Treasures of Time (21 page)

He lay against Kate’s sleeping back and looked at Hugh Paxton’s photograph on the dressing-table, illuminated by a shaft from the street lamp. Back again, he said to it, as you see. If you are in a position to see; if by any awful chance I am wrong in my spiritual and relgious unbelief. I daresay you don’t much care for me; your wife certainly doesn’t. And yet, and yet… And yet she could do a lot worse, Kate. I mean well. I do love her. My shortcomings are fairly standard ones, I think. But she…

But she is landed through no fault of her own with some fatal compulsion always to put herself in the least favourable light. Her own worst enemy is not an empty phrase. And I don’t know how fitted I am to cope with that. For ever.

Kate, an hour or two later, lay with her hands linked behind her head. You’re snoring, she said to Tom, just very slightly, just enough to let me know you’re there; I can’t imagine why people complain about other people snoring, just at the moment it’s the nicest noise I’ve ever heard.

I love you, she said. I know I’m difficult and cross and quite often people don’t like me, but I love you. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone.

She looked at her father’s photograph. Even you, and that’s saying a great deal.

Laura said, ‘Hello? Who’s that? Oh, I suppose it’s Tom.’

‘Yes. Kate’s not back yet, I’m afraid.’

‘The thing is, that if as I gathered from Kate you were coming down this weekend, the two of you, if you could get down by lunchtime, you could come with me to Standhill. John Barclay has very sweetly arranged to take me there.’

‘Standhill?’

‘Standhill is a terribly famous house,’ said Laura distantly. ‘By, um, by Inigo Thomas. I daresay you wouldn’t know.’

‘Ah.’ Tom considered the virtues of self-restraint, and rejected them. ‘I think perhaps you mean Inigo Jones.’

There was a fractional pause. ‘Of course one isn’t normally allowed to see all the house but John knows the people – who are away – and the secretary is going to show us round. It is a marvellous chance to see the pictures before they go to America. You had better be here by half-past twelve, if you would like to come.’

‘The family are based in the Bahamas, of course, now,’ said John Barclay. ‘Tax.’

‘Sad for them,’ said Laura.

‘Henry Archer, who you will meet, runs the place, really awfully well, too.’

Barclay drove. Laura sat beside him. Shreds of their conversation reached Tom and Kate, behind; which was just as well, Tom thought, the thing in its entirety, judging from the fragments you got, would have you in a state of apoplexy by the end of the drive. John Barclay wore a wide-brimmed black felt hat and dark glasses, which appeared to impede his driving.

The journey took in a good deal of Wiltshire and one of the most agreeable sections of Dorset. Than which, Tom thought, you cannot really ask for more. He sat and appreciated. Or rather, experienced pleasure and outrage in fairly equal proportions. No sooner had you done marvelling at a sequence of shape and colour, at the interruption of a sweep of downland by the dark bunching of trees in a valley, or the alternation of brown ploughlands and the sharp green of young corn, than there arrived the discordancy of a petrol station decked out with plastic streamers like the flagship of a fleet, or the unyielding cubes and tarmac of a housing estate clamped to the edge of a village. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, he thought. Or whoever else or whatever else is responsible for setting an incomparable scene and then making sure that most of us are apparently quite incapable of responding to it. Laura and Barclay, in the front, made occasional remarks that indicated a similar line of thought, which was vaguely irritating; he did not feel any more in harmony with them than with the manifold rapes of the landscape.

Standhill was indeed a very handsome house. It stood amid parkland, the scenery re-arranged around it to flatter and display: the long approach, leading the eye to the portico and sweep of steps; the formal gardens to right and left giving way to the park with its careful groupings of trees and pretty ‘temple’ with cupola on the brow of a low hil.

‘I don’t know…’ said Kate. ‘I’ve never been that mad about stately homes.’ She spoke quietly; in the front, Laura was busily enthusiastic.

‘Nor me. A reflex action, I suppose. Given the implications – the very unequal distribution of everything and the village removed because you don’t want anything so offensive visible from your drawing room windows, and the trampling on the face of the poor and the thought that I come from the class that would have been being trampled on, had I been around at the time. But given all that, let’s face it, the end product is extremely pleasing.’

‘Mmn. Yes.’

‘And I can appreciate Palladian architecture as well as the next man – ironically, given what I’ve just said about where
I’d
have been in seventeen whatever. But then, I’m a product of the historical process too, just as much as the house.’

‘My…’ said Kate. ‘You never get tired of picking a subject over, do you? Some people would just have a look, and leave it at that.’

‘I’m a case of educational conditioning.’

By a process that afforded Laura a great deal of pleasure, they were admitted not through the front door with the ticket-buying
hoi polloi
, but through a private side entrance. John Barclay and Henry Archer conversed knowledgeably about doors, ceilings and staircases; Archer, a man in his mid-forties, combined Barclay’s faintly raffish air with the complacency of a successful stockbroker: an interesting achievement, Tom thought, done somehow by means of a style of dressing that just missed conventionality and frequent conversational reference to valuations and running costs. Laura continued to enthuse. Tom and Kate lingered behind. They toured the main rooms in the wake of a guided tour, Archer apologizing for this temporary relegation to the common ruck. ‘The drawing room,’ he said, ‘is of course generally thought to be by way of a trial run for the double cube room at Wilton – some people think it marginally finer. Slightly smaller.’

Barclay said, ‘The Constables of course stay for the moment?’

‘For the moment. One can’t really say how long for, though. And now let’s go on to the Red Room.’

They followed him through. ‘And this is the part that people don’t normally see,’ said Laura reverently.

‘That’s right. Not many of the pictures have ever been on public view. One or two of the Turners went to the Burlington House exhibition. The big Constable has always been here – it was commissioned from the painter by the Stanton of the time. The Ghirlandaio and the Giorgiones were acquired on a Grand Tour by his grandfather.’ He moved ahead, with Barclay and Laura, indicating a hierarchy of value and fame within which the pictures should be viewed.

Tom and Kate lingered behind. ‘The trouble is,’ said Tom, ‘all this was very well worth coming for. Very well worth. Let’s take our time.’

They arrived presently at a small alcove in which a single picture was hung. After two or three minutes Tom said, ‘I think I like this as much as any picture I’ve ever seen. In fact I’m completely smitten by it.’

The picture, somewhat in the style of Claude Lorrain – an anglicized Lorrain, less blue, greener, and indefinably more robust – was large, and showed an affectionately painted landscape with, at one side and very much subordinate, a small grouping of figures. These, more closely inspected, could be seen to be an upper class early eighteenth century family: father, mother and three children. Like the figures in later, more properly Romantic painting, they looked out into the landscape, in semi-profile, rather than at the viewer. There were other figures in the painting, but more distant and treated as integral to the scenery: peasant women hay-making, a man driving a horse-team, a carter. They claimed attention only after one had been looking at the picture for some while; it was a painting of a place, not of people.

Trees, in the foreground, framed the receding distances of a vale. Far away, a darkening at the horizon suggested more hills, perhaps afforested and uncultivated. The vale united the functional and the aesthetic, it was of equal interest to the agrarian historian and the art connoisseur: the formality of pre-enclosure strip fields in the middle distance – colour-blocks of fawn and gold and chestnut – were offset by the textural complexity of coppices and a laddering of hedged fields beyond. Emphasis and perspective carried the eye to a cottage tucked away here, a group of grazing cows there, the vanishing white loop of a road, a curl of smoke from a charcoal-burner’s hut. It was a landscape both empty and intensely populated; it gave the impression at once of the triumph and the taming of nature. A spray of foliage in the immediate foreground was meticulously and naturalistically rendered, but one’s attention was drawn from that to the more impressionistic but equally demanding port-wine glow of the coat worn by the man in the family group.

The others had joined them. Archer said, ‘Spencer. Not a big name, of course, but it’s an attractive picture.’

‘It’s the view from the house, isn’t it?’ said Tom.

‘That’s right. And Sir John and Lady Stanton and their offspring. It’s going to the Mellon Collection. We hope. Between you and me – fingers crossed and all that, it’s not yet cleared with the export licensing people.’

‘So pretty,’ said Laura, ‘I love the little girls in their blue frocks.’

Tom looked at Archer. ‘And they’re quite happy about that?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They don’t mind – the, er, Stantons – selling a picture that seems rather to belong here.’ If you turned and looked out of the window, he now noticed, a section of the landscape shown in the picture could be seen: the same distant hill with curious notch, the ‘temple’ with its attendant grouping of trees.

‘Naturally,’ said Archer stiffly, ‘they would have preferred to keep the collection intact, but circumstances…’

‘Such dreadful taxes,’ murmured Laura.

‘If I couldn’t have kept any other single thing,’ said Tom, ‘I’d have kept that.’

Kate said, ‘Are they very hard up?’

‘Really, darling!’

Archer laughed. ‘Thanks to extremely efficient financial advice – Biggard, Handley and Hope, you know’ – to Barclay – ‘a very satisfactory arrangement was reached with the Treasury after old Lord Stanton’s death. It’s a question more of – well, of diversification, you might say. The present owner of Standhill has rather wide business interests in the Caribbean and – all this in confidence, of course – it’s a question of realizing assets with expansion in mind. So – unfortunately – the bulk of the pictures have to go. A nucleus will stay, of course, in the public rooms. There’s an interesting negotiation going on with an American library over the archives, too.’

‘Archives?’ said Tom.

‘Standhill,’ Archer explained, ‘is the only Inigo Jones house – building of any kind, indeed – to be in the happy position of still retaining all his original plans, elevations and so forth. So far as we know there’s nothing missing at all, it’s a most valuable collection, plus also the diary the architect kept over the building period, and his correspondence with leading figures of the time. We’re talking in terms of a million dollars or so.’