Christmas at Candleshoe Read Free Page A

the sledge. But almost at once a less exalted guide sweeps down on them and politely carries them off. Opening Benison Court to the public has proved to be a money-earner. A good deal of efficiency has been mobilized for the job.
     
    But at Benison even quite a lot of efficiency is liable to get spread out thin. Lord Arthur Spendlove, as he leads his own party round, knows all the closets where chaos and confusion lurk. The very skeletons in the cupboards, he likes to remark, are in a sad muddle. A clever man, seemingly shiftless because profoundly at odds with his time, Lord Arthur wonders if any amount of efficiency could now make much difference. His father, briefed by some soothing old donkey in Chancery Lane, declares that penal taxation is ephemeral, and that of the really big English properties the ownership has not changed. But Lord Arthur is aware of the price of coal and the state of the plumbing; fitfully but with an alert intelligence he conducts inquisitions in the estate office; he has followed certain financial clues through their labyrinth, and it is his conclusion that Benison is a Grace and Favour house, the patronage of which is vested in two or three powerful persons in the City. By an agreement among these, the Spendloves could be sold up tomorrow. But could he, knowing all this, control the situation any better than his father does, or than his elder brother will do, when in the fullness of time he is called home from his endless bird-watchings and other blameless idiocies in Scotland?
    Lord Arthur checks himself in these musings, and turns in negligent ease to face his little flock. He has all his father’s charm of manner, and although he will tire more quickly of this new family game, he is prepared to put greater finesse into it for a time.
    ‘First it is very necessary to apologize to you about one or two things. The truth is that we are not quite straight at Benison.’ And Lord Arthur meets the respectful attention of his group with a gaze the frankness of which must dispel any possible ambiguity lurking in his speech. ‘In the early years of the war we had a government concern quartered on us – quite an important government concern – and after that we had a couple of schools. I didn’t see much of it myself, because I was having a quiet sort of life in the desert and Tripoli and Italy. But it seems that things got pushed around a bit and stowed away and so forth; and we still don’t know quite where we are.’
    ‘Did the schoolchildren cause a lot of damage?’ An elderly woman turns from fingering the long gold curtains of the music-room to ask this question.
    ‘Oh, no – dear me, no.’ Lord Arthur’s glance has travelled over his hearers’ heads – he is inches taller than any of them – to the long line of paintings on the north wall. They no longer correspond with the faded patches on the green silk behind them, and he sees too that Canova’s frigid Aphrodite has been shoved into the corner formerly occupied by Flaxman’s bust of the elder Pitt. He is assailed by the renewed conviction that he and his family are now only camping in Benison, even that they are unlawful squatters who may at any time be evicted by the police; that they may be required to pack up their improvised domesticities and quit – trundling the Aphrodite, and Pitt if he can be found, down the league-long drive on a wheelbarrow. The vision of his father doing this rises before him, and hurtling in the other direction he sees an unending line of motor-coaches, crammed with citizens feeling in their pockets for small change. When the Ministry took over in 1939, he is thinking, my father expected the whole place to be blown sky-high within a week. But it wasn’t to be, and Benison is going to end not with a bang but a whimper.
    Fortunately he is still talking. He hears his own voice insisting on how agreeable the schoolchildren were, revealing that some of them still write, still come back and inquire