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

by Catherine Gaskin

  But Hardy’s was in my blood, whether I liked it or not. There had been no thought of refusal when Gerald had suggested that I join him on this visit, seemingly casual, unbidden so far as I was concerned, to Thirlbeck, home of Robert Birkett, 18th Earl of Askew, where we might find treasures, or perhaps – in Gerald’s favourite phrases – a load of old rubbish.

  II

  Gerald had told me to take the turn-off from the motorway at Penrith. I had thought there might be a stream of cars heading for the Lake District this Friday afternoon, now that the M6 had made access from Manchester so much quicker; but it was spring, and still cold, and the traffic, except for the long-distance lorries heading for the Border and Scotland, thinned out; a slashing rain closed the horizons, and the lorries flung dirt on the windscreen as we passed. The wipers clicked monotonously; Gerald dozed, as I thought he would, and I was left to my thoughts.

  Gerald had been so much of my life, and was still so much of it, guiding me, nudging me, pushing me where I seemed to falter or hesitate. He had been probably the closest and oldest friend my mother had ever had. They had met soon after I had been born, when she had been trying to set up in business in Kensington Church Street; he had introduced her to other dealers, taught her a great deal of what she had known about antiques, had kept a friendly eye on her rather chaotic business methods, tried to hold her back from the excesses of her own temperament, and sometimes hadn’t succeeded. He had watched her indulgently through a series of love affairs, and had always been there to comfort or humour her when they came to their inevitable end. He had never lectured or tried to change her. She had been a beautiful, passionate, exuberant woman, and in a world that too often contained dull, safe people, Gerald had prized her. For what he had done for Vanessa I loved Gerald, and now it seemed almost as if I had, with her death, slipped into her place, though I was unlike her in so many ways. Gerald had sat beside me on the plane to Zürich, and never offered me false hope that we would find her among the survivors. He had stood beside me when I had identified her body. It was his telephone call which had brought my father from Mexico. He had been a universal presence in the lives of both Vanessa and myself.

  Gerald had, of course, been my introduction to Hardy’s – that and the fact that Vanessa had been there every week, viewing, attending the sales when something interested her, sometimes stealing a good piece away for a low figure, sometimes seeing it go to another dealer who had a particular client in mind for its resale. Some buys had been inspired, some good, some foolish; the foolish ones bordered on mad extravagance. This quality in my mother had been well known, and hadn’t, I thought, helped me when I went for my interview with the directors of Hardy’s. But there were other things that helped. At her best, Vanessa had been brilliant, with a sharp eye when she bothered to use it. The interview hinged, I thought, on whether the directors believed I might have her brilliance, without her hasty excesses. I was the right age then – eighteen. Better, in their eyes, to have too little education than too much of the wrong kind. ‘If you’re right,’ Gerald had said, ‘we’ll teach you what you need to know. It’s hard work, unless you coast, in which case you’ll be gone long before your probation time is up. If, in the end, we take you into a department, you’ll work the way Vanessa never has. If you stay ... well, I don’t have to explain why you’ll think it worthwhile. By the way, the money gets better later – later, when we’re sure we’ve got you.’ They reminded me a little of Jesuits, bent on capturing the minds of the young, secure that afterwards there would be unquestioning devotion, almost fanaticism. I had come through the interview, Gerald carefully absenting himself, and had taken my place on the Front Counter, as everyone who worked for Hardy’s did for some period. Except for the beginner’s salary, it had been wonderful. I had everything going for me – my brilliant, flamboyant mother giving me an airy little wave as she ascended the great staircase to the salerooms, nearly always deeply engaged in conversation with some other dealer, nearly always, I noticed, a man; there was Gerald who was my friend and my mentor, and there was also the fact that it was no hindrance to be the daughter of Jonathan Roswell, some of whose paintings were even then beginning to appear in the salerooms, and were bringing very respectable prices. In my time on the Front Counter men smiled at me, and Vanessa had noticed that and approved – she would have felt let down by a daughter whom men hadn’t taken to. And then after a year on the Front Counter someone had decided where my aptitude might lie, and I went into the ceramics department. I saw rather less of Vanessa for the next few years because I had taken a flat on my own. I went on working, growing up, making a life for myself, and somehow waiting for something to happen – perhaps waiting for myself to turn into another Vanessa, or to become identifiably my own self. Neither of these things happened. Until the day of the plane crash I seemed purely the creature of Vanessa’s and Gerald’s influence – and Hardy’s.

  The rain drifted off into mist. The lorries were fewer. I enjoyed the sensation of power in the big car, the sense of being virtually alone on that fast, straight road. I had to keep watching that I didn’t slip over the 70-mile limit. Gerald liked fast, smooth driving, but he would have been mortified if I had been booked for speeding; to him it would have seemed a breach of good taste. Strange how he liked big, powerful cars, and yet had never willingly driven himself since he had come out of the army at the end of the war. Impossible to imagine him in some vehicle that laboured or rattled. Smoothness was Gerald’s way in everything, his whole life style. Of course I had not been there to witness how he had met the crises of his own young life; I had seen the portrait of the woman who had been his wife, and whose death had left Gerald childless, with not only his own quite respectable private income, but her considerable fortune as well. So besides what he earned from Hardy’s, moving always upwards and taking on a degree of administrative work along with his position in the valuations department, he had money for a way of life that had thrown him into the company of people who had trusted Hardy’s with the sale of some of their treasured possessions, people who didn’t want publicity for such sales. Who would know, except Gerald and a very few other people, if the Georgian silver was sold from the bank vault? Who would know if a replica was made for a necklace, which only the eye of the expert could detect? Naturally, there was always more interest aroused if some piece coming up for auction was known – the more publicity, the more people were drawn into the bidding; the provenance of the work, if it existed, always gave clues to the owner, and some pieces were too famous for their sale to go unmarked. The world of art sold publicly at auction was becoming very small. What went on in the rooms of private dealers was held to be their business alone; Hardy’s could afford no shadow of doubt on their transactions. Discretion was everything – discretion and judgement. Who came and bid for what, and on whose behalf, was also the business of the client. But Hardy’s displayed for public scrutiny what was for sale, offering what provenance existed, placing the whole weight of the reputation of the house behind what they backed as genuine, leaving alone, and to the decision of the buyer, that which was doubtful. It was a game of risk and gamble, and often of high excitement, hidden under a façade of enormous calm. So much was revealed, so much must remain hidden, and in the area of hazard. But in these days of inflation more and more people seemed willing to take the gamble that the work of art they bought was more valuable than the money they paid for it. People, like that sad man we had seen at Draycote Manor that morning, rummaged through their attics as newspaper items appeared telling of the staggering amounts of money some seeming trifle had brought at auction. The miniatures were looked at again hopefully, and the fussy collection of china dogs; they carefully took down a plate or two of the dinner service which had been put away in the top cupboards of the kitchen in their grandmother’s time. There could be heartbreak behind the sale of some single item, or a whole collection, cloaked, the owner hoped, by the discretion of Hardy’s and under the obscure designation of “The Property o
f a Gentleman”, or some other kindly shield and salve for pride. Of course it was all there, recorded in the auctioneer’s day books – the sale, the price, the owner’s name, the buyer, and if the object had ever passed through Hardy’s hands before – all of it there in the leather-bound books kept since Hardy’s had opened in St James’s almost two hundred years ago. Those books had miraculously survived the bombing of the premises during the war. I often thought that there might be those who wished they hadn’t survived. It must be painful to remember that it was on record that what had been sold in the Thirties for a bare hundred pounds or so, now, as inflation rushed on, went for many thousands. Pride would have liked the records of some of those sales wiped out – especially those who pretended that the silver was still in the vault, or the jewels remained there for security reasons. How much of all that Gerald literally carried in his head – Gerald, who seemed to me at times the epitome of Hardy’s.

  He had gone to the right schools, had spent his life among the rich and the powerful. Just too young for the First World War, he had been A.D.C. to a famous general in the Second. No medals for Gerald, but useful contacts, political as well as military. ‘I never was the stuff of heroes, my dear,’ he had once said of his war service. But he had turned it all to advantage, and used it for the advantage of Hardy’s. He was fluent in French and Italian, was part of the scene wherever the rich gathered. His quick, discerning eye had fallen on many art works in houses which were open only to invited guests. His wartime journals would never be for publication; my mother had told me that they were a record of the advance and retreat of armies, and unique in that they concentrated on the houses of the rich and the noble which stood in the path of those armies. No one really knew how much advice Gerald had given to the Allied Arts Commission on where they might search for the plundered masterpieces, the vanished treasures. It was not the sort of thing he would ever talk about. He had kept his own private record of those whose houses and fortunes had been destroyed. In his urbane, patient fashion, without a hint of patronage, he had spent his spare time searching out such people, gently probing to find if any of the treasures had somehow survived the holocaust, the destruction, the hungry years that followed. For some, the years were still hungry, but hunger had not eroded pride. It needed someone of Gerald’s tact to suggest how the problem might be alleviated. It was often through Gerald, his journal, and his fabulous memory, that some dazzling piece had turned up in Hardy’s salerooms.

  This venture today lay in the same province, brought about by Gerald’s instinct for timing, his patience and tact, his long-reaching contacts. And I was with him now because he had wanted me with him, and because I was only two days back from Mexico, and the shock of my mother’s death, and the spell of the man who was my father was still upon me, as the sun tan of Mexico showed on my wrists above the driving gloves.

  It was Gerald who had urged on us the decision to bury Vanessa’s body in the churchyard of the tiny Swiss village. ‘She wasn’t religious,’ he said, with truth, ‘and this is surely a more pleasant place than Highgate.’ And when Jonathan had turned to me after the service, with its harrowing row of graves newly made, and said, ‘Will you come back to Mexico with me for a few weeks? A few weeks of sun, Jo, and quiet. There’s nothing else but that – it’s all I can give you now,’ it had been Gerald who had pushed me towards the decision. ‘You should go, Jo. I’ll make it all right with Hardy’s. You’re due some holidays, aren’t you? – and any rate, they’d give you time off, I know. Better not to come back to London just now. Time enough in a few weeks.’

  ‘But ... I ...’ I looked at the stranger who was my father, never seen before, who was proposing that I should go with him, learn to know him after this space of twenty-seven years. ‘I don’t have any clothes with me ...’ I said lamely and stupidly.

  ‘We’ll get some in Mexico City. You won’t want much. San José is very remote, and completely unfashionable. Coming, Jo?’ A question, almost a challenge I had then answered with a nod, and had not regretted.

  San José had been what he had said – simple, remote, an almost peasant style of life lived by the numerous descendants of the Martinez family who had had the original land-grant of its huge acreage from Isabella and Ferdinand, licences to mine its silver from further kings of Spain. They were proud and very poor, and clinging stubbornly to the myth that they were still wholly Spanish, that no drop of Indian blood tainted their veins – which was what everyone in Mexico claimed, and none believed. Their sprawling hacienda was nearly in ruins – Jonathan told me that twenty years before he had stumbled across it, and had asked to rent one of the nearby ruinous outbuildings as a studio and living quarters. They had given the studio only for the price of the materials to mend the roof, and Jonathan had lived as a member of the family ever since – the most prosperous member, paying for expensive items like electricity, transport, and the food they couldn’t grow themselves. In those days it had been a large expenditure; these days, for him it was a pittance. They didn’t understand his worldwide reputation for painting what they considered were not true pictures at all, and so they didn’t take his work seriously. What they did take seriously was his almost tender concern for them, to keep their way of life going, even though the silver mines had long since passed from their control, and they lived as best they could from the poor land. So, close to fifty dark-eyed children followed him everywhere he walked – his niños he called them – chattering, vying for his attention. El Inglés they called him – not a Yanqui. And there was the beautiful, dark-eyed woman about thirty years old, whom I guessed was his mistress, a widow with three children, none of them his, and the family considered it yet another aspect of his strangeness that he should treat her with such generosity and gentleness. So he had stayed, and worked, and lived as part of their family group for twenty years, and as his daughter I was regarded as an object of curiosity and nearly veneration. At first I found it strange and uncomfortable – and in the end succumbed – to the place, to the gentle courteous people, to the atmosphere of life centuries ago.

  I could remember standing beside him staring up at the great stone sixteenth-century aqueduct which still fed the hacienda its water, turning my face to the sun. ‘How clear the air is – and the light’s so harsh.’

  ‘A painter’s light, Jo. I see everything in it – shapes and forms, everything I need. Bright, fierce colours and black shadows, this landscape says everything I want to say. I never have tried to paint what I see – just what the shapes are.’ And it was that, and his single-minded concentration, which had made him one of the foremost abstractionist painters of the world. ‘I’ll never leave here,’ he added. ‘If I left here, I’d die. And I’ll die before I leave here. They’ll bury me with all the rest of the family, Jo – there in the ground beside the chapel. You’ll understand, won’t you, Jo? – the way we left Vanessa on that hillside. It isn’t alien ground. Here is my home.’

  I had somehow, in that short time, both known and understood, in some degree. I had known at last why he and Vanessa had parted, had known why they never could have remained together. Impossible to imagine Vanessa in this setting, except as a transient visitor. Impossible to imagine him anywhere else. And when I witnessed him cough as soon as he got to the polluted atmosphere of Mexico City, I had understood much more. He only remained alive in that high, clear atmosphere of the mountains in a tropical climate, with heavy blankets and fires banked high at night against the sudden chill. In this serene, clear air he breathed, and lived, and worked. He had been right to ask me to come; now I had a father whom I not only knew, but had begun to understand.

  And then back to London, and hardly with my bags unpacked, Gerald’s phone call that he wanted me to come with him to visit two houses, and that I had the permission of my director, Mr Hudson, to stay with Gerald however many days were required. I read the accumulated letters at my flat – mostly they were letters of sympathy about Vanessa, and I had no heart to begin to answer them. I visit
ed Hardy’s, and everyone was kind, and said nice things about Vanessa, even those I knew hadn’t really admired her. I talked over the arrangements for this trip with Gerald, I wandered around in the basement of Hardy’s for a while, poking my head into departments I didn’t often visit – how long was it since I had been in the arms and armour section? – or stopped to give some time to the line of costumes accumulating on the rack? – or the row of dolls waiting for their particular sale? I went upstairs and spent twenty minutes in the largest of the salerooms where they were auctioning English pictures – quite important pictures. The sale was packed, with closed circuit television to another room, and the prices were running high; as usual it was all carried out with an air of nonchalance and familiarity, the various dealers murmuring caustic or deprecating remarks about what other dealers bought. It was all very far from the clear, calm silence of San José, and from the snow-covered mountain in Switzerland. I was back to my old world, but something had changed. At a coffee shop in Jermyn Street I found myself greeted by two young men from the coins and miniatures department of Hardy’s. At first we talked about Mexico, and then the talk drifted to Hardy’s – upcoming sales, expected prices; we couldn’t help it, any of us. We were all that way. I wondered for how many years we’d be doing the same thing, only the prices would be different. Afterwards I went and gave my routine donation of blood at St Giles’s Hospital – a card had been waiting as a reminder among the pile of mail. And then I went home and cooked some chops for supper, and sat and willed the telephone to ring and that it would be Harry Peers; but no call came from Harry. He had sent three cables, long, extravagant cables to Mexico, but no message waited for me here. I began to repack for this trip with Gerald. A kind of hurting ache came into my throat at the thought of Harry Peers. Gerald had told me he had flown unannounced to Switzerland on the day I had left with my father for Mexico, and had missed seeing me. That was Harry. In the end I finally did telephone his flat, and his manservant told me that Mr Peers was out of the country; he didn’t know when he would be back. So I would wait, and sometimes he would phone. I wished I could feel angry with him, but I couldn’t. Harry only operated by his own rules, and everyone who knew him came to understand that. I either could accept him as he was, or do without him. I didn’t want to do without him.