The Belting Inheritance Read Free Page B

light. The hall and all the corridors, both upstairs and down, were bathed in a funereal blue glow. When I was upstairs, in a bedroom which I had been told would be mine and which was four times the size of my room at Woking, I sat on the bed, looked round the vast spaces and at my toys which had been dumped in the middle of the floor, and began to cry. I was crying when Uncle Miles came in.
    “What’s up?” He looked round. “It is a bit of a barracks, I agree. But you’ll get used to it, you know. Nice to have a bit of space, really. I say, what’s this?”
    I sniffed. “It’s a mechanical bowler.”
    “Is it, now. How does it work?”
    He was down on the carpet examining the bowler, and I joined him. We found the mechanical batsman, the fielders and the wicket, Uncle Miles pushed aside a section of the carpet, and we began to play. His enjoyment of the game, as of all children’s games, was prodigious. “Be careful, here comes a devilish googly,” he would say, or “Oh, good shot, sir, right through the covers…a classic off drive…brilliantly caught, he’s a fine field, that man.” Crouched on the floor, his bald head shining and his face intent, he played this cricket game with me until there was the sound of a gong. He leapt up.
    “Good God, young Christopher, it’s dinner. We must go down.”
    “Can I go down with you?”
    “I don’t think exactly with me, that wouldn’t quite do, you see, Mamma wouldn’t want you to be under my wing as you might say. But supposing you follow me at a short distance, keep me in sight, eh?” He gave me another of his winks.
    Emboldened by the wink, I said, “Who’ll be there?”
    “Mamma, of course. You don’t want to let Mamma worry you. She won’t eat you, though she may look as if she will.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “My brother Stephen. And his wife. That’s the lot.”
    While he had been saying this, Uncle Miles had been splashing water over his face from the wash basin in one corner of the room in a rather ineffectual way. Now he straightened his tie and smoothed down his little fringe of hair.
    “You live here, don’t you?”
    “Yes, I live here.” There was nothing unfriendly in the way the words were spoken, but somehow I asked no more.
    Perhaps this would be a good place to put in a few words about family relationships. A family tree is always boring, and anyway there’s no need for it, but it may be a good thing to set out just who everybody is, because as will be seen in a few pages it is important to the story. Lady Wainwright was the widow of a general who had been knighted for his services during the First World War, and had died in the Second. She had had four children, all boys. The two eldest, Hugh and David, had been killed in the war, so that only Stephen and Miles remained. As to my relationship with them, I have already said that my mother was Lady Wainwright’s niece. That is as clear as I can make it, and I hope it is clear enough.
    I can remember very well dinner on that first night, not the things we ate but what seemed to me the enormous room with its dark oak panelling, the pictures staring down from the walls, and Thorne handing round the food. I was uncertain what knives and forks I should use and that bothered me a little, but what really worried me was that a man should be hovering about, as I felt, to make sure that everything on the plate was eaten. I very soon came to know that I was misjudging old Thorne, who was a sort of general factotum playing the parts that in other days would have gone to several servants. Apart from Thorne, there was a succession of daily helps, most of them young, and Lady W’s maid Peterson, a starchy lady with a moustache. She was a general female factotum as Thorne was a male one, and the running of Belting devolved largely upon them, for apart from occasional bursts of enthusiasm, Lady W took little interest in household affairs.
    We sat down five to table, as Uncle Miles had