They had a weekend in Paris and a Concorde trip to New York. Nikki found herself moving in circles she’d never experienced before. Royal Ascot. Henley. Her drama school training came in useful.
They married in the church in rural Dorset where her parents lived. She arrived with Daddy in a pony and trap and after the reception in Dorchester’s best hotel, she and Julian were driven to the airport in a stretch limo. The honeymoon was in Bermuda. Julian paid for almost everything. Daddy couldn’t have managed to spend on that scale.
‘It’s no problem,’ Julian said. ‘I’m ridiculously well-off. Well, we are now.’
‘You deserve to be, my darling,’ Nikki said. ‘You’ve brought sunshine into so many lives.’
They bought a huge plot of land in Oxfordshire and had their house built to Julian’s design. As well as the usual bedrooms and reception rooms, it had an office suite, gym, games room, and two pools, indoors and out. A tennis court, stables, and landscaped garden. ‘I don’t want you ever to be bored,’ Julian said. ‘There are times when I’ll be away.’
Nikki was not bored. True, she’d given up her acting to devote more time to homemaking, but she could not have managed both. When Julian was at home, he was forever finding new windows of opportunity, days to seize. His energy never flagged. He got up at five thirty and swam a mile before breakfast and made sure she was up by seven. Even in her drama-school days she hadn’t risen that early. Actors work to-a different pattern.
He had each day worked out. ‘We’ll plant the new rockery this morning and clear the leaves out of the pool. This afternoon I’ll need your help fitting the curtains in the fourth bedroom. This evening the Mountnessings are coming for dinner and I want to prepare an Italian meal, so we’ll need to fit in some shopping.’
Nikki suggested more than once that most of these jobs could be done by staff. They could afford to get people in.
‘That goes against my principles,’ Julian said. ‘There’s immense satisfaction in doing the jobs ourselves.’
‘One day I’d like to sit by the pool we keep so clean,’ she said.
‘Doing what, my love?’
‘Just sitting – or better still, lying.’
He laughed. He thought she was joking.
In bed, he showed no sign of exhaustion. Nikki, twelve years younger than he, was finding it a trial to match his energy.
At such a pace, it didn’t take long for the house to be in perfect shape, all the curtains and carpets fitted, the pictures hung. Nikki had looked forward to some time to herself when the jobs were done, but she hadn’t reckoned on maintenance.
‘Maintenance?’
‘Keeping it up to the mark,’ Julian explained. ‘We don’t let the grass grow under our feet.’
In the middle of their lovemaking the same night, the thought occurred to her that he regarded this, too, as maintenance. From that moment, the magic went out of their marriage.
What a relief when he went to America for a week on a lecture tour. He left her a maintenance list, but she ignored it and lounged by the pool every day watching the leaves settle on the surface and sink to the bottom.
When he returned he was energised as ever. Jet lag was unknown to Julian’s metabolism. ‘So much to attend to,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you’d ignored that list I gave you.’
He was as active as usual in bed. And up before five next morning. He’d heard some house martins building a nest under the eaves above the bedroom window. They made an appalling mess if you didn’t do something about it.
When Nikki drew back the bedroom curtains she saw his suntanned legs right outside. He’d brought out his lightweight, aluminium ladder. His feet, in gleaming white trainers and socks, were on one of the highest rungs. She had to push hard to open the window and force the ladder backwards, but she succeeded. And let the sunshine in.
Love-Lies-Bleeding by Barbara Cleverly
It had taken me two hours to get here. I swished my way, bouncing through the puddles in a haze of falling leaves up the long drive to Felthorpe Hall in north Norfolk. Now, Norfolk isn’t Suffolk, and that’s a fact. The skies are wider, the building flints are bigger, the distances greater, and the cry of the wheeling plover more forlorn. Only fifty miles from home, but Felthorpe Hall could never have been in Suffolk.
For the last half-hour of my journey through dripping lanes, the rain had eased off, the sun had come out, and the whole countryside had taken on a more cheerful cast. But it would still have to work a whole lot harder to please me, I thought resentfully. I drove carefully down the tree-lined carriage road to the Hall, eagerly awaiting my first sight of the ancient house, so praised in the architectural guide I had hastily referred to before I started out. I turned a corner and there it stood by the side of a dark, reed-fringed, and heron-haunted lake.
The front door was wide and welcoming, its brick dressings satisfyingly good-hearted, and the lowering sun, reflected from its many windows, spoke of ancient warmth, but as I got out of my car I paused and shivered.
‘Keep off! Go away!’ said the house to me.
‘Deus tute me spectas,’ said a stone inscription in the parapet. ‘Thou, Lord, see’st me.’
All too likely, I thought.
I didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t my job. I paused for a moment to curse my boss, Charles Hastings. The words ‘spoilt’ and ‘manipulative’ were as closely associated with his name in my mind as were ‘rosy’ and ‘fingered’ with dawn in Homer’s. I ought to have seen this coming. Well, the truth was – I had. So why had I gone along with it? For the joy of seeing a gem of a house I had never visited before and the satisfaction of arriving by myself and saying, ‘Hello, I’m the architect, Eleanor Hardwick.’ By myself, not scuttling in Charles’s wake carrying the files and the hard hats and answering to the name of ‘little Miss…er…’
We do a lot of work for the English Country Houses Trust. Of the grandees who run it, Charles appears to have been at school with the few to whom he is not related. And, as our region of East Anglia is thickly strewn with great houses, the practice is a busy one. It was one of the reasons – it was my main reason – for applying for the job of his architectural assistant. Charles calls his Trust work the office ‘bread and butter’. I would call it the ‘strawberry jam’. I’m mad about ancient buildings. I always have been. And if you’re lucky enough to get a job working for an expert in this field and you’re based between Cambridge and the North Sea, you’ve died and gone to heaven!
The lush, rolling countryside seamed with narrow overhung lanes is rich in ancient churches, cathedrals, and even a castle or two, as well as the old domestic buildings. Down one of the overhung lanes in the middle of the county of Suffolk is Charles’s house, a wing of which masquerades as his office. Latin Hall is a fine though eccentric showcase for Charles’s skills. For a start, it’s thatched, and to go on, it was built in the late thirteen hundreds. Yes, thirteen hundreds. There was still a Roman emperor on the throne when the foundations were being dug, Charles told me at my interview. A rather debased emperor, perhaps, and ruling out of Constantinople, but it made a good story for the clients. They were intended to draw the inference ‘If this bloke can keep this building standing, he might be able to do something for mine.’
My first autumn working at Latin Hall was miserable. The weather was exceptionally wet and the medieval house leaked badly. The rain-swollen doors stuck, the windows funnelled the icy draughts that knifed down from the Arctic. Charles laughed at my complaints. ‘Keep you healthy, Ellie,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing like a low temperature and a constant air circulation to kill off the bugs! Much better for you to inhale air straight from Siberia than that pre-breathed rubbish they fill your lungs with in London.’