Head down, silent, without looking to either side, he walked us towards the entrance.
The brick pathway led us to the Corinthianesque porch. Carved into the sandstone beneath a small oak barometer on the porch’s outer left-hand pier were initials which I presumed correctly to be of the Siviter family: RS, CS, ES, and JS, and an unidentified other, CM. The door opened. The clatter of a piano resounding through the house ceased in mid-concerto. A maid-servant with a French accent and a rounded face freckled like a plover’s egg stood before us straight from the pages of Lettres de Mon Moulin. In a creaseless white apron and high starched collar she was as filled with grace as a Botticelli Venus. I smiled at her and was about to send her back into the interior with our cards when she was put aside. A man stepped out, dressed in putty-coloured - almost white - broad-cloth and, in surprising combination, a pale-grey patterned silk Ascot tie. It was our host.
Siviter looked of a slightly older age than his true middle or late forties, genial and breezy. His skin was dark by English standards. He sported a luxuriant dark moustache. Goldrimmed glasses over sharp little acetylene eyes were arched by outstanding eyebrows starting to bush with age. One or two teeth were false. At his side he held a brown soft felt hat with a broad, floppy brim and low crown. Stepping forward from beneath the fanlight to join us, he immediately placed it on his head.
In the open air he seemed remarkably small, the crown of the wideawake hardly reaching Holmes’ shoulder. I estimated his weight at less than nine stone, a slight amount for a man of his age. Author of the much-loved Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas, it was hard to believe he was the fourth best big-game shot our Eastern Empire had ever produced, a wonder with a 600 Express, a sporting rifle with a recoil so powerful it would break a man’s collar-bone if he fired it from a prone position. I marvelled that a man who still wrote extensively about the sapphire skies of India, picturesque buildings, minarets and domes, the camels, deserts, the sense of endless space and endless time should now be living contentedly in so confined a valley.
‘How very good of you to come, and at such short notice,’ he welcomed us warmly, guiding us towards the door. ‘Our patron Kipling himself would be here but he and his wife were called off to Vermont. They are selling up a property there.’
After these civilities we proceeded before him through the porch and open door and entered a dark-panelled hall where my hat, dust-coat and coat and umbrella were taken from me with a bright smile by the same Venus-like maid-servant who greeted our arrival at the porch. Her uniform emitted a slight smell of rose-geranium.
Walking into the Grand Hall from the calm greens of Sussex was like following Aladdin into the Cave of Enchantment. Flowers were abundant, arranged daintily in every nook and corner. We were at once face to face with mounted heads from big game expeditions, at least one in eastern Africa to judge by a long-necked Gerenuk. Burne-Jones’ ‘The Mill’ was flanked by two water-colours by Pevensey of what I took to be gardens at Crick’s End. At their side, in remarkable contrast, hung a group of five sepia watercolours depicting Indian trades and professions. Above a fine Coromandel screen was a masterly oil-painting titled Bridge over the Thames at Barnes. It portrayed a choppy and turbulent river in its best grey winter-wear, carrying a red barge towards the interior of London. Next to it, another great waterway was represented by a painting of a dahabiah sailing down the Gambia River. Both were signed by Lesley Abdela, a female artist of Greek descent as yet unknown to me.
We were walked alongside rich and glossy tapestries draping the walls, including one of the lost Titian painting ‘Portrait of Isabella d’Este in Red’. Carpets, especially a gold kincob carpet five yards square, gave a touch of Eastern luxury, magnified by the faint smell of tobaccos and spices of India and the sudden, unexpected, sharp clean scent of kaffir lemon grass hanging in the cool dank air. Much of the remaining space was filled with an assemblage of tiny objects, some from the Far East, all from a distant past. Every item had been brought back to England in Gladstone bags specially built for elephants.
In the one step it was as though we were re-entering the Raj or other far-away land, an infinity of all that was beautiful, of utility and in good taste, a space that brought to the senses the cacophony of the sounds of the East - ships’ bells, splashing oars, native shrieks, a world where if you stared over the rain you might see Mowgli seated on the jetty, or if you cocked an ear the sound of giant kettle drums from a distant Salute State. I half-expected an Oriental figure to glide towards me, a Hindoo servant clad in yellow turban, with white, loose-fitting clothes and a yellow sash, attendant on his Maharaja, Nizam, Nawab, Khan, Maharawal, Jam, Raja or Rao, potentates whose arrival in villages was feared like the coming of locusts, so large were their entourages which, like those of Tudor and Stuart kings, had to be fed and watered without as much as a silver rupee in compensating payment.
Breaking into my reverie, Siviter told us he anticipated two further guests within the hour. A third, Lord Van Beers, was already in residence or at least on the grounds. He had spent the previous night in a tent in the garden, ‘For the sake of his joints,’ Siviter added with an ironical expression. ‘He tells me the house is too dank.’
The artist Pevensey, grandee President of the Royal Academy, was also for the moment away from Crick’s End, ‘putting finishing touches to one or two commissions’. He would return around mid-afternoon to a make-shift studio in Park Mill, at the lower end of the gardens, and planned to leave in the early evening, his work completed.
Our talk was to take place in the parlour at three o’clock. There was time for us to be conducted around the gardens. Coats back on, we followed Siviter out of the Grand Hall along a stone-flagged passage and through a side-door on to large terraced lawns where we were greeted by an assembly of leaping, barking, overjoyed Aberdeen terriers and a brace of black, curly-coated retrievers released from their shed, eager for exercise. From their sentry-duty at the front of the house, their ever-watchful eye had spotted what they took to be a stratagem by Siviter to leave them behind.
Millstones punctuated the brick paths. Two gigantic Chinese monals squawked at the dogs, rising near vertically to settle in the branches. The air was filled with the low drone of insects and the sudden sharper note of a bluefly shooting past us with its quivering, long-drawn hum like an insect tuning-fork. The beds bloomed with herbaceous plants and shrubs chosen for their hardiness.
The brick pathway turned to paving stone. The valley air was warming up in the intermittent early-afternoon sun but within the garden it was still cool, with a slight breeze. Overlooking a terraced lawn, stone seats like the sedilia of a church had been pushed into the yew-hedge, facing to the South and West for evening sun and warmth. Tucked away by a hedge we could see Van Beers’ tent.
At the sundial Siviter stopped. ‘It is my custom,’ he informed us solemnly, ‘to honour our President by offering a few lines which he composed seated on a canvas chair at this very spot.’ With an arm held high, an engaging, almost boyish smile on his face, he sang the antistrophe of ‘The Way through the Woods’: