by Peter Helton
The place was busy. Strip lighting ran the length of the low vaulted ceiling, and I did not remember the walls being lemon yellow, but there she was, thinner now and the hair under her cook’s bonnet had greyed completely, but it was without doubt the same woman, bustling about at twice the speed of her younger and thinner assistant. She didn’t remember me at all. ‘No, sorry. How long did you work here, love?’
Not long, I had to admit. I paid a ludicrously small sum for an edible-looking beef stew in gravy, with a mountain of mashed potato and an avalanche of peas. I was looking for a place to sit down when a familiar face looked up and waved me over to her table. She was sitting by herself in the furthest corner.
‘Glad you could make it, Honeypot,’ she said. ‘Dine with me. No one else dares come near.’ It was Elisabeth Kroog, the resident sculptor. ‘I knew you were around, saw your old car. Not many of those around any more. You’re a man of some taste.’
Time had not been kind to Kroog, or perhaps she had not been kind to herself. She was probably in her late sixties now but her face was so wrinkled she could easily pass for eighty and her skin looked as though granite dust was ingrained in her pores. On her nearly bald head perched a black skull cap embroidered with faded gold thread and the few teeth she had left were stained a deep amber from constant pipe-smoking. Even now the long, curved church warden pipe lay next to her plate of sausages and mash.
I started by making the appropriate conventional noises about John’s death but she cut me short with the wave of a forked sausage. ‘You know what a workhorse John was. He had a couple of scares in the last two years but refused to slow down.’
‘That was exactly how he went in the end. He died at the wheel but kept on accelerating.’
‘Very fitting. And now the bastard has left me here all alone, stranded in the twenty-first bloody century. I never thought in a million years I would end up on the wrong side of the millennium.’ She decorated the length of her sausage with mustard and bit it in half. ‘I’m glad you decided to come back. You and Washtub,’ she pointed her half sausage at Mrs Washbrook, ‘are the only familiar faces round here now.’
‘You’re the second one who thinks I came to teach here. I never spoke to John, of course, and in his letter it didn’t say anything about teaching.’
‘He knew you’d poo-poo the idea if he wrote to you; he wanted to go and charm you into it. It’s only until we can find a more permanent lunatic to work here for free meals and jelly beans. To replace Paul who followed the mammon down under to teach the colonials. I pray his plane will crash and burn.’
‘I can’t teach here; I’ve got things to do,’ I said and quickly shovelled some stew in my mouth.
‘Oh yeah? What?’ Kroog paused, clapped a paper napkin over her mouth and coughed bronchially into it. Then she looked into the napkin and said ‘bugger’ under her breath before crumpling it up. ‘What’s more important than teaching the next generation to recognize the difference between real art and real crap? Or in my case the next-but-one generation. I’m sure you can sacrifice a few weeks at the altar of the only true religion left on earth.’
‘I can’t believe John wanted me to teach again. He fired me.’
‘Not really. Everything else has stopped working properly but there’s nothing wrong with my memory, lad. You two were drinking too much French plonk by the pond and got into a ridiculous drunken argument about Matisse of all people. You both talked yourselves into a corner and you, as I clearly remember, said, “If that’s so then I don’t see how I can continue teaching here,” and John said something like, “If that’s how you feel, old boy, you should find something better to do,” and that was all. John never fired you. He liked you.’
‘I’m really not cut out for teaching,’ I said lamely. I didn’t have anything on my books and no show coming up until – hopefully – a spring show at Simon Paris Fine Art, and with a rising panic I found that I couldn’t for the life of me think of any excuses.
‘Rubbish, you’ll be fine. Write your own timetable, studio space, free room at the Bothy and free grub courtesy of Washboard here and I might even get round to paying you.’ I looked up from my plate of food. ‘Don’t look like that. I was deputy head. Now John has deserted us I’ll have to drive this ship of fools. I could really do with some help.’ She patted my hand and nodded. It was all decided, apparently.
‘How long until you find a new painting tutor, d’you think?’
‘Oh, no idea. We’ll advertise. After John’s funeral. Good, great. Have a look at the timetable. Start just as soon as you’ve got over the shock of having a job to go to.’
FOUR
‘Teaching?’ Annis nearly fell off her painting stool in her haste to silence the clockwork radio. ‘You’re winding me up.’
‘Lizzie Kroog talked me into it,’ I lamented. I looked around the studio. I must have been mad to agree to that.
‘She must have bewitched you. You always said you hated teaching. I remember distinctly you saying that teaching art was completely useless. What was it again? “You can’t teach art; it’s like trying to teach the taste of chocolate.” Your very words.’
‘It was John Birtwhisle’s dying wish, apparently. Or nearly.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I didn’t want to let them down. It’s not going to be for long. And I’ve got a couple of days before I have to start. In the meantime Kroog wants me to see if I can find any of the people on this list of exhibitors and twist their arms. Fortunately none of them seem to have moved very far.’
Annis pulled a doleful face. ‘Probably can’t afford the bus fare.’
‘One of them’s Greg Landacker; he could afford the bus company.’
‘Good luck with asking him. I hear he’s an anti-social bastard.’
‘Most painters are anti-social.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to curb your baser instincts for a while, won’t you?’ she said gleefully and turned the radio back on.
Annis was probably right about Landacker being a hard nut to crack; people said his sudden success had gone to his head, that he never answered questions about his work and had cultivated a mysterious loner act, while really craving admiration. He sounded like a right barrel of laughs. Which is why I would start with a slightly softer target, someone I had met before: Kurt Hufnagel.
Not that I thought it would be that much more enjoyable, but Hufnagel should be easier to persuade. I had met him before and he struck me as someone who would respond well to vague promises of money or publicity as long as he wasn’t too hungover. The last time I had seen him was at a private view of some of his work at Simon Paris. Then his clothes had needed ironing, perhaps even airing, and he had drunk the red wine on offer at an alarming rate. He had irritably pointed out to me that his name was pronounced Hoof-nargle, as though that should have been obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence. I had seen a couple of red dots, enough to keep him in cartons of Bulgarian plonk for a few months. Most of his paintings depicted the chaotic interior of his painting studio with the obligatory woman posed naked for no good reason amongst the clutter. Come to think of it, there had always been a naked girl somewhere in Hufnagel’s paintings. Even as he got older the girls in his paintings appeared not to age and all were of a similar physical type, though he seemed to have no preference as to hair colour. It occurred to me that being a painter he could of course paint them with green hair if he had a mind to.
His address was on the list but since I didn’t have sat nav in the DS, ‘Honeysuckle House, near Stanton Prior’ would have to do. Stanton Prior was a tiny village north-west of Bath. After criss-crossing the countryside around it for a while without success, I started looking for people to ask without having to knock on doors. There was nobody about. I wondered how the English countryside could be so empty of people considering how small an island this was, then I realized that the almost complete absence of shops and jobs might have something to do with it. Eventually I came across a farme
r in blue overalls and black wellies who was securing a load of sawn logs to the trailer behind his Land Rover; it appeared they had bounced off into the road. I picked up a stray log and lobbed it onto the trailer. The mention of Honeysuckle House drew a blank.
‘It’s owned by a painter. Kurt Hufnagel,’ I ventured.
‘Ah. People will rename houses,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s unlucky. Him, yeah, bizarre chap. But I dare say it takes all sorts.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yeah, you can’t miss it.’ He gave me ‘unmissable’ directions involving a multitude of left and right turns. ‘What was the house called before he renamed it?’ I asked as I walked back to my car. ‘Do you remember?’
‘Horseshoes.’
Unlucky for some. After about three turn-offs I had forgotten the rest of the directions but found the place anyway. It was a drab and dispiriting house standing forlorn by the side of the narrow lane. Un-cared-for dusty hedges encircled the untidy property; there was a garage with torn tarpaper roof, a largely glassless greenhouse, a tottering shed and an ugly cement-brick extension at the back of the house with a corrugated asbestos roof and rust-streaked skylights, which had to be the man’s studio. In between it all lay a wilderness of crud, including two old chest freezers, a half-burnt sofa and a slimy-looking slant of flimsy timbers. The car parked in front of the doorless cluttered garage was a cack-coloured eighties Fiesta with balding tyres. On the low garden gate, squeezed between the hunched shoulders of the hedge, a barely legible sign with blistering paint proclaimed the name of the house. Hard as I looked, I could see no honeysuckle anywhere. The area just outside the front door was crowded with tied-up carrier bags bulging with rubbish. The place gave off an air of depression that made me hesitate at the tatty wooden gate. When I pushed it open it squealed mournfully. The sound made me shrug deeper into my leather jacket. If there were more than two bottles of milk at the doorstep I would call social services and leave it to them to explore the place.
There were no bottles of milk at all, just more crud. I could hardly reach the bell button without standing ankle deep in unwholesome-smelling stuff that scavenging animals had ripped to shreds. When I depressed the button I didn’t hear it ring. I picked my way round the side of the house. Towards the back was another dark and narrow door. No knocker or bell. I tried the handle and it opened. It led into a shadowy corridor. First to my left was the kitchen. From deeper inside the house I could hear what sounded like Led Zeppelin being played at quite a volume.
‘Hello? Shop!’ I made some noise for form’s sake but it was clear I wouldn’t be heard above the din unless Hufnagel was hiding in one of the cupboards.
The kitchen was easily identifiable as belonging to an old-school painter, one who saw it as an extension to the studio and trudged paint and left smudges everywhere. It also desperately needed to be cleaned, preferably with a pressure hose, and it smelled as if something needed emptying or, better still, incinerating. Every square inch of surface had empty foil containers and other rubbish lying on it, in several layers.
I followed the noise along the shadowy corridor to a broad door which I realized led into the cement-brick annex and behind which Led Zeppelin were working on ‘In My Time of Dying’ at the appropriate volume. The door knob and surrounding area were a familiar symphony of paint smudges so I knew this was Kurt’s studio. I knocked, knocked again, got no answer, and opened the door.
I had guessed right. It was a long, open-beamed studio space crammed with the kind of stuff self-referential figurative painters like to stick in their paintings when they paint pictures of their studios – theatrical props almost, a hangover from the nineteenth century. Flower stands, pretty jars and bottles, a stuffed pheasant, a chipped bust of Mussolini, reams of fading velvet curtains thrown over sticks of furniture, that kind of thing. Hufnagel himself was standing with his back to me, working wild-haired on a large canvas secured to a couple of radial easels. He was working on another studio still life, though there was also the obligatory naked girl who was posed, almost incidentally, in a tattered armchair beside a stovepipe parrafin heater. Even though I was in her line of sight, the model, being utterly professional, completely ignored me.
‘Hello!’ I tried again and waved. It was the movement of my hand rather than my voice that finally alerted Hufnagel to my presence. He whirled about quickly, startled, staring at me through round, black-rimmed spectacles with intense painter’s eyes.
‘What the …’ He came towards me, making shooing motions, still holding a loaded brush and not afraid to use it. He made no move to silence the paint-covered midi-system. His painting gear consisted of an old-fashioned suit which was almost completely covered with paint at the front, as though he had suffered a head-on collision with a freshly painted canvas. He checked back over his shoulder but the model held her pose regardless.
‘Sorry, I did knock,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t suppose you remember me. I’m Chris Honeysett …’
‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ he said irritably. ‘Outside. I’ll come out. The sitting room. No, the kitchen, actually.’ He gently but forcefully pushed me through the door. He turned to the model. ‘OK, take a break, love. I’ll bring you some coffee in a minute.’ He closed the door firmly behind him then stared at me wild-eyed in the corridor. ‘How did you get in here? No, I mean, how did you get here? Hardly anyone knows where I live.’ He seemed genuinely unnerved by suddenly finding me in his place and fluttered alongside me into the kitchen. Here he filled a whistling kettle at a sink so cluttered with dirty dishes he could barely fit it under the tap. He then crashed the thing down on a two-ring camping stove connected to a gas bottle by what looked like a bit of garden hose and a twist of wire. ‘Bloody electric kettle caught fire. And the bloody stove burnt out.’ He waved a tragic arm at a melted lump of black plastic on a work top and at the encrusted hulk of an electric cooker sulking in a corner yellow with grease. ‘It’s a bloody conspiracy.’ He opened and closed cupboards, looking inside as though he had found himself in someone else’s kitchen. His face betrayed extreme consternation.
‘Look, I can go away if you want to get back into the studio,’ I offered. ‘I know how it is.’
‘Do you really? Well, bollocks to that, you’re here now. Only the irritated oyster makes a pearl and all that. That’s me, the original irritated bloody mollusc who cannot find any sodding coffee!’ He slammed another cupboard door. ‘Tea all right?’ He smiled sweetly, looking almost normal for the first time.
‘Sure.’
He briefly held my eyes, as though testing my sincerity and nodded a few tiny nods, then went on a hunt for tea that looked worryingly like the previous coffee hunt. ‘Ah!’ He extracted a couple of limp teabags from what looked like a half-collapsed shoebox that stood beside a bird cage containing a suspiciously quiet and motionless budgie. If the rest of his domestic arrangements were anything like this then the irritable Hufnagel ought to have pearls to spare. While he furtled about I edged closer to the bird cage. The bird on the wooden perch was plastic. The bird shit in the bottom of the cage was real.
I also had time to notice that Kurt’s hair had gone thinner and wilder since I had last seen him and he seemed to have aged a lot in other ways too. The skin on his face was dry and flaking and his stubble practically white. The taut skin on his hands looked translucent. I began to wonder whether the nests of empties everywhere didn’t have something to do with it. Supermarket whisky, most of it. With the odd bottle of single malt among them. Feast and famine, which is usual for painters – mostly famine of course, some of it doubtlessly brought on by the ever-rising price of single malt.
‘So what do you want?’ Hufnagel said as he willed the kettle to boil. ‘Who’s died? I mean, it’s got to be an emergency for you to trek out here after nine years.’
‘Nine years?’ He sounded as though I had walked out of a relationship with him. I had only met him a couple of times.
‘Nine years is when we last talked. I rem
ember it, my show at Simon Paris.’
‘Mixed show, if I remember rightly.’
‘Yeah, all right, no need to rub it in. So who died?’
‘John Birtwhistle.’
He stopped dead by the now singing kettle. ‘Oh shit! Figure of bloody speech, I didn’t really mean who has died. I mean. Shit. Old Birtwhistle. Shame. Mind you, he was no fan of mine. But a good bloke, really. I used to teach up at the old whatsit, BAA. Didn’t last all that long.’ He reanimated himself and went looking for the teapot. He found it straight away, took off the lid and looked inside. ‘Crap! Everything goes mouldy in this sodding place.’ He dived down into an old tea chest and came up with a stack of hideous pink and baby blue teacups. ‘I bought a job lot of crockery at an auction last month. Worked out a penny a piece. Saves on the washing up. They just need …’ He blew the dust out of a couple of them and put them on the table. ‘There. And no, you can’t have a saucer, I used them all for mixing paint. You know how it is. So you came here to bring the sad news? Old Birt and I didn’t exactly part as friends. What did he die of?’
‘Had a heart attack at the wheel of his car and crashed it into a field. Missed me by a whisker when he did.’
‘Dramatic stuff.’ He dropped a teabag into each of our cups and splashed hot water over them. The dank cavern of a lightless fridge yielded a carton of milk. He shook it, presumably to test how lumpy it was.
‘I’ll take it black, thanks,’ I said hastily.
‘Probably wise.’
‘What about your model?’
‘Oh yeah, forgot.’ He blew the dust out of another cup, adding teabag and water. ‘I’ll just take Sophie that.’ Lucky girl.
When he returned from the delivery he paused at the door. He looked gaunt. Hollowed out. ‘So why are you really here?’
‘Didn’t I say? It’s a show. At the college. Birtwhistle wanted past tutors to show their work. When he died he had a list of artists on him and you were right near the top. It’s thirty years of BAA, apparently. The show’s meant to be for the benefit of the students.’