Page 58 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
Spats
After lunch Carey handed me a large torch and swept me off down the cellar stairs, which were near the back door.
At the bottom lurked the boiler, ticking quietly to itself in the manner of its kind. A long, whitewashed passage led out of it, off which were a series of cellars furnished with old empty packing cases, broken suitcases and other rubbish. One contained an almost empty wine rack and the last one a strange, stone-topped table like a pagan altar, which Carey thought might have been for cutting up carcasses.
A low wooden door at the end of the passage took us into what was clearly a more ancient part, held up by a series of arches and dimly illuminated by single light bulbs hanging from cables loosely looped across the ceilings.
I was just thinking that it was as well it was dry down there, when in the very last cellar (which we assumed to be next to, or under, the old tower) we found there was a stream in a deep stone channel running right across it.
‘Oh, look – all mod cons,’ I said. ‘Cold and cold running water.’
‘This is interesting!’ Carey squatted down to examine the stonework. ‘I’ve seen this sort of thing before in old farmhouses and it must have been a luxury not having to go out for water in the middle of winter. I’m sure this is what’s feeding the fountains and fish ponds on the terraces below the house, too.’
He looked around, shining his torch into the darker corners. ‘The shape of the arches and the construction of the roof gives the place a slightlyecclesiastical air, doesn’t it? I wonder if there might originally have been an early church, or hermitage or something like that on this site.’
I shone my torch down on the huge slabs under my feet, looking for carved lettering or crosses, or whatever. ‘I sincerely hope this isn’t a crypt, with burials!’
‘No, of course it isn’t,’ he assured me, though sounding quite disappointed about it. ‘There’s a lot of space down here, but I can’t imagine what I’ll do with it, other than set up a workbench and tool rack in one of the first rooms … though maybe we could have parties down here later?’
‘Not the sort of partiesIgo to,’ I said firmly, remembering the odd stone slab table, which had looked a bit sacrificial. ‘Mine tend to involve nibbles and drinksaboveground.’
‘Is that the kind of social life you’ve been leading up here, Shrimp? It sounds like a round of total dissipation.’
‘Well, it was until Julian had the stroke. Before that, we were invited to lots of little drinks parties by the solicitor, our doctor, the vicar and a few other professional people. They were all nice.’
They’d all been about Julian’s age, too, but, unlike him, rather boring. I expect they thought much the same about me …
‘Right, time to explore the attics,’ Carey said, his energy and enthusiasm undiminished. ‘We’ll go up the backstairs and start in the servants’ wing. The nursery suite occupies half the first floor, so I presume the upper staff had the remaining bedrooms there and the unfortunate lesser orders were housed in the attics.’
He was right, too, for up there were several bleak, chilly chambers with cast-iron beds and washstands that were much more utilitarian than Arts and Crafts. Ralph Revell’s beautiful vision did not seem to have extended beyond the baize doors.
There was no connection to the rest of the house on that level, so we had to go down and back up again, but once there we saw the attic ran the full width of the house and had been crammed with unwanted possessions like an illustrated guide to Junk through the Centuries.
‘Every time they modernized, or knocked down and rebuilt a bit of Mossby, the unwanted stuff must have been stored away somewhere – and eventually they brought it all up here,’ I suggested.
‘I think you’re right, but goodness knows why they would want to hang on to most of it,’ Carey said, regarding the ranks of monstrous dark furniture with dislike. ‘Unfortunately, the pre-Arts and Crafts Revells appear to have gone in for the worst excesses of mid-Victorian mahogany in a big way.’
He picked his way through the stacked piles and flashed his torch about. ‘I think there are some nice earlier pieces hidden behind all this stuff. Perhaps some of it would look interesting in the house.’
‘You’re not sticking to the pure Arts and Crafts ethos, then?’
‘You know how I feel about restorations: every generation should leave their stamp on their homes and no one seems to have done that to Mossby. Even in the Elizabethan wing, everything later than the eighteenth century has been removed. I’ll just put a few pieces back here and there, where they seem to fit.’
It was what he was good at and it had always worked in the past, though that, of course, had been on a smaller and more domestic scale.
‘At least the roof looks fine,’ he said, looking up. ‘What little my uncle spent on Mossby appears to have gone on vital repairs to the fabric of the building, which makes sense.’
‘Let’s hope that extended to the outbuildings, including my workshop, then,’ I said, opening an old leather-bound trunk and removing an empty top tray so I could shine my torch inside.
‘I’m sure I can sell all the dark, ugly furniture to a dealer I know,’ Carey mused. ‘He’s stockpiling it under the misguided belief it’ll come back into fashion eventually. Once it’s all gone, we’ll be able to see the wood from the trees.’
‘And the Sheraton from the Chippendale?’
‘You never know,’ he said, but by then I was rooting in the trunk.
‘Oh, look, these must have come out of the old nursery!’ I said. I pulled out a doll with a waxen and ghastly face, and a small toy crib. ‘There’s a wooden top and some of those roly-poly figures that bounce up again if you knock them over, and I think there’s a Noah’s Ark, too.’ I looked up. ‘They’d add a bit of interest to the nursery in the Elizabethan wing, wouldn’t they?’
‘They certainly would, though I think I’ve seen a doll just like thatone in a horror film … And that’s a thought: maybe we could rent out the old wing as a set for horror films.’
