The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER SEVEN

Olive Trembellow was perfectly correct, as she always was. On the following Open Day there were three hundred and fifty visitors to Trembellow — and the number of visitors going to Clawstone was down to seven.

So now she was doing what she liked best in all the world.

She was doing sums.

She was multiplying the number of visitors who had come to Trembellow on the last Open Day by the amount each of them had paid, and the answer was coming to a figure with a lot of noughts at the end. Olive liked figures with noughts on the end. She liked them very much.

When she had checked her calculations she went to see her father in his study.

Lord Trembellow was doing business with his son Neville, who had come up from London, and a builder he had brought with him, but he didn’t mind being interrupted. Olive was almost a business partner herself.

‘Look, Daddy — we’ve taken nearly four thousand pounds today. We had three hundred and fifty visitors and Clawstone only had seven — and one of those was a spy.’

Lord Trembellow nodded. He had sent one of his staff, a man who was new to the district and would not be recognized, to join the visitors going round Clawstone.

‘You’ve never seen such a ramshackle place,’ he had told Lord Trembellow when he came back. ‘They’ve just got a kid taking the tickets, and no guides or anything. And the rubbish in the museum — you wouldn’t believe it. There’s a sewing machine and a jar of caterpillars and something called a Hoggart.’

‘What’s a Hoggart?’ Lord Trembellow had asked.

‘I don’t know, my lord. It’s a thing like half a skinned Pekinese rolled into a sort of ball and it’s just labelled “The Clawstone Hoggart”.’

Lord Trembellow turned to his son. ‘Get me one of those in London, will you? If they’ve got a Hoggart I’ll have one too. No, get me two Hoggarts.’

‘Why only two, Daddy?’ asked Olive. ‘Why not three… or five…?’

‘Good idea, my little sugar plum. Make a note of it, Neville. Five Hoggarts.’

Spread out on the desk in the study was an aerial photograph of the district. It had been taken from a helicopter and showed the grounds of Clawstone very clearly: the castle, the gardens — and the park surrounded by its high wall. If one looked carefully one could just make out the specks of the cattle.

Neville and the builder were bending over it while Lord Trembellow told them his plans.

‘As soon as I’ve got old Percival out I’ll get it properly surveyed, but this shows enough. The park’s a perfect building site; the drainage is good and so’s the soil — no danger of flooding. There’s room for two hundred houses easily.’

‘Why just two hundred houses, Daddy?’ said Olive in her high, prim voice. ‘Why not three hundred? Or even four? People like that wouldn’t mind living close together. Then we’d get twice as much money.’

‘Well, maybe.’ He smiled fondly at his daughter. Some people’s children were a disappointment to them, but Olive was exactly the kind of daughter he had wished for.

‘We’d have to get round the planning people but I dare say it could be done. And then — in with the bulldozers, cut down the trees, lay concrete everywhere… make things tidy.’

Lord Trembellow loved concrete. Grass and flowers and trees were so messy. Grass needed cutting, flowers could give you hay fever and trees blew down in the wind. But concrete… concrete was smooth and trouble-free, concrete gave you a level surface.

When he thought of the countryside covered in giant cement mixers pouring out streams of the wonderful stuff, Lord Trembellow was a happy man.

Lady Trembellow was quite different. She longed for a garden and she loved animals — again and again she asked her husband if they couldn’t get a dog. But his answer was always ‘No’, and when she tried to argue he changed the subject.

‘It’s time you went to London again and had something done about your nose,’ he would say. Or he would suggest that she had the cartilage in her ears cut so as to make them lie flatter against her head.

And because she had been brought up to think that a wife must please her husband, Lady Trembellow said no more.