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

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Yes – it took a bit of finding, though. I’ve only been here once before. London’s changed since then.’

  He was the heavy immovable mountain of a man he had always been. If I could have seen beyond the pebble glasses, I might have known something of his feelings, but as always they would reveal nothing.

  ‘But you didn’t expect to find me here – or you wouldn’t have come?’

  ‘If I’d known, I’d have waited till you were gone,’ he answered calmly. ‘I knew you haven’t lived here for a long time.’

  ‘Well, here I am. And here you are – and your son. I notice you didn’t have any difficulty getting in.’

  He shrugged. ‘Ordinary locks aren’t difficult for Ted.’

  ‘Convenient for you to have a son like Ted. Are you going to tell me why you’re here?’

  He moved farther into the room, slipping off the raincoat he wore. All at once his movements seemed those of an older man than I remembered, someone fatigued by the journey, stiff and cramped in his limbs. His son stood behind him, his eyes, sheathed in glasses only a little less heavy than those his father wore, shifted constantly between us two.

  ‘I think you’d better sit down, Mr Tolson. You must be tired. I am. Would you like a brandy? It’s there in the cupboard, and the glasses are in the kitchen. Coffee just needs to be heated – there’s sugar but no milk.’

  Tolson nodded to his son, and we waited in silence while the brandy was brought to him. Then Ted went back into the kitchen, and I could see the flare of the gas go on under the coffeepot. He wouldn’t find it as good coffee as Jessica made.

  ‘Why are you here, Mr Tolson? I shouldn’t need to ask, but you don’t seem ready to volunteer any information.’

  ‘I don’t volunteer anything until I know how much the other person knows. Now with you ...’

  ‘Just assume I know nothing. I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know what you’ve come for. And I didn’t expect you. It wasn’t anything to do with Jessica this morning? Or the bowl?’

  ‘In a way, nothing directly. But it brought matters to a head, let us say. I’ve been putting off making this visit – Lord Askew’s presence at Thirlbeck was unexpected, and it compelled me to be there constantly. But I’ve known that the moment would come when I’d be confronted with an unwelcome situation. Mr Stanton’s illness has merely postponed that inevitable time. But once I knew Lord Askew was returning and that people were coming up from Hardy’s I knew that the moment would come. Your breaking the bowl this morning, and the way you handled the pieces and took them off to London with you made me realise you were on to something we had over-looked – or rather Mrs Roswell had overlooked. Rather more searching enquiries were going to be made, and even before the experts came up to look at the picture. That bowl was very valuable, I suspect. We didn’t know it, of course, Or it would never have been in the kitchen. But I knew through it you would be on to all the rest of the things ... that you would start asking questions, and in turn Lord Askew would start asking questions. It is very unfortunate Mrs Roswell was killed – ’

  ‘Unfortunate!’ I slammed the glass down in anger. ‘Unfortunate! Mrs Roswell was my mother It was more than unfortunate for her – and for me!’

  He sipped at the brandy. ‘I beg your pardon. Very clumsy of me. For us – my wife and I – it was a blow as well. In more ways than one. We grew quite fond of her over the years.’

  ‘What are you talking about – over the years! My mother hadn’t been at Thirlbeck since nineteen forty-five.’

  He sighed. ‘That isn’t quite true. In about the last sixteen or seventeen years we’ve seen her there quite frequently. Several times a year, in fact. Scouting expeditions, she used to call them.’

  ‘Scouting for what – for what, Mr Tolson?’

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if they were weary. Instead of the naked look that most people who wear glasses have when they are removed, his features came into sharper focus. The strength that was implied by the sheer bulk of his body was reinforced by the sight of his eyes, a grey so deep they seemed almost black; the black sprouting eyebrows now shaped a natural frame to the formidable eyes, and the gaze fixed on me seemed even more transfixing because it was myopic. I would only be a blur to him now, sitting in Vanessa’s yellow chair. He replaced his glasses. His son came and put a cup of coffee on the table at his father’s side, and then he himself retreated to the dining table and drew out one of the chairs and sat down. Obviously he would have no part in what would be said.

  ‘It will be easier,’ Tolson said, ‘if I tell you the whole thing. Any questions you have to ask, I’ll answer. Perhaps you will be able to answer one or two for me.’

  ‘Try me – I expect I will have some questions myself.’

  He took another sip of the brandy, and then reached for the coffee, stirred it, and drank. I thought his mouth puckered a little at the taste. ‘I sought out your mother when the difficulties first arose at Thirlbeck. Until then – almost seventeen years ago – it is true that she had not been back to Thirlbeck, but in trying to find a solution to my problem I thought of her because I felt I could trust her – ’

  ‘Trust her! You were the one who called her a gypsy – you implied that both she and my father were fly-by-nights, spongers, almost. You’ve revised your opinion?’

  ‘You must realise, Miss Roswell, that when I heard a friend of Lord Askew’s was coming up from Hardy’s, I didn’t expect he would be accompanied by you. I realised that you must be wondering why your mother had never spoken of Thirlbeck, or anything it contained. So I – well, I suppose I emphasised her more ... her more raffish qualities, shall we say, when you asked if I remembered her. At that time I hadn’t quite given up hope that Lord Askew would grow bored at Thirlbeck, and simply go away. It wouldn’t have ended my problems, but it might have delayed the exposure of what I had been doing. Time itself might have helped me. No one ever expected him to come back, you see. That was where all the plans came unstuck. I never believed we would ever see him again at Thirlbeck, and it was entirely possible that he would die without ever knowing what had been taking place. But inflation in these last years has beaten us all. He needs more money, and every day in the papers there are reports of art sales at record prices at auction. I suppose it was inevitable that he would start to think of what he had left at Thirlbeck, and to think of what he could do with the money.’

  ‘What exactly are your problems, Mr Tolson? Have you been stealing from Lord Askew, and now he’s going to find out?’ I felt a kind of deadly cold anger in me which helped to keep my voice very even and nearly toneless. ‘Are you going to tell me that my mother had been stealing with you?’

  ‘Not that, Miss Roswell. If there’s been stealing, I have done it. Your mother was the means to dispose of what I had – well, what I was advised should be disposed of from the estate. It started in a rather small way about seventeen years ago, but as the demands from Lord Askew have grown and grown, we have had to increase the robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak.’

  ‘So to speak – nothing, Mr Tolson. Please don’t quibble any more. You were stealing, and you somehow induced my mother to be party to it, used her channels to get rid of what you had stolen. And all the time you despised her.’

  He took up the brandy again and drank. ‘I’ll try to tell you again, Miss Roswell. I came to your mother all those years ago because I did trust her. And I trusted her because she loved Thirlbeck. We weren’t much of the same kind, your mother and my family. We were all country people, and we’ve lived and worked on the Birkett estate for generations. We’ve had positions of trust. I believe we haven’t betrayed that trust. Now your mother – yes, she was different from us. But that summer and autumn she was at Thirlbeck I saw her often enough to know that she loved it. Yes, she did love it – the house, everything that was in it, the valley, the privacy of it, the wholeness. She knew that the Birketts owned property outside the valley, quite a lot of it. Land. And t
hat was part of it too. Before there were any of the pretty little knick-knacks you see in the house, there was the land. The Earls of Askew were powerful because of the land they held, amassed through gifts of the sovereigns in the beginning – from Henry the Eighth after he dissolved the monasteries, and then grants from Elizabeth. Judicious marriages brought other properties – farms, mines, all the rest of it. Before there was Thirlbeck itself, there was land, and it has always rested on land. People can create other things – pictures, furniture, bits and pieces of china and silver. No one can make any more land. I judged, I think rightly, that the land was more important to the future of the Birketts than their other possessions. And I believed, from what I knew of her, that your mother felt the same way. She was a romantic, your mother – well, you knew that, but you didn’t know her at the age she was when she was at Thirlbeck. She felt very strongly about the story of the Spanish Woman. The death of the Spanish Woman, if the old story is true, was the price the Birketts had to pay to keep their gifts from Henry and Elizabeth – if Thirlbeck had been turned back to Catholics, it would have been forfeit. Well, she also knew where its strength lay. People like your mother often do understand such things. Even though she loved everything that whole house contained, she understood that once the land was gone, everything was gone. So when I had my first important decision to make, I traced her in London – I knew she had gone back there and was probably dealing in antiques because she had said that was what she wanted to do. I knew she would never go to Mexico, as Jonathan Roswell was talking of doing. It was quite plain to see that summer that they would not stay together. I expected to find her in London, and I did. My great fear was that she might have remarried, and I’d never find her under another name. But she hadn’t, so I found her, and asked for her help.’

  ‘What sort of help? What could she do for you, Mr Tolson?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure she could or would do anything. But I put it to her, half thinking she might refuse completely, or she might get in touch with Lord Askew. But she did neither. She came up to Thirlbeck, looked at what was there once again, and she went away and brought back another man, a Dutchman. They spent the best part of a week there, never going outside the place, never letting themselves be seen by anyone in the district. And when they left, they took only one picture with them. A small picture. Its sale satisfied the Earl’s demands for a time. That’s how it started, and it went on like that.’

  ‘Like what? For God’s sake, what were you doing?’

  He went on, ignoring my question. ‘It had to be one thing or the other. When the rents from the tenancies of the farms owned by the Birkett family failed to reach Lord Askew’s demands, he wrote and told me I should start selling off the farms. He didn’t care which ones – I was to sell, preferably to those who were already the tenants, and on fair terms. I wrote back protesting at the selling of land, making my arguments for keeping the land as strong as I could. I should have known he would see it differently. He didn’t at all mind the break-up of the estate. It fitted his life pattern. He had no children, and even if he had I doubt it would have made much difference. He always had some sense of guilt about people being his tenants. He said the time for all that kind of thing was over. They were all strange people, the present Earl, his father and his grandfather. Each very different in their way. The quarrels he had had with his own father influenced him deeply. He hated his time at Eton. And then there was his time in the International Brigade in Spain. He saw so much of an old society crumble, and being shored up again, artificially, he thought. Then the death of the young Spanish woman he had married, and his only son. After the time in prison, he was changed for ever. Even his refusal to take a commission in the Army, not even to accept the rank of corporal, was part of it. He became a Socialist – but one who could never suppress his own taste for luxury. So the break-up of the estate didn’t matter to him. He gave me instructions to sell land that was not specifically included in the entail, whenever I had to, and not to bother him with the details.

  ‘I chose to disobey his instruction, Miss Roswell. I borrowed money to buy time, and I sought out your mother. I had some idea, of course, that the house contained valuable things, but it had never been catalogued, and I was no expert. Oh, yes, a list does exist of what the Earl’s grandmother brought to Thirlbeck. And you would have searched ’til Kingdom Come before you found it. But I had no idea which of the paintings might be of value, except, of course, the Rembrandt. Even the Earl remembered the Rembrandt. It was my effort to persuade him to sell that instead of the land seventeen years ago which finally made up my mind that I had to go against his instructions. If he preferred to sell land before pictures, then I judged him not in a fit mental state to know exactly what he was doing.’

  ‘So you decided for him, Mr Tolson. Weren’t you rather playing God with his property?’

  ‘I don’t see it that way,’ he answered calmly. ‘Land represents the strength of the Birketts. The pictures and such things are just happenstance acquisitions of the family – marrying the right person from time to time. After the present Earl there will be other Birketts. Nat Birkett and his sons. I judged it my duty to turn over to the next Earl the estate as nearly intact as I could. If it were pictures or bits and pieces of art which had to go, then that was how it would be. I still think I made the right decision for the Birketts – and I may well end up in gaol because of it.’

  ‘And did you never think my mother could have ended up in gaol with you?’

  ‘That was a risk she seemed prepared to take. And for nothing more than her expenses. I was prepared to give her a percentage of whatever we realised, but she refused. It seemed I had judged her feelings well all those years ago. She had a dedication to the ideal of a place like Thirlbeck. I never cared to probe her very much on this. It was enough that she had it.’

  ‘The things,’ I said, ‘... the things she handled, they would have had to be disposed of to private dealers or clients. They couldn’t have gone to public auction. Not through Hardy’s or anyone like them. They want to know whose property it is. If my mother – or anyone else – began to offer too much through those channels they would start to ask questions. If she had offered anything really important, there would most certainly have been questions. She couldn’t handle them through her own shop – she was only in the minor leagues of antique dealers. She would have been suspected almost at once of handling stolen property.’

  ‘She pointed this out to me. And since there was not the sort of money among English private buyers to make the sales we needed, she said she would have to take the items abroad. She had contacts ...’

  ‘Abroad ... without an export licence? You mean she smuggled art out of this country?’

  ‘She said she would have to, to get a good price. She was prepared to take the risk. Once it was in Switzerland, it could be taken without export licence into America. She said that was where the money was – the museum directors and private collectors asked few questions so long as they were convinced of the authenticity of the painting – or whatever else.’

  ‘My God, how many times did she do this?’

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘I’ve lost count. The items had to be smallish – there were the Chinese bowls and vases and scent bottles. And the snuffboxes. She said those were easy, and most of them were best sold as a collection. The furniture, of course, was impossible. That had to stay.’

  ‘And the pictures?’ I asked, my voice very faint and cold with fright. ‘Did she take more than one?’

  ‘Over the years – I expect she took about twenty. The Dutch expert said they were a very fine collection.’

  ‘Can you remember any of the artists?’ I had to ask it, but I was afraid to hear the answer.

  ‘Some I’d never heard of before. Others I was vaguely familiar with. I remember there was a Van Ruisdael – or was it two? A Seghers, several Hobemmas. There was a – a Steen? Would that be right?’ I nodded, unable to speak with the sudden dryness of my mo
uth. ‘There were several small panels by Rubens – ’

  I gestured to make him stop. ‘That’s enough, Mr Tolson. Those names – they’re quite enough. I find it difficult to believe that Lord Askew does not know what was in his possession. That my mother could have believed he did not know. It was more than a fine collection. Any museum in the world would have been proud to own them. And you still say he doesn’t know?’

  ‘He doesn’t know, Miss Roswell. He’s mentioned nothing but the Rembrandt. Even a schoolboy would remember that. But the rest – he wasn’t interested. If he’d known there were two Rubens, he probably would have remembered, but no one knew they were Rubens until your mother brought the expert. Remember that the estate was assessed for death duties during the war. The thing was hurriedly done, and incompletely, your mother guessed. I went to see him in gaol and tried to talk to him about the estate taxes, but he didn’t want to hear. “Pay them,” he said, and that was all. He wasn’t interested. None of the family had been. Pictures of cows and windmills and sailing ships – there were two by someone called Van de Velde that your mother prized highly. But he didn’t know. They’d been on the walls of Thirlbeck all his life, and he wasn’t interested.’

  ‘My mother would have told him – that time she was there. She would have known those names.’

  ‘She never saw them. Neither did your father. I had made one safe room for them all when the Ministry requisitioned the house. They’re still there. I simply left them there when the war ended. It was one room where I could keep a fairly even temperature – keep the damp from getting to them, but not so warm that they might crack. I knew that much. I went to the Museum in Glasgow to find out about it – just mentioned that I had charge of a small collection and wanted to make sure it was properly cared for. Of course they were on to me at once to see it, hoping for something good, I suppose – and perhaps a loan to the Museum. I simply said I was the caretaker and knew nothing about their value. I gave them a false name. I invented a house that didn’t exist, and I said I’d be in touch with them. They’ve waited a long time.’