Death of a Salesperson (20 page)

Lady Woolmington, Cissie, sat in the entrance hall in an old print frock, a little electric fire by her be-socked ankles, and took the money—a pound a time for adults, 50p for children, pensioners and the unemployed. When the money was safely in her possession, she would say: ‘Tours of the house go on the hour and the half-hour,' and the visitor was compelled to mooch around the hall for anything up to twenty-five minutes, watched over by a dyspeptic moose over the main door, which had one eye falling disconcertingly out of its socket. Almost never did anyone else come during this wait, and Lady Woolmington would make bright remarks such as ‘This rain's keeping people away,' or ‘In this heat people want to be outside.' The implication that normally the house was athrong with tourists was not one the visitors ever tested. Visitors never came back.

Hardacre Hall was, in truth, only the pokey dower house where generations of dowager Lady Woolmingtons had been shunted off by their newly ennobled sons. True it was built
in 1818, but it only proved that inelegant and inconvenient domestic architecture was not suddenly born with the Victorian age, any more than prudery or hypocrisy was.

The Woolmingtons had been country squires and baronets in Pendleshire for two centuries, and had been raised to a barony in 1901, for the first Lord Woolmington had lent Edward VII a large sum of money to cover a gambling debt when he was Prince of Wales. It would, in truth, have been better for the family if he had repaid the loan, for shortly after the First World War they had been forced to sell Woolmington Hall to a speculative builder, who had pulled it down and built half-timbered semis. The Lords Woolmington had retired to Hardacre, adding Hall to its name, and had been there ever since, dwindling.

Promptly on the hour Lord Woolmington would potter in. He would go around shaking hands with the waiting party of two or three, saying ‘Rotten day, isn't it?' or ‘Gardens need rain, what?' Then the tour would commence.

The rooms open to the public—the dining-room, the drawing-room, the green bedroom and the library—left the minds of the more discriminating visitor boggling as to what the unseen rooms could contain. Bumbling along through the dark and ill-decorated rooms, crammed with undistinguished or positively decrepit furniture, Lord Woolmington would seize arbitrarily and unpredictably on some article or other and proffer it before the visitor's listless gaze.

‘That's a knife,' he would proclaim, after a lunge at the mantelpiece had yielded a shoddy little tourist souvenir from the Iberian peninsula. ‘Sent by m'cousin Maud from Oporto. Family tradition says it's Toledo steel. Shouldn't think so m'self.' For favoured visitors he would add: ‘Retired there for her health, m'cousin Maud, so she said.
We
thought it was for the port.'

So the tour continued. Here was the second Baroness's work basket—‘just as she left it'. Here in a glass case was a pike caught by the seventh Baronet: ‘not specially large,
but it was practically the only time he caught anything at all'. He would flick his hand at an old candelabrum in a dusty corner, in the holders of which were dried arrangements done by his cousin Sylvia in 1957: ‘Candlesticks. That sort of thing appeal to you?' Here was a picture of the first Baron in his 1911 Coronation robes; here was the present Lady Woolmington, before her marriage, doing her debutante's curtsey before Edward VIII, he looking positively lethal in his boredom. The second Baron's saddle and the first Baroness's false front did not add significantly to the interest of the place, nor did the library, which contained bound volumes of
Punch
from 1840 until they could no longer afford to take it, a large collection of old green Penguins, and the odd copy of
Men Only.

In the middle of this fascinating collection of forgettabilia, Lord Woolmington's mind was often distracted by things of even less import. ‘There's last week's
Radio Times,'
he would mutter, and the visitor would shoot a glance there as if it were a collector's item. Or: ‘Don't tell me Ben's done his business by the coal scuttle,' he would fret, and the visitor would keep his distance, since Ben had already been identified as the old sheepdog, faithful of heart if incontinent of bowel, who accompanied every guided tour.

Sometimes in undistinguished houses the discriminating visitor's spirits are kept up by the hope of discovering some gem from an Old Master's hand. Not at Hardacre Hall. ‘That's a genuine Witherspoon,' Lord Woolmington would say, darting into a dark corner. ‘Friend of Whistler's, y'know.' The nearest any member of the family had come to being painted by a ‘name' had been when John Singer Sargent was engaged to paint the wife of the first Lord Woolmington. ‘Couldn't come. Dose of the clap or some damned thing. Sent this chap Bootle instead. Came a damned sight cheaper.'

The visitor gazed for a moment at the wife of the first Baron, in pink and purple cretonne against a background
of Sheffield fog, and then Lord Woolmington was away again. ‘And this is an Atkinson Grimshaw. Boar Lane, Leeds. Know Leeds at all?' Only when they were nearly back at the entrance hall did the visitor momentarily perk up when Lord Woolmington suddenly barked: ‘That's a Turner.' Only to sink when he added: ‘Reproduction. Got it at the Tate Gallery Shop. Always did like Folkestone.'

At the end of the tour the victims slunk speechless away. Few attempted to tip the guide, but if one should, an American or an Arab, Lord Woolmington murmured genially, ‘Quite unnecessary. Thank you very much,' and pocketed the base coin.

When the last tour had set off—if there was one—at half past five, Lady Woolmington went down to the gate and swivelled round the sign to read
CLOSED FOR THE DAY
. Then she ambled off to the kitchen to prepare the haddock or the lamb chops she had bought for their dinners. After dinner they watched television in the library, or played Happy Families, or sometimes Lord Woolmington walked into the village to the Woolmington Arms, where he was an honoured customer, despite the fact that, in the manner of his kind, he always accepted offers of drinks, but never made them.

It was in the Woolmington Arms that the turn in the house's fortunes was first publicly broached.

‘Took twenty pounds today,' Lord Woolmington announced to Jim behind the bar. ‘Can't remember when I last took that much.' Which was not surprising, for he never had. To celebrate he added:
‘Best
bitter, please, Jim.'

Lord Woolmington had no notion that this was anything other than a flash in the pan. The next day's takings were down to an ordinary ten pounds, the day after to fourteen. But on Saturday they took twenty-five pounds, and the Wednesday after thirty-four. Not once in that week did they go below twenty.

‘Double whisky, please, Jim,' Lord Woolmington began saying, in the Woolmington Arms.

At the end of that second week of prosperity he went to a jumble sale in Little Pemberley and bought a chamber pot, which he began displaying to visitors as the first Lady Woolmington's. ‘Waterworks trouble, y'know,' he always added. One or two other things that he picked up at auctions or second-hand shops he incorporated imaginatively into the family tradition.

The fact was, Lord Woolmington and Hardacre Hall were becoming a fashionable joke. It had not happened by accident. It all came back to Edwina, Countess of Carbury, who lived at Burtlesham Towers, some twenty miles away. Pendleshire had in fact been swallowed up, during the last local government reorganization but one, and was now part of Greater Cumbershire, but the Pendleshire gentry and aristocracy were a clannish lot, and they stuck together. Thus Lady Carbury knew the Woolmingtons quite well, and thought them ‘a tremendous scream'. One day she had been driven by rain to stop at the Hall with some visitors from London—journalists, for she was herself saleroom correspondent for the
Country Lady
—and Lady Woolmington had insisted on believing they had come not to call, but to take the guided tour. ‘Five quid it cost me!' Lady Carbury said ruefully to her husband afterwards. But she had not been unaware that her guests had found the tour of the house gloriously risible, and had spent much of the time in the car back to Burtlesham giving spirited imitations of Lord Woolmington's dottier pronouncements and odder mannerisms.

‘The joke of it is,' Lady Carbury said, in the middle of her guests' mirth, ‘that in among all that junk he's got the most lovely Atkinson Grimshaw.'

And her guests, most of whom had never heard of Atkinson Grimshaw, nodded wisely, until someone shrieked ‘That's m'Great Aunt Flora's tea-caddy!' and the car rocked with laughter again.

The Countess's mention of Atkinson Grimshaw was a
matter—as most things were with the Countess—of pure calculation. Burtlesham Towers was a very different kind of stately home from Hardacre. It was run most efficiently by the young Earl and his Countess: it had an adventure playground and a tropical aviary, a collection of Chippendale and a fine Van Dyke, to say nothing of a Gainsborough and two Sir Thomas Lawrences. It was a house that coach parties visited, families made the object of day outings, and it advertised on railway stations throughout the North. Nevertheless, the Earl and the Countess were regrettably short of the ready, and the Countess was—in wish if not in fact—an expensive young lady who had perpetual and urgent uses for the ready. Hence, of course, her taking on the job of saleroom correspondent.

Now to sell off any of the house's real treasures was out of the question. The Earl would never have consented, and to do so would have been self-defeating, since it must lessen the appeal of the house to the public at large. In addition, all the really important pictures were part of an entail which it would have been costly and time-consuming to undo. There were, on the other hand, works by lesser hands, among them three Atkinson Grimshaws, bought by a Victorian ancestor from the Leeds artist to make less grim some of the guest bedrooms in the East Wing. These the Earl would never regret, could surely be persuaded to sell. Thus, over a few months previous to Hardacre's sudden access of visitors, there had crystallized in the Countess's mind a plan—not a criminal conspiracy, for it certainly is not criminal to increase in value one's own possessions—but a series of delicate manœuvres which would have precisely that effect.

Twice over the last year the Countess's column in the
Country Lady
had hinted that if there
was
an artist whose stock was rising, it was that fascinating late-Victorian Atkinson Grimshaw, whose atmospheric townscapes . . . fascinating experiments with light . . . and so on, and so on. It was a
name, too, that the Countess continually yet delicately brought into conversations with friends on the fringes of the art world.

On the other hand, such delicate manœuverings seemed likely to have but marginal success. If, on the other hand, the campaign to boost Grimshaw's saleable value could be linked with someone . . . someone with the capacity to be a personality of some kind . . .

Thus, when those first visitors had gone, the Countess began to think about her visit to Hardacre Hall, and to conceive a strategy that was half joke, half serious. The first stage began when she started to talk at parties about Hardacre and the Woolmingtons as if they were the latest, most exquisitely
in
thing.

‘Have you been to Hardacre, darling?' she would ask. ‘It is the most
ab
solute scream. Woolmington himself—Wooffy—is perfectly priceless, and his tour of the house is one of
the
great comic turns of the century.'

And always, after some surprisingly vivid imitations, she would add: ‘And the funny thing is, you know, that he really has this
one
thing—this quite gorgeous Atkinson Grimshaw! One of the very best specimens!'

Thus, in the manner of these things, Hardacre Hall began to be talked about, began to get visited, first by the Countess's friends, and their friends. Then, as so often happens, the fashion gradually percolated downwards, so that, as the summer wore on, people in pubs and Women's Institutes might be heard imitating ‘Wooffy' Woolmington's guided tours: ‘And that's a genuine Witherspoon!' someone would say, to gales of laughter. Or: ‘That's m'sister's christening spoon. Traveller chappie once offered me three pounds for that, but I didn't take it.' And as often as not they would add: ‘The joke of it is, he's got this absolutely marvellous Atkinson Grimshaw. You know, the Leeds artist. Don't think he realizes how good it is.'

The success of Hardacre and Lord Woolmington could
not remain merely local. The second stage of Lady Carbury's campaign would in any case have seen to that. That stage envisaged the whole thing going national. In July there was a five-minute feature on the BBC's
Look North
programme, when a very snooty young lady was rendered speechless by Lord Woolmington's rambles through the detritus of his family's history. Then the
Observer
Colour Supplement chose him for their ‘A Room of my Own' series, and photographed him among the aristocratic rubble, with the Atkinson Grimshaw prominent in the background (‘I'll skin you alive if you don't get that in,' the Countess had told the photographer). Soon gossip writers began to call, and though they soon found that he knew no one who was anyone outside Pendleshire, they were enchanted by his personality, and wrote cod articles about the splendours of his stately home. Everybody loves a lord, but they go quite overboard about a dotty lord. In Germany or Italy Lord Woolmington might have been locked up, or at least put in the care of some strong-minded relative. In Britain he was encouraged to speak in the House of Lords, asked to open supermarkets, put on the team of
Any Questions.

Not that he accepted all these signifiers of fame and popularity. ‘Damned cheek!' he often said, when reading through some of the requests he received. Still, some of them were very lucrative. When he went to the Woolmington Arms of an evening, he often now took Lady Woolmington with him, even bought her an elaborate and expensive cocktail that had been popular in her youth. More often there were people there who were anxious to buy drinks for them. ‘Quite unnecessary . . . Thank you very much,' Wooffy would murmur.