To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  “We must insist,” Dr. Lang said crisply, “on taking charge of the Kinloch Hilt.”

  “Mm.” My uncle made a noncommittal humming noise and offered nothing more.

  “You can’t hide it away forever.”

  Himself said with regret, “Thieves grow more ingenious every year.”

  “You know my views,” she told him crossly. “The Hilt belongs to Scotland.”

  Zoë Lang looked half the size of her adversary, and was neat and precise where he moved clumsily. Belief in their cause stiffened them both. While he controlled the whereabouts of his treasure, she couldn’t claim it: if once she found it, she would never relinquish it. I could see that for each of them it was all hardening into a relentless battle of wills, a mortal duel fought over dry La Ina sherry in cut lead crystal.

  I said to Zoë Lang, “Do you mind if I draw you?”

  “Draw me?”

  “Just a pencil sketch.”

  She looked astonished. “Whatever for?”

  “He’s an artist,” Himself explained casually. “He painted that large picture over there.” He pointed briefly. “Al, if you want any paper, there’s some in my room, in the desk drawers.”

  Gratefully I went to fetch some: high-grade typing paper, but anything would do. I sorted out a reasonable pencil and returned to the drawing room to find my uncle and his enemy standing side by side in front of the gloomiest painting I’d ever attempted.

  “Glen Coe,” Dr. Lang said with certainty. “The sun never shines.”

  It was true that the shape of the terrain caused orographic cloud formation more days than not over the unhappy valley, but the dark gray morning when the perfidious Campbells murdered their hosts the MacDonalds—thirty-seven of them, including women and children—seemed to brood forever over the heather-clad hills. A place of shivers, of horror, of betrayal.

  Zoë Lang stepped closer to the picture for a long inspection, then turned my way.

  “The shadows,” she told me, “the dark places round the roots of the heather, they’re all painted like tiny patches of tartan, the red of the MacDonalds and the yellow of the Campbells, little ragged lines of shading ... You can only see them when you’re up close ...

  “He knows,” my uncle said calmly.

  “Oh.” She looked from me to the picture and back again. There were glazes of shadow over the hillsides and atmospheric double shadows over many of the tartan pools round the heather roots. I’d felt ill all the time, painting it. The massacre of Glen Coe could still churn in the gut of a world that had seen much worse genocide in plenty since.

  She said, “Where do you want me to sit?”

  “Oh.” I was grateful. “By the window, if you would.”

  I got her to sit where the light fell on her face at the same angle as I’d painted her, and I drew the face in pencil as it appeared now to my eyes, an old face with folds and lines in the skin and taut sinews in the neck. It was clear and accurate, and predictably she didn’t like it.

  “You’re cruel,” she said.

  I shook my head. “It’s time that’s cruel.”

  “Tear it up.”

  Himself peered at the drawing and shrugged, and said in my defense, “He usually paints nice-looking golf scenes, all sunshine with people enjoying themselves. Sells them to America faster than he can paint them, don’t you, Al?”

  “Why golf?” Zoë Lang demanded. “Why America?”

  I answered easily, “Golf courses in America are built to look good, with lots of water hazards. Water looks great in paintings.” I painted water-washed pebbles in metal paints, gold, silver and copper, and they always sold instantly. “American golfers buy more golf pictures than British golfers do. So I paint what sells. I paint to live.”

  She looked as if she thought the commercial attitude all wrong, as if any painter not starving in a garret was somehow reprehensible: I wondered what she would think if I told her I amplified my income nicely via royalties from postcards, thousands of copies of my paintings for golfers to send to each other from places like Augusta (the Masters) and Pebble Beach and even, in Britain, from Muirfield, St. Andrews and the Belfry.

  She sparred a little more with my uncle. He offered unstinting help with the eagle and smiled blandly to all else. She asked if King Alfred’s chalice had turned up, as her friend was still waiting to put a value on the “glass ornaments” (her words) embedded in the gold.

  “Not yet,” Himself said unworriedly. “One of my family will no doubt have it safe.”

  She couldn’t understand his carefree attitude, and it wasn’t until after she had left that I told him the glass ornaments, if they were the original gems, were in fact genuine sapphires, emeralds and rubies.

  “The King Alfred Gold Cup,” I said, “is almost certainly worth far more intrinsically than the Hilt. There’s far more gold by weight, and the gems are nearly double the karats.”

  “You don’t mean it! How do you know?”

  “I had it traced to the firm that made it. It cost an absolute fortune.”

  “My God. My God. And young Andrew was playing with it on the kitchen floor!”

  “Upside down,” I agreed, smiling.

  “Does Ivan know where it is?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, and told him where to look.

  “You’re a rogue, Alexander.”

  I had put him in great good humor. He marched us into his own room for a “decent drink”—Scotch whisky-and I stunned him speechless by suggesting that next time Zoe Lang vowed the Hilt belonged to the nation he tell her then OK, the nation would lose on the deal.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Generation by generation-ever since the invention of inheritance taxes-the Kinlochs have paid for that hilt. The same object, but taxed after a death and retaxed and taxed again. It never ends. If you give it into public ownership, the country forfeits the tax. It’s a case of kill the goose ... Dr. Lang never thinks of the golden tax eggs.”

  He said thoughtfully, “James will not have to pay crippling death duties on the castle, as I did. It was my greatest reason for handing it over.”

  “One is taxed for giving a big present to one’s son,” I smiled, “but not for losing the same amount at the casino. Nor for winning. Screwy. But that’s spite and envy for you. All feeling and no addition.”

  “What brought all this on?”

  “Thinking about the Hilt.”

  “Do you seriously think we should surrender it?”

  “No,” I said. “But arithmetic might cool Dr. Lang’s ardor.”

  “I’ll try it.” He lavishly poured more gold into my glass. “By God, Al.”

  “If you get me drunk,” I said, “James will beat me at golf.”

  James beat me at golf.

  “Whatever did you say to Himself?” he asked. “Nothing but catching a twenty-pound salmon puts him into such a high mood.”

  “He’s good to me.”

  “The sun shines out of your arse.”

  The difference between James and Patsy was that my cousin felt secure enough to make a joke of his father’s occasional glance in my direction. James would inherit his title and an entailed estate. He had none of Patsy’s devilish doubts sitting bleakly on his sunny shoulders.

  As always we went amicably round eighteen holes, laughing, cursing, helplessly incompetent, racking up scores we would never confess to, happy in each other’s undemanding company, cousins in the simplest sense, family attitudes and loyalties taken for granted.

  We pulled our golf bags along behind us on their little carts, and if I was careful replacing my clubs each time, sliding them gently into the bag instead of ramming them home, it was because the handles rested not on the firm base of the bag but in the wide bowl of the gray cloth-wrapped shape within it, the jeweled gold treasure fashioned by Maxim in 1867.

  We finished our round lightheartedly, and in the clubhouse I wiped clean my woods and irons and stowed them upright in the bag in my locker, sentinels gua
rding King Alfred’s Gold Cup.

  Owing to the rigid divisions at the top of the golf bags, which held the clubs apart to prevent their damaging each other, I had had to buy a bag that could be taken apart at the bottom-for cleaning-and in the castle’s drying room I had undone the necessary screws to take the bag apart, and had lodged the Cup inside. It fitted there snugly: and as a bonus for having to undo the bag to get it out again, it could never be tipped out by accident.

  The locker’s flat gray doors were uniform and anonymous. Changing my shoes, I put the black-and-white studs on the shelf and closed everything unremarkably away, and with amusement returned with James to the castle.

  By midmoming the next day my life in the bothy had taken shape again, and in greater comfort than before when it came to mattress and armchair. A rental truck stood outside my front door, the portable phone (with spare batteries) was working, and Zoe Lang’s portrait stood unwrapped on the easel.

  With a thankful feeling of coming home I set out the paints I needed, feeling their texture on knife and brush, darkening the background again, adding the shadows that had flashed into imagination in my travels, putting a glow on the skin and life-lights in the waterlike surfaces of the eyes.

  The woman lived on the canvas, as vital as I knew how to make her.

  At five o’clock, when the quality of the light subtly changed, I put down the brushes, washed them for the last time that day and made sure that all the brilliant colors were airtight in their pots and tubes, a routine as natural as breathing. Then I lit my lamp and put it by the window, and took my bagpipes out of their case, and walked with them up the rocky hillside until the bothy lay far below.

  It was weeks since I’d played the pipes. My fingers were rusty on the chanter. I filled the bag with air and tuned the drones, swinging them along my shoulder and waiting for such skill as I had to reawaken in my ear; and at length began to feel and to remember the fingering of one of the long ancient laments of a time earlier than Prince Charles Edward. The sadness that had enveloped Scotland for centuries before him, the untamable independence that no Act of Union could undo, all the dark Celtic mysteries, pulsed in the old elemental endlessly recurring tunes that slowly wove a mood more of endurance than hope.

  I had learned to play laments—the pibrochs-as a boy, chiefly for the unromantic reason that their slowness meant I had more time to get the notes right. I’d progressed to marches later, but a lament suited my painting of Zoe Lang better, and I stood on the Monadhliath Mountains while the moon rose, and played for her a mixture of an old tune called “The King’s Taxes” and a new one that I made up as I went along. And it was just as well, I thought as stray squeaks and wrong notes made me wince, that my old army teacher wasn’t there to hear.

  Scottish piping laments could go on for hours, but earthly hunger put a stop to them usually in my case, and I returned in the dark to the bothy, filled with a pleasant melancholy but with no feeling of despair, and cooked paella in contentment.

  I always woke early in the mountains, even in the dark winters, and the next day I sat in front of the easel watching the slow change of light on that face; the growth, as it almost seemed, of the emerging personality taking place before me. And I wondered if anyone would ever again see that gradual birth. If the picture was successful, if it ever hung in a gallery, passing visitors might give it a glance under a bright light and view it as a conjuring trick; now you see youth, now you don’t.

  When daylight was fully established I still sat comfortably in my new armchair, trying to tap into that courage I was supposed to have. It was one thing to imagine, another to do. And if I didn’t do, I wouldn’t know forever that I’d failed in courage, even though, as it now stood, the portrait of an unknown woman was complete and workmanlike.

  I had ransacked my mother’s kitchen for a sharp-pointed knife, and in the end I’d borrowed from her not a knife but a meat thermometer. This unlikely tool had proved to have a spike whose tip was both sharp and abrasive. The spike was for sticking into joints of meat: the round dial from which it protruded measured the inner heat and the state of cooking-rare, medium, well-done.

  “Of course you can borrow it,” my mother said, puzzled, “but whatever for?”

  “It’s scratchy. It’s rigid. The dial gives it good grip. It’s pretty well perfect.”

  She sweetly humored her unfathomable son.

  So I had the perfect tool. I had the light. I had the vision.

  I sat and quaked.

  I had the pencil drawing of the real Zoe Lang. I’d drawn her at the same angle. It should have been easy.

  I had to see the old face over the young.

  I had to see it clearly, unmistakably, down to the soul.

  I had to play the lament for time past. I had to play the lament as a fact but not necessarily as a tragedy. I had to depict the persistence of the spirit inside the transient flesh.

  I couldn’t.

  Time passed.

  When I finally picked up the meat thermometer and stood in front of Zoe Lang and made the first scratch down to the Payne’s gray, it was as if I had surrendered to an inner force.

  I started with the neck, conscious that if the whole concept was in fact beyond my ability, I could overpaint a fluffy scarf or jewel decoration to conceal the failure.

  I saw the outer shell of age as larger than the face within, as if the external presentation were the cage, the prison, of the spirit. I held the pencil drawing beside the painting and put dots of reference at pivotal points: at the outer lines of the eye sockets, at the upper edges of the jawbones, at the rear extension of the skull.

  With almost an abandonment of rational thought I swept the sharp scratching point across my careful painting. I let go with instinct. I drew the old Zoe in gray scratches, as if the flesh colors weren’t anything but background; I scratched the prison bars with the cruelty she’d sensed in me, with the inability to soften or compromise the brutal conception.

  I left as little to chance as I could. I traced the direction of each line in my mind until I could see the effect, and that could take ten minutes or half an hour. The result might be a sweeping stroke that looked spontaneous and inevitable, but in nerving myself each time to scrape down to the gray I was cravenly aware that a mistake couldn’t be put right.

  It was a cold day, and I sweated.

  By five o’clock the shape of Zoë Lang’s old face was clearly established over the inner spirit. I put down the meat thermometer, stretched and flexed my cramped fingers, took the portable phone with me and went for a walk outside.

  Sitting on a granite boulder, looking down on the bothy, looking away down the valley to the tiny cars crawling along the distant road, I phoned my mother. Bad reception: crackle and static.

  Ivan, she assured me, was at last and slowly shedding his depression. He had dressed. He was talking of not needing Wilfred any longer. Keith Robbiston had paid one of his flying visits and had been pleased with the patient’s progress. She herself felt more settled and less anxious.

  “Great,” I said.

  She wanted to know how the meat-thermometer picture was coming along.

  Medium rare, I said.

  She laughed and said she was pleased Himself had insisted on a phone.

  I told her the number.

  She was calm, cool and collected, her normal serene self.

  I said I would call her again on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, when I had finished the picture.

  “Take care of yourself, Alexander.”

  “You too,” I said.

  I went down again to the bothy and ate the remaining half of the paella, and sat outside in the dark thinking of what needed to be done to the picture to complete its meaning; and chiefly I thought of not muddling the outlines by too many more strong gray scratches but of not going down so deep, not nearly down to the canvas but only as far as the ultramarine blue layer, so that the wrinkles and sagging areas of old skin would be gentler, though still unmistakable. A
nd I would end, if I could manage it, with a blue-gray mistlike top portrait, so that the eye could see both portraits separately, the outer or the inner, according to the chosen focus, or could see both together as an interpretation of what all life was like, the outward relentless change of cell structure decreed by the passing of time.

  I slept only in snatches that night and dreamed a lot and in the morning again watched the light grow on Zoe Lang, and spent the day with rigidly governed finger muscles until my arms and neck ached with tension, but by late afternoon I had gone to the limit of what I could understand and show, and whatever the picture might be judged to lack, it was because the lack was in me.

  Only the eyes of the finished portrait looked blazingly young, whichever other aspect one chose to see. I put suggestions of bags under the lower lids with a few blue lines, and drooped upper lids in faintly, but that unchanging spirit of Zoe Lang looked out, present and past identical.

  I couldn’t sleep. I lay for a while in the dark wondering what I could have done better, and coming to a realization that I would probably go on wondering that for weeks and months, if not for my whole life.

  I would wrap the picture in its sheet and put its face to the wall, and when I looked at it again, when I’d forgotten the strength and direction and feeling of each individual brushstroke or scratch, when I could see the whole with time’s perspective, then I would know if I’d done something worth keeping, or whether the whole idea had been a mistake and beyond me.

  Restlessly I got up at about four in the morning and, locking my door behind me, took my bagpipes up into the mountains, seeing my way by starlight, humbled by the distance of those flaming unvisited worlds, melancholy with the insignificance of one self in the cosmos and thinking such unoriginal thoughts as that it was much easier to do harm than good, even unintentionally.

  As always the melancholy drifted away into space and left acceptance. Some people clung to angst as if it were a virtue. I let it go with relief. Optimism was a gift at birth. Bottles were half full, not half empty. When I took up the pipes in the dawn and blew the bag full of air, it was marches and strathspeys I played into the brightening silence, no longer the sad regrets of the piobaireachd.