A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4)

by Jessica Mann

  ‘I taught art,’ Basil Hutber had said.

  ‘But sir, when you said that motives didn’t matter you can’t have meant art. Surely the artist’s purpose in showing . . .’

  High minded general discussion ensued. Basil welcomed disagreement. He permitted liberties that would have been punished at other times of the day. Boys could use otherwise forbidden language and speak frankly. It must have been about 1964, the year when the Obscene Publications Act went through. Lawrence, who was only just old enough to attend such sessions, listened to the older boys talk about Lady Chatterley. He did not like to admit that he had read it, or to use Rex’s books, that he had found on his father’s shelves, as examples in the argument. He sat quiet, listening to Basil saying that it was not the artist’s intention but his effect on others that should be considered. ‘Motives don’t matter,’ he had said again.

  Now, headmaster himself, and alone in the room in which Basil had conducted those sessions, Lawrence wondered whether his predecessor had been right. He flicked through the pages of The Stroker, so like a comic book at first sight, so unlike in its ideas and in the originality of its execution.

  Rex was a good subject to work at, after all, he thought. Someone ought to write that book about him. Perhaps Lawrence would do it himself one of these days. His energy felt boundless.

  The Cavalier Press had dignified what must have seemed like pornography, even if it was artistic, with heavy paper and the elegant Garamond typeface. There were pretty curlicues on the title-page and an extravagance of end-papers.

  On the unprinted sheets at the back of this copy of The Stroker, the captioned drawings carried on, not printed but in Indian ink, smudged in one or two places as though the artist had hurried to hide his work if anyone came near. A good imitation of Rex’s style, Lawrence thought; and looking more closely realised that it was Rex’s own work.

  Those nostrils like architectural finials, that up-stroke of the pen on the lid of each pictured eye, that angle of the thick nib on each tiny fingernail – who but Rex himself could have included in these sketches every one of the characteristic details identified by a solemn researcher?

  Lawrence took his magnifying glass to peer at the drawings. They were in what he had defined as Rex’s final style, like the confident, powerful work that he had done after the pictures in the ‘Stella’ series, not long before his death. The young man’s uncertainty, which sometimes appeared in The Stroker itself, was replaced by a fluency that made one regret all the more the early end of the artist’s career.

  There were scenes in the country – hilly, rocky, bleak – and in a town; scenes indoors and outdoors. Eight extra pictures in all, done by someone at the height of his powers. Here was English society in miniature, laid bare, exposed, in the years when . . . Lawrence paused. In which years? Here was a man in uniform with a shoulder title reading Home Guard. Here was a woman in WVS uniform carrying a gas-mask case. There was a barrage balloon.

  Grandfather Cory had been a member of the Home Guard, and in spite of his pacifism remembered those days as being among the best of his life. He had often talked to Lawrence about them, extolling the spirit of cameraderie and unity. It took a war, he would say, to make men realise their brotherhood.

  The Home Guard was formed in 1940. Civil Defence, as it had been called before that, only itself began in 1938.

  Gas masks? Barrage balloons?

  Rex died in a fire in 1929.

  Lawrence was as certain as he was of his own name, that these drawings were by Rex.

  He shoved the book back into his pocket and walked rapidly because headmasters must never be seen to run across to the private side.

  The crates were not in the study.

  ‘Zoe?’

  She was upstairs being sick. Lawrence heard the lavatory flush, and went up to comfort her, but she did not like to be touched when she felt ill. She said, ‘I am going to visit old Basil.’

  ‘Good, send him my love. Darling, what happened to the papers I was working on in California? There was something I wanted to look up.’

  ‘I told the groundsman to take them away. Has he got a store room or something? I just wanted them out of the house.’

  The groundsman said that he would have put unwanted papers in the attic. It was all very well expanding into unused rooms, but where was he supposed to store unused equipment? Grumbling, he led Lawrence through a forest of obsolete blackboards, noticeboards, signboards and slates to a lean-to shed where he had put Lawrence’s tea-chest beside a heap of dank groundsheets.

  Where was the notebook in which Lawrence had written it all down? Surely, during those dreadful months of picking reluctantly over evidence that he never really expected to assemble and write down, surely somewhere he had prepared for a chapter on Rex’s death?

  Got it.

  Lawrence read, first quickly, and then very slowly, the few pages with which he proposed to start the book, describing the scene at the burnt-out caravan where Rex had – was thought to have – died, and its aftermath. Here was an envelope full of cuttings from contemporary newspapers, reports of discovering the fire, of finding human remains, of the inquest.

  There was no doubt that there had been a death. But in fact the evidence as to whose death was only circumstantial, accepted at the time and later because there was no reason not to.

  If not those of Rex, then, whose were the dreadful remains that the workers from a neighbouring farm had found and over which the pig man was sick? The tramp’s, who had been seen in the village earlier that day? There were a lot of tramps around at the time, not all rough old characters, or with hearts of gold, or gypsies, but some quite young and even well educated. People had done curious things with their lives after that first world war. The classics-quoting tramp with an Oxford accent appeared in several novels of the period.

  Lawrence visualised the scene. A tramp finds an empty caravan, simply furnished but comfortable in comparison with a ditch or hay stack. He lies down, lights his cigarette, and as he dozes the burning stub falls on to an inflammable mattress.

  Had Rex come upon the scene after the fire and leapt at the chance to make his getaway? He had good reason to wish to drop out, with a second criminal charge and prison sentence hanging over him. What was it old Danny Pedlar had said, the first one nearly did for him? Perhaps Rex in his turn had tramped away to a new life; to – and now Lawrence, at the logical moment, admitted the thought: to Carmell?

  His own Rex water colour had been put into the crate along with his papers. Until Gillian Hutber remarked on it, Lawrence had never, in all the years of owning and loving it, recognised that the scene was in Carmell. He had never known that only there was that pier, that war memorial, that church.

  The Carmell War Memorial was not completed until 1937. Its date was carved into the stone, though not reproduced in the picture. Lawrence had read the fine words a thousand times since he came to school in Carmell.

  So Rex had not died. He had survived, and been in Carmell. He might have lived permanently in Carmell. He had published nothing but sometimes played with his pens and paints. The picture had found its way into Bennetts by the sixties. The embellished edition of The Stroker, Rex’s own copy, had found its way into the ownership of someone, perhaps a master at the school, who had hidden it, or abandoned it, in the disused attic.

  Rex could even still be alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The real heroine and the fabricated one met across Basil Hutber’s bed.

  Zoe had walked to the hospital because the doctor said exercise would be good for her. She still felt sick and was glad that a prudent authority had caused benches to be placed at frequent intervals on the lake side of the road. The day was sunny so that it seemed not entirely unnatural to sit down and admire it. Screwed to the back of each bench was a brass plaque advertising the name of its donor, Wiseman, Rainsford, Hutber, all the Carmell names except St Uny, which had larger memorials.

  ‘Good morning Mrs
Cory.’

  ‘Morning dear, nice day.’

  ‘Hullo Zoe and how’s the headmaster?’

  More people knew Zoe than she knew, which was not unusual; but Meredith was gradually giving way to Cory.

  A stiff wind made the lake look as rough as a sea. Zoe took deep breaths of the chilly air, in through the nose, out through the mouth, in and out. Nausea, like hiccups, could sometimes be staved off by concentration. The school doctor, whose patient Zoe had also become, was a middle aged man, expansive, shaggy, full of admonitions about rising above things. He said that Zoe’s sickness would be cured by good food and positive thinking which was, she supposed, no less useful than any advice would be to a patient determined to accept no medicine. All the same, in spite of the doctor’s derisive denial, Zoe believed that her state could be simply explained. She said she was allergic to the baby, as she was to strawberries, and the doctor patted her shoulder and addressed her as ‘mother’ and went off to tell Lawrence to humour her. Women are funny at such times, he’d say, all man to man, best to take no notice.

  Here was Mrs Wiseman. She greeted Zoe, asked after the headmaster, was sure that Zoe was settling down nicely and learning their funny little Carmell ways. She took a duster and a tin of brass polish from her ample handbag. Her husband liked her to keep the family bench nice. She rubbed at the engraved plaque that commemorated Councillor Wiseman’s twenty years on Carmell Council.

  ‘What long years people put in on the council here,’ Zoe remarked.

  ‘Twenty years was nothing, he only gave it up because of his health. All those evening meetings . . . but think of Mr Hutber, and his mother before him. She did forty-three years, right up until her death in 1928. That plaque is in her memory, two benches along. I always give it a bit of a rub up while I’m about it, for old times’ sake. She performed the coronation the year I was Carnival Queen. I was four and a half. I can remember every moment of it.’

  The mention of a small child requires a particular, long, smiling ‘oooh’. Zoe produced the sound punctually.

  ‘I expect your husband will be just the same,’ Mrs Wiseman said.

  ‘Lawrence?’

  ‘The headmaster’s always been on the council, even old Mr St Uny, and now that poor Mr Basil . . .’

  ‘You don’t think he’ll get better then?’

  ‘Not well enough for that. It’s very arduous. Takes up a lot of their time.’

  ‘I am just on my way to visit him.’

  ‘Better get on then dear, you don’t want to overlap with Dame Viola.’

  ‘Is she coming today?’

  ‘Hadn’t you heard? Surely Mrs Rainsford would have . . .’

  ‘I might not have been in when she came,’ Zoe said, thinking of her inhospitably locked front door, behind which she had guarded her privacy to feel unwell in like an animal.

  ‘We’re very lucky. Dame Viola doesn’t often get to Carmell. As a matter of fact, just between ourselves, I don’t believe she likes it.’ Mrs Wiseman put her face close to Zoe’s and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t believe that she and Mrs Basil saw eye to eye. I think there was some jealousy between them.’

  ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘Well, Viola had looked after Basil all that time, before he was married, and then she never came here again after the war, not even when they wanted to honour her for her exploits in the Far East. And she didn’t even come to Mrs Basil’s funeral. So you can’t help wondering.’

  ‘I had better be getting along if she is coming here today then.’

  ‘That’s right. He’ll like your flowers, they’ll cheer the place up a bit. I’m not saying anything against the hospital, don’t think that, as a matter of fact I’m Vice Chairman of the League of Friends of the Hospital, but you can’t say it’s what a man like Basil Hutber is used to. We all thought that Mrs Rainsford might have preferred to have him with her, but then I did hear he insisted on staying, and of course it’s not for us to judge others,’ she said, in a judgemental voice. Zoe murmured, ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘In any case he’s always been one for having his own way, right back to when he came back and set himself up in the old doctor’s place with Viola keeping house for him. About nineteen thirty, that would be. He turned the tenants out, I remember it because they were cousins of ours and we had to put them up until they found somewhere else. They had thought they would be safe enough there, for nobody had seen or heard of him for years, just sent the rent to the lawyers. He could have been dead for all they knew.’

  ‘That’s the house Rainsford and Gillian live in now?’

  ‘That’s the one. And then it was empty again when Basil married Nell St Uny, but they used it for evacuees. Oh well.’ Mrs Wiseman gathered her cleaning materials together. ‘It’s all ancient history now, can’t be of any interest to you, you wouldn’t even have been born. I don’t know exactly how old you are—’ she paused, waiting to be told.

  ‘I am thirty-two, Mrs Wiseman.’

  ‘There, I thought so. My friend said you couldn’t be more than thirty. But you don’t look so well today. I hope the air of Carmell doesn’t disagree with you.’

  ‘I am fine. Really. Just something I ate.’ Zoe had been rather wishing that her condition showed, so as to excuse her weakness, but she suddenly could not bear the thought of Mrs Wiseman’s wise words about pregnancy. ‘I must get on. Visiting hours . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Basil’s visitors can just walk in any time.’ The words floated after Zoe who walked briskly, telling herself that if she took no notice of her nausea it might go away.

  *

  A hundred years ago benefactors had subscribed to provide a haven for Carmell’s destitute on waste land at the far end of Fore Street. Now the building stood in the middle of the expanded, town, its high chimney an ever present intimation of morbidity. Older residents still called it ‘The Workhouse’, and carved into the granite stone above the main door were the dread words, ‘Carmell Poor Law Institution’, but it was officially the geriatric unit of Hexbridge District General Hospital. Services for the acutely ill were in Hexbridge itself, twelve miles from Carmell, and the maternity unit, where Zoe would go, was fifteen miles away in the other direction. Workers in what they called ‘The Caring Professions’ discussed discharge into the community and rehabilitation, but it was generally recognised in Carmell that those who entered the old workhouse as patients seldom left it for an ordinary life again; or for life at all.

  The impressive granite entrance was no longer used. Through a side door, wide corridors and stairs led to the five floors of wards and offices. Every effort that well meaning administrators could make to cheer the place up had been used – brightly coloured paints, plastic plants, ‘user-friendly’ direction signs. The ‘acute geriatrics’ were on the third floor. Zoe walked along the passage behind a very small woman who was singing a nursery rhyme. ‘Boys and girls come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day.’ The cracked voice, parody of a child’s treble, repeated the words again and again.

  Basil Hutber was at the far end of the ward, which was a long, narrow, high room incapable of sub-division into anything cosier – a Nightingale ward, called after its designer, with twenty-five beds on each side of it. They were pushed too close together for the curtains between them to provide any privacy. Patients were encouraged to personalise their own living space as the jargon had it, and there were teddy bears and photographs of grandchildren on the lockers, and hand crocheted shawls on the high, washable chairs. Under the powerful smell of antiseptic was the ammoniac odour of incontinence. Some patients were in bed, their wrinkled arms pale on smooth sheets. One woman continually emitted short, anguished wails.

  ‘She thinks she’s in labour.’ The staff nurse spoke kindly, her gentle eyes glazed in thought of her own future. She was saving up to get married to her boyfriend, who worked on a North Sea rig. She would have six children and two dogs. She liked helping people. She did not believe that she would ever be
old and re-live her labour.

  Zoe found herself longing to turn round and go out again, out into fresh air. She shuddered to think that she might one day be fed from a spouted cup or have her limbs washed as she lay exposed to view. ‘They don’t mind,’ the staff nurse said. ‘They are past caring.’

  Basil Hutber, not yet believed to be past noticing what indignities he suffered, lay in relative privacy in a room usually reserved for the dying. From the neighbouring cubicle a clergyman’s voice could be heared murmuring consolations but Basil Hutber did not seem to require them. His grasp on the world was tenacious, even if he could not express it fluently any more. The left side of his face was stiff and the lips immobile, but his right eye twinkled at Zoe and he said in a slurred but determined voice, ‘I always did like pretty girls.’

  Another girl was sitting on the far side of the bed. She had yellow hair curling into bubbles and brilliant, almost primary coloured eyes and cheeks. But for the experienced expression in the eyes and the sensuous mouth, it could have been a dangerous boy. Zoe made her usual assessment of clothes: casual, expensive, new. That punched leather skirt had been in last month’s Vogue. The jacket on the chair showed its famous Milanese label.

  Zoe put her irises down beside other vases of flowers, some grapes, a basket of fruit still wrapped in plastic film, and some new novels. Only the Carmell Times and Echo seemed to have been read.

  Zoe held out her hand across the bed. ‘I am Zoe Cory.’

  ‘How do you do. Tamara Hoyland.’

  ‘She came to ask me about my sister,’ Basil Hutber said.

  ‘I am making a radio programme about Dame Viola. I’m getting background, but everyone tells me that Carmell has changed out of recognition since she lived here.’

  ‘Depressing place it was in those days,’ Basil said.

  Zoe looked at him in surprise. She said, ‘I have been given to understand that it was the best of all possible worlds.’