Muriel's Reign Read online

  Muriel’s Reign

  SUSANNA JOHNSTON

  Dedicated to both Stella Weatherall and George Christie

  with love and gratitude.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  ALSO BY SUSANNA JOHNSTON

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  The first thing that Muriel Cottle did after moving into Bradstow Manor was to go back on the promise she had made herself – that she would always use the pretty little bedroom that she had originally been allotted by a curmudgeonly servant on her first visit there.

  Instead she moved into a large and airy one where she continued to cohabit with Peter, her blind brother-in-law and her dog, Monopoly.

  After her inheritance she had played with the idea of changing her name but, since she hoped, eventually, to marry Peter, who was her husband’s brother, there didn’t appear to be any way out of being called ‘Cottle’ – a name she had never cared for.

  Their courtship had been slow and comfortable and now, apart from the awkwardness of his being Hugh’s brother, Peter kept her afloat – helped her to sail over the endless dilemmas that arose every day to cast shadows over the miracle of her fortune. On bad days she clung to him as to a plank in choppy water.

  Many of her early days at Bradstow Manor had been almost unendurable and there had been near-unanimous revolt amongst the underworked retainers.

  Phyllis, the self-appointed housekeeper and one-time ‘carer’ to the former owner, showed scars of bitter betrayal beneath anaemic prettiness and dug even deeper than the rest.

  ‘Of course. You never knew him. Never came to visit, did you? We all wondered what he got into his head when he willed the property over to you. But, then, he wasn’t himself – and all those promises he made.’

  Muriel had straightened her back in confidence – knowing she had no case to answer for. Since spending many hours with Jerome’s solicitor, Arthur Stiller (labelled a ‘sweetie’ by the rector’s wife), she understood more of the history of the place than she had done when first it had been thrust upon her.

  ‘Phyllis. Once and for all. This house belonged to Mr Atkins’s wife. My mother’s cousin – Alice. She was descended from the family who actually built it and, as it turned out, Marco and I are the only leftovers of that line.’

  She remembered the scene, wondering why she had described herself and Marco as ‘leftovers’, as she tidied a lampshade that was shedding threads.

  Remembered, too, how in spite of the hurdles it promised, the first sighting of the house had set her heart beating with acquisitive desire.

  She had not, though, consulted Arthur Stiller on the topic of divorcing Hugh. The solicitor, whose fingers looked like lardy dumplings, was too local, too much of a friend of the rector and his wife, to confide in on a matter where sensitivities were finely balanced.

  Peter and Muriel had gingerly introduced the subject of divorce to Hugh who had favoured a hangdog expression and willed his face to turn a reddish shade.

  ‘Frankly, both of you. I don’t know what you’re plotting. Is Muriel to cite me or am I to cite her – producing my own brother as co-respondent?’

  ‘Oh Hugh,’ Muriel had pleaded, ‘can’t we do it by post or something?’

  ‘Come on, Muriel. I have my needs and, I might add, my rights. We were, still are, married when you came into – er – all this.’

  Hugh knew – had heard from someone who had overheard – that an object of importance lay unexposed under the Elizabethan eaves. Muriel guessed that he guessed that she had something interesting to hide.

  When, a month or so earlier, a thin young man and his fat secretary had arrived from London representing a firm of auctioneers, to value the contents of the house, it was possible that an amazing discovery had been made.

  There was a small painting above the piano in the hall that showed a chubby child holding up a bird. It looked very like a Bronzino hanging in the Uffizi and the thin young man, Muriel detected, wet his pants as he spotted it. He wore a grey flannel suit, checked shirt (so as not to look too formal in the country) and a smart tie. He carried a folder and held it in front of his trousers after the accident.

  Muriel still waited to hear if the picture was, indeed, priceless.

  Hugh suggested, ‘Perhaps I could, at least, have a small painting? I always liked the one of the little boy holding up a bird. Reminds me (this he said tenderly) of Marco when he was small.’

  They did not inch forward.

  Before sleeping Muriel, in her mind, made a list of all members of her household – outlying ones and neighbours too.

  Dulcie, more man than woman in the caravan with cats.

  Sonia, ex-secretary and peculiar.

  Kitty (angelic).

  Extra daily helpers, mostly relations of Kitty.

  Joyce and Eric (garden), both bad-tempered.

  Phyllis, ex-carer to Jerome Atkins and a thorn in everybody’s flesh.

  Hugh, ex-husband in squash court.

  Marco (son) and Flavia (daughter-in-law) with Cleopatra (small granddaughter) in old barn.

  Dawson (rector) and his wife Delilah at the rectory.

  Monopoly – her dog – once Hugh’s.

  On top of these, mixed and mingled in her consciousness, came extra members of a sprawling cast. Sporadic visitors. Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), Mambles (Princess Matilda), Cunty and Farty (maids no longer of use at Buckingham Palace), and Moggan the Queen Mother’s effeminate chauffeur. Lizzie, a clinging old schoolfriend. Dear David, an American writer.

  These characters merged into one gruesome image as her head, touching Peter’s, fell onto the luxurious pillow.

  Chapter 2

  Sonia, the pixilated secretary who had, during a period of many years, worked for Jerome Atkins, showed disapproval of the new regime; lady of the manor’s husband living in the abandoned squash court whilst his brother slept in her bed.

  She retired at once – leaving sheaves of fluttering, unfiled and incomprehensible papers in overflowing boxes in a dank and stuffy room at the back of the house; unpaid bills and sniffed-into paper handkerchiefs. On her departure she ordained that the ‘office’ was not to be dismantled and that she was to pop in daily to make sure that the cats were not abused.

  Apart from Kitty, the celestial cook, Jerome’s motley crowd of helpers had done nothing but obstruct Muriel’s path since she first took possession of the house.

  Muriel’s inherited, lifelong friend, HRH Princess Matilda (younger by several years than her sister – the Monarch) had decreed that Hugh, disgraced MP, penniless, a womaniser and discarded husband, must be housed somewhere, however humble, on the estate. Muriel’s friendship with Matilda – known to her very few friends as Mambles – decided on by both sets of parents in the girls’ infancies, was a thorn in Muriel’s flesh but not, in spite of Mambles being a semi-drunken depressive, an intolerable one for she caused amusement and was affectionate in her way.

  Muriel’s immediate thought had been to convert the tack room for Hugh to
live in. There were no horses at Bradstow – although two donkeys lived in a paddock alongside Dulcie; Dulcie was possibly a genuine hermaphrodite.

  The tack room was small and she took pity – deciding to put her husband into a squash court that had been unused for at least fifty years.

  It was bleak with light coming in mainly from the roof; walls tall and bare. Muriel, with unwelcome interference from Dulcie, had hung up threadbare carpets and installed a ‘futon’ on the gallery – smothering it in a duvet.

  It was dreadfully uninviting and Hugh strove to make it more so – placing an ironing board in a prominent position and piling packets of ‘meals for one’ in spots where they could not fail to be noticed. He had decided to learn to play the flute and a music stand stood in one corner of the court. A couple of kitchen chairs were pulled up to a bare table on which perched, as reproachful reminder, a large photograph of his wedding to Muriel in which HRH Princess Matilda and Peter formed part of the group.

  Then there was an empty dog basket to underline the unlikely possibility of Monopoly, originally his dog but now of altered allegiance, deserting Muriel at the big house and joining him in the squash court. Only the shower room shone; sparkling with vitamins, coloured mouthwash, cotton buds and battery-operated objects for dental care.

  Moving him in had been ghastly. Mambles had suggested sending Cunty, a retired royal servant and now in Mambles’s part-time employ, down to help and Muriel had considered turning her housekeeper, Phyllis, over to Hugh but feared he would sleep with her and cause confusion. He was hell bent on dismembering Muriel by thrusting guilt on her and often mentioned that he might become a trainee plumber or help in the garden from time to time.

  He was beginning, with martyred enjoyment, to come to terms with his humiliation when Delilah, wife of the rector, called on him. The weather was cold and the sky already dark. Delilah carried a powerful torch that nearly blinded Hugh as he opened the door to her.

  ‘Cooee. It’s me. I’ve brought you a bottle of our home-brewed beer and want you to know that here, at Bradstow, we’re very broadminded people. Dawson, my husband, is not judgemental – although he’s rector, and says he believes that the extended family has Christian origins.’

  Hugh asked her to sit on one of the kitchen chairs as she gazed at the wedding photograph. ‘What a gorgeous picture. And HRH. She must have attended. Is that – er – your brother – the one acting as best man?’

  She suggested that Hugh pay a visit to the rectory that very evening to eat mince pies and drink ‘plonk’.

  He said that he would like to; had no engagements and enjoyed a walk.

  ‘Good. That’s settled. We try to gather in a few lame dogs as Christmas draws near. It takes all sorts and we have a lovely parishioner coming to take pot-luck too this evening. He’s a sweetie – but something, and this is very sad, went wrong with his chemistry and they say – well. Tittle-tattle. We’re all God’s creatures.’

  Hugh walked quickly past the manor house – shuttered in a wintry way – and pictured, within, his wife in happy harmony with his brother beside a vast Elizabethan fireplace and Monopoly, his faithless dog, gloating in comfort as a Christmas to end all Christmases was planned. The entire village had been asked in to sing carols in the hall. His blind brother, acting as host, was to play the piano accompaniment and a suitably tall tree would be sure to stand in the well of the sturdy staircase.

  He wondered as he neared the rectory if, over plonk and mince pies, he might be asked to help with the Sunday School or be roped in to ‘beat the boundaries’ on his wife’s estate as he cleared his throat and waited to be greeted by an ecstatic Delilah.

  ‘Our boy, Alastair, is here as luck would have it. And Tommy. Christian names only by the way. Rule of the village. We asked Dulcie to come along. She’s lonely as well.’

  Hugh was introduced to a subdued Alastair who, having been wooed by both daughters of some exiled member of the royal family thanks to an introduction from Muriel and Mambles, had escaped from the grasp of each – having failed to choose between them. They had both become anorexic and were at each other’s throats after their separate rejections and Mambles remained in a state of high dudgeon against the rector’s son. She had learnt ‘through the back stairs’ that Alastair had once been in trouble for dropping his trousers on public transport and refused to see why he couldn’t have taken on both girls – ‘time share or something’.

  In Delilah’s sitting room, Hugh was startled. Dulcie, his neighbour from the caravan, stared brutally at him from an oily rubber outfit that she had refused to remove in the hall, and said, ‘Will you tell that wife of yours that there are some things that I cannot abide and incest is one of them. I gather that blind man she lives with happens to be your brother.’

  Before Hugh had opened his mouth ‘Tommy’, fellow guest, interrupted with a wink and a giggle.

  ‘Aren’t you dishy. Tommy Tiddler. That’s what they call me.’ Just for a moment Hugh thought that he also said ‘darling’.

  Tommy Tiddler was fat, particularly round the middle, and wore an ermine stole, pinned on to one of his shoulders by a paste brooch in the shape of two goats committing, quite clearly, a sexual act. He reeked of scent that smelled as lemony as fluid used in public lavatories.

  Dawson, in dog collar, joined them and asked, ‘Might either of you two chaps be interested in helping with the Sunday School? Only three pupils at the moment. We could do with some fresh blood.’

  Tommy Tiddler writhed and attempted to enthuse Hugh.

  ‘One might enjoy,’ he dimpled, ‘take along a dressingup box and some “bits”. One’s party trick is an imitation of the Queen Mum. Drape a quilt over the shoulder and pin it with this.’ He touched the sexually intertwined goats.

  Delilah wheeled round at the mention of the Queen Mother.

  ‘Do you happen to know this, Hugh? Is there a chance of Muriel entertaining any “royals” over Christmas? I’ll be decorating the church – gorgeous holly this year – and Dawson does a lovely sermon on Christmas Day. That is to say he does two. Midnight service of course on Christmas Eve. I’ll need to know so as to keep pews free up near the front.’

  Inwardly Hugh urged Delilah to ask him to read a lesson in church but had no luck. No point, mercifully, in her asking blind Peter. Perhaps Marco, his and Muriel’s son, was to be chosen spokesman. Heir apparent.

  Hugh knew nothing of Muriel’s Christmas plans – other than that he was expected to lunch at the manor following the morning church service. Possibly on Boxing Day as well. Delilah was in full swing. ‘Of course Christmas is a family occasion. We all envy you having that gorgeous little granddaughter. Of course you know Dulcie. She lives near you in the van and,’ in a whisper, ‘don’t you pay too much attention to her rough manner. There are those who won’t be served tea by her at the fete but I always say and Dawson agrees, she’s a law unto herself … Now, Tommy. You’ll be a comfort to each other. He may not look it but he’s a churchgoer and a lonely soul like yourself.’

  Tommy tried again with Hugh. ‘One is a chef by trade. Nibbles and eats for special occasions. Let one know if ever one’s entertaining.’ Hugh thought of his solitary meal unfreezing as Tommy Tiddler spoke.

  Then, getting closer so that scented fumes flew up Hugh’s nostrils, Tommy pointed in the direction of Alastair who gangled in the corner of the room.

  ‘Of course you know of his disgrace. Would that one had witnessed.’

  Hugh stepped backwards. Did Delilah really intend that he make friends with this fright left over from the fifties? Cross dress with him at Sunday School?

  He had, after all, knocked around a bit and wondered if this relic of post-war England was symptomatic of small village life.

  He strode back through Muriel’s kingdom, dejected, cold and at sea, towards the bachelor minginess of the old squash court.

  The degree to which he had already been degraded curdled his blood. Returning, as he had, from Johannesburg to find his w
ife not only having landed a magnificent place but having installed his inadequate brother, Peter, within it.

  Since earliest days he had considered his brother to be weird and a drip – despising his aspiration to become a poet and his mannerly ways.

  Now what?

  Peter had triumphed over him. Cornered a comfortable study; slept with Muriel and had kidnapped his dog.

  He, Hugh, made do in an outhouse. It was all intolerable.

  However, as he heated up a ‘meal for one’, he allowed himself to think that Muriel’s housekeeper, Phyllis, was not unattractive.

  Chapter 3

  Phyllis had been washed up; more often than not on sharp, litter-strewn beaches. Her mother, a single parent from a small Welsh town, had instilled in her the fact that her face was to be her fortune.

  Nothing else was likely to provide her with one.

  She left school early and took odd jobs but none of them brought her fortune. Events led her from rented rooms to factory work, to other towns, to occasional adventures but nothing rose to the standard of the early promises made by her mother.

  Fred was the nearest she got. He was handsome and a sporadic big spender; rode a motorcycle and rented a furnished basement flat near Central London.

  He worked, he told her, for J. Arthur Rank and rewarded her with descriptions of the cinema trade as they ate in restaurants. Phyllis settled for it. Her higher expectations had dwindled and she took a morning job cleaning for a family who were good to her and was grudgingly contented.

  One afternoon Fred was knocked off his motorbike as he drove the wrong way down a one-way street. He died in the ambulance as it made its way to the nearest hospital. Phyllis was saddened for she had liked Fred well enough and was anxious about her future.

  J. Arthur Rank’s were, obviously, excellent employers but unlikely to know much about pensions for common-law wives.

  The day after Fred’s death she looked up the firm in the telephone book. Fred had never allowed her to ring him at work.