Treasures of Time Page 14

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.’

  ‘Pity the Soane Museum couldn’t raise the funds,’ said Barclay. ‘Or the Bodleian. There have been murmurings, of course, that the Stantons might have put a lower price on them to keep them in the country. But one does see the problem, of course,’ he added.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Kate, ‘people give things to libraries and museums. Such as my father. Of course he wasn’t rich or aristocratic.’

  Archer was now looking ruffled. ‘Naturally the family are the first to regret… The Soane Museum was given eight weeks to try to match the Texas offer. Unfortunately… So there it is. Very sad, but inevitable.’

  ‘Oh, quite inevitable,’ said Tom, ‘given human nature, from which obviously even the aristocracy aren’t immune. It’s interesting,’ he went on, ‘I can understand lions and vintage cars and antique emporia, up to a point. Vulgarization and exploitation I can sympathize with. Just about. In fact at the moment they look in thoroughly good taste. This, though, leaves you fairly staggered. It’s amazing!’

  ‘Oh nonsense, Tom,’ said Laura. ‘You don’t know anything about how frightfully difficult it is for people to keep up old houses like this nowadays.’ She gave him an icy look and went after Archer, who had walked angrily away. John Barclay looked put out. He said, ‘Henry Archer is a distant cousin as it happens, his mother was a Stanton, but I suppose you couldn’t know that.’ He too moved off down the gallery.

  Tom turned back to the picture. ‘My mother always used to say, you’re entitled to think what you like, but nobody’s going to thank you for saying it.’

  ‘So did mine,’ said Kate. ‘A bit differently put.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’m not. I enjoyed it.’

  ‘I’m quite glad we came, all the same. There’s always something a bit awe-inspiring about greed on a really majestic scale.’

  The next day, they walked on the downs behind the village. Kate said, ‘Ma was wondering about you, over the washing-up. She was wondering if you realized how off-put people can be by outspokenness and if there’d be any point in you trying for a job in the civil service and she could have a word with James Hamilton only to tell the truth she wasn’t absolutely sure you made an awfully good impression, that evening. And she was feeling it was a pity you were so opinionated because you’re really rather nice-looking.’

  Tom laughed. He took her hand. ‘Well, it’s a relief that I’m acceptable on one count, I suppose.’

  It was early evening. The sky had cleared after a day of intermittent heavy rain; in a clear, sharp light the surrounding hills had the brilliance and detail of scenery seen through binoculars: grazing sheep half a mile away wore discernible painted numbers, the trees crowning the hillock of the East Kennet barrow showed individual outlines. There were long muddy puddles on the farm track that they were following, wide streaks of light that reflected the sky so that, picking a way past them, they walked in a circular world, the same underfoot as overhead. Birds fled past like arrows. The wind brought smells of hay and a farmyard.

  Everything is all right, Kate thought. Now, just this minute, everything is all right. I could sing. The world is beautiful and I am in it and that is enough. Just for now, it is as easy and as simple to be me as it is for those birds. All I have to do is be, not feel or think.

  Once, I walked along here with my father.

  I am thirteen. I have breasts that slide and bounce under my jerseys; I hate them, they make me feel funny, I think all the time that people must be staring at me. I walk beside Daddy and he talks about somewhere he has been digging, about what they dug and about the people he was with, he is funny about what someone did and he makes me laugh. Suddenly, I feel as though I were someone else, not me: I feel pretty and thin and friendly. I tell him about things: about what I like and what I think and what I have been doing at school. In the middle, I remember who I really am and I say, sometimes I hate being me, I hate who I am, I wish I was someone else, anyone else. And he takes my hand and swings my arm up and down and says, we all do that, Katie, now and again, it can’t be helped, that’s something we all have to put up with. Some more than others, he says, but that is to himself, it seems, not me. And then he sees a hawk on the telephone lines and shows me, and we stand for a moment, looking. The hawk is bright brown against the sky; I see its yellow stare and the wind ruffling its feathers and beyond it the green downs and the sun like a penny behind a cloud. I stand outside myself and see all that and everything is all right again.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m making a paper boat, aren’t I? This is paper-boat-sailing weather.’

  The wind, driving along the puddle, ridged it with tiny waves. Tom said, ‘Go the other end, I’m sending you down an armada of unpaid bills.’

  ‘Idiot…. I could never fold them properly. It’s one of the lots of things I’ve never been able to do.’ She walked to the far end of the water and watched him, folding away there twenty yards up the path. ‘Go on,’ she shouted, ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Hang on, I’m a perfectionist, Batts Road primary school champion, time was.’

  And the first boat came spinning down in the force nine gale, making good time, six seconds flat by Kate’s watch, to be fished out water-logged and on the edge of capsizing.

  ‘That’s not done your bank statement much good!’

  ‘Never mind. Stand by – something with a bit more power coming up.’

  And the next, veering wildly, made four and a half seconds before going aground.

  ‘Tom! That was a page of notes or something!’

  ‘No time to be choosy. We’re racing some small craft now. Stop-watch out!’

  Daft, she thought fondly, mad… And the cocked white hats came flying down, three of them, neck and neck. But one took off and became airborne, flew away over the fence into the field, one keeled over into the mud and was beached, leaving the winner only to be picked up by Kate. ‘Slow! Eight seconds!’

  Letters, scrawled in black marker pen, crept in and out of the paper folds: a C and an H and an E. She shook it open and saw – streaked now with mud and wet – a sketch of a canal lock with a narrow boat drawn up in front. A gay, pretty little sketch. And across the bottom, scribbled, Tom – love from Cherry.

  And the sun went in, appropriately, shoved behind a wedge of hitherto unremarked black cloud.

  She handed him the unravelled boat, walked quickly away down the track.

  He caught her up. ‘Look… She took me along the canal that day in Birmingham. She did it then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d forgotten it was in my pocket. I didn’t look…’

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

  But it does matter. Where there was sun and bright sky-reflecting water and grass pouring in the wind there is uncertainty and misgivings and the knowledge that nothing stays still, that one moves all the time from one moment to another, that everything changes.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘The intellectual career of William Stukeley,’ Tom wrote, ‘may well provide us with a salutary instance of the manipulation of historical evidence.’ May well? Either it does or it doesn’t; ‘may well’ is journalese. Substitute ‘provides’ for ‘may well provide’… ‘As Stukeley’s attempts to interpret the information he had gathered move from the objective and scientific to the subjective and fantastic, as he starts to believe not what the facts suggest but what he would like to believe, we see…’ Well, what we see is a man behaving like most people, and not like a historian, which is what
he is setting out to be. Historians are not allowed to use the past for their own ends. Nor, by the same token, are blokes who happen through accident of fate to own the only complete set of Inigo Jones plans and sketches pertaining to a particular house. Nor are politicians, house agents, antique dealers, autobiographers or any other category of person that does so most of the time. ‘… Nevertheless, however tarnished Stukeley’s credibility as an antiquarian after his ordination in 1728, his early work remains as testimony to a vigorous and enquiring mind, while the pattern of his career serves as a…’… useful rung for the scholarly progress of one Tom Rider, in this present year of grace, himself involved in the same line of business. Thus do we feed one upon another.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Tony Greenway, ‘I’ve got five chapters under my belt.’

  ‘Great! I’d love to read it, when you’ve got a bit further.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. Not really. You don’t have to be that polite. How’s the Paxton programme coming on?’

  ‘Quite nicely. The overall structure’s worked out now, and I’ve got various people on tape to go with film of different crucial sites. Helicopter shots, too. It’s going to be a very visual programme, much more so than Teilhard was, we had a lot of sweat there thinking up shots. At least with archaeology there’s absolutely no problem in that direction, it’s a question of picking and choosing. We’re filming down in Wiltshire at the end of the month. Will you and Kate be around?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we can miss out on that.’

  ‘All well now?’ said Tony delicately.

  ‘Pretty well.’

  Tony’s own personal life – his inclinations even – remained mysterious and unspecified. He was attentive – slightly gallant, indeed – towards women while at the same time giving the impression that possibly these attentions were performed only in the course of duty, whether professional or social. If his taste ran rather to his own sex, there was no evidence for this either, except in the absence of any convincing demonstrations in the direction of girls. Tom was forced to the opinion that he might be in the presence of one of those rare spirits able to survive without emotional or sexual commitment of any kind. He wondered what it felt like. Where work was concerned, on the other hand, Tony gave every indication of absolute and indeed excessive commitment: he seemed frequently on the verge of nervous collapse. He worked, often, nine or ten hours a day, fuelled by enthusiasm and what appeared to be a kind of panic. He was also a prey to bouts of depression and self-doubt. During Tom’s sojourn in the flat, he had occasionally unburdened himself, slumped in gloom in the mornings, drinking cup after cup of coffee, dispirited about the impermanence of what he made, about something he called ‘truthfulness’, about whether it mattered at all. Of course it matters, Tom would say briskly; at the other end of the room the blank screen of the very large television set reflected the London skyline through the flat’s picture-window, a panorama of clouds, multi-storey buildings and the occasional aeroplane.