Murther and Walking Spirits

  “But Victorian Gothic is coming into great popularity. Have you seen Kenneth Clark’s book?”

  “That’s scholarly, of course, and the scholarly buyer isn’t usually well-fixed. Strictly Old World. Cottage and quarter-acre of garden. And there’s location, in the present instance.”

  “What’s wrong with the location? Look outside. A superb day. A splendid view, right over toward the Red Castle.”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Gilmartin. It’s Wales. Wales is too far, and too wet, and too unfashionable.”

  “But you sell places in northern Scotland, for God’s sake! What’s fashionable about that?”

  “That’s sporting. Grousing. Deer. Those big creatures – what do they call ’em? Stags. They kill stags. Just between ourselves, there are two people up there breeding stags, to keep the mountains well-stagged, for the sportsmen. A good stag fetches quite a figure.”

  “I believe there are a lot of otters in the stream here.”

  “Otters don’t pull, Mr. Gilmartin. You have to walk too far to find ’em. And in water. Otters are not a major enthusiasm among the Stock Exchange set.”

  “This is very discouraging.”

  “Sorry. But I know you want me to be realistic.”

  “What does realism suggest, then?”

  “We’d have to explore that. Suppose we run a picture in Country Life; and that means substantial investment on our part, as I’m sure you’ll understand. What does this place look like to the casual eye? What can a photographer get hold of? It’s not really a castle, though those towers are castle features, certainly. And it’s not ecclesiastical – not an old abbey or anything of that sort – though there’s an ecclesiastical air about it, especially the windows. And it’s bloody well not domestic, if you’ll pardon my French. Doesn’t look homey. Not at all. So what can we hope for? Might go for a school, but they never have any real money. Might go for a nunnery, and those R.C.S are sharp dealers, let me tell you. I don’t suppose you have any objection to an R.C. sale?”

  “I’d sell to Old Nick if he would pay a good price.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re free of religious prejudice. That’s always troublesome in a vendor.”

  “You tell me that location, and location, and location are your standards. A good price is mine. Or rather, I should say it’s the standard the Inland Revenue have imposed on me.”

  “Ah, it’s a forced sale, is that it?”

  “Indeed it is. And I’ll tell you why. My father was born in this county, very near here, and he always wanted a house here. Always wanted this house, in fact. But he was a citizen of Canada. He knew what the situation was: he was liable for estate taxes in both the United Kingdom and Canada, and on his full estate. You can guess what that would mean. Taxes far exceeding even his substantial means. After a lot of haggling and costly legal process he got an agreement from the tax people here that if he lived in this place for seven years after the agreement was signed, his estate here would be taxed only on what he owned in the United Kingdom. But that agreement came too late. He died five years later, and now I have to arrange to pay full estate tax in both countries, even though he never lived here for more than six months in any given year. The Canadians are very decent as tax-gatherers go, which isn’t far. So are the people here. But they are not so decent that I don’t have to find a hell of a lot of money – so much money that when it’s all paid there won’t be much left, if anything is left at all. It’s policy, they tell me. He left some substantial bequests, though not to me. So you see how it is. I’ve got to squeeze as much money out of this house and its estate and its furnishings as I can possibly get, or I’m ruined. Worse than ruined, because I live on a professor’s salary. I belong to the kind of people who buy Old World cottages if they buy anything at all. I may have to sell my modest, modern Canadian house to make up the final sum. The lawyers! They get their big slice, win or lose. So I’m avaricious, Mr. Crouter. Avaricious as only a cornered man can be. And I’m asking you, what can you do for me?”

  “My very best, Mr. Gilmartin. Butler and Manciple always do their very best and you can be sure I’ll tell my principals everything you’ve told me. They understand about estate taxes. A lot of our business comes from people who’ve been taxed out of places they’ve lived in for – nearly as long as Robert de Belème’s time ago. I suppose you hate selling this place?”

  “Frankly, Mr. Crouter, I don’t. It would never be mine, however long I lived here. This place represents a dream of my father’s, and it was a dream that did not make my life easy, I may tell you. This was his Land of Lost Content, which he managed to turn into a sort of Paradise Regained.”

  “You don’t say so! Okay Mr. Gilmartin. I’ll do the best I can, as I’ve said. And I can tell you – I’ve a romantic side to my character, my wife keeps telling me – we at the firm know that we do quite an extensive business in dreams. That’s what estate-agency is.”

  (9)

  HOWEVER BOLDLY, and indeed cynically, Brochwel speaks to Mr. Crouter about selling Belem Manor, his thoughts when he sits in the big, now somewhat dismal, library that night, having supped on cold lamb with salad, followed by Old Rose’s notion of coffee, are in a very different strain.

  Paradise Regained, he had called the Manor, and doubtless for Rhodri it had been so. The powerful Liverpool owners of Belem Manor, the Coopers, had obeyed the ancient law of Heraclitus, that excess in anything eventually runs into its opposite, and their wealth had brought ease, refinement, an illusion that wealth needs no shepherding, and eventual ruin. For him to be able to buy the Manor – that was a stroke of quite unforeseeable good fortune. To have the Canadian dollars to restore the splendour which the Coopers had allowed to run to seed, and to be himself the master of a great house for which his father, the unfortunate Walter, had once supplied the liveries – was that not a Paradise Regained, an adjustment of the balances of Fortune?

  To be able to indulge the hobby of his middle age, and fill Belem with handsome antiques had given him unceasing pleasure. His own taste was fair, and he had the guidance of his old school friend Fred ffrench, who had become something of a notability in the world of antique dealers. (Was he not one of the committee who vetted the furniture that was shown at the annual Antique Dealers’ Fair in London? Was he not a regular supplier to the great Bond Street dealers of antiques that he bought in Wales when Wales was still unknown territory to the English buyers?) Yes, Fred ffrench, who had gone to school with Rhodri. Fred had come up in the world, and converted his father’s undertaking business into one of the finest provincial antique shops in the Kingdom. On the way he had abandoned the English spelling of his name, and Fred French became Fred ffrench, which was authentically Welsh, and looked well on his letterheads. Fred ffrench was happy to put his taste, his knowledge and, of course, his professional scale of fees to work for his old friend.

  Old friends; there were plenty of them and Rhodri never turned his back on one of them, however humble. But there were new friends, as well. County people, many of whom had been brought to straitened circumstances by wars which claimed cherished sons; that ill-fortune worked hand in hand with rising taxes, and the temper of a time which was sour about their sort of privilege. They were pleased to welcome the new owner of Belem Manor; his lavish spending looked like an assurance that the old days, when county was county, had not wholly disappeared. There were those, of course, who despised him as an upstart; they were county people who did not like his New World ways, and townspeople whose long Welsh memories went back to the days of drunken Uncle David, and the disgrace of bankruptcy. But on the whole Rhodri had managed very well as a county landowner, and his open-handed support of local causes salved the feelings of the gentry whenever those might be rubbed a little raw.

  Oh, he had enjoyed a happy old age, had Rhodri. He had returned to the Land of Lost Content and found it still a land of present content. But now the setting in which he had played out his comedy must be disposed of, the fine antiques
must be sold, the rapacity of the tax-gatherers must be appeased.

  The auction impended, and Brochwel dreaded it, for he saw it as the piecemeal destruction of his father’s dream. The dreamer now slept, never to wake again, but after every life, some wretched dispositions must be made, and somebody must see them through. And so – an auction.

  (10)

  THE AUCTION. This film represents an extraordinary variety of techniques; the scene with Mr. Crouter, for instance, was as direct as it could possibly be. The war scenes with Brochwel in the cellar and the altar tomb were wonders of rapid cutting and montage, and now as I first see the great auction at Belem Manor I know that there are to be even more, even dizzier, evocations of fact mingled with feeling, superimpositions, distortions, and all the riot of épopée cinématographique as the great Abel Gance and Leonid Trauberg conceived it. If, during my lifetime, I had been confronted with the job of reviewing this film, what could I have made of it in my useful journalist’s prose? Its import is amply clear – much clearer than straight narrative could achieve – but its technique is the phantasmagoria of the human mind, of human perception, of human thought as poets of the film understand it.

  The auction – what a festival it turns out to be! A big tent, an ornamental tent like a wedding marquee, has been set up on Belem’s lawn, and at one end of it two kitchen tables have been put together to form a platform, and covered with a handsome Turkey carpet; the auctioneer now takes his place; he is not that genial figure, a country auctioneer, but Mr. Beddoe, one of the high priests of the great Bond Street auction house of Torringtons, and his mien is serious. He is, in himself, an assurance that fine things are to be sold, and fine prices expected. Before he begins he glances over the assembly who sit in the folding chairs on the grass. Mr. Beddoe is an old hand, and knows precisely who they are.

  The local gentry, of course; come to see the fun, to marvel at the prices people will pay for chairs and tables they have known when Rhodri Gilmartin was dispensing his considerable hospitality. Some of them have pencils ready to mark prices in their catalogues. (Catalogue on request, from Torringtons; price one guinea.)

  The visitors, some from quite a long way off, in Cheshire or Shropshire; they think they know antiques, and hope to pick up good things at less than shop prices; they study Connoisseur and Frank Davis’s column in Country Life and they have been busy on the view-days, taking note of what they think they will bid for. They have vainglorious hopes of getting the better of Mr. Beddoe, of scoring off Torringtons, and boasting about it forever after.

  The Ring. Mr. Beddoe knows the members of the Ring very well, but he does not nod or acknowledge their presence. These are the professionals, the men from the big antique dealers, who attend every significant sale, buy all the best things, and know to a farthing what every object will sell for when they have got their hands on it. They hate and despise the visitors, those simple amateurs, and sometimes when they feel mischievous they trap one of that gullible tribe into a contest of bidding, and then leave him with a piece they have never seriously thought of buying, which has been run up to an absurd price. It is possible – even though it is illegal – that the Ring will let one of their number buy a good piece at a low price, if he can, and then, when they meet at night at the Green Man in Trallwm, they will have another auction, and one of their number will buy it at a greater price, for sale to a customer he knows wants this very thing; the precious object will at least double its money, on Bond Street.

  The Ring are the old hands at the antique business. Not well-dressed or remarkable men to look at; they do not seek to call attention to themselves. But they are the nourishing root of a complex trade. They are not in the least like the glossy young men with cut-glass accents who will eventually sell the antiques (polished and repaired where necessary) in Bond Street, in Cheltenham, in Oxford or wherever people seek the very best survivals from the furnishings of an earlier age.

  The Ring are not the eager bidders – the catalogue-wavers, the putters up of hands, the head-bobbers. Mr. Beddoe knows them, and a wink or a raised pencil is signal enough for Mr. Beddoe.

  Mr. Beddoe, and his colleague Mr. Wherry-Smith, are prepared to steer a careful course over the three days of the Belem Manor Sale. There is a lot of Victorian Gothic and some earlier Gothic Revival stuff in the catalogue; it remained in the house when Rhodri bought it, because it was too big, too grandiose for the dwellings of the remaining Coopers. That style is now well advanced in the antique market as collectable. It will not draw the visitors, but the Ring will pick up the best of it. Mallatt’s, on Bond Street, is already doing very well with Gothic Revival, and it will be a rage for a few years.

  The hour strikes from the Belem stable clock, and Mr. Beddoe taps on his desk with a ball of ivory which he holds – not for the likes of Mr. Beddoe is the conventional auctioneer’s hammer – and silences the crowd, which Brochwel, standing alone at the back of the marquee, judges to be no less than two hundred and fifty.

  “This is an important sale, ladies and gentlemen, and Torringtons are very happy to be offering some exceptional pieces, including many in the Gothic Revival area. The terms of sale are printed at the front of your catalogue, and I expect you to have familiarized yourselves with them. So without more ado [Mr. Beddoe relishes ‘ado’ as a word congruous with the antique trade] let us begin, and I think we may as well start with the famous Belem Clock, which you have undoubtedly examined in the Great Hall.”

  Indeed the audience has gaped at the astonishing Belem Clock, much too big to be brought into the marquee. Whoever buys it will have to pay a handsome price to take it away.

  “Made in 1838 by Hausburg of Munich; strikes the hours on one bell and the quarters on four others, each quarter differently. An eight-day movement, and the dials on the façade show seconds, days of the week, the days of the month, the months, the four seasons, the signs of the zodiac, the time at Belem Manor – which is, of course, the time at Greenwich – as well as the phases of the moon. The pendant escapement is on Graham’s principle. The case finished, as you have seen during the view days, in fine bronze and ormolu.

  “But the special feature of this clock is its assembly of chimes, thirty-seven in number, operated by sixty-two exquisitely tuned steel keys. There are seven changeable cylinders, and the chimes will play four English airs, four Irish airs, four Welsh airs – and I know that many in this audience have just heard it play ‘Of noble race was Shenkin’ – and four patriotic airs. There are two cylinders of Scottish airs – the Cooper family, who commissioned this remarkable clock, were proud of their Scottish ancestry – and of course in the best nineteenth-century tradition there are four Sacred airs. Cylinders cased in oak boxes lined with velvet. More than a clock: a musical instrument of unique quality.

  “The ornamentation is in the finest early-nineteenth-century style. Figures representing Day and Night; two heads of Time in youth and age, and medallions of the Seasons, all rendered in verd-antique. Dial enriched in gold and fine enamel. An unique piece, ladies and gentlemen; a triumph of horological skill and in itself a splendid evocation of the mid-nineteenth century. Somewhat large, it must be admitted, but many of you have very large houses, I know, and we now ask for your bids on an exceptional timepiece.”

  Silence.

  “Nobody likes to be the first to bid on the first item. I know that well. So shall I propose a figure? Shall I say five thousand pounds for a beginning? You would not, as I am certain you know, reproduce this clock today for five times that figure. There simply aren’t the workmen. Five – do I hear five? Does anyone say five, to start the bidding?”

  Nobody says five. Or anything at all. Mr. Beddoe comes down, and down, and down, until one of the Ring (who knows an American with a place in Scotland, who will pay ten thousand for the clock) gets it for five hundred pounds.

  Is Mr. Beddoe dismayed? Not he! He knew that monstrous clock would go very low, but he knew that the buyers would thereby be encouraged to think that everyth
ing that came up subsequently would go low. And he is right. The next item, an angle ottoman – “upholstered in China Damask trimmed with silk gimp and cord, finished with silk tufts and rosettes and a shaped valance trimmed with bow gimp and fringe” – goes for exactly twice what he had mentally decided he might get for it. All is going well. The crowd thinks it smells bargains. The ottoman whispers of Victorian flirtations, of crinolines wooed by drooping sidewhiskers.

  Mr. Beddoe offers what he calls a Portfolio Stand in oak, with brass ornamentation and crimson tassels. A century ago the pious Coopers used it not for portfolios, but for a gigantic Bible, which was thus displayed, opened each day to some edifying passage, in the Great Hall. Mr. Cooper read from it when the forty indoor servants were assembled for morning prayers. The Coopers had great faith in daily doses of religion for keeping the maidservants sweet and the menservants chaste, and upon the whole it worked – the daily prayers, Sunday processions of the whole household to church, and a decidedly un-Christlike severity toward any backsliders, pregnant housemaids or light-fingered footmen. This object, which Brochwel thinks a monstrosity, fetches a very good price from a visitor who wants it to display his art books, which exemplify the religion of his very cultivated style of life.

  Rhodri, assisted by electricity and modern refrigeration, had managed Belem with five indoor servants.

  Upon the whole, good objects, conformable to modern life while bringing to it a whiff of Gothic Revival romance, fetch good prices. Two hall seats, upholstered in Utrecht velvet which, though faded, is still sturdy, bring a surprising figure. They look like something on which Sir Walter Scott might have sat – but he hadn’t.

  A pianoforte by Broadwood, the case of which is gussied up in elaborate marqueterie of an eighteenth-century savour, but standing on Gothic legs, causes a contest of bidding that looks as though it might bring two ladies to blows. It is not offered for view by the porters who move the furniture in and out of the tent with expedition, stage-managed by a senior man who is rather past heavy lifting; the piano may be seen in the drawing-room in the house. The bidders know that the innards of the piano are in ruins, but they want the extraordinary case, for reasons best known to themselves. The members of the Ring are not interested in this one, and watch the bidding with the amused despisal that is the mark of their profession when amateurs are vying for anything they themselves do not want.