‘What are they, diaries?’ I asked.
‘No. Stamps. It’s a collection of stamps.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment, the collector’s instinct suddenly taking hold, a feeling of excitement. Only once before in the years since I had switched from marine engine salesman to estate agent had the job given me the opportunity to acquire a collection direct from the owner. My eyes were fastened on the albums, wondering what was inside those battered leather covers. They looked Victorian, in which case there could be some early GBs. But this was a young woman I was dealing with, not a businessman. ‘You could put them in the bank,’ I said, ‘or it might be better to let the solicitors hold them.’
She shook her head, those large, prominent eyes of hers staring at me intensely. ‘I’d rather you kept them,’ she said.
It was an odd request. ‘Why? If they’re valuable …’
‘It isn’t that – though I wondered, of course, when things became really difficult. Anyway, I didn’t know how to go about selling them, and there was never any time …’ She hesitated, still staring at me, but her gaze had turned inward. ‘No. I just want to know they’re safe, that’s all. I don’t want them in the house any more.’ That husky voice of hers was low-pitched now, almost a whisper, her thoughts a little disconnected. ‘Something Jona wrote in a letter. I keep on remembering. He’s never been much of a letter writer, too wrapped up in his ship. He did write to me about Tim’s future. I’d cabled him about the nursing home charges, but even then his letter was all about the need for an engine overhaul, which meant Australia and no cargo earnings. It’s very expensive running a ship, I know, but—’
There was a long pause, and then she suddenly looked at me again and said, ‘But about those stamps, he did write that Tim had been very excited when he discovered them. I don’t know why. That was just after the accident, and I couldn’t get any sense out of Tim, of course.’ Her eyes went to the window again. Another, longer pause; then she said, ‘You’ve got to remember he wasn’t very coherent. There was brain damage as well. That’s why I put them in the loft. I thought he might suddenly want them. He had moments when he could communicate, after a fashion. But he was very strange, very unpredictable. About a fortnight ago, just before I finally persuaded the nursing home to take him – they’re some sort of charitable hangover from colonial days and very choosy, it seems, about whom they take – he suddenly seemed to want to see them again, and when I brought them down to him, he lay staring at them most of the day. Then he suddenly lost interest. He was like that.’ Her voice was very low, falling almost to a whisper. ‘If ever I catch up with the man who did that to him, I’ll kill him.’
It was said so quietly, without emotion, in the same matter-of-fact way she had mentioned sorcery. If she had said it wildly, I could have put it down to her being overwrought. But she wasn’t overwrought or in any way hysterical. She just sat there, making a flat statement, and that made it all the more frightening. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Can I have a look at the albums?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Her eyes were staring past me at the mask above the bed, her tone offhand.
I put down my cup and picked the albums up. They were identical, measuring about eight inches by five, the leather dark green, almost black, and very thick, the clasps gilt, two to each album, and the hinges damaged. The pages were loose-leaved, a heavy cartridge paper, the stamps carefully presented, sometimes only one to a page, sometimes complete sets. Many of them were unused, and in the case of the sets most of them were overprinted SPECIMEN. NO early GBs, no Queen’s heads, virtually the whole collection devoted to views, ships, a sprinkling of animals, and all about the turn of the century. Nothing very early and every stamp stuck down, which was a pity.
The first volume I looked through contained nothing but Canadian provincials and Australian states. There was a Specimen set of Tasmanian scenes which was particularly attractive, and the last two pages were taken up with what looked like proofs. But it was the second volume that interested me, an exclusively island collection: Malta, Papua, North Borneo, Samoa, Tonga, Bermuda, Cook Islands, Jamaica – ships, canoes, galleys, coats of arms, island scenes, and in the case of Samoa a page of the EXPRESS stamps. There was a nice Specimen set of Turks and Caicos to the full 3s. value, all with ships, and a very battered imperforate stamp, blue with a white sailing ship and the script letters LMCL underneath, stuck to the centre of the page so that it caught my eye. It was pen-cancelled and rang some faint bell in my memory.
‘Well?’ she asked as I sat looking at it, trying to remember an island that had issued a stamp with no designation on it, only a monogram. ‘I read somewhere that old stamps had kept pace with inflation.’
I nodded. ‘Better than most things. But I couldn’t give you even a rough idea what these are worth, not till I’ve checked them through with the catalogue. Even then, I won’t be certain because of their condition.’
‘I think my brother realised we were short of money. That day when he lay there staring at them, I was helping him over his lunch—’ She stopped there, a muscle in her cheek twitching at the memory. ‘I don’t know whether I understood him right, but I thought he tried to tell me they would be worth a lot to somebody.’
I thought she meant a collector, or a dealer, and I said, ‘I think I should warn you they won’t fetch anything like the catalogue price. It’s an interesting little collection, well arranged, but I don’t think there’s anything very rare, and none of them are in mint condition. They’re stuck down, you see. Mint condition requires that the original gum on the back be intact.’
‘I see.’ She frowned. ‘You’re not a stamp dealer, are you?’
‘No, but I collect them.’ And I told her how as a kid I had used any money that came my way to buy pictorials. ‘They were quite cheap then, and it was a sort of displacement activity, I suppose, a world in which I could forget that my parents were at each other’s throats and only staying together on account of me. Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the rise in market values to switch into line-engraved issues, concentrating on Great Britain and the Caribbean, islands like Antigua, St Kitts, St Vincent, Turks and Caicos.’
‘So you know some of the dealers?’
‘Two or three, yes. When I get the chance, I buy at auctions. It’s usually cheaper at auction.’ I hesitated, not sure what she wanted. ‘Would you like me to get a valuation for you?’ And as I said it, I knew it had been prompted by a desire to see her again.
‘Could you?’ She was silent a moment, thinking about it. ‘Thank you, yes. I’d be very glad if you would.’
It was as easy as that, and feeling slightly pleased with myself, I finished my tea and picked up the clipboard. Knowing something of her circumstances now, I said, ‘Is there anything else – anything I’ve missed – that you want either included in the sale or else for me to value for you while I’m here?’
‘No, I don’t think there’s anything else. Just about everything that’s left belongs to Tim, I suppose. I don’t own very much now except my clothes.’ And she added, ‘There was a time when we were quite well off, but when my father finally died—’ She hesitated. ‘I knew he’d been financing Jona, but not the extent of it. There wasn’t much left for Tim except the house, and these last two years I’ve sold off what I could. There’s nothing of any real value here now. Can I give you some more tea?’
I thanked her, studying the inventory as she refilled my cup. The contents I had listed wouldn’t fetch enough to keep him very long, even if the nursing home was charity-run, and to get her mind off the subject of finance, I asked her about the carvings. ‘Was it your grandfather who collected them?’
‘My great-uncle.’
‘He was a missionary, was he?’ I was thinking of the label on the base of that wooden figure downstairs.
She seemed amused. ‘No, he was the black sheep of the family. An inveterate liar, that’s how my grandfather described him. But he wouldn’t talk about him, except on
ce long ago I remember he said his brother had got into some sort of trouble. He shipped out on a wool ship to Australia and wasn’t heard of again for several years. Then he suddenly turned up in England boasting he owned an island and some schooners and had become king of a lot of cannibals in a world where they believed their ancestors were butterflies.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘My grandfather was always reminiscing about people with strange backgrounds, so I didn’t take much notice. I was a child at the time, but I liked the bit about the butterflies.’
‘It was his brother, then, who gave him the carvings?’
‘Yes, his younger brother Carlos.’
‘And he gave him the carvings to convince him of his improbable story, I suppose.’
She laughed. ‘No, I think he just left them with Grandpa so they’d be safe. I’ve often wondered about that, whether he had some sort of premonition. He was drowned, you see, on his way back to the Pacific. He had come to England to raise money for the purchase of a steamship and was drowned when it sank.’ And when I asked her where it had sunk, she said, ‘In the Pacific, somewhere east of Papua. But God knows where. There weren’t any survivors. He had named her the Holland Trader.’ And she added, ‘It happened a long time ago, in 1911. Sad, isn’t it?’
She turned her head from the window and smiled at me. ‘That’s all I ever got out of my grandfather. He wouldn’t talk about him. The subject was taboo. So maybe you’re right. Maybe Carlos Holland did bring those carvings home to prove he was telling the truth for once.’ And she added in that husky whisper, ‘I think of him sometimes. An odd name, Carlos – for an Englishman. And the man himself a complete mystery. If only he had kept a diary.’
‘Is that why you’ve hung on to the carvings?’
She nodded. ‘It’s teasing to know so little – no letters, nothing; just those carvings, and the stamps. You’ll find his name inside the albums.’ I thought her interest in the man was the natural reaction of somebody whose life had been very restricted, but then she said, ‘Strange I should still have relics of his world, and nothing left of my grandfather’s. He had marvellous things – native head-dresses and spears. But they were all left behind when my father sold Kuamegu. I can only dimly remember them now, and the brilliance of the poinsettias, the women with their bare pointed breasts and the men wearing nothing but a few broad grass fronds – arse grass, we called it – hanging from a waist cord.’ She gave that little shrug and got to her feet. ‘It was all very primitive, wonderfully colourful.’ She began gathering up the tea things. ‘You have finished, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I was thinking how wrong I had been, her background so very different from my own. ‘You were born out there?’
‘At Kuamegu, yes. It was a coffee plantation in the Highlands about five thousand feet up in the Chimbu country.’ She stood there for a moment, very still. ‘Buka wasn’t the same, hot and humid, always raining. And living at Madehas …’ She turned away. ‘After Mother was killed, we came here. That was something different again, and when you’ve no money—’ She stopped abruptly, gave a little self-derisory laugh and picked up the albums. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this. Stupid of me. I’ll get these wrapped up.’
She left me then, and I sat there for a moment, the clipboard on my knee, wondering where Buka was, what part of the Pacific she had been talking about. Doing my National Service in Singapore as a junior officer on landing craft, I had had just a glimpse of the Pacific, the only exciting bit of travel I had ever managed to achieve, and here was this strange young woman talking about it as though the Pacific islands were more home to her than England. What would she do now? If I ever catch up with the man … Those shocking words came suddenly back to me. But with her brother to support, the sale of the contents wouldn’t get her out to the Pacific, and from what she had said I guessed the house itself was mortgaged. I wasn’t certain what age she was – late twenties, early thirties, it was difficult to tell. And the way she had looked, sitting there, staring out at the sea. If she intended going back, then the stamps were her only hope, and as I got to my feet, I was wondering whether I could find the money to buy them from her. Stuck down like that, they couldn’t be worth more than £200 or £300.
I put the clipboard in my briefcase and stood staring out of the window at the sea. It was milky calm, the horizon lost in haze. I thought of all the times she must have stood here in her bedroom looking out at it, and at night in moonlight, longing to be away. If it had been anybody else, if she hadn’t talked like that, then I could have made her an offer for those stamps and she would probably have taken it. I don’t know why I wanted them so badly. It wasn’t the stamps themselves. I had some of them already, and the others I could have bought from Josh Keegan or one of the other dealers in the Strand. No, it was something in the careful way they had been stuck into those albums, the planned choice of subjects, almost as though there had been some purpose in collecting just those items and presenting them in that particular way.
I knew it was foolish of me. Even that second album didn’t contain a single stamp of the islands on which I was now concentrating. But collecting is like that. You see something, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, you want it. Would she take £400 for them? I could probably raise that much on a quick sale of some Penny Blacks. But as I started down the stairs, I knew I couldn’t do it. Without a valuation it would be taking advantage of her, and I had promised to get them valued.
She was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, and as she saw me to the door, handing me the albums neatly wrapped, all I said was: ‘I’ll do what I can for you, Miss Holland. There’s a member of my sailing club, a retired naval commander, who deals in stamps. I’ll ask him to have a look at them. But please don’t bank on their being worth very much.’
She shook her head, and the light coming from the door showed a deep scar running back from behind her left ear into the orange-red cap of hair. ‘Of course not. I no longer expect anything to be made easy for me.’ And then with a quick lift of her chin: ‘I’ll find a way.’ It was said to herself, not to me. She held out her hand. ‘Thank you. I’m glad you came, you’ve been very kind.’
I was thinking about her, and about the way she had said, ‘I’ll find a way,’ for most of the drive back to Chelmsford. I just couldn’t get her out of my mind. I couldn’t think of any girl who had made such an instant and deep impression on me, and God knows I’ve never been short of girlfriends. But it had always been physical before. This wasn’t physical. I didn’t know what the hell it was. I’d read about people falling in love, but that was in books. The real-life relation ship was sex, the physical meeting of two bodies. It was what men and women were all about. But not this one. The impact had been entirely different, an emotional intensity, an emanation almost of something totally alien to me, as though she had the power to project herself into my mind. It wasn’t her face, or her figure, or even those extraordinarily prominent breasts that I was remembering now. It was the impression she had made, her strange background, those dreadful words of hers and her face so set, and that reference to the death certificate, talking of her brother as though he were already dead. ‘You think your brother will die then?’ I had asked her, and she had replied, ‘Unless I can do something about it, get that death wish lifted.’
It seemed such nonsense, in the hot sun driving down the A12. But in that house, in her presence, talking to her, it had all seemed real enough. And there were those two battered green albums lying on the seat beside me. It was almost as though she were there herself, so powerful had been the impact of her personality.
That evening, instead of going down to the boat, I drove straight home, taking the albums with me. Great Park Hall, at the end of almost a mile of dirt farm track, was a very lonely place, which was the reason the rent was within my means. To call it a hall made it sound grander than it was; almost any old farmhouse in East Anglia can be called a hall. It was, in fact, little more than a cottage full of centuries-
old beams with the remains of a moat taking up most of the overgrown garden. I was fending for myself now, and with a tankard of beer and some chicken sandwiches I settled down to check the stamps against the catalogue.
My British Commonwealth catalogue was two years old, but at least it would give me a rough idea of what the collection was worth. And as I worked through the albums page by page my excitement grew. I was the only collector who had ever seen them, and whether she wanted to or not, I was certain she would sell them in the end. She knew she’d have to. Why else had she wanted them valued? The question was, what was the fair price?
It took me just over two hours to list them. There were 247 stamps ranging in value from almost nothing up to £65 for the Turks and Caicos Specimen set of nine sailing ship stamps. The total added up to £1,163, excluding the proofs and the ship stamp with the script lettering LMCL.
By then the sun had set and the light was fading. I sat there for a long time, idly going through the thick pages of the albums again, wondering what sort of figure a dealer would put on them. I thought perhaps half, or even a third, of the catalogue value, for not only were the more valuable unused and Specimen stamps stuck down, but many of them showed signs of discoloration, caused probably by damp.
I suppose it was the island scenes that started me dreaming of the Pacific. Ever since my Singapore days I had wanted to see more of the Pacific. I didn’t switch on the light but sat there in the half-dark, thinking about my own future and what I should do if Rowlinson did offer me the job of looking after his Australian interests, something I had been angling for even before I knew the partners weren’t going to let me in. He had rung me up two days ago, saying his manager had finally promised him the figures for the Queensland station within a week. If that LCT I had served on hadn’t poked its nose into the Pacific north of Indonesia, maybe I wouldn’t have been so pleased at the prospect of Australia. But my appetite had been whetted, and since then I hadn’t been out of England except to sail my Folkboat across to Holland and spend a few days in the Dutch canals.
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