1

Another foul wet autumn afternoon. But here, in the drawing room – music! Diana’s fair head was bowed over the cello, skinny little George held his violin aloft, and Margot, now and then, caught sight of her hands and dark hair reflected in the upraised lid of the grand. Half-past three, but the fire and the lamps were lit and the room shone against the rain sweeping across the garden and beating against the tall squared window panes.

The last bars faded. They were still for a moment. Then Diana sighed, George lowered his bow, and Margot turned on the piano stool to look at them.

‘Yes?’

‘I think so.’

‘Can we just take that from letter K?’

‘If we do it any more we’ll have nothing left for tonight.’ George almost shook himself, like a shivering little animal, and walked across to where the violin case lay open on a chair. His feet in scuffed brogues sounded loud, then soft, moving from board to rug. He laid down his violin, and closed the lid.

Whimpering and scratching came from outside the door. He tiptoed over, flung it wide.

‘My friend!’

‘Oh, George! You’ve made him jump.’

He bent to the sleek black head.

‘In you come.’

Wag wag, patter patter, over to the fire.

‘Good dog, that’s it.’ He flung himself into the wing chair and patted the seat. A black nose poked in, a head squeezed adoringly against his thigh. George leaned back, patting the sleek coat, closing his eyes. ‘Any chance of tea?’

‘I expect you’d like us to make it.’ Margot closed her score. Diana was resting her cello on its stand, wiping the bow.

‘How kind.’

It was freezing out in the hall. ‘Must light the fire after tea.’ They hurried down the passage, with its row of bells which nobody rang any more, and into the kitchen. A huge room to heat, but warmer in here with the range. The big black kettle hummed.

‘Are you nervous?’ Diana pulled out a tray from the rack.

‘I’m always nervous.’ Margot opened the pantry door. An ice-house. ‘You know I am,’ she said, and then: ‘I can almost see my breath.’ She drew a covered half fruit cake from a shelf and came out shivering, closing the door behind her with her foot.

‘It never shows. And George always pretends he’s not.’ Diana put a cotton-lace cloth on the tray, set out cups and saucers, pulled open a rattling drawer for knives and teaspoons. She’d been coming here since childhood, knew every shelf and cupboard. There had been Nanny, then, of course. Nanny and Miss Renner.

 

The day nursery had beeen made into a schoolroom; the four of them sat round the table, Miss Renner at the top in a high-backed chair. Maths books, poetry anthologies, a globe. French conversation.

‘Bonjour, mes enfants.’

‘Bonjour, mademoiselle!’

Miss Renner had a fiancé, she told them, fighting in France. Captain Gibson. She pinned little flags in the map on the wall, to show them important places. As the years went by, so the pins moved. Liege. Ypres. Neuve-Chapelle. Loos. Verdun. The Somme. None of them ever forgot the Somme.

 

‘Shall we have toast?’

They carried it all back to the drawing room, the grandfather clock in the hall just striking four, the rain going on and on.

‘What good girls you are.’

‘Make yourself useful and put another log on.’

The Hepplewick Trio, taking tea. George had come up with the name.

‘This is where we met, where it all began.’

Margot Heslop, Diana Embleton, George Liddell.

‘Frank would have made it a quartet.’

‘But Frank isn’t musical, is he?’

‘Political.’

A general sigh.

 

Hepplewick Hall lay well back from a quiet lane, the entrance shielded by trees. A broad, left-curving drive swept up to a flag-stoned terrace. The house was elegant, built of stone, with tall chimneys, and the plans which William Newton had drawn up in 1761 were still kept in the bank in Morpeth. Newton had grafted the house on to the fifteenth-century pele tower, empty and looming. Margot’s father said he wasn’t sure if you could graft something grand on to something much simpler, but that was the word they all used.

Once, the Hall had had staff: generations of Heslops had rung those bells, summoning cook, parlour maid, footman. Grooms had run out at the arrival of carriages, horses had clip-clopped over the stable-yard. One of them, a tall black hunter, had a portrait up in the dining room, whose walls were hung with Heslops: Margot’s father said it was good enough to be a Stubbs.

These days a Ford Model T stood in a loose box. There were no horses, and almost no staff at all, for in the 1930s the idea of service had given way to the idea of work – when you could get work. It was only the gardener, old Barrow, whose name they’d long since stopped laughing about, who’d been here for ever and still came up twice a week, with Mrs Barrow. She cleaned, and sometimes cooked, while he worked in the kitchen garden, tended the rose beds and the beehive, heaped up bonfires, mowed the endless lawn.

A towering cedar stood on the grass, on the right of the curving drive, and darkened the fine casement windows at the front, but no one had ever wished that cedar gone: generations of Heslops had taken tea in its shade on summer days; a swing still hung there.

‘Push harder! I want to go high!’

They took it in turns, out in the garden after lunch, whenever it was fine. Frank was the tallest, the most in demand as a pusher, strong as a horse at seven, able to bat the ball which Miss Renner threw right into the shrubbery.

‘I’ll get it!’

‘No, me!’

Margot – ‘tall for a girl’ as Miss Renner said, and she herself lean and rangy – went racing over the grass, little George hurtling after. Dreamy Diana stood dreaming.

Cricket and croquet and the swing. And races.

‘Go!’

Down from the sundial and over the lawn, down to the ha-ha, quite a long way. Capability Brown had put it in, riding over from Capheaton in his carriage on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1762, walking with Sir Thomas Heslop over the unmade ground: that was how Miss Renner thought it might have been. Sir Thomas had made his money in coal. He wanted something to show for it: grand house, grand garden. Brown’s elegant plans, too, were kept in the vault in Morpeth.

The children stood on the edge of the ha-ha, panting. Slow-moving cattle grazed the field on the other side. Frank almost always won.

And at the end of the afternoon, the pony and trap came for him and Diana to take them back to Great Whitton, and another for George, to clip-clop him home to Coquet Bridge. Miss Renner went to clear everything away in the schoolroom, and Margot ran looking for her mother.

‘Here I am, darling.’

Up in the broad airy bedroom, up at her dressing table, fastening an earring, smiling at the reflection of her daughter as she came running in, over the blue and green rug. They leaned together, watching the endless images of themselves in the triple glass.

‘So many of us!’

Often, before bed, her mother would play the piano. Sometimes she sang.

‘Now the day is over,

Night is drawing nigh;

Shadows of the evening

Steal across the sky . . .’

The grandfather clock in the hall struck the hour. Margot leaned against the piano and watched the shadows lengthen over the garden.

 

When it rained – and it rained a good deal – they played inside, allowed in the drawing room to read on the window seat, dress dolls in the corner, spread soldiers on the floor. Miss Renner talked again of her fiancé. She played them marching songs on the piano, singing away. ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, ‘Here we are, Here we are again!’

They stamped up and down, they sang as the rain poured on. Sometimes the songs were gentle and sad, not war songs at all: ‘The Eriskay Love Lilt’, ‘Loch Lomond’.

‘And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye . . .’

The Scots had always raided, and the Northumbrians raided back. The pele tower had been built so strong that no Scot could get in there: that was what Margot’s father told her, and she told the others, thinking pele was spelled peal, and thinking of bells.

Alone in the great big drawing room, she ran her fingers over the piano keys. She gazed at Miss Renner’s music, and at her mother’s, turning the pages. She banged about, she loved it. When she was six, she began to have lessons. By the time she was seven, they knew she was going to be good.

By then, her mother had stopped doing pretty things at her dressing table, or playing the piano in the evenings. She was lying in bed all the time.

‘But I want to see her!’

‘Later, my duck. Mummy’s resting now.’

When Margot was eight, it was 1916. That was the year her mother died, and when Miss Renner pulled her on to her lap and rocked her, she was sobbing not only for Evelyn Heslop but for Edward Gibson, who had taken a lock of her hair to France, and written letters beginning My darling Emily (she pressed the page to her lips), and died in the Battle of the Somme.

‘For me and my true love will never meet again . . .’

They never sang ‘Loch Lomond’ after that. They looked away from the bright little flag on the map. And after that everything changed. Frank and George went off to prep school, Miss Renner stayed bravely on. But a motherless only-child could not be at home with a nanny and a governess for ever, even if there was another little girl sharing lessons.

In 1918, Margot and Diana were sent to boarding school. Thomas Heslop hugged them both to him as Barrow heaved their trunks up into the trap.

‘Please don’t cry.’

‘Don’t you cry, Daddy.’

They clip-clopped away down the autumn lanes.

‘Here we be, Miss Heslop.’

They held hands as they looked at the long flight of steps.

 

Margot’s memories of her mother faded. The great deep house remained. When she came home for the holidays she jumped down from the trap and ran over the flags. She kissed the brass knob above the letter box, stood looking about her as Barrow led the pony back to the stable yard. The branches of the cedar rose and fell in the wind; the swing swung to and fro. To the right of the door, at the corner of the house, stood a huge old forsythia, which tossed in the long wet spring, shaking yellow flowers all over the flagstones, floating in pools in the hollows. Her mother had painted a watercolour of it: windy sky, grey stone, lemon-bright flowers and shining water. It hung on the landing now.

Indoors, Margot put down her schoolbag and kissed the case of the grandfather clock. She stood in the shadowy hall, feeling suddenly very alone, and watched the rose-pink smiling sun above the face move infinitesimally to the right. She waited for the chime to welcome her. Her own grandfather had listened to it, when he was a boy: her father had told her that.

‘You’re back!’

He came out of the library to greet her, his dog behind him, as the clock began to strike. She flew into his arms.