Rumours

What could Stella say to that? Though desperate to know more, she bit her tongue and looked at her hands. Lydia’s were bony and long; papery skin over navy veins like very old corduroy. A signet ring loose on the little finger of her right hand, an antique diamond ring and thin gold wedding band on her left. Stella had a very strange impulse to lean right over the coffee table and take Lady Lydia’s hands in hers, give them a gentle rub. Perhaps Lydia sensed it because she took to her feet and demanded that Stella follow her on a tour of the house.

Sell? Sell all this? Is that really why I’m here? Me? Can’t be.

‘Of course, we’re the wrong way around,’ Lydia said of the drawing room. ‘When I was a girl, this was the dining room – one never had a south-facing drawing room because all the oil paintings would take a thrashing by the sun. That’s why the good paintings are currently in the dining room – which was once the drawing room because it’s north facing. That’s what my father told me – though my mother told me it was because my Fortescue ancestors were atrociously ugly.’ The slicing look Lydia sent Stella informed her that her giggle was inappropriate. ‘Hence them being consigned to a room less used.’ She was leading on, along the flagstone hallway, to the room in question. The same beautiful tall double doors and fanlight as the drawing room, the same lofty windows, but just two of them in here, east facing. The room was light but undeniably cold. The fireplace was bereft of logs, nor was there an electric heater in its place. The cherubs on the plaster frieze weren’t hunting stags here, but hefting urns about. Their naked little bodies made Stella feel the cold on their behalf. The eyes of generations of Fortescues appeared to glower at her from the confines of their florid gilt frames as if to say, who on earth do you think you are to sell our ancestral seat as though it’s a commodity akin to a sack of apples?

‘They’re not so ugly,’ Stella remarked diplomatically, ‘they just look a little – humourless.’

She checked Lady Lydia’s expression. She looked horrified. Stella shivered.

‘Bastard!’

‘Oh God – I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean … I only meant—’

‘Bastard bastard bloody dog! Barnaby! Mrs Biggins!’

It was then that Stella noticed a furl of turd that had been deposited (quite some time ago, it seemed) on the floor just by the head of the table.

‘It’s testimony to the airiness of the room that one cannot – detect it,’ Stella said.

Lydia stared at her, unblinkingly, before nodding slowly. ‘You are most certainly an estate agent,’ she said, but Stella was unable to tell whether this was a compliment or an insult. ‘You call it spin, don’t you. This way.’ They left the door open and the dog mess for Mrs Biggins to deal with; crossed the staircase and entrance hallway and went into the library. This room was as warm and inviting as the dining room was cold and uncongenial. Stella thought, I don’t care how common I might appear – and she said ‘Wow!’ out loud as she beamed at the three walls given over almost entirely to handsome mahogany bookcases – mostly carrying leather-bound volumes. Stella estimated the longest was at least twenty feet. Three leather Chesterton sofas at right angles to each other were set around a low table in front of the fireplace stacked with logs. A desk with a dark green leather inlay was positioned by one window, a writing bureau at the other. Stella perused the titles. French and English novels, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, atlases, monographs and a whole section of art books.

‘I studied art,’ she said quietly, as if to remind herself. She ran her fingertips gently over the routered wooden shelves right to the end. She stopped. It couldn’t be! She looked at Lydia and smiled.

‘May I?’ but she didn’t wait for an answer. Where the bookcase ended in a long, slim vertical column, Stella gave a little press and a pull and the front of the column popped open like a secret door to reveal that it was a false front – behind it, the shelves continued, with just three books’ width, for the full height of the bookcase. There were books on these hidden shelves too, but their spines were blank. ‘Are they very rude?’ Stella asked.

Lydia laughed. It was an unexpected warm, earthy cackle. ‘Eye-wateringly so – that is, if you were a dainty eighteenth-century lady prone to fainting at the very thought of even a naked forearm. Hardly the Kama Sutra. They’re frightfully tame to me, so goodness knows what you’d make of them.’ Insult or compliment – again Stella wasn’t sure and Lydia’s voice had become cool by the end of her sentence.

‘Have you had them valued?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Cart the lot off to Christie’s for them to be pored over so publicly? Lady Lydia, your collection of two hundred years of pornography might fetch one hundred pounds at auction.’ Stella laughed – but Lydia gave her a look to silence her. She led on, back through the hallways and up one side of the double staircase.

‘Now that,’ Stella murmured, ‘is a backside to behold.’

‘You insolent young woman.’ Lydia rounded on Stella who, for a split second, feared she might be pushed down the stairs. She’d already tripped over a threadbare section of runner.

‘Lady Lydia – no! I didn’t mean—! I was referring to – that.’ Stella was holding on to the banister with both hands so she moved her head fast as if banging it against an imaginary wall, to signify where she was looking. It was a huge oil painting of a horse and rider, portrayed from behind. Only an eye and an ear of the horse were visible, while the rider looked most uncomfortable turning around in an already cumbersome military get-up. It was the horse’s rump which all but filled the canvas, its tail mid-swish, revealing its arsehole.

‘I’m sorry, I—’ Stella glanced at Lydia who was staring at her. ‘I studied art. It was my world before I—’ And then Stella thought, Oh, for God’s sake, the woman’s not going to bite you. And then she thought, I studied art before all the shit fell on me from a great height and I clawed my way out and am where I am today. And then she thought, But this woman doesn’t need to know that. ‘Before I went into property.’ She made it sound like a sensible choice, that her current career was as dignified and hallowed as the study of art. Lydia’s ice-pale blue eyes were still scoring straight through her, like a welder’s flame through sheet metal.

‘This painting was a gift – to Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, the first Earl of Barbary, who built this house.’

‘Is it Mallory Beckinsford?’

‘As I just said,’ Lydia said slowly, witheringly, as if Stella was dim as well as deaf, ‘Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, the first Earl of Barbary, who built this house.’

‘I’m so sorry, I meant the artist – is it Mallory Beckinsford?’ Stella could tell Lydia hadn’t a clue who the artist was, and hitherto hadn’t been remotely interested.

‘Beckinsford,’ Lydia said, in what she thought was a cleverly non-committal way. ‘It’s a portrait of the Prince Regent.’

Stella dared to take one hand from the banister. ‘It’s just Beckinsford was taught by Reynolds – and Reynolds painted a similar portrait of the Prince Regent.’

Lydia brushed the air. ‘Longbridge is full of portraits. Fortescues, royalty, Fortescues with royalty, with swords, guns, with horses, dogs – it’s who we are.’

Stella worked hard to keep her tone conversational, but she was excited. ‘I think this painting would have been given to Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, the first Earl of Barbary – but as a rather barbed gift. It’s a slur – an elegantly concealed two fingers – from the Prince Regent. He did it to others. A very nicely painted insult, quite literally shoving his horse’s great big bum in the face of Lord Fortescue. But no doubt the Earl knew that and turned the joke on its head by graciously accepting it and hanging it right here, pride of place.’

Lydia was looking at the painting again, her eyes travelling over it in little bursts. She turned to Stella and nodded.

‘So one oughtn’t to look a gift horse in the mouth – but up the arse?’

‘Something like that,’ Stella smiled at the painting. ‘You might want to have it valued. Do you know of any fracas between the Prince and the Earl?’

‘There is some salacious family rumour about the Earl and one of the Prince’s mistresses and the billiards table right here at Longbridge.’ Lydia’s tone suggested it was all beyond ridiculous. ‘I’ll be sure to call Christie’s,’ she said. ‘They can come and sift through all the historic backsides at Longbridge – human and equine – whether hidden in the library or hanging, bold as brass, right here.’

She sounded sharp and Stella felt deflated. Best leave all art in the past – her own as well as the Fortescues’. Leave it behind. Move on. Here to sell the house, remember. Then a notion sent a shot of adrenalin which almost winded her.

‘How many bedrooms?’ Stella asked, taking a sweeping glance at a queue of closed doors and that was just in this semicircular landing of the house.

‘Five.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Only five bedrooms? Here? At Longbridge?’

‘What are you talking about? Twelve bedrooms including the three in the Victorian wing,’ Lady Lydia said.

‘Pardon me, I thought you said five and I thought to myself surely not—’

‘You are pedantic – it’s tiresome,’ she barked. ‘These days, five of the rooms have beds in them – so the other rooms are not bedrooms, are they?’

Stella was tempted not to bite her tongue, she was tempted to say, well, if I’m pedantic, you’re downright rude. ‘Logical,’ she said instead. ‘It’s the estate agent in me – we’re trained to call even a store cupboard a bedroom if the headroom is sufficient and it is physically possible for someone to stand and also sleep in it.’

‘The more bedrooms, the higher the price?’

‘Square footage is the priority,’ Stella said, ‘and you certainly have that at Longbridge Hall – never mind the quota of bed frames.’

‘Well,’ said Lydia, ‘you’d better see if the servants’ rooms right at the top count too.’

‘How many bathrooms?’

‘Three.’

‘I don’t mean with baths – I mean, rooms in which there is the relevant plumbing.’

‘Three,’ Lydia said loudly, giving the ‘r’ a good roll around her tongue, as if Stella had reverted to dim and deaf again. ‘Mind you, there was only one until after the War.’

Oh dear, Stella thought. Three bathrooms? That’s it?