The good weather continued through the week and they found themselves on a second excursion the following weekend. This time Dr Pertwee was the instigator. Sally had sent her a letter, announcing their engagement, and she had responded at once with an invitation to lunch in her rooms on Saturday. Her congratulations were heartfelt, even a little tearful. She gave them sherry then served up a characteristically bitty lunch of Spam, egg salad, pickled beetroot slices and a Stilton so strong it was nearly mobile.
‘I have some news too,’ she announced, handing out frugal third shares of a tinned treacle pudding she had heated inside the kettle. ‘Not,’ she laughed, ‘I hasten to add, another engagement. No. I’m going away. I’ve decided the time has come.’
‘What fun,’ Sally said, ‘A holiday?’
‘In a way,’ Dr Pertwee told her. ‘But a long one. I’m retiring.’
‘Forgive me,’ Edward put in, ‘But I thought you already had.’
‘I’m retiring, young man, from the world.’
Neither Sally nor Edward knew quite what to say. Sally stood to take the kettle and set about making them a pot of tea.
‘Properly speaking,’ Dr Pertwee went on, ‘I’m retiring from the vexatious world of men. I’m joining the women at Corry.’
‘The island?’ asked Edward.
‘That’s right. You remember, don’t you, Sally? Off the Dorset coast. That rather saintly woman from St Maud’s went there – Professor Carson. Bridget Carson.’
Sally returned to the table with tea and cups.
‘But I thought you were an agnostic,’ she said, frowning.
‘So I am, dear. And so I shall continue, barring miracles. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem with them. Corry is a very unorthodox community – not like a nunnery at all. One of their number penned a tract prescribing division by gender as the cure for all society’s modern ills. And they house a Buddhist and a Communist vegetarian. Not in the same room, though,’ she chuckled. ‘No, I shan’t be becoming a Bride of Christ at my great age. The Mother Superior, Lady Agnes Bowers, wrote to me out of the blue this week. One of the sisters has been gathered, it seems, to the Great Dormitory in the Sky, so they now have a rather nice vacant room with a view of the sea. My name was put forward by several of the women, including the saintly Professor Carson.’
‘Will you be happy there?’ Sally asked, still uncertain.
‘Could you pour, dear?’ their hostess asked Edward. ‘My old wrists can’t handle that pot when it’s full.’ She turned her face towards Sally, although concentrating her gaze on a crumb she was chasing off the tablecloth with the side of her palm. ‘Well happiness was ever a moot point. I should certainly be happier there than in some ghastly rest home. I know I could crumble away contentedly on my own – plenty of people here seem to – but the peace would be most beneficial and I could learn to keep bees, which is something that has always fascinated me. Apiculture is the island’s principal source of income, you know,’ she told Edward, like some benign geography tutor. ‘There’ll be a kind of liberation in leaving all my books and business behind and making a late, fresh start in a new, more practical world. I suppose the communal meals with some pious creature reading aloud from improving texts might take a little getting used to, but I usually read when I eat alone and it would be better than the din of everyone chattering at once, the way I fear a group of educated women might tend to. So,’ she sipped her tea, ‘I’ve told them yes and I shall be taking up residence – bag and baggage – at the end of August. Which sadly means I shall have to miss witnessing your first months of wedded bliss.’ She pulled a comical-sad face at Edward, who smiled back at her.
‘I’ll miss you,’ Sally said slowly. ‘I’ve always thought of you as my second mother.’
Edward glanced at her, wanting to take her hand. He wished, guiltily, it were her real mother who was moving away so completely.
‘I would hope that by now, I’d become a sort of friend as well,’ Dr Pertwee replied.
Too moved to speak, Sally merely smiled and kissed her cheek. Her eyes were large with tears. He saw that Dr Pertwee was determined not to let Sally make her mawkish. Her tone was bracing.
‘Anyway, you can come and see me.’ She patted Sally’s hand then thought to reach out and touch Edward’s arm as well. ‘You can both come and see me, you poor, untried young people. We have an open day once a year, or twice. I forget. Now, Edward, were you serious in your offer of taking the old crone for an outing in your marital motor?’
‘I certainly was. Where would you like to go?’ he asked.
‘Ely?’ Sally suggested.
‘That would be nice, dear, but then we’d be forced to endure evensong and I was rather thinking I might pay my last respects to The Roundel.’
‘But of course,’ Edward told her. ‘Where is it?’
‘You drive out past Mildenhall towards Methwold. It’s near St Oswald’s church. Down some tiny roads. I’ll know the way when I see it.’
In the Wolseley, Dr Pertwee sat up in front beside Edward, fluttering her hands in excitement as they passed old, familiar sights or new, surprising ones, and calling out comments to Sally in her soft tones.
The house was unlike anything Edward had ever seen, though he said at once that it reminded him of a cathedral chapter house. Its twelve sides gave it an almost circular appearance. Its small red bricks and pantiled roof were the only concessions to vernacular fenland style. A small hillock raised it slightly above the astonishing flatness round about, and a thickly overgrown walled garden shielded its lower windows from public gaze and winter winds. Not that there could ever be much public in such an eerie, isolated spot. The nearby village comprised no more than six houses and a church. The nearest building was a huge brick barn which looked older than anything else there.
‘Sally, if you don’t mind.’ Dr Pertwee took a large iron key from her bag. ‘The lock’s a little stiff. You may have to jiggle it.’
Sally jumped out, unlocked the gates and Edward drove in. Brambles dragged cruelly along the car’s painted flanks. What had been a steep gravel drive was almost buried beneath weeds and moss. He ground to a halt rather than battle on.
‘When were you last here?’ he asked, astonished.
‘Oh,’ the old woman said airily, waving a hand, ‘Years’ ago, now. It was with Bridget Carson. I remember her car was very new and she was most concerned about it overheating so we drove at a snail’s pace. It must have been at least five years before the war, anyway: Let’s leave the car down here and walk up.’
Sally rejoined them and she and Edward walked up the hillock with Dr Pertwee between them, shielding her from the vicious lashing of thorny stems.
‘You’re right to talk of chapter houses,’ Dr Pertwee said. ‘The chapter house at Wells was said to be the inspiration, along with the Medici chapel in Florence because the designers had recently completed the Grand Tour. Personally I have always subscribed to its complete originality. The architects were women, you see, so people have always been at pains to dismiss the whole project as somehow derivative. My five-times-great aunt and her unmarried niece they were. Women designing buildings was unheard of then. It’s pretty rare now. Men usually build in squares, of course. Assertive squares and self-important rectangles. Domes and circles have always had a suspect, popish and distinctly female air to them – one thinks of the Radcliffe Camera, and the follies at Stowe – all very well, but hardly suitable for home and family. Even the British Library’s circle is contained and mastered by rectangles – and St Paul’s and St Peter’s – like inspiration brought to heel by rationality.’
They climbed up a short flight of steps to reach the front door. This was built into a gothic arch to echo the mossy, gothic windows let into the walls at even intervals. Dr Pertwee produced a second key from her bag and, with a helping push from Edward’s shoulder, let them in.
A small panelled lobby led to a surprising galleried hall which reached up to the second storey’s painted dome. Rooms led off the hall, at equidistant points, like slices of a cake. Their arrangement was echoed in the lower-ceilinged rooms above and by the store-rooms, kitchen and larders in the basement. The circularity was not entirely fanciful. Two single women, who had spent the greater part of their fortune on building costs, could not afford much in the way of staff or fuel. So, the interconnecting rooms followed the course of the sun. A breakfast room led to a morning room to a sitting room to a dining room to a study. Only one fire at a time would have to be made up, its hot coals preceding the inhabitants in a lidded brass bucket on their quiet daily passage through the succession of chambers. Rooms dictated the pattern of their day as strictly as the motions of sun and moon did the hours of worship in a convent. A housemaid’s labour was halved at every turn, with cunningly disguised storage areas for linen, candles, fuel and cleaning equipment. A dumb waiter brought food by the directest route from the kitchen to a tiny servery off the dining room. The enlightened architects had even thought to let large, low windows into the kitchen quarters to give their staff an equal share in the view of the garden.
Dr Pertwee explained that she had not lived in the place for over fifteen years and that some distant cousins had long since made inroads into her stocks of furniture. What remained – some of it beautiful, if battered – was dusty and cobwebbed. There was a sweet smell of damp everywhere and a chill, despite the warmth outside. But the spirit of the place survived; inspired and invigorating.
Edward was enchanted, as he had never been by the grand country houses to which Thomas had taken him in the surrounding counties. Dr Pertwee opened an old steamer trunk that had been left in the hall, and began to lift out the antiquated dresses it contained to show Sally. The women laughed and gasped over the old fabrics, holding up their beaded and glistening surfaces like so many precious relics.
Edward left them and climbed the narrow flight of stairs that curved up to the floor above. Despite the overgrown shrubs outside, the house was intensely sunny. Light spilled into the hall from a grimy lantern window at the dome’s apex. Clearly rain did too; there were greenish damp patches on the surrounding plasterwork and what appeared to be ferns growing on some of the lantern’s glazing bars. He walked around the gallery, smiling at the crudely painted cherubs and clouds overhead and peering through open doors into sparsely furnished bedrooms. He investigated a bathroom whose massive fittings, including a free-standing, claw-footed bath, appeared to date from before the Great War. He played a few, wheezing bars of a Lutheran chorale on a harmonium that stood, incongruously, on the other side of the room, then he turned to walk around the gallery. He looked down on the women and ran a curious finger along the thick handrail of the balustrade, revealing a rich mahogany gloss beneath the dust.
The last bedroom, the same off-square shape as the others only narrower, contained a spartan child’s bed with a rudimentary cast-iron frame. Edward sat on it. The springs complained and the yellowing ticking of the mattress felt clammily cold beneath his hands. Sally’s voice exclaimed over something, and was followed by Dr Pertwee’s, lower and persistent. He rose and was about to join them again when he saw that the pretty Gothic window had been spoilt by iron bars, rammed into the window frame on the outside.
Suddenly he felt the presence of Miriam, more strongly than he had in years. He stumbled back on to the mattress, oppressed by successive impulses of grief and a bleak unmanning fear. It was as though he could feel his sister’s mind within his own. She was alive. All at once, he knew she was alive somewhere, and he had an overwhelming, hideous sense that she was suffering. He shut his eyes tight as if trying to rid them of painful dust. He forced himself to concentrate on real things, on the chill of the mattress, the undisturbed smell of the room, the clattering of birds in the ivy outside, and gradually the palpable sense of her slipped away from him. He reopened his eyes and, blinking, looked afresh at the room, like a man who had woken with a start but had yet to perceive what had roused him.
Sally’s voice, laughing, was coming along the gallery.
‘Edward? Guess what? Edward? Where are you hiding, silly?’ She appeared in the doorway and saw in an instant that something was wrong.
Her voice quickened, ‘Edward, what is it?’
‘Nothing. I … I just got a bit breathless, that’s all. I think it’s the cold and the dust.’
He stood, taking her offered hands. ‘I’m fine. Honestly Doctor.’ He smiled at her, kissed her worried pout. ‘Let’s go down. This house is bizarre.’
‘This house is ours.’
‘What?’
‘This house is yours.’ Dr Pertwee had climbed the stairs to meet them.
‘Don’t look so shocked, Edward!’ Sally laughed.
‘Or properly speaking, this house is hers,’ Dr Pertwee continued. ‘Shall we go outside and see just how bad the garden’s got? You see, Edward,’ she said as they left the house, ‘The Roundel has always belonged to women. The idea was that it should pass into the hands of the first daughter of each generation, with priority being given to any that remained unmarried. Both my brothers were killed back in 1917, so I’ve no family to leave it to.’
‘You mentioned cousins,’ said Edward, as they passed out through the jungle of tree-high tangles that had once been a rose garden. Dr Pertwee pulled a long face.
‘My aunt had a depressingly respectable son who sired a clutch of depressingly respectable children. They are amply provided for by their father and I feel they are less than kin to me.’ She paused for a moment to dead-head a spray of browning blooms. ‘They live in Surrey,’ she added, as though this explained everything.
‘But it’s yours,’ he said, looking up at the weathered bricks, the cracked windowsills. ‘Surely you still have some need of it?’ What had seemed a charmingly battered folly was acquiring by the minute a high flavour of onerous responsibility.
‘On the contrary, dear boy, I shall be glad to rid myself of such a heavy burden. Property can make one feel profoundly guilty. This poor garden!’ She tut-tutted and vainly tucked a fistful of clematis back into the branches of an old, dead apple tree. The knotted hank of foliage and dark pink flowers swung back into Edward’s path before he could pass. He ducked beneath it. Dr Pertwee was leading them down the hillock, on the opposite side from the entrance to the house. They emerged from the jungle into long grass. It reached the old woman’s waist but she walked on regardless, trampling a path in which he and Sally could follow.
‘I shall be able to rest content in my retirement in the knowledge that two young, vigorous people are living here. You don’t have to transform the place. You don’t have to become its slaves. Just enjoy it. Love it. I’ve neglected it so.’
‘But surely,’ Edward called after her from the rear. ‘Surely you could sell it? A place of such historic interest … It must be valuable.’
‘I don’t want to sell it,’ Dr Pertwee countered. ‘Property out here is worth nothing and besides, I think there was something in the term of my unmarried aunt’s will that forbade me to put the place on the market. My solicitor could tell you.’ She stopped and turned to face him. ‘Don’t you want Sally to inherit all this? And your daughters?’ she asked, waving a hand at the garden as she fixed him with her quizzical stare.
‘Oh yes. Of course,’ he stammered. ‘It’s only that your kindness … I should say … I’m most embarrassed, Doctor.’
A bewitching smile broke out on her wrinkled face. She told him, as though it were the easiest thing in the world, “Well don’t be.’
As they walked on, Sally reached blindly behind her, took his hand and squeezed it with controlled excitement.
The garden was not circular, as had at first appeared. At the road side it was rounded, following the line of the hillock and the house, but to the rear it stretched away to meet a stream that ran beneath a group of trees; rustling poplar and trailing willow. Beneath the surface, wigs of emerald weed shook in the current. Sally sighed with open pleasure and sat on the bank. Edward spread his jacket, inside-out, on the grass and helped Dr Pertwee lower herself to sit on it. He sat a few feet from them both, his back against a willow trunk. On the other side of the stream a few more trees clustered, then the garden gave way to drifting acres of fenland crops. The first two fields, Dr Pertwee explained, belonged to The Roundel and were let out to a local farmer for a nominal rent. The view would never be spoilt.
‘Of course, I shall have to go through the motions of adopting you,’ she told Sally. ‘In the event of the cousins kicking up a stink. I don’t think they will, though. As I say, they live in Surrey. A place like this would be anathema to them. Too many draughts. Too much dust. Too old too, probably.’
‘What would your parents say to that, Sally?’ Edward asked.
Sally had taken off her shoes and was dipping her white feet in the water. Roused from her child-like absorption, she turned, wrinkling her eyes against the sunlight.
‘Mum would understand. She’s a realistic soul.’
‘And your father?’ Dr Pertwee asked.
‘He’d do as she told him.’
‘So,’ Dr Pertwee told Edward, after a thoughtful pause, ‘you’ll be gaining not one mother, but two.’
On the drive back into town, there was little conversation, but occasionally Edward would look at Dr Pertwee or catch Sally’s eye in the rear-view mirror and would be given a comfortable smile in return. It was as though they both felt the need to reassure him.
‘All will be well now,’ their smiles told him. ‘We have everything under control.’
When they arrived back at Dr Pertwee’s rooms, he stepped out to open the car door but sensed that Sally wanted to lead her back inside without him, so as to enjoy a moment of private thanks.
As Edward drove her back to Wenborough, he asked, ‘How will we manage to live?’
‘Way out there, you mean?’ She laughed at his simplicity.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. I’ll find something. I’ve convinced Bastard Graeme to do the decent thing and make enquiries among his GP contacts. There should be several out there somewhere. If we’re lucky there’ll be an old one with a comfy rural practice, looking to retire.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You?’ She laughed again. ‘Well you, mein Lieber, are going to leave your bookshop and beaver away in perfect peace at becoming a celebrated composer.’