Country Plot by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page A

afterwards into the fifties, was always having house parties; and his grandfather was one of the Prince of Wales’s set – he used to visit quite often. There are presents from him all over the house. He always made a point of leaving something.’ She laid a loving hand on the end of the table. ‘I feel I let it down rather. Haven’t had a dinner party in years. It does reduce to quite a manageable size if you take the leaves out, but then you’ve the problem of what to do with them. And if you leave them out too long, the colour of the wood changes and they don’t match any more. So I leave it be. I don’t eat in here alone, of course.’
    Beyond those two rooms was the library – ‘Unusual to have it on the ground floor, but the first owner was an eccentric’ – and the passage ended in a small, panelled door. ‘That goes through into the cottage,’ Kitty explained. ‘Peter’s grandfather had such huge shooting parties, he used to use the cottage as extra guest accommodation. But Bill Bennett lives there now, so it’s locked. We both have a key in case of emergencies. You’ll meet him later – he gardens for me in exchange for living in the cottage rent-free.’
    On the other side of the passage were the kitchen and its attached sculleries, larders and storerooms, and the back lobby through which they had entered, which housed the stairs down into the cellars. The kitchen had been fitted out with modern units and slate work-surfaces, and there was a gas stove as well as an Aga, but there was also a massive old wooden dresser and an old-fashioned scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the stone-flagged floor. It was all spotless, and a rinsed-out dishcloth hung neatly over the edge of the porcelain sink. Mrs Phillips had finished and gone. Jenna would have liked to investigate the complex of rooms and cupboards beyond it, but they didn’t linger there. Kitty obviously had no attachment to kitchen regions.
    The other two rooms on the ground floor were at the back. Of the sitting room Kitty said, ‘This was the kitchen of the original house, but only until around 1820. I more or less live in here now. There’s a gate-leg table I use to eat on in the winter, and in the summer I’m in the conservatory most of the time, when I’m not outdoors.’
    The other room, which had floor-to-ceiling panelled cupboards built into the walls, was empty except for a large round table in the centre.
    â€˜We call this the housekeeper’s room,’ Kitty said, opening a door on the far side and revealing a staircase. ‘You see, the backstairs come down here. The Everest who had the kitchen built was a bachelor until late in life, and his housekeeper had this room as her sitting room. The maids used to sit round that table and do their sewing in the evening, while she read to them from the Bible. Compulsory virtue. Fierce old thing, she was. There’s a watercolour showing the scene upstairs – I’ll show you when we get there.’
    Jenna asked what was in the cupboards.
    â€˜Oh, just household china,’ Kitty said. ‘Dinners for twenty-plus take a lot of crockery. Shall we go upstairs?’
    â€˜Oh please,’ Jenna said, ‘can we go up the backstairs? I always wanted to live in a house with two staircases.’
    Kitty laughed. ‘It
is
rather thrilling. I always wished I’d lived here as a child. Peter said he and his brothers used to race round and round, up the backstairs and down the main stairs, until someone caught them and gave them a clump on the ear. And they used to slide down the backstairs on a tray when they could get away with it. Boys have all the fun.’
    On the first floor there had been three bedrooms along the front of the house and three along the back. The middle one on the front had been turned into the two en-suite bathrooms for Jenna’s room and that occupied by