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

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘All those ... still there?’ Perhaps he knew what I was thinking. Last season a Cuyp had gone at auction for over six hundred thousand pounds. There was no name among them which flashed a signal light of instant fame to the whole world, such as the Rembrandt, but to the art world this could be a collection of enormous distinction and importance. ‘Not catalogued? ... Not known?’

  He shook his head. ‘All by descent from the Van Huygens family. Mixed among them are the usual number of respectable and fairly nondescript canvases. And there’s the Birkett contribution of country-house portraits which aren’t at all good. The Van Huygens must have acquired all their stock of pictures in the seventeenth century – almost hot off the artist’s easel – and never added to the collection. They all fall within that one great period of Dutch painting. I suppose they’d filled their walls by then, and never bothered acquiring later artists. Once we’ve destroyed the copies Vanessa brought here, we’ll bring in the big guns to give their opinions. But I haven’t any doubt that it is ... well, what everyone like myself dreams of. In my opinion it’s a major art discovery.’

  ‘When did you see them? I would have liked ...’

  ‘Jo, you weren’t here. After Tolson told his story yesterday morning, well, I stopped putting off going into the picture room. Tolson had a list of the copies, and had always kept them separated. We’ve been through the rest, and I’ve already sorted the good ones. It was quite a task – just physically moving them all, and looking. I must say Tolson was very determined to guard every single picture the house held. There are engravings, there are flowers pressed under glass – and watercolours which look as if someone’s governess executed them,’ he added unkindly.

  Tolson made a defensive gesture with his hand. ‘You do understand how it was, Mr Stanton? With the requisition order on the house I had to be very careful. All I knew was that one picture was supposed to be a Rembrandt. What did I know about the others? You can’t be too careful. If those scientists had ever really come to take over the house, I would have moved the whole lot – pictures, furniture –everything but the very heavy stuff – into my sons’ houses. We had cleared out rooms to get ready for it. Even some outbuildings. I was afraid of the damp though. You remember we couldn’t get building materials during the war. A single leak in one roof – well, what did I know about the damage it could do? It was hard enough just to keep going during the war – to keep the farms up – never mind looking after all these delicate things.’

  His gesture with his large splayed hand was final; he had had this charge, he had done the best he could. He had saved everything without discrimination. It was up to others to sort the good from the inferior and the bad.

  ‘You acted very wisely, Tolson,’ Gerald said soothingly. ‘We went through – ’

  Once more I interrupted him. ‘We? Was the Condesa there? Does she know?’

  Since Askew didn’t seem inclined to answer, Gerald did. ‘You realise, Jo, that the Condesa came here with Robert, believing as he did, that there was a Rembrandt in the house. Now, of course, it became quite impossible to conceal from her that it is a copy – but a signed copy of a self-portrait. She is an intelligent woman ... she guessed that if there was this one copy, there were probably others. She understands, and she will not betray what happened here. The choice between the land and the art works was just as clear to her as to Tolson. It will not, I think, be necessary to tell her the part Vanessa played in all of this. The fewer people who know of that the better. But …’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘she is a member of this ... this conspiracy also.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gerald admitted. ‘Yes, I suppose she has unwittingly become one.’

  ‘And Jessica,’ I demanded. ‘Was she also with you?’ I was aware immediately of the slump of Tolson’s body in the chair. I had touched again, harshly, on the weak spot.

  ‘I had realised it was unwise to involve Jessica any further. There is a limit to the responsibility which should be placed on the child. So I sent her home to the South Lodge. I would think she suspects something is stirring, but so long as she doesn’t know exactly what, then I think we are quite safe to carry on.’

  Quite safe ... quite safe. The words had a great feeling of security. I looked at Tolson’s large intractable figure, the very image of a man unshakable in his loyalties, his conception of duty. Yes, one could leave it to him. I looked between Gerald and Tolson in a kind of daze of fatigue. Two men, infinitely capable in their own spheres. With the handing over of the miniature I had laid down most of my own problems. Then I looked again for the miniature. Askew was turning it still in one hand, while he sipped steadily at the brandy. I wondered how much of the conversation he had really attended to; he was lost in a world that was Thirlbeck, but still a part of Thirlbeck none of the rest of us seemed to know.

  I made an effort to focus my mind. ‘You went through all the paintings – all of them?’

  ‘Yes – all of them.’

  I turned then to Tolson. ‘You did say you had gathered up every picture in the house? Every one? There aren’t any in your part of the house – not on staircases, or out-of-the-way places?’

  ‘Everything except a few watercolours that Jessica did. She’s quite talented. I had the best of them framed ...’

  ‘No ... well, I really didn’t think ...’

  ‘What is it,’ Jo?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing, really. Just some odd idea I had, but it really couldn’t mean anything. I suppose in everything you looked at yesterday you didn’t come across anything that might remotely look like ... might be an El Greco?’

  ‘Remotely? Jo, you know as well as I do that there is no such thing as a painting that is remotely like El Greco. It either is an El Greco, or it isn’t. He didn’t have any imitators. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gerald. Please forget it. I know it sounded stupid. So much has happened, I ...’

  He was nodding his head absently, his thoughts evidently on the business at hand, not on my fantasies. ‘After all, Jo, finding an El Greco in the middle of a collection of Dutch Old Masters would be rather a cuckoo in the nest, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I got to my feet. ‘Do you need me for a while, Gerald? I thought I might go and take a walk. My head feels as if it’s packed with cotton wool. I never did manage very well on missing sleep ...’

  ‘No, nothing right now, Jo.’ He looked at Askew. ‘Robert, I’ll have to monopolise the phone for a while. A call to Hardy’s, just to tell them that I’m still alive. A hint of good news to come. But I’ll tell them I’m not prepared to leave for a week or ten days yet. That will give us time to get to Switzerland. And about you, Jo. You’ll have to go to Zürich with us, so I’ll say you’ll be back with Hardy’s in a few days. I’ll say I need you here to help with some preliminary sorting. And, Robert, I’ll start the telephone calls to Switzerland. Can you be prepared to go at any time, Tolson, once I’ve made the necessary connections? Your passport, and all that ...?’

  ‘I’ve always kept my passport up to date. Mrs Roswell made sure of that. We never knew when it might be necessary for me to go either to Amsterdam, where the ... the copier worked, or to Switzerland, in case she was herself unable to go.’

  ‘Very good,’ Gerald said briskly. ‘Then I’ll start the calls, Robert. Robert ...?’

  Askew stirred, and seemed to shake himself back to awareness. ‘What? Oh, the calls. Yes ... yes, of course, Gerald. Handle it whatever way you want. You’ll do it better than anyone ... Yes, of course.’

  He rose, and then rather unexpectedly addressed himself to me. ‘Mind if I go for a walk with you? My own head could stand a bit of clearing. Things to think over ... All right?’

  ‘Yes ... yes, of course. I’ll just go upstairs and get my jacket. I won’t be long.’ I was conscious of a sense of disappointment. I hadn’t realised until he made his request, that in fact I had been intending to walk to Nat Birkett’s house. I had told myself all through the dr
ive up here that I would merely say what I had come to say, offer the evidence of the miniature, and then I would go. I had meant to leave Nat Birkett free of any sense that I was reaching out to hold him, to bind him in the fashion that the Tolsons bound him. We would both have our memories of that radiant dawn in the shelter by the woods, and if it were no more than a memory, then we would let it be so. But when Askew spoke I had to acknowledge to myself that I had intended to take the road along by the South Lodge and climb the hill to Nat Birkett’s house. I knew that pride or independence had no place in what I remembered of that morning.

  But then I had looked fully into Askew’s face, and had known that even that walk along the valley to Nat’s house must wait. The face of this man who had seemed to age overnight was the face of a man desperately lonely. He wasn’t even trying to cover it; I thought of the whole span of his life – the life of the boy who had lived here, and the brief periods he had spent here as a man. I sensed that whomever he had had with him as his companion and lover during this long absence, he had still been lonely, and a part of him had always been homesick. He had come quite suddenly and cruelly to the realisation of it in this past day. I couldn’t refuse the quiet plea of his loneliness now.

  I walked slowly across the room as Askew held the door for me. Tolson followed. As I reached the door Gerald’s voice came again, musingly.

  ‘Lastman ...Lastman ...’ We all turned. Gerald was staring at us, his brow creased. ‘I remember it now. Some place I had encountered that name very recently – and not as a signature to a painting. You won’t remember it, Jo. Why should you remember what happened to the others? I stayed on there in Switzerland for a day after you left with your father – to take care of certain formalities. By that time most of the relatives had left – either taking their dead with them, or having buried them there. One man only had not been claimed. He had a passport – and therefore an identity. But the authorities in Holland were unable to contact relatives. He seemed to be a man quite alone, they said. His name was Lastman.

  ‘I suppose it’s conceivable that neither he nor Vanessa had any idea they would each take that flight. He was waiting in Zürich for his share of the money, waiting to deposit it in a Swiss bank. It came sooner than anyone expected. So he and Vanessa may have found themselves unwittingly on the same plane – something they would never have done if either had known. Stand-by passengers. Yes ... his name was Lastman.’

  Gerald’s face crumpled; he picked up his pen and bent swiftly over the notebook once more. I felt Askew’s hand on my shoulder propelling me through the door. I heard his voice, low, close beside me.

  ‘We can’t help it, you know – the way we have to die. It’s just best to remember that we all do, some time.’

  Upstairs I washed my face in Gerald’s bathroom, splashing the cold water into my stinging eyes. My face, without make-up, looked back palely at me from the mirror. Pale lips, pale grey eyes, pale blonde hair, the tan of Mexico had almost gone. Strangely, the face I saw seemed to have altered subtly. I looked older. There was a twist to the mouth I had never noticed before – if it had been there before. I saw a face that did not look at all like Vanessa’s. Perhaps I had never even remotely looked like Vanessa, but I had tried to. It almost seemed as if I had stepped out finally from behind her shadow and declared myself to be my own self. Perhaps it had happened when I had sat there in the empty church, studying the miniature, and in those moments had decided that I would return to Thirlbeck – as if in throwing in my lot with Vanessa’s own decisions, I had truly become my own self, not her shadow. Or perhaps it had happened in the instant I had stood at the door of my own flat, and refused to answer the insistent ringing of the telephone, when before I would have flown to it in the hope that it was Harry calling. Perhaps it had happened most clearly when I had entered Thirlbeck once again in the early hours of the morning, had seen the whole valley bathed in its white moonlight. It might have happened in the moment of my stepping across the threshold, greeted by the hounds as if I had been known all my life. It could have been all of those things, or one. Most strongly it could have happened when I was received, as if by a ghostly presence, back into the room of the Spanish Woman. Perhaps it had come to me in my exhausted sleep, as the sun had risen over Brantwick, and gradually stolen down the fierce, barren slopes of Great Birkeld, and the young priest had robed himself to say the first of those nine Masses.

  But strangely when I went back to the Spanish Woman’s room to get my anorak I was at once aware of an alien presence. As before the room had always welcomed me, now the ambience was distant, almost warning. I looked around, but everything seemed as I had left it. I had made the bed, and tidied the possessions I had scattered around the night before, my clothes were hanging just as I had left them, the suitcase with the silk scarf with the pieces of the Sung bowl, and the wrapped Book of Hours of Juana, seemed quite undisturbed. I bent to smell again the captured scents of last summer in the bowl of potpourri. All was the same. I turned at the doorway, my anorak over my arm, and looked back. I had expected to see her, there in the chair by the fireplace – or was that her shadow thrown on the floor by the sunlight? But she was my friend, and whatever, whomever had recently entered here, was not. I thought of the sugar-spun fairy who had danced about on that morning I had first wakened at Thirlbeck. Jessica. No – not Jessica. Jessica had been sent home. But home was only a mile down the valley, the South Lodge. And Jessica had inhabited Thirlbeck all of her life. No prohibition by her grandfather could keep her out.

  I looked once again at the empty room, the empty chair by the fire, the empty chair at the long table. Once, long ago, a young Spanish girl had sat there. She was there no more. I shook my head and closed the door. Once I had re-entered Thirlbeck, it had become possible to believe in ghosts.

  II

  Askew had not really intended to take a walk, or his resolution had faltered. He was there, where so often I had seen him with the Condesa and Gerald, on that mown patch of grass, the long view of the tarn exposed, with an ice bucket and the long-necked bottle of champagne embedded in it, placed ready on the wooden table. He waved to me, almost a replica of the youthful gesture he had always used. But I was conscious that this time it was a replica, a studied thing. And he knew it also.

  ‘Thought we might enjoy the sun,’ he greeted me. ‘Sheltered here.’ Even the words and sentences were cut short, as if he had no strength for unneeded effort.

  There were three glasses on the tray. ‘I called up to Carlota, but she doesn’t seem to be about yet. She’ll probably appear some time soon. She has a marvellous instinct for timing. You’ll have a drink?’ It was scarcely a question. He was already pouring it.

  I thought of the brandy we both had drunk, and now the champagne. It hardly seemed to matter. It was the sort of day that I would never live again.

  ‘Yes – yes, thank you.’

  He poured for both of us, and eased himself into the deck chair close to me. We made a slight inclination to each other with our glasses, but exchanged no words of salutation. As with each situation here, I was beginning to believe that I had been doing it for a long time. I believed it also as Tolson approached from the gravelled area through the mown path of grass, walking purposefully, but not hurrying. It was probably the combination of fatigue, of brandy, and the first heady sips of champagne, but I thought I saw him walking out from centuries past, Tolson in all guises, in all dresses, always a Tolson come to serve a Birkett.

  But it was to me he spoke. ‘There’s a telephone call for you, Miss Roswell. It’s Mr Peers. I told him you were out of doors, but he said he’d wait. Mr Stanton told me he’s quite ready to leave the study for you ... otherwise there’s the extension in Lord Askew’s room, or the one in the service passage.’

  I put down the champagne and started to rise; then I dropped back in the seat again. ‘Thank you, Mr Tolson. Would you ... would you mind telling Mr Peers that you can’t find me, but you’ll deliver the message when I get back
?’

  He nodded. ‘Of course, Miss Roswell.’

  When Tolson had gone, Askew said, ‘You could have gone. I don’t mind ...’

  ‘I wasn’t certain ... no, I’m sure I didn’t want to go. For once, Harry will have to wait. He won’t wait very long,’ I added. ‘After a while he won’t call any more.’

  ‘Isn’t that a rather unfair way of getting rid ... well, I’m sorry, it isn’t my business, and it may not be what I think it is.’

  ‘Unfair? Not just at the moment. Oh, I won’t just let him go by default. But I’m too tired now to talk to him. I will talk to him when I’m sure that I’ll sound as if I’m sure. Harry is used to a rather different person – someone not quite sure, ready to be told what to do. I want him to understand I know what I’m talking about, that I mean what I say ...’ I looked across at Askew. ‘No, you really don’t know much of what it’s about. But for the first time I’m sure about what I want to do. I don’t want to drift into something because it’s easier than making some other decision and living by it. I don’t think Harry would care for that sort of person. It’s only fair to tell him. Have you got a cigarette?’

  He gave me one from the gold case I remembered, and lighted it, before taking one for himself. We sat in silence for some time. The wind from the tarn was gentle, and sun-warmed. There was the sound of bees engrossed in the blossom of an old apple tree that had survived the jungle about it. I sipped the champagne and smoked, and wished that, for some time, life could stay just like this. All I needed was a little time. A time to get used to the creature who had broken from the chrysalis; the wings yet were feeble and uncertain. I knew what I had just done. I had handed back the world on a golden plate that Harry had offered. Gerald would be disappointed – and surprised. He would have enjoyed that house in St James’s Place; he would have enjoyed my and Harry’s children, and enjoyed the fact that I would go on working at Hardy’s. He would never want to see me repeat the untidiness and chaos of Vanessa’s life, her impulsive rashness. I would have been safe with Harry – safe and empty. As the years passed I would have grown into the person Gerald had hoped for, the expert who would have written, eventually, scholarly monographs on ceramics, the expert Harry had not just hoped for, but planned for. I would have borne him children, and waited for him to come back from his trips, or waited for those late-night meetings to finish. And then I suppose that I would have stopped waiting in my heart, and accepted the fact that Harry had acquired me, a home, children, all in one well-executed move, and he would expect us all to function with the clockwork regularity and precision of his own efficient staff. I would have been his best girl – but one like my own china figurines, relegated to a shelf until wanted for use or inspection. And what would I have in place of Harry? I didn’t let myself think of that. What was important was that the new uncertain person who had broken out of the mould must stay outside. It seemed odd that in stepping away from the shadow of Vanessa to which I had clung, I had in some respects become more like her. But now, instead of standing behind her, I could turn and face her.