Christmas at Candleshoe Read Free

conjectural Spendloves prancing upon badly foreshortened horses. Presently they are peering into a chill and musty gloom, while their guide fumbles for an electric switch. ‘There you are. Rather fun – what?’
    With a flicker and a ping a bar of fluorescent lighting has snapped on. Lord Scattergood’s party takes on an unhealthy tinge and the mortician might be a piece of bad embalming. Only Lord Scattergood’s own complexion is so florid as to be indestructible. He watches with amusement as his guests peer doubtfully into the great wedge-shaped space beneath the last flight of stairs. It is the corner into which, in a suburban house, one pushes the pram. And now Lord Scattergood’s guests, as if they were Gullivers in a Brobdingnagian semi-detached villa, are looking at an enormous baby-carriage, elaborately painted and carved. The greengrocer’s younger child becomes excited and utters cries.
    ‘Constructed for the children of the Swedish Countess in 1722.’ Lord Scattergood embarks somewhat uncertainly on an explanation of how this lady found herself a Spendlove. ‘But, as you can see, it is really a sledge. She is said to have had reindeer brought over, and in winter her children went bowling about the park.’
    ‘Did you have more snow in those days than you have now?’ The American lady who inquired about the ghost has put this question with an air of much acuteness. Lord Scattergood, cheerfully accepting the character of a Methuselah, replies that the winters were decidedly more severe then than now.
    Meanwhile the sledge is being a great success. It is pronounced to be cute and sweet. A young female from Sydney, who is mostly bare legs and an enormous rucksack, declares it to be dandy. The greengrocer’s younger child starts shouting. Only the mortician from Buffalo remembers the motive behind this inspection. With professional deftness he applies a scraping fingernail to a leather surface. ‘I don’t get this,’ he says. ‘1722 isn’t so very old. And it don’t look old, either.’
    ‘Ah – you misunderstood me.’ Lord Scattergood glances amiably round, collecting the attention of his auditory. ‘It’s not the carriage itself that is at all notably old. I’m not sure that the fellow Gibbons I was mentioning didn’t have a hand in it. But the sledge-runners are quite old – and fine pieces of timber, as you can see. Cedar wood. They came from the Middle East.’
    ‘The Middle East?’ The mortician is suspicious.
    ‘Yes – brought back by an ancestor of mine – quite an enterprising fellow – from the top of Mount Ararat. Ship’s timbers, he decided they were. And he was a sailor, so he ought to have known.’
    The more mentally alert of Lord Scattergood’s hearers giggle or gasp. An explanatory voice at the back, unconscious of offence, says, ‘Blessed if the ol’ bastard doesn’t say ’e’s got Noah’s ruddy Ark.’ The greengrocer’s second child, thus hearing mention of this object of juvenile enchantment, breaks loose, rushes forward, trips, grazes a knee, and howls. The greengrocer’s wife, deeply mortified, seizes the child, rights him, and is about to administer the alarming if innocuous shaking with which in England the simpler classes are accustomed to admonish their young. But Lord Scattergood is before her, whisks the child to his shoulder, and marches off with brisk talk of warm water and sticking-plaster. The greengrocer, his wife, and his elder child follow. They are really awed now. Lord Scattergood pauses until they catch up. He has forgotten his damned tourists and the turn he puts on for them. The child has casually attracted him, and for five minutes he will chat to the parents just as he would do to any of his great neighbours in the county. He believes that they will go away with the unspoken knowledge that one does not shake small children.
    Autocratic and benevolent, Lord Scattergood disappears. The group remains for a moment in uncertainty, staring at