myself.’

‘And a wife supported her husband in other ways. Made a home for him.’ Unexpectedly, she laughed, a bubbling hiss from the back of her throat. ‘And in the case of a vicar’s wife, she usually ran the parish as well. You’ll have plenty to do here without going out to work.’