"I've read about that," said Maud cautiously.
"Have you now? Keep up with family things, do you?"
"In a way. I have particular family interests."
"What relation are you to Tommy Bailey then? That was a great horse of his, Hans Andersen, that was a horse with character and guts."
"He was my great-uncle. I used to ride one of Hans Andersen's less successful descendants. A pig-headed brute who could jump himself out of anything, like a cat, but didn't always choose to, and didn't always take me with him. Called Copenhagen."
They talked about horses and a little about the Norfolk Baileys. Roland watched Maud making noises that he sensed came naturally, and sensed too that she would never make in the Women's Studies building. From the kitchen a bell struck.
"That's the tea. I'll go and fetch it. And Joan."
It came in an exquisite Spode tea service, with a silver sugarbowl and a plateful of hot buttered toast with Gentleman's Relish or honey, on a large melamine tray designed, Roland saw, to slot into the arms of the wheelchair. Lady Bailey poured. Sir George quizzed Maud about dead cousins, long-dead horses, and the state of the trees on the Norfolk estate. Joan Bailey said to Roland, "George's great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. He keeps them alive. They're not fast conifers, they're mixed woodland, some of those rare trees are very old. Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We've lost acres and acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things."
"Do you know," said Sir George, "that up to the eighteenth century the major industry in this part of the world was rabbitwarrening? The land wasn't fit for much else, sandy, full of gorse. Lovely silver skins they had; they went off to be hats in London and up North. Fed 'em in the winter, let 'em forage in the summer, neighbours complained but they flourished. Alternated with sheep in places. Vanished, along with much else. They found ways to make sheep cheaper, and corn too, and the rabbits died out. Trees going the same way now."
Roland could think of no intelligent comments about rabbits, but Maud replied with statistics about Fenland warrens and a description of an old warrener's tower on the Norfolk Baileys' estate. Sir George poured more tea. Lady Bailey said, "And what do you do in London, Mr Michell?"
"I'm a university research student. I do some teaching. I'm working for an edition of Randolph Henry Ash."
"He wrote a good poem we learned at school," said Sir George. "Never had any use for poetry myself, but I used to like that one. 'The Hunter.' Do you know that poem? About a stone-age chappie setting snares and sharpening flints and talking to his dog and snuffing the weather in the air. You got a real sense of danger from that poem. Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying. We had a sort of poet in this house once. I expect you'd think nothing to her. Terrible sentimental stuff about God and Death and the dew and fairies. Nauseating."
"Christabel LaMotte," said Maud.
"Just so. Funny old bird. Lately we get people round asking if we've got any of her stuff. I send them packing. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Joan and I. There was a frightful nosy American in the summer who just turned up out of the blue and told us how honoured we must be, having the old bat's relics up here. Covered with paint and jangling jewellery, a real mess, she was. Wouldn't go when I asked her politely. Had to wave the gun at her. Wanted to sit in Joan's winter garden. To remember Christabel. Such rot. Now a real poet, like your Randolph Henry Ash, that'd be something different, you'd be reasonably pleased to have someone like that in the family. Lord Tennyson was a bit of a soppy old thing too, on the whole, though he wrote some not bad things about Lincolnshire dialect. Not a patch on Mabel Peacock though. She really could hear Lincolnshire speech. Marvellous story about a hedgehog. Th'otchin 'at wasn't niver suited wi' nowt. Listen to this then. "Fra fo'st off he was werrittin' an witterin' an sissin an spittin perpetiwel." That's real history that is, words that are vanishing daily, fewer and fewer people learning them, all full of Dallas and Dynasty and the Beatles' jingle jangle."
"Mr Michell and Miss Bailey will think you are a frightful old stick, George. They like good poetry."
"They don't like Christabel LaMotte."
"Ah, but I do," said Maud. "It was Christabel who wrote the description I read of the Seal Court winter garden. In a letter. She made me see it, and the different evergreens, and the red berries and the dogwood and the sheltered bench and the silvery fish in the little pool… Even under the ice she could see them suspended-"
"We had an old torn cat who used to take the fish-"
"We restocked-"
"I'd love to see the winter garden. I'm writing about Christabel LaMotte."
"Ah," said Lady Bailey. "A biography. How interesting."
"I don't see," said Sir George, "that there'd be much to put in a biography. She didn't do anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn't a life. “
“As a matter of fact, it isn't a biography. It's a critical study. But of course she interests me. We went to look at her grave."
This was the wrong thing to say. Sir George's face darkened. His brows, which were sandy, drew down over his plummy nose. "That unspeakable female who came here-she had the impudence to hector me-to read me a lecture-on the state of that grave. Said its condition was shocking. A national monument. Not her national monument I told her, and she shouldn't come poking her nose in where, it wasn't wanted. She asked to borrow some shears. That was when I got the gun out. So she went and bought some in Lincoln and came back the next day and got down on her knees and cleaned it all up. The Vicar saw her. He comes over once a month, you know, and says Evensong in the church. She sat and listened in the back pew. Brought a huge bouquet. Affectation."
We saw-
"You don't have to shout at Miss Bailey, George," said his wife. "She's not responsible for all that. There's no reason why she shouldn't be interested in Christabel. I think you should show these young people Christabel's room. If they want to see. It's all locked away, you know, Mr Mitchell, and has been for generations. I don't know what sort of a state it's in, but I believe some of her things are still there. The family has occupied less and less of this house since the World Wars, every generation a little less-Christabel's room was in the east wing that's been closed since 1918, except for use as some kind of a glory-hole. And we, of course, live in a very small part of the building, and only downstairs, because of my disability. We do try to have general repairs done. The roofs sound, and there's a carpenter who sees to the floors. But no one's touched that room to my knowledge, since I came here as a bride in 1929. Then we lived in all this central portion. But the east wing was- not out of bounds exactly-but not used."
"You wouldn't see much," said Sir George. "You'd need a torch. No electricity, in that part of the house. Only on the ground-floor corridors."
Roland felt a strange pricking at the base of his neck. Through the carved window he saw the wet branches of the evergreens, darker on the dark. And the dim light in the gravel drive.