A La Carte Read online

  That was nearly thirty years ago. The friend with the employment agency got me a job. I stayed with her until I found a room of my own. I have prospered. I am managing director of my own company now and if I am not rich I am comfortably off. My marriage lasted only a short time but there is nothing unusual in that. Children I never wanted and I have none. Five Basenjis have been my companions through the years and they have been more to me than lovers or children.

  Mrs Poulter told me my grandmother had left me the house. The chance of this I believed I lost for ever on the day I left. I had never heard from my grandmother, had written no letters and received none. I seldom thought of her. Then one Monday morning three years ago a letter came from a law firm telling me she had died and left me the house. The funeral had taken place. I wondered who had seen to the arrangements. The Harper-Greens? If they expected a legacy they were disappointed, for it all came to me, the house and its contents, the grounds from which you could see the meadows and woods of Chatsworth.

  Now I should know the answers to those questions, the solutions to many mysteries. I drove up there one morning in autumn, my pair of Basenjis with me in the back of the estate car. Was the truth that she had loved me all along, valued me in her cold inexpressive way? Or had she simply not bothered to change her will because, though she cared nothing for me, there was no one else she cared more for?

  We let ourselves into the house, the dogs and I. It was dusty and the ceilings hung with cobwebs, but the smell that met me as I walked up the stairs was the smell of paper, old paper turned yellow with time and packed away in airless places. The sewing room door was not locked. There were ashes in the grate and the silver Aladdin’s lamp lighter still on the mantelpiece. A sheet of paper lay on the blotter on the table that was big enough to seat twelve. There were lines of writing on it, the final sentence broken off, the fountain pen lying where my grandmother had dropped it and a splutter of ink trailing from the last, half-completed word.

  With the keys from the bunch I held I unlocked the burglar-proof cupboard doors. It was all there, all the secrets, in fifty scrapbooks, in a thousand letters received, and a thousand copies of letters sent, in a hundred diaries, in deeds and agreements and contracts, in unnumbered handwritten manuscripts. The smell of paper, or perhaps it was the smell of ink, was acrid and nauseating. The dogs padded about the room, sniffing in corners, sniffing along skirting boards and around chair legs, sniffing and holding up their heads as if in thought, as if considering what it was they had smelt.

  I began emptying the cupboards. Everything would have to be examined page by page, word by word, and in this house, in this room. How could I take it away except in a removal van? I imagined the misery of it, as sad and dreadful things were slowly revealed. Presently I got up and took my grandfather’s silver lighter off the mantelpiece. I struck it with my thumb and the flame flared orange and blue. The Basenjis were watching me. They watched me as I applied the lighter to the pile of paper and the flame began to lick across the first sheet, lick, die, smoulder, lick, crackle, burst into bright flame.

  I picked up the dogs, one under each arm, and ran down the stairs. The front door slammed behind me. What happened to the keys I don’t know, I think I left them inside. I didn’t look back but drove fast away and back to London.

  It had been insured but of course I didn’t claim on the insurance. The land belongs to me and I could have another house built on it but I never shall. Two years ago a tour company wrote to me and asked if they might bring parties to look at the burnt-out shell as part of a scenic Derbyshire round trip. So now the coach that goes to Chatsworth and Haddon Hall and Bess of Hardwick’s house, follows the winding road up the hill to my childhood home, shows off to tourists the blackened ruin and the incomparable view.

  I will never forget the way the police told me my house had burned down. Later they hinted at arson and this is how the guide explains things to visitors. But that evening when I had only been back a few hours, the police came and spoke to me very gently and carefully. I must sit down, keep calm, prepare myself for something upsetting.

  They called it bad news.