Chapter 7: Arrival

I drove past the front of my mother’s grand old house, where the rose bushes in front of the two wings were still exhibiting gloriously in full flower, showing a range of colours from white through pink to luscious reds in front of the ancient red bricks and white columns.

On the side of the East Wing was a polycarbonate roofed wooden car port in front of a row of grand garages that I knew had been minimally converted from what were once buildings that housed saddles, two-wheeled gigs and four-wheeled carriages of various kinds back in the day before motorised vehicles. The carport is a modern wooden structure with spacing for three vehicles, the two outside spaces occupied by an Audi and a Ford.

“Oh damn!” I exclaimed, “Looks like my father’s here,” I told Kay-Lynn.

“Really?” Kay-Lynn sat bolt upright as we pulled into the last remaining parking spot under the canopy of the car port between the two parked cars.

“Yeah, that’s his Audi,” I nodded to the right while shaking my head in puzzlement, “while the Ford Ka on your side is Mum’s. Even after all these years Mum has summonsed Dad to come home to show that they are still carrying on the charade of being a normal family.”

“It does show that they both still care for your feelings though, Drew,” she said over the roof of the car as we both got out of the Aston, “the effort of keeping up appearances that they put in shows a degree of love and respect for you that is really quite touching. It is a kind of understandable dishonesty that is maintained simply because they care about you so much.”

“And his bonnet is still quite warmish, so he must’ve come down early.”

“Or he may have just popped down to the bakery for breakfast croissants?” Kay-Lynn countered as she added one hand to the bonnet while reaching for my other hand with the other as we stood in front of the car. “It doesn’t feel hot enough for burning up the motorway as we just have.”

“Well, he’s here now and on the positive side it means we could kill two birds with one stone. So, come on, let’s get this over with,” I said as I steered her towards the back of the East Wing where the kitchens were.

“Bugger, look at that view!” Kay-Lynn gasped and stopped in her tracks as we reached the point at the end of the gap between garages and the East Wing, where the path turned sharp right.

The vista to the south of the house was pretty spectacular when viewed for the very first time and even for me who had been inoculated to the scene for all of my 36 years, was reminded of the impression after a couple of months’ absence. I could still imagine seeing it for the first time through Kay-Lynn’s eyes. We were at the top of a hill, more of an escarpment really, and the view into the valley below was quite special.

The White’s House was built by one of my ancestors in the Regency period, after having made his fortune in the East Indies through conquest and trade in teas and spices. Back then, this property had been a vast estate of dairy and arable farms, interspersed with water mills, granaries and at least a couple of breweries. The earlier Tudor house had been completely rebuilt around the central core, although signs of the old house could still be seen within, like the Tudor fireplace in the ante kitchen and even older ancient timbers exposed in what were once servants’ quarters in the attics.

Nowadays, within the valley below could be seen the ribbon development of a small town with a river running through the nearest side of the houses and shops, the far side of the valley still dotted with farmhouses and directly associated agricultural buildings. On this side of the town there were plantings of screening willows at the riverside, then fields of recently harvested wheat or barley with huge rolls of straw waste waiting to be collected for storing and using for farm animal bedding through the winter. Then there was an ancient brick wall, delineating the boundary of the house’s remaining estate which consisted now of just the house and around 60 acres of gardens, and of course the original stables that were behind the garages. The extensive gardens were constantly in need of care and Mum still had a team of two or three gardeners who came in from their cottages to tend to the plants, hedges and lawns.

I leaned over Kay-Lynn, who stood transfixed at the scene, put my arms around her, rested my chin on her shoulder and whispered, “One day, honey, all this will be mine. However, I absolutely dread the thought of the responsibility, to be honest this vista is of national importance. What do you think of this view though?”

“I think it is incredibly beautiful, it sums up England at a glance. Oh to be able look out at this scene, this mixture of calm and bustle, would be all the fillip you’d need to get up in the morning and do what needs to be done to keep this place looking so beautiful.” She looked up at me, lowering her voice to whisper, “Don’t tell me you’d consider ... selling this, or even worse, treating this place as one of your development projects?”

“No, rest easy, I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. When I say it could be mine, what I really mean is that I could only manage this estate during my tenure, I cannot sell it or destroy it without the rest of the Trustees’ say-so. This land is actually owned by a family trust, it is the only way to protect it from the taxman who would take in lieu of punitive death taxes. I couldn’t sell it, give it away or get rid of it in any legal way even if I wanted to. It’s been in my mother’s family’s possession for over 200 years. I have distant cousins, some live with me in my building, that I wouldn’t trust to fetch me a newspaper from the shop and back, let alone give them free rein over this place. I suppose Mum has been quite worried about what would happen to this place if I died without issue.”

She squeezed my hand, “Hopefully, the twins would carry it on, if you will teach them the right ways to carry out their duties. If the house is owned by the trust, there would be no arguments about who was born five seconds before the other in the case of twins, would it?”

“True, I guess, but I’d have to check the law with Butch.”

“The twins could live in a wing each, plenty of room to bring up families, eh hon?”

“They could, honey, you sound like a good problem solver, that will come in handy over the next few months.”

“So, if they have a wing each when they are old enough to do so, will you hold on to it grimly or leave it to the twins and slum it back to your London flat?”

“Only yesterday you though my flat was ‘bloody incredible’, not some place to ‘slum back to’, in your words,” I teased the sweet girl.

She punched me on the shoulder with her spare fist, with a pretend angry look on her face, “Don’t you dare use my words, which were spoken with me only having a fraction of the knowledge of the incredible scenes that you appear to live with every day of your life. Yes, your slick and modern top floor flat is still bloody incredible, the best flat that I have ever been in in my life so far, but this...” she waved her hand at the impressive vista before us, “this is in a whole different class altogether. It is so utterly beautiful that I don’t have the words to describe it in any way that could reflect what my heart is telling me in, my emotions are too overcome do it justice. If I didn’t love to go into St Thomas’ every day to care for my patients, I would switch to a local clinic or old people’s home just to be able to see this inspirational scene every day.”

“Well, wait until you see this same scene from one of the upstairs bedrooms, it is even more spectacular, as the view of the formal gardens over the box hedges is even better at this time of year. Come on, let’s tear ourselves away and get inside. This scene will still be here tomorrow. We’ve an important job of announcements to do here today, now, remember?”

“Yes, of course, Drew, how could I forget? Duty comes before pleasure.”

The first unlocked door we walked through was a corridor cum boot room with rows of wellingtons and lighter boots and shoes in a rack along one wall. I stopped in front of the rack and slipped off my trainers and picked up a familiar pair of soft slippers into which I tucked my feet. I turned to Kay-Lynn.

“We always wear slippers in the house, honey, to keep the cleaning down and reduce wear and tear on the priceless Persian carpets, remember even some of the fixture and fittings in this place are irreplaceable. Please take your shoes off and put them on the top of this stool here.”

I opened a cupboard next to the rack and revealed another rack all packed with spare slippers, which I knew were stacked in size order from bottom to top, from tiny childs’ slippers up to big adult pairs. I selected a pair of slippers from around the middle of the rack and handed them to her.

“These should be your size, try them on,” I said, “Don’t worry, they are cleaned and sprayed with air freshener before putting away. Just leave them on the stool when you’re finished with them and they will be dealt with and put away. If we were here overnight, your outdoor shoes would probably be cleaned before the morning, although that might be a slight exaggeration as we are not staffed as we used to be 200 years ago but leave them here a couple of days and magic happens.”

“These slippers are pretty, who do they belong to?”

“No-one, although they may have belonged to someone as some stage; these are spares. The ones in the open racks in the room are in regular use, I got mine out of one of my own cubby holes. Once you’ve been here a time or two, your slippers will find a place in the open racks, probably next to mine.”

“There are even baby booties and children’s ones in the cupboard, are they all spares?”

“Yeah, some of those were once mine plus spares that Mum bought for guests with small children.” I said, “When I was a boy and we had my friends over for parties quite often; we would ask them to bring slippers but we always had spares just in case. Some slippers were so old, I remember, that we had a clear out some 20 years ago, when I still lived at home, and sent dozens of them off to the V&A and some of them are apparently still on display there. The gardeners have their own boot-shoe changing arrangements in one of the potting sheds, but I see we have at least one servant in the house, and my nose tells me it’s almost certainly the cook. You’ll love Ana, she’s actually a midwife and only comes in on special occasions to help because Mum never did learn how to cook. My mum and Ana have been friends for years, certainly she was around during all my earliest memories.”

At the end of the boot room another door led us into the large and hot kitchen.

“Ana,” I called out to the woman standing at the stove with her back to me, “Come and meet my girlfriend.”

Ana turned from what she was stirring and let out a shriek. She carefully took the saucepan off the Aga burner and moved towards me with her arms out wide to give me a hug.

Ana was a small woman, of Asian extraction, possibly China or Hong Kong, maybe 5ft 2/5ft 3 looking far too slim to be a cook, aged in her sixties. She had never worked actually as a full-time cook, her qualifications were in nursing and she was a senior midwife at the local maternity hospital. But she worked part-time here during the week and only at weekends if my parents entertained; over recent years social events at the house had considerably dropped off as my parents aged. Because I usually popped in to see Mum on a Sunday, and I’d often treat her to a local pub roast dinner rather than cook for herself or get Ana to do another shift, so I hadn’t seen Ana for maybe five or six months.