This collection’s title is taken from its first story, a novella, which is followed by four shorter tales, all expertly and sensitively drawn.
Story 1, “The Heir,” concerns an inheritance as told from the point of view of the heir, an unmarried middle-aged man. Its subtitle, “A Love Story,” is not a reference to another person but to the inheritance.
Story 2, “The Christmas Party,” tells of a longtime family alienation and separation followed by a shocking reunion.
Story 3, “Patience,” is a touching tale of an apparently “comfortable” marriage, but where the husband tends to lapse into his secret memories of a long-past love. The title is the name both of a version of Solitaire that his wife often plays and of her coping with her husband’s curious mental absences.
Story 4, “Her Son,” is the poignant story of an aging mother eagerly planning for the future with her long-absent son, now returning but with his own private ideas.
Story 5, “The Parrot,” is a short allegory about the unremitting need for freedom.
By : Vita Sackville-West (1892 - 1962)
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Miss Chase lay on her immense red silk four-poster that reached as high as the ceiling. Her face was covered over by a sheet, but as she had a high, aristocratic nose, it raised the sheet into a ridge, ending in a point. Her hands could also be distinguished beneath the sheet, folded across her chest like the hands of an effigy; and her feet, tight together like the feet of an effigy, raised the sheet into two further points at the bottom of the bed. She was eighty-four years old, and she had been dead for twenty-four hours.
The room was darkened into a shadowy twilight. Outside, in a pale, golden sunshine, the birds twittered among the very young green of the trees. A thread of this sunshine, alive with golden dust-motes, sundered the curtain and struck out, horizontally, across the boards of the floor. One of the two men who were moving with all possible discretion about the room, paused to draw the curtains more completely together.
“Very annoying, this delay about the coffin,” said Mr. Nutley. “However, I got off the telegrams to the papers in time, I hope, to get the funeral arrangements altered. It would be very awkward if people from London turned up for the funeral on Thursday instead of Friday—very awkward indeed. Of course, the local people wouldn’t turn up; they would know the affair had had to be put off; but London people—they’re so scattered. And they would be annoyed to find they had given up a whole day to a country funeral that wasn’t to take place after all.”
“I should think so, indeed,” said Mr. Chase, peevishly. “I know the value of time well enough to appreciate that.”
“Ah yes,” Mr. Nutley replied with sympathy, “you’re anxious to be back at Wolverhampton, I know. It’s very annoying to have one’s work cut into. And if you feel like that about it, when the old lady was your aunt, what would comparative strangers from London feel, if they had to waste a day?”
They both looked resentfully at the still figure under the sheet on the bed, but Mr. Chase could not help feeling that the solicitor was a little over-inclined to dot his i’s in the avoidance of any possible hypocrisy. He reflected, however, that it was, in the long run, preferable to the opposite method of Mr. Farebrother, Nutley’s senior partner, who was at times so evasive as to be positively unintelligible.
“Very tidy, everything. H’m—handkerchiefs, gloves, little bags of lavender in every drawer. Yes, just what I should have expected: she was a rare one for having everything spick and span. She’d go for the servants, tapping her stick sharp on the boards, if anything wasn’t to her liking; and they all scuttled about as though they’d been wound up after she’d done with them. I don’t know what you’ll do with the old lady’s clothes, Mr. Chase. They wouldn’t fetch much, you know, with the exception of the lace. There’s fine, real lace here, that ought to be worth something. It’s all down in the heirloom book, and it’ll have to be unpicked off the clothes. But for the rest, say twenty pounds. These silk dresses are made of good stuff, I should say,” observed Mr. Nutley, fingering a row of black dresses that hung inside a cupboard, and that as he stirred them moved with the faint rustle of dried leaves; “take my advice, and give some to the housekeeper; that’ll be of more value to you in the end than the few pounds you might get for them. Always get the servants on your side, is my axiom. However, it’s your affair; you’re the sole heir, and there’s nobody to interfere.” He said this with a sarcastic inflection detected only by himself; a warning note under the ostensible deference of his words as though daring Chase to assert his rights as the heir. “And, anyway,” he concluded, “we’re not likely to find any more papers in here, so we’re wasting time now. Shall we go down?”
“Wait a minute, listen: what’s that noise out in the garden?”
“Oh, that! one of the peacocks screeching. There are at least fifty of the damned birds. Your aunt wouldn’t have one of them killed, not one. They ruin a garden. Your aunt liked the garden, and she liked the peacocks, but she liked the peacocks better than the garden. Screech, screech—you’ll soon do away with them. At least, I should say you would do away with them if you were going to live here. I can see you’re a man of sense.”
Mr. Chase drew Mr. Nutley and his volubility out on to the landing, closing the door behind him. The solicitor ruffled the sheaf of papers he carried in his hand, trying to peep between the sheets that were fastened together by an elastic band.
“Well,” he said briskly, “if you’re agreeable I think we might go downstairs and find Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth. You see, we are trying to save you all the time we possibly can. What about the old lady? do you want anyone sent in to sit with her?”
“I really don’t know,” said Chase, “what’s usually done? you know more about these things than I do.”
“Oh, as to that, I should think I ought to!” Nutley replied with a little self-satisfied smirk. “Perhaps you won’t believe me, but most weeks I’m in a house with a corpse. There are usually relatives, of course, but in this case if you wanted anyone sent in to sit with the old lady, we should have to send a servant. Shall I call Fortune?”
“Perhaps you had better—but I don’t know: Fortune is the butler, isn’t he? Well, the butler told me all the servants were very busy.”
“Then it might be as well not to disturb them? At any rate, the old lady won’t run away,” said Mr. Nutley jocosely.
“No, perhaps we needn’t disturb them.” Chase was relieved to escape the necessity of giving an order to a servant.
They went downstairs together.
“Hold on to the banisters, Mr. Chase; these polished stairs are very tricky. Fine old oak; solid steps too; but I prefer a drugget myself. Good gracious, how that peacock startled me! Look at it, sitting on the ledge outside the window. It’s pecking at the panes with its beak. Shoo! you great gaudy thing.” The solicitor flapped his arms at it, like a skinny crow beating its wings.
They stopped to look at the peacock, which, walking the outside ledge with spread tail, seemed to form part, both in colour and pattern, of the great heraldic window on the landing of the staircase. The sunlight streamed through the colours, and the square of sunlight on the boards was chequered with patches of violet, red, and indigo.
“Gaudy?” said Chase. “It’s barbaric. Like jewels. Astonishing.”
Mr. Nutley glanced at him with a faint contempt. Chase was a sandy, weakly-looking little man, with thin reddish hair, freckles, and washy blue eyes. He wore an old Norfolk jacket and trousers that did not match; Mr. Nutley, in his quick impatient mind, set him aside as reassuringly insignificant.
“Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth are in the library, I believe,” Nutley suggested.
“Don’t forget to introduce me to Colonel Stanforth,” said Chase, dismayed at having to meet yet another stranger. “He was an intimate friend of my aunt’s, wasn’t he? Is he the only trustee?”
“The other one died and was never replaced. As for Colonel Stanforth being an intimate friend of the old lady, he was indeed; about the only friend she ever had; she frightened everybody else away,” said Nutley, opening the library door.
“Ah, Mr. Chase!” Mr. Farebrother exclaimed in a relieved and propitiatory tone.
“We’ve been through all the drawers,” Mr. Nutley said, his briskness redoubled in his partner’s presence. “We’ve got all the necessary papers—they weren’t even locked up—so now we can get to business. With any luck Mr. Chase ought to see himself back at Wolverhampton within the week, in spite of the delay over the funeral. I’ve told Mr. Chase that it isn’t strictly correct to open the papers before the funeral is over, but that, having regard to his affairs in Wolverhampton, and in view of the fact that there are no other relatives whose susceptibilities we might offend, we are setting to work at once.” He was bending over the table, sorting out the papers as he talked, but now he looked up and saw Chase still standing in embarrassment near the door. “Dear me, I was forgetting. Mr. Chase, you don’t know Colonel Stanforth, your trustee, I think? Colonel Stanforth has lived outside the park gates all his life, and I wager he knows every acre of your estate better than you ever will yourself, Mr. Chase.”
Mr. Farebrother, a round little rosy man in large spectacles, smiled benignly as Chase and Stanforth shook hands. He liked bringing the heir and the trustee together, but his pleasure was clouded by Nutley’s last remark, suggesting as it did that Chase would never have the opportunity of learning his estate; he felt this remark to be in poor taste.
“Oh, come! I hope we shall have Mr. Chase with us for some time,” he said pleasantly, “although,” he added, recollecting himself, “under such melancholy circumstances.” He had never been known to make any more direct allusion to death than that contained in this or similarly consecrated phrases. Mr. Nutley pounced instantly upon the evasion.
“After all, Farebrother, Chase never knew the old lady, remember. The melancholy part of it, to my mind, is the muddle the estate is in. Mortgaged up to the last shilling, and over-run with peacocks. Won’t you come and sit at the table, Mr. Chase? Here’s a pencil in case you want to make any notes.”
Colonel Stanforth came up to the table at the same time. Chase shied away, and went to sit on the window-seat. Mr. Farebrother began a little preamble.
“We sent for you immediately, Mr. Chase; that is to say, Colonel Stanforth, who was on the spot at the moment of the regrettable event, communicated with us and with you simultaneously. We should like to welcome you, with all the sobriety required by the cloud which must hang over this occasion, to the estate which has been in the possession of your family for the past five hundred years. We should like to express our infinite regret at the embarrassments under which the estate will be found to labour. We should like to assure you—I am speaking now for my partner and myself—that our firm has been in no way responsible for the management of the estate. Miss Chase, your aunt, whom I immensely revered, was a lady of determined character and charitable impulses....”
“You mean, she was an obstinate old sentimentalist,” said Mr. Nutley, losing his patience.
Mr. Farebrother looked gently pained.
“Charitable impulses,” he repeated, “which she was always loth to modify. Colonel Stanforth will tell you that he has had many a discussion....” (“I should just think so,” said Colonel Stanforth, “you could argue the hind leg off a donkey, but you couldn’t budge Phillida Chase,”) “there were questions of undesirable tenants and what not—I confess it saddens me to think of Blackboys so much encumbered....”
“Encumbered! My good man, the place will be in the market as soon as I can get it there,” said Mr. Nutley, interrupting again, and tapping his pencil on the table.
“It would have been so pleasant,” said Mr. Farebrother sighing, “if matters had been in an entirely satisfactory condition, and our duty towards Mr. Chase would have been so joyfully fulfilled. Your family, Mr. Chase, were Lords of the Manor of Blackboys long before any house was built upon this site. The snapping of such a chain of tradition....”
“Out of date, out of date, my good man,” said Nutley, full of contempt and surprisingly spiteful.
“Let’s get on to the will,” suggested Stanforth.
Mr. Nutley produced it with alacrity.
“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Farebrother, wiping his spectacles. The reading of a will was to him always a painful proceeding. It was indeed an unkind fate which had cast one of his amiable and conciliatory nature into the melancholy regions of the law.
“It’s very short,” said Nutley, and read it aloud.
After providing for a legacy of five hundred pounds to the butler, John Fortune, in recognition of his long and devoted service, and for a legacy of two hundred and fifty pounds to her friend Edward Stanforth “in anticipation of services to be rendered after my death,” the testator devised the Manor of Blackboys and the whole of the Blackboys Estate and all other messuages tenements hereditaments and premises situate in the counties of Kent and Sussex and elsewhere and all other estates and effects whatsoever and wheresoever both real and personal to her nephew Peregrine Chase at present of Wolverhampton.
“Sensible woman—she got a solicitor to draw up her will,” said Mr. Nutley as he ended; “no side-tracks, no ambiguities, no bother. Sensible woman. Now we can get to work.”
“Ah, dear!” said Mr. Farebrother in wistful reminiscence, “how well I remember the day Miss Chase sent for me to assist her in the making of that will; it was just such a day as this, and after I had been waiting a little while she came into the room, a black lace cap on her white hair, and her beautiful hands leaning on the top of her stick—she had very beautiful hands, your aunt, Mr. Chase, beautiful cool ivory hands—and I remember she was singularly gracious, singularly gracious; a great lady of the old school, and she was pleased to twit me about my reluctance to admit that some day even she ... ah, well, will-making is a painful matter; but I remember her, gallant as ever....”
“That’s all rubbish, Farebrother,” said Mr. Nutley rudely, as his partner showed signs of meandering indefinitely on; “gracious, indeed! When you know she terrified you nearly out of your life. You always get mawkish like this about people once they’re dead.”
Mr. Farebrother blinked mildly, and Nutley continued without taking any further notice of him.
“You haven’t done so well out of this as John Fortune,” he said to Stanforth, “and you’ll have a deal more trouble.”
“I take it,” said Stanforth, getting up and striding about the room, “that in the matter of this estate there are a great many liabilities and no assets to speak of, except the estate itself? To start with, there’s a twenty-thousand-pound mortgage. What’s the income from the farms?”
“A bare two thousand a year.”
“So you start the year with a deficit, having paid off your income tax and the interest on the mortgage. Disgusting,” said Stanforth. “One thing, at any rate, is clear: the place must go. One could just manage to keep the house, of course, but I don’t see how anyone could afford to live in it, having kept it. The land isn’t worth over much, but luckily we’ve got the house and gardens. What figure, Nutley? Thirty thousand? Forty?”
Mr. Nutley whistled.
“You’re optimistic. The house isn’t so very large, and it’s inconvenient, no bath-rooms, no electric light, no garage, no central heating. The buyer would have all that on his hands, and the moat ought to be cleaned out too. It’s insanitary.”
“Still, the house is historical,” said Stanforth; “I think we can safely say thirty thousand for the house. It’s a perfect specimen of Elizabethan, so I’ve always been told, and has the Tudor moat and outbuildings into the bargain. Thirty thousand for the house,” he noted on a piece of paper.
“I wouldn’t care for it myself,” said Mr. Nutley, looking round, “low rooms, dark passages, a stinking moat, and a slippery staircase. If that’s Tudor, you’re welcome to it.” His voice had a peculiarly malignant intonation. “Still, it’s a gentleman’s place, I don’t deny, and ought to make an interesting item under the hammer.” He passed the tip of his tongue over his lips, a gesture horridly voluptuous in one so sharp and meagre.
“Then we have the furniture and the tapestries and the pictures,” Stanforth went on. “I think we might reckon another twenty thousand for them. Americans, you know—or the buyer of the house might care for some of the furniture. The pictures aren’t of much value, so I understand, save as of family interest. Twenty thousand. That clears off the mortgage. What about the farms and the land?”
“You could split some of the park up into building lots,” said Mr. Nutley.
Mr. Farebrother gave a little exclamation.
“The park—it’s a pretty park, Nutley.”
“Very pretty, and any builder who chose to run up half a dozen villas would be a sensible chap,” Mr. Nutley replied, wilfully misunderstanding him. “I should suggest a site at the top of the hill, where you get the view. What do you think, Colonel Stanforth?”
“I think the buyer of the house should be given the option of buying in the whole of the park, that section being reserved at the price of accommodation land, if he chooses to pay for it.”
Mr. Nutley nodded. He approved of Colonel Stanforth as an adequately shrewd business man.
“There remain the farm lands,” he said, referring to his papers. “Two thousand acres, roughly; three good farm houses; and a score of cottages. It’s a little difficult to price. Say, taking one thing in with another, twenty pounds an acre, including the buildings—a good deal of the land is worth less. Forty thousand. We’ve disposed now of all the assets. We shall be lucky if we can clear the death-duties and mortgage out of the proceeds of the sale, and let Mr. Chase go with whatever amount the house itself fetches to bring him in a few hundreds a year for the rest of his life.”
They stared across at Chase, whose concern with the affair they appeared hitherto to have forgotten. Mr. Farebrother alone kept his eyes bent down, as very meticulously he sharpened the point of his pencil.
“It’s an unsatisfactory situation,” said Mr. Nutley; “if I were Chase I should resent being dragged away from my ordinary business on such an unprofitable affair. He’ll be lucky, as you say, if he clears the actual value of the house for himself after everything is settled up. Now, are we to try for auction or private treaty? Personally I think the house at any rate will go by private treaty. The present tenants will probably buy in their own farms. But the house, if it’s reasonably well advertised, ought to attract a number of private buyers. We must have a decent caretaker to show people over the place. I suggest the present butler? He was in Miss Chase’s service for thirty years.” He looked round for approval; Chase and Stanforth both nodded, though Chase felt so much of an outsider that he wondered whether Nutley would consider him justified in nodding. “Ring the bell, Farebrother, will you? It’s just behind you. Look at the bell, gentlemen! what an antiquated arrangement! There’s no doubt, the house is terribly inconvenient.”
Fortune, the butler, came in, a thin grizzled man in decent black.
Perhaps you had better give your instructions, Nutley, Chase said from the window-seat as the solicitor glanced at him with conventional hesitation.
“I’m speaking for Mr. Chase, Fortune,” said Mr. Nutley. “Your late mistress’s will unfortunately isn’t very satisfactory, and Blackboys will be in the market before very long. We want you to stay on until then, with such help as you need, and you must tell the other servants they have all a month’s notice. By the way, you inherit five hundred pounds under the will, but it’ll be some time before you get it.”
“Blackboys in the market?” Fortune began.
“Oh, my good man, don’t start lamenting again here,” exclaimed Mr. Nutley hurriedly; “think of those five hundred pounds—a very nice little sum of which we should all be glad, I’m sure.”
“Dear me, dear me,” said Mr. Farebrother, much distressed, and he got up and patted Fortune on the shoulder.
Nutley was collecting the papers again into a neat packet, boxing them together on the table as though they had been a pack of cards. He glanced up to say,
“That settled, Fortune? Then we needn’t keep you any longer; thanks. Well, Mr. Chase, if there’s anything we can do for you to-morrow, you have only to ring me up or Farebrother—oh, I forgot, of course, you aren’t on the telephone here.”
Chase, who had been thinking to himself that Nutley was a splendid man—really efficient, a first-class man, was suddenly aware that he resented the implied criticism.
“I can go to the post-office if I want to telephone,” he said coldly.
Mr. Farebrother noticed the coldness in his tone, and thought regretfully, “Dear me, Nutley has offended him—ignored him completely all the time. I ought to have put that right—very remiss of me.”
He said aloud,
“If Mr. Chase would prefer not to sleep in the house, I should be very glad to offer him hospitality....”
“Afraid of the old lady’s ghost, Chase?” said Mr. Nutley with a laugh that concealed a sneer.
They all laughed, with exception of Mr. Farebrother, who was pained.
Chase was tired; he wished they would go; he wanted to be alone.
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