The Belting Inheritance Read Free Page A

house. You would be treated as one of my own family.” As though suddenly conscious that there was another person in the room, she said: “This is my son, Miles. He is in fact some kind of cousin of yours but you may call him Uncle.”
    “I know,” I said. “From the Christmas cards.”
    Lady W drew her brows together. Uncle Miles popped up with a jerky movement, shook my hand, said “How do you do, Christopher,” whispered loudly in Lady W’s ear, “Father’s family,” and sat down again. She nodded.
    “I have been in communication with your father’s family, and they would be agreeable to this arrangement.” From the little I knew of them I could imagine that they would not welcome the idea of looking after a twelve-year-old boy. “What do you say, Christopher?”
    I had wept when I first heard of my parents’ deaths, but this was the first time after hearing the news that I felt like weeping again. I was faced with an act of choice, but I knew even then that in any real sense I had no choice at all. What would become of me if I said no? It was not that I wanted to say no, but that I felt the humiliation of being a thing rather than a person, a thing that was not wanted by “my father’s family,” but that Lady W was prepared to accept. I looked down at the floor and mumbled something.
    “What’s that?” Lady W asked fiercely.
    I managed not to cry as I said, “All right.”
    “I like a boy who can make up his mind,” she said as she got up. Uncle Miles got up too, and no doubt he understood something of what I felt, for with the eye that was on the blind side of Lady W he gave me the most tremendous wink.
    After that things seemed to happen as if I were in a dream. Outside, Mrs Parker had already packed my things, and Uncle Miles had been to our house, collected my games and toys and put them into a suitcase. Within a few minutes the Parkers’ front door had closed on me and I was stepping into an enormous old-fashioned Daimler, which had a speaking tube between the chauffeur (who disposed a little contemptuously of my small cases) and the back seats. I can remember perfectly that my feeling as I got into the car was one of regret that Billy Parker was at school, and could not be there to see me drive away.

Chapter Two
    The House and the People
     
    What was Belting like? I have thought about the way in which I ought to describe it, without much success. At first I thought that I would extract the description of the house in Pevsner’s Kent, but Pevsner’s interest is naturally enough
in it as a Victorian Gothic eccentricity, and the account of spires and flying buttresses doesn’t bear any relation to what I saw and felt at the time. And since that is the really important thing, that is the way I have decided to put it down.
    The Daimler drove through an entrance each side of which was guarded by a battered but formidable stone lion, down what seemed an endless tree-lined drive, clattered across a cattle grid, and debouched finally into a wide gravelled courtyard. My immediate reaction as I looked at the forbidding spires of the Victorian Gothic front that seemed to stretch endlessly upwards was that I was being taken to live in a church. I went very hesitantly inside, snatching off my school cap, and found myself in a great hall with enormous doors leading off it.
    Almost straight ahead there was a winding staircase which led up to a gallery that ran round three sides of the first-floor landing. Bits of armour and out-of-date weapons – assagais, Zulu shields, old muskets, swords – lined the walls. In one corner was what I took to be a sentry box. In fact it housed the telephone, but for a long time I was afraid that somebody would leap out from it and attack me. But the thing I hated most was the prevailing gloom. The house was dark, Lady W was mean in small matters, and at some time in the past she had been told that daylight lamps were better for the eyes than ordinary yellow electric