Troy Chimneys Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Kennedy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  New Introduction by Anita Brookner

  PROLOGUE: 1879

  THE LUFTON PAPERS: 1818

  THE LIFE OF MILES LUFTON: 1782–1818

  INTERLUDE: 1879–1880

  THE LUFTON PAPERS (concluded)

  JOURNAL: 1818

  MEMOIR: 1808–1818

  EPILOGUE: 1880

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘She combines imagination with delicate feeling, capturing the right atmosphere with a simple style that makes her story timeless’ Times Literary Supplement

  A Victorian gentleman is forced by illness to entertain himself with the family archive, and he uncovers the Regency-era correspondence and diaries of one Miles Lufton, MP - apparently a black sheep of the family, connected with a scandal long buried. But through the pieced-together artefacts from the past, a fuller picture emerges of a man torn between two personalities – Miles, serious, studious and penniless, and ‘Pronto’, flirt, political mover and eternal ‘extra man’. Miles longs to dispose of his disreputable alter ego, but that way lies calamity . . .

  See also: The Forgotten Smile

  About the Author

  Margaret Kennedy was born in 1896. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller. She then met and married a barrister, David Davies, with whom she had three children. She went on to write a further fifteen novels, to much critical acclaim. She was also a playwright, adapting two of her novels – Escape Me Never and The Constant Nymph – into successful productions. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph were made, and featured stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine; Kennedy subsequently worked in the film industry for a number of years. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws of Parnassus. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.

  OTHER NOVELS BY MARGARET KENNEDY

  Ladies of Lyndon

  The Constant Nymph

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Fool of the Family

  Return I Dare Not

  A Long Time Ago

  Together and Apart

  The Midas Touch

  The Feast

  Lucy Carmichael

  The Oracles

  The Wild Swan

  A Night in Cold Harbour

  The Forgotten Smile

  TO JAMES DAVIES

  MARGARET KENNEDY

  Troy Chimneys

  INTRODUCTION

  TROY CHIMNEYS is a disconcerting novel. It belongs to Margaret Kennedy’s later period, when her plots became more complicated, sometimes excessively so, and her early rebelliousness was becalmed into a quite perceptible longing for goodness and honour in the conduct of life. Both these characteristics are probably carried to their fullest extension in Lucy Carmichael, arguably the most popular of her last works and a book which carries a charge of an ordeal endured and a resolution vindicated which continues to impress even today, when the comparatively pellucid moral climate of the 1950’s has become clouded to the point of obscurity.

  For these late novels of Margaret Kennedy, like those which Elizabeth Taylor was writing at the same time and a little later, are about virtue. They are virtuous novels written by essentially right-minded women, and it is a tribute to their sophistication that they are by no means as simple as that point of departure would seem to indicate, for virtue does not triumph, patience is not rewarded, people do not receive from the author their just deserts. One might then quite legitimately ask how these novels are to be perceived as virtuous. The answer, I think, is to be found in the pain the author feels that moral conundrums cannot be resolved and the result presented like a cheap diagnosis of a chronic malady. Margaret Kennedy (and here Elizabeth Taylor resembles her most closely) is a serious woman who is content to translate her concerns lightly into the traditional forms of the English drawingroom novel.

  Her distaste for formulae can perhaps be deduced from a remark made by one of the characters in Troy Chimneys about the novels of Jane Austen.

  ‘That lady’s greatest admirers will always be men, I believe. For, when they have had enough of the parlour, they may walk out, you know, and we cannot.’

  The speaker is Caroline Audley, a lonely thoughtful woman of high intelligence and integrity who is in a position to observe that Jane Austen’s life in the parlour concealed a certain abdication of passion and risk, and, more interestingly, a certain collusion with the traditional male activities of getting and spending: her heroines, with their curious appeal, are essentially gamesters for whom everything comes out right in the end. But for the serious woman (and I do not for a moment compare Jane Austen and Margaret Kennedy as writers) the end can be sad or disappointing or merely inconclusive. Mrs Kennedy does not offer nostrums in the form of easy solutions, and in this it can be seen that she has concerns over and above bringing her story to a neat conclusion.

  Troy Chimneys is an exercise in all these negative modes, and at the same time it is not what it seems. The title would seem to promise one of those soothing panoramas of English country life in the middle to upper income range, for Troy Chimneys is the name of a house, and a very idyllic house it would appear to be, somewhere in Wiltshire. It is the house that serves as the main vehicle for Margaret Kennedy’s nostalgia, for it represents peace, happiness, withdrawal from the murky concerns of fortune hunters and politicians, and the reward on earth for all the hard work that men have to devote to their careers, sometimes against their better nature. Yet Troy Chimneys also represents an unattainable goal, for the hero of the novel, Miles Lufton, who buys the house as a guarantee of the time when all his conflicts shall be over, dies before he can ever live there. And despite the really quite complicated and occasionally puzzling arrangement of the novel, it is the image of that house, silent, peaceful, and yet eternally out of bounds, that stays with the reader.

  Yet Troy Chimneys, the house, is merely a strand in the background of the book. The foreground is occupied by Miles Lufton, the almost self-made politician who labours half-heartedly in the England of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period. Should this promise an agreeable exercise in the higher reaches of Regency tosh, the promise is again unfulfilled and the reader discomposed. For Miles is a very complex character. He has apparently all the gifts, loving and virtuous parents, handsome and agreeable brothers and sisters, a country parsonage for a home, good health, a fine wit, no great fortune but an enlightened perception of where his interest lies and a determination to devote his energies to his own advancement. Indeed this perception strikes him early on in his career as something that might lead him into an inferior mode of behaviour, and he resolves to treat himself as two distinctly separate people: as Miles Lufton, a man whose native goodness has not been finally extinguished by self-interest, and as Pronto, the all too available extra man, diner out, weekend guest and flirt who sees all social gatherings as occasions for advancement and who never refuses an invitation because it might lead to useful contacts. Lufton and Pronto combined add up to an extremely plausible public figure: agreeable, even desirable, company, possessing the instincts of the rat pack, yet with a keen memory of original goodness to temper his appetites.

  But the interesting thing about the Lufton/Pronto character is that nothing goes right with him. His generous impulses fall short of effectiveness. His passions can be seen to be all too moderate. He cannot carry anything through to fulfilment. And when he finally consider
s himself to be in love – with the authentically serious Caroline Audley – he cannot see that he has turned the possibility of loving her over in his mind for far too long, has left her to grow older, has in fact ruined her life, because of some flaw in his nature or his character or his outlook which prevents him from making any clear distinction in the moral order of things between the imperative and the merely beguiling. Even his death is a sort of accident, although the occasion is a duel, the proceedings reported by an interested witness, and a great deal of the evidence suppressed.

  The story is an oblique one, and is rendered even more oblique by the manner in which it is told. The main body of the narrative is a limpid memoir which purports to be written by Lufton himself. This memoir is sandwiched between two sets of letters written by descendants of the Lufton family who are initially attracted by this colourful ancestor and then prudishly distressed by his example. It is the method used by Benjamin Constant in Adolphe and it would appear that Margaret Kennedy took it from that source. If it is a method which marries uneasily with the tradition of the English novel as practised half way through the twentieth century, then it must be allowed that Margaret Kennedy cannot be relied upon to give her readers what they think they have been led to expect. She is disconcerting in her preoccupations, disconcerting in her methods, and technically more learned and experimental than many of her successors in the 1980’s.

  Anita Brookner

  London, 1984

  PROLOGUE: 1879

  PROLOGUE: 1879

  IN LETTERS AND journals of the Regency occasional reference is made to a person called Pronto who is generally mentioned as a fellow guest in a country house.

  Conscientious researchers have identified him with a certain Miles Lufton, M.P.; he sat for West Malling, a borough in the pocket of the Earl of Amersham, and he held an important post at the Exchequer during the years 1809-1817. He spoke frequently and well in the House, in support of Vansittart’s financial policy. Nothing else is known of him save that he could sing; in the Bassett Papers he is reported to have been visiting Lingshot in 1813 and to have delighted the whole company one evening by ‘singing like an angel.’

  At the age of thirty-six he wrote a short autobiography. This, together with a kind of diary that he had kept, came into the possession of his sister, Susan Lufton. She took them with her to Ireland when she went there to live with another sister, Lady Cullen, of Cullenstown, Co. Kildare. She subsequently married a Mr. Lawless and sailed for India, leaving the Lufton Papers behind her. They lay forgotten in the attics of Cullenstown for thirty years. They were then removed to the library by a Miss Honoria Cullen, who had taken it upon herself to sort all the papers in the house because she had nothing else to do. They were not read at that time, and they remained undisturbed in the library for another thirty years.

  The Cullens had no motive for perusing these faded pages. They had little interest in their Lufton grandmother or in any of her family. The Luftons, who came from an obscure parsonage in Gloucestershire, were, by Cullen standards, ‘nothing much.’ Only one of them, a Eustace Lufton who became an admiral, was worth remembering. But the papers were eventually taken from their drawer in 1879, and sent to Brailsford in Warwickshire, at the request of the Hon. Frederick Harnish, brother-in-law to Sir James Cullen. This was not on account of any sudden interest in ‘Pronto,’ but in connection with the following correspondence between Harnish and Cullen.

  Brailsford, Dec. 3, 1879

  DEAR JIM,

  I think Emmie once told me she thought you had some old papers in which frequent reference is made to our queer relative, the Chalfont whose collection of pictures, etc., we now have at Brailsford.

  I wonder if you would do me the great favour of letting me see them? Convalescence is such a bore that I have been amusing myself by going through his letters, and am getting very much interested in ‘Cousin Ludovic’ as he is still called. He left boxes upon boxes of papers, all in the wildest disorder. I don’t think they can have been touched since he died in 1830. He never succeeded to the Amersham title; my grandfather was his first cousin and that is how we came in.

  I want to know more about him. I had always heard that he was a lunatic. But you know our family! That is what we would say about a man who bought pictures and did not hunt. We have a portrait by Opie, which looks decidedly mad, and there is a secluded suite of rooms, still called ‘Lord Chalfont’s Rooms,’ in which we, as children, imagined that he had been confined with half a dozen keepers. Emmie, who was the bravest of us, was the only one who dared go there after dark.

  He must have had lucid intervals. The first papers I looked at were all about the Elgin Marbles, which he seems to have admired when nobody else did. He was one of those who supported their purchase by the British Museum. And I have found a couple of letters from Wordsworth, dull in themselves, but not, obviously, written to a lunatic.

  As evidence on the other side there is a portfolio of drawings by the poet Blake. Only a madman could have drawn them or bought them. You never saw such things! One cannot even be sure whether the figures are clothed or not.

  There are no letters written by him. Have you got any? He must have written thousands to have got so many replies, and he seems to have kept every scrap of paper ever sent to him. A good many are solemn records of his dreams! He wrote down every dream he had, as soon as he woke up.

  It is very difficult to get information about what went on thirty years before one was born. That is an epoch about which everybody shuts up. Family skeletons ain’t respectable for at least a hundred years. My chief source of information about that period is our old neighbour, Sir Mervyn Crockett, now well over ninety. He was no end of a buck in his time, and full of anecdotes, – seldom of a kind which I can stomach. Some of them, in fact, make me feel quite sick. The squalor of their jokes is unbelievable and so was their brutality. He remembers nothing of Cousin Ludovic save that they ‘roasted Chalfont at Eton in 1796.’ I thought this to be some kind of slang, but it is literal. They hung the poor little boy up before a very hot fire for several minutes! Crockett chuckled when he remembered it; to him it was a capital joke.

  Do, my dear fellow, let me see those papers, unless they are private and confidential. Love to Emmie. Tell her that I am getting on famously and hope to be well enough to visit you all in the spring.

  Yours ever,

  F.H.

  Cullenstown, Dec. 10, 1879

  DEAR FRED,

  We have found the papers you mean and sent them off by parcel post. They have been kicking about in the library as long as I can remember. I glanced through them and see that they are full of references to a ‘Ludovic’ who must, I think, be your man.

  What you say about family skeletons is very true. I know nothing about the great-uncle Miles Lufton who seems to have written these papers. I once asked my mother about him and she protested that she didn’t either, but with a little blush which she always sports when she tells a fib. I believe she does know something and that he was not quite the thing. She hates anything shady.

  I don’t see why he should have vanished into complete obscurity like this. I only took a very hasty look at the papers, but, by his own account, he seems to have been very much the thing, an M.P. and all that, went everywhere, knew everybody, and cut quite a dash. And he owned some property too, a house in Wiltshire called Troy Chimneys. There were one or two letters about it, along with the papers, which I have not sent because they cast no light on Chalfont. They are merely about leases and repairs, etc.

  If you see Crockett again, do pump him. Ask him if he knew anybody called Pronto, for that seems to have been my great-uncle’s nickname among his fellow bucks. And pass on anything that he may let fall, the more disreputable the better. Emmie agrees with me that there might be some mystery. When my mother comes here after Christmas I will try her again.

  Emmie sends her love and tells you not to keep your nose in dusty papers all day long, for it can’t be good for your cough. />
  Yours ever,

  JIM

  Brailsford, Dec. 15, 1879

  DEAR JIM,

  How very good of you to send the Lufton Papers. Tell Emmie that it is good for my cough. When people ask after me, my family say: Oh, he is so much better that he is writing a history book!

  How curious that your great-uncle once owned Troy Chimneys! I think I have seen it. At least, I have seen a house in Wiltshire answering to that odd name, and I can’t believe there are two. A local antiquary told me that it is probably a corruption of Trois Chemins, and three roads do certainly meet at its front gate. I saw it when I was staying at Laycock, and we all agreed that it is a pity such a striking old house should not be properly kept up. It is a mere farm-house now. There is a manure heap by the front door and half the windows are boarded up. I remember it chiefly for a very pretty stone dovecote and a great old mulberry tree in the rough grass in front.

  I saw Crockett yesterday and tried to pump him about your great-uncle. The name Lufton stirred no memories, but Pronto did. He burst out laughing and said that of course he knew Pronto. Everybody knew Pronto.

  He remembers no good of anybody, but I am sorry to say that he could not produce anything very disreputable about Pronto, or tell me what became of him. He described him as ludicrously determined to get himself on in the world, out to please, especially where the ladies were concerned.

  He claims to be himself the author of the nickname. Signor Pronto, he says, was a character in a popular farce, — a most obliging person who always turned up in the nick of time to arrange matters for everybody. The catch word of the farce was: Pronto will manage it! Some great lady was lamenting the difficulties of arranging charades at her country house party; ‘But,’ she cried, ‘I expect Mr. Lufton tomorrow and he will manage it for me.’ At which Crockett, who was present, said: ‘Oh ay! Pronto will manage it.’ After that they all called Lufton Pronto behind his back.