A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [76]
The red brick Queen Anne manor house stood back from the road in a small park, if such an unpretentious setting of trees and paddocks could be so called. A walled orchard on the far side stretched down to the first few cottages of the village. The general impression of the property was of an estate neat and well superintended, rather than large. The place possessed that quality, perhaps more characteristic of country houses in England than in some other parts of Europe, of house and grounds forming an essential part of the landscape. The stables stood round three sides of a courtyard a short way from the main buildings, and there Eleanor was accustomed to spend a good deal of her time, with animals of various kinds, housed about the loose-boxes in hutches and wooden crates.
Within, there existed, rather unexpectedly, that somewhat empty, insistently correct appearance of the private dwellings of those who have spent most of their lives in official residences of one kind or another. A few mementoes of posts abroad were scattered about. For example, an enormous lacquer cabinet in the drawing-room had been brought from Pekin—some said Tokyo—by Sir Gavin, upon the top of which stood several small, equivocal figures carved in wood by the Indians of an obscure South American tribe. The portraits in the dining-room were mostly of Wilson forebears: one of them, an admiral, attributed to Zoffany. There was also a large painting of Lady Walpole-Wilson’s father by the Academician, Isbister (spoken of with such horror by Mr. Deacon), whose portrait of Peter Templer’s father I remembered as the only picture in the Templer home. This canvas was in the painter’s earlier manner, conveying the impression that at any moment Lord Aberavon, depicted in peer’s robes, would step from the frame and join the company below him in the room.
The Wilsons had lived in the county for a number of generations, but Sir Gavin had bought Hinton (with which he possessed hereditary connections through a grandmother) only after retirement. This comparatively recent purchase of the house was a subject upon which Sir Gavin’s mind was never wholly at rest; and he was always at pains to explain that its ownership was not to be looked upon as an entirely new departure so far as any hypothetical status might be concerned as a land-owner “in that part of the world.”
“As a matter of fact, the Wilsons are, if anything, an older family than the Walpoles—well, perhaps not that, but at least as old,” he used to say. “I expect you have heard of Beau Wilson, a young gentleman who spent a lot of money in the reign of William and Mary, and was killed in a duel. I have reason to suppose he was one of our lot. And then there was a Master of the Mint a bit earlier. The double-barrel, which I greatly regret, and would discard if I could, without putting myself and my own kith and kin to a great deal of inconvenience, was the work of a great-uncle—a most consequential ass, between you and me, and a bit of a snob, I’m afraid—and has really no basis whatever, beyond the surname of a remote ancestor in the female line.”
He was accustomed to terminate this particular speech with a number of “m’ms,” most of them interrogative, and some uneasy laughter. His sister, on this occasion, looked rather disapproving at these excursions into family history.
She was a small, defiant woman, some years younger than Sir Gavin, recently returned from a journey in Yugoslavia, where she had been staying with a friend married to a British consul in that country. Although spoken of as “not well off,” Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson