and Katie, floated out as they darted about in one of their complicated games. The sound of sheep bleating strayed across from the common.
She yawned and stretched, opened her eyes and glanced idly round the garden. Her eyes were large and luminous, a deep sea-blue, with long, dark, curling lashes. At twenty-nine she was a good-looking woman; she had been a ravishingly pretty girl. Not very tall, slightly built and fine-boned, with narrow wrists and ankles.
The phone rang from inside the cottage. Her face broke into a smile. She sprang to her feet and ran in through the back door, along a passage into the sitting room. She snatched up the receiver.
‘Venetia?’ At the sound of Philip Colborn’s voice her smile vanished.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her tone was easy and amiable. She remained standing, turning her head this way and that as she listened, glancing about the room. From time to time she interjected a word or two, giving him no more than surface attention.
On the wall nearby hung a long mirror. She considered her image with a critical eye, studying her new dark blue cotton sundress with its bold white patterning, pondering the effect against the silky skin of her shoulders.
A note of remonstrance appeared in Colborn’s voice. In the garden the children laughed and called. She half turned to scrutinize her rear view in the glass. With her free hand she raised the skirt of her sundress. She stood with her head inclined, the gaze of her sea-blue eyes detached and assessing, contemplating the reflection of her slender, shapely legs.
Springfield House, the home of the Colborn family for over two hundred years, occupied a prime position in Cannonbridge, close to the town centre but retaining, with its large grounds, a good deal of quiet and privacy, a sense of the spacious, leisured Georgian days in which it had been built.
The Colborn who had chosen the site and built the house had been a successful lawyer, the son of a country parson. In early middle age he had gone into politics, representing the borough of Cannonbridge for the next thirty years; he had achieved minor office. He took for his wife the daughter of an earl, a high-principled, handsome, energetic young woman. Lady Wilhelmina made a lasting name for herself in Cannonbridge by her devotion to good works. There was still a Lady Wilhelmina Crescent in the town, a Lady Wilhelmina Memorial Hall, a Lady Wilhelmina tavern.
After this splendid start the fortunes of the Colborns suffered a long, slow decline. Succeeding generations were less talented, less enthusiastic, less energetic. The family remained prosperous, well esteemed locally, until the early part of the twentieth century, when the gentle decline began to accelerate. A son was killed in the Boer War, another in the Great War. A third Colborn was killed in the Second World War and a fourth, Philip Colborn’s father, died five years after the war of wounds received at Alamein.
At the time of his father’s death Philip, his only child, was seven years old. Philip’s mother felt the loss of her husband as a savage blow. Always a dependent, clinging woman, she sank rapidly into isolated, grieving widowhood, withdrawing from all social life and before long retreating even further, into outright invalidism. She lived on until Philip was a grown man but never again made the slightest effort to bestir herself to go out into the world.
The house slipped into neglect and from neglect into decay. The magnificent gardens became a wilderness. Several rooms were shrouded in dust sheets and closed up. It wasn’t money that was in short supply but energy and resolution, interest and motivation. Little by little the name of Colborn slid from the consciousness of the town.
At half past seven on Friday morning Philip Colborn woke in his bedroom on the first floor of Springfield House. His eyes ached, his head throbbed. His sleep, as often of late, had been uneasy and broken. He and his wife Ruth had occupied separate bedrooms since the time three years ago when he had been struck down by influenza.
He got slowly out of bed and went over to the window. He was forty-one, with a tall, rangy figure. He had been handsome as a young man and was still good-looking enough, with his fair hair and grey eyes, to attract a female glance. He drew back the curtains and gazed bleakly out at the day. A sparkling May morning, sunlight glittering the dewy lawns. From downstairs he could hear a radio playing, something from Bizet, hauntingly beautiful.
The gardens were once more a superb sight, thanks to the determination and dedication of his wife Ruth. They had married nine years ago, eighteen months after the death of Philip’s mother. He had wanted to sell Springfield House which he saw only as the gloomy, secluded, dilapidated dwelling in which he had grown up. He had thought of buying a much smaller house on one of the new developments on the edge of Cannonbridge; he believed the move would provide a sense of release, of a fresh, hopeful start.
But Ruth had been horrified at the notion. She was certain the house could be restored to its old glory within a few years, the gardens even sooner. The fabric of the dwelling was still essentially sound. All the furnishings and pictures, all the objets d’art were still there; nothing had been disposed of. And there was more than sufficient money. Philip had inherited the whole of his mother’s estate and in addition he had his salary from the bank where he worked. He had allowed himself to be persuaded.
‘Are you awake, darling?’ Ruth called up to him now from the foot of the stairs. He crossed the room and opened the bedroom door. The music rose up at him, imploring, yearning. An alluring odour of coffee drifted over the threshold. ‘I won’t be long,’ he called down.
When he came into the kitchen a little later Ruth had already finished eating. ‘I have a particularly busy day ahead of me,’ she reminded him. She was a year or two older than her husband. Not very tall, delicately made, with a calm, pale, oval face and small regular features. Her thick, heavy brown hair, the colour of beechnuts, was wound carefully and becomingly round her head in shining braids and loops that gave her a look of a Brontë or Jane Austen heroine.
She moved swiftly and efficiently about the kitchen, attending to half a dozen tasks. From the radio a pair of voices soared in harmony. Philip went over and switched the radio off. Ruth halted for an instant and glanced at him in surprise.
‘I’m sorry.’ He sat down at the table. ‘I have a headache. I slept badly.’
She gave him a look of tender concern. ‘Shall I get you an aspirin?’
‘No, thanks. Just some coffee.’ She tried to persuade him to eat but he shook his head. While he drank his coffee she went along to the front hall to look for the post and came back with a handful of mail, mostly for herself. She always had a good deal of mail; since her marriage she had assiduously followed the example of Lady Wilhelmina and worked tirelessly for a dozen charitable causes. She slit open the envelopes, swiftly sorted out what must be dealt with promptly, what might safely wait a little. She sat down opposite Philip and poured herself some coffee.
Philip glanced through his letters without enthusiasm. He was employed by the bank where the Colborns had always kept their accounts; he had been manager of the Cannonbridge branch for four years now. Ruth had worked for the same bank herself. She wasn’t a native of Cannonbridge; she had been transferred to the Cannonbridge branch a year or so before she and Philip were married–that was how they had met.
She glanced up from her correspondence and saw his dejected air. ‘Cheer up,’ she said in a tone of bracing optimism. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
He was jerked out of his thoughts. He gave her a long look as if he hadn’t really seen her for some time, then he leaned across the table and laid a hand on hers. ‘I do appreciate all you’ve done for me,’ he said with feeling. ‘I may not say so very often but that doesn’t mean I’m not deeply grateful.’
A
