The Belting Inheritance Read Online Free

said we should. I did not take to Stephen or Clarissa, and I saw at once that they did not take to me. I have never seen a man so tight and boxed-in as Uncle Stephen. I called him that, since if I was to call Cousin Miles Uncle, it was only natural to apply the same name to Cousin Stephen. The tightness came partly from the clothes he wore, stiff white collars that seemed always half a size too small for him, ties knotted to strangulation point, and suits that managed to be at the same time baggy and tight, baggy at his thin chest and tight at the hips, where he was big without being at all a fat man. The parting in his hair might have been made by a knife, and beneath it his face was white and intense, sharp nosed and thin lipped. When he spoke it was as though words were butterflies which had escaped from his mouth, and which he was trying with sharp snaps to retrieve. There was something about the passion with which Stephen tore a bread roll into pieces, the savage, loving care with which he dissected a piece of fish, that remains with me still.
    Clarissa was a red-faced loud-voiced woman who was somehow, for all the loudness, not in the least jolly. She wore rather tweedy clothes, and was passionately fond both of hunting, and of breeding bull terriers. Perhaps it was in sympathy with the bull terriers that her own legs were bowed. I thought at the time that I had never seen anybody like her before in my life, and this was an accurate observation, for there are no such people in Woking.
    Dinner could not in any case have been a comfortable meal for me, but it was made worse by a sense that I was on trial, that Uncle Stephen and his wife were waiting for me to make some mistake that would exclude me from Belting for ever. I subconsciously realised that Lady W and Uncle Miles were on my side, and that Uncle Stephen and his wife were against me. I did not understand, however, that their wishes were of no importance, since what Lady W wanted was what happened at Belting.
    After dinner we went into the drawing-room. The whole of Belting seemed to me then so strange that this was no odder than the rest, although I did think that it was extraordinarily cluttered with furniture. It was in fact a remarkable room, for Lady W had preserved it as nearly as possible as a drawing-room of the late eighteen-eighties. It was a kind of museum piece, except that this museum was lived in. There was a dark flock wallpaper, the curtains were of dark red velvet with tassels and a fringe, above the carved mahogany chimneypiece there was an ornamental mirror. Vases and ornaments stood everywhere, in all sorts of niches and on little tables. There were four highly decorative clocks, two glass domes containing wax flowers and fruit, mahogany tables covered with dark fringed cloths and inlaid mahogany cabinets. The fireside and wing chairs were, however, very comfortable, and Lady W had so far succumbed to modernity as to permit electric lighting – and not daylight lamps, either – to replace gas.
    Miles and Stephen excused themselves after they had drunk coffee, and Clarissa went off to look at something in the stables, so that I was left alone with Lady W. She told me to come and sit beside her, and I went over and sat on a cushion at her feet.
    “Do you think you will like it here, Christopher?” She checked herself abruptly. “That’s a stupid question, don’t bother to answer. Let me tell you something about Belting. I love it myself, and we can all talk about the things we love.”
    She told me then that Belting had been the family home of her husband, General Wainwright, and that he had brought her there when they were first married before the First World War, an unimaginably long time ago. She talked about him, and about the great work on the Egyptian Wars that he had been engaged on for years when he died in nineteen-forty.
    I interrupted her. “That was Arabi, wasn’t it? And he was beaten at Tel-el-Kebir.”
    My knowledge came