A Kiss for the Enemy Read Free Page B

Bargate Manor, this centre was the inner hall. The front door opened to a flagged space, with chests, umbrella stands, shooting sticks and croquet mallets piled haphazardly, foxes’ masks mounted and scrupulously marked with the date and place at which young Marvells had been honoured by successive Masters of Foxhounds. From this outer hall – echoing, functional, draughty – glass doors gave on to the inner hall. The inner hall was the heart of the house.
    It was a large, low-ceilinged oak-panelled room which ran the depth of the building, so that at the far end from the outer hall, windows opened on the garden – the rose garden, with brick paths intersecting beds of musk and floribunda roses. In a huge, stone-surmounted fireplace logs burned without ceasing from early November until at least the end of March, so that although the fire seldom smoked uncomfortably there was always awareness of its scent and crackle. Tables, piled high with books and magazines, separated a large number of comfortable sofas and armchairs. There were, on one wall, a set of eighteenth-century prints of Sussex; although a few ‘good’ pictures hung in the drawing and dining rooms – and some undistinguished Marvell portraits in the library – the panelling of the inner hall was beautiful in its own right and needed little embellishment. It was a dark room, yet never depressing. Colour was provided by the gentle shading of the sofa covers, by crimson curtains after dark, and, in almost all seasons, by a huge bowl of flowers which were Hilda Marvell’sskill and delight. The inner hall never seemed empty. It was irredeemably untidy, and conveyed always a sense of companionship, of voices.
    Bargate was of no great architectural distinction. The oldest section – of which the inner hall formed the main part – was built in 1625. An elegant, though not altogether congruous, wing was erected at a right angle to the Jacobean house in 1768. In this wing, reached by a passage from the inner hall, was a long drawing room with French windows opening on to a lawn, next to a small, square study invariably knee-deep in John Marvell’s papers. This eighteenth-century wing also contained a very delicate, curving staircase.
    Less happily, John’s grandfather had, in 1860, felt an injudicious urge for grandeur on a larger scale. He had, in consequence, tacked on to the other end of the original building a library (the biggest room in the house), a billiard room, and a number of closets and washplaces which earlier generations had found unnecessary and which, although adding to comfort, were unsightly. The windows of these Victorian rooms were large, plain and disproportionate to the original (whose front they extended). Behind the library was a new dining room and extensive kitchens, also added in the Victorian era. Nevertheless, Grandfather Marvell had kept the colour tones of the house’s exterior harmonious. He had used the same grey facing-stone, and the general effect was, by 1937, by no means disagreeable. Climbing creeper helped blend the work of one century with another. Like many English houses, Bargate was a hotchpotch, but a hotchpotch with some dignity and a good deal of charm.
    John went into the inner hall. A man with hair now greying, clean-shaven, face weather-beaten, lined and kindly, he walked with a slight limp. It was impossible to imagine his quiet, courteous voice saying a hurtful or malicious word. Hilda Marvell smiled up at him from a chair where she was making entries in a notebook on her knee. She had, he knew, been listening to the broadcast ceremony from the Cenotaph in London.
    â€˜Did it come through all right, my love?’
    â€˜Oh yes! It was such a relief to think it was George there – everything bound to be done right. Before, one never knew.’
    â€˜Perhaps that’s a little unfair, darling,’ said John mildly. ‘His predecessor always struck me as