The Belfry

by May Sinclair

It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane; and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to the fair.

He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.

It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.

And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the
plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.
They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.
And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.

It wasn't a large party—only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty altogether, counting outsiders.

Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest warning or preparation.

Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room loose into the passage and the stair-place.

So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the motto: "Dominus Defensor Domi," and on either side the rose and the grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.

And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor, he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.