Ornament and Silence by Kennedy Fraser

Author:Kennedy Fraser [Fraser, Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5203-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

WAKING the next morning to sunshine at the window and, from outside it, a chorus of cooing pigeons and joyously barking dogs, I found myself in the company of Rothschilds straightaway. A line of caricatures and silhouettes hung on the wall opposite my pillow—an Indian file of shortish, roundish men, marching with supreme self-confidence through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British history: Nathan Mayer (founder of the British branch of the family banking house), Lionel, Anthony, Natty, Leopold, with top hats, bowler hats, spats, canes, waistcoated paunches; financiers of wars against Napoleon and the Boers; first Jews to be elected to Parliament; first to be elevated to the peerage; sweeping the board at the Oaks and Derby with the products of their racing stables; friends and confidants of prime ministers and kings; little black figures on white paper, here at Ashton, facing the English countryside.

I opened the leaded casement and leaned out. Wisteria and clematis lay in waiting, pressing to get in. In the distance unfurled an old, familiar dream: a rolling green ridge hazily shimmering on a May morning, the fields marked by flowering hawthorn hedges high as cottages, and a distant frieze of venerable woodland with a church spire peeking out. In the middle distance, a herd of deer like something in a tapestry lifted their heads in unison in a field, then wheeled and scampered away. Closer still lay a garden unlike any garden I had ever seen. The outline of Edwardian lawns and flagstone terraces was there, but floppily uncorseted, left to riotous, rampant seed. Artfully undisciplined lilac and cherry blossoms swayed over unmowed meadow grass that was sprinkled with white cow parsley, yellow cowslips, bluebells, tulips that were blowsy, droopy-petalled, pale pink. The air was full of scent. Butterflies were everywhere, jerkily dancing and alighting. Doves spread sun-pierced wing fans and looped with purring drumroll sounds overhead.

Miriam Rothschild came walking through her garden, surrounded by seven dogs. Like an Eskimo and his sled team, the group came forging through the waist-high snow of cow parsley down a winding, mower-wide cleared path. Shelties with fluffy brown-and-white coats came flowing and jostling ahead of her and behind, speeding on paws placed one straight in front of another, woofing, or stopping abruptly to sniff the damp spring earth. Their leader shot out of the flowering tunnel, then craned its pointed nose back over its shoulder to make sure its mistress was there. At her forceful command, it plunged excitedly on. The woman had a handsome head with a widow’s peak of white hair under a purple kerchief tied at the nape. Tortoiseshell spectacles, hanging from a chain, bounced on an ample bust. As she, too, emerged from the cow parsley and crossed a part of the lawn that was kept close-cropped and velvety, she was revealed as a square, stout figure in a shapeless dress and matching sleeveless jacket, a style she adopted as her uniform some forty years ago, in order to free her mind for more important things. Today’s outfit was in a silky purple-and-turquoise printed stuff.

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