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

by Catherine Gaskin

  Then I suddenly realised that I could turn and face anyone – anyone at all.

  I said to Askew, ‘What will you do now? Are you going to let Gerald take over everything? Are you going to go away and let him arrange a sale of everything that’s in the house? If we recover the million pounds will you go off and just spend it?’

  ‘I don’t see how I can, do you?’ He flicked the ash of his cigarette towards the ashtray, but the breeze carried it off. ‘Too many people have paid too high a price because I have refused my responsibilities here. I’m thinking now ... I’m thinking that I shall stay. It may be a decision made late. But at least it’s a decision. I may even be able to do something to ease Nat Birkett’s burden. All this land that Tolson has saved for the estate ... it’ll be worth a good deal of money, and demand a hell of a lot in death duties. I probably should stay here and see if some of it can’t be fashioned into some sort of trust – only for that I shall have to try to stay alive another seven years, I suppose. I could try to make friends with my heir, however unwilling he is. There are a lot of things I could do ... should do. It begins to seem now that I must. That people have been willing to risk prison, that Vanessa has died while carrying out an unpaid commission for the sake of holding Thirlbeck together, finally places a responsibility on me that has always been there ... but I’ve never been able to carry it before. Never wanted to. So ... probably I shall stay on. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Not quite. What will you do? Just sit here in the sun? And indoors when it rains? Who will keep you company?’

  ‘Not Carlota. Is that what you’re asking? No, you wouldn’t ask that. But Carlota won’t stay. This isn’t her place. In time she’d shrivel and die here. In time I shall, too – but at least I know what I have finally come back to. Very belatedly, I shall have to learn from Tolson what I must do – how I must act. He will know. I don’t know how to live this sort of life. But I haven’t been very successful at any other sort of life, and here at least I can try. Does that satisfy you?’

  I sat silent for a while, thinking about what he had said. ‘Why does it all have to be sold? Why does all the furniture and pictures and books have to go? You could open it to the public. Or just the house alone, even if you had to strip it of the most valuable things – just the house alone is worth a dozen visits. You’re used to it – you were born here. But when I first saw it, I thought it had grown out of a fairy tale. It’s very beautiful – all of this valley. All of this valley that you keep people out of. This is a very crowded little island, Lord Askew. I wonder if it’s right that people like you – and Tolson, I suppose – should be allowed to keep quite so much to themselves. This whole region is one of the few National Parks we have. And you own a slice in its very heart. Do you really have the right to keep it all to yourself?’

  ‘You’re talking about my going into the Stately Homes business. That just isn’t on, you know. I could never do it. I don’t feel much pride in this place, or much identification with it. It will be hard to stay, hard to learn to be something different at this stage in my life. It would be impossible if I had to encounter strangers walking through my house, and set up souvenir stalls, and all that. No, for my time, at least, it will have to stay as it is. When Nat Birkett’s time comes, he’ll have to make his own decisions.’

  ‘By that time,’ I said, ‘the best of the furniture and the pictures will be gone. The things that help draw people will be gone. What’s left of the garden will be lost ...’

  ‘Look,’ he said with an air of wearied patience, ‘there has to be a choice. I have to put several hundred thousand pounds into Tolson’s hand to do what needs doing about this place. You can see for yourself that it needs a new roof. Have you noticed the outbuildings? – they’re falling down. Tolson and his sons need new tractors and farm equipment – yes, even if they’re tenants they’ve a right to some help. With as much land as there’s still left there could be some sort of co-operative for machines and all that stuff. There’s areas that should be drained – much of it could make good pasture. There are fences – miles of stock fencing that need attention. It’s got to be paid for with something. Have you noticed how well-managed Nat Birkett’s farm is! He’s in debt to the bank for a lot of that, but he’s got the best farm in the area. What will he thank me for most? A flourishing estate, well run and productive, or a few Dutch pictures and some spindly legged tables? There’ll be enough left here – the big stuff that no one could sell. I doubt that he’ll want to open the place though – he’s not one bit keener on swings for the kiddies and car parks littered with cigarette packs than I am. Quite a touch of the eccentricity of the Birketts, Nat has, even though he’s so distantly related. Must be something that happens to you when you know one day you’ve got to be the Earl of Askew. Poor devil, he won’t like it one bit better than I do.’

  ‘Have you suddenly become a farmer yourself?’

  He shook his head. ‘Do I sound converted? I really don’t understand half of what’s really needed. If I stay here, it will be to relieve Tolson of the financial problem of supporting me elsewhere. He seems to think there’s some symbolic value in my actually being resident here. I think I’ll only be a nuisance to them all ... but I’ll have to give it a try.’

  ‘When did he say all this?’

  ‘Last night. Last night, after our day of revelations about the pictures and the other things, after that session Gerald held in the picture room, he and I had a long talk alone. Or at least I listened to him talk. I wondered what he would do with the money if he had it to spend here at Thirlbeck. He gave me a lot of talk. Breeding better beef cattle for the Common Market – but it takes years to do that. We should have a completely automated milking parlour for the dairy herd – and that stock needs improving, too. We should be looking out for prize rams for the sheep. And that’s just the Home Farm. If there was money, he says, he could get good qualified help if he could build decent cottages for them, and pay them more than the minimum rate. It sounds fair, doesn’t it? You forget that half the agricultural labourers in the country don’t have running water in their houses, and no means of transport to the nearest town. Makes it hard on the wife and kids. I never thought of it that way. My father and grandfather had plenty of help about the place. But most of the cottages they had were picturesque hovels, and they’ve fallen down, which they deserved to do – like the North Lodge. A model farm, Tolson paints it as – with me, belatedly, as the model landlord. Of course I won’t be. I’ll sit here and he’ll run the show. But I’ll try to sit here, just the same.’

  ‘Gerald once described you as antiestablishment before anyone really knew what that was. And now you’ll be living an almost feudal life ...’

  He stubbed out the cigarette and immediately reached for another. ‘I had half-baked ideas on Socialism. I dashed off to Spain to fight for the common man and his rights. I didn’t notice that the common man on my father’s estate wasn’t doing all that well. Somehow one only thought of the poor in England in those depression years as being in cities and in the mines. I forgot my father owned mines, and the labourers’ wives carried water from a pump. I saw it rather more clearly after the war. But I wasn’t professing to be a Socialist any more. I wasn’t professing to be anything. I’d reached the age when ideals flicker and go out unless there is something to nourish them. I didn’t seem to find it here, so I went away and left it all to Tolson. I thought when I told him to sell the farms at fair prices to the sitting tenants I was doing my bit for my own little system of land reform. It never occurred to me that Tolson would see it all in larger terms – that the Birkett estate should be one big co-operative. Paternalistic, I call it, but Tolson seems so damn right about his figures. If a man only farms eighty or so acres, how the hell can he afford to run a tractor? In his small way Tolson had been running a sort of co-operative with the Home Farm and the farms his sons have tenancies of, but he has schemes so grand I can’t even imagine how he’ll work them. But I don’t have to.
All I have to do is sit here, and that will make Tolson happy. He’ll know I’ve given my tacit approval to all the schemes he’s worked out. In fact, I’m so completely in his debt that there’s no chance of ever repaying him. And as for Vanessa ... well, she’ll never know that I’m even trying.

  ‘It’s an England,’ he continued, ‘that I don’t know any more. I’ll have to try to know it. I can ride here a bit, and shoot a bit. I suppose we could straighten out the house a little, and I could have a few people to dinner. I could join some London clubs – finally. That would give me a reason for shooting up and down the M6 to London every so often. After all, I don’t suppose it will be so very different from what I’ve been doing all these years. Except that this time I’ll be an Englishman, doing all these things in England – and just as much a stranger as I’ve ever been in all the wild and lonely places I’ve visited.

  ‘I might even,’ he added, with a curious shyness, and a covering dry laugh, ‘I might even read a book or two. I didn’t have much education, you know. I was always bottom of the class.’

  Why should my heart ache for him? And yet it did. I wished I could say something, but there were no words of reassurance. He was a stranger in a strange land, and struggling, in his sixties, to make it his own. He would try to stick it out, but I thought he would very often be making the headlong flight down the motorway, and then, restless and bored in his London clubs, making only a superficial life for himself there, he would be heading back north on the motorway, to meet the same stranger here at Thirlbeck.

  ‘I hope you and Gerald will come sometimes,’ he said, ‘I’d be glad if you would.’

  ‘We’ll come, of course.’

  ‘Good! I’m glad to know that, I don’t know quite how to start all this. It isn’t that I can just pick up where I left off – things have changed too much for that. And I’m not young any more. It’s rather bad when the excitement – even the hope of excitement goes. It will be very bad indeed once Carlota goes.’

  ‘Are you sure she will go?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, in time she’ll go. She’s a rare and exotic bird, Carlota. It wouldn’t be fair to expect her to settle down like a little broody hen. She will be sad about going, I know. She will talk about coming back. Perhaps she will come back a few times. And each visit will be shorter and shorter ... and I will be older.’

  This time it was I who rose and poured more champagne. ‘I’ll come back if you really want me to. Yes, I will come back.’ I handed the glass to him, and the smile he gave me had so little resemblance to the smile of the man who had come down the steps to greet us on that first night that once again I hardly recognised him. The charm was still there, but he was so vulnerable; he couldn’t often, I thought, in the years since he had grown up and left Thirlbeck and his father, have had to ask for friends, for company. And yet what did I really know of him? I knew little, and should judge less. But in these last few hours we had grown rapidly closer – closer in thought and age, much closer in understanding.

  It was hardly a shock then when the miniature came out of his pocket. Often as we had talked I had noticed that his hand went there, and he touched something, as if for reassurance. I saw the tiny thing suddenly exposed in the sunlight; the diamonds, dulled a little in their aged setting, sprang to life. ‘I didn’t think it mattered if I took it. Gerald has the number. He doesn’t need this.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He sat and looked at it for a moment. ‘Perhaps I shall ask you to lend it to me for a while. It really belongs to you, but do you mind if I keep it? Just for a while?’

  I couldn’t deny it to him. At once I had the sense that of all the treasures Thirlbeck possessed, this was perhaps the only thing he really wanted. ’No, you keep it. Keep it as long as you want. Perhaps Vanessa might have liked that best – having it go back to you. She must have thought it very special. It was in the zippered compartment of her handbag, as if she rarely was parted from it. And yet I’d never seen it in my whole life before.’

  ‘I wish she would have taken much more from me, but she never did – or would.’

  ‘Did you really expect her to? This is truly a very special gift. A Nicholas Hilliard miniature, and one of your own family.’

  ‘That part of it didn’t matter. It looks like Vanessa. That’s why I gave it to her. I hadn’t forgotten about it, but still when you brought it out this morning, it was as if someone had thrust me back all those years. Red-haired and beautiful, Vanessa was – and a little bit wild. Just the way I imagined the woman in this portrait was. I remember when I was a boy I used to look at this quite often, and wish I had known her. When Vanessa came, it was like seeing the lady in the portrait come to life.’

  I was pouring the last of the champagne. Could we really have drunk this much? It was too late for the Condesa to come now. The droning sound of the bees seemed hypnotic, or was this the sensation of being totally relaxed with this man merely what champagne drunk in the sun will do? I watched the long reeds in the shallows of the tarn sway lightly in the breeze.

  ‘Shakespeare called miniatures “The Manacle of Love”,’ I said softly. ‘People used to carry them then the way we carry special photographs now – very precious, personal things. Do you think she carried it in that way?’

  ‘I hope she did. If she did, I suppose it is evidence of how much she was prepared to do for Thirlbeck. But I hadn’t expected her to remember or care about it for such a long time. Vanessa was very independent. After she and Jonathan left Thirlbeck, I never saw her again.’

  ‘Tell me about it – what it was like then, here at Thirlbeck? The three of you ...’

  ‘The three of us. Yes, that’s what it felt like – just the three of us. We had all come through a different sort of war, and at that time it felt as if survival should count for something splendid – if we had survived it meant it was for some special reason. Vanessa achieved her special thing in her own way – Jonathan found his. I’m the one who can’t find anything significant in the years since then ... so, because of Vanessa and because of Tolson, I’ll stay. There’s a little time yet ...’

  ‘But tell me,’ I insisted. ‘Tell me about it then.’

  ‘Then? Well, we were all young – that’s the first point. At least we seemed young. I was in my thirties, and that seems young to me now. Vanessa was only about twenty-one. Jonathan, I suppose, was twenty-seven. It was very isolated up here then. At times it seemed as if we were the only three people left alive in the world. No doubt we were very selfish. The Tolsons all were here, and life wasn’t one long game for them, the way we made it for ourselves. Every fine day was an excuse for a picnic. Mrs Tolson was a splendid cook, and a baked rabbit was a feast. Funny ... how I remember the food. We were still rationed, of course, but with the war over, a bit of black market didn’t seem such a crime. After the Army food I used to look forward to every meal. I used to go and gather the eggs from the hen run myself, and I was very greedy with them. I used to shoot too – out of season, and all. But the valley was so overstocked, it had to be done. I shot deer, partridge, and pheasant. We had venison and jugged hare, and trout. Once in a while we’d have salmon. There were salmon about, if you knew the streams. Most of it illegal, but we didn’t care. Vanessa and Jonathan eventually ate most of their meals here – I wanted their company. Any reason was good enough to bring up the best wine from the cellar. Having been through one war, we saw no reason to save anything for the next time around. It began to seem like one long party, and we gave Jonathan very little chance to work. It used to make him angry sometimes, and he’d keep to himself for a day or two. But he wasn’t well and he wasn’t working well. So he’d be back with us, and the party would go on.

  ‘Then all of a sudden it seemed as if we’d come to the last of the wine. We knew we couldn’t go on like that for ever. It was autumn, and Vanessa and Jonathan went – quite suddenly they went. So I went too. Vanessa had left an address in London, but when I went there, I found out that they
’d never been there. That was when I knew Vanessa didn’t want to see me again.’

  ‘But you had given her the miniature, and she had taken it. That must have meant something.’

  ‘I had hoped it meant something. But obviously it didn’t mean what I had hoped.’

  What had seemed difficult before now was easy. I asked my question directly. ‘Did you love her? Did she love you?’

  ‘I loved her. I believed I loved her. I really believed that. But perhaps she didn’t believe it herself. Perhaps she never loved me. She never said she did. I remember ... she never actually said she did.’