Sense & Sensibility. Joanna Trollope

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      Sir John Middleton liked to describe himself as a dinosaur. In fact, he said, he was a double dinosaur.

      ‘These days,’ he’d say, to anyone who would listen, ‘it’s out of the Ark to inherit a house, never mind a bloody great pile like Barton. And as for being a baronet – I ask you! The definition of antediluvian, or what? There isn’t even a procedure for renouncing your title if you’re a baronet, would you believe? I am stuck with it. Stuck. Sir John M., Bart., to my dying day. Hah!’

      His father, another Sir John, had been born in the house, which he left, without a penny to run it, to his son. It was a handsome William and Mary house in Devon, set in dramatic wooded country above the River Exe, to the north of Exeter, and the household, in young Sir John’s childhood, had grown used to the corridors being scattered with buckets placed strategically under leaks in various ceilings, and to draughts and damp and extremely intermittent hot water, provided by an ancient boiler in the basement which devoured industrial quantities of coal to very little consistent effect.

      Sir John’s father had minded none of these things. He had been a boy at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was absolutely indifferent to bad weather, bad food and chilblains. He inherited just enough money to continue living at Barton Park in increasing discomfort, but still able to indulge to the full his passion for field sports. He shot and fished anything that moved or swam, preferred his gun room and game larder to any other parts of his house and, after his wife unsurprisingly left him for a property developer in Bristol, spent any available cash on trips to slaughter snipe in Spain or sharks in the Caribbean. When he died – as he would devoutly have wished to do – big-game hunting on a private estate in Kenya, he left his son the run-down wreck of Barton Park, the title and a locked cabinet of beautifully kept, perfectly matched pairs of Purdey shotguns.

      Sir John the younger was entranced to inherit the Purdeys. He had also inherited his father’s passion for field sports – indeed all his local friends were distinguished by having subscriptions to the Shooting Times and freezers full of braces of pheasant that their wives were sick of cooking – but he had also profited from the childhood and adolescent years spent living with his property-developer stepfather, in Bristol.

      It had been made plain to Sir John, from a young age, that the luxury of making choices in life simply did not exist without money. Money was not an evil, Charlie Croft said to his stepson, it was the oil that greased the practical wheels of life. It was foolish to the point of silliness to think you could do without it, and it was asinine to fear it. Money was there to be harnessed, to work for you.

      ‘And if you want to keep that old barrack going that your dad left you – and I’, Charlie Croft said, ‘would pull it down in a heartbeat and build some practical, properly insulated executive houses there, if I had my way, because it’s a cracker of a site – then you’ll have to make it earn its keep.’ He’d eyed his stepson. ‘Furthermore,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be very interested to see how you do it.’

      For most of his twenties, Sir John had had little success in making Barton Park work for itself. After a short commission in the Army, in his father’s footsteps, he camped in a set of three rooms situated just above the antediluvian boiler, and commuted to a day job in Exeter, as managing director of a small company on an industrial estate making specialist pumps for desalination plants. The company had only hired him, he was well aware, because his title was useful in attracting the attention of overseas customers, who СКАЧАТЬ