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

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘And how are you going to wake him up, Jessica? Doesn’t Nat Birkett know how valuable you are? How clever and how good you are at everything?’

  ‘He will,’ she said sharply. ‘Once I’m twenty he’ll realise. He’s been too used to thinking of me as a child. But he’ll realise.’

  Her voice was still very soft, like a whisper. Both of us spoke as if this were an entirely ordinary conversation, our tones level and calm. But I had seen the colour come more strongly to her cheeks, which always had the texture and appearance of a wax doll, and her china-blue eyes were brilliant and at the same time stony and hard, staring at me across the table with a strange fanatical glow of which I would never, until this morning, have believed her capable. What had Nat accused her of – greed, hate, jealousy, a blind, possibly a murderous rage? I gazed at her in fascination, and then my eyes flickered back to the bowl. Now I took it in my hands and turned it over, looking at the faint marks there, examining the glaze, tracing the line carving with my finger. There was a serenity in its execution, a lack of haste; it almost seemed to possess its own sense of time. I looked back at Jessica, and I couldn’t have told if it was she, so transformed, or the bowl I held in my hands that caused the tightening in my throat, the churn of excitement that seemed also mixed with fear, in my stomach.

  Her voice again, whispery, silky. ‘Why don’t you go? You know you’re not wanted here. None of you are wanted here. You’ve no business being here – upsetting things, putting things out of order. It was all right until you came. But you’ll go again, and we’ll have everything back as it used to be.’

  ‘Nothing will ever be as it used to be, Jessica. Lord Askew has come home, and that has changed things.’

  ‘He’ll go again. It doesn’t really belong to him.’

  ‘Who does it belong to, Jessica?’

  ‘To us. To my family, and Nat Birkett. Lord Askew might as well die and let Nat Birkett have what is his. Why do old men stay around, making other people wait for what should be theirs?’

  I thought she had the blank look of obsession now, the fixed eyes, the voice completely without emotion. And I turned and turned that bowl in my hands because she seemed mesmerised by the movement, and my pulse hammered in my wrists.

  I spoke very softly to her, as to a person in deep shock. ‘And did Patsy Birkett get in the way, Jessica? Did she make you wait too long for what is really yours? There was going to be an operation, and she might get well, and live for a long time, mightn’t she? She used to come and see the jewel, La Española, didn’t she? Your grandfather encouraged her to come – to see the jewel, to walk through the rooms. Your rooms, Jessica. Did you take the jewel out yourself that day? Did she find you in the Spanish Woman’s room with it? Or was it the other way around? Did you leave her there – alone, frightened? And when she didn’t come down, you didn’t go back to find out what had happened to her. Not then, nor all the next day, when they were searching.’

  Incredibly, there was the faintest trace of a smile on her lips, turning upwards as if in remembrance. ‘I did nothing to her. Caveat Raptor: Who Seizes, Beware. She held La Española as if it was already hers, and she walked around this house as if she already lived here. These rooms – my rooms. I did nothing to her. I didn’t even touch her.’

  ‘Jessica! No more! You’re imagining things again!’

  Tolson stood in the doorway that led from the service passage. His black, monumental frame seemed stooped, his shoulders rounded more than before, his arms hanging loosely like some great animal.

  And at the sight of him the bowl fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers and smashed in many pieces on the flagstone floor.

  CHAPTER 6

  I

  Then I was driving down the motorway towards London, the pieces of the bowl wrapped in a silk scarf, and packed among my clothes in a suitcase. I kept pushing the Mini near seventy, pushing until my teeth seemed to rattle with the vibration. I noted the stares of the drivers I passed, most of them driving much more powerful cars; often I got frantic and antagonistic blasts from horns when I did something especially stupid. But I kept pushing and sometimes taking foolish risks – except that in my present frame of mind, I really didn’t know what was foolish. I stopped when I had to at the service areas, to go to the toilet, to buy coffee in a plastic cup, and a wrapped sandwich which I ate later as I drove. All of England was going by in those hours, down from the sparsely populated region of the northeast, through the Manchester–Liverpool overspill, on and on down until the prettily luxurious, but still overcrowded Home Counties came up. It began to rain, and the driving grew harder, but I didn’t relax the speed. I got to Watford, and Hendon, and I could feel my eyes begin to sting and burn. And then I was enmeshed in the crawl of the evening rush-hour traffic, and there was nothing I could do but sit and stare at the lines of cars ahead, and those going in the opposite direction, listening to the click-click of the windscreen wipers; it was then I smoked the first cigarette since I had begun to drive, and let my thoughts deliberately dwell on what had happened at Thirlbeck.

  Askew hadn’t even seemed very interested when I told him – hadn’t even wanted to delay his breakfast to look at it. ‘You don’t seem to understand, Lord Askew. It may be very valuable, and I’ve broken it.’

  Unbelievably he had shrugged. ‘I’m afraid I have to talk in clichés, but I don’t know what else to say. It’s broken – plenty of things get broken. As well as people.’

  ‘But you do understand that I have to go and tell my director at Hardy’s. For someone who works with ceramics, I’ve been unbelievably clumsy. They expect better of me.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just sit down and have your breakfast, and let me have mine, there’s a good girl.’ He poured coffee for us both. ‘I really think you’re being a bit hasty over this. After all, what does it have to do with Hardy’s if something in my house gets broken? I simply don’t see the connection. Why does it become their business? Here, at least have some toast with that.’

  ‘Well, you did say you were considering offering the contents of this house for auction. What I’ve just done could seriously prejudice that. You might decide to take the sale to Christie’s or Sotheby’s ... or somewhere else. Whether or not this turns out to be what I suspect it might be, or quite worthless, is hardly the case. You wouldn’t expect anyone from Hardy’s to go round smashing things in people’s houses.’

  ‘My God, you do take yourself seriously. You mean to say if you happen to put a chip in an old kitchen cup you might get the sack?’ He laughed as he spoke, and plunged into a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage.

  ‘It’s hardly a matter of getting the sack. The thing is that I believed I might be handling something very valuable. There are degrees of carelessness, Lord Askew.’

  ‘You know you really are a bloody fool. You needn’t have said a word about it. If it was in use in the kitchen, no one had any idea it might be especially valuable. You could just have kept your mouth shut, and no one would have been any the wiser.’ He waved his fork in the direction of the pieces on the sideboard. ‘Looks like a perfectly ordinary bowl to me.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look like that to me. And I’m surprised you’d imagine I’d say nothing.’

  He looked at me hard. Then he laughed again. ‘Well ... I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to hear something like that. And especially from someone your age. No wonder Gerald sets such store by you. Noblesse oblige ... Scout’s honour ... and all the rest of it. I’m sorry I’m laughing. I just can’t help it.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Then I’ll try not to. But suppose I just say “forget it”? There was an accident. It happened to my property. I overlook it. I forget it. Now, do you still have to go rushing off and confess all to your director?’

  ‘I want to. I will. What I’d like to know is if there’s a chance that there’s any more – like that.’ I inclined my own head towards the sideboard.

  ‘
How should I know? The house is full of junk, isn’t it? – with a few good bits scattered about. You know how a family picks up rubbish through the years, especially if there’s a place to store it. Just take those damn boxes you’ve been going through. At least two hundred years of papers there, and probably not a single piece of it worth saving. Have you seen the attics? A real nightmare. If you combed them you might come up with a few more pieces like that. No doubt that’s where one of the Tolsons found it and decided to put it to use.’

  ‘It would be unusual for something like that to be lying around in an English country house unless it had been acquired in China. Can you remember, Lord Askew, if any of your family were in China – well, let’s say some time in the nineteenth century?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t alive then.’ He went back and helped himself to more sausage, sublimely indifferent. ‘There was, of course, old Major Sharpe. He was married to my grandfather’s sister. Used to come over from near Whitehaven every Christmas. He’d been holed up in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, and he insisted on retelling the story every time he came. They lived in a small place, and I seem to remember falling over Chinese swords and armour and all that sort of stuff. There were probably a few Chinese vases around. Since they didn’t have any children it’s quite possible all those bits and pieces came here to Thirlbeck after my great-aunt died. But I really couldn’t say. Once I went away to school anything might have happened here and I probably wouldn’t have noticed any change. It’s all a long time ago ...’

  All a long time ago. That was how families did it – collected these treasures often in complete ignorance of them. And the thought nagged again and again of Vanessa, who hadn’t been so ignorant. I remembered the prunus vase in the library which had been made in England, and my head ached with it all, and from the petrol fumes, and the day-long vibration of the flight down the motorway in the Mini. I hoped very much I was mistaken about what lay wrapped in the silk scarf in my suitcase.

  It was after 6.30 when I reached Hardy’s. The director of the ceramics department would probably have left, but I decided to go in. The daytime crowds were emptying off the streets in this part of St James’s, where almost no one lived, but many worked. I rang the night bell at the back entrance in an alley where the big delivery doors were, and was routinely examined through a viewer by the security man. ‘It’s you, Jo,’ he said, as he opened up. He’d known me since I’d begun visiting Hardy’s with Vanessa at about age fifteen, and he’s never called me anything else. ‘Mr Hudson’s still here. He said if you came you were to go straight up to him. Here, want to leave the bag?’

  I rummaged around and found the silk scarf with the pieces in it. Hardy’s wore an almost ghostly air at this time of day – with the big front doors closed, and the great stair empty, no voices, no buzz of conversation, no whisper of the supposed secrets and tips that dealers were thought to pass to one another, no sudden burst of laughter when someone told a good trade joke, no stiffening and over-polite courtesies between rivals who knew they would surely be bidding against each other at that day’s sale. I paused at the top of the stair, which led on to the salerooms, and for an instant they were peopled and full of sound, full of the life that daily flowed through Hardy’s. How long I seemed to have been away, and yet it was only a few weeks. Until a few weeks ago I could almost have wrapped up my whole life and believed it had been lived here, would go on being lived here. Then I heard the lonely clicking of a single typewriter coming from the outer office of Mr Hudson’s room. I went and knocked and walked in.

  Bunny Goodman, his secretary, looked up. ‘It’s you, Jo. He’s expecting you. Go in.’ As I passed she asked questions about Gerald, and then added something about Vanessa. ‘I was going to write you, Jo, but it seemed too formal, somehow. I’m awfully sorry. But I hear you’ve been out in Mexico with your father, and now that place in the Lake District with that dashing Earl. What a life! And here I am bashing out the same old letters.’

  It wasn’t going to be quite the same again, ever. The snow-covered mountain in Switzerland, and Mexico, and Thirlbeck, Askew and Nat Birkett, and my father Jonathan Roswell, all stood between. I was acutely conscious of the miniature in its leather pouch which had never left my possession since the day I had discovered where it truly belonged. ‘He isn’t really so dashing, Bunny. Just a very sophisticated, but not particularly brilliant man, who loves women, and good food and travel. He’s won medals and he shoots and rides – I suppose that’s it. It really isn’t all that glamorous when you live with it. And he’s getting on a bit.’

  ‘You can say that. I saw a photo of him once. I wouldn’t mind being around him. Well, better get on in to the Boss. He’ll think we’re chattering again ...’ She pulled the paper out of the machine. ‘That’s that for the day. I just thought I’d stay on a bit since the Boss was ...’

  She was another who had almost grown up at Hardy’s, working on the Front Counter, and then in the catalogue room, and finding her berth here as William Hudson’s secretary. She didn’t pretend to have the qualifications of any of the experts of the ceramics department, but she was, all the same, a very shrewd judge of whatever passed over her desk. It was the kind of learning that went on at Hardy’s; by seeing, feeling, and recording one learned.

  William Hudson rose from his desk when I entered. ‘Ah, Jo, there you are. I hoped you might come before I closed up for the night.’ He paused. ‘My dear girl, you look terrible! Here – ’ He went to a beautifully inlaid cabinet and produced a bottle and glasses. ‘A Scotch, Jo? I expect you’ve been on the road most of the day. Nasty weather for it, too.’

  I sipped the Scotch cautiously, but gratefully. ‘Mr Hudson, I don’t think you’ll be half as nice when you know what’s happened.’

  He leaned back in his chair, his gaze going fondly, as it often did during interviews with him, to the beautiful glazed pottery figure of a mounted drummer of the T’ang Dynasty which stood on top of the bureau.

  ‘Jo, I’ve had a telephone call from Lord Askew. I must confess it made me most curious. He said I was to take notice of absolutely nothing you said. He said he thought you were ... well, a little unsettled still after your mother’s death. Jo, what has happened?’

  I put the glass on his desk and brought out the fragments of the creamy-white bowl. ‘This is what has happened, Mr Hudson. And I broke it. I dropped it.’

  He drew the silk scarf towards him gently, and took a long time examining the pieces. He put a few of them together, getting an idea of the shape of the bowl, his fingers traced the carving just as mine had done that morning. He fingered the glaze, noted its crazing, turned the pieces back and forth. His face grew long in concentration, and as I watched, I saw the dawning of regret.

  ‘Well ... without betting my life on it, it looks terribly like that Ting-yao basin we had last year. Sung Dynasty. Beautiful piece – if it were in one piece.’

  ‘That’s it. I dropped it. It was in one piece this morning.’

  He looked across at me. ‘And Lord Askew wants me to pay no attention to anything you say. A slight accident occurred, he said. Nothing of any importance. It was his property, and he doesn’t in any way hold you responsible. In fact, he thinks you’re a little mad for being in such a state. Did you tell him, Jo ... Did you tell him about this?’ He prodded the pieces.

  ‘I didn’t say what I thought it was. I just said I suspected it might be very valuable. But I don’t know if he has any idea of how valuable. His ideas of value – well, it’s how much champagne it will buy, or how much does a horse cost, or a good car. I didn’t suggest ...’

  He regarded me bleakly. ‘Well, he absolved you of any responsibility. Absolutely. He made that quite clear. But of course he didn’t know that we sold that other one for forty-nine thousand pounds. That’s an awful lot of money to drop, Jo, isn’t it? Again his fingers gently touched the fragments. ‘And a very beautiful bowl.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. I told him I had to come and se
e you. He didn’t understand. He thought I needn’t have said anything. No one would ever have known.’

  He sipped his Scotch, and took some time before answering; he seemed to be giving all his attention to the T’ang horseman. ‘And you and I know different, Jo. You would have known – and that, in my mind, is what makes the difference between a person who does a job for what’s in it for him, and someone who does it because he can’t help it – does it for love, almost. I have to deplore your carelessness, and congratulate you on having a good eye for a piece that really is pretty rare. You could go a long way, Jo. I must see if there isn’t a place for you in Oriental ceramics. I fancy you might be getting a little tired of all those Meissen shepherdesses.’ He fingered one of the fragments again, carefully not looking at my face so that I had time to compose it again. ‘And as for this ... well, it can be mended, of course, but it can never be the perfect piece it was. Pity ... it would have been nice to offer another of that quality. They don’t come along that often. By the way, I assume Lord Askew was thinking of disposing of it?’

  ‘How could he? ... He didn’t know he had it! It’s all in such a crazy state up there. He was ready to have us come up there and go through the whole house. And then Mr Stanton got ill. Now Lord Askew seems to have settled in a bit. He doesn’t want to talk about business, and he doesn’t seem to want Mr Stanton to leave, even though he’s well enough now, I think. And this morning, when I broke this, I thought I might have ruined Hardy’s chances of having a perfectly magnificent sale ...’

  We launched into the talk that was close to both of us. For a time, as I described Thirlbeck, the barrier of age and status between us vanished. I told William Hudson about the crowded attics of Thirlbeck, the big ground-floor rooms crammed with furniture, the books, even the metal shutters. I found myself even telling of the night I had triggered the alarm system in the room which housed La Española. We were two professionals talking about what we loved; but I found there were things I could not say. I did not talk about the Rembrandt which gave Gerald so much worry, about the possibility of other pictures in a room I had never entered; I did not talk of the great hounds which followed me, and I said nothing about the miniature in my handbag. I said nothing at all about Vanessa ever having been at Thirlbeck. If that part of the story was ever told, it would have to come from Gerald. I said nothing, either, about the Book of Hours of Juana, and the translated fragment in the hand of Philip the Second. From this well-lighted office in St James’s, with the sound of the slackening evening traffic outside, the world of Thirlbeck seemed incredibly remote. I began, almost, to wonder if my imagination had not coloured too highly some aspects of that great house in its closed, hidden valley. But the pieces lying in the silk scarf between us were real enough.