Annie, Carmen and Laura walked all the way from Fenedge to Bellamy House Hotel. The event is imprinted into their minds: the long straight road to Winterwart, the hot afternoon, the white dust, that day when they set out to meet their fate, or at least to have their interviews. Now, it’s a good half hour’s walk from Fenedge to Bellamy House Hotel (forty-five minutes to Winterwart) and many still walk it daily, there and back; for though these days the Bellamy House Courtesy Car is despatched to pick up guests who arrived at Kings Lynn or Norwich stations, or to meet the little Lear jets which fly into Bellamy Airspace outside Fakenham, its function is to oblige the leisured, not to transport staff. A courtesy car, Bellamy House bound, overtook Carmen, Laura and Annie that very afternoon but did not stop, and rendered them despondent. They feared this was the pattern of life to come. Some rode in carriages, others walked. And how did you get to be one of the privileged? How did you get from here to there?
The road from Fenedge to Winterwart runs parallel to the coast for a time, and then veers off towards it. It passes first through the beet fields, interrupting the long straight lines of low foliage which run sternly on either side to meet the horizon, allowing all the space in the world to the sky and the winds – painters love East Anglia because of the light – then crosses a patch of the old wood, where the oak, the ash, the maple and the beech stretch above the road to form a dappling canopy, before coming to the straight and boring conifers of the Forestry Commission – at least the crossbills love the conifers, if nobody else does. (Crossbills are small parrot-like finches; their presence anywhere excites birdwatchers very much.) Then the forest in its turn gives way to grassy fields, and the white paling fences of the ‘Convalescent Centre for Ailing Horses – Prop. Mr E. Bliss, Homoeopathic Remedies a Speciality’. And then, in time gone by, as reward and privilege, two thirds of the way to Winterwart, you would reach the high wrought-iron gates of Sealord Mansion, and peer through them to its wonderful formal garden, for so long in marvellous wrack and ruin: yew hedges falling into delphiniums, ivy creeping into the disused fountains, clematis and climbing roses fighting for space and light, and everywhere butterflies – the silver spotted skipper, the holly blue, the painted lady, the Duke of Burgundy (the latter if you were lucky) – attracted to the garden by the presence of nettles, St John’s wort and lady’s-smock (Cardamine pratensis) – plants that botanists agree deserve more than to be dismissed as weeds. And there, half-hidden by abundant foliage, you would see the great house with its glass rotunda – once home to one of the biggest telescopes in Europe – its curving glass panels (an architectural wonder) cracked and broken, the better for bats and barn owls to fly in and out. This was surely Driver’s safe house – its facade cracked and crumbling, pulled to pieces by weather and ivy; the absurd cherubims weathered noseless, the bolts of the big black front door rusted through – a door which local legend said opened of its own accord on Halloween night to let out the year’s batch of vampires, which would then fly howling and cackling over the fens and the forests and the marshes, bringing the next year’s crop of trouble. All this, for the sake of Fenedge and environs, to bring prosperity and energy to the area, and offer opportunities for local employment – or so Sir Bernard suggested in his Change of Use application to the Planning Committee -was now to be swept away: cleaned up; tidied; brightly lit and unspooked; renamed Bellamy House as Windscale was renamed Sellafield, in a piece of potent magic.
And though Alison says to me, ‘I always found the place perfectly pleasant and I’m very sensitive to atmospheres,’ I thought if she could so misjudge herself, she could also misjudge the house. But what do I know? As I say, I never saw Sealord in its decay, which was also its prime. I was taken to its smart restaurant once, after Sir Bernard had got his hands on it, and found it very boring: the smoked salmon dry and the lamb cutlets overcooked and flaky, though of course I didn’t like to say so.
As Carmen, Laura and Annie approached what was rapidly turning into the Bellamy House Hotel, workmen were taking down the old iron gates, and putting up a steel security barrier, which was to open by remote control. The girls were early for their three o’clock appointment with Mrs Haverill, the housekeeper, so they just sat down by the side of the road and watched. Carmen, Annie and Laura remarked to one another, with nudges and giggles, that the workmen were unusually skeletal; their expressions were dour; there was no opportunity here for banter, whistles or agreeable bridling. They were not local workmen, that was for sure. Annie wondered where Sir Bernard had dug them up, and that convulsed them again.
On the other side of the gate, tractors and diggers swept up and levelled the overgrown flowerbeds and the remnants of lawns, crunched up the ornamental lead border markers, turned up the little bones in the pets’ cemetery, and made one mass, one mess, of a thousand different things, from the heath spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza maculate) to the dewberry to the dog rose to the Digitalis purpurea (or foxglove) to the paving slabs brought south (with great difficulty) from York, to the melon frames; shovelling soil so that the entrance to the underground ice house must remain forever hidden – but everything passes; everything that grows must die, everything that’s built must crumble; it’s just sad to be around when it does. Enough.
A whirr was heard and a wind arose, and a smart black and red helicopter came down over the row of beeches – fortunately, they were to stay – onto a make-do helipad behind, and out of the machine stepped Sir Bernard and Lady Rowena, whom Driver had been trying to palm off on Sir Bernard for some time. Lady Rowena had done Driver a favour or two in her day: he owed her something now, that is to say, marriage to someone as energetically rich and famous as Sir Bernard; and failing that, she could at least serve to make Carmen jealous, should the occasion arise, and she be Sir Bernard’s final choice. Driver likes to keep all his options open as long as he can. Don’t you? Who knows what’s going to happen next?
Lady Rowena had a long, haughty face and upswept hair. She wore fine leather boots, britches and a crisp white shirt. She had a long back and a stylish very flat what the Americans refer to as ass and my grandmother as ‘derrière’. Over her shoulder was flung an ugly leather bag, hand-stitched, of good quality. She had a loud plummy voice.
‘Some things won’t do,’ said Lady Rowena to Sir Bernard, her voice carrying in the wind. ‘Some things will and some things won’t, and this is one of the things that won’t.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Sir Bernard, who still remained socially insecure, at least just a little. His father, after all, had been a local farm boy, who later took to breeding boiling fowls.
‘That, darling,’ and she pointed to a swinging sign being carried past by workmen. It read ‘Bellamy House Hotel. Old World Value, New World Comfort’. ‘Whoever thought of that?’
‘I did,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘What is more, darling, I think it’s rather good.’
‘I don’t,’ said Lady Rowena. ‘Old World simply doesn’t recognise the existence of New World. You’ll get the dreadful helicopter set in for a while, but only till they realise Old World isn’t in situ. Then they’ll be off. Just “Bellamy House”, dear, pure and simple.’ Oh, she was smart. Sir Bernard had spent hot nights with Lady Rowena, her long legs, still booted (for he rather liked that) wrapped round his strong neck (or he rather thought that was what was happening), or else lying more sedately, her plummy voice in his ear (she never whispered: the whole world could hear her bizarre suggestions. What did she care? Servants didn’t count as other people anyhow, she’d told him so), so he thought it behoved him to call her darling. And Driver would nudge him by day and say, ‘A bit of hot stuff I found you there. I told you the brave deserved the fair. And she’s got so many contacts, that woman. The right lay is the best entrée!’
And because Driver’s advice always seemed to work out, Sir Bernard listened, and slept with Lady Rowena, and dreamt of Carmen.
A catechism
Q: This is all very well, but what does the Devil do with souls once he’s got them?
A: Pretty much what the tractors were doing that day at Sealord Mansion. That is to say, making one undifferentiated mass of a whole lot of originally rather nice if trivial things. Like an angry child churning up all his dinner on the plate before he eats it. The Devil seeks sameness. It’s the Devil’s plan to create a faceless, tractable, self-interested crowd out of the human race; a crowd whose behaviour is predictable, and therefore controllable. Self-interest is supremely predictable. It’s the same for everyone everywhere, as morality is not.
Q: Can you hold out against the Devil?
A: Yes. You can trick him by word, and surprise him by deed, because the only thing he really understands is self-interest. He lacks imagination. So his deals often don’t hold. They fail, like a Moscow coup.
Q: What sort of deal has Driver made with Sir Bernard?
A: In return for surrendering his soul to the Devil and not to God when he dies, so that the Devil gets a nice rich extra goblet for the mashing (or another ally in the war of Evil against Good, depending on which tradition you favour), Sir Bernard gets his wishes granted, his desires fulfilled, though this could sometimes be a problem for Driver. How can Driver square Sir Bernard’s wish to have Carmen for a wife with his desire for social status? It’s a problem. Driver, on the day the three girls went for their interview at Bellamy House, had been hoping that Sir Bernard would forget Carmen and fall in love with Lady Rowena and make life simpler all round. Carmen was meant to have gone after the air hostess job. But she didn’t, so that was that. The Devil’s only weapon against free will is self-interest. Now he just has to stand back and see what happens.
Q: How do I know when the Devil has got his eye on me?
A: You will hear a little voice in your ear saying, ‘I have to look after myself; no one else will.’
Q: Then what do I do?
A: You think of your mother and try not to believe it.
Q: Does the Devil have rules he has to keep to?
A: Oddly enough, he has a sense of fair play. He doesn’t move the goal posts.
Q: What is his hold over Sir Bernard?
A: Sir Bernard once said, while the Devil was passing, ‘I’d give my very soul for enough capital, just for once,’ and the Devil heard and now Sir Bernard goes from strength to strength and Driver is his chauffeur, his amanuensis, his Grey Eminence, the private whisperer in his ear, and those who knew him before and know him now marvel, so changed a man is he. The clumsy oaf, chicken farmer, drumstick maker, now a friend to celebrities, patron of popular causes, a man who leaps out of bed in the morning to do his press-ups. Who ever has enough capital? You can go on needing more, more, for ever. Driver’s going to be around for a long time.
Many people, of course, put the improvement down to Sir Bernard’s former nasty wife’s being so unfaithful he at last found the courage to divorce her, but I know it’s more than that. Fat had turned to muscle, meanness into lordliness, twenty years been taken from his life clock just like that. Mind you, Sir Bernard still had no taste. The Devil can give a man everything but taste. He has none himself, or very little. God is his brother. You know how it is in families: how the qualities are doled out by common consent. God was the one with taste; the serious one with an eye for a painting, an ear for a symphony; the Devil the one who knew how to have a good time, and who listened to Radio One, down-market to his leather boots.
Q: How do you know all this about the Devil? Stop, stop, or I’ll call the vicar.
A: I am the vicar.