Would Not Be Restored
The appraiser came at four in the afternoon, which in that house was already evening, because the curtains had not been opened in the lifetime of anyone currently employed there. He was shown through three rooms to reach the fourth. He was good at his work and his work had taught him to look at ceilings first, so he saw the water stain before he saw the Marquis, who was standing beside the fire in a coat that had been extremely expensive during a decade the appraiser had studied but not lived in. There were flowers in a porcelain vase on the table between them. They had been cut, at a guess, the previous week. Nobody had removed them and nobody appeared to be intending to.
He began the way he always began, aloud, because clients like to hear a professional thinking. Condition, provenance, comparables. He said the mirror was Venetian and the silvering had gone at the edges, foxed, he called it, and that resilvering would return perhaps thirty guineas to it. He said the portrait had darkened under a century of chimney smoke and that a careful cleaning would bring the reds back and the price with them. He said the giltwood had oxidised and could be brightened. Every observation arrived attached to a small subtraction, and every subtraction had a technical name, and he had used those names for twenty years without once hearing what they had in common.
The Marquis let him finish. He was courteous in the specific way of a man who has never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed, and he did not argue, because arguing would have implied the appraiser was wrong, and the appraiser was not wrong. He was simply valuing the house as if the last hundred years had been an accident that could be corrected for a fee. So the Marquis asked him something instead, mildly, the way you would ask about the weather on the road. If the smoke comes off the portrait, he said, what exactly is it that you have removed.
The appraiser said, correctly, soot. The Marquis said, also correctly, my family. A hundred and forty winters of them, sitting in this room, breathing at that painting. Then he did something the appraiser did not expect, which was to hand over the ledger, open at the inventory, and invite him to walk three lots again with a second column drawn beside the first. One column for what a thing is worth cleaned. One for what it is worth as it stands. Take your time, he said. I have rather a lot of it left, which is the only category in this house that has not depreciated.
By the third lot the appraiser had stopped writing. His trade rested on a proposition he had never examined, which was that time is something that happens to an object rather than something the object accumulates, and that the correct response to it is removal. Foxing, craquelure, oxidation, patina: four words for the same event, three of them insults and one of them a compliment, and the difference between them was nothing but fashion. He had spent two decades pricing the removal of the only thing in the room that could not be bought.
He should say, in fairness to the man, that the Marquis was not attempting to keep the house. He knew perfectly well it would be sold, that the sale would be soon, and that the coat he was wearing would outlast the family that had commissioned it. He was not resisting the auction. He was insisting on an accurate catalogue. There is a difference between losing something and agreeing to describe it as though it had already been worthless, and he had decided, some years earlier, that he would concede the first and never the second. Dinner was announced at seven, as it was announced every evening, for a table that had been laid for eight since a year the appraiser did not ask about.
The house built the room you can wear. It opens in gold and the gold is already dark at the edges: clove bud dry and antique, black pepper and coriander behind it, mandarin and plum arriving as varnish and wine rather than as fruit. Then flowers that have been standing too long, carnation and rose and orris and immortelle, formal, powdered, magnificent, three days past their hour. Underneath, the building itself, myrrh and frankincense and opoponax and Tolu absorbed into wood and plaster the way two centuries of incense are absorbed into a chapel. And beneath all of it civet and castoreum, which is the part nobody commissions and everybody has: the body inside the tailoring, warm, animal and entirely mortal.
He asked what it was worth.
The Marquis asked worth to whom, and when.
Restoration is a form of forgetting that arrives with an invoice. Some things are worth precisely what has happened to them, and the only way to find out is to refuse, once, to have them cleaned.