He stopped as Askew’s hand suddenly slammed down on the desk. He turned a troubled, angry face from Gerald to Tolson, and then looked back at me.
‘Can’t we stop this?’ he said. ‘Can’t we remember that we’re talking about someone who didn’t steal these things, but who ran considerable risks to sell them quietly, and out of the country, most likely. Remember we’re talking about Vanessa Roswell. Remember that!’
Gerald answered him slowly. ‘I am remembering it, Robert. In fact. I haven’t yet quite taken the dimension of the situation, all its aspects.’ I watched him very closely. His voice was firm and decisive; he showed no trace of that tranquil invalidism which had hung on in the days after he left hospital. It was as if this shock – this news of Vanessa’s total involvement in Tolson’s regular plunder of the treasures of Thirlbeck – had shaken him back to full life, as if he was fighting once more, fighting to save what he could of Vanessa’s reputation and fighting to save what could be saved for Thirlbeck. And in this metamorphosis back into a healthy man, he had also resumed his cool, professional air, the man of the world of art, the man of the world of prices, who could calmly assess his situation before he moved on. ‘I am indeed remembering Vanessa. I’m remembering her in every aspect that I knew of her.’ His tone was thoughtful, and Askew’s anger seemed to fade. ‘I knew her as a woman who enjoyed city life, someone who functioned best surrounded by people, and talk, who thrived on the rumours and gossip, the in-fighting of her business. She had a very quick eye, Vanessa, though not always a true one. When she saw the best, she always recognised it. If it was doubtful, she also was doubtful, not certain in the area of second-best. What is taking time to adjust to is the Vanessa I didn’t know – the person who recognised the best in ideals, as well as objects. Obviously she believed passionately that what Tolson had set out to save was the best, and so she worked with him and others to sacrifice what must be sacrificed to keep this ideal whole. To do this she has dealt with objects, perhaps one or two objects that are among the greatest works of art our civilisation will ever know. It takes time to adjust, Robert. I have to adjust to a different Vanessa – one who could keep her secret to herself over all these years.’ He shook his head, and sighed. ‘An old man’s vanity, if you like, but I always flattered myself that Vanessa told me everything. And now I find that she made many journeys when I didn’t even know she was out of London – that she kept secret what she knew I should never know. She would have known that I would have had to put a stop to it one way or another – the easiest would simply be to have informed you. If she had ever wanted to unburden herself, the quickest way would have been to tell me. But she chose to remain silent, and work on alone, which wasn’t in character, as I saw her. Well, that’s another dimension I have to get used to. In the meantime, I must just try to evaluate what exactly was taken from here.’
‘To what purpose?’ Askew said. ‘Why try to put numbers and figures on it all? It’s gone, isn’t it? And Vanessa was the go-between in it all. None of us will ever understand why exactly she did it – though Tolson probably understands better than any of us. Did you understand, Tolson? It certainly wasn’t for profit ...’
Tolson stood there, his glasses masking his expression, his big frame seeming to block the light from the window. ‘Once she had agreed, I never asked her why. I find it difficult enough to explain why I did it myself. I asked for her help, and she gave it – far more than I had expected when I first approached her. We asked very few questions of each other. She never asked to see the farms that the money she brought had saved for the estate, and I never asked how she came by her contacts and arranged all the deals she did. I had made up my mind about her when she was here all those years ago, and my opinion didn’t change. I never mistrusted her in any of these transactions, though my brother did, in the beginning. After a while even he was convinced. Even he stopped puzzling over why she did it.’ His tone was so even he could have been talking of some ordinary transaction, a legal bill of sale, some trifling act of commerce, not a systematic act of smuggling and forgery on a grand scale. He had lived with it so long it was a fact of life to him.
Gerald tapped the desk with his pen. ‘Well, we all know that smuggling goes on constantly. We all know that there are buyers always ready for what they know must be smuggled and probably has been stolen. But there’s always some old family somewhere in Europe who are prepared to swear that that particular work of art has been with them hundreds of years. Someone will furnish provenance, even where it doesn’t exist. I would guess that for every painting that Vanessa took out of the country, her contact in Switzerland had a Hungarian prince or a Prussian count in exile who was willing to give it some sort of provenance. Exactly the kind of thing that happened here – the family who has treasures on their walls and are simply not aware of them until they are “discovered”. Oh – ’ he shook his head. ‘The art world is full of such tales, and lots of them true. If the article offered with the dubious provenance is itself genuine, all the experts have to do is see such things, and there’s no problem of selling. If you find a source like this to tap, the demand will exceed the supply.’
He turned sharply to look up at Tolson. ‘That was why she dared the Rembrandt, wasn’t it? You had run out of all the other things, and of the good pictures which were small enough to leave this country in a suitcase.’
Tolson nodded. ‘I don’t know anything about pictures. But she said we had taken all the really top class ones that could be taken. There was only the Rembrandt left. We hesitated for a long time about that. The man ... the one who did the copying didn’t want to take it on. Mrs Roswell told me he had grave doubts about his ability to reproduce such a painting. Mrs Roswell persuaded him. It was the money, I suppose. He was getting old, he’d been in prison for forgery, and the only employment he’d ever had after that was working for a firm of picture restorers. He wanted to be finished, to retire. So he agreed, when she convinced him that no one would ever see the copy – that no one but Lord Askew ever knew of its existence. You see, it all rested on my belief that Your Lordship would never come back here again. This was to be our last sale – well over a million pounds. I thought even Your Lordship would hardly need more than that. We would be in peace. No more trouble for Mrs Roswell. And the estate would be safe.’
‘The forger,’ Gerald said. ‘The man who’d been in gaol – would it have been Van Hoyt? He’s the only copyist I’m aware of good enough to have done that.’ He nodded towards the shadowed picture on the wall. ‘He went to gaol for forgery about fifteen years ago. I should have thought he was dead.’
Tolson shook his head. ‘It could have been him. Perhaps he went under another name. Mrs Roswell was very careful not to talk of names of people she had dealings with. I’ve been trying to remember a name ever since Miss Roswell asked me that question. I seem to remember something like Last ... perhaps it was Lastman. It seemed a sort of made-up name to me. Something Mrs Roswell used to avoid mentioning his real name. She had been in contact with him for about ten years. That was after we sold off most of the Chinese things, and the snuffboxes, and after that first painting – which I was sure you’d never remember because it was hanging in our wing – was gone. Your Lordship asked for money which I couldn’t possibly supply without selling several farms, and it was then Mrs Roswell said she’d try to find this person ... this Lastman.’
Gerald leaned back in his chair. ‘Perhaps it was a made-up name. Just the sort of bitter jest that a man who had been in prison for forging Dutch masters might make. You perhaps remember that one of the early teachers of Rembrandt was Pieter Lastman, no inconsiderable artist himself, but best remembered for that single fact. It could have been a supreme irony for Van ... for Lastman to have made his final copy a self-portrait of Rembrandt himself – ’ He stopped abruptly. ’Are you all right, Robert?’
Askew waved his hand impatiently. ‘Perfectly all right, Gerald. Perfectly. As well as anyone can be who finds out what other people have
been doing in his name – for him, at risk, for a very long time.’
‘My lord ...’ Tolson began.
Askew cut him off. ‘Tolson, just one more favour, please. Would you mind bringing me some brandy? Thank you.’
Tolson left the room. Askew nodded after him. ‘It is pretty shameful to come back and find that one man’s stewardship has been better than I could possibly deserve, much more than my treatment of him and this place merited. It shames me that he has borne this alone, and never came to me to tell me what straits my own negligence had placed him in. What an opinion he must have of me that he thought me incapable of responding to an appeal of desperation. Strange ... strange to think that he and Vanessa were some kind of superpatriots, in their fashion. So determined to hold on to this little bit of England, to keep it intact, that they both took unbelievable risks. One doesn’t see Vanessa that way – I agree with you in that, Gerald. Tolson, one understands better. After all, he was born to this place. But then, so was I. I simply failed to live up to it. They took the risks for this thing I inherited, and – well, I got the medals. They make it easy for one to get medals when there’s a war on. But what sort of awards would there have been for Vanessa and Tolson if they had been found out in any other sort of circumstances than these?’ His lips twisted upwards, but no smile came; his skin had a greyish tinge. ‘The Queen’s Award for Industry, perhaps? They were very industrious, weren’t they? Holding together nearly nine thousand acres of land – in this valley and outside of it – and a lot of it good arable land. Some of it, Tolson tells me, is now within zones with building permission. Even Tolson couldn’t have foreseen the rise in the value of land, almost any sort of land, when he first began this business. He just stuck to the principle that land mattered, and other things could go first.’
‘He didn’t foresee, either,’ Gerald said, ‘that there would be such an astronomic rise in the value of just about everything in the art market.’
‘Well, he made his choice, didn’t he?’ Askew answered. ‘After all, until Vanessa brought her experts here, he wasn’t sure that there was much of value here. It was just the instinct that somehow – no matter what demands I made of him and of this place – that he would hold the land together. As it happens, I now think he made the right choice. I might have possessed some half-baked socialist principles, but I obviously haven’t lived by them, have I? What shames me most is that he had to do it as he did – not telling me, and not daring to sell openly. If I had been here ...’ He shrugged. ‘But I wasn’t here. That’s the whole point. I was not here where I suppose I should have been. I chose to walk away from all this, and leave him the responsibilities. Can I complain about his management? I don’t have the right to.’
I licked dry lips. ‘You don’t intend to prosecute ...?’
I thought I saw beads of sweat stand out on his upper lip. ‘Prosecute? For God’s sake! The man hasn’t stolen anything! It’s all here, isn’t it? The land’s here, everything accounted for. What I’ve taken from Tolson’s life I can’t say – when I think of what he’s endured in worry all these years, I owe him. And prison, what will that do? – I know, I’ve been there. He won’t come out a reformed character. I see no reason why he should reform. And Vanessa – I can’t send her to prison. She’s dead now, and if it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have been on that plane – ’ He shook his head violently as I tried to cut him off. ‘Well, can you expect me to feel any differently? Yes, I know it could have happened any other way, but it happened this way. And because of me. Directly or indirectly, it happened because of me. Sending people to prison doesn’t change any of that.’
Gerald rapped his pen again on the desk. ‘Don’t dwell on it, Robert. It does no good. What might have been ... whose fault it was. You’ve got to live with the here and now. I must confess again that Vanessa’s part in this astounds me. Not because I don’t believe she would have had the daring to do it – she had more than enough. But that she was so possessed of the idea of holding all this together. That she and Tolson should have become partners in this. They really are a very unlikely pair. Very unlikely. I can’t think how Tolson ever brought himself to the point of asking for her help.’
‘When you’re desperate, you do desperate things, Gerald. You’d think Tolson never could get his tongue around the sort of things he had to say to Vanessa at one time. But he did. Having taken that first step – having got her co-operation, I imagine both of them went deeper and deeper into it, hardly noticing. It’s a very tight little world up here. Tolson has complete loyalty from all his family – however many of them knew anything about all this, no one would have questioned that he wasn’t doing the right thing. It’s possible Tolson never was able to imagine what Vanessa had to go through to get those things out of the country. My God, I can’t smuggle a packet of cigarettes ...’
Tolson had returned with a tray, three glasses, and a bottle of brandy. I noticed that Askew’s hand trembled as he poised the bottle over the glass, looking at me. I shook my head; then he turned to Gerald, who also declined. He poured a large amount for himself, and drank quickly, and I was reminded of the first night I had spent at Thirlbeck when he had sent me for the brandy, and his face had had the same ashen colour. After he put the glass down he said to Tolson, ‘For Heaven’s sake, do sit down! – sit down and have some brandy.’
Gingerly Tolson drew his swivel chair closer to the big desk and sat down. I saw his heavy, thick fingers, those fingers I could somehow never imagine toiling over ledgers, twine and untwine themselves. He paid no attention to the invitation to pour himself a brandy.
Askew motioned to me. ‘Like the gentleman he is, Tolson refused to tell me yesterday who had managed to get rid of all the things ... who had disposed of them, how they had been copied. Nothing but the fact that they were gone. I still don’t understand why you had to come back here and tell me what Tolson had refused to tell. So, it was Vanessa ... surprising as it is to Gerald and myself, it was Vanessa. Now, why did you have to come here and give us this information? For Gerald it’s painful. I’ve already said how it affects me. I can’t imagine it’s been easy for you to come back here in order to tell us these things about your mother.’
‘I didn’t intend to. After Mr Tolson and I ... after we met in London, I thought I could never bear to come back here. Then something happened to change my mind. Because I knew Mr Tolson would have had to tell you he has not received payment for the Rembrandt. It was lodged in a Swiss bank in a numbered account – which bank and which number, Mr Tolson doesn’t know. So you’re missing more than a million pounds for the Rembrandt, Lord Askew. And only Vanessa knew where it was.’
Gerald leaned forward anxiously. Tolson had not stopped clasping and unclasping his hands, waiting to see how the information I had given him last night would be judged. ‘Have you found something, Jo?’ Gerald demanded. ‘Have you?’
‘I think so – I hope so.’
I took the miniature from my handbag, and passed it to Askew. He tensed visibly as he saw it, and seemed reluctant to take it from my hands. Gerald edged his chair closer, peering to see. It was actually he who took it from me. His mind, working more quickly than at any time since his illness, must at once have placed it as the miniature missing from the set of five in the velvet frame upstairs. ‘This is ...’ He looked at me, his eyebrows raised.
‘It was in the handbag Vanessa was carrying when the plane crashed,’ I said to Askew. ‘I couldn’t identify any other piece of luggage as hers – a lot of it was completely destroyed. But I knew her handbag. Her passport was in it, and other things I could identify. I had never seen this before ...’
There was heartbreak now in talking. I had not thought it would be easy, but the agony of sifting through the pathetic possessions of the victims laid out in that school hall of the mountain village was back in its full force. And as I spoke I saw Askew’s hand go slowly towards the little portrait of the red-haired lady now lying on the blotter between himself and G
erald. He took it in both hands and turned it between his fingers, as I so often had done. His expression had altered subtly; I saw some reflection of my own pain there. Then he laid it down and reached for his brandy glass.
‘With her, you said? It was in her handbag?’
‘Yes. I assumed she had bought it in Zürich. Vanessa often was lucky in running across finds in people’s houses, or junk shops. There was still a price tag on it. A rather new price tag.’
Now I looked at Gerald. ‘It suddenly came to me that it wasn’t a price tag at all. Look at it! I haven’t really looked at it all these weeks. To me it was just the price she had paid in Swiss francs. But it couldn’t be that. It’s all wrong, isn’t it?’
Gerald turned the tiny piece of white cardboard on its thin red string. ‘SF 13705,’ he read. He looked at me enquiringly. He still did not speak of the miniatures upstairs.
‘In Vanessa’s handwriting – I don’t know why I never wondered about that before. It couldn’t have been the price marked on it in some shop. And in Swiss francs it just doesn’t make sense. Not for a miniature like that. If it is a Hilliard that means it would have sold for only, well, let’s say for rather less than fifteen hundred pounds. Even if a junk-shop dealer had had it, he wouldn’t have let a diamond-studded frame go for that price. And at any rate, it would have been the most unbelievable chance that she had run across it during that very short visit – ’
The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets. Page 30