The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets.

by Catherine Gaskin

  We sat for a while over coffee, and Gerald went on further about his plans, the whole apparatus of the beginnings of a great auction was set in motion. ‘You’re aware of our scale of commissions for selling, Robert?’

  ‘Commissions? Oh, yes, there has to be commission, of course.’

  ‘I’d just like to be sure you know it,’ Gerald said. ‘On individual lots up to five hundred pounds it’s fifteen per cent. On individual lots from five hundred to ten thousand pounds it’s twelve-and-a-half per cent. On individual lots over ten thousand pounds it drops to ten per cent.’ He glanced around him. ‘There are a great many items here which will, in my opinion, bring far more than ten thousand pounds. You may set a reserve price, of course, and if, at auction, the item does not reach that price we, the house, buy it back in for you.’ He was reciting this almost by rote; this scale of charges was printed in every catalogue Hardy’s issued. It was one of the ways the great auction houses held themselves above the dealer in modern paintings whose commission on living artists, and those who, dead or alive, were bound to him by contract, was often forty, and sometimes fifty per cent. I found myself for the first time wondering what commission my father’s New York dealer charged for the sale of those pictures painted in Mexico, crated and shipped by air to New York, to buyers probably already waiting for them. Gerald was continuing, determined that Askew should know what expenses the forthcoming auction would entail. ‘If we were doing a valuation for probate or insurance there’d be a small charge – but if you, within a year of the valuation, send us the property for sale, the fee is refunded. On the contents of this house, which will, of course, run far beyond one hundred thousand pounds, the fee is one quarter per cent – refunded, naturally, since you have decided to go ahead with the auction. There are travelling expenses for the people who come to do the inventory, and a living expenses charge of five pounds per day.’ The mechanism, once started, went inexorably on. Gerald talked of sending up Hardy’s two top Old Masters experts, and possibly another outside consultant. ‘It could be that there are other items of interest among the paintings from your Grandmother van Huygens. Are there other things locked away that we should see, Robert?’

  He shrugged. ‘I lived here as a boy, Gerald, and after I left school I suppose I could count the weeks I actually spent in this house. There must be bits and pieces about, but as a boy I just wasn’t interested. It was always a very uncomfortable place to live in – my mother went through one stage when she banished almost everything to the attics. Said she didn’t want so many servants around eating their heads off just to keep the place dusted. A real Scot in that way, my mother was. She was completely dominated by my grandmother, who lived to a nice ripe old age. Our family was very unpopular in the county. No Edwardian house parties at Thirlbeck. They used to call my father “The Invisible Earl”. He was very churchgoing – that’s one of the few gatherings he was ever known to attend. He made my mother refuse all invitations – and she was allowed to issue none. No wonder she sent everything but essentials up to the attics. He never got over how the House of Lords treated his father. What he did was to thumb his nose at the whole system of which he was supposed to be a pillar, and yet when I went to Spain and joined the International Brigade he treated me as if I were a traitor. Perhaps the memory of that was what made me do such foolhardy things during the war. So you see, Gerald, there aren’t many fond memories attached to this place. Might as well let it go.’ He twisted his cigarette into the saucer of the coffee cup. ‘Let it all go.’ He looked across at the Condesa. ‘We’ll have some days in the sun left, won’t we, Carlota?’

  His answer was her hand extended to him. ‘Let us go for that walk we didn’t have before lunch, Roberto. Yes, there will be days in the sun ...’

  They left us, and Gerald produced his notebook and was writing quickly, muttering to himself. I saw in my imagination the whole thing start up, the people from Hardy’s I was so familiar with going over the place with interested, admiring – but stranger’s – eyes. I saw the place stripped of what was preserved here, and what was left would be only that which was too large to move or to sell, and in the end the house might look as it had done when it was first built – very sparsely furnished with massive pieces, the long table, these high-back chairs, the fourposter beds. The beauty of the house would shine through then, but it would be a house stripped of most of its history. For the first time in my life I felt a disloyalty to Hardy’s. I wished Gerald and I had never come, had never recorded what was here. I began to understand the jealous possessiveness of Tolson and Jessica. I decided then that if I were invited to return to help with the inventory, I would find an excuse to refuse. I didn’t want to see this house denuded, even for the most splendid sale I had ever been associated with. I suddenly understood the passion that invaded some men, so that they suffered any sort of indignity and invasion of their privacy to keep their ancient houses intact. And then, at that moment, I thought I began to understand Vanessa. If she had seen all this, and said nothing, then her reasons and feelings might have been what I was now experiencing. Once again I switched to dislike of that man, Robert Birkett, Earl of Askew, walking in the fitful spring sunshine with his mistress, planning their lives in a place where the sun always shone. Already I felt a sense of loss in what this house would suffer; I did not want to see it in the days when either the rain or the bulldozers would breach its walls.

  Finally Gerald had finished with his notes. ‘I’m going up for a nap, Jo. You’ll make some sort of start on that load of papers in the study, will you? Not that you’ll discover anything in a few hours, but it will keep Robert quiet about the painting.’ He sighed. ‘Well, it will be my job to tell him what our experts think – but sufficient unto the day. You’ll manage all right, won’t you?’

  I watched him go up the stairs, moving quite heavily. It was unlike Gerald to retire in the afternoon, but then, I wondered if indeed he had really wanted to mingle with the first of the season’s tourists in Kesmere when he had suggested the drive before lunch; Gerald’s kindness sometimes overcame his innate discretion – about himself and others. Well, I wasn’t ever going to see Kesmere. And I hoped I would never see Thirlbeck again.

  Before I took the circular ladder from the library to begin my task in the study, I moved it so that I could climb up and inspect the prunus jar that stood on the top of the bookcases. Last night, lost in the shadows, it had given hope, but this morning even though my attention had mostly been focused on the people here, I still reacted to my training. Even to my inexpert eye it didn’t look promising, and when I was up on the ladder and held it in my hand, it had no more virtue than the nineteenth century copies of the Famille Noire we had seen yesterday in Draycote Manor. These sort of jars were turned out by the thousand in Hong Kong. I shrugged. Well, what family didn’t collect junk along with treasures? Or had this family ever collected anything? Perhaps all of worth and beauty, apart from the Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture which the house held, had probably come in the dowry of Grandmother van Huygens. I began to form an idea of the Askews – perhaps an unjust one. Lords of the manor in a small way, then owners of large tracts of land which gave them eminence, and then jumped-up to nobility, possessors of packs of hounds, and compliant women, and a great jewel. Until the event of a bourgeoise Dutchwoman, they had had nothing but their house and lands. I put the prunus vase back in its place with a shrug of half contempt. No wonder inherited titles of nobility counted for so little now. They were not earned nor even deserved. No wonder Nat Birkett fought against his inheritance. And Robert Birkett, for all his medals and his physical bravery, had lacked the courage to stay on and continue what had been begun so many years ago. He displayed a fatal weakness; it had needed only three generations for the vitality of his grandparents to decay into parasitical ennui. But as I climbed down the ladder I looked again into the bookcases, and noted the volumes – many titles in Latin, some in Greek, on botany and anthropology, and there, in faded green leather, a
set of the works of Darwin. This family had had its scholars, as well as its soldiers. What a mixed, odd lot they were. And I began to worry again about the stain of damp in the corner, and the mildew growing on the leather bindings. What else besides a possible first edition of Darwin could there be? In spite of myself I was growing interested in the Birketts again. Suddenly I felt more enthusiasm for the largely fictitious task Gerald had set me.

  The enormity of it, though, struck me again when I wheeled the ladder into place under the wall of filing boxes in the study. I didn’t even glance at the picture in its dark place down at the other end of the room; that was now for Gerald and the experts to worry about. I climbed the ladder and began staring at the dates on the boxes. When would Askew’s Dutch grandmother have come to Thirlbeck? How old would she have been at the time? I allowed for Askew’s age, and then gave fifty to sixty years earlier for the birth of his grandfather. When would he have married? At about the age of thirty – 1880–2? I took down a box marked 1880. When I opened the box by pulling on its red strings the smell of dust came strongly to me; there was dust already on my hands, and tickling my nose. I noticed with annoyance that although the box had been labelled 1880, the first few papers relating to rents due from variously named farms: Potter’s Pasture, Bar End, Crossthwaite – were for the year 1883. The papers were brittle to the touch, and brown at the edges, and the ink turning brown. I glanced down the entries written in a copperplate, clerkly hand, and then a note thrust among the papers in this careful script in a thick sprawling hand, as though the writer had not the patience to spend much time at the desk. See to the shipping of slate from Engle to Whitehaven. Dowson owes five hundred pounds. Start drainage of Torrister Bottom. Askew’s grandfather, the reforming farmer Earl? – the one who had been the butt of the House of Lords? Or was it the Earl he had unexpectedly inherited from? More sheets with accounts, then a surveyor’s drawing of an acreage which contained three farms, one of them outlined in darker ink dated 1889. Something the Earl had sold – or wanted to buy. Then something written in a large, careful woman’s hand – something that looked for all the world like a recipe and written in what I guessed was Dutch. Then one absurd word at the bottom in English, in the same hand – Gooseberries. The prudent Dutch housewife putting down the store of jams for the winter? There might have been two hundred separate sheets of paper in that box. I looked despairingly at the boxes reaching over my head to the ceiling. It would make a fine lifework for someone – assembling the family history of the Birketts from their dusty, brittle papers. I sighed, and sneezed loudly.

  ‘God bless ...’ It was Jessica, below me, and behind, standing in the doorway.

  She wasn’t fazed by my lack of answer. ‘Can I help you?’ She seemed even smaller than before, and like a bright butterfly in this dim room, wearing her rather childish yellow sweater, something that looked as if it had been left over from school, shrunken from many washings, and outlining small, immature breasts.

  ‘Well – I don’t know.’ I wondered why she made me so uncomfortable, as if I had been caught prying. ‘Lord Askew and Mr Stanton thought I might be able to find some references to the picture. But the papers are very mixed up. They don’t seem to follow the dates on the boxes.’

  ‘No, they don’t, do they?’ she replied cheerfully, as if she didn’t mind at all the difficulty of the project. ‘It’s as if someone had the good idea of having all the boxes made, and then couldn’t be bothered sorting the papers properly. You’ll never get through them all this afternoon, will you?’ So she already knew that Gerald and I would be leaving tomorrow. ‘What sort of paper are you looking for? I’ve been through a lot of the boxes myself – just for fun. Grandfather says I’ll have to really settle down one day and put them in order. I don’t see the point myself, but they’re fun to look through. What sort of paper?’ she repeated.

  ‘Well, anything that might relate to the pictures Lady Askew, the Earl’s grandmother, brought over from Holland. There might have been a list of some kind ... anything. Anything about when the family might have acquired them. A bill of sale ... some reference in a diary, perhaps?’ She was already shaking her head.

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Quite important. It’s always a help when something is going to be sold if there are some details of its history. Who bought it, who sold it, if it was ever exhibited. We call it provenance.’

  Her face grew quite blank. ‘No, I don’t know anything. I don’t remember seeing anything of the sort.’ She took a few steps towards me, coming round to face me. ‘Are you going to sell everything in the house?’

  ‘Whoever told you that?’

  ‘Well, you’re from Hardy’s, aren’t you? Does Lord Askew owe some money? He shouldn’t sell off what’s here. It doesn’t really belong to him – it has to be kept ...’ The blankness was suddenly gone, replaced by a passion which made her soft voice shrill.

  ‘Jessica!’ Tolson was walking through the hall and heard her voice. He came quickly to the door. ‘Jessica, what’s the matter?’ Then he took in the sight of me perched on the ladder. His eyes seemed to darken behind the heavy glasses. ‘Is there something I can do for you, Miss Roswell?’

  I found myself explaining once again why I was there. His face remained impassive, and Jessica broke in before he could speak. ‘I’ve told her there’s nothing. I would have found it, wouldn’t I, Grandfather? I’ve been through almost every box that’s there.’

  ‘Hush, Jess – hush. Don’t excite yourself.’ His tone was deliberately calm. ‘I expect none of us ever paid much attention to what’s in those boxes. But it’s a big task. Far too big for Miss Roswell in a few hours. Perhaps when she’s gone you and I, Jess, could start to look. Now, I think your grandmother would like some help. She’s preparing tea. Lord Askew and the Condesa have driven into Kesmere.’ He looked up at me. ‘Jessica will bring a tray to the library in about twenty minutes. Perhaps you might be good enough to inform Mr Stanton?’

  I began to climb down the ladder. ‘Go, Jess, there’s a good girl.’ The tone was placating, gentle, more full of emotion than I could have believed possible. There was the sound of her light running steps in the hall, and the unoiled squeaking of the service door.

  ‘I’ll carry the tray to Mr Stanton,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right. He’s a little tired. It might do him good to rest until dinner.’

  ‘Of course, whatever you like, Miss Roswell.’ He appeared perfectly indifferent to what I did, the voice so utterly changed from a few seconds ago. He was about to turn when I halted him. I had to ask it now, because I knew it was possible that I would not see him alone again before we left.

  ‘Wait, please.’ He waited, impatience in his stance. ‘Mr Tolson ... You – well, you probably remember my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’ He repeated the words as if I were a fool.

  ‘Yes, my mother, Vanessa Roswell.’ I pressed him because he looked as if he were going to ignore my question altogether. ‘My father and mother, Jonathan and Vanessa Roswell. They were here for some months just after the war. They had the lodge at the other end of the valley, across Brantwick.’ I was using the name as if I had known it all my life.

  ‘Yes, I do recall. Yes. What about it?’

  He had drawn in upon himself even more. The eyes behind the glasses seemed to freeze me. ‘Oh, just ...’ He made it impossibly difficult. ‘Well, I wondered how much you remembered of them. Lord Askew said they were often here with him. It was before I was born – I didn’t know they were on the Birkett estate. I knew it was somewhere in the Lake District, but not here ...’

  ‘What do you expect me to tell you?’ he demanded. ‘I don’t remember every little thing. It was the end of the war. Things were very difficult – rations hard to get. The Earl was in residence and there was a great deal to see to. Very little petrol. Mr Roswell used to drive that Bentley that Nat Birkett has now, and it used too much petrol. The Earl used to give him our coupons. And then they had cream and egg
s and even meat – from the lambs and bullocks we slaughtered. I had a terrible time accounting for it all with the Ministry of Food. The Earl didn’t seem to understand about such things.’

  ‘My father wasn’t well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Lord Askew was trying to help him.’

  ‘That is as may be. But the Bentley and the petrol and the food.’

  I sighed. ‘I’m sorry to have revived unpleasant memories. You didn’t much care to have them here, did you?’

  ‘I let them the lodge – I was responsible for that. They just came here and asked, because they saw it was empty. Out of the blue, like a couple of gypsies. Lord Askew was present at the time, and he said at once that they could rent the lodge. It wasn’t strictly legal. The Ministry of Defence had requisitioned the whole house during the war, but they never finally came to use it. I have no idea what they ever intended it for – some place to house some scientists, I think. It was very annoying. The North Lodge was included in the requisition order, and they hadn’t de-requisitioned it at that time. But Lord Askew insisted that we could go ahead without permission. As it happened, the Ministry of Defence never knew anyone used the place. And they went off without paying the electricity bill. Lord Askew even wanted to give them the Bentley, but Mr Roswell said he couldn’t afford to run it. They just went off the way they came – like gypsies, moving south when the cold weather came.’