Mingled With Venom

Chapter 1

Three Houses in Cornwall

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‘A full family reunion can be a very chancy business,’ said Maria Porthcawl.

‘This one looks like being a chapter out of Ivy Compton Burnett,’ said Fiona Bute. ‘Mrs Plack has already thrown a fit of hysterics and retired to her bed with a migraine at the thought of all the cooking involved.’

‘Madre has left me to issue the invitations. Surely she must know better than to seat Rupert and Diana at the same table. They haven’t spoken a civil word to one another for years.’

‘They need not sit next to one another.’

‘Then what about Gamaliel? Does she know he’s black?’

‘I doubt whether she even knows of his existence. Anyway, it’s a legal adoption, so he counts as one of the family. Then there are Quentin and Millament, Diana’s twins.’

‘But they’re only twelve years old. Surely they won’t be expected to dine with the rest?’

‘If she said everybody, she meant everybody.’

‘Well, let’s hope some of them won’t be able to come. What with Parsifal’s allergies, Diana on a diet and Bluebell being a vegetarian, no wonder Mrs Plack has taken to her bed! It’s enough to send any self-respecting cook to the madhouse, not to mention Garnet’s antisocial habit of trying all his food on his dog before he touches it himself.’

‘It is because Parsifal collects strange herbs for Blue to cook, but as for coming, they’ll all turn up if they know what’s good for them. Nobody knows yet who is mentioned in the Will.’

‘Oh, goodness, give her a chance! She’s only just over seventy. She isn’t going to die just yet.’

‘Everybody has to go at some time or other and she takes big chances scrambling about on the cliffs the way she does.’

‘I wonder whether I could fiddle the invitations a bit.’

‘In what way?’

‘Make a judicious selection and not invite them all.’

‘Those who weren’t invited would find out. Off you go. Get the job done and the cards delivered. The notice is short enough as it is. It is only a question of cards, not letters, I suppose?’

‘Cards, yes. I shall be as formal as the printed message allows. The more off-putting the invitations sound, the more likely they are to be turned down.’

‘Don’t you believe it!’

‘Just wishful thinking, that’s all. Is your own future secure?’

‘Is yours? We may be giving the best years of our lives, as the saying goes, but nothing in this world is a certainty. She takes us both for granted, and that is no advantage when it comes to receiving benefits.’

Maria was the daughter of seventy-five-year-old Mrs Leyden. She was a widow of fifty-two and had been known to refer to herself as her mother’s unpaid housekeeper, but this was an unfair assessment of her position in Romula Leyden’s household. She did pretty much as she pleased most of the time and was generously treated, although her mother had never approved of her marriage to Vannion Porthcawl, an actor who was far more often out of work than in it, and Romula had made no secret of her satisfaction when, having lived long enough to see his twin children, Garnet and Bluebell, reach the age of twenty, he obtained a part in a London pantomime, got drunk on the strength of this and was run over by a bus in Oxford Street and killed. Maria had lived at her mother’s house in Cornwall for the ten years which succeeded this accident.

Fiona Bute, aged thirty-five, was nominally the secretary, but was, in fact, a protégée. Romula had been disappointed in both her own children: Maria had made a marriage which deeply displeased her and Basil had fathered an illegitimate child. What was worse, in Romula’s opinion, was that neither he nor the woman had ever wanted to be married but had lived happily together until the woman died. When this happened, Basil begged his sister Maria to bring up his boy Rupert with her own two children, and unable to live without his lover, he put an end to himself by blowing his brains out.

Bereft, as she saw it, of both her offspring—for she had never had both of them together in her house after they had formed what she regarded as their disastrous partnerships—Romula had taken unto herself the orphaned child of a second cousin, so that Fiona Bute found herself in the position of adopted daughter. When, forgiven after her husband was dead, Maria returned to the maternal fold, Fiona went out of her way to make a friend of her. This was first because, with Maria’s advent, she wondered whether her own standing with her protector was likely to be put in jeopardy, and later on because the two women genuinely liked one another. Between them the house ran smoothly.

‘And now this upset!’ thought Fiona, shoving gilt-edged cards into envelopes she had already addressed. ‘Why on earth does she want to draw the family together for a dinner party? It must be to discuss her Will. But why all of them? She thinks Rupert comes of tainted stock; she’s often told me so. She disapproves of Garnet and Bluebell because they’re Vannion Porthcawl’s children, and what she’s to make of Gamaliel goodness only knows!’

She wondered whether she had uttered this thought aloud, for the door opened and a girl of twenty came into the room.

‘Did you call?’ she asked.

‘No, Ruby, I didn’t,’ replied Fiona testily. ‘Here, lick some of these envelopes for me while I go and call up Lunn to act as postman.’

‘What’s all this? A dinner party? Oh, good! We’ll get something decent to eat.’

‘We always get something decent to eat,’ said Fiona. ‘Anyway, I expect you’ll have to stand down, or there won’t be enough men to go round.’

‘I could provide my own. Barnaby would love to come and it would give him a fine chance to meet the abuela and ingratiate himself with her, wouldn’t it? After all, she foots his bills for my singing lessons.’

Ruby Pabbay’s position in the household was an ambiguous one. As a girl of sixteen she had been taken on as kitchen-maid, having been recruited from the local orphanage. Less than a year later, Romula, paying an unexpected visit to the kitchen, had heard her singing as she prepared the vegetables. The upshot was that she was being groomed and trained for the concert platform; the peeling of potatoes and the rest of her mundane duties had long been things of the past.

She was a tall, good-looking girl, sensible enough not to abuse her new position, a ready learner of upstairs speech and manners and very anxious to shine in the sphere which Romula had chosen for her. She had proved adept at picking up languages, could sing in French, German and Italian, and called Romula madame in public and abuela (which Romula herself had chosen) in the house, but not in front of the servants. Mrs Plack, the cook, hated her and called her ‘that jumped-up hussy’; Redruth Lunn, the chauffeur, made amorous approaches to her, was unmercifully snubbed, and remained faint but pursuing, and Maybury, Romula’s personal maid, petted and spoilt her. Some of the servants thought that this was in the hope of future gain when Romula died, but in fact, Maybury was Ruby’s natural mother, although Ruby herself did not know this.

The house was called Headlands and was aptly named since it stood, in a somewhat isolated position, between two of these, Scar Point and St Oleg’s Head. Its immediate surroundings were the downland turf. The views from the back windows were of a superb stretch of the Cornish coast and there was no garden or surrounding wall or fence and no approach except for an unmade-up track just wide enough to take the car and the tradesmen’s vans. The outbuildings consisted of a double garage, the stables which housed three well-bred horses, two large kennels for the guard-dogs and a cottage shared by the chauffeur and his sister who groomed the horses. Her name was Mattie, but she preferred to be called Matt. She wore men’s clothes, whistled through her, teeth and was a regular customer at the pub in the village, where she slapped people on the back, stood her round and was the local darts champion.

The house in which Romula’s grandson Garnet lived was very much smaller than Headlands. It belonged to him and he shared it with his sister Bluebell, her husband Parsifal Leek and their adopted son Gamaliel. The house was called Seawards and was as romantically situated as its name suggests, for it was built literally on the coast and from the back of the house a slipway for boats ran down to a strip of rough beach and the opening of a tiny cove. Built originally towards the end of the seventeenth century, it had been altered and added to by its various owners until its original builder would hardly have recognised it.

Seawards was approached downhill. A short slope curved down to it from the road which led to the village, the hotel and, further off, the pub. An iron gate near the culvert over a small but noisy waterfall opened on to a garden with crazy paving, florabunda roses, fuchsias and lavender. Against the stonework of a high wall, the tall stems, broad leaves and sinister flowers of monkshood made a patch of green and purple in an angle of the steep-stepped little enclosure.

At the back of the house, which faced the sea, strong wooden shutters were attached to the windows to offer a defence against the winter gales. From the french-windows, unshuttered in the lovely June weather, there was a wide view of the Channel, for the house was on a curve of Veryan Bay. From these french doors, which were on the second and third floors, steps led down from the balconies to a long, stone-flagged back garden, walled on the one side, but bounded on the other by the small stream which rushed in a waterfall past the side of the house and down to the cove and the sea.

The stream was nowhere very wide. It could be crossed by stepping stones and then a long ascent of narrow steps, cut into the hillside and mounting steeply upwards led to an overgrown track which marked what had been the smugglers’ path to the inn. The inn, since those days, had been greatly enlarged and was now a holiday hotel, although the oldest part of the building was still in use, thanks to extensive renovation and repairs.

In spite of their grandmother’s wealth, neither Garnet nor Bluebell was comfortably endowed. Each received an allowance from the old lady, but they felt it was grudgingly given and even after their father’s death it had not been increased. Romula had forgiven her daughter Maria for marrying, but she could not bring herself to forgive Garnet and Bluebell for being Vannion Porthcawl’s children.

Almost needless to say, the inhabitants of Seawards boasted no servants except a daily char and a weekly washer-woman and lived plainly.

Parsifal, Bluebell’s husband, was a minor poet whose romantic Christian name was off-set by his less poetical surname of Leek. Apart from his wife’s allowance from her grandmother, he kept the wolf from the door by publishing an occasional slim volume, begging sycophantically from Romula when the big bills came in, and also by writing verses to be printed on Christmas and birthday cards and, when he could get the work, by doing research for authors too busy, too incompetent or too lazy to do it for themselves. He lived his own life and wandered about the countryside in search of what he called inspiration.

Bluebell was a painter who sold an occasional picture to the summer visitors to the hotel. Her brother Garnet wrote moderately successful romantic novels under the pen-name of Gertrude Fosseway, and bore most of the household expenses.

Bluebell’s adopted son, the negro boy Gamaliel, was still at school. He was a beautiful and intelligent lad, a splendid swimmer and the school boxing champion. His hero was Muhammad Ali, and his immediate ambition was to be chosen for the next Olympic Games. He saw this as the best means of turning professional later on and becoming world champion at his weight whatever, in adulthood, that weight turned out to be.

He kept these ambitions mostly to himself, being well aware that they differed very considerably from Bluebell’s conception of his future. She wanted a university scholarship for him and a professional career of a very different sort from that which he had mapped out for himself. He was down on the school register as Gamaliel Leek, but he detested both names and always called himself Greg Ubi on the covers of his exercise books, the name under which he intended to fight later on.

He was popular with the masters and particularly so with the women teachers to whom he was always courteous and cordial; thus he was allowed to get away with his assumed name, the staff and the head teacher feeling sympathy, no doubt, with one who disliked his adoptive cognomen so much.

The registers were never called, the easy-going staff being content to cast a non-militant eye over the class, put a black zero against the names of any absentees and fill in all the red markings on Friday mornings while the school was at hymn practice in the hall with the head teacher. It was not a school which gained university scholarships, but nobody had told Bluebell that, and, as the school was in a town fifteen miles away and she had no car, she had made no enquiries, content to thank God for the school bus which made farepaying for Gamaliel unnecessary.

Only to Garnet did the lad ever unburden himself and only occasionally at that. He would sit on Garnet’s bed while the novelist tapped away at a typewriter set on a table in the window and remain there, silent and unwinking as a statue, for perhaps a couple of hours or more. When Garnet knocked off work they would drink beer together, eat ginger biscuits and sometimes talk, sometimes not. Gamaliel had taught Garnet to swim. In return, Garnet had dedicated a book to him: To my splendid friend, Greg Ubi.

Gamaliel had not read the book, but in his own room he mouthed the dedication over and over again. As neither Parsifal nor Bluebell ever read Garnet’s books, they never asked who Greg Ubi was.

On the other side of the hills, high up, since it was built on top of the cliffs although some fifty yards inland, stood the rambling, somewhat decrepit Edwardian house known as Campions. Here lived the rest of Romula’s relatives, Rupert Bosse-Leyden, his wife Diana and their twelve-year-old twins Quentin and Millament, when the last-named were not away at boarding-school.

There was nothing unusual about the house except that it stood on land belonging to the National Trust. Rupert and Diana lived rent-free in return for keeping the environs free of holiday makers’ litter and the surrounding footpaths clear so that the public could have access to the cliffs and the impressive and beautiful views.

To help with the work involved, the occupiers gave free lodging at Easter to students who were willing to lend a hand with clearing and opening up woodland paths and in summer by going out early in the morning tidying up cans, bottles, cartons and paper left by holiday visitors. They also good-naturedly helped with the household chores and exercised the owners’ three dachshunds.

At other times of the year Diana was bored. She had never wanted children and when, in the second year of marriage, she produced twins, she was highly resentful of having to tend two babies instead of one. After the children were old enough to be sent to boarding-school and she and her husband became more and more estranged, she began a flirtation, which developed into an affair, with Garnet Porthcawl. An affair, however, taken much more seriously by her than by him, for whereas Diana was frustrated and bored, Garnet was contented with his home life, got on well with his sister, loved Gamaliel and looked upon the weak and often peevish Parsifal with tolerance, if not with affection or respect.

Another reason for Garnet’s reluctance to be married was that, although his income was rather more than enough to support himself and contribute towards, the support of his sister, her husband and Gamaliel, he doubted whether he could stretch it sufficiently to support a wife as well, for, married or not, he had no intention whatever of deserting Bluebell and Gamaliel. He knew that Parsifal could do little for them.

Rupert’s estrangement from his wife had begun with her resentment at what had been a difficult birth of the (to her) unwanted twins, followed by the discovery that Romula, Rupert’s wealthy grandmother, far from forgiving him for his illegitimate origins now that he had legitimate children of his own, refused an invitation to his children’s christening and declined to see him when he called to remonstrate with her.

He earned a sufficient although not a considerable income by writing educational books, but his magnum opus was to be a work of the flora of South Cornwall, for which he sometimes enlisted the help of Parsifal, whose poetic wanderings occasionally produced fairly rare specimens of the local plants. To console himself for the breakdown of marriage, Rupert had what was supposed to be a platonic friendship with Fiona Bute. She would have been prepared to marry him if she had not felt that Romula would disown her if she did. Divorce from his wife, however, was not one of Rupert’s priorities.

It was not until they were nine years old that Quentin and Millament became aware of the strained atmosphere of the house. This had nothing to do directly with their actual age, but was due to their having been sent home from school in the middle of the spring term owing to an outbreak of infectious illness.

Suddenly the house was different. During the Easter and summer holidays there were the students, a father who liked children and would take them for walks in the woods, a mother who would put up packets of sandwiches and provide fruit and there were always dogs and puppies about the house and garden. At Christmas their adopted cousin Gamaliel, who had taught them to call him Greg Ubi, always came to stay and they went back with him to Seawards, that mysterious, exciting house, for the New Year and to finish the holiday.

But in the middle of the spring term it was as though a blight had settled on Campions. The weather was cold and wet, so that it was not possible to go out into the woods, there were no puppies to play with, the thoroughbred dachshund sire was out at stud, the bitch was heavy with her next consignment and was more or less in purdah, one of the maids was under notice of dismissal, the others were sullen because they were on her side and against Diana who had sacked the girl in a fit of petulance and knew it but would not retract, and as for Rupert, the children’s companion at holiday times, he was immersed in his writing.

Even Gamaliel’s company was denied them, for he still had to attend school. Moreover, his homework, however carelessly or badly he did it— and he refused to ask for help—occupied his evenings. The twins, however, were resilient. When the next school holidays came round, all was as before, and, at their age, they neither knew nor cared about the sympathies and antipathies of those in the family circle. They knew that they had a great grandmother whom they had never seen and a grandmother who paid occasional visits to Campions and brought sweets. They knew from her that she had fostered their father when Rupert was a boy, and had brought him up with her own two children.

They were well acquainted with Bluebell through Gamaliel, less so with Garnet. Of Parsifal they knew little, for he was not at ease in the company of children and was apt to make himself scarce when they paid visits to Seawards. His, however, was a presence they could easily dispense with. Bluebell, who was an excellent cook, fed them, Gamaliel was their play-fellow and Garnet was sometimes available to join in a game or tell jokes and show them card tricks. Parsifal was, for them, a redundant member of the household and, for his part, was content to be so. Whatever the weather, his daily walks grew longer when Quentin and Millament were in the house.