‘Unless there is anything of value in the loft that you want included in the sale?’
She hesitated, then shook her head. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Any jewellery you want disposed of?’
She laughed. ‘All that went long ago.’ She fell silent, as though recollecting; then she gave a little sigh. ‘Mother left me her things. They were beautiful, mostly native work. But they didn’t fetch much.’ Her eyes fell involuntarily to her hands, which were strongly formed and capable, the wrists slim and bare, no rings on the short, broad fingers. ‘I hated parting with them. But I kept the carvings.’ She said it almost defiantly. ‘My grandfather gave them to me, and I’ve nothing else to remember him by.’
She sat there for a moment as though thinking about him. Then she said, ‘Do you have a safe in your office?’
‘Yes.’ I concentrated on my tea, wondering what was coming, still thinking about her brother and his mysterious illness.
‘I was hoping perhaps you’d have room for these two albums.’ She nodded to the books on the dressing table. They were old leather-bound volumes with metal clasps.
‘Yours?’ I asked, not quite certain on whose authority the sale was being made.
There was a momentary hesitation; then she said, ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose they are now.’ She was staring towards the sea again. And then, as though conscious that she had been speaking as if her brother were already dead, she went on quickly, ‘They were among his things when he was sent home. He couldn’t speak at all then, but I knew they were important. We were very close, you see. And then Jona wrote — that’s my elder brother — he said if Tim ever recovered, he thought he’d want to make some enquiries about them. So I kept them here, hidden in the loft.’
‘What are they, diaries?’ I asked.
‘No. Stamps. It’s a collection of stamps.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment, the collector’s instinct suddenly taking hold, a feeling of excitement. Only once before in the years since I had switched from marine engine salesman to estate agent had the job given me the opportunity to acquire a collection direct from the owner. My eyes were fastened on the albums, wondering what was inside those battered leather covers. They looked Victorian, in which case there could be some early GBs. But this was a young woman I was dealing with, not a businessman. ‘You could put them in the bank,’ I said, ‘or it might be better to let the solicitors hold them.’
She shook her head, those large, prominent eyes of hers staring at me intensely. ‘I’d rather you kept them,’ she said.
It was an odd request. ‘Why? If they’re valuable …’
‘It isn’t that — though I wondered, of course, when things became really difficult. Anyway, I didn’t know how to go about selling them, and there was never any time …’ She hesitated, still staring at me, but her gaze had turned inward. ‘No. I just want to know they’re safe, that’s all. I don’t want them in the house any more.’ That husky voice of hers was low-pitched now, almost a whisper, her thoughts a little disconnected. ‘Something Jona wrote in a letter. I keep on remembering. He’s never been much of a letter writer, too wrapped up in his ship. He did write to me about Tim’s future. I’d cabled him about the nursing home charges, but even then his letter was all about the need for an engine overhaul, which meant Australia and no cargo earnings. It’s very expensive running a ship, I know, but-’
There was a long pause, and then she suddenly looked at me again and said, ‘But about those stamps, he did write that Tim had been very excited when he discovered them. I don’t know why. That was just after the accident, and I couldn’t get any sense out of Tim, of course.’ Her eyes went to the window again. Another, longer pause; then she said, ‘You’ve got to remember he wasn’t very coherent. There was brain damage as well. That’s why I put them in the loft. I thought he might suddenly want them. He had moments when he could communicate, after a fashion. But he was very strange, very unpredictable. About a fortnight ago, just before I finally persuaded the nursing home to take him — they’re some sort of charitable hangover from colonial days and very choosy, it seems, about whom they take — he suddenly seemed to want to see them again, and when I brought them down to him, he lay staring at them most of the day. Then he suddenly lost interest. He was like that.’ Her voice was very low, falling almost to a whisper. ‘If ever I catch up with the man who did that to him, I’ll kill him.’
It was said so quietly, without emotion, in the same matter-of-fact way she had mentioned sorcery. If she had said it wildly, I could have put it down to her being overwrought. But she wasn’t overwrought or in any way hysterical. She just sat there, making a flat statement, and that made it all the more frightening. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Can I have a look at the albums?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Her eyes were staring past me at the mask above the bed, her tone offhand.
I put down my cup and picked the albums up. They were identical, measuring about eight inches by five, the leather dark green, almost black, and very thick, the clasps gilt, two to each album, and the hinges damaged. The pages were loose-leaved, a heavy cartridge paper, the stamps carefully presented, sometimes only one to a page, sometimes complete sets. Many of them were unused, and in the case of the sets most of them were overprinted SPECIMEN. NO early GBs, no Queen’s heads, virtually the whole collection devoted to views, ships, a sprinkling of animals, and all about the turn of the century. Nothing very early and every stamp stuck down, which was a pity.
The first volume I looked through contained nothing but Canadian provincials and Australian states. There was a Specimen set of Tasmanian scenes which was particularly attractive, and the last two pages were taken up with what looked like proofs. But it was the second volume that interested me, an exclusively island collection: Malta, Papua, North Borneo, Samoa, Tonga, Bermuda, Cook Islands, Jamaica — ships, canoes, galleys, coats of arms, island scenes, and in the case of Samoa a page of the EXPRESS stamps. There was a nice Specimen set of Turks and Caicos to the full 3s. value, all with ships, and a very battered imperforate stamp, blue with a white sailing ship and the script letters LMCL underneath, stuck to the centre of the page so that it caught my eye. It was pen-cancelled and rang some faint bell in my memory.
‘Well?’ she asked as I sat looking at it, trying to remember an island that had issued a stamp with no designation on it, only a monogram. ‘I read somewhere that old stamps had kept pace with inflation.’
I nodded. ‘Better than most things. But I couldn’t give you even a rough idea what these are worth, not till I’ve checked them through with the catalogue. Even then, I won’t be certain because of their condition.’
‘I think my brother realised we were short of money. That day when he lay there staring at them, I was helping him over his lunch-’ She stopped there, a muscle in her cheek twitching at the memory. ‘I don’t know whether I understood him right, but I thought he tried to tell me they would be worth a lot to somebody.’
I thought she meant a collector, or a dealer, and I said, ‘I think I should warn you they won’t fetch anything like the catalogue price. It’s an interesting little collection, well arranged, but I don’t think there’s anything very rare, and none of them are in mint condition. They’re stuck down, you see. Mint condition requires that the original gum on the back be intact.’
‘I see.’ She frowned. ‘You’re not a stamp dealer, are you?’
‘No, but I collect them.’ And I told her how as a kid I had used any money that came my way to buy pictorials. ‘They were quite cheap then, and it was a sort of displacement activity, I suppose, a world in which I could forget that my parents were at each other’s throats and only staying together on account of me. Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the rise in market values to switch into line-engraved issues, concentrating on Great Britain and the Caribbean, islands like Antigua, St Kitts, St Vincent, Turks and Caicos.’