The Goldenacre Episode 41

Tallis looked to Bobby – her face was a disapproving mask. Felix sat tentatively on the arm of one of the antique chairs and ran a hand through his hair. “Where is this conservation work being done?” Bobby said.

Felix crossed his arms. He looked like Olivia, Tallis thought – same straight nose, hooded eyes – but there was something crumpled and defeated about him. He reminded Tallis of himself. An imploded man.

“Ah now,” Felix said, smiling and shaking his head.

“I knew you might ask – Catherine Peters would tell you. She’s the woman to speak to on that. She is handling it all. I believe you’ve met?”

“I believe so,” Tallis said. “But maybe Ms Donnelly here and I can speak to Ms Peters now? We are here, after all. Be a shame to waste the trip.”

“Again, I must disappoint you,” Felix said, looking down at his shoes. “She is not technically here. I know this is all terribly awkward.”

Olivia sighed. The loudness of the sigh seemed deliberate.

“So the painting is not here?” Bobby asked.

“No,” Felix said. He looked up. “There’s our Constable, of course – our little policeman – which you may have seen in the East Corridor, and there’s a marvellous Raeburn in the lounge. Our prints and drawings are in the library–”

“We are not here to see them,” Bobby said.

“Let’s have some tea and biscuits,” Olivia cut in, “and talk about where we are on this whole matter of The Goldenacre. Let’s get to a better place.”

She asked Bobby and Tallis to retrace their steps to the windowed corridor, and then moved to Felix, bowing her head to him, and spoke in low, hard tones.

They rewalked the corridor, the light rising over the silent old building and its wooded landscape.

Bobby looked to Tallis and raised her eyebrows, shaking her head. “Furious,” she said evenly.

Olivia caught up with them, smiling, and led them down a tight spiral staircase to a large pantry and kitchen.

Sunlight hung around windows, set back in thick stone.

There was a vast old stone fireplace and several iron ovens. A young woman was making tea and coffee.

On a long wooden table, plates of biscuits and small cakes had been laid out. They sat, and the young woman, whose dark shirt had a crest embroidered on its breast, poured tea.

“Thank you, Sasha. This is the oldest part of the house,” Olivia said, taking a biscuit and breaking it with her fingers.

“The whole house was built and rebuilt many times. Additions and augmentations and subtractions. Where we have just been – the coloured rooms – is 18th Century, and that is where we mainly do hosting and parties and, we hope, more corporate hospitality and so on.

Stormy

It is watercolour and mixed media. I assume you know this is a very delicate piece of work

“The picture corridor was added later, once the sunken garden had been built, to afford the view. But this takes us back to the original house, which was fortified. Some of the battlements remain – it was all very stormy around the Borders, of course, for a long time.

“This is my favourite room, the kitchen. My father’s, too. He would sit here and read the papers by the big fire in his muddy boots with the dogs. And when I was home, as a child, we would always come here for snacks and naughtiness. And then, as now, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after my brother.”

They drank tea, sitting on wooden chairs around the table.

Bobby tapped her phone on the wood. “So, The Goldenacre,” she said.

“Look, I am so horrifically sorry your journey here has been fruitless,” Olivia said. “A breakdown in communication, not for the first time. I have been away, and he has been away, and this is how these things happen. He tends to do things out of order: out of our plan. Daddy always says I am good at strategy, and Felix is better at tactics.”

Tallis looked around: Felix was absent. They had lost him, somewhere in the house.

Bobby leaned forward. “I can see there’s been a foul-up here. But obviously, as head of conservation I am very interested in the state of the painting that we will inherit – is it undergoing a conservation process right now? Your brother mentioned cleaning up? It is watercolour and mixed media. I assume you know this is a very delicate piece of work and...”

Olivia crunched her biscuit. “Yes. I can put your mind at rest on that. My brother was talking vaguely and euphemistically – not for the first time, again. I understand there is an issue with the frame, primarily.”

“It is not the original frame, is it?” Tallis said. “It was damaged in a fire?”

“The frame is integral,” Bobby said. “It is all of a piece.”

“Well, it fell from the wall in the fire in 1961,” Olivia said, answering Tallis. “The original frame was, as you know, very decorative, designed by Mackintosh’s wife, who was as you know also an artist. Margaret. The Glasgow Style.”

Tallis nodded.

Sasha arrived again, with a thick paper file, and then swished away.

“Thank you,” Olivia said. She opened the file, which was full of papers and pictures of The Goldenacre. She passed an old black and white image of the painting in its original frame to Tallis and Bobby. “Rather exquisite, isn’t it?”

The image was old, rendered in light grey and plunging black.

The frame was moulded and designed – a bespoke rectangle in the late Glasgow School style. There were stylised roses in three corners, and a lily in the top righthand corner.

“The lily,” Olivia said softly, “is a reference, apparently, to CRM.’s health, which was obviously fading at that time. His final weeks, as you may well know, were not spent in Glasgow or France, but in London. Cancer of the tongue and mouth. Terrible.”

Bobby nodded, sipping her watery tea. “No smoke damage, at all?”

More tomorrow.

Philip Miller lives in Edinburgh. An awardwinning journalist for 20 years, he is now a civil servant. The Goldenacre, published by Birlinn, follows his previous novels, The Blue Horse and All The Galaxies. His latest novel, The Hollow Tree, is to be a sequel to The Goldenacre.