She hated it when he was angry. And besides, it wasn’t good for his blood pressure. Better to keep quiet about the letter, to throw it on the fire and pretend it had never existed. More than likely it was the work of that careless girl who Arthur insisted Julia sack after she’d burned the cuff of one of his shirts.
As was often the way of their evenings, when he was home, Arthur was downstairs in his library and Julia was in her upstairs parlour. It was her favourite room in the entire house. During the day it gave her a beautiful view of the rolling parkland that surrounded Melstead Hall, all one hundred acres of it.
She had been married to Arthur for eight years, yet she still had to pinch herself that her life had been so transformed. One minute she had been a lowly nurse living in a two-bedroom semi in Bayswater, and the next she was the wife of Arthur Devereux.
Her father had always said that marriage wasn’t for her, that no man would treat her as well as he did. Her duty, he would repeatedly say, was to be a dutiful daughter and remain at home to look after him. He had encouraged her to become a nurse so that when the time came she would be better equipped to take care of him when he was old. He had been dead a year when she met Arthur and oh, how she wished he could see her now, mistress of Melstead Hall no less!
Listening to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece chiming the hour, she hoped that when Ralph, Arthur’s son from his first marriage, arrived later that evening for the weekend, he wouldn’t antagonise his father. He had a habit of provoking Arthur and creating an unpleasant atmosphere.
She put away her sewing kit and once more examined her stitchwork closely. Arthur liked his clothes to be just so. ‘I might well be rich enough to wear a new shirt every day of the week, but I’m not a spendthrift,’ he would tell Julia. ‘People who are careless with money don’t deserve to have it.’
Satisfied that the button she had sewn on was perfectly straight and secure, and that it would meet with Arthur’s approval, Julia put it ready for her to iron in the morning. After being forced to sack the servant who normally did the washing and ironing, it was now down to Julia to take care of the laundry, and any sewing that needed doing.
‘You’re the only one I can trust to care for my clothes properly,’ Arthur had explained to her. ‘I know I’m fastidious, but I can’t help the way I am. You understand that, don’t you?’ She had told him she understood perfectly.
There were many other tasks he didn’t trust the household staff to do and Julia willingly did them, wanting so much to please her husband.
A strict disciplinarian, her father had brought her up believing that nothing mattered more than obedience and duty. ‘No matter how insignificant the task is, or how difficult, it should be done to the best of your ability,’ he would say. For as long as she could remember, this was what Julia had tried to do.
So when Arthur insisted that she make a weekly inventory of the contents of the pantry and his extensive wine cellar, she did it with painstaking attention to detail. ‘This way,’ he claimed when he was checking the ledger books into which she recorded the inventories, ‘the household staff can’t pilfer from me and think they can get away with it. It’s important for me to have somebody running the house in my absence whom I can trust.’
That Arthur trusted her to carry out these jobs and not Miss Casey their housekeeper, filled Julia with pride and the determination to do everything just as Arthur wanted.
She wouldn’t dream of telling anyone this, for fear of appearing paranoid, but Julia could never shake off the suspicion that Miss Casey watched over her. She was convinced the woman looked down on her, and that the other members of staff talked about her behind her back. She often heard them whispering amongst themselves, but they fell instantly silent when she walked into the room. She never mentioned this to Arthur for fear that he might sack every member of staff, leaving her with all the work to do. She wasn’t scared of hard work. Not at all. It was just there were only so many hours in the day and this house was so very big to run. It was a maze of rooms and shadowy corridors that were difficult to heat. In winter, and when Arthur was away in London, he instructed that the heating was turned down. Ice would form on the inside of the windows and winds, straight from the North Sea, whistled through the gaping cracks.
‘A hale and hearty girl like you can withstand a little cold, can’t you, Julia?’ he would say. ‘I wish I had your constitution,’ he would add, ‘but as you know all too well from when you nursed me, I’m not blessed with good health like you.’ That was how they met, when she had nursed him through a severe bout of pneumonia.
She once remarked that their son Charles would fare better with a little more heat, but Arthur chided her for spoiling the boy.
This was Charles’s first term away at boarding school and Julia missed him terribly. He was such a sweet gentle boy.
‘The worst thing you can do to that boy is mollycoddle him,’ Arthur had claimed when she had suggested there was no hurry to send Charles away to school.
Julia would have liked a daughter. She felt sure Arthur wouldn’t talk of toughening up a daughter by sending her away to school. Every month that went by, Julia hoped that she was pregnant, but it hadn’t happened. Now that she was thirty-seven, time was running out for her. Perhaps it had already. For Arthur too, given that he was now fifty and his health was not as it should be. He really ought not to eat so much, but the slightest hint from her on the subject and he would fly into a rage.
When Arthur had bought the Hall from Sir Archibald and Lady Fogg and driven Julia here for the first time to see it, he had been jubilant in his ownership of the house. Taking her upstairs, he had insisted they make love straightaway in what would be their bedroom. ‘Start as we mean to go on,’ he’d declared as he instructed her to remove her clothes and lie down on the dusty floorboards. Their noisy coupling had embarrassed her acutely as the thump-thump-thump echoed around the empty house. She had been grateful nobody else had been there to hear.
His appetite for sex matched that of his love of food and she worried sometimes that she wouldn’t be able to satisfy him. But as always, and remembering her father’s stern edicts, she performed her duty to the best of her ability and with exacting diligence. She never complained about the bruises to her body with which she often woke in the morning, or the pain that accompanied them. Complaining was not something she did.
And why should she complain when Arthur had given her so much?
Chapter Ten
London and Suffolk
October 1962
Ralph
Ralph Devereux would have set off earlier for Suffolk, but he’d had some unfinished business to attend to. That of ending things on the telephone with a girlfriend who’d started to imagine the ringing of wedding bells. The thought of marriage appalled him. He was twenty-two, had only come down from Cambridge this summer, and had no intention of settling down for a very long time yet.