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

  I lay back on my pillow, forgetting for the moment how badly I wanted the tea, and reaching for a cigarette instead, something I rarely did at this time of the day. I could laugh a bit, but it really wasn’t funny to be trapped for some days between the two opposites of ideal beauty – this tiny, perfect English rose, and the haunting, dynamic presence of the Spanish aristocrat. It was a situation in which Vanessa would have revelled; not by any means as classically beautiful as either, she would have outshone them both by sheer flamboyance.

  I flung back the bedclothes. Better try this maddening little girl’s tea and bread; the tray gave me no reassurance that she ever made mistakes. The tea was kept hot in its little teapot by a knitted cosy; the china was delicate, and the wafer-thin slices of bread tasted like something that everyone had forgotten how to make fifty years ago. And this girl-child wrote poetry as well. I scowled at the morning-blue surface of the tarn – not the best beginning to the day.

  Gerald greeted me in a rather subdued way when I entered the dining-room; he was eating a piece of toast with a very thin scraping of butter on it. ‘Finished already?’ I said. ‘Would you like more coffee?’

  ‘I haven’t begun,’ he answered.

  ‘Unlike you. There’s everything here.’ I was lifting the lids off silver dishes. ‘You can have bacon, kidney, sausage – three kinds of eggs. There’s even something that looks like kedgeree.’ I didn’t mention the oatmeal – that wasn’t Gerald’s dish.

  ‘Thank you, this is enough.’

  His tone was so unusually remote that I turned to him swiftly. ‘Didn’t you sleep well?’

  ‘Well enough, I suppose. Yesterday was a long day – perhaps we were overambitious. Should have taken two days to come up. It is pretty well the end of the world, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Jo. Just pour me some coffee, would you please?’

  I settled at a place opposite him. ‘You’re missing something in this sausage.’

  ‘Cumberland sausage,’ he said briefly. ‘They make a thing of it up here.’

  ‘I suppose you were awake enough to see the fairy-child who brought the tea?’

  He brightened a little. ‘Yes – lovely little creature, isn’t she? Can’t imagine that dour old giant Tolson is her grandfather.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened. She’s a little bit spoiled, and is certainly Grandfather’s pet. She likes to think she owns Thirlbeck, too.’

  For the first time that morning he smiled fully. ‘Jo, you sound rather like the Condesa. Little Jess hasn’t many friends among the women here.’

  ‘All right,’ I answered, ‘so I’m jealous.’

  ‘That’s better. Always better when you face the truth.’

  ‘The truth is she could put on a drawstring bodice and a Bo Peep hat and she’d be the ideal model for a porcelain shepherdess. Not really my taste in china.’

  ‘She drew my bath for me,’ Gerald answered. ‘I think she’s charming.’

  ‘That leaves the Condesa and me to our own opinions. And where,’ I said, ‘are Lord Askew and the Condesa? Do you know?’

  ‘Robert’s been and gone. The Condesa, being a Spaniard, probably doesn’t like to rise before eleven. I think our charming little Jessica might get a pillow thrown at her if she attempted the early-morning-tea routine with the Condesa. Coffee black and strong, I think, would be to her taste.’ He snapped a piece of toast in two. ‘And I’ve remembered about the Condesa.’

  ’What about her?’

  ‘I was thinking last night – couldn’t remember where I’d ever encountered her before, or if it was just her name I remembered. Her face, of course ... but then, one dreams of faces like that. Or you see them in glossy magazines. But I was thinking ... remembering. She’s the daughter of a Spanish nobleman – someone who was once in Franco’s cabinet. I think he’s dead now. She was involved in some scandal. I can’t remember the details. The usual thing, I suppose. She took up with another man, and there was no prospect for a divorce from a Spanish husband. And when that relationship fell through, she was on the international circuit, with barely enough money to keep her afloat, I imagine. Cut off from her family, to whom, naturally, she is a disgrace. How old do you think she is: thirty-five – thirty-seven?’ He was giving her the benefit of a few years, I thought, but I did not object. What mattered was what Gerald felt about her, not what she actually was. ‘Her relationship with Robert can’t be of very long standing. She wasn’t with him when I chanced to meet him in Venice last spring. She can’t like it here. It’s not her sort of place, is it? They can’t be planning to stay long. An international beauty can’t afford to retire for too long from the scene – she wastes her fragrance on the desert air.’

  ‘Perhaps she loves him,’ I said. ‘It may be as simple as that.’

  ‘It may be that she is forty,’ he answered, with unusual ruthlessness. ‘Or more. And she is growing a little afraid. She has come here with Robert because she doesn’t want to let him go – and there is no other place at this time for her. And probably not much money of her own. Naturally she can never marry him, not so long as her husband is alive – and Robert is so much older.’

  ‘Now that she has seen what is in this house – the furniture, the one painting on display – will she let him go?’

  ‘Will it be her choice? Was it ever the choice of the others? I really don’t know. He is a man of great charm – and kindness, in his fashion. But I also think that since the war – since the death of his wife and son – he has become a man who hasn’t allowed himself ever to become completely involved with, or committed to, anyone or anything. But, well, there comes a time. Perhaps if she would agree, he might be willing to settle with the Condesa for the rest of his life. A man grows tired of endless pursuit ... In fact, a man just grows tired.’ His tone dropped to a musing quiet, as if he were thinking of the tiredness of age. ‘Who is the heir, I wonder ...?’

  ‘His heir, Gerald, is that tousled young man in the Bentley we met yesterday. And my impression is that he can’t bear the thought of Lord Askew and the whole idea of an inheritance – ’

  We stopped. Tolson stood at the door.

  ‘Miss Roswell. There’s a telephone call for you – from London. A Mr Peers.’

  I smiled, not able to help myself. And I was hurrying towards the door. I didn’t care about the tone of disapproval from Tolson, or about Gerald’s knowing smile. Harry did that to me. I wanted to hear that lighthearted, slightly mocking voice, the grin that was implied in it – all the things that were so opposite to my own approach to life.

  ‘If you will take it in Lord Askew’s study, Miss Roswell – I’ll show you.’

  ‘Yes – yes, I know. We were there last night,’ and I hurried across the hall ahead of him. He followed me, and for a wild moment I thought he was going to stay with me while I talked. But he watched me for a moment as I picked up the phone near his desk, his heavy brows drawn together as if he didn’t feel it was altogether right for me to be receiving calls on Lord Askew’s phone, and how had the caller known I would be there, in any case? Then, with a kind of a shrug, he withdrew. I waited for a few seconds, listening to his steps fade away into the service passage before I spoke.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Fine one you are! Leaving me stranded – alone – all weekend. Didn’t you know I’d be rushing back to hold your hand?’

  ‘Liar! You never rushed anywhere to hold my hand. You just happened to come back. Had a good time?’

  ‘A good time?’ His Manchester accent, slightly overlaid with London, rumbled at me sternly; it was one of the things I liked about Harry that he had never tried to do anything with his accent. It wasn’t public school – it never would be. At times its implication of Northern hardheadedness was a valuable asset to him. When he spoke, his listeners knew that shrewdness and success spoke; how the words came out didn’t matter. ‘It was business, luv – not a good time.’

  ‘Since
when has business ever stopped you having a good time?’

  He laughed and made no more protests. ‘Well, it was profitable. I’ll be able to afford to take you to dinner a few more times. What I’d like to know is when that will be. You’re up there in those damned Lakes. I once knew a chap – he lived next door in Manchester – went up there and never came back. Fell down a bloody mountain flank into a lake. Dangerous, I call it. My old mum would never let me go up there.’

  ‘Harry, you fool. If only I could believe you sometimes.’

  ‘Honest, luv – cross my heart and hope – and all the rest of it. So when are you coming back from Lord Whatsits?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps tomorrow. And how did you know I was here?’

  ‘Know? Listen, luv, when Harry Peers wants to know something, there’s always ways of finding out. I telephoned around. Found out you were with Gerald Stanton. So then I found out where Mr Stanton was headed.’

  ‘Hardy’s isn’t open. The security people wouldn’t know where we were.’

  ‘Who said anything about the security people? I think I roused one of the directors from his bed to enquire about Mr Stanton’s whereabouts.’

  I sucked in my breath. ‘I wish you hadn’t. One doesn’t call the directors to find out where a minor employee is for the weekend.’

  ‘Cool it, Jo. I didn’t mention your name. And the same director thinks I may be going to buy something quite big in a sale that’s coming up. Which I might. He didn’t mind talking – not at all.’

  ‘Harry, you’re dreadful.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘No – you’re wonderful!’

  ‘That’s better. That’s my girl. And how is that madman, the noble Lord Askew? What’s he trying to sell – that rock of his?’

  ‘Rock?’

  I could hear him sigh. ‘God bless your nice upbringing, Jo. I mean that bloody great diamond of his. Does he still have it?’

  ‘It’s right here in this room.’

  For once he had no immediate reply. Then slowly, as if he were speaking to a child: ‘You mean there – right in the room with you? Did you see it? What does it look like?’

  ‘It’s fabulous, Harry. It’s hardly been cut at all – just polished on the natural surfaces so that you can see right into it. It’s like a ... a sort of mountain of light. It’s so big you can’t believe it’s a diamond – ’

  ‘All two hundred-odd carats of it. Always wanted something like that myself.’

  ‘Not this one, Harry!’ All at once I felt a sort of coldness about me, and I knew that I also believed the stories about La Española. ‘You wouldn’t want this one.’

  ‘Who says I wouldn’t? I’ll bet anyone who bought it could make a tidy profit by the time it was cut into a few decent-sized hunks. Is that why you’re there? Is he selling? What’s Gerald Stanton doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know how you know so much about La Española, but you ought to know that I can’t discuss Gerald’s business, or anyone else’s with you. Gerald is paying a call. He was invited – and I am driving him. So far as I know there is no business being done here.’

  ‘Luv, I don’t believe you. But I’d think you a fool if you said any more. I like a girl who can keep her trap shut.’ His tone changed. ‘Are you all right, Jo? – I mean all right.’ I knew he was talking about Vanessa’s death. ‘I just missed you in Switzerland, and I didn’t like to bust in in Mexico – not when you were just getting to know your dad. After all’ – the flippancy returned to his voice – ‘after all, he might have thought I was trying to pick up a few of his paintings on the cheap. But it went all right with him, did it? I mean, you and your dad, you got on all right?’

  ‘Yes, Harry. It was – it was very good.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Nice to find a dad at your age, and one that won’t breathe down your neck either. I’ll miss your mother, though, Jo – she was my sort, Vanessa was. Smashing girl.’

  ‘I know.’ My voice came out thinly because of the tightness in my throat.

  ‘All right then, luv. Take care. Try to stay dry up there, and don’t fall down a mountain. See you.’

  ‘When?’ I couldn’t help saying it, even though I knew he hated to be pinned down.

  ‘Oh – soon. ’Bye, Jo.’ Then there was the dull buzzing of the disengaged line. I felt more lonely then than at any other time since Vanessa had died. Harry had slipped away from me once more. There would be someone else for him to call now, someone else to take to dinner tonight. And with this sick emptiness upon me, I believed I loved him. But I didn’t think he loved me, or any other woman. Love – that kind of love – had been beaten out of him as he had pushed and shoved his way to the top. Probably the only woman he had ever loved was the mother whom he had settled – his father was an adjunct with whom he liked to argue about soccer but whom he otherwise didn’t seem to regard very highly – in a suburban semi only about a mile from the row of slum houses where he had been born. They hadn’t wanted to go farther away, or to live more grandly, and Harry had the wisdom not to try to force them. His knowledge of his origins was Harry’s strength – more than any other man I had ever known. His women were the decorations of his success; no particular woman, it seemed, was essential to him. I wasn’t essential to him; he was offhandedly fond of me, and in these last weeks, unusually gentle and kind. I replaced the receiver slowly, leaning back against the roll-top desk, hearing Harry’s words again, the flirtatious mockery, seeing his half-ugly face, with its strong eyebrows crooked in amusement, a ruthless, eager face, his brown eyes quick and knowing.

  I was remembering, as I too often did, the first time I had felt those eyes fastened on mine: I remembered it in every detail. It had been my first exposure to his brashness, his cocky good humour, when it pleased him to be that way. I had been walking down from the bus stop in Piccadilly to Hardy’s, taking note as I always did of the changes in the windows of the art dealers and galleries which lined the street below Fortnums. I had reached the one that specialised in ceramics; this day there had been a new pair of Chinese vases, of an early dynasty – which dynasty I wasn’t expert enough to place absolutely, and certainly not without handling them – and I looked much closer. I was rooted, though, entranced by the colour, the pale green, the crackled glaze, the long tapering necks of the jars, their perfect proportion to the flare of the base. And then behind me, Harry’s voice, unknown until that moment.

  ‘What a beautiful pair ...’ I turned and his grown-up urchin’s face, with the springing black hair, had been grinning at me, his eyes just a little above the level of mine, his stance like a game little fighting cock. ‘... of legs,’ he had finished.

  And then he had walked on with me, talking about the Chinese vases with a degree of expertise which might have been the truth, or equally might have been meant to dazzle me and give me no time to probe his knowledge farther. I made some stumbling replies as we walked, he turned the corner with me, and to my great shock, mounted the steps of Hardy’s with me. I was utterly dumb now, wondering what to do with him. I had paused at the Front Counter, making some excuse to turn off and say something to Mr Arrowsmith, who had presided there for more than twenty years, the man who began the training of every newcomer to Hardy’s, the sons of directors, and the sons of dukes, the shy ones who had to be taught how to talk to those who came to the Counter, and the ones who had to be taught that two years’ studying art history didn’t automatically make them experts. He was, in many ways, the face of Hardy’s to the public, a jovial, courteous but shrewd face; I had trained under him, I trusted him – in a way I also loved him. I stood with him now as the urchin young man – not really so young since he was in his thirties – had continued up the great staircase to the salerooms, saluting me with an impudent wave of his hand. It was a gesture that, for all the world, reminded me of Vanessa.

  Mr Arrowsmith had acknowledged him with a smile and a benign nod of his head.

  ‘Mr Arrowsmith, who’s that?’

&nb
sp; ‘Who’s that? But you came in with him, Jo.’

  ‘I’m still asking who he is.’

  ‘That, my dear, is Mr Harry Peers. Clever young devil. He’s got a good eye and he’s learned very quickly. Jumped up from nothing of course. But he’s a millionaire, they say. Not that he’s got his money from spotting good buys at Hardy’s – that’s just a millionaire’s hobby. I’m surprised you don’t know about him – haven’t seen him in here before this.’

  ‘Why should I? These days I’m shut up in my cupboard with my bits and pieces of china, aren’t I? It isn’t like the old days on the Front Counter – I saw everyone then.’

  Mr Arrowsmith had nodded; he thrived on every minute of his contact with the crowds of people who flowed through Hardy’s door. He wanted his young people to get on at Hardy’s, to find their place, but he felt sorry for them when they had to leave behind the vitalising force of this busy, colourful reception hall. Not for anything would he have spent his life in one of our storerooms where the items were catalogued and made ready for the sales. His passion was for people, not objects.

  ‘Yes, true, Jo. You’ve moved on, and up – I suppose. One day you might be very good. But you don’t have half as much fun as you used to, do you?’

  And I hadn’t denied it.

  I was remembering this now, the time, the passion spent, the love lavished on objects as I began to move slowly away from the desk, pausing about the middle of the room – the room that looked so different now, as the morning light poured in at the long windows on each side of the painting. The same cold excitement gripped me as had done last night. I was hardly conscious that I was committing a breach of manners and discipline in staying to look at the painting without invitation, without Askew and Gerald being present. What was drawing me was the emergence from the shadow which the light from the two windows threw between them, of a face. I stared, and the face came more and more to life – the painted face of a man with an ugly, bulbous nose, a man with careless hair and a cap perched haphazardly on it, a man with brown eyes that registered age and suffering, had known the happiness of success, of his wife, the comfort of her dowry, the misery of her death, the taking of a kindly, undemanding mistress, the death of his only son. He had painted his own face so many times in his life, in great adornment, in the garish turbans and antiquities with which he had once loved to surround himself, now here he was in his old age, a plain man, revealing himself in the splendid beauty of his plainness. The portrait was unadorned, as if he had looked into the mirror and had been determined to record the pain and joys of his long life – Rembrandt van Rijn, son of a miller, painter of Leyden and Amsterdam, thrown from poverty to riches to bankruptcy – all of it looked from the portrait without self-pity or compassion. It was painted in the muddy browns of his later years, but it also wore the dirt of the years since it had been painted. I stopped at the point where the light from the two windows blinded me, and shadowed the painting too much.