A great deal nearer than the Solway Firth

      Sir Gordon felt slightly uneasy on his visit to Flaxborough Hall. This was the real deal. Rose Cottage truly was only a cottage after all.

      He felt uneasy from the moment Kirkstall nosed the Rolls-Royce up the long drive towards the beautiful Jacobean frontage, through parkland laid out by Perspicacity Smith centuries ago.

      There were signs, it was true, of slight but disturbing decay. Some of the bushes needed pruning. Branches that had been ripped off trees by the recent gales still lay on the ground. The mellow red-brick walls were in need of pointing. A gutter here and there hung loosely. Drainpipes were rusty.

      The eighteenth Earl of Flaxborough stood at the top of the steps to welcome them, almost as if Sir Gordon and Peregrine Thoresby were royalty. Here too there were signs of slight but disturbing decay. He looked frail. He seemed to have become slightly too small for his clothes. He was beginning to droop, as if his long legs could no longer bear the weight of his even longer body. He had stretched his thin hair bravely over his scalp, to little avail.

      ‘I am so delighted to welcome you to Flaxborough,’ he said, in a melodious voice steeped in history.

      There was a slight stiffness to his walk as he led them through the great hall into a large drawing room. The chairs in which they sat felt as if dust sheets had only just been removed from them. A chill hung over the house. Damp clung to the walls like a nervous child. It would have been tactless to look at the plaster too closely.

      ‘The bells aren’t working,’ said the Earl apologetically. ‘Excuse me while I round up some sherry.’

      Perhaps the Earl’s stiffness was just a result of the damp, but when he had gone Peregrine commented, ‘He walks as if he has the burden of history in his bones.’ Peregrine had a great mass of curly black hair which made him look much younger than his forty-eight years. His voice was almost as posh as the Earl’s, but thinner and more strident. ‘Did you notice that little habit he has of glancing behind him? Is it fanciful to imagine that he is seeing seventeen Earls of Flaxborough marching behind him, watching what sort of a fist he is making of managing his inheritance?’

      Taking an interest in 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,’