Summer in February

by Jonathan Smith

  The place in South Africa is not specific but that it is South Africa I am clear. I know I am facing the Boers. They are bearded. They carry their rifles across their backs as they ride their Basuto ponies. It is very difficult to draw or paint horses in full flight but I know there is a famous English artist who can do so. I cannot remember his name. The Boers have leather bandoliers slung over their chests. There is a skirmish. Because I am less confident about the horses I concentrate on very detailed drawings of the Mauser Mod 60 rifles and Eighth Field Battery fifteen-pounders. There are burnt-out wagons and putrefying dead horses, but (sitting on my hillock) I am absurdly safe from the fire all around me. The mail has just come in and I read my haul of letters from a beautiful girl whose face mingles with the words. Big guns are coughing and smacking. I finish my bread, sardines and bully and drink my coffee. I sit on my little hillock, a mound the size of an appropriate seat. Then, with increasing discomfort and a sudden realisation of leaping terror, I find I am sitting on an ant hill.

  I awake from this one scratching myself.

  But the dream I had that night in Fuller’s Hotel was in some ways the worst, and it continues to plague me.

  One of my oil paintings is brought back from South Africa and much admired. It is hung in the Royal Academy, in a shadowy corner not unlike the place where the elegant Florence sits on Merrilegs. Entitled Fight to the Last Man it depicts heroic death on a battlefield. A young officer is lying on the ground, his head cushioned on the hands and knees of a comrade, and he is being given a drink, probably his last drink. He is very young. He looks a little like Joey Carter-Wood. There is no blood visible and no wound. Around him are poor devils cowering in filth. The mountains in the background are not unlike the Drakensburg Mountains, and not unlike the Black Mountains on the Welsh border, yet this cannot be for those two ranges could scarcely be more dissimilar.

  At the foot of the mountain range I see another figure. Looking closely I see I have drawn with perfect skill, a skill I do not possess, the face of my young brother, Sammy. There is a black insect on his lips. The bite mark swells into a mound.

  From this dream it takes me some time to recover and compose myself.

  It was not easy for me to write those out.

  Alfred, Florence and I were not due to meet again until lunch so I had the morning in London to myself. Alfred insisted upon an Italian restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue because ‘For l/6d. we can eat like kings.’

  I shaved, cut breakfast and tubed to Hope Bros where I got measured for a suit. By then my headache was clearing and I was in need of coffee and a newspaper, the pages of which were full of the strikes and of miners marching down the Rhondda Valley, while there were fears, too, of general unrest in Liverpool. To sit in the centre of London and read the newspaper is to feel at the centre of the world, and I realised how remote from the main events of the day I had become in Lamorna. It even took me a while to spot the difference in the noise on the streets: the horse carriages had largely given way to motor buses, but on the day before Florence so filled my eyes I had not noticed this on the journey from Paddington station to Burlington House.

  One minute I was scanning the paper; the next I was walking. In a trance I found myself pushing past pedestrians and going in quite the opposite direction from the restaurant where we were to meet. I turned left and right automatically and was through the doors and up the wide stairs, as if guided and drawn.

  There were far fewer people. Less oppressed by the crowd I could now enjoy the still privacy of the moment. Without anyone else nearby I could now look at her as hard and for as long as I wished. It held and moved me greatly. In my mind I was in that clearing with her, and mercifully free of Munnings, but would she ever be, that was the point, could she ever be free of the man who had so perfectly captured her in paint? Could I free her?

  I heard footsteps, but I did not turn. They came steadily on. I knew whose footsteps they were, I would know them anywhere. They stopped just behind me. Usually I give little credence to outlandish events in everyday life. Indeed I tend to be rather short with people who tell me how abnormal or unearthly some of their experiences are. I spoke first.

  ‘I wanted to come back … on my own.’

  ‘I knew you would,’ she said.

  ‘But I had no intention of doing so. How could you have known?’

  ‘I knew you would, Gilbert.’

  ‘Because you know me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Still I did not turn. I spoke, as it were, to her portrait.

  ‘Where is … he?’

  ‘Talking to my father.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘There are so many … details. So many arrangements.’

  ‘I’m sure there must be.’

  ‘There has been a change of plan.’

  My heart jumped. Was it possible? At the last minute had she stepped back from the brink? A change of plan!

  ‘Has there?’

  ‘We would like you to join us for lunch at home.’

  I swallowed hard.

  ‘Would you mind very much if I did not. I have some shopping to do.’

  Her voice became a painful whisper.

  ‘As you wish,’ she said.

  ‘Do we have time for a walk in the park?’

  ‘I’m afraid not … there’s no time for anything.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Gilbert,’ she went on, ‘you mustn’t. You mustn’t overrate my virtues.’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t.’

  It was as if she was on a secret mission the nature of which, whether serious or bizarre or mysterious, was quite closed to me. We turned our backs on her portrait, and at the foot of the wide staircase we parted, she to her father and future husband, I to the Army and Navy Stores, where I bought two calabash pipes, and then on to an electric bioscope theatre.

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ I said aloud in the darkness, but by the time I returned to Lamorna I knew, deep down, I would not attend their wedding, and I did not.

  It is impossible, I now realise, to see it as anything other than premeditated; and the most careful premeditation at that. I have considered it, mulled it over from every conceivable aspect, or at least from every aspect that I can conceive. Could sudden anger have led to it? Or the onset of despair? And if so where did the despair deepen into such a decision? Was there perhaps a half-hour of unimaginable tension when it did not matter what dreadful crime was committed as long as the desired end was achieved?

  No. No!

  To do such a thing required precise planning, stealth and concealment, and everything planned to happen in the most intimate setting. For this to succeed there must be no hint to one’s partner of what is being contemplated or coming. There can be no question of mad impulse or rush of blood. The blood that planned this must have been cold.

  Her voice shaking, her feet occasionally banging the floorboards in distress, Laura Knight told me the facts. Then, when she had calmed down somewhat, over the tea served at Mrs Jory’s insistence, she started to fill in the details of the day. After the service, in St John’s, Westminster, in which Florence looked ‘quite exceptionally lovely’, there was the reception for the guests, an extravagant affair at which Munnings spoke with considerable generosity of spirit and some skill and, reading between Laura’s lines, rare self-restraint. In their rather stiff way the Carter-Woods were, Laura said, pleased at the union of their daughter and the much-talked-of artist, or at least managed to seem so. Indeed the whole day, in Laura’s opinion, had gone ‘well from the start, you couldn’t say otherwise’.

  I did not ask Laura why or how she came to be staying at the same hotel as A.J. and Blote. The same hotel! That still strikes me as decidedly strange, but then, set beside so much that is appalling, such strangeness pales into nothing.

  Laura said she retired to her room in good spirits – in such good spirits that she drew, for half an hour, the curtains, washstand and water jug. Then, while thinking
of going to bed, there was a violent knocking on her door. She opened it to see A.J., hollow-eyed and incoherent. She followed him along the corridor and up two flights of stairs.

  Florence was lying at the foot of their bed on the carpet. At first Laura thought there had been a terrible fight, that A.J. had throttled her. She was breathing very hard, making a choking and gurgling sound as if being strangled. Her face was grotesquely distorted, the muscles in her neck taut. Then Laura knew it was poison. There was no need for chapter and verse, she had encountered cyanide before, in her younger days in Paris. She had seen its effects. It was poison, she was sure of that, as she fell to her knees at Florence’s side.

  Part Four

  As on a Damson

  ‘I was wondering,’ Gilbert whispered, his voice more uncertain than he had ever heard it, ‘do you by any chance have any books, any reference books, that is, on poisons?’

  The librarian looked over his glasses, and whispered back.

  ‘Poisons? Yes, that would be in the second Reading Room, if you—’

  ‘And their … effects.’

  ‘Of course, sir, this way.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’

  ‘You are not, and I know exactly where it is. Someone else was asking about this only a few weeks ago.’

  He was in the Morrab Library again, the place where not many months before, in a state of high excitement, thinking he might well be the man most in her mind, he had scanned the dictionary for the meaning of ‘Blote’ and then the art shelves for a facsimile of Botticelli’s Venus. Once again the librarian was most helpful. Once again Gilbert sat in the same dark corner, guiltily covering the book, but this time as he pulled up his chair he was a shaken man.

  Around him, old men dotted the seats, single with their thoughts and their sticks.

  He had seen the approach of death before: he had held Sammy’s hand as he shivered and sweated. And he had seen violent deaths, but shocking though they were that was part and parcel of his life as an army officer. For that kind of death he was, in a sense, prepared if not trained. Apart, however, from seeing Mrs Paynter’s dog and the painting The Death of Chatterton he knew next to nothing of the after-effects of taking poison, and his knowledge of his ignorance led him back to the Morrab Library. He had to know. He had to know everything, and everything he read there in the library suggested that the reality of a poisoning was far less pleasant and far less peaceful than the graceful, even elegant position of Chatterton’s body in the painting by Henry Wallis led one to suppose.

  As he braced himself to look for the entry on cyanide he wondered how on earth Florence had obtained the poison in the first place. He tried to envisage her in the act of purchasing it. With a chill, he realised he could. She would purchase it in a most matter-of-fact manner. But did she know, know in a specific way, what she was going to experience? Did she have any detailed idea of her proposed end?

  Cyanide. Heavy though the book was, it fell conveniently open on the page.

  Cyanide, he read, starves the body of oxygen, so the result of swallowing it would be much the same as suffocation or even hanging (Gilbert swallowed and nodded). This would go some way towards explaining Florence’s red and swollen face, as described by Laura, and her noisy, strangled gasping for breath.

  In her final moments she would find her heart beating faster in an effort to force the blood round her system, with her brain pounding from an increased pulse. As her chest heaved rapidly in the fight for breath her limbs would become numb. There would be a roaring, as of wind and waves, in her head.

  At the thought of such pain running through her body Gilbert closed his eyes, hoping by doing so to see Venus delicately floating on the shell, coming steadily towards him on water so calm there seemed not the merest breath of wind to ruffle it. This did not work. He opened his eyes to the roaring, which soon gave way to blackness and unconsciousness.

  How soon the blackness came depended on the individual. It was a difficult task to describe the time it took to pass from unconsciousness to death. After death, however, the stages were clear. After death all her muscles would relax, including her involuntary muscles, so that her bowels and bladder would be voided. To one entering the victim’s room at this juncture the strong smell of faeces and urine would be immediately evident.

  Her body would be cyanosed, with all parts of her flesh now bearing a deep purple sheen, as on a damson. Her tongue would be swollen and extended, her eyes open and staring, showing broken blood vessels or pettachia, a vital clue for those looking for strangulation.

  These words, Gilbert gulped.

  Pettachia was not a word Gilbert had before encountered. The word stopped him reading. He tried to push back his chair quietly. It squeaked loudly. Head bowed he walked a few paces away from the open book. His brain hammering, he once again asked himself why would a woman so beautiful and so sought-after plan to kill herself on her wedding night and in such a horrible way? Worse still, why would she choose to do so in the bed she would share for the first time with her newly married husband? Gilbert put his hands over his face to block out the pictures. What did Florence imagine would happen in that bed that justified such a self-inflicted end, and was not to inflict this on herself also, in a sense, to inflict it on Alfred? What blow could be more damaging to the partner left alive? Did it not all smack of revenge?

  When his eyes cleared Gilbert resumed his seat. He read on. The next section upset him, if that were possible, even more. With his stomach a hard painful knot, he read that within twenty-four hours of death Florence’s skin would shrink, giving the impression to the onlooker – onlooker! Who could look on while this hideousness happened? – that her hair and her nails were continuing to grow after death.

  Her long tresses … her long fingers.

  A day or so later rigor mortis disappears and her body begins to decompose, turning into fluids and gases.

  Decomposition.

  By the end of a week, and Gilbert realised it was exactly a week now since the day of their wedding, her body would have changed colour to green and purple, the skin so loose it could, with ease, be rubbed off. Another week, and the gases forming in the gut made the stomach swell and swell until stretched balloon-tight, fit almost to bursting.

  He had seen such horses, with long teeth and open mouths and bursting stomachs.

  He dreaded a fourth dream, a new portrait of Florence and Merrilegs.

  By the third or fourth week her body had decayed so much that her hair and her nails, her long hair and her long nails, could easily be pulled out, and her oval face was green and purple and bloated.

  Gilbert shut the book and rose unsteadily. He stumbled out of the library, blinking in the sunlight and the tilting seagulls. He held tightly on to the handlebars of his bicycle, feeling that the more firmly he held on to the bicycle the more firmly he held on to life, to the earth. Out on Mounts Bay the sun reflected sharply off the sea. He cycled along. He passed Stanhope Forbes’s school and looked up at the three huts. He climbed Paul Hill. His mouth felt dry, his legs felt weak. After a mile or so of bicycling, his energy and his teeth-gritting determination would pump his legs up the slopes no more. By the gate where he often stopped to admire the view of the sea he retched into the tall nettles.

  That evening, for the first time, Alfred and Florence were to come down for dinner. Mrs Jory, of course, knew nothing of the wedding night. As far as Gilbert knew, only he and Laura and Harold Knight did, and even they knew only of the final act of the drama, not what events or motives led to it. They could speculate all they liked, and Gilbert and Laura did, but Florence’s face would tell them far more.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Munnings,’ Mrs Jory told Gilbert proudly over his early breakfast, would be arriving in the late morning. Best to keep well out of the way, Gilbert thought, while they moved in their possessions, or what few would fit into such a small set. And while they moved in he would not come back for lunch but stay over in Boskenna. After all, presumably the las
t thing they would want at this stage would be any kind of reception?

  ‘Such a pleasure they’re coming here, isn’t it?’ Mrs Jory said, with as close to a purr as she could manage. Then added:

  ‘And so soon after the wedding, I’m so proud they changed their minds, aren’t you?’

  She rolled her eyes and puffed out her bosom.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ she repeated.

  Yes and no, Gilbert thought, nodding into his tea. Whose decision was it to live in the hotel? Alfred’s or Florence’s? Perhaps, for entirely different reasons, they now both wanted the setting of a hotel, neutral ground on which they could be served, a place with the distractions of daily comings and goings.

  As Gilbert changed nervously for dinner he could hear the new occupants moving around beyond the adjoining wall. He heard chairs and furniture being readjusted, the sound of wardrobes opening and not closing properly, of suits and dresses being put on coat hangers. Florence and Alfred were, after all, both so well dressed. Through the wall he could also smell, or did he imagine it, oil paint and turps; and, or did he imagine this too, the scent on her dresses, the same scent that sat beside him on the train and stood behind him in the gallery.

  He listened. He sat very still on his narrow bed and listened. There were mumbles, a low exchange or two, another coat hanger rattling the panel of the wardrobe, an abrupt laugh but no distinguishable words, which suggested Alfred had somewhat modulated his volume levels. His feet, however, continued to clip the floorboards. Hers made far less noise, as if she chose the carpet instead.

  In his attendant silence Gilbert looked at Sammy’s birds’ eggs, even turning a few over with as light a brush as possible. What clothes would she wear at dinner? he asked the eggs. How would she look? Would she be terribly damaged? How would she behave? For her to be at the same table with Alfred and Gilbert would be but no, that was to suppose he himself was in some sense special or chosen. He put away the eggs, with the exercise book safely beneath it, and hoped he would not hear their bed when they both were in it.