A New Map of Love

by Annie Murray

  ‘Shelves top, drawers bottom?’ he asked, pushing himself to sit up. Vera moved as if to help, then retreated, seeing that he could manage.

  ‘Yes – glass at the front. You’re getting better, you are.’

  ‘Called a bureau bookcase,’ he advised.

  ‘Right you are,’ Vera said. He knew she wouldn’t forget. She never forgot anything.

  ‘I didn’t hear the old girl,’ he said, sipping the tea.

  ‘Oh no, it wasn’t her – nice chap in a wagon. Clarence says it’ll have to wait a week or so – they’ve put it in the back of the barn.’

  George frowned. ‘When’s this wedding?’

  ‘Not till July, apparently.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘Oh – there was a note with it, hang on!’ Vera ran downstairs and came back with a creamily thick envelope.

  ‘I say.’ George eyed it. ‘Top quality, that.’

  Vera slit it open and handed him the sheet of cream paper. Ornate handwriting in blue ink looped its way down the page with a rightward lurch.

  Baxter –

  Herewith delivery of my Hepplewhite. You’re to carry out all necessary to make fit as a gift for my late brother’s boy, Roderick Storr-Mayfield.

  I shall expect you to telephone me as soon as it is ready and my man will come to transport it.

  Sincerely,

  An inscrutable scribble was followed by the printed words:

  ELEANORA AGNES LUCINDA BYNGH.

  4.

  On Sunday afternoon he felt well enough to potter about downstairs, with the prospect of a peaceful afternoon to himself. At this first appearance on the ground floor, Monty gave him the sort of hero’s welcome that implied he had been absent for several years.

  ‘Careful old boy, you’ll have me over,’ George protested over the mighty woofing and crazed tail-wagging. ‘Yes, yes – I know you’re pleased to see me.’ He bent over and gave Monty’s ears a fond waggle. ‘Come on – I need some lunch.’

  He had told Vera he would absolutely be all right on his own. He experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom in being able to stand in his own kitchen and knock up an omelette without interference or undue conversation, other than with the dog. Adding quartered mushrooms, a slick of baked beans and sawn off chunks of bread with a slab of Anchor butter, he sat at the table amid the smell of frying with a sigh of happy anticipation.

  Better not start on the beer yet, I suppose, he thought. Arms and legs still aren’t quite right. They felt distinctly tremulous. To his surprise he could not manage to eat all the bread and butter. His trousers felt loose at the waist. This wouldn’t do.

  ‘Right-o, Monty,’ he said, stacking the washing-up in the sink. ‘Let’s see what’s been going on while I’ve been in my sickbed.’

  Monty clicked along behind him into the office. George lobbed him a liquorice treat.

  ‘There you are – that’s your lot. Settle down now.’

  Monty subsided with a grunt behind the chair, head resting on his paws. George opened the current stock ledger and sat up straighter with surprise.

  ‘My goodness!’ he said. There was quite a list of sales in Vera’s infantile handwriting. As well as the serpentine-fronted sideboard purchased by Love’s Young Dream, a mahogany dining table and chairs had gone – and even that huge oak tallboy that had been sitting there for weeks. The buyer was not a name he recognized. Passing trade perhaps.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Good old Vera.’ She had told him this, come to think of it, but he had not been in a state to take it in. There was no need to have worried. Vera was clearly keeping everything in order.

  He sat back, his thoughts untethered. He had the whole afternoon – he should get on with something. Should he make a start on sorting through Win’s things, while he had private moments without all these women insisting on helping? But his mind shied away from this, as much from the resulting emptiness of drawers and cupboards as from the task itself. No. Too final. Gratefully, he remembered her presence with him during his fever. He couldn’t start clearing out her possessions while it still felt as if she might walk in at any moment.

  Easing his chair closer to the shelves, he picked out a couple of old ledgers and flicked through them, looking at past years of trading, items listed in his own faded handwriting. He could remember a good many of them, where he had bought them and from whom; who had bought them off him.

  The two clippings fell out from one of them as he riffled the pages, their paper sulphurous yellow, a rusted staple holding them together. It was a moment when his younger self met him as if round a bend in the road and it took him some seconds to recognize what he was seeing. He stared, frowning at the grainy picture. It was of the Prince of Wales, before all that palaver with Mrs Simpson. He was opening the British Trade Fair in Buenos Aires, surrounded by ripples of flags and a blaze of lights, in March 1931. That’s why he had cut it out, evidently. It was three years after he had been there himself.

  The other was the picture of him, taken that day by Joe Black, his London employer, which had ended up in one of the Sussex newspapers. He stood, posed in front of an ornate marble mantelpiece.

  George gazed, half unbelieving now, at the stolid eighteen-year-old in a tight suit, hands clasped in front of him. He could almost feel the blush that had risen in his cheeks that day in Lord Buckleford’s grand house as Joe Black instructed, ‘All right lad, keep it still.’ Behind him, arranged close together on the mantel for the purpose of the picture, were the Allodola Bronzes, Mars and Venus, each on horseback. They were exquisite pieces from the Florentine workshop: two of the most beautiful pieces he had ever seen. When he first caught sight of them, he had felt the hairs stand up on his skin, so lovely were they, so perfect. And he must have been one of the last people to see them together, that day in 1926, before the blunder that had separated them. The papers came to Joe for the photograph eventually, as they tried to track the missing Mars down, but it had been too late.

  How strange that this should come to light just when he had had that dream. He knew where Mars was all right. Mars had found his way to the Americas. But it was the exquisitely beautiful Venus who had cantered through his dream the other night. Venus, whose tragic loss of her pair had seemed an extension of all the tragedy suffered by the Buckleford family.

  Lord Buckleford’s three sons had all been army officers in the Great War. None of them returned to their Sussex village. By 1926, Lady Buckleford had also died and, with his heart in tatters, Lord Buckleford was selling the manor. In the division of what should be kept, what sold, Mars was mistakenly packed up and – as George had discovered when he came upon the bronze two years later in in Paul Lester’s estancia in Argentina – exported. Venus, it seemed, had been subsequently sold off in haste. Without Mars, she was of far less value. But George had always wondered whether the loss of her other half had been too painful a reflection for Lord Buckleford of his own solitary state. Venus disappeared from view. For over thirty years now, since rediscovering Mars, he had longed to find her again. Somewhere in his mind, he had been keeping an eye out for Venus’s beautiful form, her swathes of hair and downcast eyes, ever since.

  April

  Six

  1.

  When is it going to warm up? George wondered, pausing to look out as he washed up his morning porridge pan. A harsh wind was shifting the clouds across the sky with unusual speed, the sun flashing in and out.

  ‘Porridge,’ he said, resting the saucepan on the rack and clearing bits of onion-skin out of the plughole. ‘That’s the thing.’ Eating porridge was like pouring concrete into foundations and he could certainly do with some in his. Over the ten days since he had climbed out of bed, wobbly as a newborn calf, his recovery had been slow. He kept thinking about the need to plant his potatoes and onions, but even now he still felt muzzy of head and cotton-woolly of leg.

  ‘It’s the Result of Bereavement,’ Vera counselled, in a way that suggested this was somet
hing she had just read somewhere. ‘It’s not just a mental thing you know.’

  Vera was being especially authoritative these days. And not without reason. She had been so busy selling off the stock, and at good prices, that the place was beginning to look frugally furnished rather than offering the atmosphere of elegant profusion for which George aimed. He really must get out buying. Tomorrow – that’s what he’d do. He’d get the van out – and there was that auction over near Marlow . . .

  He was just pulling on his old tweed jacket when there came an urgent knocking at the back door. He found Kevin on the step, Holland overall hanging open to reveal a waywardly buttoned shirt. Evidently he had been sent to deliver a message so pressing that he was still in the middle of his elevenses – or as it happened, half past nineses – which consisted of a cheese and onion sandwich. Arduous feats of chewing and swallowing had to be undertaken before he could utter a syllable.

  ‘Clarence says –’ he managed, before having to pause, his Adam’s apple bucking alarmingly.

  ‘Take your time, boy,’ George advised.

  ‘He says you’d best come,’ Kevin declared after a last, challenging swallow. His face brightened at this achievement. ‘Bit of bother.’

  The workshop, which usually gave off sounds of hammers and chisels, the rasping circular saw and shouts of male voices, had fallen silent. George stepped inside to find the familiar sawdust and varnish smells, and his men, Alan and Clarence, standing beside the mahogany bureau bookcase which Lady Byngh’s ‘man’ had brought in a couple of weeks earlier. As one would imagine to be the case with most of Lady Byngh’s possessions, it was in urgent need of succour.

  ‘What’s the trouble, Clarence?’ As usual, George found himself addressing Clarence with a joviality verging upon the idiotic, to dispel the aura of sepulchral gloom that Clarence generated around himself.

  Clarence, sleeves rolled up, prodded the piece of furniture with his right index finger as if to warn it what was coming, then folded his gristly arms and stood back, staring at it. Everyone waited for him to utter.

  ‘That,’ he said at last, with a grim nod at the thing, ‘is mated.’

  George looked in consternation at the tall piece of furniture, with its glazed cupboard doors – some panes missing, others cracked – its elegant broken pediment cornice, the wood of the back and drawers all gasping for cleanliness and nourishment but which should eventually polish up nicely. The piece that Lady Byngh had called ‘my Hepplewhite’.

  The thing about Clarence – however galling – was that he was almost never wrong.

  ‘You’d better show me.’ George realized that as he had been ill in bed when it arrived, he had never even had a look at the thing. ‘Are you sure?’

  Clarence uncrossed his arms and again prepared himself to speak.

  ‘It is Hepplewhite, surely?’ George pressed him, impatient for this verbal event to begin.

  ‘The top part might be,’ Clarence declared at last. ‘The state it’s in dun’elp. Covers a multitude of deception, all that filth on it. But look ’ere.’

  At the point where the top and bottom met, in one small place at the side, he scraped away at the coating of decades of grime, nicotine deposits and ancient furniture polish which covered it like a sick man’s sweat. After a moment, horrified, George saw it appear: a definite join. Together they tugged out the lower drawers, having to stop for a bout of sneezing brought on by the dust. Close up, everything about the bottom half of the piece screamed ‘pastiche’.

  ‘And the feet—’ Clarence pointed a spindly finger. ‘Those feet should have cried out to us.’ The bracket feet, though on the face of it in the right style, were ill proportioned and too large.

  George stood up slowly, fingering the sticky veneer. I’ve had my eye off the ball, he thought.

  ‘It’s a clever match,’ he remarked, while he tried to think what else to say.

  ‘It is,’ Clarence agreed. ‘But she’s a pup all the same.’

  George rubbed his hand back and forth through his hair as he did when he was bothered.

  ‘You wouldn’t expect it – not someone like her, would you?’ Alan said. He sounded unusually sullen.

  ‘She said it had been in her family for generations,’ George said. Foolishly he realized that as Lady Byngh occupied the tip of some branch of the aristocracy, however attenuated, he had not questioned whether the piece would be genuine.

  ‘I’d say that bit is a good forty or fifty years younger than the top,’ Clarence said.

  ‘Yes,’ George said humbly, ‘I can see you’re right. I’m most grateful to you, Clarence.’

  A slight flexing of Clarence’s lips indicated a certain satisfaction with himself. Sour old bugger, George thought fondly.

  Kevin stood watching, picking shreds of onion out of his teeth with a wood splinter.

  Alan, who was leaning against the workbench, arms folded, said, ‘Well – are you going to tell her? She wants it sent back to her before she ships it off, you know.’

  This presented a rare dilemma. Neither George nor Clarence had any interest in deception or charlatanry. Normally it would not even be a question. Genuine was genuine and their pride lay in affirming it. But this was Lady Eleanora Byngh. It was as if she was there in the room with them suddenly, in her singed old tweeds, her bird’s-nest hair and random stockings. She had brought the best that she could find to them, having raked through her frowsty house and the remnants of her pride to find a gift of some standing for a distant young relative, who presumably had no idea of the state in which she lived. The bureau bookcase would be taken to Kent, where it might sit tight for decades before anyone discovered that they had been endowed with a Hepplewhite mule.

  ‘No,’ George said quietly. ‘I don’t think we are. It’s the restoration she’s paying us for. Just do your best for her. Let her enjoy it for a bit. And let’s hope that’ll be that.’

  The men’s eyes met – except for Kevin’s, which seemed to be, for the time being, in a state of post-sandwich vacancy. They all nodded.

  2.

  ‘Off out, are you, Mr Baxter?’

  ‘Morning, Kevin!’ George sloshed a last bucket of water over the front of the car. It was an elegant Standard Vanguard saloon and he enjoyed the sight of its grey paintwork dripping and shiny clean. He couldn’t have gone out with it in the deplorable state it had been in – you could hardly tell what colour it was. You had to make a good impression, best foot forward on parade and all that. He turned towards the house with the empty bucket. ‘Yes – off to an auction. Need to stock up.’

  Kevin loped after him. ‘Could I come, d’you think? Just this once? I’ve never been to one of them auctions. Never been nowhere much at all.’

  ‘Well—’ George turned at the door, stalled by this tragic admission. ‘Yes, why not? There’s nothing that can’t wait today, I don’t think. I’ll be ten minutes. Go and tell Clarence – and bring your sandwiches with you.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Mr Baxter!’ Kevin, enraptured, disappeared across to the barn with an unprecedented turn of speed.

  George changed into a tweed suit which he considered made him look rather racy. He had recently had a haircut, was trying to pull himself together. Got to start somewhere after all. He gave himself what he hoped was a winning, dimply smile in the mirror. Downstairs he found Vera close up to another mirror in the hall.

  ‘Ju’ ’eeing ’o ’y ’ace,’ she mumbled, in the process of applying more of the pink lipstick.

  ‘I’ll have to leave Monty here today,’ George said. ‘He’d be no help at all where I’m going.’

  ‘Oh that’s OK,’ Vera said to his reflection. She rubbed her lips together. ‘He’ll be all right.’ She turned round and eyed George. ‘Ooh – you’re looking smart today, Mr Baxter.’

  ‘Thank you, Vera.’ Gratified, he examined her in turn. She was wearing a well-tailored navy suit with her clicking heels and that hair was definitely different.

  ‘So are you,’ he
said. It was true. She looked more . . . What was the word? Sophisticated?

  ‘Well . . .’ Vera smoothed her hands first over her hair, then over the collar of her jacket. ‘I can’t go about looking like a cleaner if I’m in the shop, can I?’

  ‘No – of course. You’re quite right.’ He felt a wave of gratitude towards her. It was true, the addition of ‘my tranny’, the little transistor radio that had joined the other items in Vera’s basket, made his kitchen a rather noisier place these days. But goodness knows she did bring life and vigour with her. Bashfully he added, ‘You’re doing a fine job, Vera.’

  She blushed with girlish pleasure. ‘Am I, Mr B? Truly? I’m really, really doing my best!’

  ‘You’re doing excellently,’ he laughed. ‘Why d’you think I’m having to go and stock up today? You seem to have sold half the shop since I’ve been out of action!’

  Vera radiated gratification at this praise. Then her face became anxious. ‘And you don’t mind that . . . Well, I’m not cooking as much, and . . .’

  ‘But I can cook now, thanks to you! Though I’m sure Alan’s glad of a meal now and then.’

  ‘Oh I can do that.’ Her expression became solemn. ‘I just mean – well all the extra things I used to do. I just don’t seem to get around to all my bottling, and I’m not making as many pies and all those sorts of things. Alan’s getting a bit . . . Anyway, I thought you might mind?’

  The extent of George’s relief was like an iceberg submerged beneath his smile. ‘Vera, my dear – we’ve enjoyed your pies for many a year. But you’re moving on to other things. Pies will have to come second. Of course I don’t mind.’

  Vera’s pink mouth spread wide. In fact there was much mutual beaming. ‘Oh I knew you’d understand, Mr B. And I’m so lucky to have such a nice boss!’ She was just moving off again when she turned.

  ‘By the way – Mrs Linklater still hasn’t paid her bill.’