by Peter Helton
‘Well, you’ll find out when you get there tomorrow, won’t you?’
THREE
It was without the slightest feeling of foreboding that I brought the DS to a halt on top of the ridge. I had stopped in a narrow lane beside a neglected drystone wall, to find myself ignored by a small herd of brown cows beyond it. From here I could look down into the little valley, on the other slope of which nestled the tiny village of Batcombe, looking exactly as it had seventeen years ago, perhaps a hundred and seventy years ago. Sitting here, all it took was a small adjustment of the inner eye for the twenty-first century to dissolve into the misty sunshine. The clusters of freestone cottages, the comfortably sagging roofline of the Three Magpies pub and the ancient church flying the flag of St George on its squat tower all wrote ‘English village’ across the hillside in a firm, old-fashioned hand. From here I couldn’t see even a single car, which made the illusion of looking back into a previous era near complete. I turned off the engine. The distant bark of a dog and the squawks of pheasants nearby were all the sounds I could hear above the ticking of the cooling engine. The view plucked at me with a strange nostalgia for a distant past, a past that wasn’t mine. Then an RAF helicopter tore across the valley and nudged me back into the present.
The Bath Arts Academy had its home at Batcombe House, a substantial pile of masonry above the village, half hidden from view by a protective arm of Summerlee Wood. I rolled to the bottom of the hill, crossed the stream via the single-span stone bridge and zipped up the other side, past the Three Magpies and through the heart of the village, with its triangular village green in a crook of the road and what looked like a real live post office clinging on to the end of a row of low cottages. A few 4x4s were dotted about here and there, some with real mud on them.
Batcombe House hadn’t changed much either since I last saw it. It was a very large house set in several acres of grounds that ran on into Summerlee Wood. The house itself was early 19th century, which had been added to in Edwardian times. All had aged well together. Ivy had been allowed completely to cover one wing and looked determined to swallow the rest of the building. As usual the wrought-iron gates were wide open and if they were a little rustier than the last time I drove through them I didn’t notice it that day. A few cars were parked on the patchwork of concrete hard-standing in front of the house and a tangle of bicycles leant by the porticoed entrance.
Bath Arts Academy was a slightly overblown title for a small private art school that had never catered to more than sixty well-off students. It did not give out grades or award degrees and so did not attract the kind of government funding or scrutiny other art schools enjoyed. It meant that tutors could concentrate on teaching whatever they thought artists needed to learn rather than doing paperwork, but it also meant that fees were high. The BAA was expensive rather than exclusive, with a student body that consisted of a mix of ages and nationalities. That the college would have freely accepted working-class applicants, had any beaten a path to its brass-handled doors while carrying enough money on their person, remained an untested hypothesis. What you needed to get into the BAA was talent, passion, plenty of funds and a touch of the eccentric. I locked the car and crunched over the perishing concrete to the west wing of the building. An unexpected rush of memories made me want to have a quiet look around before announcing my arrival. From the left corner of the house towards the west you could see, on the other side of the decidedly tufty lawns, the sculpture sheds and the ‘bothy’ of the resident sculptor, sculpture having been banished from the house where less noisy and noxious art forms were taught. As a painter I had never been wild about sculpture but I approved of the big and noisy variety. A lot of it was standing around in the gardens, especially near the pond. I walked along the stone-flagged path skirting the west wing; every flagstone was cracked and chipped, some rocked underfoot; grass and weeds had made a home in the cracks. The French window of Studio One was wide open, yet the small forest of easels stood silent and leafless. From somewhere I could hear a voice, measured, melodious and with frequent pauses; even without hearing what was being said I recognized the familiar rhythms as an art history lecture accompanied by a slide show. The room above Studio One served as meeting place and lecture hall; sure enough, its four sash windows were closed and curtained. Further on, a long and ramshackle conservatory and the rooms behind it were home to the small ceramics department. Right now it presented a damp air of neglect which was wholly deceiving. By necessity potters, needing to fill kilns which would turn clay into ceramic, worked in batches and, in my memory at least, spent even more time reading novels on the lawn than the painters did. Then suddenly they’d all disappear when the opening of the big kiln yielded up excitement and disappointment in near equal measure.
Many of the conservatory’s lights were cracked and much of the glass was almost as grimy as the windows of my own studio. Some split-bamboo shades and strung-up dustsheets helped with the gloom. I approved. Standing in the open door I could see only one solitary girl sitting at one of the potter’s wheels. She wore a once-white, clay-streaked smock over a pair of jeans; her long, straight blonde hair was tied back into a ponytail with a gingham tea towel. The electric wheel hummed and spun. The girl looked up, registered me without apparent interest, then looked down at the wheel. She threw a lump of grey matter the size of a man’s brain on to it and centred the wet mass. Her hands cupping the spinning clay, she looked across at me. Without taking her eyes off my face she conjured with the clay. A tall, narrow vessel grew from between her hands; for a moment it spun, perfectly rounded and upright, guided by her thin fingers, then she crushed the vessel back down into a dense, spinning lump. Her eyes blinked only once. Gas-blue eyes. ‘Help you?’
‘No. I know my way around. Where’s everyone, at a lecture?’
‘The Future of the Visual Arts in Britain.’
‘You’re not going?’
The clay on the wheel wobbled then stopped. The girl cut the clay off the wheel with a wood-handled wire cutter, wet her hands and re-centred the lump. ‘No thanks, I have seen the future.’
‘And what’s it look like?’
She set her face into a narrow-eyed scowl and raised a wide-mouthed vessel from the clay, then squashed it down so it spun misshapen and off-centre. She hammed up a tragic voice. ‘Dumpy. The future … is dumpy.’
Perhaps she could read the future in lumps of clay. ‘Thanks for the warning.’
I walked on to the next door: the Small Studio. A select, fanatical bunch of painters had received my equally fanatical wisdom concerning drawing in here. A few paces further brought me to another set of French windows: Studio Two, the large painting studio. I could not pass without sticking my head in. It was also devoid of students but crammed with paintings in progress, mostly large canvases on the walls and only a few smaller ones on easels. Some talented stuff here, with one or two exceptions, but nothing earth-shattering. I stood in the open French doors with the studio behind me and looked across the lawns that were surely in the process of returning to pasture. To the left I could see several large wood and metal sculptures standing close to the sculpture tutor’s house, as though left there as giant peace offerings. There were the low sculpture sheds behind; further to the right and in the shadow of Summerlee Wood I could see Fiddler’s Pond, so named because the shape of its dark waters used to be reminiscent of a violin, yet today its edges were ill-defined. Only the bravest students, or those propelled into the water by their contemporaries, swam in it.
I completed my first foray past some neglected flower beds that had been all but swallowed up by brambles and evil-looking laurels, and back at the front of the house I pushed through the glass doors into the cool entrance hall. To the uninitiated, the profusion of doors, stairs and corridors was either inviting or intimidating, depending on temperament. I remembered it all easily. To the left a corridor led to painting studios and ceramics, then the stairs that led to the next floor and the attic above, beside it another corri
dor and off that the steps leading down into the basements. All the paintwork had once been cream but all doors, doorframes, corners and even the banister bore a thirty-year patina of many-coloured finger-, palm- and even the odd footprint. To my right the door to the administrator’s office stood half-open and I sensed movement in there, so that’s where I headed. Inside, a large woman in skirt, shirt and sensible shoes was standing with her back to the door in front of three open filing cabinets. She was pulling out file after file and laying them on an already tottering pile on the deep windowsill.
‘Hello?’
She whirled around and laid one hand across her heart. ‘Hoo! Haa. You startled me.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head.
‘Guilty conscience?’
‘Oh, always,’ she assured me. It was more than just the hoo that made me think of an owl. She was in her thirties but in defiance of current fashion had a pudding-basin hairstyle, wore large amber-coloured round glasses and dressed in greys.
‘Sorry I startled you.’
‘That’s OK. Can I help you? Oh, wait, I know who you are … don’t tell me, you’re …’ She held up her left hand and wiggled ringless fingers at me. ‘Honeysett, right?’
‘Right.’
‘I’m Claire Kilburn, I do the admin around here. Trying to. I saw your picture in the Chronicle a while back. That thing with the iguana called Knut? Amazing. But you’re also one of poor John’s artists. Mr Birtwhistle’s, I should say. You used to work here.’
‘For a very short time.’
‘Well, you must have made an impression because poor Mr Birtwhistle said he was very keen to get you here and teach again. Unfortunately he died in a car accident a couple of days ago. You probably heard about that? The police have been here twice already. Tragic, quite tragic.’
And could have been even more tragic had there been a headwind. ‘Quite tragic.’
‘For the college too,’ she said. ‘He was a popular tutor and really the driving force behind the school. Sorry, that’s not what you came here for, is it? We’re all a bit distracted at the moment.’
‘Had you worked for him for long?’
‘No, not at all. I’ve been here a couple of months now. There wasn’t much administration going on until I got here, to be honest. It was a little chaotic, shall we say.’
‘I can well believe it.’ I remembered this office looking like the dumping ground for everything from bundles of life drawings to plaster moulds and etching plates. A plastic skeleton usually stood by the fireplace. Now the place looked like a proper office. Naturally I preferred it the way it was before. It reminded me of home. ‘I’m not actually here to teach. Mr Birtwhistle wanted me to be part of an exhibition he was planning. Is that still going ahead?’
‘Oh, but you’re quite wrong there. Paul, our painting tutor, has gone and left for a teaching job in Queensland, of all places. Interviewed over the phone and the internet and went as soon as he got the job. John didn’t want to stand in his way. It was you he had in mind as a replacement.’
‘There was nothing about it in his letter. It was all about the exhibition.’
‘Oh, I know; he was going to see you personally. He said he would try and sweet-talk you into it.’
‘All academic now, I guess. What about this exhibition? Is that going ahead?’
‘Oh, absolutely. I think it’s even more important now. It was almost like it was his last wish, wasn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And naturally we’ll include some of John’s own images, to show just what an underrated artist he was.’
I had warmed to the idea of a mixed show at the college; some interesting artists had taught here in the past. ‘Good. I’m glad. So, who else will be showing?’
Claire sat down behind the smaller of the two desks, opened a drawer and withdrew a sheet of paper, which she handed to me. ‘It’s not as long a list as John would have liked. Some could not be traced, one died, another went mad, one gave up painting for potholing. Much the same thing if you ask me. Anyway, that’s how it goes.’
I ran my eyes down the list and recognized most of the names. ‘So these are the ones that agreed to show? It should be quite …’
‘Well, no, actually. Sorry.’ She held up both hands in apology for interrupting. ‘That’s just a preliminary list, nothing has been finalised. John was going to see them all personally. I don’t know how many he managed to visit. You might have been the first.’
It had been more visitation than visit. ‘He died before he managed to see me.’
‘Yes, the police asked me about that.’
‘About what?’
‘Whether John had communicated with me and had he mentioned that he had seen you that day.’
Typical, as Annis would say. Despite the fact that Birtwhistle had nearly killed me, the police hadn’t taken my word for it that he died on the way to my house rather than from my house. I changed the subject. ‘I’ve met one of the artists on this list, and I’ve heard of Greg Landacker, of course.’
‘Ah yes, Landacker is quite a name; we are very keen to have him exhibit. I don’t think he has exhibited anywhere for a while.’
‘I think you’re right. I like his stuff. Like it a lot. Dawn Fowling I don’t think I have met; I only vaguely remember swirly canvases. And Kurt Hufnagel, he’s quite good. I met him though he probably won’t remember me,’ I said modestly. Or remember much else of the evening, I thought uncharitably. There were five names here, including mine. My name topped the list.
Above us much chair-scraping signalled the end of the Future-of-Art lecture. I thanked Claire and wandered back into the hall, still studying the short list of names and addresses. There was something odd about it, I thought, but I couldn’t immediately see what. I was distracted by the sudden onrush of students, all heading for the refectory. Somewhere among that lot was probably a tutor but the group was so mixed that no one stood out. They all passed through the hall in groups or pairs, ignoring me. Relative quiet once more settled on the hall.
‘You’re going to do it then?’ said a voice right behind me. I turned around. The girl from ceramics stood there, still wearing her spattered frock, but she had let her hair down. She was standing about a foot closer to me than was conventional between strangers. Her eyes, perhaps more petrol- than gas-blue, were nearly level with mine, but she was looking just past me as though passing on confidences and checking for eavesdroppers.
‘Yes, I think I will. You know about this then?’ I held up the list. ‘If the others agree to do it, I will. It sounds like a really good idea.’
‘It is. Shame there’s no potter on the list, of course, but apparently the last tutor went mad and smashed all his work. I know how he feels. Ah, here comes Dumpy.’
I turned around. A woman descended the stairs then clacked in noisy heels across the floor. She was about forty, I guessed, but didn’t look like an art-school tutor. Only a tall, thin creature like Ceramics Girl would have described her as ‘dumpy’. She was comfortably pear-shaped and unfortunately permed, certainly, and five foot if she was an inch, but she was sharply dressed in a Windsor-blue business suit. She made for the office door but changed her mind, swerved and turned towards me with a sigh. ‘And you are …?’ Her voice was tired and irritable.
There was only one possible answer to that. ‘Chris Honeysett.’
‘Yes, and …?’ She suddenly mellowed, looking even more tired. ‘Are you a parent?’
It wasn’t something I felt like discussing, so I said, ‘I used to work here, for a short while.’
‘Oh, you’re one of those. Sorry, my mind is rather full at the moment. My father’s death has left me with an awful lot to sort out. I’m Anne Birtwhistle.’
I mumbled my condolences, which seemed to make her irritable again. ‘You’re here because of this exhibition my father had planned.’ She looked around the hall and staircase. Both were adorned with student work, some of it truly hideous, and which had probab
ly been there for decades where it attracted dust and caustic comments from later students, often scribbled in biro on the wall next to them. ‘Well, a change of decor might not be a bad thing. But I’m afraid I’m far too busy to give it any attention now.’
‘I received a letter from your father which said your administrator …’
‘Yes, Claire,’ she filled in.
‘That Claire would be organizing the show.’
‘I doubt she’ll have the time either. This place needs a complete overhaul since I’ve now been lumbered with it and with my brother conveniently bumming around in Asia. Or was it Sweden? I tell you what. You want this show, you get started on organizing it. We’ll talk again after my father’s funeral.’ She nodded, tried for a smile and failed, then disappeared into the office and shut the door behind her.
A familiar smell of refectory food came wafting up from the basement. I checked my watch: lunchtime. The school had always provided breakfast and lunch, free to tutors and at reasonable prices for students. Meals – quite edible meals, as I seemed to remember – had been cooked almost single-handedly by a reassuringly large woman called Mrs Washbrook; could she possibly still be down there? It certainly smelled familiar, I thought when I followed the echoing stone steps down into the basement. Of course I was neither a student nor a tutor but if she still ran the place I would throw myself on Mrs Washbrook’s mercy.