back at Norland and getting out of the kind of car that Fanny would hate to see on her gravel sweep: an elderly Ford Sierra with a peeling speed stripe painted down its dilapidated side.
Margaret waved wildly from the kitchen window. ‘Edward! Edward!’
He looked up and waved back, his face breaking into a smile. Then he ducked back into the car to turn off some deafening music, and came loping across the drive and then the grass to where Margaret was leaning and waving.
‘Cool car!’ she shouted.
‘Not bad, for two hundred and fifty quid!’
She put her arms out so that she could loop them round his neck and he could then pull her out of the window on to the grass. He set her on her feet. She said, ‘Has Fanny seen you?’
‘No,’ Edward said, ‘I thought she could see the car first.’
‘Good thinking, buster.’
‘Mags,’ Edward said, ‘where’s everyone?’
Margaret jerked her head towards the kitchen behind her. ‘In there. Having a major meltdown about moving.’
‘Moving! Have you found somewhere?’
‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘Only hopeless places we can’t afford.’
‘Then …’
Margaret looked past him at the offending car. ‘Fanny’s throwing us out,’ she said.
‘Oh my God,’ Edward said.
He stepped past Margaret and thrust his head in at the open window.
‘Ta-dah!’ he said.
‘Oh Edward!’
‘Oh Ed!’
‘Hi there.’
He put a leg over the sill and ducked into the room. Belle and Marianne rushed to embrace him. ‘Thank goodness!’ ‘Oh, perfect timing, perfect, we were just despairing …’
He put his arms round them both and looked at Elinor. ‘Hi, Ellie.’
She nodded in his direction. ‘Hello, Edward.’
‘Don’t I get a hug?’
Belle and Marianne sprang backwards. ‘Oh, of course you should!’
‘Ellie, oh, Ellie, don’t be so prissy.’
Edward moved forward and put his arms round Elinor. She stood still in his embrace. ‘Hello, you,’ he whispered.
She nodded again. ‘Hello.’
Belle said, ‘This is so lovely, you can’t think, we so needed a distraction. Come on, kettle on, cake tin out.’
Edward dropped his arms. He turned. ‘Yes please, to cake!’
Marianne came to put her arm through his. ‘You look horribly well. What have you been up to?’
He grinned down at her. ‘Loafing about. Sailing a bit.’
‘Sailing!’
‘I’m a good sailor.’
Margaret came scrambling through the window. She said, ‘Fanny’s seen your car.’
‘She hasn’t!’
‘She has. She’s kind of prowling round it. Perhaps she’ll think it belongs to one of the workmen.’
Edward said to Belle, ‘Will you hide me?’
‘No, darling,’ Belle said sadly. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is. We’re about to be homeless. Can you imagine? It’s the twenty-first century and we aren’t penniless but four educated women like us are about to be—’
Edward said, abruptly, cutting across her, ‘You needn’t be.’
‘What?’
Even Elinor dropped her apparent lack of interest and looked intently at him. ‘What, Edward?’
He glanced at Elinor. He said, ‘I – I mentioned I might ask about, while I was in Devon. If anyone knew anywhere for rent. Going cheap. And, well, it happens that – well, someone I know down there is sort of related to someone who’s related to you. So I told them about you. I told them what had happened.’ He looked at Belle. She was staring at him, and so were all three of her daughters. Edward said, ‘I think there might be a house down there for you. It belongs to someone who’s some kind of relation, even. Or at least someone who knows about you.’ He paused and then he said, ‘It’s – it’s a sort of grapevine thing, you know? But I think there really is a house there, if you’d like it?’
Sir John Middleton liked to describe himself as a dinosaur. In fact, he said, he was a double dinosaur.
‘These days,’ he’d say, to anyone who would listen, ‘it’s out of the Ark to inherit a house, never mind a bloody great pile like Barton. And as for being a baronet – I ask you! The definition of antediluvian, or what? There isn’t even a procedure for renouncing your title if you’re a baronet, would you believe? I am stuck with it. Stuck. Sir John M., Bart., to my dying day. Hah!’
His father, another Sir John, had been born in the house, which he left, without a penny to run it, to his son. It was a handsome William and Mary house in Devon, set in dramatic wooded country above the River Exe, to the north of Exeter, and the household, in young Sir John’s childhood, had grown used to the corridors being scattered with buckets placed strategically under leaks in various ceilings, and to draughts and damp and extremely intermittent hot water, provided by an ancient boiler in the basement which devoured industrial quantities of coal to very little consistent effect.
Sir John’s father had minded none of these things. He had been a boy at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was absolutely indifferent to bad weather, bad food and chilblains. He inherited just enough money to continue living at Barton Park in increasing discomfort, but still able to indulge to the full his passion for field sports. He shot and fished anything that moved or swam, preferred his gun room and game larder to any other parts of his house and, after his wife unsurprisingly left him for a property developer in Bristol, spent any available cash on trips to slaughter snipe in Spain or sharks in the Caribbean. When he died – as he would devoutly have wished to do – big-game hunting on a private estate in Kenya, he left his son the run-down wreck of Barton Park, the title and a locked cabinet of beautifully kept, perfectly matched pairs of Purdey shotguns.
Sir John the younger was entranced to inherit the Purdeys. He had also inherited his father’s passion for field sports – indeed all his local friends were distinguished by having subscriptions to the Shooting Times and freezers full of braces of pheasant that their wives were sick of cooking – but he had also profited from the childhood and adolescent years spent living with his property-developer stepfather, in Bristol.
It had been made plain to Sir John, from a young age, that the luxury of making choices in life simply did not exist without money. Money was not an evil, Charlie Croft said to his stepson, it was the oil that greased the practical wheels of life. It was foolish to the point of silliness to think you could do without it, and it was asinine to fear it. Money was there to be harnessed, to work for you.
‘And if you want to keep that old barrack going that your dad left you – and I’, Charlie Croft said, ‘would pull it down in a heartbeat and build some practical, properly insulated executive houses there, if I had my way, because it’s a cracker of a site – then you’ll have to make it earn its keep.’ He’d eyed his stepson. ‘Furthermore,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be very interested to see how you do it.’
For most of his twenties, Sir John had had little success in making Barton Park