The Belting Inheritance Read Online Free Page A

only from a history book that we happened to have at home, but she was delighted. She pressed my hands together in her two hot old ones, and said that I should help her with the book – for since her husband’s death she had dedicated herself to the task of finishing it. She had said that I might wander round the room and so, while she was telling me the history of the house I did so. I looked at the wax flowers which fascinated me, and at a small stereopticon in which pictures appeared to be three dimensional. Upon the top of a carved mahogany grand piano there were a number of photographs in frames. She told me to bring over one, which showed two young men in uniform. When I brought it to her she sat looking at it with a face like a mask. Above it her white hair, which I had not seen beneath the hat when she first came to see me, was piled up with wonderful care.
    “Hugh and David,” she said. “My two elder sons. They were both killed in the war.”
    Looking at the photograph I could see a likeness to her in the beaky noses and in the eyes. I asked what Stephen and Miles had done in the war.
    “Stephen was in a reserved occupation. And Miles – Miles has never been any use. Do you play the piano?” I shook my head. “Hugh played the piano, that one over there. It hasn’t been touched since he died.”
    “When did he – ”
    “He was killed soon after D-Day, in France. David was a bomber pilot. He was shot down. Sometimes I think I died with them.” She said almost angrily, “Put them away. Put them back where they belong.”
    Now that I pause to re-read all this the whole thing seems to me immensely Victorian, and I suppose that what existed at Belting was the shadow of a Victorian situation. Lady W’s determination to perpetuate the glories of the Wainwrights was always touched by her knowledge that this kind of thing was out of date, just as she knew that there was something ridiculous about preserving the drawing-room as a museum. She knew that it was absurd, but she was serious about it too, and she exerted on Stephen and Miles the power that a strong personality has over weaker ones. Stephen worked in a desultory way as partner in a firm of surveyors in Folkestone a few miles away, and had lived at Belting all his life. When he married it must have seemed to him natural that his wife should make her home there too. Miles had come to live there near the end of the war, in circumstances made known to me later on. In one sense it was true that they couldn’t get away from Lady W, but in another way they were simply waiting for her to die.
    Her husband had been killed in one of the early German raids on London, and he had died without making a will, so that the house and all the money had come to her. I gathered that there was a great deal of money, although she never said so; or talked about it in detail. But Thorne, of whom I saw a lot in my early days at Belting, once told me that General Wainwright could have bought up the whole surrounding countryside if he’d a mind to, and both Stephen and Miles left me in no doubt that there was a lot of money, and that it would come to them. I gathered that when she died they expected that the house would go to Stephen as the elder, and that the rest of the estate would be divided between them. I once heard Clarissa complaining bitterly to Stephen of all the work she had to do. Why couldn’t there be a proper cook, proper housemaids? Such things were obtainable even in these days, and goodness knows there was enough money. Why didn’t Stephen say something? Stephen glanced at me and said that little pitchers had long ears.
    As far as I know, neither Stephen nor Miles dared to speak to Lady W about the money, or to criticise her in any way. She made little secret of the fact that she despised them both, and that her heart had been given to her two elder sons. The moustached Peterson told me one day of her reaction when she heard of both their deaths, within a