Murther and Walking Spirits

  “That’s my polishin’ brought that £800!” she hissed to Brochwel. “That’s my Lavendo and elbow-grease that fetched that £800; and for that little side table! Who’d ever have thought that!” And she was probably right. Auctioneers know that a piece that has been in loving and careful hands for years brings far more than the supposed “treasure” that has been hoiked up from storage in the back of a stable, unloved and forlorn.

  Unlikely objects fetched unexpected prices. There was keen competition for a “prie-dieu chair,” upon which a petitioner could undoubtedly have knelt, but it is far more likely that one of the Cooper daughters had sat on the cushioned kneeler to put on her pretty stockings. The Victorians and the designers of Gothic Revival furniture had a curious trick of adapting a medieval object to a domestic modern need. There were “aumbries” for instance, made in imitation of the cupboards in which the chalices and patens of the Communion service were kept, but which the Victorians used for their teacups and milk jugs. Silver especially came in for this sort of transformation and many a jam-spoon took the form of a spoon for the holy oil at a coronation. Commodes, chastely concealing a chamber-pot for use in a lady’s bedroom, might have quite a Gothic air about them, so that the infrequent pleasure of defecation – the displacement of the Victorian female tappen – was enhanced by a sense of historical continuity. These po-boxes – as the Ring called them – went very well in the antique shops of the kingdom. They made pleasing occasional rests for lamps. Belem offered several examples of all these things, remaining from the high and palmy days of the Coopers.

  The prie-dieu chair; as the bidding became quicker and keener Brochwel thought about the religious associations of his family. Janet – the Mater – whom he had never seen, had apparently been deeply devout in the Evangelical, Wesleyan manner, as had Walter, who also had died before Brochwel was born. Great people to pray, both of them. Great people to set aside a tenth – the biblical “tithe” – of their little income to be given to church and charity. Rhodri had been only an occasional church-goer, but he was a generous church-giver. A salve to conscience? Malvina had long ceased to go to church, even infrequently, before her death. An invalid. Sometimes the minister came to call, and drank tea, and laughed more often than the conversation seemed to make necessary. But in one of these Belem Manor conversations, during that last visit, Rhodri had said something significant.

  “In all our life together, I never saw her pray,” he said, with a wonder that made it plain that he himself did pray, perhaps furtively but none the less with true intent. If they had shared a religious life, would the need for insistence on truth and loyalty have been less avid? If they had had a belief in which they could, so to speak, turn easily and draw full breaths, would they have needed so strict a world of duty?

  I, the patient looker-on, think I know the answer to that. Rhodri and Malvina had come at the end of the great evangelical movement in Christianity, when the immense impulse given to it by John Wesley and his disciples was running down and no longer infused those who believed they believed. Could Malvina, whose family had been ruined by church ambition and church hypocrisy, have been a strong believer? She was not a saint and it would have taken the zeal and fortitude of a saint to believe devoutly and humbly in a faith that had brought ruin and humiliation and a sense of treachery.

  As for Rhodri, his relinquishing of the church – though not wholly of belief – had a different, a comical, an entirely understandable and forgivable origin. He simply outgrew Methodism. He possessed a strong, though not a cultivated or refined, aesthetic sense, and the hideous temples of evangelicism, like William McOmish’s Grace Church, made him laugh. If that was God’s house, God must have appalling taste. If the people God assembled there were His chosen, God was welcome to them. Rhodri the journalist knew too much about many of them to accept them as intellectual or ethical equals. There was no spite in this, just a little snobbery of a not wholly discreditable kind.

  Snobbery, like every other social attitude, takes its character from those who practise it. The snob is supposedly a mean creature, delighting in slight and trivial distinctions. But is the man who bathes every day a snob because he does not seek the company of the one-bath-a-week, one-shirt-a-week, one-pair-of-clean-drawers-a-week, one-pair-of-socks-a-week man? Must the gourmet embrace the barbarian whose idea of a fine repast is a hamburger made from the flesh of fallen animals, and a tub of fries soaked in vinegar? Is the woman who wears a first-rate intaglio to be faulted because she thinks little of the woman whose fingers are loaded with fake diamonds? Rhodri had outgrown the kind of people who exemplified – no, not the faith of his fathers, but what remained of that faith in the modern world.

  Doubtless it is the Devil’s work to nibble away at a man’s belief in such a fashion, but it must be admitted that the Devil is a fine craftsman, and so many of his arguments are unanswerable. Probably Heraclitus would have had something to say about that. Everything, in time, begets its opposite.

  (13)

  IF IT IS TRUE, as the song says, that “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage,” it is equally true that art and snobbery, art and snobbery, go together like a highway and robbery. On the second day of the sale Mr. Wherry-Smith, one of Torringtons’ best men when it came to pictures, takes the auctioneer’s elevated desk, and sets to work with professional geniality.

  As a joke, he opens with two pottery caricature figures of Gladstone and Disraeli. A member of the Ring is annoyed when an eager outsider pushes the price up to twenty-five guineas (for Mr. Wherry-Smith does not admit the existence of any lesser unit of currency), but the Ring man knows where he can get rid of those things for sixty, without a murmur.

  Then come the pictures, some of which are better than Rhodri ever knew, or the Coopers ever foresaw. A Gainsborough called The Beggar Boys, with an indisputable pedigree, went for thirteen thousand guineas. The county spectators gasp, for they had always liked that picture, as they sat under it in the dining-hall at the Manor, but they had never respected it, and were humbled by their own lack of prescience. A portrait by Millais of his wife – the former Mrs. Ruskin, and a stunning Scots beauty – brought five thousand, and another Millais, of pretty children, brought two. Noblemen fetched less. A reputed Kneller of the Marquess of Blandford (John Churchill, but not the John Churchill) fetched a mere seven hundred and fifty guineas and an Earl of Rochester (which one? the one who wore a white periwig) went for a miserable hundred. A Poynter of squeezable but obviously virginal girls in a classic setting, with plenty of sun shining through their flimsy garments, brought twelve hundred guineas from a wistful local bachelor who had always fancied it, but a gloomy Watts called Love and Death went for a risible sixty. The very next picture, a rousingly romantic portrait by John Singleton Copley of the twelfth Earl of Eglinton, glorious in Highland chieftain’s dress, created a furore, and the Ring quickly ran it up beyond the reach of any but very serious buyers; it went at last to one of themselves for thirty-five thousand guineas. There was a round of applause in the marquee, and Mr. Wherry-Smith, smiling as though to say, “Nothing to do with me; I am but the humble broker of the Muses,” bobbed his head in acknowledgement.

  Some of these pictures came with the Manor and represented the taste of the Coopers, who had bought fashionably in their time; their Victorian pictures have come into favour again. Some of the pictures had been bought by Rhodri, whose simple principle it was to buy what he liked, and that meant pictures of men who looked as if they held their heads high in the world, and ladies who had beauty in the style of one age or another. He liked to surround himself with pictures of people who might have been his ancestors, if he had belonged to the class that has ancestors, and not just forebears. He never pretended that these odds and ends from sales were connected with himself by anything other than right of purchase. But in a way he was right. These were pictures of people successful and important in their own time, and as a successful and important person he might be c
onsidered their descendant and modern exemplar. Some of the pictures were good – in the world of Mr. Wherry-Smith and the Ring – and some were scorned in that same world. Some fetched substantial prices. Some went for under £100, which in modern terms is ignominious. To Brochwel everything in the sale was part of the milieu Rhodri had created for himself, the stage-setting against which he had played the final scenes of his hero-struggle, and it was painful to see prices put on the fabric of a dream.

  Mr. Wherry-Smith bent his neck to the rougher yoke of two depictions of Napoleon, copied from French originals by one of the Miss Coopers who had a talent – though not a large one – in that direction. Napoleon apparently thinking; Miss Cooper has left the nobility of the Emperor in abeyance and has emphasized the simple Corsican; his eyes are dimmed and he seems not to have shaved lately. There is about him the air of a bandmaster ruined by drink. Napoleon Crossing the Alps; after Delacroix – a very long way after. Can the Emperor not ride? Why is his horse being led by a picturesque guide? Of course this permits the Emperor to look out of the picture, straight at the audience, so to speak. One hand is thrust into his bosom. Neither of these pictures reaches twenty guineas. They will end up in third-rate schools, to impress third-rate parents, who know Napoleon by sight.

  Worse is to come. The Temptation of Christ which had hung in a place of honour in the Great Hall is a very flat picture, and in many respects inexplicable, for Christ seems to have spent his forty days in the wilderness in a pink tea-gown. His face is that of the usual nineteenth-century Bearded Lady, and the hand with which he gestures toward the heavens is apparently without bones. The Fiend is the colour of dirty bronze. Naked, but decently vague about the crotch, he points below, to the Kingdom of this World. The Fiend, undoubtedly by accident, is handsomer than Christ. No bids, and the picture is withdrawn.

  Nor has Mr. Wherry-Smith any better luck with the statuary with which the Coopers had ornamented their house, and which Rhodri had found too heavy to remove. Mrs. Cooper, in Roman dress, teaching two small sons in Roman tunics from a marble Bible; classically, but without obvious erotic effect, her nipples are discreetly hinted at under her drapery. Nipples are of course very maternal, but they have other significances, and perhaps Mr. Cooper had not been indifferent to these. Clever, is it not, to suggest the human form below the garments, and in stone? But not clever enough for anybody in the marquee. Mrs. Cooper is too big, too marmoreal, too holy, even for a garden ornament. Besides, how would you ever get the thing home? Mr. Wherry-Smith, in answer to a question, denies any knowledge of B. E. Spence, the sculptor, who has signed the piece and added “Fecit Roma” to show that it is right from the nineteenth-century fount of all great art.

  Showing no emotion, Mr. Wherry-Smith passes on to Eve, a bluey-white marble effigy of our First Mother. She is reaching upward, presumably for the apple, but the whole tendency of her body is downward; her mouth droops and her flesh seems heavy as if more than ordinary gravity were dragging it to earth. She is fattish, but her breasts are globular; her hips are broad and suggest squelchiness; her mount of Venus is chastely imperforate and has the bald impersonality of a blancmange. She has long, ladylike fingers and prehensile toes.

  “You have seen it in the Library Garden, ladies and gentlemen. What am I bid? Shall I say a hundred guineas, for a start?”

  He is permitted to say it, but nobody seconds his optimism. Eve will remain where she is.

  Rhodri had rather liked Eve. A nude, but biblical and thus permissible.

  (14)

  THE THIRD DAY of the sale is reserved for what the auctioneers call “domestic” objects, and it is not the distinguished Beddoe or the aesthetic Wherry-Smith who preside, but a Mr. Boggis, whose realm this is, and who brings Torringtons a considerable sum each year by selling what would never appear in a Bond Street shop. The contents of servants’ rooms, piles of excellent bed-linen, Turkey carpet – worn but with many a year left in it – stair carpets and gleaming brass stair-rods for those who can still persuade maidservants to polish them, sixty-eight yards of Brussels carpet from an upstairs corridor, long runs of magazines for decades out of publication, lowly po-boxes from the domestic quarters, a cheval-glass at which the servants have smartened themselves before going through the baize door which divided their world from that of the gentry, towel-horses, sets of jugs and basins and chamber-pots (florists sought chamber-pots because, when discreetly used, they are excellent for middle-sized “arrangements”), sets and sets of chairs in dozens and half-dozens from all parts of the house and especially from the back quarters where forty domestic bottoms had to be accommodated for meals and for rest, the Aga cooker, the sale of which makes Rose weep, for it has been her domestic altar and she knows its every whim. Mountains of things, and money in every one of them, which Mr. Boggis can charm out of them as deftly as anybody in the auctioneering world.

  Surprises, of course. An oak bidet is put up, and to many of those in the marquee its purpose is unknown. They do not associate the Victorians with those objects that appear so mysteriously in the bathrooms of hotels when they venture “abroad.” But some female Cooper must have been so Parisian in spirit as to desire such a thing, and here it was, from Gillows of London. It brings an astonishing sum from an antique dealer from London, who sees a future for it. Who collects period bidets?

  Equally astonishing prices are paid for the piles of velvet curtains, supplied long ago by John G. Grace of 14 Wigmore Street. When the Coopers built their new Gothic Belem, Mr. Grace’s men spent fifty-six days hanging curtains and laying the carpets. Mr. Boggis has unearthed much information from some records still in the house, which lends an inexplicable authenticity and antique charm to what might otherwise appear to be second-hand domestic furnishings. Oh, he is a shrewd man, is Mr. Boggis! Splendid stuff here, even after more than a century; some amber China damask brings ahs and oohs from those who know fabrics. Much of Mr. Grace’s work goes to a London costumier, who will reshape it as costumes for plays and films.

  The greatest surprise of all, perhaps, is the Orthophonic; such a novelty when it first appeared at St. Helen’s, so full in tone, so deft at allowing the “inner voices” of complex music to “come through,” as earlier machines had not been able to do. Rhodri never noticed that it was growing old, as he was increasingly deaf, and that other record-players had succeeded it and improved on it; he had brought it from Canada because he was not quite sure where he would buy such a thing in the United Kingdom. Now, it appears, it has risen again from its lowly estate as an outworn instrument, and become valuable as an antique, capable of being put in first-rate condition, and of course the very thing for playing your seventy-eight revolution recordings, ladies and gentlemen, which will not function on your new high-fidelity machines.

  Not just the old Orthophonic leaps into life, but also the scores of records that go with it. Many of these are now collector’s pieces. Georges Barrère playing “The Swan” exquisitely on his gold flute, Melba singing Tosti’s “Good-Bye,” Evan Williams singing a Welsh song of parting, “Yn iach y ti, Cymru,” Gogorza singing “Could I,” singers forgotten, like Cecil Fanning and David Bispham, and “Hearts and Flowers” played by the Victor Salon Orchestra. There are five enthusiasts in the marquee, and the Ring is not interested – indeed has come today only for a bedstead in the Gothic taste, with hangings reputedly designed by Morris – and the bidding is keen and rapid. The watchers are excited. Old gramophone records! Who would have suspected! Have we anything at home like this? Brochwel is pleased that the record of “Gems from Lady Mary” brings £8. “What do the Yanks know of England?/That know not Austin Reed?” A man who is an enthusiast for forgotten musicals bids it up and is pleased to get it. Mr. Boggis, crafty man, puts up the best of the records one by one, and not in batches. Mr. Boggis is just as highly esteemed, at Torringtons, as either Mr. Beddoe or Mr. Wherry-Smith, because Mr. Boggis believes that at an auction sale there is no such thing as something nobody wants. He might even have sold Eve if she h
ad not been Fine Art, and thus Mr. Wherry-Smith’s.

  He proves it in the last lot of all that comes under his hammer. A quantity of garden equipment has gone, at reasonable prices, and assemblies of odds and ends – “job lots” is the term – for reasons that can only be known to the buyers. This final lot is made up of a hand lawnmower in poor order, a trousers press, a quantity of burlap wrapping, and a zebra-skin rug. It goes to a farmer for eighteen shillings and, as Mr. Boggis will tell you, every eighteen shillings is eighteen shillings you didn’t have before.

  By five o’clock the sale is over. Brochwel cannot bear to walk again through the empty rooms; the house has the ravaged, unswept air of a place that has been looted by an army; nothing remains but odds and ends of rubbish in corners. He finds Old Rose in what used to be the Servants’ Hall, empty now except for the old woman who is weeping into her apron. She is to be the caretaker until a new owner is found, and she will live at her cottage down near the gate with her nephew, who is not a good fellow, and exploits her. Brochwel cannot think of anything to say, but he takes Rose in his arms and kisses her wildly rouged cheeks, and walks the two miles back to Trallwm.

  (15)

  BROCHWEL is staying at the Green Man. He drinks a couple of whiskies and then resigns himself to the dinner; some sort of unidentifiable warm flesh, vegetables cooked to mush, and stewed prunes with chemical custard to conclude the feast. The vile coffee – gravy colouring and hot stale beer, it might be – is an extra, but he has it because it is expected of him. He is, after all, the gentleman who has come all the way from America to close up Belem Manor. The Manor has figured in the history of Trallwm in the past, and the inn has no doubt that it will rise again after some temporary lull in its fortunes. Though who will keep it up in the real old style, as the late Rhodri Gilmartin has done, is certainly a problem. Rhodri Gilmartin had a very long purse, no doubt of it. Gave to everything, and his annual lawn-party – plum cake and strawberries unlimited for the old men and women from the Union (no longer called “the workus”) was famous. Had a real feeling for the workus, had Mr. Gilmartin. This gentleman, his son, will certainly be very rich.