The China Governess Read online

  From the embankment above there was a clatter as the signal fell and her arms closed round him possessively.

  ‘I’d still rather you didn’t go. I’ll hold you. I’ll make you miss the train.’

  He released himself gently. ‘Please don’t,’ he said gravely but with great sweetness, his lips close to her ear. ‘You hurt too much. Too much altogether.’ And turning from her he ran up the slope into the half-light which was already throbbing with the noise of the train.

  Julia sat listening until the engine had shrieked away into the fields once more and then with a sense of desolation she let in the clutch and drove away through the back roads to where the village of Angevin lay hidden in the Suffolk folds.

  She avoided the turning to the single main street of cottages and took, instead, the upper road which wound through the fields to a pair of neglected iron gates which led into a park so thickly wooded with enormous elms as to be completely dark although their leaves were scarcely a green mist amid the massive branches.

  The trees grew near to the house, so close in fact that they obscured it from the north side and she had to use the headlights to find the squat Tudor arch which led into the paved yard. As she passed it a yellow-lit doorway suddenly appeared in the shadowy masonry and the angular figure of a woman stood silhouetted within it. She came running out to the car.

  ‘Mr. Tim?’

  ‘No.’ Julia was apologetic. ‘It’s only me I’m afraid, Mrs. Broome. We got held up and I left him at the station. You knew he was going back to London, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Until tonight.’

  There was an indescribable note of satisfaction in the brisk voice which startled Julia as well as reassuring her, and the newcomer went on talking. ‘He told me all about it on the telephone and what he didn’t tell me I was able to put together. There isn’t much Mr. Tim hides from me.’

  It was a strange greeting, neither hostile nor effusive, but possessive and feminine and tremendously authoritative. Julia was only just sufficiently sophisticated not to be irritated. ‘What about the car? I don’t think it ought to stand out where it can be seen, do you?’

  ‘No, miss, I certainly don’t and I’ve given my mind to that, all night nearly. I think it should go down to the little piggy brick house. I’ll show you where.’

  She stepped into the empty seat and pointed to an opening on the farther side of the yard.

  As she settled down beside her, Julia noticed that she was trembling with excitement, and her round face turned suddenly towards her showed patchy red and white. Margaret Broome was a woman of perhaps fifty, but her coarse hair was still fair and her light brown eyes were bright and shiny as pebbles in a brook. Her gay green cardigan was buttoned tightly across her chest and she folded her arms against the cold.

  ‘It’s all overgrown but if you drive slowly you’ll make it.’ she hurried on. ‘I slipped down last evening to make sure we could get in. It’s the old summer-house at the end of the View. We used to call it the piggy house when Tim was a baby, after the little pig’s house that was built of brick you know.’ She was unselfconscious in her nursery talk, matter of fact rather. ‘Nobody goes there now. It’s too far for anyone in the house but right in front of the windows, so no one’s going to hop in there courting from the village. Here we are. See, I propped the doors open. You drive straight in.’

  It was a little ornamental temple with a tessellated floor and pillars, designed perhaps as a music-room in some far off Victorian age of extravagance.

  The panelled double doors had lost much of their paint but they were still stout and the car lights revealed the usual summer-house miscellany piled in spider-infested confusion against the far wall.

  ‘There,’ said Nanny Broome, hopping out with the agility of a girl, ‘now we’ll shut and lock the doors on it and no one will be a penny the wiser. We must hurry though, because it’s nearly light. Come along, miss, stir your stumps.’

  The nursery way of speaking flowed over Julia, amusing and reassuring her without her realizing that she was receiving a treatment whose technique was as ancient as history. She hurried obediently, helped to close the doors and then followed the angular figure round the side of the building to the broad, terraced path which led up the slope to the front of the Keep. As she looked up and saw it for the first time from this vantage-point she paused abruptly, and the older woman who was watching her exploded in a delighted giggle. In the pink light of dawn, with the long shafts of sunrise cutting through the mist towards it, the Keep at Angevin was something to see.

  At that moment it was a piece of pure visual romance, inspired and timeless. Much of its triumph lay in the fact that it was an unfinished thing. The original family who had begun to build a palace to outrival Nonesuch had died out before they had put up little more than the gateway, so that the actual structure which had come down to posterity retained the secret magic of a promise rather than the overpowering splendour of a great architectural achievement.

  Two slender towers of narrow rose-pink brick, fretted with mullioned windows, were flanked by three-storied wings of the same period, all very carefully restored and remarkably little spoiled by the Victorian architect who had chosen to build the summer-house at this magnificent point of vantage.

  ‘How staggering it looks from here!’ Julia was almost laughing. ‘When I came to the house-party at Christmas we didn’t get as far as this so I never saw it from this angle. I know why Timothy calls it his castle.’

  ‘It is his castle.’ Again the satisfied and possessive warning note jarred on the younger woman. ‘When he was a tiny boy in the war, he and I used to sneak out here in the very early morning mushrooming, and I used to tell him about the knights riding in the courtyard, jousting and saving ladies and killing dragons and so on. He loved it. All the kids have it now on telly,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘Do you ever see it? Ivanhoe.’

  ‘That was a bit earlier, I think. You’re a few hundred years out. When was this building begun? Henry the Eighth’s reign I suppose?’

  ‘Henry the Eighth! He was nobody to tell a child about!’ Mrs. Broome appeared to be annoyed by a fancied criticism. She strode up the path, the patches on her round face brighter, and her eyes as hard and obstinate as stone. ‘I’m afraid I wanted my young Mr. Timmy to grow up to be a chivalrous gentleman with a proper attitude towards women,’ she said acidly. ‘I hope you’ve discovered that he has one, miss?’

  She turned her head as she spoke and made it a direct question. Julia regarded her blankly. ‘I love him very much,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘Well, I thought you did, miss, or you’d hardly be here now would you?’ The country voice was ruthless. ‘What I was meaning to say was I hope you’ve always found him what you’d wish, you having been brought up as I hope you have?’

  It only dawned upon Julia very slowly that she was being asked outright whether or no she was a virgin, and her youthful poise wilted under the unexpected probe. The colour rose up her throat and poured over her face, making the very roots of her hair tingle.

  ‘I . . .’ she was beginning but once again Nanny Broome had the advantage. Reassured on a point which had clearly been exercising her, she became kindness itself and almost more devastating.

  ‘I see you have,’ she said, patting the visitor’s arm. ‘Of course young people are the same in every generation. There’s always the ‘do’s’ and the ‘don’ts’ and it’s only a fashion which seems to put one or the other lot in the front rank for the time being.’ And, as if to emphasize her wholehearted co-operation in an enterprise of which she had once been doubtful, she seized the girl’s little suitcase and hurried on with it, still talking. ‘Sometimes children get funny ideas, but I brought up Mr. Timmy myself, and I didn’t think the schools could have done him much harm after that. It’s a scientific fact, isn’t it, that if you have a child until he’s six it doesn’t matter who has him afterwards.’ Again she gave the little laugh that would have been arch had it not b
een for the alarming quality of complete faith which pervaded it.

  The girl glanced at her sharply under her lashes, and the blurred youthfulness of her face stiffened a little.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind me calling you Nanny Broome but that’s how I think of you. I’ve heard it so often from Timothy,’ she began, taking the initiative. ‘Did you look after him from the time he was born?’

  ‘Very nearly. He was just over the two days, I suppose, and the ugliest little monkey you ever saw. Great big mouth and ears and his eyes all squitted up like a changeling in the fairy tales.’ She laughed delightedly and her face became radiant and naïve. ‘I’ve looked forward to saying that to the girl he was going to marry for over twenty-one years.’

  Julia’s intelligent mouth twitched despite herself. ‘And is it true?’ she ventured. ‘I mean, was he really? Or can’t you remember now?’

  The elder woman blinked like a child caught out romancing. It was a completely sincere reaction and utterly disarming. ‘Well, I remember he was very sweet,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I loved every little tiny scrap of him, that’s all I know. He was my baby. I’d lost my own, you see, and he crept right into my heart.’ She used the cliché as if she had coined it, and the essential side of her nature, which was warm, unselfish and mindless as a flower bud, opened before the girl. ‘You see I’d been a nurse in the Paget family over at St. Bede’s and I was just on thirty when I met Mr. Broome, who was the head gardener, caretaker and everything else here. He was a widower with five lovely grown-up children and when he asked me I couldn’t resist them and all this lovely place to bring them to. So I married him, and my own little boy was on the way when there was all that business before the war – Munich time. The doctors had me in hospital at Ipswich but it was no good. Baby didn’t live and I came back knowing I wouldn’t have another. So when I was given Timmy to look after you can guess, I expect, young though you are, how I felt. And hasn’t he grown up a darling? And now you’ve come to take him away.’ The final phrase was spoken solely for effect and its falseness did not convince even Mrs. Broome herself, apparently, for she laughed at it even while she uttered it and there was no trace of resentment in tone or smile. ‘You’ll never take him right away,’ she added with a grin of pure feminine satisfaction. ‘He’ll always be my little Prince Tim of the Rose-red Castle in one little corner of his heart. You can see that’s true because where did he bring you? He brought you to me to hide you. Now you come along and I’ll give you a cup of tea.’

  They had reached the last terrace as she finished speaking and only a lawn separated them from the tall graceful façade, whose blank windows looked out sightlessly to the estuary two miles away.

  ‘It’s all locked up except for my little door.’ She took her visitor’s elbow and guided her over the damp grass to the narrow entrance from which she had first appeared.

  Julia was aware of a small service hall with the stone painted walls and varnished woodwork of the more solid variety of Victorian Gothic mansion, and found herself ushered into a long, narrow room with a very high ceiling. It was yet warm and remarkably comfortable despite a double row of painted waterpipes round the cornice.

  ‘Since the children went and Miss Alison wanted Broome and me to live in the house, we gave up our cottage and I’ve made us a little flat out here.’ Her guide led her over to the window where a modern dining unit complete with pews and a gay blue and yellow plastic-topped table had been installed. ‘The big kitchen is nearly forty feet long so there was no point in poor old Broome and me rattling about in it alone. I use the scullery as my kitchen and the butler’s pantry has made me a lovely double bedroom and you’d never guess that this was the still-room before the First World War, would you? It’s my lounge now and I love it. Excuse me a moment while I see to the kettle.’

  She bustled out of the room, arch, affected, enjoying the romantic situation to the full and yet, despite it all, strangely genuine at heart. Julia looked about her curiously. The room reflected its owner to the point of giving itself away. A pile of weekly magazines whose bright covers promised the latest in patterns and notions stood on the old-fashioned dresser, which itself had been treated with white paint. The walls under the festooning waterpipes were hung with a rose-strewn paper and the sky-blue curtains matched the table-top and the washable upholstery of the chair-seats. Home-made black wool rugs broke up the glare of black and yellow linoleum tiles but the ‘contemporary’ effect was not so much enhanced as debunked by a peculiarly individual type of ornament. The room was full of toys which had been mended and repainted and which stood about in places where knick-knacks would have been more usual. A wooden engine, for instance, enamelled scarlet over its scars, occupied the place of honour in the centre of the dresser, while all over the place there were little newly-dressed dolls and animals, as well as china wheelbarrows and boots holding cut flowers or little ferns.

  Julia’s white leather coat and silk scarf appeared remarkably sophisticated in this artless setting and Mrs. Broome, returning with a painted tin tray set with multi-coloured china, eyed her with open admiration.

  ‘You look just like what the paper said of you – the one that forecast the engagement,’ she announced. ‘“The leading fashionable young lady of the year”, I was so happy I cried when I read that. “A princess” I said. That’s what I always promised Mr. Timmy when he was a little tiny boy.’

  Julia sat down abruptly, trying not to look dismayed. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You explain quite a lot about Timothy, Nanny Broome.’

  ‘Quite likely, but not all,’ The woman spoke with unexpected shrewdness. ‘There’s nothing like a British Public School and Oxford to mould the clay. Mr. Eustace Kinnit said that when he insisted on sending the poor little chap away to Totham preparatory school. He was only eight and a bit; he did look a baby.’

  She was talking fast and pouring out at the same time, but as she picked up a steaming cup to hand it to her guest she paused and fixed her hard brown stare on her.

  ‘Tell me, miss, what exactly has your father got against young Timmy? I should have thought my boy had every mortal thing a gentleman could want for his daughter. Looks, lots of money, wonderful brains and education, a place all ready for him in a business which will be his one day, and lovely manners, though I say it myself who taught him. I don’t understand your Dad because if we’d been preparing the lad for it all his life he couldn’t have been more suitable for you, or that’s my view!’

  Julia hesitated, and Mrs. Broome nodded her approval without letting up in any way.

  ‘Did something happen to put your father off?’ she inquired. ‘He seemed willing enough at first, didn’t he? He was going to give you a dance to announce it or so Probe Parker said in my paper. Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind and was dead set against it and the column wanted to know why. Quite frankly, Miss, so do I, and I’m the one who would know if there was anything real to object to.’

  The dark and elegant girl in the beautiful clothes sat looking at her thoughtfully and Mrs. Broome watched her.

  ‘You were thinking that too, weren’t you, my poppet?’ she said with her eyes but she did not venture the question aloud and Julia came to a decision.

  ‘Did you ever meet Timothy’s parents, Mrs. Broome?’

  ‘No, miss, I didn’t.’ She spoke with decision but there was a faintly satisfied, ‘just as I thought’ expression in the voice. ‘I heard Mr. Eustace’s and Miss Alison’s younger brother had been killed in Spain, of course, but I didn’t see much of the family the first year I was married. It was only when I came home from the hospital after losing my baby that I found the family had moved down here because the war was just about to start. When I first married Broome the house was kept as it is now, partly as a show place and partly as a store. The Family owns a gallery of antiques besides having an interest in the big auction rooms. And a lot of the important pieces were very often kept here, as they are still.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that.
’ Julia was anxious not to intrude. ‘I only wondered if you’d ever seen Timothy’s mother.’

  ‘No, miss, I only saw the girl who brought him down because London might be bombed. She wasn’t a uniformed nurse and not really safe with him, which was why I took over. I always understood that his Mummy had died in childbirth, but with eighty babies in the house you can understand I was too busy to hear much.’

  ‘So many?’ Julia’s dark eyes widened. ‘Miss Kinnit told me at Christmas about the evacuees. On the first day of the war this house was invaded. It was a sort of clearing station, wasn’t it, for the district? You must have had a time!’

  An expression of such intense happiness that it could almost have been called a radiance transfigured Nanny Broome suddenly.

  ‘Oh! It was wonderful,’ she said, fervently. ‘I never had a second to think of my own trouble, and then having Timmy without his mother it saved my life it did really!’ She paused. ‘Your father’s very old-fashioned, I suppose?’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Father? No, I should have said the opposite.’ The girl was out of touch with the trend the conversation was taking. ‘Why?’

  ‘I went to the adoption when Mr. Eustace made Timmy his own little son,’ said Mrs. Broome without explanation. ‘We all went up to the Law Courts in London and into the judges’ secret room and it was summer and Timmy was in his first white sailor suit with long trousers although he was only five.’

  ‘Secret room?’ Julia appeared fascinated.

  ‘Or it may have been “private”, I forget.’ The romantically-minded lady was unabashed. ‘Anyway it was hidden away in the panelling, and all the gowns and wigs and waterbottles and things were about, and I sat in the passage while the business was done. Timmy was wonderfully good so the lawyer told me. We used to play “Judges” after that. I had an old white fur shaped stole that looked just like a wig when you put it round your face. Now, miss, Broome will be up in a minute, so I’m going to take you up to your room. I’ve been getting it ready ever since I heard a rumour Timmy had got a young lady. I knew he’d bring you here honeymooning. He always promised me that. “I will bring my bride, Nan, and you shall look after us”.’ She imitated the small boy with such fidelity that for a second he stood before them, an arrogant pygmy, packed with authority in a washable white sailor suit.