The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  * * *

  Roy Brookner was a man of considerable experience in his job, and over the years had become immune to both shock and disappointment. He had even learned to deal with the worst nightmare of all, which was the classic one of the little old lady, finding herself, probably for the first time in her life, short of money, and deciding to have appraised, and then to sell, her most treasured possession. Boothby’s would be informed of this intention, and Roy Brookner would duly make the appointment, and the—probably long—journey to see her. And at the end of the day his would be the heart-breaking task of informing her that the painting was not a Landseer; the Chinese jar, thought to be Ming, was nothing of the sort; and the ivory seal of Catherine de Médicis did not, in fact, date from that lady’s period, but the late nineteenth century; and so, they were worthless.

  Mrs. Keeling was not a little old lady, and she was the daughter of Lawrence Stern, but even so, he opened the covers of the folder without much hope. What he expected to discover he really did not know. What he found was of such heart-stopping importance that, for a moment, he could scarcely believe his eyes.

  Sketches, Penelope Keeling had said, but she had not told him what sketches. They were painted in oil, on canvas, the canvases ragged-edged and still showing the rusty impression of tack marks where once they had been nailed to their stretchers. One by one, taking his time, he took them up, gazed in incredulous wonder, laid them aside. The colours were unfaded, the subject matters instantly recognizable. In mounting excitement, he started a mental catalogue. The Spirit of Spring. The Lover’s Approach. The Water Carriers. The Sea-God. The Terrazzo Garden …

  It was almost too much. Like a man half-way through an enormous gourmet meal, he found himself sated, incapable of continuing. He paused, his hands stilled, hanging loosely between his knees. Penelope Keeling, standing by the empty fireplace, awaited his judgement. He looked up and across the short distance that separated them. For a long moment neither of them spoke. But the expression on his face told her everything she wanted to know. She smiled, and the smile lit up her dark eyes, and it was as though all the years that she had lived had never happened, and for an instant he saw her as the beautiful young woman she must once have been. And the thought occurred to him that if he had been young when she was young, he would probably have fallen in love with her.

  He said, “Where have these come from?”

  “I’ve had them for twenty-five years, hidden in the back of my wardrobe.”

  He frowned. “But where did you come upon them?”

  “They were in my father’s studio, in the garden of our house in Oakley Street.”

  “Does anyone else know of their existence?”

  “I don’t think so. But I have a feeling that Noel, my son, had begun to suspect—though why, I have no idea—that they did exist. But I can’t be sure of this.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He’s been searching around, going through the attic. And became extremely bad-tempered when he found nothing. I’m certain he was looking for something specific, and I’m fairly sure it was the sketches.”

  “It sounds a little as though he knows what they would be worth.” He reached down to turn over another canvas. “Amoretta’s Garden. How many are there altogether?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Are they insured?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you hid them?”

  “No. I hid them because I didn’t want Ambrose to find them.”

  “Ambrose.”

  “My husband.” She sighed. Her smile died, taking with it that vibrant flash of youth. She was her age again, a handsome, grey-haired woman in her sixties and tired of standing. She left the fireplace and went to sit in the corner of the sofa, resting one arm along its back. “You see, we never had any money. That was the crux of the matter, the root of all the trouble.”

  “Did you live with your husband at Oakley Street?”

  “Yes. After the war. I’d spent all the war in Cornwall because I had a child to look after. And then my mother was killed in the Blitz, so I stayed on to care for Papa as well. And he handed Oakley Street over … and a…” Suddenly she laughed, hopeless, shaking her head. “So garbled. It makes no sense. How can you possibly understand?”

  “You could try starting at the beginning and going right through to the end.”

  “That would take all day.”

  “I have all day.”

  “Oh, Mr. Brookner, I would bore you to death.”

  “You are Lawrence Stern’s daughter,” he told her. “You could read me the telephone directory from cover to cover and I should remain fascinated.”

  “What a nice man you are. In that case…”

  * * *

  “In 1945 my father was eighty. I was twenty-five, married to a Lieutenant in the Navy, and the mother of a four-year-old child. For a little while I had been in the Wrens—that’s when I met Ambrose—but when I knew I was having a baby, I got my discharge and went home to Porthkerris. I stayed there for the rest of the war. I scarcely saw Ambrose during those years. He was at sea most of the time, in the Atlantic, and then the Mediterranean, and finally in the Far East. I’m afraid it didn’t bother me very much. Ours was a thoughtless wartime affair, a relationship that never would have got off the ground in peacetime.

  “As well, there was Papa. He’d always been an enormously youthful and energetic man, but after Sophie was killed, he grew suddenly old before my very eyes, and there could be no question of my leaving him. But then the war ended, and everything changed. All the men came home, and Papa said that it was time for me to go back to my husband. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t want to, and it was then that he told me that he’d made over the title deeds of his house in Oakley Street, so that I would always have a base, security for my children, and financial independence. After that, I had no excuse to stay. Nancy and I left Porthkerris for the last time. Papa came to see us off at the station, and say goodbye to us, and that was a last time as well, because he died the following year, and I never saw him again.

  “The house in Oakley Street was enormous. So big that Papa and Sophie and I had always lived in the basement, and let out the upper floors to lodgers. That way, we could make the establishment, more or less, wash its face. I carried on with that arrangement. A couple called Willi and Lalla Friedmann had lived there all through the war, and they stayed on. They had a little girl, and she was company for Nancy, and they were my permanent tenants. For the rest of the house, it was a fairly floating population, coming and going. Artists, mostly, and writers, and young men trying to get a toe in the door of television. My sort of people. Not Ambrose’s.

  “Then Ambrose came home. Not only did he come home, but he left the Navy and accepted a job in his father’s old family firm, the publishers Keeling and Philips, in St. James. I was rather surprised when Ambrose told me this, but I think on the whole he did the right thing. I found out later that he’d blotted his copy-book when he was out in the Far East—antagonized his Captain and got a bad personal report. So, if he had stayed in the Service, I don’t suppose he’d have got very far.

  “So there we were. We didn’t have much, but we had more than most young couples. We were young, we were healthy, Ambrose had a job, and we had a house to live in. But apart from that, we had nothing, no common ground on which to build any sort of a relationship. Ambrose was intensely conventional and something of a social snob … he had great ideas about always making friends with the right people. And I was eccentric and careless and, I suppose, impossibly unreliable. But the things that were important to Ambrose seemed trivial to me, and I couldn’t share his enthusiasms. And then, there was the vexing question of money. Ambrose never gave me anything. I suppose he reckoned I had my own private means, which in a way I had, but I was perpetually strapped for cash. As well, in my family, money was something that one, hopefully, had, but never spoke about. During the war, I’d managed on my Naval Allowance, and Pa
pa used to put a little each month into my account to pay the housekeeping bills, but as there were no luxuries to spend money on, and everybody was bone-shabby anyway, it didn’t seem to matter very much.

  “But, married to Ambrose, living in London, put a very different complexion on things. By now my second daughter Olivia had been born, so that was another mouth to feed. As well, the old house was in a dreadful state of repair. Not bombed, thankfully, but cracked and dilapidated and generally falling to bits. It had to be rewired, and the roof had to be repaired. Then the plumbing went wrong, and of course everything needed painting. When I spoke to Ambrose about this, he told me it was my house and so my responsibility, so in the end I sold four precious paintings by Charles Rainier that had belonged to Papa, and those raised enough cash to do the most rudimentary of repairs, but at least the roof stopped leaking, and I could stop agonizing as to whether or not the children were going to electrocute themselves by stuffing their fingers into the old-fashioned wall sockets.

  “And then, the final straw. Ambrose’s mother, Dolly Keeling—she’d spent the entire war bomb-dodging in Devon—came back to live in London. She took a little house in Lincoln Street, and from the moment she arrived, she began to make trouble. She’d never liked me. I don’t really blame her. She never forgave me for starting the baby, for ‘trapping’ Ambrose into marriage. He was her only child and she was intensely possessive. So, she re-possessed him. All at once, being married to Ambrose was rather like looking after another person’s dog. Every time you open the door, it bolts for home. Ambrose bolted for his mother. He used to drop in for a little drink on his way home from the office … the tea-and-sympathy syndrome, I suppose. He used to take her shopping on Saturday mornings, drive her to church on Sundays. It was enough to put anyone off going to church for life.

  “Poor man. Divided loyalties are not easy companions to live with. And he deeply needed the adulation and attention that he got from Dolly and which I was incapable of giving him. As well, Oakley Street was never the most peaceful place in the world. I liked my friends around me; Lalla Friedmann and I had always been very close. And I liked children. Lots of children. Not just Nancy, but all her little school friends as well. In fine weather, the garden swarmed with them, hanging upside-down from ropes, or sitting in cardboard grocery cartons. And the little school friends all had mothers, who drifted in and out, and sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and gossiping. There was a constant activity—jam being made, or somebody cutting out a dress or making scones for tea, and always toys all over the floor.

  “Ambrose couldn’t bear it. He said that it got on his nerves, returning from work to such bedlam. He began to resent the close quarters we lived in, especially as we owned the whole of the spacious house. He began to talk about chucking the tenants out, giving us room to spread. He talked about a dining room for dinner parties, and a drawing room for cocktail parties, and a bedroom and dressing room and bathroom, en suite, for ourselves. And I lost my temper and asked him what we were going to live on if we didn’t have the rents coming in. And he went into a three-week sulk, and spent more time than ever with his mother.

  “Just existing became an uphill struggle. Money was something that we argued about all the time. I didn’t even know what he earned, so I had no sort of hold on him that way. But I knew he must earn something, so what did he do with it? Buy drinks for his friends? Buy petrol for the little car his mother had given him? Buy clothes? He was always a very natty dresser. I became intensely curious. I began nosing around. I found and read his bank statement, and saw that he was over a thousand pounds overdrawn. I was so naïve, so simple, I finally decided that he’d found himself a mistress and was spending his entire salary on keeping her in mink coats and a Mayfair flat.

  “Finally, he told me himself. He had to. He owed five hundred pounds to a bookmaker, and he had to pay the debt within a week. I was making soup, I remember, stirring the big pot so that the dried peas wouldn’t stick to the bottom. And I asked him how long he’d been backing horses, and he said for three or four years. And I asked about other things, and then it all came out. I think he was what nowadays would be called a compulsive gambler. He used to play at private gaming clubs. He had taken one or two big risks on the stock exchange and they hadn’t come off. And all the time, I’d never had the slightest suspicion. But now he confessed, was even slightly shamefaced, but desperate. He had to get the money.

  “I told him I hadn’t got it. I told him to go to his mother, but he said that he’d been to her before and she’d helped him, but he hadn’t the nerve to go to her again. And then he said, why not sell the pictures, the three Lawrence Sterns, which was all I had of my father’s work. And when he said that I became almost as frightened as he was, because I knew that he was quite capable of simply waiting until he had the house to himself, removing the pictures and carting them off to a sale-room. The Shell Seekers, as well as being my most treasured possession, was also my comfort and solace. I couldn’t live without it, and he knew this, so I told him I’d raise the five hundred pounds, and I did, by selling my engagement ring, and my mother’s engagement ring as well. And after that, he became quite cheerful again, and his old perky, self-satisfied self. For a little he stopped gambling. He’d had a bad fright. But before long, it started again, and we were back to the old hand-to-mouth existence.

  “Then, in 1955, Noel was born, and at the same time we were faced with the first of the big school bills. I still had the little house in Cornwall, Carn Cottage. After Papa died, it belonged to me, and I clung on to it for years, letting it out to any person who would rent it, and telling myself that one day I should be able to take my children there, to spend a summer. But I never did. And then I got a marvellous offer for the house, too good to refuse, and I sold it. When I did that, I knew that Porthkerris had gone for ever and the last link broken. When I sold Oakley Street, I had plans to return to Cornwall. To buy a little granite cottage with a palm tree in the garden. But my children intervened and talked me out of it and finally my son-in-law found Podmore’s Thatch, and so, after all, I shall spend the twilight of my years in Gloucestershire, and not within sight and sound of the sea.”

  * * *

  “I’ve told you all this, and I still haven’t got to the point, have I? I still haven’t told you about finding the sketches.”

  “They were in your father’s studio?”

  “Yes, hidden away behind an artist’s accumulation of years.”

  “When did it happen? When did you find them?”

  * * *

  “Noel was about four. And, to accommodate our growing family, we had taken in another couple of rooms. But the tenants filled the rest of the house. Then, one day, a young man appeared at the door. He was an art student, very tall and thin and poor-looking and quite charming. Someone had told him that I might be able to help him, because he had won a place at the Slade, but could find nowhere to live. I hadn’t a corner to put him, but I liked the look of him, and I asked him in and gave him a meal and a glass of lager, and we talked. By the time he was ready to go, I was so taken with him, I couldn’t bear the fact that I was unable to help him. And then I thought of the studio. A wooden shed in the garden, but stoutly built and watertight. He could sleep there, and work there; I could give him his breakfast, and he could come into the house to use the bathroom and do his washing. I suggested this, and he jumped at it. So then and there, I found the key, and we went out and inspected the studio. It was dirty and dusty and stacked with old divan beds and chests of drawers, as well as my father’s easels and palettes and canvases, but it was sound and rainproof and it had a northern skylight, which made it all the more desirable to the young man.

  “We agreed on a rent and a day of entry. He went, and I started work. It took days, and I had to get my friend the rag-and-bone man to help me, and bit by bit, he loaded all the old rubbish into his little cart and drove it away. It took a number of journeys, but at last we were down to the final load. And it was th
en, at the very back of the studio, lost behind an old chest, that I found the folder of sketches. I recognized them immediately for what they were, but had no idea of their worth. At that time Lawrence Stern was unfashionable, and if a painting of his came up, it went, maybe, for five or six hundred pounds. But finding those sketches was like being given a present from the past. I had so little of his work. And I thought that if Ambrose knew about them, he was immediately going to demand that they be sold. So I took them indoors, and up to my bedroom. I taped them to the back of my wardrobe, and then I found a roll of wallpaper and papered them in. And that’s where they’ve been ever since. Until last Sunday evening. Then, I knew, all at once, that it was time to let them see again the light of day, and to show them to you.

  * * *

  “So now you know.” She glanced at her watch. “What hours it’s taken to tell you. I’m sorry. Would you like a cup of tea? Have you time for a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, I have time. But I’m still greedy for more.” She raised her brows in question. “Please don’t think me curious or impertinent, but what became of your marriage? What became of Ambrose?”

  “My husband? Oh, he left me.…”

  “Left you?”

  “Yes.” To his astonishment he saw her face light up with amusement. “For his secretary.”

  * * *

  “Soon after I found the sketches and had hidden them, Ambrose’s old secretary, Miss Wilson, who’d been with Keeling and Philips for ever, retired, and a new girl came to take her place. She was young, and I suppose she must have been quite pretty. She was called Delphine Hardacre. Miss Wilson had always been called Miss Wilson, but Delphine was never referred to as anything but Delphine. One day Ambrose told me he was going up to Glasgow on business; the printing side of the firm was based there, and he stayed away for a week. Afterwards, I found out that he hadn’t been to Glasgow at all, but up to Huddersfield with Delphine, to be presented to her parents. The father was immensely rich, something to do with heavy engineering, and if he thought Ambrose was a bit old for his daughter, this was obviously balanced out by the fact that she’d found a nice class of man for herself, and was besotted by him. Soon after this, Ambrose came home from the office and told me that he was leaving. We were in our bedroom. I’d washed my hair and was brushing it dry, sitting at my dressing-table, and Ambrose sat on the bed behind me, and the entire conversation took place through the medium of my mirror. He said he was in love with her. That she gave him everything I never had. That he wanted a divorce. Once divorced, he would marry her, and meantime, he was leaving Keeling and Philips, as was Delphine, and they were moving north to make a home for themselves in Yorkshire, where her father had offered him a position in his company.