Someone comes to the front door, which is wide open to let in the sunshine, lifts the heavy brass knocker, and lets it fall, once. I’m upstairs, in a dark bedroom, bent over the laptop. I don’t hear anyone go to the door to answer it.
The visitor waits patiently, then after perhaps half a minute touches the doorbell just enough to make it bubble into life. A modest ring. Not peremptory.
Still no one comes. I’m feeling far too unsociable today to haul myself out of my swivel chair and put on an appropriate face for dealing with strangers at the door. For whoever it is must be a stranger. Anyone familiar with this house knows there’s no need to knock or ring, let alone do both. Someone answer the door for crying out loud, I think.
The bedroom door handle is an arm’s length away. I reach out, pull open the door six inches, lean across and peer down. From this height and this angle I can see a pair of black, male, slip-on shoes, worn past the point of shabbiness, resting patiently on the earthenware porch tiles. Above the shoes, black waiter’s trousers, also shabby. From where I’m sitting the rest is obscured.
Someone selling something probably is my guess. Being two strides off the coast road we get lots of these. Dishcloths, Jehovah, tea towels, the Liberal Democrat party, charity subscriptions — you name it. Judging by the state of the shoes this could even be that most disconcerting thing, a man reduced to begging.
The shoes are pointing outwards at ten to two and perfectly still. Hurried footsteps resound across the hollow wooden floor of the hall. Here she comes. ‘Hello!’ she says. ‘Can I help you?’
I don’t catch the name. But I hear him say, by way of an introduction, that he was last here 40 years ago. He was a young journalist then, he says, working for the Plymouth Independent. We get quite a few of these, too, knocking on our door. Sentimental individuals who came here once 20, 30, 40 years ago, more often as a child on a bucket-and-spade holiday, and have cherished golden memories of the place ever since. They knock on the door on the flimsiest of pretexts and tell us about them. Always nice people. Always apologetic. Sometimes we try to live up to being inhabitants of their land of lost content and offer them a cup of tea.
This one says that when he was here 40 years ago he got talking to a gardener employed by two elderly spinsters who lived in the old mansion that teeters on the cliff edge. The thought of two elderly spinsters rattling around in this spectacular house captured his journalist imagination, and he persuaded the gardener to introduce him to the old girls. They agreed to be interviewed and were as fascinating as he imagined they might be. They were both passed away, he presumed, these spinsters?
Oh, yes, she says. But it was a long time ago and well before we came. One died aged 103, she said, and the other at 105. And then as a consolation, perhaps: would he like a cup of tea? He would, he said. Thank you very much.
She didn’t ask him in. She invited him to sit on a little cast-iron chair in the porch while she disappeared back into the house to put the kettle on.
Our kettle takes for ever to boil. Irritation, curiosity and a tiny dash of compassion got me up out of the chair and down the stairs to keep our nostalgic visitor company while he waited. The top half turned out to be as shabby as the bottom. He looked emaciated, too, under his creased shirt. The glasses were cheap and rather absurd. He wanted a belt to hold his trousers up. He looked like a man fallen on hard times so long ago he had become reconciled to them.
On holiday, then, I said? Sort of, he said. He was speaking at the literary festival and had tacked on a couple of extra days. Speaking at the literary festival, I said! I nipped back upstairs to fetch the programme and handed it to him. Which one are you, then, I said?
He leafed through the booklet. Here we are, he said, handing it back open at the right page.
Great Hall, 5.30pm, I read. Dear Diary, Dear New Labour. Chris Mullin was MP for Sunderland South and a distinctive character in Parliament. In 1994 he began a secret diary to chart the rise — and fall — of New Labour. He gives his insightful observations.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ I said, astonished. ‘I read your book! And I enjoyed it!’
Talk about change my tune.
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