A Sculptor's Gift (part 4)
9
It is morning and I see Lady Pinke-Burnleigh through a gap in a door. She has five bolts of fabric on a vast Regency table and is staring at them intently. I'm still not sure about her so I try to creep past the door but, just when I am past, I hear:
"Good morning!"
"Er, good morning. They're nice."
"Thank you!" If Lady Pinke-Burnleigh thinks my observation lame, she doesn't say so. She spreads out a little of each fabric, a heavy-duty cotton twill in two shades of blue, one of red, one of grey and one of yellow. She looks at me. "Which one do you prefer?"
"What's it for?" Lady Pink-Burnleigh nods approvingly.
"Ah, smart question, young man! Yes, context is all. It's for work-wear in my factories. We need an overhaul." I study them.
"An overhaul of the overalls." I realise, even before the sentence is completely out, how awful it is but it seems to tickle Lady Pinke-Burnleigh.
"Good one! I must remember that for the next board meeting." I decide to enjoy her smiling eyes and her polite laughter at my joke but I'm not sure it is politeness as she is actually finding it hard to keep a straight face and when the monocle drops from her eye she looks even friendlier. Is this a bit more of The Big Thaw? I watch her still smile as she spreads the fabric over the table and decide that the word 'thaw' is a tad dramatic. All the same, I’m glad it’s daylight again, as the sunlight through the windows makes my nocturnal fears of, for example, being dragged from my bed and shackled to some subterranean dungeon wall all the more ludicrous. Pausing, I draw breath and put in my tongue-in-cheek contribution.
"Well, the yellow is highly visible and safe but it may also be a challenge to keep clean. People find red makes others look more attractive, so you might have people copping off behind the bike sheds for a quickie in firm's time. The grey would go with any complexion but not be that visible and the blues are predictable but workmanlike." If Lady Pinke-Burnleigh has picked up the facetiousness of my answer, she gives no indication of it.
"Like your thinking! Goodness, we can’t have people ‘copping off’, can we? Blue it is, then. Light or dark?"
"Ooh… Light."
"Thank you. I liked them all, but I couldn't decide." Lady Pinke-Burnleigh opens a laptop and the glow reflects itself in her monocle as she speaks softly in the direction of the screen. “Right… Let’s just run that one through…” The computer is at odds with a woman who has just stepped out of the nineteen-twenties, but it seems the irony has passed her by. Tapping a couple of keys, she grins. “And… Done!”
My resolve to be aloof is pitiful up against my host’s charm offensive, so I try Cool And Indifferent, but I am really, really curious about the overalls destined for her factories.
"So, how many you having made?"
"Oh, a couple of thousand."
"Ah… Er… Right. Well, I'll be seeing you then!"
"'Bye. If you have a few spare moments, go and have a nosey up in the attic. I think you might find some inspiration up there... And see if there's anything you'd like to wear." Is she being rude about me being hard-up? I look at the face where the monocle is at odds with the eyeshadow and the smiling red lipstick. She taking the piss?
Final verdict: probably not.
Wending my way to the attic with the help of a map scribbled on monogrammed notepaper, I try to make a mental list of 'Nice Things To Say About Lady Pinke-Burnleigh'.
1) Perhaps she is, after all, a creature of this world and its sordid realities? Anyone with factories employing two thousand people and who even takes an interest in their work-wear must be sort of ok.
2) She is quite stylish and doesn't follow the herd: like me, really, except she’s rich which of course makes it eccentric as opposed to just plain weird.
3) She's acceptable-looking when she smiles and the flash of silk stocking did make my heart race a little… But then whose pulse wouldn’t quicken at the sight of a rare 1930s weave?
Lady Pinke-Burnleigh thinks she has made a discovery about me and seems keen to foster what, on very flimsy evidence, she believes to be a love of clothes - something I admit I don't mind. She is right in a sense as where you find clothes is where you often find patterns and, if old enough, they're copyright-free.
In one wing of the house is the attic full of wardrobes, hampers and trunks and I have been given access to the clothes of the Sixth Marquis who spanned the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth. He was, by all accounts, fond of both spending money and performing in amateur productions, the combination of the two providing quite an impressive range of stage costumes, all of them strange interpretations of ‘Mediaeval’ and ‘Elizabethan’ and giving a merely fleeting nod to historical accuracy but making up for it with their luxury and craftsmanship.
And they're in the hampers.
The wardrobes reveal shirts and boots, shoes, ties, socks and suits. The Marquis was a tall man for the period (roughly my height and build). I try on various outfits, going for an Irish thorn-proof tweed in lovat green with a subtle check in salmon pink. I toy with the idea of an Irish saffron orange kilt but my courage fails me (dismissing it, of course, because it's impractical for a sculptor) and I play safe (ish) with a pair of baggy plus-four trousers the same pattern as the jacket.
All this is surprisingly fun and appeals to the child in me. What really clinches the choice of trousers is the amount of sock that will be on show, this allowing a real statement below the knee and I go for six long, woollen pairs that range in colour from a vibrant mustard to the deepest bitter-chocolate.
I have already spotted a full-length mirror in another section of the attic abandoned beyond a conglomeration or dusty beams and struts. Steering a path through dolls houses, prams and a rocking horse, I give myself a cursory glance in it but I am far more taken with a glass cabinet I have just caught sight of containing metal soldiers, all in perfect line; despite the glass, they are, like everything else, dusty. I slap the sleeve of the jacket and, grinning like an idiot, witness generations of long-dormant particles rising to Heaven in a cloud.
For some reason, I feel the way I do when I go to my 'secret' stream by the factory and I’m now becoming excited, managing to convince myself that this could be a new secret place. I look closer at the display case and there are scores of Prussian cavalry, teams of French artillery with miniature brass cannon and whole brigades of scarlet-coated British guards in faultless lines that seem to go on forever.
Every few rows, there is an officer on a horse or a standard bearer with his lead flag fixed in motion, its billowing a century-old flow of hot metal now frozen in time. A comforting connection with these little men creeps from a dark cupboard in my brain and I pick up random troops, look at them, smell them and put them down again, all the while remembering how I scoured second-hand shops with my grandfather for lost and forgotten survivors such as these.
I'm beginning to like this place.
Shit… Did I just say that?
I go into yet another section of the attic and spot a Bakelite telephone on a once-important table which, now forgotten, has apparently been brought up here to die in peace. I lift the receiver hesitantly and listen. I start, as I do not expect to hear the whirring and the clicks, let alone a tinny voice on the other end saying:
"Good morning, and how may I be of assistance, please?" It is Nicky, the girl who met us when we arrived and whose office I have already stumbled upon. She recognises my voice and relaxes immediately. "Are you having fun up there? Found anything to go clubbing in yet?"
"Clubbing? If you mean bashing wildlife up on the moor, then the answer is probably yes but if you mean standing in a sweaty pit swimming in alcopop, then probably not." Oh, hell. I'm getting old. I point out that I will be a good boy, and not only will I get the clothes cleaned now but also before I give them back.
Cue the tinny giggles.
"Oh, didn't she tell you? They're yours to keep, if you want them. She says to take a couple of outfits, at least. The laundry van comes on Tuesdays, so whatever you wear will be back the following week. And don't forget, washables and stuff for dry cleaning can both go down the same chute."
"Chute?" What chute? I hear a slurp as Nicky sucks the desperate last dregs from what is, most likely, already her second can of Diet Coke despite it being only half past nine in the morning. The cola fixation is part of Nicky's island of normality, a little rock that stands all alone in the vast, deep ocean of the house's eccentricity. I can hardly hear her, the phone is so old and dusty.
"Now,"' gasps Nicky between fuller (must be a new can) gulps, "there's as likely a laundry chute by your door, probably disguised as something. I reckon perhaps shove at a couple of paintings 'til you find it or push summink like a flap or, or, a door or a whatsit, ok?" her voice is becoming higher and more frenetic as a) she gets into her subject and b) the caffeine kicks in. "Or praps it's like a letter box voila an' that's the one ifyerlucky 'n it's bye bye undies fr'another week ‘til you get'em back hahahaha!"
The giggles have risen a notch and now give a fair imitation of a smoke alarm, this giving way to a hacking cough like a reluctant old lawn mower banging into life. This itself is a prelude to "I think I need some fresh air!" Even in the short time I have been here I realise that this is, with touching irony, code for “I need an effing cigarette and I need it right NOW."
"I'm coming down. See you in a minute."
In the office, I notice more about Nicky. She is looking for something and among her effects there are reassuring signs of a High Street Life down there such as a drawer hiding nail varnish, spare tights, makeup and an iPhone. There is also, however, a drawer containing the concert schedules, instrument mute and sheet music for marches, Latin dance tunes and film themes that one would expect to be within easy reach of the First Cornet of the local silver band. I know when it's Nicky's lunch-break by the rippling arpeggios and, during the practising of tricky passages, outbursts of "Oh, fuckingshittingfucking fuck!" occasionally followed by "Oops - sorry, your ladyship."
Scrabbling round in the drawer for her cigarettes, Nicky nods at the sunny day through a window and shakes the packet towards me.
“No thanks. I’ll join you outside, though.”
I'm surprised Her Ladyship doesn't mind the smoking but then I learn that she sometimes joins Nicky on the gravel under the Orangery veranda. Nicky seems to be one of those people who bring out the normality in others - even, to some extent, the lady of the house. When I get there, Lady Pinke-Burnleigh is drawing languidly on a Black Sobrani through a mother of pearl and jet cigarette holder while her employee is pulling spasmodically on a supermarket own-brand.
It is amazing what similarities connect the most opposite people and I notice that Lady Pinke-Burnleigh and Nicky share the same hair colour. In the unlikelihood of a) Nicky being Lady Pinke-Burnleigh's teenage slip-up and b) dark burgundy being a natural hair colour, it looks more cosmetic nurture than genetic nature. But why the same colour? Coincidence? A hair-dying party? It's the only colour sold in the village shop? I discount the lesbian lover theory, despite naïve presumptions about tweed-suited and monocled women.
The employer is fully aware that the girl is keen to get back inside, not so much as a demonstration of hard work and commitment but because the game app on her phone will go AWOL if she doesn't tend it properly. Lady Pinke-Burnleigh doesn't appear to mind that either; she just seems to like having Nicky around and when she visits the office you can tell she is both touched and amused by the little band of soft toys that live between Nicky's pen pot and the jokey mug in the forest of leads between the computer and the wall. She may not even mind (too much) the odd lump of chewing gum placed absently under the edge of the desk, evidence of her assistant occasionally forgetting that she is no longer at school.
When I go down, I not only find her ladyship and Nicky standing under the canopy but I also spot the approaching gardener who is puffing on his pipe in time to the scrunching of stones under his boots. He reaches the women just before I do and, as Nicky turns to speak to him, I wonder how she will address him, not really expecting the whiny 'hi, Gramps" that issues from the cheap red lipstick. He looks disapprovingly at his granddaughter's familiarity with Her Ladyship, but he still grants her a smile at the last minute and the faintest trace of an "arr". He then turns to Lady Pinke-Burnleigh, looks apologetic for not addressing her first and touches the frayed, earthy peak of his cap.
He doesn't stop to join these fellow smokers (he has been around long enough to have developed an unshakable instinct regarding one's place) and he touches his cap again before a nod and a smile from the lady of the house grants him further passage to the kitchen where he will presently take his tea and flirt with the Mrs. Henderson the cook, something his granddaughter takes great care to avoid walking in on if at all possible.
10
I am supposedly here because of my sculpture, but that seems to be changing. Even when my piece arrives, I am more interested in the way it gets here than in seeing it again. Things have changed since I arrived, and that particular lump of metal is from a previous (now irrelevant) plot and I'm on a new leaf - nay, working in a completely new book that has fallen randomly from the bookshelf of Life and flung itself open at my feet, right...
Here.
Lady Pinke-Burnleigh drives me to the main gate, annoyed at the sight of both a television crew and the Mayor. The "odious little man" is explaining (I discover later on the news) that he is, of course, willing to let my sculpture go out of the goodness of his heart and deliver it here personally because Lady Pinke-Burnleigh has promised an ever-so generous donation to his domestic violence fund. Guessing what is going on, she grimaces at his distant form, pulls her kid gloves even tighter over her probably-white knuckles and stamps the pedals to the floor as she bangs the engine right down to first gear and then judders the freshly-waxed fragrance of the limousine to a stop.
"Do you realise... That's my cousin?"
"Pardon?" I can't quite believe what this woman is saying. As I am digesting this fact, she grips the walnut steering wheel and, baring her perfect teeth, snarls softly but with great passion, as if sheer strength of emotion is going to push her venom through the windscreen and embed it in the unnaturally even tan of the man in the suit, the man who is directing the truck, smiling at the camera crew and cajoling his workmen, each group alternately gaining his attention as if they are sections of an orchestra and he both composer and conductor of this grand score that is his opus magnum.
"That so-called man", she continues, "will do anything he can to bug me and, further more, he will do anything for publicity. This must seem like Christmas."
I watch Lady Pinke-Burnleigh with new-found fascination as she slumps back in her seat and gazes at the sculpture. Like the smoking, this is revealing more cracks in the perhaps-a-little-human-after-all woman sat beside me: I can also see that she is thinking what I am thinking - that my own opus magnum of a sculpture looks tired with its graffiti, loose bolts and bits knocked off and missing.
Her ladyship suddenly smiles, whispers in my ear and pauses for my reply. Patting my arm, she smiles again and gets out of the car, confident in both her own ability as an orator and that she has my blessing. Approaching the sculpture and the television crew (but ignoring the Mayor completely), she walks out of the gate and looks straight into the camera.
I can see her pausing, though. This man, her cousin, was probably the little boy she used to go and visit when their parents got together on Sundays. She may not be seeing him as devious at this very moment but as a child grown into a man who has merely taken a wrong turn and, through blindness of judgement caused by repeated episodes of panic and desperation, ended up behaving like a right twat.
But she doesn’t hesitate for long. She now has the full field of vision covered by the television camera, the pause giving her time to coax the publicity machine towards herself and away from the little man in the shiny grey suit. The intrusion has made her livid and pushed her into a situation of vulnerability but, being Lady Pinke-Burnleigh, she is making attack her best line of defence. Once the press's attention is secured she waves to me, almost theatrical in her apparent enthusiasm.
Oh hell. She’s beckoning me over to stand next to her.
This is when I remember I'm still wearing the Sixth Marquis' Edwardian Irish thorn-proof suit complete with plus-fours, yellow socks and a check that has gone from being a muted salmon in the dimness of the attic to, in the midday sunlight, a vibrant orange. I make a bad impersonation, a caricature of a toff that will be Disneyed smooth on countless flat screen TVs with any remaining nuances reduced to a few brash colours from a cartoon paint chart.
I am the small child who has been dragged away from the private haven of a dressing-up box and brought downstairs to be shown to the guests. Standing with her ladyship in her striped blazer and cricket whites, I reckon we must embody everything that a considerable number of British people have decided they hate.
It is thus that my rejected sculpture is sent packing (with my blessing) back from whence it came… And in full view of the television cameras, too.
I have to admit it - she's pretty good and, to be fair, I'm impressed.
Driving back up the gravel and into a garage, Lady Pinke-Burnleigh abandons the car, throws the keys to Adlington the chauffeur and exits, patting various luxurious limousines with a happy drum-break as she weaves between them. Even now, she quickly regains her composure but still allows herself the smallest of smiles as she relishes the Mayor's latest own goal.
Lady Pinke-Burnleigh has just, in the space of fifteen minutes, gone from A Bit Eccentric to Fairly Awesome. In days of yore, she would have been toasted in the estate tavern where some inebriated local laureate would have made up a fifty-eight verse ballad about how she had overcome evil, tyrannical officialdom – nowadays she is more likely to be Youtubed/Tweeted/blogged and splashed across the six o’ clock news, a transient, hare-today-gone-tomorrow gone viral as opposed to successive generations celebrating her exploits by means of the steady, plodding tortoise of alcohol-fuelled oral tradition.
“Twas early one May
In the noon of the day,
The Mayor was beat ‘oller
By a woman they say.
With ‘er ladylike foot
In ‘er Jimmy Choo boot
‘Er Ladyship kicked
‘is Versace silk suit
She shown ‘im the door
An’ she give ‘im what for,
Trod ‘is gert nylon toupe
All into the floor.
She made ‘is balls feel
‘Er Jimmy Choo ‘eel,
An’ she’s trampled ‘is ego
Causing ’im for to squeal.
...Or something like that, I should imagine. If not a twenty-verse dirge, then the story will be preserved somehow at the Burnleigh Arms with, no doubt, more than one villager ready to raise a pint of something to toast The Loony Woman In The Big House… Not to mention a considerable proportion of the town chatting about it before going to sleep in their Burnleigh Brand pajamas under their Burnleigh Brand duvet covers having pulled their Burnleigh Brand curtains shut for the night.
It is with no small trepidation on my part that Her Ladyship and I watch ourselves on the news with Charlotte who's entered the drawing room with sawdust in her hair and protective goggles lowered and draped around her neck, every inch the obsessive artist who is totally oblivious to the incongruity of her paint-spattered mechanic's overalls among the potted palms, antique furniture and Old Masters.
Charlotte doesn’t really register our TV appearance because Charlotte is focused on an exhibition at the moment and has even stopped eating with us at regular mealtimes. No, she prefers to keep to her schedule, bash on and get her sculptures finished because she is showing in less than two weeks' time. We’ve swapped roles and she is now the one producing grandiose three-dimensional statements while I am the one working with small pieces of paper, each one a new design for stockings and tights...
…And we’re both ok with that. Coming here has opened her horizons, whereas this place has had me reverting to type while also promising a secure and fruitful environment so I can spend even more time in my own little world.
Charlotte does stop working now and then and she accompanies me on the occasional, dutiful walk but I know she isn't concentrating on our conversation but thinking about her art. I say she has no need to apologise, that I understand because I am an artist as well (her silence is deafening at that point) and that we can just be quiet if she wishes. In the end, even the walks stop as she becomes fed up with feeling guilty about her obsession. It doesn't take long before the only sign of her is Nicky taking her trays of food, nobody else seeing her at all apart from a technical assistant.
Just as we are beginning to really worry about Charlotte, she texts us one morning (now her only form of communication) and asks us to go to the stable block at midday. She has erected a light-proof tunnel and we go through it only to enter a pitch-black chamber. I remember her attic room with the card, the torch and the coloured sweet wrappers and it is slowly becoming apparent why Borrington (seemingly just at home with a hammer as he is with accounts) and the gardener (probably coaxed reluctantly from his shed, mumbling the obligatory oaths expected by his regular audience, devotees who would be disappointed at anything less colourful) have both been up ladders and are covering the large stone-mullioned windows with heavy black plastic.
In the darkness of Charlotte’s studio, I can just make out the faint glow of a laptop from behind a baffle and the click of a switch. The artist beckons to us and we walk hesitantly through a red beam.
Then it starts.
This time, Charlotte's creations are not small snippings of menus and flyers but huge, immaculate, white surfaces the size of walls with coloured theatre lights that are timed to hit their facets and cut back to blackness as suddenly as they appear. We have been instructed to wander and it is magical, like walking through a giant Cubist chamber with verticals knocked out of kilter and slants and slopes at odds with gravity, balance and the tilt of the Earth... And yet it is ordered, its authority reigning with a sure, calming hand over the whole.
It is, in short, just right, so right that one knows the smallest nudge at one of the planes with a finger would render it all less than the breathtaking spectacle that it is. Even when it is finished, there isn't a fumbling of light switches on the wall to put the houselights back on. No, in fact there are no houselights at all, just other lights that get very gradually brighter, neutral extras to service the main cast of reds, blues, purples and yellows that have just finished breathing on the white planes. Now, with merely sufficient light to enable her to traverse the floor, Charlotte walks over to the laptop and clicks the mouse to finish it completely.
"Wow". As reactions go, it's hardly a Times review but it's all I can manage. It is, though, more than enough for Charlotte who now stands outside with us in the brash sunlight. She looks bashful, awkward, as if she has never considered that there will be a time after her (for want of a better word) performance and thus not made contingencies for it. Lady Pinke-Burnleigh beams, sighs and embraces Charlotte. Even the studiedly feet-of-clay, hard-bitten gardener Colin is lost for words, not that he has probably ever been the most verbose of God's creatures.
And my own endeavours? Nothing like. It is as if Charlotte has received my crown gently, burnished it and found the gold beneath what I thought was a wreath of iron.
I have, on the plus side, become quite free and easy about where I go: I’m now fairly in tune with the place and often have a wander for half an hour before I sit down at my drawing table and start designing. There is much to inspire me in my work, such as the 'Roman' mosaic of a gigantic octopus on the bottom of the swimming pool, its body shifting menacingly as the water is disturbed by the breeze. I once imagined it on the crotch of a pair of tights with a nautical theme, the creature woven up side down with its tentacles taking up the area occupied by a woman’s pubic hair. I showed my design to Lady Pinke-Burnleigh and I still don’t know whether she thought it was a good idea as she didn’t say anything but suddenly looked out of the window and wittered nervously about the weather and how she really hoped they would manage to get the harvest in okay.
None of which was really very helpful.
There are more formal offerings at the Hall, too, such as the Elizabethan knot garden with its low, intricate pattern of hedges or the labyrinth in the floor of the chapel built by monks in the twelfth century, the only part of an adjoining Abbey to survive when the remaining buildings burnt down in eighteen fifty-three during a firework party thrown by one of Lady Pinke-Burnleigh's ancestors.
In the immortal words of Colin, ‘it were the fiff ’un what done it, Gawdressiz soul’. The fifth marquis was indeed an enthusiastic amateur pyrotechnician, a man whose last mortal act embarked him on his spectacular (if rather sudden) journey to The Afterlife. That act was, namely, the lighting of the famous "Burnleigh Big Banger", a home-made monster that was reputedly the usual climax to his frequent firework displays. Although the consumption of two and a half bottles of champagne was probably instrumental to the outcome, the incident was never referred to by loyal retainers as anything but "a bit of a tragic misfortune".
Not in public, anyway.
Not much of the fifth marquis made it to his coffin and, even now, the gardener occasionally digs up pieces of bone which are definitely not badger, or dog, or cow, and this sometimes as far afield as the vegetable garden next to his cottage at the edge of the Burnleigh estate.
It doesn't matter how early I start, Colin the gardener is always up and about and I have, for a few days now, been deemed worthy of a wave back: this, according to Nicky, is quite something. Because I show an interest, her grandfather will even, if in good spirits, lean on whichever of his impressive arsenal of garden implements is currently being deployed and tell me tales - sometimes at great length - of the history of the house.
This exchange has become quite a relaxed, pleasant ritual between us and it is the only time he ever strings more than a couple of mumbles together. It's still hard to catch every word, but we get there via a bizarre montage of facial expressions, gestures, sound effects and scribbles with a stub of pencil on one of many seed packets secreted about his person. He will break off occasionally to hoot a blow into a threadbare but ornate silk handkerchief (an ancient, much-treasured Christmas present from Lady Pinke-Burnleigh's father) or double with laughter at a reminiscence which I have hardly caught the gist of, but to which I contribute a hearty chuckle or two.
Today is such a day, but just as I am turning to go to my studio he coughs and, with great ceremony, takes a key from his waistcoat pocket. As he holds out the key, his calloused, dirt-ingrained hand lends a special significance to the black-pitted piece of iron in the same way a penny held out in the wrinkled palm of a grandparent is more precious to a child than any gold sovereign ever could be.
I'm not sure whether I am to merely show interest in the key or to take it - am I allowed, even, to touch it? I cannot tell. Seeing me hesitate, he jerks his hand gently towards me and, as I take the key, he looks round and puts his finger to his lips. With the slightest of twitches he tilts his uncapped head towards the old wooden gate I encountered on my first foray into the grounds. This time, however, it has been decided that I am deemed worthy to go through it.
"Say nutt'n!" I smile and shake my head vigorously, touched that I should be so honoured. It is then I learn that it is not her Ladyship I am to keep the secret from because she wouldn't mind at all. No, it is one of his underlings, an agency worker brought in to cover for a sick colleague and sent off by the gardener to tend the hedgerows. I get the impression that they are the horticultural equivalent of Siberia, the poor woman apparently being guilty of nothing worse than not being "wunneruss". I don't for a second kid myself that I am 'wunnerus' either, but being party to what is behind that gate is feeling more of an honour at each passing moment. I turn to walk once more up the avenue of trees, promising once again to be very discreet.
When I get to the ancient timber door, I see the hinges are damp and, bending down, I smell oil. They have just been lubricated. Whether as a favour to me or to the hinges, who knows but, whichever it is, I am grateful and touched. The key turns easily and I see the lock has a similar residue, the oil can having also visited the inner depths of this seemingly redundant hole in the weathered oak.
So it's inside the gate I go. I walk for a minute or so and there, in a clearing in a wood, is a folly made from masonry presumably rescued from the old Abbey. I brush past the undergrowth and reach the rough, rather haphazard collection of carved stone, the whole edifice reminiscent of the random parts that made up my sculpture. The roofless building is low but wide across its circumference, a broken circle twice the height of a man and with all the width of a stage. I follow the curved wall round to an opening which seems innocuous enough, but nothing would have quite prepared me for what I am about to see.
It isn't a folly.
It's a mausoleum.
Among urns, alabaster jars with names inscribed on them and rusty iron vases is a bronze plaque featuring the fifth marquis' eerily familiar aquiline profile, a fragment of the genetic baton that has passed from generation to generation until ultimately reaching the last one in the race - she who, all those weeks ago, trod a leisurely path across the square towards my sculpture. Just on the interesting side of forty, Her Childlessness must have surely dropped (or nonchalantly tossed) that baton onto the track by now?
Taking up a large chunk of the wall is a slab bearing the Burnleigh arms and motto. Cradled in the curve of the masonry, I am in the presence of the Fifth Marquis, the Seventh, the Eighth and, in front of me, the Sixth, now in closer proximity to one of his own tweed jackets than he will ever know... Or perhaps he does, but I don't shiver at the thought. No, this place is reassuring - and so peaceful - that I feel I am home.
The urns are high in the wall, each with its niche and, despite the eccentric choice of building matter, the whole is very ordered. Wives have not been granted a place, the chapel being their ultimate, more refined destination.
No, not for them this rugged, outdoor gentlemen's club.
I imagine the chaps getting together at night for a bit of Afterlife chin-wag and gentle ribbing, the Seventh Marquis getting his own back on a strict - yet strange - father now that he has the courage to cheek him about his outlandish theatrical productions and even weirder costumes; after all, it must be hard to get a hiding if you are both spectres. As there are so few remains of the Fifth Marquis, I can see them all teasing him that he has to make up for it with a bronze plaque.
"Ah," he retorts, "but I'm here..." With a pause as he waits for the collective...
"...IN SPIRIT AND THAT'S WHAT COUNTS!" I think of this feeble family in-joke keeping them amused night after night, never failing despite its corny repetition over decades, centuries, eternity.
I smile at the thought, step out of the mausoleum and stand in the clearing again. It is neatly delineated, a large roundel of earth beaten flat and a contrast to the deep, dark floor of the woods around it. Peering into the distant trees, I am surprised to see a man in blue trousers and polo shirt with a camera. Another man, similarly dressed, emerges from the undergrowth and does up his flies. Although this might normally be the prelude to some kind of banter, they say nothing and the first one carries on taking pictures in careful silence.
Now I’m certain they are not supposed to be here because the second man is revolving slowly on the spot and keeping a look-out. Poachers? Hikers? But what about the uniform? It takes a few moments for my brain to rummage through various possibilities, but it then clicks.
They are from the Council.