by Jessica Mann
Alexandra was still talking about her campaign. ‘What do you think, Tara? After all, you’re in the business of preserving the past. Do you think works of art should be allowed to leave the country? Is it right for some millionaire to have them to gloat over in private?’
‘No. They should be available for study.’
‘Study. You would say that. It’s intellectual snobbery. Why should scholars be more entitled to see them than millionaires? It is ordinary people whose lives need enriching with art.’
‘These pictures weren’t available for ordinary people before they were sold.’
‘That doesn’t mean we should perpetuate archaic injustices. Now they have emerged from the prison of private hoarding, they have to stay out in the open. What I . . .’ But at this point the baby began to cry and the middle child to whine.
Tamara said to her father, ‘Who did own them anyway?’
‘He was a client of mine, Captain Leslie, you might remember meeting him occasionally. Nice old chap. But his children have emigrated.’
‘How did he come by things like a Gainsborough?’
‘Inheritance, I think, and his wife had a lot of her family stuff too, some wonderful furniture as well as the pictures, and the house they lived in. It was a folly, and the Leslies converted it into a house. Mrs Leslie’s father inherited it from old Lady Clementine Bessemer, one of the last of a family that once had great estates in Devon. They owned Stockwell, until the middle of the last century I think, but the title went to distant cousins and all Lady Clementine kept was that useless folly – or so she must have thought it – and some unfashionable family portraits. I believe she was quite young at the time, poor girl.’
‘How did she support herself?’ Olga Hoyland asked.
‘She had a post at Court, maid-of-honour to Queen Victoria or something of the kind.’
‘An awful way of life,’ Olga Hoyland said energetically. ‘You remember, girls, hearing Grandmamma talking about it. I should hate it.’ Olga’s mother had been in attendance on the Czarina, before escaping in 1917. She used to repeat to her family, like folk tales, the saga of her travels through Russia, Mongolia, China, Canada and America. She had experienced more in that year of adventure than most people do in a lifetime.
‘I can think of worse fates, at least you would meet some interesting people,’ Alexandra said, and Tamara wondered why everything Alexandra said these days sounded like a reproach or a complaint.
‘At least it was a roof over her head and a salary,’ Rob Hoyland said. ‘Clementine Bessemer never married, so she really lived at court. There’s a marvellous story of Clem Leslie’s father collecting old Lady Clementine’s things from Windsor. Lady Clementine herself had died about five years earlier.’
‘Tell us the story, Father.’
‘Queen Victoria had died in 1901, and left all her personal papers to be sorted out by her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, and she spent the ensuing years casting historical documents onto bonfires in spite of all the protests of the King, the Prince of Wales, and anyone else who had the nerve to remonstrate. She said she had a right to do it and her mamma would have wished it. In those rooms full of the accumulated papers of three quarters of a century, Princess Beatrice came across some packing cases with Lady Clementine Bessemer’s name painted on them. She must have stored her personal belongings at Windsor, not having a proper home of her own to put them in. So Princess Beatrice summoned Clem Leslie’s father, who was Lady Clementine’s great nephew and residuary legatee, to take them away, and she gave him a lecture about preserving them as memorabilia and taking good care of them, and keeping the old lady’s memory green, and all the while there she was destroying her own mother’s diaries and letters like a madwoman.’
‘What did those packing cases have in them?’
‘The family portraits, I suppose, among other things. I never heard the details. But that was where Clem Leslie got quite a lot of the antiques she had at the Folly.’
Distrust coincidence, Mr Black had warned, quoting: ‘One is a coincidence, two is happenstance, three is enemy action.’
‘Can I have a look at the sale catalogue? Is it in the house?’ Tamara asked. Although the place looked untidy, the Hoylands could always find what they wanted. The catalogue was in a wooden bowl (carved from one of the dead elm trees removed from their drive) under a roll of half-embroidered canvas and on top of a pile of postcards from the Louvre. The prices were pencilled in beside several of the lots.
‘I went along, just for fun,’ Olga Hoyland said.
‘Fun,’ Alexandra muttered jealously.
‘I did buy something, that coral teething ring.’
‘Was there much jewellery?’
‘Nothing very special. Mostly Victorian things like a mourning brooch, full of hair, and lots of jet. It was all sold to Mr Yeo who keeps the antique shop in Stockwell, except for one ring in a separate lot, look, number twenty-nine, intaglio amethyst set in filigree, probably sixteenth century.’
‘That’s closer to your period, Tara,’ Alexandra said. ‘Wouldn’t you want that kind of thing to be in a public gallery?’
‘It ought to be in the British Museum,’ Tamara said energetically, and then stopped to laugh at herself. ‘You are quite right, Sandra, and I do agree with you. It’s just that ancient things get me more worked up. I should like to save treasures for the nation, just like you. Let me make a contribution to your fund.’
After dinner Olga Hoyland offered to put the grandchildren to bed, and Alexandra went to talk to Tamara while she unpacked her case.
‘It’s nice coming home for a visit. I try to bring the children when I can. It doesn’t change, does it? Mother runs the place like a machine.’
Tamara drew the familiar chintz curtains across the window, and sniffed at the vase of lily-scented mahonia. ‘It isn’t so difficult without children around,’ she said, trying to console.
Alexandra flung herself onto the bed. ‘There always are children around, that’s the trouble. Have you got a smoke? I can’t when Ben’s in the room, or he starts shouting, “Mummy, Mummy, you’ll die.” It’s all that bloody telly, corrupting his mind.’
Tamara unearthed a carton of stale Dunhills from her desk, and watched the nicotine soothe her sister. She said, ‘It doesn’t seem to work for me.’
‘Wish it didn’t for me, we can’t afford it anyway. Not your problem, that.’
‘Not at the moment,’ Tamara agreed.
‘Not for long, is that it? Is it your bookseller?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, Tara, who is he? What’s his name, what does he do, how long have you known him?’
‘I have only just met him, he’s an art dealer, he’s called Kim.’
‘Art dealer,’ Alexandra muttered.
Tamara added hastily, ‘He’s the most gorgeous-looking man I have ever seen.’
‘Is he more than just a pretty face?’ Alexandra had married the prettiest possible face herself.
Tamara said, ‘He doesn’t look like James, he’s more . . . inscrutable. Rugged.’
‘I suppose what you mean is that he’s marvellous in bed. But is there anything else?’
‘You mean getting married and settling down. How would I know? I have not known him long. I don’t know much about him, where he comes from, or where he’s going, anything. I’m probably being a rash idiot. I know it isn’t like me, I’m usually such a one for checking and looking things up and making sure, considering all the alternatives and possibilities.’
‘Nonsense, Tara, you are the most impulsive person I know.’
‘That’s only because I usually reach the same conclusion after thinking things through that I jumped to before. But this time I haven’t even tried.’
‘He’s bewitched you. Have you bewitched him?’
Tamara blushed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh dear. I know it’s a good idea to be spontaneous, in theory, I mean, I suppose I would say that,’ Alexa
ndra said with a marked lack of spontaneity. ‘But, oh Tara, do be careful.’
*
It was the very next morning that Tamara discovered that she had not been nearly careful enough. Alexandra had driven off after the baby’s early feed, to get back to Bristol, in time for the eldest child to go to play group. Tamara came down to have breakfast with her parents before they left for their respective offices.
‘What have you got on today, Tamara?’
‘One or two bits of field work.’
‘Be careful if you go up on the moor. Snow is forecast.’
‘One of the places I need to see is at Stockwell.’
‘It’s not the weather for seeing ancient monuments,’ Olga Hoyland said.
‘Now that’s a coincidence,’ Rob Hoyland said. He leafed through the opened letters beside his plate. ‘There’s a letter here forwarded by the auctioneers who handled the sale at Stockwell Folly for us. Someone who wants to know more about the Leslies: would anyone know where they acquired a particular picture that was in the sale. Funny after what we were saying last night. A Prince Joachim of Horn. What sort of title do you think that is?’
‘A German one,’ Olga Hoyland said. ‘One of my ancestors married into the family. I’ll show you.’
A bound volume of her mother’s numerous interlocking family trees stood in a bookcase alongside the photograph album, and a copy of the privately printed memoirs of forty years as a county councillor by Rob Hoyland’s father.
‘Going back a bit of course,’ Olga murmured. ‘Let’s see . . . here we are. It was in eighteen forty. Poor girl, and she died within a year. Childbirth, I suppose.’
Tamara looked where her mother’s finger pointed. Sonya, the third of six children, born 1826, died 1844, married in 1843 to Siegfried Frederick, second son of the reigning Prince of Horn und Reiss und Drachensfeld.
‘Joachim von Horn und Reiss und Drachensfeld,’ Rob Hoyland rolled the name on his tongue.
Joachim von Reiss. Chim Reiss. Kim Rice, Tamara thought. She felt her skin burning and a chill in her stomach. Her heart was beating very fast and sweat started out on her forehead, the physical signs of realising that one has made a disastrous mistake.
Chapter Seventeen
Tamara waited to ring Department E until her parents had left the house. She sat pretending to concentrate on the Western Morning News, which carried an article about the forthcoming exhibition of treasures from East Germany, and discussing the softening of political attitudes that this initiative represented.
James Bond had fallen for the charms of girls who turned out to be working for his enemies. George Smiley’s wife let him down over and over again. There was no reason to expect secret agents to be less foolish about the opposite sex than anyone else. But that was no comfort. My famous bloody intuition, Tamara thought.
‘Will you be in for dinner tonight, Tamara?’ her mother asked.
Kim had not actually lied to her. Perhaps he always used the democratic name. Why should he tell a casual girl friend who he really was, or about his interest in his family’s treasure? Tamara had not told him anything about herself.
‘Come and have lunch with me if you are anywhere near the office,’ her father said.
It was not his reticence, it was what she knew from Mr Black that was burning a brand in Tamara’s self-esteem. A neo-Nazi, a fanatical right-wing Catholic revivalist. That was what Joachim von Horn und Reiss und Drachensfeld was – that, and a pretty face.
If it had been only his pretty face I fell for, she thought, it would have been all right.
‘See you tonight,’ Olga Hoyland called, slamming the front door.
Am I so desperate to find a man that I don’t see what the ones I fancy are really like? she asked herself dismally. Am I so indifferent to the responsibilities I chose to take on? Should I have known that with Kim Rice I was mixing up business and pleasure?
Intellectual honesty required the answer, ‘yes’.
Mrs Uglow said that Mr Black was in a meeting. She always told callers that.
‘But Mrs Uglow, it’s me, Tamara Hoyland.’
‘I am very sorry, Dr Hoyland, but he really is at a meeting this time. He’s not even in the building.’
‘Do you expect him back soon?’
‘Not today at all.’
Not that it made much difference. What could he have said that Tamara did not already say, more viciously, to herself? Would he have summoned her straight back to London, or told her to get on with it, using her emotional impulses instead of being used by them.
Another call, after a tiresome session with Directory Enquiries; the young art dealer. Had he been the one to offer the Italian painting to Kim Rice? ‘No, no, of course not, I’d never heard of him. He rang me up and said he’d heard that I’d got a primitive and could he have a look? Why do you ask? I hope there isn’t anything . . .’
Tamara assured him that he could count on the sale going ahead. And may I be forgiven, she thought, certain that Kim Rice would never go near the young man again. Having got his excuse for going hunting on Artemis’s home ground, where would he begin? Presumably in exactly the same place as Tamara proposed to search.
Microdots of snow were beginning to fall on the higher ground as Tamara drove towards the moor, and once over the top, the Folly at Stockwell appeared suddenly as the road descended from a high curve. It was a castellated tower, with windows like arrow slits and a nail-studded front door. In the North it would have been a Peel Tower. Here it was exactly what it was called, a folly, which had been designed to decorate the view for the inhabitants of the Big House.
Monuments from the more distant past, for whose remains Tamara had a professional responsibility, were scattered over the landscape. Within the circle of her vision were two clusters of hut circles, a standing stone, and a memorial to men fallen in the Napoleonic wars. The moors stretched away, bare, brown, speckled with white where last week’s snow still lay on the north facing slopes. A line as neat as geometry divided the empty land from the wet, midwinter-green fields.
On the south side of the tower was desolation.
The original quarrying must have started behind a hill and out of sight. Perhaps the machinery and explosives had spoken of prosperity, employment, dividends for the landowners, a prudent use of the earth’s bounty. The Bessemers probably congratulated themselves that they were sitting on a fortune.
Now, immediately below the tower, was a huge, rough heap of spoil glistening from afar, and even admirable to those who saw the tower as part of a wide sweep of country, but from close by greyish brown, speckled and tabby, only gleaming bright where the snow still lay on it. The excavations for china clay had crept towards the tower, consuming the hill, the hollows, gouging out great holes in the ground and leaving behind them, when all the valuable material had gone, the foretaste of an icy hell, where nothing could grow, all dirty, and useless. Even the water that filled the deeper pits was a wicked green, the kind of colour used by pharmacists to warn that a liquid would be poisonous.
The tower was empty. Soon it would be gone, literally as though it had never been, leaving no trace for the field worker to detect, for the very ground on which it stood would disappear, its elements reconstituted into utensils, cosmetics, or the glaze on paper, and no reminders would stay in the useless spoil to denote a house in which a family had lived for as long, at least, as anyone now living could remember.
The house, abandoned and due to be demolished, had of course been vandalised. Tamara entered through one of several broken windows, and found the detritus of irresponsible occupation lay in every room. But the kitchen and bathrooms contained modern fitments, central heating pipes followed the skirting boards, and there was recent electrical wiring. It must have been a comfortable home. The big house, Stockwell itself, stood in a derelict park about half a mile away, its long façade visible from this angle with a full complement of chimneys, columns, porticoes, and blind-looking windows. The new road to the china
-clay workings, which Tamara had come on, had cut across the parkland, separating the tower from the house, so that one could no longer see the path that must have once led strollers towards this pretty peep. The actual drive to the house turned off what might have been an earlier highway, further down the hillside. Even from this distance, it could be seen that the drive was rutted and unrepaired, and that it led to an area of overgrown ground in front of the house. A red car was parked on it.
The uneven surface of the drive scraped on the bottom of Tamara’s tiny car, though it could have done no harm to Kim’s well-sprung Saab. Tamara parked beside it, making no attempt at quietness, but he did not appear. The wide steps were cracked and crumbling, and there seemed to be no bell or knocker. There must be a back door.
Tamara walked along the frontage of the house. The windows were set too high above the ground for her to see into them, and the area windows were shuttered. There should once have been a footpath running along the side wall, but now undisciplined vegetation came right up to it. Tamara picked her way through it.
She was perfectly used to visiting lonely monuments; it was part of her job. Why then, she wondered, did Stockwell seem so frighteningly deserted? Was it the unformulated thought of ghosts, or traps, or ‘nasty men’ that made her tread so softly, peer so carefully ahead, listen so anxiously for non-existent sounds?
The side of the house was almost as long as its front. On round the corner, then, and on to – nothing. There was no back wall. Where the rear of the house should be was open space.
The façade and most of the two side walls of Stockwell were propped upright by immense wooden scaffolds. The back wall had disappeared completely, probably in the fire that had left blackened patches all over the interior walls, grotesquely alternated with patterned paper and plasterwork. Somebody had repainted the outside of the remaining walls since the fire. Where the ground floor rooms had been, thistles and docks were growing.
