It was a small party that gathered later that morning at the Richards’ handsome, white-painted Georgian cottage. Sited in woods at the edge of the Westbury Hall estate, the Baileys reached it by walking along a sheltered footpath leading off the main drive to the old manor house itself. Including Major Richards’ elderly widowed mother, an austerely dressed leftover from the Victorian era with a face set in permanent distaste at the modern one, seven souls sat down to a splendid luncheon of roast goose and all the trimmings.
It was the first time the Baileys had met Major Richards since arriving in Westbury, and Sarah’s youthful memory of him as an unsmiling, highly strung military type of strong opinions but few words proved to be an accurate one. She was able to observe him closely during luncheon because she’d been seated next to his place at the head of the table. Powerfully built, he clearly liked his food. He took plenty of everything from the dishes presented by their long-suffering maid. No, she could never manage to call him Uncle Hector.
‘Amen and tuck in,’ he said after rushing the brief grace, and Sarah was all too aware of him working his way through his meal, sorting and turning the different components as he loaded his fork then chewed each mouthful noisily. At the draining of each replenishment of claret in his glass his face grew more flushed, and oily strands of greying hair began to fall over his forehead.
For a while the conversation was desultory as everybody tucked in.
‘How much leave do you have for Christmas?’ Mrs Bailey, who was sitting opposite Sarah, asked Ivor, who sat between the girls.
Ivor swallowed his mouthful and looked eager. ‘I’m to report back tomorrow evening.’
Major Richards cleared his throat and Sarah noted the wary way that Ivor glanced at him before continuing. ‘There’s a big exercise planned, Father, but with luck I should get away again at New Year.’
‘Does anything amusing happen in Westbury at New Year?’ Sarah asked and Diane looked up with interest. She’d no more than picked at the fatty slices of meat on her plate, Sarah noted.
‘The Kellings are in London unfortunately,’ Aunt Margo remarked with a sigh. ‘They usually throw such a splendid party for the hunt on Boxing Day.’
Sir Henry and Lady Kelling had chosen to stay in their Belgravia residence this Christmas. Their daughter, the Hon. Robyn, had come out in society earlier in the year, and Lady Kelling, it was always said, preferred London society to anything Westbury had to offer. This, Aunt Margo had already told the Baileys. She was very interested in the Kellings’ lives. Too interested, Belinda Bailey used to say snidely after reading any letter from Aunt Margo, but Sarah’s father would put in mildly that the interest was natural. The Kellings lived in Westbury Hall and were, after all, Major Richards’ employers.
‘I was going to say,’ Ivor chipped in. ‘The Bulldocks are putting on a do. Perhaps I could snaffle an invitation. If you girls should like to go, of course.’
‘The Bulldocks,’ Major Richards sneered as he jabbed a roast potato, but he failed to add anything to explain this comment.
‘Jennifer Bulldock is a very nice girl,’ Mrs Richards ventured.
‘Of whom do we speak, may I enquire?’ asked the Major’s mother, rook-eyed and with one hand cupping her ear.
‘The Bulldock children, Mother.’
‘Oh, the Bulldocks.’
‘If you will go,’ Major Richards addressed his son, ‘find out, will you, what the old man’s up to now.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘What is the matter with the Bulldocks?’ Sarah’s mother asked. ‘Should the girls be going to this party?’
‘Of course they should, darling,’ Aunt Margo said. ‘Don’t take any notice. They’ll have a marvellous time.’ She rang a small bell and the maid bustled in to clear the plates.
Sarah hated Major Richards’ offhand manner with his son, as though Ivor were a dog to be kept on a tight leash. She reminded herself of the trials the older man faced and tried to feel charitable. It had been a matter of revulsion to her as a young child that Major Richards had lost his right foot to a hidden mine during the last days of the Great War. Now she was older she saw how the artificial replacement gave him discomfort, for he used a stick and the lines of pain etched into his face made him appear a decade older than his fifty-two years. And the wound had been more than physical. Soldiering had been his profession, her mother had once explained, but when he’d eventually left hospital in 1919 he’d found himself on the scrapheap as far as the Army was concerned, on civvy street with a small pension, a wife and a young son to support, and competing with thousands of others for the handful of jobs available that were suited to his station. After two years of bitter disappointment, the colonel of his old regiment wrote out of the blue advising him to apply to Sir Henry Kelling, whose estate manager was retiring and to whom Colonel Battersby had mentioned Richards’ name. The family had moved into Westbury Cottage and had lived there ever since; Major Richards being competent at his job as far as anyone knew.
Everyone oohed and aahed as the maid bore in the Christmas pudding, the brandy aflame with blue light. When they had each eaten a portion and old Mrs Richards had recovered from choking on the hidden sixpence in hers, someone remarked on how early it was growing dark outside.
‘It’s snowing again,’ Diane noticed with alarm. ‘What will happen if we get stuck here?’
‘You’ll all have to sleep on the floor,’ Ivor said, eyes twinkling. ‘And we’ll have cold goose for days and days and burn the furniture for firewood.’
‘Oh really, Ivor,’ Mrs Richards said, seeing Diane’s alarm.
‘What nonsense did the boy say?’ the old lady cut in.
‘Nothing, Mother.’
‘It’s so kind of you, Hector, to have sent your Mr Hartmann to dig us out this morning,’ Mrs Bailey said to get the conversation rolling again.
‘We didn’t send him exactly, Belinda. Ivor would have gone, of course, but then Hartmann called by to say he would.’
‘Really? Well, it was very thoughtful of everyone. Hartmann’s been very efficient. He’s your gardener, did you say?’
‘He’s under-gardener for the estate,’ Major Richards said, cracking open a walnut. ‘He lives with his mother in a little lodge up near the hall.’
‘He seems, well, a cut above the usual. And that accent. Is it German?’
‘He’s a Hun, yes, or half a one. That’s his father’s side. His mother is English, though you wouldn’t guess it. He was born and raised in Germany, but he and his mother arrived a year ago. Something rather unpleasant happened to Herr Hartmann.’ Here Major Richards drew a finger across his throat. ‘Fell foul of those Gestapo chaps, or so we gather. Anyway, Lady Kelling is some relation of Mrs Hartmann’s and Sir Henry made them welcome, gave the boy work. Hartmann seems pleasant enough, but I’d be careful what you say near him.’
‘Be careful?’ Sarah wondered. ‘Of what?’
‘If we go to war he’ll be the enemy, won’t he?’
‘Oh, surely not. Anyway, do you think we will go to war?’
‘Farmers like Bulldock and his ilk would say not. You were still in India, of course, but you could almost touch the sense of relief round here when Chamberlain pulled us back from the brink. I’m the last one to want us to go through war with Germany again, mind you, but this Hitler cove, I don’t trust him an inch.’
‘Mr Hitler, did you say? The man has no breeding,’ old Mrs Richards barked. ‘What are things coming to?’
Everyone was silent, in respect for what Major Richards had endured, Sarah imagined, or perhaps it was fear of what might be to come. Surely, though, it was unthinkable that Europe should go to war again. They had fought the war to end all wars such a short time ago and nobody would seriously contemplate a repeat of it.
‘War would be different this time,’ Ivor Richards said, his quiet words distinct enough in the silence even for old Mrs Richards to hear. ‘We’ve seen it in Spain. Cities bombed and set aflame. Women and children killed. And the Germans, those tanks they’ve got, remarkable machines, whole, terrifying divisions of them—’
‘Ivor, stop it, dear. It’s Christmas Day. I won’t have talk of it. You’ll frighten the girls.’
‘Sorry, Mother, you’re quite right, of course. It’s talk about Hartmann that started all this.’
He doesn’t like him, Sarah thought, surprised. She sat quietly and sipped her glass of cognac. Hartmann was dangerous, but not in the way Ivor meant. It was the animosity his name roused. But whatever it was Sir Henry Kelling saw in Paul Hartmann, she saw too. His parentage was irrelevant. She liked him for his kindness to them.
The snowfall did not last long and the woods seen from the drawing room where they’d retired for coffee were bathed in a rosy light. ‘I’d rather like a walk,’ Sarah suggested, but only Ivor offered to join her. They muffled themselves up to the eyes in coats, scarves and gloves and set forth into a dream landscape, following the path up towards the hall, because Sarah said she’d like to see the place.
‘It’s so wonderful out here,’ she said, laughing with pleasure as the snow crunched under their boots.
‘I’ve always loved snow. It’s like having a holiday. No one has to do anything except survive it.’ Ivor’s voice had a wistful catch that made her glance at him, but he was concentrating on staying upright.
‘Who are the Bulldocks?’
‘Oh, the Bulldocks.’ His sudden laugh caused birds to fly up in panic, scattering snow from the trees. ‘They’re an old Norfolk farming family. My grandmother fell out with old man Bulldock’s mother years ago and my father thinks Bulldock’s a lily-livered Nazi-lover. Part of the happy band of Hitler-appeasers in Norfolk, of whom there are more than one or two. Mr Mosley’s Blackshirts have been seen round here, you know.’
‘They sound appalling. I suppose none of this will stop Diane being able to go dancing?’
‘Good lord no. We’d not speak to half our neighbours if we took that attitude. I say, your sister’s a damned pretty girl, but I’ve yet to see her smile.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear. Mummy wouldn’t like it.’ For a moment Sarah walked ahead, feeling unaccountably disturbed. Actually she didn’t care sixpence about him swearing, she had said it simply to shut him up.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’
She turned. ‘Listen, Diane’s had a worse time than any of us,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t want to talk behind her back, but please remember that.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’ His brow creased with anxiety and she relented.
‘No, it’s I who should apologize. I spoke too harshly. Forgive me.’
‘Of course.’ He gave her a sorrowful smile. ‘I sometimes say the wrong thing, but I don’t mean to.’ Now she felt a rush of sympathy for him, glimpsing a sensitive nature, and laid her hand briefly on his arm to reassure him.
They trudged on for a while up the steep hill, breathing heavily with the effort, then the woods came to an end, and suddenly there before them, a few hundred yards away, was Westbury Hall. They stopped to rest and Sarah stared at gracious lines of its old ochre brick walls, the crenellations and turrets crested with drifts of snow, the diamond-paned windows overhung by icicles.
‘Lovely pile, isn’t it?’ Ivor remarked.
‘Elizabethan?’ she asked as they set off towards it.
‘That sort of whatnot. As Mother said, the family are in London much of the time. Money’s tight. Can’t afford to run a full staff, Dad reckons. If there’s another war, well, you can understand why the Kellings, the Bulldocks and their ilk are resisting it so loudly.’
‘Sir Henry Kelling, too?’
‘He’s not as bad as some of the others,’ Ivor admitted. ‘But another war would put paid to his sort, that’s what Father thinks.’
‘Don’t you think the danger is past? That Germany has all it wants now?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ivor spoke as though weighing his words. ‘Surely they’re not foolish enough, but the stories you hear of the strength of their forces tell otherwise. We can only hope. What do they want, that’s what I’d like to know. And what could we do against them? Sometimes I think the Bulldocks of this world are right and we should stay out of it, but then . . .’
‘We have obligations.’
‘Yes, we do, and we cannot cut ourselves off from our sworn allies.’
They were close to the house now so that it towered over them, and their boots met gravel under the snow. Sarah, on tiptoe, clutched a sill to look in through a window, and was put out to find the curtains were drawn. Instead Ivor led her under an arch into a courtyard at the side of the house, then on through a snowbound garden, where they passed the muffled shapes of bushes, statues, a simple fountain. Two sides were lined with poplar trees, but along the far edge ran a high brick wall of the same ochre hues as the house and into one end of this was set a studded wooden door. It was closed and banked up with snow.
‘The kitchen garden’s through there,’ Ivor explained, ‘and beyond that the cottage where the Hartmanns live. I say, we should start back, don’t you think?’
A doleful twilight brooded over the snow, and Ivor turned to go, but Sarah was reluctant. The thought of the walled garden beyond the door was intriguing. She longed to see it, but Ivor was already ahead. As she hurried after him, the thought of a warm fire and Christmas cake rose in her mind. She’d return here and see the gardens properly in the spring, she promised herself. Hopefully with an invitation, for today it felt they were trespassing.
They arrived back at Westbury Cottage in cheerful spirits only to be puzzled by their reception.
‘Goodness, dears, how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed we look,’ was Aunt Margo’s greeting as they entered the stuffy drawing room. And everyone stared at them in amusement, which Sarah found unnerving.
There had been something unreal about the whole day, she reflected that evening, the alien light on the snow, the sense of desertion at Westbury Hall. She’d longed for the delightful Christmases of her childhood, for although there had been icicles, candles and a leaping fire in the grate today, and rich marzipan fruit cake, it was marred by bereavement and rumours of war. The innocence of those far-off days of her childhood was gone for ever.