‘And now this upset!’ thought Fiona, shoving gilt-edged cards into envelopes she had already addressed. ‘Why on earth does she want to draw the family together for a dinner party? It must be to discuss her Will. But why all of them? She thinks Rupert comes of tainted stock; she’s often told me so. She disapproves of Garnet and Bluebell because they’re Vannion Porthcawl’s children, and what she’s to make of Gamaliel goodness only knows!’
She wondered whether she had uttered this thought aloud, for the door opened and a girl of twenty came into the room.
‘Did you call?’ she asked.
‘No, Ruby, I didn’t,’ replied Fiona testily. ‘Here, lick some of these envelopes for me while I go and call up Lunn to act as postman.’
‘What’s all this? A dinner party? Oh, good! We’ll get something decent to eat.’
‘We always get something decent to eat,’ said Fiona. ‘Anyway, I expect you’ll have to stand down, or there won’t be enough men to go round.’
‘I could provide my own. Barnaby would love to come and it would give him a fine chance to meet the abuela and ingratiate himself with her, wouldn’t it? After all, she foots his bills for my singing lessons.’
Ruby Pabbay’s position in the household was an ambiguous one. As a girl of sixteen she had been taken on as kitchen-maid, having been recruited from the local orphanage. Less than a year later, Romula, paying an unexpected visit to the kitchen, had heard her singing as she prepared the vegetables. The upshot was that she was being groomed and trained for the concert platform; the peeling of potatoes and the rest of her mundane duties had long been things of the past.
She was a tall, good-looking girl, sensible enough not to abuse her new position, a ready learner of upstairs speech and manners and very anxious to shine in the sphere which Romula had chosen for her. She had proved adept at picking up languages, could sing in French, German and Italian, and called Romula madame in public and abuela (which Romula herself had chosen) in the house, but not in front of the servants. Mrs Plack, the cook, hated her and called her ‘that jumped-up hussy’; Redruth Lunn, the chauffeur, made amorous approaches to her, was unmercifully snubbed, and remained faint but pursuing, and Maybury, Romula’s personal maid, petted and spoilt her. Some of the servants thought that this was in the hope of future gain when Romula died, but in fact, Maybury was Ruby’s natural mother, although Ruby herself did not know this.
The house was called Headlands and was aptly named since it stood, in a somewhat isolated position, between two of these, Scar Point and St Oleg’s Head. Its immediate surroundings were the downland turf. The views from the back windows were of a superb stretch of the Cornish coast and there was no garden or surrounding wall or fence and no approach except for an unmade-up track just wide enough to take the car and the tradesmen’s vans. The outbuildings consisted of a double garage, the stables which housed three well-bred horses, two large kennels for the guard-dogs and a cottage shared by the chauffeur and his sister who groomed the horses. Her name was Mattie, but she preferred to be called Matt. She wore men’s clothes, whistled through her, teeth and was a regular customer at the pub in the village, where she slapped people on the back, stood her round and was the local darts champion.
The house in which Romula’s grandson Garnet lived was very much smaller than Headlands. It belonged to him and he shared it with his sister Bluebell, her husband Parsifal Leek and their adopted son Gamaliel. The house was called Seawards and was as romantically situated as its name suggests, for it was built literally on the coast and from the back of the house a slipway for boats ran down to a strip of rough beach and the opening of a tiny cove. Built originally towards the end of the seventeenth century, it had been altered and added to by its various owners until its original builder would hardly have recognised it.
Seawards was approached downhill. A short slope curved down to it from the road which led to the village, the hotel and, further off, the pub. An iron gate near the culvert over a small but noisy waterfall opened on to a garden with crazy paving, florabunda roses, fuchsias and lavender. Against the stonework of a high wall, the tall stems, broad leaves and sinister flowers of monkshood made a patch of green and purple in an angle of the steep-stepped little enclosure.
At the back of the house, which faced the sea, strong wooden shutters were attached to the windows to offer a defence against the winter gales. From the french-windows, unshuttered in the lovely June weather, there was a wide view of the Channel, for the house was on a curve of Veryan Bay. From these french doors, which were on the second and third floors, steps led down from the balconies to a long, stone-flagged back garden, walled on the one side, but bounded on the other by the small stream which rushed in a waterfall past the side of the house and down to the cove and the sea.
The stream was nowhere very wide. It could be crossed by stepping stones and then a long ascent of narrow steps, cut into the hillside and mounting steeply upwards led to an overgrown track which marked what had been the smugglers’ path to the inn. The inn, since those days, had been greatly enlarged and was now a holiday hotel, although the oldest part of the building was still in use, thanks to extensive renovation and repairs.
In spite of their grandmother’s wealth, neither Garnet nor Bluebell was comfortably endowed. Each received an allowance from the old lady, but they felt it was grudgingly given and even after their father’s death it had not been increased. Romula had forgiven her daughter Maria for marrying, but she could not bring herself to forgive Garnet and Bluebell for being Vannion Porthcawl’s children.
Almost needless to say, the inhabitants of Seawards boasted no servants except a daily char and a weekly washer-woman and lived plainly.
Parsifal, Bluebell’s husband, was a minor poet whose romantic Christian name was off-set by his less poetical surname of Leek. Apart from his wife’s allowance from her grandmother, he kept the wolf from the door by publishing an occasional slim volume, begging sycophantically from Romula when the big bills came in, and also by writing verses to be printed on Christmas and birthday cards and, when he could get the work, by doing research for authors too busy, too incompetent or too lazy to do it for themselves. He lived his own life and wandered about the countryside in search of what he called inspiration.
Bluebell was a painter who sold an occasional picture to the summer visitors to the hotel. Her brother Garnet wrote moderately successful romantic novels under the pen-name of Gertrude Fosseway, and bore most of the household expenses.
Bluebell’s adopted son, the negro boy Gamaliel, was still at school. He was a beautiful and intelligent lad, a splendid swimmer and the school boxing champion. His hero was Muhammad Ali, and his immediate ambition was to be chosen for the next Olympic Games. He saw this as the best means of turning professional later on and becoming world champion at his weight whatever, in adulthood, that weight turned out to be.
He kept these ambitions mostly to himself, being well aware that they differed very considerably from Bluebell’s conception of his future. She wanted a university scholarship for him and a professional career of a very different sort from that which he had mapped out for himself. He was down on the school register as Gamaliel Leek, but he detested both names and always called himself Greg Ubi on the covers of his exercise books, the name under which he intended to fight later on.
He was popular with the masters and particularly so with the women teachers to whom he was always courteous and cordial; thus he was allowed to get away with his assumed name, the staff and the head teacher feeling sympathy, no doubt, with one who disliked his adoptive cognomen so much.