Looking at the house from the old the old stone pillars that still held the front
drive gates fast and tight, the meadow and the once gravelled drive up to the old pile
looked as though they had been left untended for a century. Where he remembered a
tree lined sward of thick pasture to the left of a drive penned comfortingly in by a
solid wooden stock fence, and a straight run up to the house lined on the right with
poplars, he now saw tangle and mess. Brambles as tall as a shire horse smothered the
field, roaming at will, laying their tendrils to earth and sprouting back up in a cat’s
cradle of thorn and rotting berry. In those patches of ground yet to fall under the
dominion of the fromboise assault, there stood man-size thistles and towering clumps
of nettle, as erect and hostilely on guard as the brambles were chaotic and malevolent.
The drive lay broken and twisted, with roots breaking through the once
pristine canal of Cotswold stone. Here again great tufts of undergrowth were plaiting
barricades against the outside world. One of the aged poplars had crashed down
across the drive, acting as a second line of defence, a reserve trench, behind which he
suspected there were more thorny warriors waiting for him. The gates themselves
were rusted beyond hope of opening, fused together at hinge and at lock, clinging to
the crumbling stone pillars for dear life. It won’t be long, he thought, before they
come crashing down.
As for the house not even the slowly setting August sun could bathe it in a
sympathetic light. The little that he could see of the place through the shadows
seemed to suggest that it was covered in Russian vine and honeysuckle and, here and
there, monstrous liana fronds of brilliant white clematis. The house was collapsing
under the weight of its own floral winding sheet, using vegetation as a shield against
man and the elements. He could see swathes of missing roof tiles, and the ridge itself
bowed at one end. The Victorian solidity of brick and stone was finally giving way to
the elemental decay endemic in the twenty-first century.
“My God”, he said to himself. “She’s really let the place go. Still, Mary’s
right. We need to think about the future. She’s getting on a bit, is old Aunt Billie.”
Johnny Hester-Siddeley wandered back to the Range Rover parked a little
down the lane and just out of sight of the house, and considered what to do next.
Should he hack his way up to the house or should he perhaps try the old farm track
leading up to the back yard. Judging by the state of the once publicly presentable side
of the house, God alone knows what that’s going to be like, he thought. He decided
that rather than end up covered in scratches and have his Harris Tweed ripped and
pulled to shreds, he would try the tradesman’s entrance. Aunt Billie might not be up to
much, but surely at her advanced age she must have some way of letting the health
Johnnies and meals on wheels ladies onto the premises.
He gunned the V8 and spat stones against the crumbling dry stone wall that
marked the boundary of Aunt Billie’s little estate. The black four-by-four growled
slowly down the lane, following a left hand bend as the road wound down and along
the far edge of what had once been North Euston Manor Farm, until he found a break
in the hedgerow. There was a relatively new looking wooden five-bar gate set
between the stone walls that backed the hedges, and although the track showed no
signs of any other recent maintenance, it was at least clear all the way up the back of
the house. In fact, as Johnny jumped out of the car and unhitched the gate, he saw that
the back meadow and the old orchard didn’t actually look too bad. Maybe, he thought,
she just can’t manage it all anymore.
Aunt Billie was an interesting old bat. She wasn’t exactly a blood relative,
more a giggling compadre from his mother’s finishing school days, where they had
became a bosom chums during the social whirl of the nineteen fifties and all that
debutante nonsense. Johnny’s mother ended up marrying a cousin of the then youthful
and engaging Billie Tuke-Hastings, but the direct line of this once numerous family of
minor Gloucestershire gentry were all now long under the sod, and Johnny could lay
claim to be the sole legal heir.
His mother and Aunt Billie had kept in reasonably close contact for the twenty
years until Johnny’s mother fell prey to an untimely maternal death, and he
remembered as a young boy the occasional visit to the farm, memories filled with
lemonade on the front lawn where now the brambles reigned supreme. In his memory
it was always summer, always hot, and the beautifully manicured roses filled the air
with perfume.
Aunt Billie, unfortunately, struggled when it came to men, and now she was
eighty years old if she was a day, alone and surely decrepit, an old maid who had
spent her best years looking after a sot of a brother and two inevitably ailing parents.
Johnny remembered cats. He was a dog man himself.
He squeezed the Range Rover through the narrow gate, jumped out to close
the gate behind him, and then drove slowly along the track and up to the house. From
a distance the rear of the old farmhouse did not look too bad but now that Johnny had
parked up and run his experienced eye over the place he felt more than a little
dismayed. The roof would need completely replacing, the windows were rotten, the
guttering was shot to hell, the pointing was in a dreadful state of repair, and all in all
he wondered whether it might not be easier to clear the site and rebuild.
“God alone knows what the inside is like”, he muttered. “Still, a good plot like
this on the edge of a chintzy Cotswold village should fetch a whacking price whatever
state it’s in.”
His wife, Mary, was right when she said that he couldn’t leave the place to go
to rack and ruin, and as Johnny was now the old girl’s last kith and kin surely they
deserved a little something for all their efforts. Johnny couldn’t quite put his finger on
what those efforts had been over the years, but nonetheless he saw no point in missing
an opportunity to do both him and his aged aunt a mutual favour. It was serendipity,
he thought, that no sooner had his wife mentioned the old girl, than she had
telephoned asking him to attend on her at five o’clock sharp this very day.
The stable door to the kitchen was open at the top and he poked his head into
the gloom within. “Hello”, he shouted. “Anyone there?”
Silence.
Johnny waited for a moment or two to see if the old dear needed time to
hobble from her lair deep in the bowels of the house, but not a breath of air moved.
He pulled the latch on the bottom half of the door, swung the door open and was
about to enter the kitchen, but before he could go any further a crisp voice rang out
behind him.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you, sonny!”
Johnny froze. It was the sort of voice that aimed a double barrel shotgun at
one’s head. He turned slowly, feeling rather sheepish as he raised his hands only to
see a short but still hearty little old lady in a bright blue-green twin-set standing next
to his shiny black car with a shovel in her hand. She looked entirely capable of lifting
the shovel, and Johnny knew instinctively that even were she not capable she would
make the effort, just for him, just this once. He recognised Aunty Billie at once. She
wore her now white hair long rather than in that typical blue-rinsed perm, stood
strongly and firmly for one of her advancing years and still had that bright green gaze
that he remembered from his youth. She was a little rounder now, but she was still
gracefully menacing. He switched to estate agent mode; smile, offer your hand, ooze
sincerity.
“Aunty, it’s me, Johnny. You remember, Christina’s little boy? Christina
Hester. Married your cousin, Max Siddeley. It’s me, Aunty, Johnny Hester-Siddeley.
You asked me to pop over.”
He took a step forward, his hand outstretched and ready for a hearty welcome.
“Lemonade on the lawn”, he said, schmoozing for all that he was worth. “It’s
been a long time, I know, but business and families. Anyway, after your call I thought
I’d do the honourable thing and come and see you, see how you are, see if you need
anything.”
Aunt Billie looked at him for a long moment and then snorted. She rested the
shovel against the car door, the blade upright. She watched as the fattening fifty year
old cove in front of her winced. Tweeds and smiles. I know your sort, she thought.
She stepped forward, ignoring the proffered hand, and walked into the kitchen.
“So you’re what became of Christina’s boy! You’re the grown up version of
the little shit who ran amok in the rose garden and puked on Daddy’s Dahlias. Stands
to reason. Well, you’d better come in then. I make no apologies for the place. It’s how
I like it. You get to my age and you find that you don’t give a flying fack about what
other people think.”
She cleared a space amongst the old newspapers and empty tins of cat food
that littered a scarred and stained antique pine kitchen table, and pointing to a rickety
old carver she said, “Sit!”
This was not quite the welcome that Johnny had expected, but he’d come
across all sorts in his long career as a country estate agent. Half the gentry were
utterly bats, while the other half were most definitely hairy on the inside. Mind you,
he thought, rough or smooth, they’re all wolves, the lot of them. He ran his tongue
along his teeth. He was in her kitchen and she was making him a drink, which was all
that really mattered. The trick to any transaction was to overcome the initial objection.
It was the start he needed. He kept smiling, and assumed the relaxed, legs crossed,
hands in lap pose of one who always mixed with the finest sort of people.
“So, Aunty, how’ve you been keeping all these years? He asked nonchalantly.
“None of your fackin’ business”, was her almost joyful reply.
Enjoying the momentary discomfiture of her reluctantly invited guest, Aunt
Billie busied herself filling the kettle from an ancient faucet that jutted from the wall
under the kitchen window, the frame of which was as flaked and mildewed on the
inside as it was rotten on the outside. The faucet juddered violently as the water
gushed out. Billie sat the kettle on a black range cooker, the sort that should never be
cleaned even though it relied entirely on solid fuel. Sooty dust motes took to the air as
she put the kettle onto the warmer.
Aunt Billie dug around in a cupboard and found a particularly rank packet of
Shrewsbury biscuits that she kept especially for visitors. After a few minutes of
awkward small talk the kettle whistled, hot water was poured, one tea bag sufficing
for two mugs, a scraping of milk was added so that it could float in lumps on the
surface of the tea, and with a tiny, eighty year old flourish she sat down opposite her
would-be relation.
She smiled sweetly as she held out the plate of rancid biscuits and asked,
“Biccie, Johnny?”
He blanched visibly but took one for forms sake. “Thanks, Aunty.”
Johnny took a quick, almost furtive sip of the tea and nearly spat it out all over
the table, but instead he managed to swallow it manfully and smile thinly. Despite the
evidence of cats, namely the empty tins of food, scratch marks on the back of the
door, and a very bald and tattered grey felt mouse lying by a pot rack next to the
cooker, he could see none of the awful animals anywhere. There was also a distinct
lack of fur balls blowing across the stone floor and, thankfully, no smell of musk or
wee.
Johnny pointed at the tins littering the table and asked, “Cats? Can’t see any of
the little rascals anywhere, though. Got ‘em all out mousing?”
She shrugged her shoulders and replied, “Must be, I suppose. I’m sure they’re
around somewhere.”
There was another pause during which both of them tried to smile and failed,
managing only to twitch facial muscles in a distinctly inhuman and alarming way.
When Aunt Billie smiled Johnny noticed some rather pronounced canines, which sent
a slight shiver down his spine. Good heavens, he thought, sipping more of the
dreadful liquid in his mug, when on earth did she last see a dentist?
Billie rested her arm on the table and planted her feet firmly on the stone flags
of the kitchen floor. “So, Johnny, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”
Johnny swapped his legs over, feeling the first glimmer of pins and needles
pricking at his left ankle. “Well, Aunty, you did. The telephone call? Just wanted to
make sure you’re chipper and everything’s alright, really. Often thought about you,
and then realised it must be years since we caught up. The wedding actually. God,
twenty years goes by so quickly, doesn’t it, Aunty.”
Aunt Billie leaned forward slightly and almost spat at him. “Does if you’re left
on your own to look after half-wits and invalids.” She sat back again and looked him
squarely in the eye. “Anyway it’s all bollocks. You know it and I know it. Funny,
recognised you as soon as I saw you peering in at the front gate. Could always tell a
Siddeley. Spivs and con-men, the lot of them. Still, nice car, so you must be good at
it.”
She watched him as his cheeks puffed red. “So, let’s not call a shovel a
mattock, eh? You’ve turned up because you think I called you because I want to
bridge the gulf between us and leave the house to you when I die? Didn’t think you’d
hang about once I made the call.”
She leaned forward again, this time wagging a finger under his nose. Her eyes
shone a brilliant feline green, as if they reflected the fire of the waning sun behind
Johnny’s shoulder. “Don’t deny it. Can’t stand people who shilly-shally. I’m not a
fool you know. I might choose to live like a recluse but I’m still in touch with the
world. Keep abreast, you know, keep myself informed. Got the internet for shopping
and all that sort of thing. Just because a lady doesn’t want to mix with people doesn’t
make her mad or smell like a vat of cat’s pee. You see this skirt and jacket. Marks and
Spencer. Delivered to my door. Whatsername, blonde woman, looked like a pipe-
cleaner, not bad in The Boyfriend as I recall, she looked very good in it on their web
site. Covered up her lumps and bumps and cellulite, so it’ll do for me, I thought, and I
was right. And do you know what? I bought it so I could look someone like you in the
eye and say fack orf. So, spit it out, Johnny, there’s a good boy.”
Billie slumped back in her chair and took a mouthful of the now thick and
lukewarm tea. Unlike Johnny she did spit it out, all over her blue-green skirt. He
flourished a handkerchief and offered to wipe. She nodded and closed her eyes for a
moment, breathing hard. She seemed to have lost her sparkle all of a sudden, as
though the effort of waiting for the visit and the offensive manoeuvres undertaken
since his arrival had worn her out. Johnny felt just a little sorry for her.
Aunt Billie’s voice was much softer now. “You’re right though. No use
denying it. I am getting old and this place is… a bit of a mess.”
She pointed at Johnny’s barely touched cup of tea. “Tell you what. Chuck that
filth in the yard. In the cupboard on the wall behind you you’ll find two glasses and a
couple of bottles of single malt. Pick one and let’s have a little drinkie and a proper
chat.”
Manna from heaven, thought Johnny. “Of course, Aunty, no problemo.”
He threw the foul brew that had masqueraded as tea out through the open
kitchen door, put both his and Billie’s cups in the sink, and proceeded to open the
cupboard.
“Good God, Aunty! You said a couple of bottles. There’s thirty in here at
least.”
“I know. Every time I do a Tesco delivery I add a bottle. For the winter,
mainly. Anyway, we shan’t be short of a drop while we talk. The Poultenay’s nice.”
Johnny did as he was told, pouring out a couple of stiff whiskeys that filled the
air with the smell of sweet peat and smoked wood. Billie suggested they watch the
sun set across the back meadow, so they moved from the kitchen to a rickety old
bench set against the back wall of the farmhouse, and drank in the amber warmth of
late summer and good malt. Neither of them spoke for some time, not until the sun
had dipped below the tree line and then bathed the sky in reflected golds and pinks.
Eventually Billie took Johnny’s arm and suggested that they go inside. She was
starting to feel evening’s chill and her glass was empty.
They retired from the tired and shabby kitchen to the main drawing room.
Unlike the tatters of the domestic area, the living room was still remarkably well
fettled. A good Wilton never wears out, and the furniture, if a little on the traditionally
brown side, was obviously of quality and still kept in good condition. Billie preferred
table lamps to the ceiling lights, and together with the scotch and a delivery of
delicious beer battered cod and chips from the village pub, which was obviously a
regular arrangement, they settled down to a mellow evening of malted business.
Billie was the first to speak after Johnny had cleared away the plates and the
condiments. “Now, I want you to shut up and listen, Johnny. No interruptions. Can
you do that?”
He nodded vigorously, assuming that this would provide the necessary proof
of his good intentions.
“Good. There are three things to discuss. One, you will phone that simpering
wife of yours and tell her you’re staying overnight. We have a lot of business to
transact. Two, I am going to make an arrangement with you that will benefit both of
us, so no chicanery on your part is needed. Three, during the night, no matter what
you hear or dream, do not get out of bed. Touch nothing, do nothing, and you’ll be
fine. Is that understood?”
Johnny considered all three points carefully. Point two was obvious and
exciting. Point three was most odd, so he ignored it. He reacted badly to point number
one.
“Aunty, please don’t call Mary that. She’s been good to me, mostly. We have
our differences but…”
Aunt Billie cut him off immediately. Now on her third glass of good malt she
seemed to have regained her combative edge. “Rubbish. The moment I met her at
your wedding I thought, what a silly cow. She’s a snob, Johnny, but not a very good
one. Knows the price of everything but never the value. You were a hound man,
weren’t you, Labs and the like?”
Johnny felt it best to humour the old girl. He really rather wanted to get onto
point two. “Yes, Labs and a Lurcher. Still, Monty died, what, five years ago, I think.”
Billie smiled. She had him. “And do you have dogs now?”
“Yes, Aunty, two of the little blighters, Bonnie and Prince.”
“Don’t tell me”, Billie chirped, delighted that she was utterly vindicated.
“Scotties! Hah! They’re not dogs, Johnny, they’re vermin. An abomination. Yapping
shag-pile! That woman has no soul. Anyway, telephone her and then we’ll get round
to business. Oh, and by the way, I’ve put a pair of Daddy’s pyjamas in the spare room
along with his old dressing gown and slippers. Might smell a bit of pipe tobacco, even
now, but they’re not too moth eaten so you’ll be nice and snug.”
Once again Johnny did as he was told and if he was honest with himself the
choice between spending an evening with Mary or Aunt Billie was not a hard one to
make. He was more convinced than ever that the old girl was on the batty side of the
equation, but he liked her balls. With his domestic arrangements made for the evening
Johnny settled back onto the rather comfortable chesterfield, topped up both his and
Aunt Billie’s glasses, and settled back to discuss point number two.
“So, Aunty, about the house. I was thinking…”
Again she cut right through the middle of his musings like an Arabian scimitar
arcing towards an exposed neck. “I don’t doubt you were, Johnny, but whatever you
may have been thinking simply won’t do. The arrangement is as follows: You will
value this property and sell it for me. I want the best possible price given the general
decay and dilapidation. I will then split the proceeds with you, one half each. While I
may be old and while I do find it difficult to keep this old wreck afloat, I am certainly
not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. I want half so I can travel the world. You get
half as your inheritance. Oh, and once the deal is done, I never want to see or hear
from you or that socially impossible wife of yours ever again.”
Johnny felt that the last point was gratuitously unnecessary, but was
disinclined to argue the general point. As far as point number two was concerned he
agreed to the terms at once, seeing something close to half a million heading his way.
By a mixture of lamp and torch light Aunt Billie then conducted him around the seven
bedroom house, the collapsing outbuildings, and the cellar. Johnny made verbal notes
on his mobile phone as they went round, detailing the state of disrepair in almost
every room bar the well kept drawing room, and with the preliminary inspection
completed he and his aunt settled down with yet another large one. Give the old bat
her dues, he thought, she can hold her liquor. For his part, Johnny was beginning to
feel just a little bit tipsy.
“Look, Aunty, we’ll have to do a structural and have a proper look when it’s
daylight. There are a number of issues, damp and the like, which will have a material
effect on values. In good condition, with the land, I’d normally say about one point
two mill, but as things stand we’ll probably go for eight hundred thou. We could
consider auction. I have a couple of friends who could help there and if we market
properly we could push nine if we can convince the punters that it’s mostly
superficial. Caveat emptor, and all that. I can set everything in train tomorrow
morning, have my people out here in a day or so, do the measurements, the photos
etcetera. We might have to have a bit of a tidy up as well, for when the clients come
round. What do you think?”
Aunt Billie felt suddenly very tired. She gulped down the last of her Scotch,
felt her face flush with warmth, and nodded. “Sounds very like trade to me, Johnny,
but then that’s what you’re good at, I suppose. I’ll leave all that to you. I shall move
out once we get to the point of visitation. I couldn’t bear the thought of receiving
bankers. There’s a little of Daddy’s cash left and I’ve always fancied a spell at the
Ritz. Do they still do a proper afternoon tea in this Godless age?”
Aunt Billie took a lingering look around the room. There were so many
memories, some of them even quite pleasant, but it was definitely time to rid herself
of the past. On the mantelpiece above a red-brick crafts movement fireplace, she
looked at a simple brass carriage clock, the glass of which was inevitably cracked.
“Good gracious, look at the time”, she said forcefully. “Off to bed with you,
my lad, it’s nearly midnight. Where does the time go?”
As they were getting up to leave the room, Johnny noticed an old photograph
on a solid English Victorian sideboard. “My word, is that you Aunty?”
“Yes”, Aunt Billie said wistfully, “and your mother. Ravishing, wasn’t she.
That was our deb year.”
Johnny felt a warm glow rising in his heart. “Rather a fine young filly