June 1987
Jimmy left it to me to shut the old place down.
He’d always been weak like that, sentimental.
I think it was the shame that got to him in the end—the shame of losing it all.
And he bloody well should have been ashamed because if you’re going to lose a fortune you should at least have the decency to lose it on something interesting.
Gamble it or snort it or go off your head and spend it all building a starship out of Norwegian spruce or something.
Not Jimmy. Jimmy was just a Lloyd’s name.
But that was all it took, in the end. Asbestosis hit and Lloyd’s of London was paying out hand over fist, and poor bastards like Jimmy were on the hook for more than even we could afford, and the Branninghams had never been short of a bob or two, as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now.
I had my own inheritance, of course, but they couldn’t touch that.
He actually asked me if I could bail him out, and I’m not ashamed to say I laughed in his face.
Even if I could afford it—which I couldn’t, Lloyd’s liabilities were uncapped and I wasn’t about to write him a literal blank cheque—I wouldn’t have.
He was the man of the house, after all, the golden boy, the heir to the name and the estate.
It had never been mine, not really. Nothing in the whole fucking house had ever been mine.
Don’t look at me like that, it spoils the flow of the story. That was a deliberate setup.
Although actually, maybe you’ve done me a favour.
If this does end up in your little paper, I don’t want to come across as some godawful cliché.
No, I really don’t think that’s how I want to be remembered.
Nothing in this house had ever been mine…
dot, dot, dot, pause for effect…except her.
Gah, no, I can’t believe I even considered going there.
It’s like something you’d read on the back of a cheap paperback you buy in an airport.
I am choosing, for what it’s worth, to assume that the nymph is fine. If she was dead, I expect you’d have told me. And besides, I’d have known—I keep an eye on obituaries and these days I have a Google alert as well, which I’m sure will get deeply wearing once she starts appearing on television.
Well she always was a handy little cook, although if you don’t mind my saying, that wasn’t the skill I most valued in her.
Where were we?
Oh yes, Jimmy. Didn’t even have the balls to shoot himself, you know.
That’s what I’d have done—at least it’s what I’d have done if I’d been in his situation, which as I think we’ve established is a situation I would never have been in to begin with.
That’s the done thing, you see, in our set.
You let your family down like that and you quietly dig out your father’s pistol or the groundskeeper’s shotgun or whatever and you blow your brains all over the Axminster.
Jimmy just got sad and resentful for a few years. At the very least you’d think he’d drink himself to death, but no. It was cancer in the end. And not one of the glamorous cancers. I think it was his bowels although I was in Paris at the time.
Anyway, back in eighty-seven, when he’d lost everything in the most flatly pathetic way you could lose everything, he called me up and said, “Emmy, I need you to sort out the house, you never liked it anyway”—that much was true; Patchley was pretty enough but a big shiny prison is still a prison—“so you’ll have an easier time of it. ”
Well, I told him I wasn’t a fucking accountant and he could get the solicitors to do it, but he said it had to be family.
“Family,” I remember saying to him, “can go fuck itself.”
And he said, “Emmy, please,” and he sounded so wretched I agreed just to shut him up.
So there I was. I’d already done the dark business of telling the staff that they’d no longer be needed, which they didn’t take well but they’d not exactly had much choice in the matter. And with the people gone, all that was left was the stuff.
After all, isn’t that what a legacy is when you think about it? Nothing but stuff. Old wood and brittle porcelain and ink on paper and paint on canvas. We pretend it’s history, we pretend it’s memory, but it’s nothing of the sort.
Still, on the day the hotel people came around to decide what pieces they wanted to keep and what pieces they were going to sell off to the public like some grotesquely over-glorified garage sale, a little of Jimmy’s sentimentality must have rubbed off on me, because I found myself wandering the house looking at rooms I hadn’t really looked at in decades, just trying desperately to feel something.
I don’t like to, as a rule. Emotions are such sticky, unhelpful things. But there was an end-of-an-era sense about the selling of Patchley that made me want to indulge, if only a little, in melancholy.
It wasn’t very, in the end. Melancholy, that is.
The more I walked the halls of that enormous, pointless house I’d grown up in, the more convinced I was that it had nothing to offer me or, for that matter, anybody else.
A nicely assembled pile of rocks it may have been, but it was still just a pile of rocks.
Then I saw her.
At first I thought I was losing my mind or seeing ghosts, because this—let us not forget—was the year of our lord 1987 and we were all of us flirting dangerously with our sixties, but the woman I saw wandering the halls of Patchley House, staring at the décor like a tourist, was the image of the nymph as I’d known her all those years ago.
Fuck me she was beautiful.
I mean really. I’d called her nymph at first because a classical education does terrible things to a young girl, but by all the gods you might pray to, it suited her.
I—and you’ll forgive an old woman the indiscretion but this memory pleases me—I remember the first time I saw her naked.
We’d actually been fucking for a while, but given the situation in the household it was hard to find time to properly be together.
Once she became my lady’s maid it was rather easier, and so it wasn’t until fifty, fifty-one perhaps, that I got to know what she looked like as well as what she felt like.
And damn it all she was worth the wait. She stood there in the half-dark, her hair spilling lightly over her breasts, her eyes cast just slightly down. Titian could have painted her. And when I pressed my lips to her skin I felt closer to paradise than I ever have on this earth.
What she was doing now, this ghost out of time walking the halls of a dying stately home, I couldn’t say.
So I asked her, “Can I help you?”
“Not really,” she replied. And it wasn’t her voice. Nor, now was I closer, was it her face. Like but not like. “I’m just looking around.”
“The sale is tomorrow,” I told her.
“I know. I just wanted to see the place, I suppose, before. I’ve always meant to visit but I’ve never really found the time.”
A great many things about this woman were piquing my interest. In—I hope you understand—a strictly appropriate way. “Something particular about Patchley that stands out to you?”
“My mum used to work here. I think it might have been important to her.”
As I say, I keep an eye on obituaries and I did then as well. But I am neither infallible nor incapable of reaching an obvious conclusion, so her use of have been made my breath catch and my throat close, like I’d had a bad reaction to a bee sting. “Is she…is she no longer with us?”
The woman laughed at that. “What? No, she’ll see us all out, I’ve no doubt of that. I just mean—she’d talk about this place sometimes, and I got curious.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her—I suspected I knew but I wanted to be certain.
“Sue. Sue Rice. Going to be Sue Jones soon—that’s another part of why I’m here, as well as the sale. It just feels…I don’t know, there’s sort of a chapter closing?”
“That makes sense,” I told her, though I wasn’t sure it did really. As I say, I’ve never been one for sentiment.
“So who’re you?”
It was a reasonable thing to ask and to this day I’m not quite sure why I lied, but I did.
“Jane,” I said. “Jane Loris. I used to be housekeeper here, and I’m helping the family put the place in order.”
It was a silly deception, and honestly I think it speaks rather poorly of Susan that she didn’t see through it. I neither talk nor dress like a housekeeper and I never have.
“When was your mother here?” I asked, as casually as I could, which, though I say it myself, was extremely casually. “I might remember her.”
“The fifties, I think?” She couldn’t be more specific. “Her name was Doris—it would have been Doris Cooper then.”
My intent, I think, had been to say something cuttingly anodyne.
Oh yes, I recall, pleasant girl, good teeth or similar.
But hearing her name—even though I never really used it, she was always the nymph as far as I was concerned—silenced me and I stood there with my lips going dry and my eyes on the edge of betraying me.
“She was a good girl,” I said. Which was true.
“Was there anything in particular she talked about?”
“Just that she’d been happy here,” Susan said. “And that Sir Arthur had been a kind man. She took me to his funeral, I think, but I don’t remember it.”
I nodded, though I was fast losing interest. “Yes, he’s much missed.”
An awkward silence fell between us, and I was beginning to think that Mr. Jones was welcome to young Susan. She might have superficially resembled her mother, but she wasn’t anything like as interesting.
“She mentioned you, too, I think,” she added. “I forget the name, but she said the housekeeper had been good to her.”
I confess that one burned. “How sweet.” For a moment, it seemed she was about to go, and while I didn’t think we would ever be bosom companions, I wasn’t quite ready for her to leave just yet, so I asked her if she’d like a tour.
She said she would.