Music at Long Verney (17 page)

“And as it happens, I want Furnivall's hoopoe too,” Mrs Harington declared. “I'm very fond of hoopoes.”

Mr Grimshaw's sardonic laughter behind the screen sounded quite devilish. The screen itself trembled. The tip of a penknife appeared in the centre of Grace Darling.

“You old beast, you sneaking old beast!” exclaimed Mrs Harington; and with great force and accuracy she hurled the opossum muff over the screen in a line with Grace Darling. There was the sound of a strong man struggling with a mouthful of fur. The penknife made another slash.

Mr Edom said, “George.”

Mr Collins stepped forward, and inexpressively, like a force of nature, conveyed Mr Grimshaw into the street.

Saying, “You were marvellous,” Mrs Harington threw herself into Mrs Otter's arms.

“So were you,” replied Mrs Otter. “Avenging and bright. Now shall we all sit down? Do sit down, Mr Collins.”

Mr Collins sat down and smoothed the muff, which Mr Grimshaw had used as a boxing glove. Mrs Otter advised him to pretend he was in the Salvation Army and give it a good shake. He did so.

There was a long silence spent in getting over it. Mrs Harington was the first to speak.

“Now I must buy it, mustn't I? What's so extremely grand is that I can. Richard gave me a hundred pounds yesterday, to buy myself a present. Will that be enough?” Before Mrs Otter could get her word in, Mr Edom said, “It would have been handsome, Mrs Harington, but now it's excessive. The screen is no longer in mint condition. I think it can be repaired, but I can't in conscience ask more than ninety. George, did you happen to notice what it's like at the back?”

“The bird's all right. He took care of that. But the Tower of London's a bit knocked about.”

The two men went off to consider the damage. Mrs Harington moved closer to Mrs Otter. “I wonder if I ought to give him his bird. I'm afraid he was rather set on it.”

“It would be a kind thing to do – if you could manage it without putting his back up.”

“I wasn't thinking of being kind. I was thinking about being on the safe side. For suppose he decided to steal it? Suppose I woke up one night and heard the magnolia creaking and saw his face glaring in at my bedroom window and it came out on the baby as a port-wine hoopoe.”

“If I were you, I wouldn't give it another thought. For one thing, he's respectable at heart and would never climb up someone else's magnolia. For another, speaking as an experienced matron, all this talk about birthmarks is bugaboo.”

Mrs Harington opened her lovely mouth, then closed it again. When the screen had been settled, the two ladies left together, as Mrs Otter was being given a lift home. Mr Edom watched their departure with satisfaction. It had all turned out very nicely: Toby Otter would not go to prison and his mother would be left with a comfortable remainder. Yet it seemed to him that despite this happy ending a sudden cloud had shadowed her, a resignation, a tremor of regret for something precious and irrecoverable, not to do with the screen.

IT IS COMMON
experience how the possessions of one's childhood vanish: the blue and white mug with D on it, picturing a dog and a duck and a dairymaid, and at the bottom when you have drunk up your milk, a daisy; the
ombres chinoises
marionettes, with strings attached to their joints – and if you pulled injudiciously, their elbows started up level with their ears, while their faces retained an impassive scornfulness for such mere contortions; the stuffed printed-cotton cat, on whose oval base were four mushroom-coloured underpaws, a triumph of art and realism; the high chair, detestable because it was childish, but with a better side to its character since it raised you to the level whence you could see out of the window; the picture of Queen Victoria, and the watercolour landscape with the moon and the row of silhouetted fir trees that you privately connected with wolves and weren't easy about; and the carved wooden bear brought from Switzerland, and the red velvet pincushion, and the dolls' dinner service – all scattered, all gone, broken or left behind in house moving or given away. All gone from your ungrateful memory, too, forgotten for half a century or only brought to mind by something in a display cabinet; having emerged from neglect and oblivion as an antique, rare and costing a great deal of money.

And then, suddenly, when you are an old woman – though
not in your case a rare and valued antique – they flock back; and as they reappear you discover that they are far more yours than you supposed – that you remember everything about them, the crack that ran through the dairymaid, the smell of the bear and of the pin-cushion, the rattle of the dolls' soup tureen because the lid didn't quite fit, the mild supportingness of the cat when used as a pillow. They are more faithful than you.

Mr Collins, the assistant at the Abbey Antique Galleries, did not interrupt this train of thought that a thimble case had aroused in the old lady's mind. She was a Miss Mainwaring, and said by his employer, Mr Edom, to be knowledgeable – high praise on those controlled lips. Mr Edom did not acclaim this quality often – perhaps once a year or so. She was an aunt of Canon Balsam's, and visited. During those visits she would come to have a look round the Galleries, and this was what she was doing now. It was the first time Mr Collins had been tête-à-tête with her; but her presence was so contained and her examination so unobtrusive – she was not one of those people who take things up or ask to have things taken down – that to all intents and purposes he might have been alone. Ultimately, she would buy something – if only for manners' sake. She was one of the old lot.

Mr Edom was out, doing a valuation. That same morning he had come back from the auction rooms with a tea chest full of pewter – measures, platters, tankards, and tobacco boxes, collected by the late Randolph Fyffe-Randolph, M.F.H. – remarking that a good half of it was Britannia metal but the remainder not too bad. Mr Collins was now peering into the remainder for touch marks. Touch marks are the devil, for pewterers had no conscience and stamped them here, there, and anywhere. He had settled a tankard – William Tomkins – and was thankfully putting it by when he happened to glance inside the lid. There, near the rim, was a different set of touch
marks. He checked the second set of marks. If the lys was in fact a sceptre and the mark like B face downward an elephant, the lid was David Oliphant, Anne and George I. A lid might have been wrenched off and replaced by an earlier lid; but the hinge showed no sign of this and the tankard, now that he came to look at it as a piece of pewter and not merely a field for touch marks, seemed a cut above William Tomkins, who supplied mostly pothouse stuff under George III. If William Tomkins had bought the tankard in a job lot – as he might well have done if he was short of stock just then – a begrimed David Oliphant tankard might have been handed to an apprentice for a rub-up, and the apprentice tempted to illicit sporting with the punches. Or was this being imaginative? Mr Collins glanced at Miss Mainwaring and wondered if she was knowledgeable about pewter.

He saw her halt in front of a carved and gilded oblong frame. She was knowledgeable about frames, anyhow. He saw her look with a tranquil smile at the blackened oil painting on wood. He heard her say, “So here you are.”

The candlelit woman leaning from the window was no darker than she had always been. If you were acquainted with her, you could distinguish the rim of her linen cap against the hooding shadow behind, and the hand holding the candlestick, and the other hand shielding the flame – the flame whose light shone gently and ruddily on the oval face, colouring the nearer cheek and the tip of the long nose and laying areas of shadow between the cheekbones and the rather small almond-shaped eyes. There she was. No restorer, no flaying turpentined hand, had come between them. Unchanged, she was still watching from her window, unalarmed, patient, and slightly amused; still, after more than half a century, waiting for Lucy Mainwaring to come into her grandfather's library.

She had watched several generations of Mainwarings. Grandfather's grandfather, a squire in Cambridgeshire, had taken her in quittance of a debt, together with a Watteau that turned out to be a Pater. They hung on either side of the fireplace, being much the same size. For a while the Watteau that turned out to be a Pater had been Lucy's preference: you could see more of it, and the lady had a lap dog. You could see more of it, and that was why after a year or two you saw there wasn't much in it. The lady sat propped against the balustrade like a doll, and the legs of the gentleman playing the mandolin were not a pair. But the other one, the older you grew and the oftener you looked at it, the more there was to see, to see into, to think about. So it came to be called Lucy's picture.

Time sweeps one on, sweeps one into the enthusiasms of one's adolescence and out of them into fresh enthusiasms. Lucy was sixteen and living for Botticelli when her grandfather died. The house was sold, the property distributed. Aunt Lalage, who lectured about Anglo-Saxons at Girton, went off with the library books, and with the books went the two pictures. Mother resented this. It was such a beautiful old frame; Lalage had no appreciation of antiques and would probably stick a fancy portrait of Beowulf in it – the last thing in the world Grandfather had intended. And whenever she and Lalage met – which was seldom – she would ask, “Have you still got Lucy's picture?” Lucy saw her picture once or twice on Lalage's wall. No, noted it: she did not see it. By then she was living for D'Annunzio, and for a young man called Dennis Macnamara, who thought all that sort of thing great rot and died of dysentery in Mesopotamia. Lucy remained a spinster. Aunt Lalage maturely married a don, who was Welsh and made everyone read the Mabinogion. They retired to the land of his fathers and Lucy's picture was lost in the mists of Snowdonia.

But here it was.

Mr Collins had heard her quiet exclamation. Obviously it had not been addressed to him, since here he already was. But when a lady speaks, especially such an old lady, it is manners to get up. He got up. Having got up, he realised that it would not be manners to sit down again. Mr Edom had a particular way of approaching contemplative customers that Mr Collins in his clandestine heart called the Funeral Gondola. It was inimitable, though no doubt part of it came by practice. Mr Collins practised a few hushed strokes forward, and the old lady turned to him and said, “I recognised it.”

If she could do that through all those layers of varnish, she was certainly knowledgeable about the Dutch Masters.

“A Schalcken,” he said.

She nodded.

“The frame is unusually fine,” he continued. “It is contemporary. It was probably made for that very picture.”

“So I have always understood,” said the old lady. “You see, it's my picture.” She turned back to the Schalcken and smiled at it.

Poor old thing, she must be a little mad. He must deal with her gently – but he wished Mr Edom would come back.

When people get up on your account, it is never easy to get them down again. Lucy Mainwaring also wished that Mr Edom would come back, and faithful Ponto, his watchdog, return to those tankards. Instead, here he was, lankly hovering. She would have to say something to him. What a pity, when she had so much to say to the woman leaning out of the window; or rather, so much to ask, for she herself had not very much to tell.

“Where did Mr Edom get her?”

Mr Collins did the best he could, which was to pretend he hadn't heard. For this was appalling – at any rate it was on the brink of becoming appalling. The poor old thing wasn't going to stop at being a little mad. She was going to work herself up,
idée fixe
, persecution mania, and all that. How on earth was he to deal gently with an elderly maniac, convinced that the Schalcken was her picture and had been stolen from her? He looked to see if she had an umbrella. She hadn't; but she could do a lot of execution with that handbag. If force of godless prayer could have fetched Mr Edom back, Mr Edom would have darkened the door at that same instant. Instead, it was a couple inflamed by a television series about adventures in finding unidentified antiques. Mr Collins knew that kind at a glance – perhaps because there, but for the grace of God, he might have been adventuring himself.

“I don't suppose you've got any old books,” said the lady.

So they were on the prowl for edge-paintings, were they? Mr Collins had no patience with this craze for edge-paintings. He liked a handsome binding as well as any man; but with the spine of a book, and its sides, not to mention its interior, to be decorative on, tricking out its fore-edge – where at most a decent gilding should prevail – with esoteric views of St Paul's or what not, was going too far.

He indicated a row of Surtees, a broken set of Migne's
Patrologiae,
Hakluyt's
Navigations,
and Bewick's
Birds.
They took up each volume in turn, held it slantingly frontwise to the light, and spun the pages. “I'm afraid none of these are quite what we want,” said the man. “Do you go in for Art Nouveau?” And the woman said, “Have you any old Victorian jewellery?”

They were not nice people, but they were providential. Relieved of the necessity of throwing sticks for Mr Edom's Ponto, Miss Mainwaring went on interrogating the woman at the window. Here she was – but how had she got here? Through what dusty auction rooms, unsurmisable ownerships, perils? Lalage had died in 1942, with a small obituary in the
Times.
Her don survived her by six years, so earning a rather larger obituary, as
by then there was more room for civilian demises. Nineteen years, then, had been spent by the candlelit lady in travelling from Merionethshire to Oxfordshire. But she might well have been blown out of her course. One of the unsurmisable owners, a bank manager, say, or a clergyman, powerless as a Jesuit under authority, could have been directed to a wider usefulness at Wolverhampton, from Wolverhampton to Brighton. Considered in that light, she had been expeditious; though she looked composed as ever, she might even be rather out of breath, having got to the Abbey Antique Galleries only just in time.