Ashenden: A Novel - Softcover

Wilhide, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451697899 ISBN 13: 9781451697896

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2013

Synopsis

A beautifully atmospheric debut about 240 years in the life of an English country house, “this book is a sparkling jewel: full of fascinating detail, high drama, and sly wit” (Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire).

THE HOUSE CONTAINS TIME. ITS WALLS HOLD STORIES. . . .

When brother and sister Charlie and Ros discover that they have inherited Ashenden, the beautiful eighteenth-century English country house steeped in their family history, they face an important decision: Do they try to keep it or do they sell it?

In a beguiling narrative spanning two and a half centuries, we meet those who have built the house, lived in it, loved it, and those who would subvert it to their own ends. The walls of Ashenden echo with the lives of the architect who directs the building of the house in 1775, the wealthy Henderson family in their heyday, the maid who is tempted to solve her problems by stealing a trinket, the Jazz Age speculator who hosts a fabulous treasure hunt, the prisoners held there during World War II, and the young couple who lovingly restore it in the 1950s.

With upstairs and downstairs storylines intertwining to form a rich tapestry, Ashenden is an evocative portrait of a house that is a character as compelling as the people who inhabit it.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Wilhide is the author of more than twenty books on interior design, decoration, and architecture and a coauthor and contributor of many more. Born in the United States, she moved to Britain in 1967, where she lives with her husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The Cuckoo’s Egg: 2010

Winter has been hard on the house, the bitter cold eating into the honey-colored stonework, causing portions of the façade to crumble and flake away. Even in the external areas that are less exposed—under overhangs, for example—where the weeks of severe frost have been prevented from doing their worst, fresh staining has appeared in ugly blotches that bloom like malevolent flowers of decay.

Ashenden Park, built towards the end of the eighteenth century, and one of the finest late Palladian houses in the country according to those who make it their business to judge such things, was once surrounded by thousands of acres. Over the years the estate has shrunk to grounds of under a few hundred, which is nevertheless more than enough to provide an uninterrupted view from all sides.

Look around. It is as if the house were an island domain in a sea of green. In front, land slopes away, then rises to a gentle hill dotted with stands of trees and grazed by deer; behind, terraces descend more abruptly to the river, the modern world nowhere in evidence. The principal block, like the two smaller pavilions that flank it, is crowned with a pediment on the main elevation. Its centerpiece, and the focus of the symmetry of threes and fives and sevens, is a recessed columned loggia that soars from the first floor to the roof. At the lower story a continuous wall topped with a balustrade links the buildings together and makes elegant sense of it all. From a distance, as you come up the drive, for instance, the crisp lines of the architecture appear intact and it is possible to appreciate the clarity of the design more than two centuries since it sprang from a drawing into life, from a mind into being.

Look again. Up close the deterioration is brutal and alarming. Stone teeth missing under the roofline, rotten sills, the dull blank eyes of windows. Another winter as severe as this, the rot will find its way indoors and there will be serious trouble. Already the roof is leaking and the background heat that has been maintained in the principal rooms is barely enough to ward off the damp.

The house is much smaller than a palace, smaller too than many others of its type, yet much larger than most people today would recognize as a home. How many rooms? It depends on how you count them. About two dozen in the main block, give or take, not including hallways, landings, staircases, of which there are many. The side pavilions, once service quarters, are houses in themselves. Altogether it is a mansion, perhaps, but here is a trick of the architecture: a mansion that feels both generous and human-scaled. Were you to see it from above, from the flight path to Heathrow under which it lies, you might imagine yourself picking it up and placing it in the palm of your hand for safekeeping.

The house contains time. Its walls hold stories. Births and deaths, comings and goings, people and events passing through. Some of the occupants of the Park (and not all its occupants have been owners) have treated it well; others have been criminally careless. For now, however, it lies suspended in a kind of emptiness, as if it has fallen asleep or someone has put it under a spell. This silence won’t last: can’t last. Something will have to be done.

* * *

Charlie Minton, fifty-seven years old, twice married, father of one, woke up and for a moment didn’t know where he was. It was a familiar feeling: over the years he’d woken up in boardinghouses, tents, three-, four-, and five-star hotels, shacks, on the backseats of cars and airport floors, in Beirut, Tokyo, New Orleans, Rio, and Pretoria, and had had the same momentary feeling of dislocation. It was part and parcel of the itinerant, unsettled life he had once chosen for himself and sometimes still hankered after. Now, he thought, this gray light could only be England, and as he came more fully into the day, something even worse occurred to him, which was that he was at Ashenden Park. More specifically, he was lying in bed in one of the spare rooms in the south pavilion, part of the house converted by his aunt and uncle over thirty years ago for their retirement.

He burrowed under the duvet, but any hopes that his mind would drift back to sleep and leave him in peace for another five minutes came to nothing. How could it, when every morning for the past two weeks the same dead weight had landed on him as soon as he had opened his eyes?

Over a fortnight ago, a February evening, he had been sitting at his worktable at home in the apartment on the Lower East Side he shared with his second wife, Rachel, correcting the proofs of a catalog to accompany a retrospective exhibition of his photographs. It was the kind of judgment that needed daylight, and he had moved away from the deceptive warmth of the Anglepoise to stare out of the window at snow flurries blown upwards and sideways in the sodium glare. He was thinking that he didn’t much like the word “retrospective”—it reminded him how old he was—when the phone had rung. The dog, snoozing in her basket, raised her head.

It was Rachel’s night at the Sita Center and she would be calling to say that she had yoga brain and should she pick up a takeout or was there something in the fridge. But as he reached for the handset, snug in its cradle like a papoose, he’d thought it was odd she was calling on the landline. Rachel always called him on his cell.

It hadn’t been Rachel and it had only been when he’d picked up the phone that he’d noticed the red light was blinking.

Down under the duvet, clinging to his body heat on a cold, damp English morning, Charlie remembered his wife coming through the door of their apartment that February evening in New York, dumping her bag of yoga kit, snowflake stars melting on the little black ankle boots he’d given her for Christmas. Greeting the ecstatic dog, whose claws skittered across the waxed floorboards. Then taking a look at his face and asking what was the matter.

For a moment he had considered not saying anything at all. Pretending nothing had happened. Then he told her that his sister had just called with the news that Reggie was dead.

“Your aunt Reggie?”

He nodded.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, honey.” She came across the room to give him a hug and he could smell sandalwood in her hair. “That’s too bad.”

At this point anyone else would have said that his aunt had been over ninety and had had a good, long life. But Rachel never said the obvious thing, which was one of the reasons he loved her.

“When did it happen?”

“Around noon their time. Ros was pretty upset. She’s been trying to get hold of me all day.” Ros was his sister.

“Didn’t she try your cell?”

“Repeatedly. Bloody useless network.”

Rachel rubbed his arm. “You planning on going over for the funeral?”

Before he could answer, he had to tell her the rest of it, knowing that would mean there was no further retreat from reality. “Reggie’s left us the house. Me and Ros.”

Rachel drew back. “That big old place?”

“Ashenden Park.”

Ashenden Park. An image of its tawny stonework, its severe classical symmetries, formed itself in his mind. His uncle Hugo— his mother’s brother—had bought the house just after the war and, together with his wife, Reggie, had saved it from what would have been almost certain destruction. The two of them had been devoted to one another and the house they had painstakingly restored but they had never had children of their own.

“I thought it was going to be donated to the country or something.”

“To the National Trust.” His breath constricted in his chest, and he felt the same sensation he’d had when he’d heard the news twenty minutes before: that of opening a door and stepping into space. Falling down, down, down, his feet scrabbling for a floor that wasn’t there. “That’s what we all thought.”

“Is Ros sure?”

“She rang Reggie’s solicitor this afternoon and he told her. We’ve inherited the house and whatever’s left of the trust Hugo set up for her. I’ll have to get over there straightaway.”

Rachel’s face registered internal adjustments, shifts of perspective. Yet, and this was another reason why he loved her, she did not rush to offer her opinion or second-guess his own. She held back. Only this late in life had he come to understand the paradox of true intimacy: that it depended on this type of respect.

He said, “Whatever happens, it’s not going to be quick. I’ll have to cancel my seminars at Parsons. Take a leave of absence.”

“The exhibition?”

He shrugged. “Let’s eat. We’ll talk after.”

* * *

Now, two weeks later, on this soggy gray morning at Ashenden Park, lying in the hollow of the mattress, the slightest movement accompanied by the creaking of the tarnished brass bedstead, the percussion of its springs, Charlie thought about what a good buy those little black ankle boots had been and how much he would like to see Rachel wearing them this very minute. He badly missed his wife.

In his first marriage, Charlie had experimented with similarity, shared interests, and things in common. He had since come to the conclusion that opposites worked better. People always imagined that opposites clashed, but in his experience similarities did, each vying for the same piece of ground. Opposites didn’t have to mean conflict, wars of attrition, any more than they had to attract; sometimes, they made for smooth-running train tracks.

He and Rachel had met eight years ago at a Parsons fund-raiser: his seminars were beginning to be popular with the students and there was a rumor that he migh...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1451697899
• ISBN 13: 9781451697896
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368