A New Map of Love

by Annie Murray

  George managed to swallow a rising remark that he was neither a member of the police force, nor of her personal staff.

  ‘Put the list out to your colleagues – fellow dealers or whoever they are.’ She gave an imperious wave of the hand. ‘No doubt some of it will turn up quite soon. They didn’t seem the sharpest knives in the drawer. But the worst of it is, they stole the Hepplewhite, the one your man polished up for me.’

  ‘Yes – Miss Persimmon told me,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that.’ Secretly he wondered if this might be a blessing.

  ‘Of course, I’m quite distraught,’ she announced, not sounding so in the least. George wondered if anyone would ever be able to recognize that Lady Byngh was distraught beneath her, at best gruff, but more commonly rude and aggressive manner.

  ‘However,’ she went on, ‘fortunately, Roderick need not be without a wedding gift. I have a plan B. Ah – here comes Percy.’

  Persimmon’s exertions on the staircase were audible long before she appeared.

  ‘Let me . . .’ George half rose from the chair.

  ‘No!’ Lady Byngh barked, so that he descended again swiftly. ‘Don’t interfere. She gets very put out.’

  An erratic clumping of feet, accompanied by rattlings and clinkings, preceded Persimmon’s entrance: a shove of the shoulder against the door and the manoeuvring of an unfeasibly vast tray. George watched with apprehension as she wove across the room to the chest of drawers, which offered the only bare surface, and deposited it with a crash of bone china. A teaspoon leapt to the floor.

  ‘I brought you some boo-doir biscuits,’ Persimmon announced, lifting the plate as George hurried over to retrieve the spoon. On the dressing table, he noticed, were enough things – picture frames, brushes, bottles – to persuade him that this really might be Lady Byngh’s bedroom.

  As the coffee-pouring took place, Lady Byngh recited the toll of her losses from her list: the Hepplewhite bureau, eight dining chairs described as Chippendale, a lady’s work table with chess set on top, a wash stand, a Windsor chair, Chinese vases and numerous other items of china, tea caddies, various other treasures and gold jewellery.

  ‘From India,’ Lady Byngh elaborated. ‘Not the sort you could actually wear, of course. Dreadful, heavy, native stuff. But solid gold. It belonged to Mother.’

  ‘Huh!’ Persimmon interjected, shuffling over with little white cups of coffee. ‘Mother!’ she added with apparent venom before heading for the door.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ George called after her, even though he did not much care for coffee. She made another low ‘huh’ sound, but gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

  ‘Fetch plan B, Percy!’ Lady Byngh shouted after her.

  ‘That’s what I’m doing!’ shrieked Persimmon.

  While they waited for the whole stair-climbing business to begin again, Lady Byngh tapped the list in her lap, covered with her looped handwriting. He saw with surprise that her hands were rough, the nails chewed and broken.

  ‘Most annoying,’ she said. ‘I’m most concerned about the boy’s wedding. My nevew, you know.’

  ‘I suppose you could buy something,’ George ventured. ‘I mean, if you no longer have anything of more sentimental value.’

  She fixed him with a look of baffled contempt. ‘My dear, one doesn’t buy antiques – one inherits them.’

  George swallowed. ‘If that were the case, one would hardly make one’s living selling them – would one?’

  Lady Byngh gave him another look of distaste, one that seemed designed to eliminate his very existence. He forced down the mutinous rage rising in him. It’s just her upbringing, he told himself. She can’t help it. Poor old dear, clinging to her things. He took a bite from one of the sugar-coated biscuits. It tasted of dust.

  Persimmon reappeared, in surprisingly good wind after her ascent, George thought, a newly lit cigarette in its holder in one hand and a silver teapot in the other.

  ‘Plan B,’ Lady Byngh said, showing signs of brightening. Her face lost some of its grouchy bullishness. She added something George did not understand, which sounded like, ‘Ba-lo Percy.’ One of those Indian orders, he guessed. Watching Persimmon deliver the thing to the bed, George realized that though she had her own style of cantankerousness, he could not detect any resentment in her manner at being so ordered about. She had perhaps long been a servant, he thought, watching her depart through the door again.

  ‘Now, Baxter.’ Lady Byngh thrust the teapot in his direction. ‘I want you to look and see if this will do for Hughie’s boy. It’s got to be something good. I don’t want to let the side down. Percy’s given it a good polish. Those awful louts didn’t find this – it was at the back of a cupboard.’

  George was tempted to tell her at this point that the marvellous Hepplewhite bureau, about which so much had been heard, was not in fact the pure treasure she imagined. But he kept quiet. That particular news did not reflect well either on himself or Lady Byngh.

  He handled the teapot, examining it. It was a well-proportioned piece, of medium size, with the streamlined grace of an ocean liner.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said at first sight, praying inwardly, don’t let it be plate. Eager people were forever coming to him to sell what they assumed were solid silver heirlooms, only for him to have to enlighten them that the silver part only went skin deep. Even before he turned this one over, he was pretty sure it was the real thing. The first of the hallmarks on its slightly concave base confirmed it. He began to breathe more easily.

  ‘Will you tell me?’ Lady Byngh urged. He was surprised by the sudden softness of her voice, containing something close to humility. ‘I’ve never know about silver marks. Well,’ she startled him with a gruff chuckle, ‘or about much else, come to that. I’d like to know something about it.’

  George turned to look at her. Her face was intent and there was a youthful eagerness in her eyes that touched him. Silver was something he knew about, relished. ‘Certainly,’ he said. He pointed the lion out to her. ‘See this one? The lion passant, sterling silver.’

  ‘So it is solid silver?’

  ‘Ninety-five per cent at least, yes. Now, see this one?’ She leaned to look and gave a gasp of pain.

  ‘Sorry – let me hold it closer. That mark is the monarch’s head. You see, in the period when this was made there was a tax to be paid on silver – from 1784 onwards. The monarch’s head was a duty mark. It started then because they needed money to fund the American war – the War of Independence, that is. But I’m sure it continued to come in very handy.’

  ‘Ah –’ She peered closer, sounding uncertain. ‘So . . . oh dear, I don’t remember much. Schooling a bit patchy. I read up on whatever I can, but . . .Who’s that supposed to be?’

  ‘Well, see these other marks?’ Enjoying this small authority, he pointed to an ‘O’ to one side and a crowned leopard opposite it. ‘The leopard means it’s a London piece. That’s the London silversmiths’ mark. And every year they’d mark them with a different letter. So far as I remember, “O” would be round about 1810. So, that makes the monarch George the Third.’

  ‘I see.’ She was steady now and interested; somehow more normal. ‘And the last one – those initials? The maker?’

  He was careful now, diplomatic. The initials CB were set close above GB. He happened to have seen them before.

  ‘Yes – they were a husband and wife partnership. Caroline and George Blakeley.’

  ‘You surely don’t mean it was made by a woman?’

  Her sceptical tone got under his skin. He forced a smile, cradling the gleaming thing in his hands. ‘Actually, it’s possible. There were women silversmiths, skilled ones. But they may have overseen the business together, managed other craftsmen. It’s hard to be sure.’

  She stared at him. God, he thought, it was hard to like the woman.

  ‘But is it good?’ She was insistent, almost childlike.

  It was good enough, he thought. After all, would the fortunate Roder
ick have a clue anyway? Though not rare or outstanding, and just one of thousands of items of the period crafted by smiths all over London and elsewhere, it was still an honourable piece.

  ‘It’s very fine,’ he told her. ‘I’d say it would make an excellent present – and it’ll be much easier for you to send.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Lady Byngh subsided suddenly into the pillows as if a string holding her taut had been cut. ‘Got to do my best for Hughie’s boy.’ She closed her eyes for such a long pause that George thought she had drifted into sleep. Relieved, he was about to rise and creep from the room when she opened them again, looking perfectly alert.

  ‘I su-ppoose,’ she drawled, ‘you imagine that Percy and I are a couple?’

  Her face crinkled, possibly in amusement at the sight of George’s inability to bring forth a single sensible word in reply to this. In fact the thought had not crossed his mind. His only observation had been to wonder that Lady Byngh seemed to have reduced Persimmon, as she did everyone, to an object at her beck and call and nothing more.

  ‘Not all women who resort to “shacking up” together are lesbians, you know.’

  ‘Er, no. No,’ George agreed fervently, though this was a generalization that until this moment he had not found it necessary to formulate. Heavens above – thoughts scrambled ineffectively in his brain – why did he always seem to get into things like this, without ever asking to? ‘No, quite.’

  ‘Percy has only been back with me for the last couple of years in fact. I was married once, you know. Look—’ She nodded peremptorily across the room. ‘There on the dressing table.’

  The dressing table, with a toilet mirror on the top, was draped with a length of turquoise silk, parrots threaded through in red and gold. Among the feminine bits and pieces he saw two framed photographs.

  ‘The one at the front is my brother – poor darling Hughie,’ Lady Byngh instructed.

  ‘Ah.’ George groped for something positive to say. For some reason he came out with, ‘Families are a great blessing, aren’t they?’

  ‘Huh,’ Lady Byngh retorted. ‘I’m glad you think so.’ He felt foolish, wondering why he’d said it. It was hardly something he knew for himself.

  He glanced back at her for a second from the faded picture of an earnest, round-faced young man in cricket whites, with unruly-looking waves of hair. There was a slight resemblance between them, in the set of the face, the heavy brows. He couldn’t help but think that the boy looked a trifle gormless. From her tone he concluded that poor darling Hughie was no longer with them. Killed in one war or another, he wondered? Perhaps the same went for Lady Byngh’s erstwhile husband.

  The other frame displayed a classic wedding portrait of the period: softly focused in sepia with an abstract studio background. The groom, with thin, tapering handles of moustache and brilliantined hair stared at the camera with apparent resentment. He had on some sort of uniform, though George was not sure which one – something colonial-looking. Beside him, the veil lifted back from her face, sat a surprisingly mature-looking woman, dark hair pulled back under a pearl tiara, emphatic brows and the same eyes he could feel watching him now as he examined the picture. The young Eleanora Byngh’s features gave the impression of gritted teeth, rather than abundant joy.

  ‘Last ditch,’ Lady Byngh commented. ‘Thought I’d better give it a try. Play the game as one was expected to. Mother wanted to net him because he was a stray baronet. Ghastly mistake. Of course, poor old Archie went and got himself shot by the Japs in the jungle somewhere, the silly boy. But I’d bolted long before then. Six weeks after the wedding, in fact.’

  ‘Six weeks?’ George was too astonished to measure his response. ‘My goodness – that can’t have gone down very well.’

  Lady Byngh snorted. ‘My dear, you have no idea.’

  3.

  Exhaustion settled on him as he stepped out into the rose-scented afternoon; a heavy-headed longing to do nothing but sleep. Even with his jacket and tie flung on the back seat, sleeves rolled, the heat was soporific. The air seemed to slump in through the opened windows, even in the cool tunnel of conifers. He rejoined the glare beyond, the unbroken blue of sky, the green ripple of barley across the hillside.

  By the time he got home it would be almost four. An hour until they shut up shop. Customers seldom came in late on a Friday. He could have a cup of tea instead of that vile coffee, a quiet hour in the office, perhaps even a snooze? He breathed in, then let out an airy sound of release. It felt as if he had been in Greenburton House for several days. In fact, it had been barely an hour and a half.

  As he turned into the drive of Chalk Hill House, it was immediately obvious that something was up.

  Vera, arms folded, was standing at the front door, Alan on the gravel in front of her, making agitated motions with his hands. At the level of Vera’s knees, George could just see Monty’s head looking out, ears quivering as he adjusted his gaze to whoever was speaking. The dog had a bewildered air, which George immediately began to share.

  Seeing him arrive, the two of them stopped arguing and stood waiting, Alan pink and het up, Vera tight-lipped, mutinous. As George climbed out of the car, he glimpsed Clarence and Kevin sloping back into the workshop, from where they had been watching the goings-on.

  Monty tore out to meet George as if in delight that an intermediary had arrived on the scene.

  ‘Hello, old chap.’ George grabbed a moment’s refuge in stroking the dog’s jowls, then straightened, with an imminent feeling of being about to sink once more out of his depth. Monty wandered off to sniff round the shadiest edges of the yard.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked, attempting a brisk air of authority.

  Alan gestured at Vera, as if towards someone beyond help. ‘You tell ’im,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s just—’ George had never heard Vera speak like this before, bitter and resentful. ‘He says I’ve done wrong. We had one of them knock-you-uppers round . . .’

  ‘Knockers!’ Alan erupted. ‘You can’t even get that right!’ George was surprised and appalled at the way he spoke to her, but he tried not to show it.

  ‘I see?’ he said encouragingly. He knew a number of the knockers who worked the area, men who did not have shops but who worked door to door, buying and selling on. George had nothing against most of them. The ones he knew were lively characters who got about quite a bit. In fact there were one or two he had asked to keep an eye out for him – ‘Venus on horseback, old boy? Unusual. Still – if I see her I’ll tip you the wink.’ And he’d had some good deals through them, often celebrated after with boozy meals in pubs around the county.

  ‘Who was it?’ he asked. ‘Not old Arthur Salmon, or Reg Dickson?’

  ‘No,’ Vera retorted. ‘I’d’ve known who they were. This was a gingery chap, said his name was Charlie Bird.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know.’ George recalled him. A younger bloke, used to be a greengrocer before he decided he could make more out of antiques.

  ‘I told you, Vee!’ Alan insisted. George was struck again by the crouching force of his anger. He seemed ready to explode.

  ‘Yes, but he wasn’t anyone I’d seen before,’ Vera said. ‘I mean, I can’t just let anyone in. How’m I supposed to know who you can trust? Anyway, all I did was say you weren’t here and he should come back. That’s all.’

  George was at a loss as to what the problem was. If Charlie Bird was after something, he’d be back. Deals were like women: they brought out male persistence.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ he said, tiptoeing through the mysterious turmoil that all this seemed to have aroused. ‘No harm done.’

  ‘Huh!’ Alan folded his arms now and stared at the ground.

  ‘Vera – could you please go in and take Monty with you?’ George suggested. ‘Put the kettle on – I’ll be in in a moment. Alan, a word, please.’

  Alone, the two men stood in silence. George felt a drifting apathy move through him. The easiest thing would be just to
go inside, have a sit down and a cup of tea. But he was disturbed by what he had seen. He roused himself to speak.

  ‘Something else bothering you, Alan?’

  Alan’s head jerked up, arms unfolded and his whole lanky height seemed to increase.

  ‘She shouldn’t be giving orders around ’ere.’ The words poured out, as if he had been longing to say them. ‘It’s not her place. It’s not . . . it’s just not right.’

  ‘But . . .’ George attempted, but the flood had only just begun.

  ‘Twenty years we’ve been married. Twenty! And now she goes round handing out orders, tells ’im to go away – and the feller, Charlie, ’e comes out to the workshop and d’you know what ’e says? ’E says, “Who’s that old dragon in the house then? I ain’t seen ’er before.” And a few other things ’e has to say which I won’t repeat.’ Alan leaned towards George, his face distraught. ‘That’s my wife he were talking about, Mr Baxter. How would you like it, eh? Seeing your missus getting—’ He gestured with his hands again, palms up, as if waiting for the right words to settle in them. ‘Getting above herself, as if she’s too good for the rest of us – oh!’ He turned away and strode off, as if from an unbearable thought.

  ‘But no harm’s been done, you know, Alan,’ George started after him, but Alan flapped his arm as if warning him to keep his distance and walked away, shaking his head.

  In the kitchen, he found Vera at the sink, arms folded again, staring out over the garden. Monty was sitting at her feet looking up at her, his natural expression of woe suited to the times. The kettle whispered in the background.

  ‘It’s all right, Vera,’ George said from the doorway. ‘You really haven’t done anything wrong – I don’t blame you for being cautious. Old Charlie’ll be back if he wants something.’

  He heard a sniff. Vera turned, red-eyed, a handkerchief screwed up in one hand.

  ‘I haven’t changed all that much, have I?’ she appealed.