Читать книгу The Secrets of Greystone House - Marcus Attwater - Страница 3

I walk through the gates of 22 Andover Lane, and for a moment I wonder if I have come to the right place. In my memory Greystone House is more imposing, more extravagant in its collection of gables and chimneys and outbuildings. But I know this must be it, and as I continue down the drive an earlier perspective reasserts itself. It is a large house, a house which announces itself to the world, and if it spoke louder to me as a boy than it does to me now, it is still the same Greystone: sitting foursquare in the garden, with its smooth lawns and yew hedges and yes, even with the big urns filled with geraniums either side of the front door steps. The garden is looking a bit rough around the edges now. The sycamore has outgrown the lawn and towers threateningly over the house, the ivy covers more of the grey stone.

The house is late Victorian, built for the founder of Hambleton’s, the toffee manufacturers, in 1890. It is not an especially graceful or well-proportioned building, just a bit too tall for its width and giving the impression that it has been haphazardly assembled of all the pieces the owner thought should go into a rich man’s house: a porticoed front door, bay windows, terraces, a conservatory. Inside, the main staircase is impressive, but the backstairs have an inconvenient twist in them; the first floor passage goes around more corners than seems necessary, as if the architect wasn’t quite sure how to dispose of the bedrooms; and reaching the guest rooms on the attic floor involves travelling through the servants’ part of the house. I saw none of this when I stayed here that summer. It was a house of a kind I had never known before, admitting of endless exploration, and its inhabitants provided a continuous pageant of a life I was unfamiliar with. What I didn’t know then – what I have, in fact, only recently learned as I walk through those gates – is that the Hambletons of Greystone House have their own reasons to remember that particular summer, reasons more sad and troubling than my own.

The first time I came through these gates I was eleven, a shopkeeper’s son from East Finchley. I spent eight weeks here, eight weeks so far removed from my normal London life that they have always remained a separate episode in my memory, a clutch of vivid impressions that stand out in bold colour among the fuzzier recollections of the time before and the brown and grey of the years which came after. It was one glorious holiday to me, and it is only with hindsight that I recognise that those were not halcyon days, that I spent my time among individuals with their own passions and preoccupations, their own sorrows – and secrets.