It’s always been a matter of curiosity to me why postmen persist in wearing shorts regardless of the viciously unpredictable seasons of England. Perhaps it’s a badge of honour in an occupation so starved of appreciation. For a short while we had a postwoman who eschewed her small red van for a bike, and she was possibly the only one who dressed appropriately for the elements.
Last week, however, it was our usual bare-legged chap, and on account of the driving rain, and the fact I had taken shelter from it under the grandest of our sweet chestnut trees, I decided to save the poor wretch the business of continuing all the way up the drive to the house by relieving him of his deliveries.
Had I given it rational thought I would have stayed put and let him pass me by, since there is always a terrific amount of last-minute post before Grandfather’s party. But having unburdened him from an armful of letters and small packages I found myself remaining under a dripping tree waiting for the shower to pass lest I should ruin the paper. There is no other reason than this that I would have found myself browsing idly through the pile of RSVPs, bills, catalogues and flyers that would have normally never attracted my attention, since our post is separated by Adam every morning and all items redistributed discreetly to their intended recipients, which judging by what I held in my arms, must often include the dustbin.
On coming across an opened and resealed letter amongst this most mundane pile of paper, my interest was stirred. The curious thing was that this piece of returned mail did not have our address on it.
We are not hard to find. The correct address is ‘Bosmaine House, Fieldings, By Catscombury, Gloucester’. There is no need for anything as vulgar as a postcode, since the estate encompasses two villages in the area, including Catscombury itself, and its small, irritatingly but picturesquely inefficient post office. Hence Grandfather regards having to identify the family seat by numbers and letters an intolerable insult which is why no such thing is included on our writing sets.
But this envelope, a small affair, calling-card size, had merely the words ‘Squire-966’ scribbled on the back in pen, and yet had been delivered to our door. Since it clearly belonged to nobody at this address I pocketed it without conscience. I confess I was intrigued. The rain softened and I walked up the driveway, anticipating with pleasure a hot bath, and less so an evening of dull conversation.
Grandfather had three ‘Amusantes’ staying. One apparently presented a political late-night television programme that nobody watches but everybody admires. Another was an artist of some sort whose work involves decaying fruit, and the third was a female bullfighter and is now an architect of perfectly preposterous structures, admired and written about by people who live in Georgian townhouses. They were all terribly pleased with themselves, and adopted that easy posture that the lower classes care to affect to indicate they are not impressed by being entertained by the last remains of English aristocracy, but which in fact reveals they believe quite the contrary. We do not slump casually at dinner and undermine etiquette. We sit properly and attend to our manners. I judged them accordingly.
I know I am a plain woman, but unlike my ancestors, modern life affords me the freedom to enjoy my privilege without the intolerable pressure they suffered of marrying unattractive wretches who pitied them but required an increase in status.
Grandfather has often remarked on his relief at my genetic predisposition to clumsy, ungainly, sexual unattractiveness, as he says it ‘brings less trouble to the door’. He may be right. Untroubled by suitors, I have a quiet, if splendid life.
Grandfather sits, of course, in the Lords, and I am titled, and when he dies I shall inherit Bosmaine, which, unlike the properties of many of our friends and family who are obliged to sell cream teas to obese people with tattoos and screaming children in fold-away buggies just to have the roof repairs done, remains an estate that more than earns its keep.
It’s assisted, of course, by substantial investments Grandfather made in Africa via the great friends he made when his parents were mine owners, whom I know, though it’s never discussed, he continues to assist in siphoning foreign aid into private bank accounts with a skill that would make him the greatest chancellor Great Britain never had. The upshot is, we are a rarity. We are an aristocratic family that still has money.
Of course when I say family, we are certainly diminished in that respect. When mother and father and Hugo and James died in the Cessna plane crash off Antigua (the pilot was a drunk; Grandfather ensured his family were subsequently made destitute), Grandfather was apparently a broken man. But even though I was only three, and Grandfather is not the most emotionally demonstrative of human beings, he was all I had left, and indeed I was all he had left, and so we love each other in a cautious but unbreakable bond that is unspoken but ever present. It’s admittedly lonely at times, but then I imagine, if called for, I would take a bullet for the old goat.
The dinner was as tedious as anticipated, with the architect and the TV presenter fighting for attention as they argued about politics in Europe and I saw my opportunity to slip away. Nobody, I imagine, mourned my leaving. My contribution to the evening was watching and listening, and despising these monkeys we have never met, and will never meet again, ‘busy’ people, yet not busy enough to turn down a weekend invitation from a stranger to dance to the tune of money. Before pudding was served the artist did at least turn to me and ask, ‘And what is it you do then, Sarah?’ I replied, ‘I am currently a visiting professor at Harvard researching the outcomes of proto isolated genetics.’ She nodded sagely, waiting, and when I added nothing further said, ‘Very very cool,’ and turned away again.
Grandfather loves this. Of course I am no such thing. I made it up. But I know he enjoys the discomfort of the Amusantes when they curse themselves for not having thoroughly googled me. There always follows a great deal of barely disguised regret that there might have been someone useful at the table whom they ignored, and they may have seemed foolish, and so with that triumph I chose that moment to leave.
I kissed Grandfather on the head and retired. I smiled, feeling their palpable uneasiness that they were the only ones there, and there was no A-list party other than themselves, no ‘networking’ opportunities, their sole chore being to amuse Grandfather over his pigeon pie. These are the people who write in the Guardian about refusing honours, and reforming the second chamber, yet they can all be summoned with merely the opening of a gold-trimmed invitation card. Anticipating their horror at reading the reports in all the society magazines of his summer solstice party only two weeks from their dinner, to which none of them would be invited, sealed the schadenfreude.
Tragedy, as I was taught by my ridiculously attractive drama tutor Miss Anderson in boarding school, is defined by the protagonist bringing the calamity upon themselves.
* * *
When I retired to my room I opened the letter expecting something mundane. It was not. It was perplexing. Several Post-its, from a high-end hotel chain, had been stuck with red pointing arrows to locations on a ragged map of our area.
On each Post-it, in a rough ring, in the centre of which appeared our estate, was a person’s name, and a letter of the alphabet, either A or B. I confess to having felt a worm of excitement. Whether of pleasure or trepidation I can’t decide. My life is contented but it rarely has the extremes of dark and light that describe the thrill of being alive that I understand some other people experience, from having read accounts of their exploits. It was perhaps that the letter may have actually been connected to us in some way, and not just a delivery error, that ignited the part of my brain long buried from childhood, when I played solitary detective games in the grounds, picking up meaningless objects and constructing crimes and clues around their origins.
The addressee on the envelope was one ‘Allun Carver’. A strange spelling of a common first name, but not a mistake as the hand was careful, by a nibbed pen.
I opened my laptop and googled the street name on the address, a street in London. Then disappointment. A shabby, empty corner shop next to a bookmakers.
In truth there was nothing remarkable about this. But it niggled sufficiently to puzzle me, and there had been little else to do this last while, except fend off the exasperation of the household staff who appear to become hysterical when dealing with catering and parking arrangements. I had not been in London for months, so resolved to go almost immediately. I would visit and investigate, just as I had done when aged seven, when I found the bare footprints before the party, just by the summer pavilion, that really had no business being there in the mud.
I resolved to pack lightly and head off in the early hours. If I timed it right I would be long gone before the Amusantes had eaten their sullen breakfast in a fog of their own failure.
* * *
It doesn’t take long for a person of my standing to get what I want. Even before I arrived on the train the estate agents named on the To Let board had been alerted to my interest in the vacant shop and one of their representatives was waiting for me as I stepped out of the cab. He was a young man whose skin and features suggested an Arab origin, but with a personal grooming style currently fashionable in the less affluent boroughs of London. His hair was slicked down like a licked newborn calf and the sharp suit he wore was of a garish pastel powder blue that any decent tailor would pay to have removed from his workshop under cover of night.
He unlocked the security grating, pushed open the peeling front door and we entered. I’m not certain what I expected to find, but the dusty empty shop floor was a crushing disappointment. A quick glance told me this had been an electrical appliances store. Catalogues of fridges and TVs lay in untidy piles, and a few cardboard boxes still contained odd cables and plug attachments.
The empty shelves were fringed with Day-Glo labels proclaiming special offers on selected computers.
I quizzed the estate agent as to the previous owner, and he told me it had been a British Indian gentleman who had now gone out of business. I asked if the gentleman had perhaps had a business partner, but drew a blank and in addition a sideways glance of suspicion that perhaps I was not a straightforward businesswoman looking for a vacant shop let. I asked if I could survey the back premises. Having lost interest in me he opened the office behind the counter and then began tapping into his phone and staring out of the window.
I opened the door onto a grimy office, as dusty and empty as the shop, but on the floor lay some in-trays. On the top to the left, the unopened mail, perhaps a dozen or more letters, of one Allun Carver.
How very disappointing. The answer straight away. No trail to follow. No secrets to uncover. Just a man who worked in a shop, who didn’t open his mail and must have left before the last one arrived. Why it had come our way may be perfectly well explained, but it seemed as though I was to be thwarted in adventure. The child detective in me wilted but while my bored companion gesticulated at the sky with a loosely flapping hand as he droned in a monotone to someone on the phone, I nevertheless scooped up all the envelopes and slid them into my bag.
Since the occupants had taken everything of value it seemed no great crime. It would be something to read later in my room at the club.
* * *
The tiresome Wilkinson sisters were staying in town and so it was no hardship to leave the dining room, these days full of city women with flattened-end false fingernails, to their braying and take supper upstairs.
I started at the bottom of the pile, eleven letters in all, and began to open them in order, bottom to top. There is no point in dragging this out. Mr Allun Carver was clearly an invited guest to Grandfather’s summer party. There was the invite, or should I say three of them, right at the bottom of the pile. There were the familiar bronze tissue-lined envelopes, gold-trimmed, finest hand-spun cards, and punch-stamped lettering, requesting the RSVPs by, well by next Wednesday as luck would have it. The most curious thing was they had been sent in the same packet, only one short month after last year’s celebrations. Affording Mr Carver and his two mystery companions a good clear eleven months to respond seemed not only excessive, but highly unusual since our invites did not go into the post until May.
The other pieces of mail were an enigma. Three names. Callum Dale, Olive Channing, Shirley Fog. I looked at the postmarks. Each one had arrived within a month of the other. A piece of paper with three names, and a reminder that there was ten months to go, then nine and so on.
Only the one I had intercepted contained the map and the arrows and, as I realise now, the ‘by Wednesday’ note. It must surely only refer to the party itself. On reflection, the last returned letter had an unusual air of urgency about it, as though the sender had been perplexed at the others not having been acknowledged.
It suggested the sender had been staying at various outposts of this high-end hotel, posting out regular reminders, doing little else other than counting down to a date. Only this last missive conveyed a palpable sense of anxiety.
In fact on examination only the first one had the Squire-966 on it, and one can only surmise that it must be a postbox number for Bosmaine, otherwise how would it have arrived at our door?
So if I did not send this, then it can only have been Grandfather.
I realised that I had wished for some rare detective treat to unfold and found myself childishly disappointed that it had not led to something grisly and sinister. The dull part was that I simply had to go home now and ask Grandfather what it meant.
I had dreamt of trails of clues, secrets unfolding, but here I was once again, the solitary grandchild of a solitary man, dreaming of adventure in the musty bedroom of a gentlewoman’s club in Bloomsbury, with nobody to share my dreams. Opening the mail of a stranger for thrills and receiving none.
What had I secretly hoped for? Perhaps that dear Grandfather was a serial killer or a Satanist? How very predictable. Slaughtered innocents? Secret cult members being invited to parties to perform rituals?
I almost yawned at the prospect. This was the stuff of the English tabloids. I would frankly be disappointed if none of Grandfather’s cronies had dispatched the odd orphan or danced naked except for antlers and a cape. It took not the slightest flight of fancy to picture half the board of governors on his Trust engaged in such a thing at this very moment.
The horrible truth was that I had been excited at the prospect of a more intriguing mystery. It was my loneliness I suppose. There. I will admit to it. I am lonely.
It embarrassed me where this solitude-induced weakness had led. All that was left was to return to the country the next day and have Grandfather recount some dreary tale why a dreary man in London gets letters every month reminding him about the summer party. A caterer perhaps? The man who provides the generators for the marquees? He’d moved on a year ago and his mail was delivered while the shop stayed open, but since it had closed his letter came back.
I felt a fool. Looking for adventure when none was present. I glanced down at the map again, and the letters written neatly under their names.
Olive Channing A-
Shirley Fog B-
Callum Dale AB+
Blood groups. Blood.
* * *
I had a good two hours before my direct train, and I used them to return to the shop on Caledonian Road. It was locked and shuttered again. I entered the bookmakers. It was not a smoky and squalid den, but had the feel of a dowdy airport lounge. Two men stood staring at a TV screen high on the wall, an older woman sat at a machine and a young man attended the screened-off counter.
I approached him.
‘May I ask if you knew the gentleman who ran the shop next door?’
The young man stood up straight, and plucked at his tie. ‘Nah. Sorry, love. I don’ know ’bout that.’
‘Do you know when it closed?’
‘Nah. Was closed when I started.’
‘Thank you.’ I turned to go.
The woman looked up. ‘You asking about Saheed’s place?’
‘The electrical shop. Next door.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah. Saheed. Been gone two months now.’
I moved to her and sat down unbidden.
‘Why you asking?’
‘I had some mail for a man who may have worked there. A Mr Carver.’
She narrowed her eyes, thinking. ‘Can’t place him. Nah. Saheed was a nice man though. Nice and polite. Do anythin’ for ya.’
‘Do you know why he left?’
The woman rubbed at the back of her neck. She smelled faintly of rose water and urine. ‘Kept gettin’ visitors like.’
‘Visitors?’
She nodded. ‘I never saw ’em. But he said he didn’t care for ’em.’
‘Tax men? Gangs?’
She blinked up at me through smeared spectacles. ‘Visitors. I just said, didn’t I?’
The two men had turned to look at us, irritated that their concentration on a greyhound race was being disrupted.
‘Thank you,’ I said kindly.
I decided a coffee and cake in the station would be a more valuable use of my time than speaking further to a woman with mental health issues. I left as quietly as I’d entered.
* * *
We entertain in grand style only once a year. The summer party is everything. I have little involvement. I have a handful of friends, well acquaintances really, that I formed at Cambridge. I always ask them but they rarely attend. They are married with families and busy lives, or live abroad, and after years of being turned down I mostly leave the guest list to Grandfather, who enjoys the company of celebrities of every hue.
But what I have been accustomed to is the calmness of Grandfather’s demeanour preceding these events. He is perturbed by very little.
However, on the occasion of my return from London this was far from the case. My sole living relative was pale, distracted, almost wringing his hands at every turn. His temper was short and his attention shorter.
In such a mood it was perhaps not wise to bother him with questions about the returned letter.
However, Grandfather’s mood was so out of character, so tense, so tetchy, that he caught me short in the great hall.
‘Sarah!’ he bellowed. ‘Are you completely at a loss?’
I was not quite sure what to make of this. At a loss? Did he mean idle? A tiny wound I had hitherto been unaware of opened in my heart, but small as it was it was sufficient to change my mood. I replied with ice in my voice.
‘Something amiss, Tather?’
I should say at this point that we have pet names. When he is in my favour he is always Tather, an inheritance from my mispronunciation at toddler level. He in turn calls me Podge, which is exactly as it seems, an affectionately impolite reference to my build. That he had called me Sarah indicated he was annoyed.
‘Everything.’
‘Then perhaps we should have a whisky. It’s not too early.’
He sat down heavily in the chess chair. I poured our drinks and sat opposite him.
He gulped his down.
‘I have a question for you, Tather.’
He was barely paying attention, fidgeting and shifting.
‘Do we know an Allun Carver?’
The crystal decanter set was a wedding present to my parents. I was sorry to have lost one of the six glasses as Grandfather dropped it on the hearth, but I was sorrier still to see the raw, primordial fear that rendered his familiar face as unlovely as it was unrecognisable.
* * *
Adam had helped Grandfather to his room and he had been quietly resting for over an hour when he appeared at my door. He was still putty white, but there was a new, composed nature to the man.
‘Sarah. Let’s walk in the garden.’
We said nothing at all until we were well away from the house, through the laburnum walk and down to The Pearly Gates, the plot of meadow where all the family dogs have been buried over the years.
I am patient, and I waited for him to speak first. He continually glanced here and there, as if expecting company, but in such a secluded spot it was unlikely. He looked at me with rheumy eyes.
‘We are not as small a family as you think.’
‘What do you mean? Since Uncle Oswald and Lottie died there’s only us.’
‘No. No. They are legion.’
‘Please, Tather, sit down.’
His madness was frightening me. I guided him to the stone bench we had carved for Meg, the insubordinate wire-haired fox terrier we had both loved, and he sat like a child.
Grandfather then took my hand, a gesture I had never experienced. It was awkward but the tightness of his grip let me no choice but to endure it.
‘I shall keep this simple, Podge. We haven’t much time.’
I shifted uneasily.
‘My great-grandfather. A taste for the slaves we owned back then. Fathered many, many children.’
‘Oh please,’ I interrupted, ‘that kind of historical behaviour isn’t a family matter.’
He squeezed harder, and became stern. ‘Listen. He kept one woman, some witch doctor’s daughter. Brought her to England, kept her in a cottage right under the nose of Lady Bosmaine. They had seven children. Those children, born and bred in England, had many more.’
‘Well I imagine that bloodline is well diluted by now, Tather. And illegitimacy is no concern of ours.’
He hissed a warning through his teeth to be quiet. ‘They had a summer ball. The slave woman, having lost her mind in age and sickness, turned up at the house in a fine dress waiting to be admitted. Lady Bosmaine had her thrashed and thrown out of the grounds.
‘When the staff arose in the morning the front steps were adorned with the skull of a baby, woven through with willow twigs and nightshade, smeared with blood, and burned in the sockets was the remains of an invitation to the ball. The woman was found dead by her own hand later that day.’
I sighed. My only living relative was beginning to go senile. ‘What is this primitive nonsense? Who is Allun Carver? Tell me now.’
He dropped my hand. My ire had been noted. ‘We have since held a summer ball now for 123 years at Bosmaine. Following some, shall we say, disturbances, at the balls following the slave woman’s death, on the advice of her son it became the custom to invite those unrecognised family members to the party.’
‘Then why have I never been introduced?’
‘Only the relatives who have died in the year between balls are invited. They decline.’
I confess I snorted. ‘Tather, I am telling you honestly now that we are going to see Dr Maston together as soon as we have done with this ridiculous party. But if I’m right you’re informing me that for 123 years the family have been inviting dead people to Bosmaine.’
‘Yes, Sarah.’
I stood up. ‘And how, pray, do we deliver these invitations?’
‘We lay them on their graves.’
‘And Carver?’
‘Not family. Merely the postman. He is informed by another who follows the bloodline, notes the births and deaths, and finds the graves. Carver delivers. We pay them well.’
He stood up, agitated again. ‘Where is he, Sarah?’
‘Gone away.’
He is a tall man, my grandfather, and as described a man of great personal power and standing. But he shrank before my eyes, diminished to a huddle.
‘Then we are undone. We are undone.’
He wept.
I was unable to witness this and I paced as he sobbed. When I turned he was sitting again, his head in his hands.
‘He left a map.’
Grandfather sat up straight. ‘Oh, my dear girl. My love!’
I have never been embraced by him like that, and I hope never to be again.
* * *
I had little idea of how I would feel on approaching the grave. It was a modest affair in a tiny village churchyard south of Market Harborough. It was an unlovely place, a 19th-century church of no great merit bounded on both sides by unpleasant modern bungalows. Olive Channing had, by all accounts on her newly carved granite stone, been the beloved wife of Ernest, himself deceased, and mother to two loving children who missed her dearly.
There were some withered chrysanthemums on the grass and an ugly white plastic bowl of fake violets, still tied around with tattered purple ribbon. That this woman, this ordinary, unremarkable nobody of a person could in any way be connected to the Bosmaines seemed ridiculous.
What did any of these imposters even look like? Had the rogue gene survived the journey intact, or were my hundreds of dead relatives part of a giant human kaleidoscope?
I took the invitation out of my bag and looked at it with distaste. Had I not been foolish enough to have intercepted the postman that rainy day only a week ago, I would have been sheltered from this preposterous superstition that has blighted my otherwise robustly sane grandfather for his entire life.
But now I was drawn in. Curiously I found myself beginning to anger. By what right did these individuals deserve to have such cloak and dagger fuss made over their mere existence? They had their own families. Considerably more than I had. Husbands, wives, children, siblings, the company of warm, loving, living relatives.
And while I was playing on my own these people, who history claims share my blood, were being part of something I could never enjoy. Even in death they were joined, invited in some stupid ritual to still be part of the bigger picture, a piece in the jigsaw from which I still felt excluded.
Did Grandfather expect me to keep this going after his own death? Was I bound now to carry on paying our mysterious servants to follow this ritual until my own death when the Bosmaine line ends with me?
I am too old to bear children now even if I wished. On reflection, over the grave of this plain woman, it seemed all I had was our history. There is no future.
I felt hot tears prick my eyes and I bowed my head as I bent down to the grave.
* * *
Wednesday’s grim trip to those gravesides seems a long time ago now that I am standing in the lily-bedecked library with a very fine glass of Médoc in my hand. Grandfather is quite himself again. He is dressed magnificently in white tie and is delighted that we have a minor young royal here for this year’s event, with the young ladies going perfectly mad over him in the garden.
The party has become quite The Thing amongst smart sets over the last few years and I find myself as pleased about this as much as Grandfather. I am not in much demand at any party but I stare with quiet satisfaction out of the window down the lawn to the far woods. The weather has been a friend all day and the high summer sun is only now setting behind the tall beeches, throwing the great trunks into deep shade against the pinking sky.
As my eyes adjust I notice some guests have strayed into the trees. I smile at the state their party shoes will be in when they emerge. They have little idea how muddy it can be, even in the driest of weather. We have guests who, when shooting for pheasant in the season, often emerge from that same coppice, covered head to foot in muck as though from the trenches. It will be no less brutal to taffeta than to Harris tweeds.
I lower my glass a little and squint. There are three, I think, but I wonder at what they are doing. They’re coming this way, back to the house, slowly. Their gait is unusual. Are they injured? I hope no incident has occurred. This is an important night for us both.
I feel my heart beat a little faster, though I’m not certain why. I put down my glass to go and find Grandfather. It takes some time to locate him, and the candles are being lit as it grows darker. For some reason I feel a little panic. Eventually I find him, standing in the entrance hall behind the great pillars, greeting some late evening arrivals with much slapping of backs. He sees me, and his face falls.
Do I look concerned? I walk slowly towards him, the desire to be at his side stronger than it has ever been. To be together. A family. I reach him and lift my hand to hold his.
The door knocker sounds. Instead of opening the door wide and standing back in greeting, Adam slips through the narrow gap so that we cannot see our new arrivals. Grandfather is looking at me.
Adam is talking to someone. We only hear his voice. It is rising in anxious agitation. It is loud enough for us all to hear: ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask to see your invitations.’
Grandfather’s eyes are black holes, of disappointment, accusation, and naked, visceral fear.
He knows what I have done.
Muriel Gray is a broadcaster and author of three horror novels, plus many short stories. She is chair of the board of Glasgow School of Art and a board member of The British Museum. She lives in Glasgow.