Hugh Farrington purchased Inglewood House intending to use it as a summer estate, but on the family’s first foray up from London, his wife, Prudence, fell in love with its remove. They stayed for the better part of eight months, during which time Prudence oversaw various improvements and added feminine touches to make the rooms less austere.
We know that George Farrington’s early years in Inglewood were as delightful for him as they were miserable for his brother, Norvill. William Eliot had alluded to this in his talk at the Chester, citing a short nineteenth-century monograph of the family written by a local headmaster who’d been acquainted with the Farringtons. Norvill was caned regularly by his tutor, had no friends to speak of and was forced to stay home and take extra lessons, while George, three years older, was allowed to travel with his father when he visited the House of Commons. One spring Norvill gathered the nerve to enter his father’s study to complain about the inequity, and Hugh, in a bout of unpredictable anger, struck him in the head with the sheaf of papers he was reading. Thereafter he refused, out of shame, to allow Norvill to bring up either issue again. Norvill that year was made all the more miserable by George’s happiness with village life, by his friendship with the head gardener’s son and his tireless enthusiasm for the outdoors. This misery he exhausted by setting snares in the woods for hares, taunting the blacksmith’s daughter and, once, catching a grass snake by the river and releasing it in the scullery.
Norvill had only been away at university a year when George wrote to tell him about being offered a place on a botanical expedition to the Himalayas. He would be gone eight months and Norvill would need to stay the term in Inglewood to manage the house and property and look after their mother, who had begun to suffer from nerves again. Their father, he wrote, was required too often in the city to make lodging in the country house a reasonable option for him.
We know it was in that year, as George dispatched letters from canvas tents perched on cliffsides — the hands of the porters who delivered them to British ships so dirty the envelopes arrived at Inglewood with a crust of earth — that Norvill began to imagine his brother dead. Their mother read the missives to herself at the breakfast table, the hand holding the paper visibly trembling, the other flat on her neck. As he watched her lips move silently, Norvill invented a catalogue of misfortunes: cholera one day, rockslide the next, a parasite or botched robbery in a village on another. His mother would smooth the spotless white table linen in front of her when she was done, and Norvill would glower at his grizzled bacon, shoving his fork into the pale flesh of the melon brought into the village by cart, fantasizing that George was, at that very minute, expiring on a gravelly hillside. His mother, her face lit up, asking once, “Whatever, darling, are you smiling at?”
Neither George nor Norvill had children, and after Prudence died the estate fell into the hands of her nephew Archie, the only son of her younger brother. He had the house emptied and the household dismissed almost immediately but held on to the property. During the bombing in the Second World War, Inglewood House was used to lodge schoolchildren from the south, as was the nearby Whitmore. The estate’s gardens were already ruined by then, according to the local historian, and further demolished when volunteers dug up some of the plots near the house to plant vegetables.
After the war Inglewood House sat empty. Then, in the 1960s, long after anyone had set foot in it, Archie’s daughter listed the house with a property agent in London along with the furniture Archie had kept, and a good portion of what, by then, had become “unfashionable” art, as well as the books, the textiles and the moth-eaten menagerie of stuffed mammals that had been stowed in their coastal attic. The property was advertised for ten years before a group of investors from the Inglewood area managed to form a Trust and purchase it, hoping to find the capital to restore the gardens as a means of bringing tourists into the village. By the time of the book’s writing in 1976, the estate was falling apart, though the author felt sure — in the way hopeful local historians tended to — that the estate would “soon be returned to its former glory so that it can take its place as a unique representative of the houses of its age.”
When Maureen comes out to clear Jane’s plate, Jane says, “Thanks,” then “Sorry,” because she can tell from the dwindling sounds of the washing-up on the other side of the swinging kitchen door that she is the last of the five guests to have come down for breakfast and that Maureen has been waiting for her to finish up.
“We make the rooms up between noon and two,” Maureen says, the red apron she was wearing over her blouse replaced by a simple grey jacket, a pink shimmer on her lips as if she’s going out. She collects the cutlery and then angles the Inglewood book on the table so that she can see it better. On the cover there’s a black-and-white photograph of the estate house from the turn of the century, the Doric columns of the front portico looming over a half-dozen gardeners in white shirts and waistcoats clipping hedges or hand-mowing a lawn that seems to sprawl endlessly in front of them. “My grandfather was a delivery boy there,” Maureen says. “Never once set foot in the place.” She pauses. “Do you need anything else?”
“No thanks.”
She bends sideways to get a better look out the window behind Jane. “It’s nice weather for your walk to the caves.”
“I might go over to Inglewood House, actually.”
As Maureen heads toward the kitchen, she says over her shoulder, “It’s not open to the public, I’m afraid. They’ve been doing some work there on the weekdays, taking up half the village parking.”
To get a better look at the estate Jane puts her hands up onto the mossy ledge of the stone wall that runs along the field, its flattened top lined with a carpet of lichen that furzes under her fingers. With the toe of her left shoe jammed into a crevice, she tries to haul herself up. On her third go she gets high enough to rest her torso on the ledge, the flat width of stone pushing into her abdomen, her legs dangling and Sam barking and turning circles below. From up here she can see the back of the manor: a row of floor-to-ceiling windows that look onto the gardens, four narrow balconies spaced evenly above those, and then the roof, gabling up to its six chimneys. There are ceramic pots of juniper on the patio stones clustered next to a dozen bags of fertilizer and a wheelbarrow; the air is claggy with the smell of manure and mulch.
When she drops back down onto the grass near Sam, he jumps up on her, his paws dirtying her jeans, tail wagging madly. For a second or two she thinks she will carry on with their walk as planned, but then the image of Leeson and Herschel meeting Farrington in a parlour on the other side of the stone wall pulls at her. This is followed by thoughts of N, by what it might mean — at a time when everything else in her life is going so badly — to find her.
“Right, then, Mr. Coleridge”—she claps, bending down to Sam and hooking one arm under his forelegs and the other under his bum—“you wait up on top. Do you hear me? Wait!” And once up, having pushed himself off her chest with his back legs, he does wait, all two and a half stone of him balanced sideways on the flat top of the wall, inching down into a sit while Jane hauls herself up again.
Inglewood House, when Jane peers into its windows, is in a strange state, as if mid-restoration. Looking through the tall windows that line what was once a library Jane can discern a half-dozen pieces of furniture covered in dustsheets and stacks of boxes lined up on either side of a large marble fireplace. The far wall of the room is completely taken up with empty bookshelves of gleaming wood. Heavy silk curtains hang on either side of the windows, gold tassels banding the cloth; the ceiling has an ornate set of panels with motifs from the Orient. The library is uncarpeted except for ratty grey runners laid over the hardwood — the kind movers set down at every venue.