other people had never been high in Sir Gordon’s priorities, but he found himself examining the Earl more closely as he returned with a tray, a bottle, and three Georgian sherry glasses. Sir Gordon was sensitive enough to feel a little embarrassed at being treated by this aristocrat as if he was manna from heaven, but then there came that voice again – ‘I have a sherry that I think will amuse you’ – and the authority returned, Sir Gordon was in his thrall.
‘I thought we’d have luncheon first,’ said the Earl, after they had been amused by the sherry, ‘and then examine the picture.’ He pronounced it ‘pickcha’.
Peregrine had refused to tell Sir Gordon what the purpose of their visit was. ‘I’m sorry, I know how infuriating it is,’ he had said, ‘but I want your reaction to be instinctive and immediate.’ Now it was clear that the Earl wanted him to buy a pickcha for the collection. Peregrine had explained that the estate was in deep trouble and needed to sell its assets. It was situated in an unfashionable part of the country – Bedfordshire – and was in the shadow of Woburn. The eighteenth Earl did not have a talent for showmanship. The house was seventy-ninth in the heritage top hundred. No elephants or giraffes wandered its grounds to delight the masses. No pop stars drowned the screeching of the peacocks.
Lord Flaxborough led them along a damp corridor towards the cavernous dining room. His wife arrived to join them as if she had been hiding in a secret passage. They lunched at a large table with the Earl at one end and Lady Flaxborough at the other, and of course it occurred to Sir Gordon that this was the real version of the parody he had performed with Christina in the private room of the Hoop and Two Colonels only yesterday – could it really have been only yesterday?
Lady Flaxborough was pale and slim and had a face like an overworked angel. She was painfully polite, asking Sir Gordon endless questions about his collection, his charitable foundation, even Climthorpe United. ‘It must be such fun to own a whole football team,’ she said, in a tone that almost but not quite concealed the subtext of ‘What kind of an idiot are you?’
Sir Gordon, determined to begin to turn over a new leaf and talk to people about themselves, was forced to spend the whole luncheon behaving as if he was rehearsing the final run-through of a television programme about his life. Poor Peregrine was silenced too, bypassed utterly.
The luncheon was served rather slowly. In fact, it was thirty-five years late. It consisted of brown Windsor soup, roast lamb in caper sauce, and sponge pudding, and was served by a butler who looked like a gnarled oak and made Farringdon seem a complete imposter.
‘I think you may be rather mystified by the red wine,’ said the Earl, and they were, although Sir Gordon had to be careful not to end up too mystified; he needed to be fresh for the evening.
And then the meal was over and the moment came.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Lady Flaxborough. ‘I will be so grateful to you, Sir Gordon, if you agree to help us dismantle our heritage, but I cannot bear to witness it.’
‘I understand,’ said Sir Gordon in a hoarse voice.
He didn’t know whether protocol demanded that he attempt to kiss Lady Flaxborough on her white cheeks, but in the end he only shook her hand.
The three men climbed the main staircase, in the face of a northerly gale blowing from the bedrooms, and entered the long gallery, which was indeed long, but slightly less long than most of the other long galleries in the stately homes of England. Nobody ever said, ‘When you go to Flaxborough, you must see the quite long gallery.’
They had the quite long gallery to themselves. The house was closed for the winter. The air was icy. Two small radiators were pointlessly hot.
The Earl led them to a rather small painting, a watercolour entitled Storm Approaching the Solway Firth. It was a Turner, dating from 1836. In the presence of its owner, who’d had more than fifty years to admire it, and of Peregrine, who was steeped in the language of art appreciation, Sir Gordon felt incapable of any adequate response. He was out of his comfort zone. Luckily, Peregrine spoke for him.
‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘A minor masterpiece, perhaps, yet a masterpiece. The colours more muted than in some Turners, but we know it’s autumn and we don’t know how we know and that is very clever. We know the storm is coming, we feel the unease, we may suspect that this will be the first storm of winter, yet the picture is almost still, but the stillness is fragile, the stillness is doomed, the boat looks so peaceful, the water is just gently ruffled, yet we know that the boat will soon be tossed and helpless. Magnificent. Will you buy it, Sir Gordon?’
‘The provenance is utterly secure, I suppose?’ said Sir Gordon, making it only just a question.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said the Earl. He couldn’t look Sir Gordon in the face. ‘Let me put you fully in the picture, Sir Gordon. I have three pictures that have been earmarked for sale, with huge regret. All masterpieces but what else is one to sell if one needs to raise money? This, a Tintoretto, and a Monet. Our great institutions in this time of cuts cannot afford to buy everything, so the pictures will have to go to auction unless … unless a saviour can be found.’
A warm feeling crept over Sir Gordon. Saviour. He was a saviour. In moments like this he almost persuaded himself – perhaps occasionally did persuade himself – that this was why he had done it all, this had always been his purpose, to make money in order to use it more wisely than any government, in order to give something back to the nation he loved and, more important, the nation that loved him. He no longer felt uneasy in this house. He even felt a sense of triumph, and he longed to say, ‘I’ll buy all three.’ Why not? That would show just how successful he had been, and just how generous he was.
But that would have been vulgar, and, however weak his position, there was still something about the Earl that forbad vulgarity in his house. Besides, there came with Sir Gordon’s warm feeling a colder undercurrent, a trickle of sensitivity that marred his pleasure as he witnessed the unease of a man short of old money practically begging to be saved by new money.
Maybe Peregrine Thoresby could read his mind, and had sensed the danger. Certainly he leapt in pretty quickly.
‘Clearly, even if we wanted to, the collection couldn’t consider buying all three,’ he said. ‘There are limits even to our resources, and the publicity it would engender would create an excitement that we just would not be able to accommodate in the context of our other work and the rest of our collection and the inevitably finite resources of our building itself. So, Sir Gordon, I felt – and this is what I would strongly advise – that we should purchase the Turner. If all three go to auction, none of them is likely to remain in Britain. There simply isn’t the money here to rival what there is in other places. Well, if the nation loses the Tintoretto and the Monet, they weren’t ours in the first place. But to lose a Turner – even a relatively small work from someone so British, so quintessentially British, even, dare I say it, quintessentially English – would be a tragedy.’
Sir Gordon knew that the Earl and Peregrine would be capable of talking about the picture for at least an hour without being so vulgar as to actually mention money, so, however much he might regret it, however much it would suggest that his reactions and his motives were less spiritual than everyone else’s, he would have to be the first one to raise the subject.
‘So, what sort of sum are we talking about here?’ he asked.
‘I’ve taken the liberty of talking to the Earl about this, Sir Gordon,’ said Peregrine, ‘and we’ve arrived at a round figure, a very round figure, which we think is fair, in no way excessive, and which acknowledges that this is a relatively small work, and a watercolour,
