Solomons Seal (3 page)

‘It was his brother, then, who gave him the carvings?'

‘Yes, his younger brother Carlos.'

‘And he gave him the carvings to convince him of his improbable story, I suppose.'

She laughed. ‘No, I think he just left them with Grandpa so they'd be safe. I've often wondered about that, whether he had some sort of premonition. He was drowned, you see, on his way back to the Pacific. He had come to England to raise money for the purchase of a steamship and was drowned when it sank.' And when I asked her where it had sunk, she said, ‘In the Pacific, somewhere east of Papua. But God knows where. There weren't any survivors. He had named her the
Holland Trader.
' And she added, ‘It happened a long time ago, in 1911. Sad, isn't it?'

She turned her head from the window and smiled at me. ‘That's all I ever got out of my grandfather. He wouldn't talk about him. The subject was taboo. So maybe you're right. Maybe Carlos Holland did bring those carvings home to prove he was telling the truth for once.' And she added in that husky whisper, ‘I think of him sometimes. An odd name, Carlos – for an Englishman. And the man himself a complete mystery. If only he had kept a diary.'

‘Is that why you've hung on to the carvings?'

She nodded. ‘It's teasing to know so little – no letters, nothing; just those carvings, and the stamps. You'll find his name inside the albums.' I thought her interest in the man was the natural reaction of somebody whose life had been very restricted, but then she said, ‘Strange I should still have relics of his world, and nothing left of my grandfather's. He had marvellous things – native head-dresses and spears. But they were all left behind when my father sold Kuamegu. I can only dimly remember them now, and the brilliance
of the poinsettias, the women with their bare pointed breasts and the men wearing nothing but a few broad grass fronds – arse grass, we called it – hanging from a waist cord.' She gave that little shrug and got to her feet. ‘It was all very primitive, wonderfully colourful.' She began gathering up the tea things. ‘You have finished, haven't you?'

‘Yes.' I was thinking how wrong I had been, her background so very different from my own. ‘You were born out there?'

‘At Kuamegu, yes. It was a coffee plantation in the Highlands about five thousand feet up in the Chimbu country.' She stood there for a moment, very still. ‘Buka wasn't the same, hot and humid, always raining. And living at Madehas …' She turned away. ‘After Mother was killed, we came here. That was something different again, and when you've no money—' She stopped abruptly, gave a little self-derisory laugh and picked up the albums. ‘I don't know why I'm talking to you like this. Stupid of me. I'll get these wrapped up.'

She left me then, and I sat there for a moment, the clipboard on my knee, wondering where Buka was, what part of the Pacific she had been talking about. Doing my National Service in Singapore as a junior officer on landing craft, I had had just a glimpse of the Pacific, the only exciting bit of travel I had ever managed to achieve, and here was this strange young woman talking about it as though the Pacific islands were more home to her than England. What would she do now?
If I ever catch up with the man
… Those
shocking words came suddenly back to me. But with her brother to support, the sale of the contents wouldn't get her out to the Pacific, and from what she had said I guessed the house itself was mortgaged. I wasn't certain what age she was – late twenties, early thirties, it was difficult to tell. And the way she had looked, sitting there, staring out at the sea. If she intended going back, then the stamps were her only hope, and as I got to my feet, I was wondering whether I could find the money to buy them from her. Stuck down like that, they couldn't be worth more than £200 or £300.

I put the clipboard in my briefcase and stood staring out of the window at the sea. It was milky calm, the horizon lost in haze. I thought of all the times she must have stood here in her bedroom looking out at it, and at night in moonlight, longing to be away. If it had been anybody else, if she hadn't talked like that, then I could have made her an offer for those stamps and she would probably have taken it. I don't know why I wanted them so badly. It wasn't the stamps themselves. I had some of them already, and the others I could have bought from Josh Keegan or one of the other dealers in the Strand. No, it was something in the careful way they had been stuck into those albums, the planned choice of subjects, almost as though there had been some purpose in collecting just those items and presenting them in that particular way.

I knew it was foolish of me. Even that second album didn't contain a single stamp of the islands on which I was now concentrating. But collecting is like
that. You see something, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, you want it. Would she take £400 for them? I could probably raise that much on a quick sale of some Penny Blacks. But as I started down the stairs, I knew I couldn't do it. Without a valuation it would be taking advantage of her, and I had promised to get them valued.

She was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, and as she saw me to the door, handing me the albums neatly wrapped, all I said was: ‘I'll do what I can for you, Miss Holland. There's a member of my sailing club, a retired naval commander, who deals in stamps. I'll ask him to have a look at them. But please don't bank on their being worth very much.'

She shook her head, and the light coming from the door showed a deep scar running back from behind her left ear into the orange-red cap of hair. ‘Of course not. I no longer expect anything to be made easy for me.' And then with a quick lift of her chin: ‘I'll find a way.' It was said to herself, not to me. She held out her hand. ‘Thank you. I'm glad you came, you've been very kind.'

I was thinking about her, and about the way she had said, ‘I'll find a way,' for most of the drive back to Chelmsford. I just couldn't get her out of my mind. I couldn't think of any girl who had made such an instant and deep impression on me, and God knows I've never been short of girlfriends. But it had always been physical before. This wasn't physical. I didn't know what the hell it was. I'd read about people falling in love, but that was in books. The real-life relation
ship was sex, the physical meeting of two bodies. It was what men and women were all about. But not this one. The impact had been entirely different, an emotional intensity, an emanation almost of something totally alien to me, as though she had the power to project herself into my mind. It wasn't her face, or her figure, or even those extraordinarily prominent breasts that I was remembering now. It was the impression she had made, her strange background, those dreadful words of hers and her face so set, and that reference to the death certificate, talking of her brother as though he were already dead. ‘You think your brother will die then?' I had asked her, and she had replied, ‘Unless I can do something about it, get that death wish lifted.'

It seemed such nonsense, in the hot sun driving down the A12. But in that house, in her presence, talking to her, it had all seemed real enough. And there were those two battered green albums lying on the seat beside me. It was almost as though she were there herself, so powerful had been the impact of her personality.

That evening, instead of going down to the boat, I drove straight home, taking the albums with me. Great Park Hall, at the end of almost a mile of dirt farm track, was a very lonely place, which was the reason the rent was within my means. To call it a hall made it sound grander than it was; almost any old farmhouse in East Anglia can be called a hall. It was, in fact, little more than a cottage full of centuries-old beams with the remains of a moat taking up most of
the overgrown garden. I was fending for myself now, and with a tankard of beer and some chicken sandwiches I settled down to check the stamps against the catalogue.

My British Commonwealth catalogue was two years old, but at least it would give me a rough idea of what the collection was worth. And as I worked through the albums page by page my excitement grew. I was the only collector who had ever seen them, and whether she wanted to or not, I was certain she would sell them in the end. She knew she'd have to. Why else had she wanted them valued? The question was, what was the fair price?

It took me just over two hours to list them. There were 247 stamps ranging in value from almost nothing up to
£65
for the Turks and Caicos Specimen set of nine sailing ship stamps. The total added up to £1,163, excluding the proofs and the ship stamp with the script lettering LM
^C
L.

By then the sun had set and the light was fading. I sat there for a long time, idly going through the thick pages of the albums again, wondering what sort of figure a dealer would put on them. I thought perhaps half, or even a third, of the catalogue value, for not only were the more valuable unused and Specimen stamps stuck down, but many of them showed signs of discoloration, caused probably by damp.

I suppose it was the island scenes that started me dreaming of the Pacific. Ever since my Singapore days I had wanted to see more of the Pacific. I didn't switch on the light but sat there in the half-dark, thinking
about my own future and what I should do if Rowlinson did offer me the job of looking after his Australian interests, something I had been angling for even before I knew the partners weren't going to let me in. He had rung me up two days ago, saying his manager had finally promised him the figures for the Queensland station within a week. If that LCT I had served on hadn't poked its nose into the Pacific north of Indonesia, maybe I wouldn't have been so pleased at the prospect of Australia. But my appetite had been whetted, and since then I hadn't been out of England except to sail my Folkboat across to Holland and spend a few days in the Dutch canals.

And that girl – she had spent most of her life out there.
Very primitive, wonderfully colourful.
I was remembering the way she had said that, the nostalgic whisper of her voice. And now she was free.

If I offered her £500, would that be enough to take her where she wanted to go?

I switched on the light then and spent an hour running through the catalogue, searching for that stamp I hadn't been able to identify. I had an uneasy feeling that it might be valuable, even though it was spoilt by an ink cancellation; also, it was slightly creased and appeared to have been cut into at the top right-hand corner. I even tried an old Stanley Gibbons World Catalogue, concentrating all the time on the islands of the Pacific, but in the end I had to give it up. I just couldn't find it. Nor could I identify the proofs, which were printed in black on thick paper
and showed what looked like a seal in a rectangular frame and also the frame separately.

It was not until Sunday evening that I was finally able to contact Tubby Sawyer. He had been north along the coast as far as the Deben estuary for a few days, and I called across, inviting him over for a drink, as he drifted up on the tide to his moorings. He was a short, stout man with blue seaman's eyes in a round, babyish face, and coming alongside in his tiny plastic dinghy, he looked like a frog balanced precariously in the cup of a waterlily. ‘And to what do I owe the doubtful pleasure of being offered a gin on your old Folkboat?' he asked, squeezing himself in through the hatch and lowering his heavy bottom into the space at the head of the only berth. He wore a tattered blue sweater, oily jeans, and his bare toes were poking out of his salt-stiff deck shoes. ‘First time this season.' He grinned at me, leaning frayed woollen elbows on the makeshift table. ‘There must be a catch in it.'

‘There is,' I said. ‘I want you to value some stamps for me.'

‘Free of charge, I suppose.'

‘Of course.' And I explained about Miss Holland's circumstances as I poured him his pink gin.

‘Any particular period?'

‘Victorian, most of them.' I gave him his drink and put the albums down in front of him. ‘See what you think. There's one I haven't been able to identify, and where there's just one stamp to the page like that, it makes them look important even if they aren't.'

He sat there for a moment gazing at the worn
leather covers with their gilt fastenings. These are the sort of albums Victorian ladies used for drawing miniatures, writing poems, pressing flower collections, that sort of thing.'

I poured myself a drink and watched him as he opened first one, then the other, leafing quickly through the loose pages. ‘You're right about the period, anyway. The end of Queen Victoria's reign, most of them stamps in issue in the late eighteen hundreds, and all of them stuck down tight.' He shook his head sadly. ‘Still, it's probably better than if they were hinged with gummed strips from the sheet margin, a very common practice in those days.' He turned to the island album and began going through it slowly, page by page, until he came to the blue stamp with LM
^C
L below the ship. He paused there and sipped his drink. ‘This the one you couldn't identify?' And when I nodded, he said, ‘Try Trinidad. The “Lady McLeod”. Its value may surprise you.'

I sat down on the berth opposite him, watching his face, which was lit by the evening sun slanting in through the open hatch. He was turning the pages again, and I couldn't be sure from his expression whether the stamp would put the collection beyond my reach. He came to the end and lit a cigarette, leaning back, his eyes half closed. ‘Well?' I asked.

‘Don't be so impatient. I haven't finished yet.' He smiled. ‘But it's interesting – very. I'll tell you why in a minute.' And he leaned forward again and began working his way through the second volume. It was so quiet on board I could hear the ticking of the ship's
clock and the gurgle of the tide making against the bows. And then, when he came to the proofs, he held the two loose leaves up to catch the light, peering at them closely. ‘Do you use a magnifying glass when you're charting?'