by Gary Newman
Respectfully,
Odette Pidgeon
The English-surname spelling of ‘Pidgeon’, too – and this Laurent’s damaged lungs suggested poison gas, hence the First World War rather than the Second. I wondered how he’d ended up afterwards in Niort, and whence his impressions of my grandfather as a ‘gentleman’? I refolded the sheet of notepaper, and was about to slip it back into its envelope, when the faintest of faded-ink inscriptions on the back of the sheet caught my eye. My heart began to pound as I recognized my grandfather’s handwriting: Secured. P. died 11th March, before my help could reach him.Pax cineribus. So why ‘peace to (Pidgeon’s) ashes’? Just conventional piety or an element of reconciliation or even forgiveness on Sebastian’s part? And what had been ‘secured’? And 11th March of what year? I replaced the sheet in the envelope.
Curiouser and curiouser. Throughout my life, my grandfather’s elusive memory had echoed like a grace note. He’d died before I’d been born, and neither Nanny nor my own father had ever really talked to me about him. All through the dreary endurance of my boarding-school boyhood I’d woven romantic fantasies round his memory, and now it was as if he’d jumped out of his photo and was standing beside me!
I went back to the Jiffy bag for the Bible, with Nanny’s acceptance letter of my grandfather’s proposal of marriage tucked between the pages of Revelations. I opened the Bible at the first page of the two marked by the letter, and read the line that had struck me the first time I’d read the letter: He that overcometh the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of Life. White . . . Hadn’t white figured in the unreformed young Sebastian’s drug-trip impressions in the tatty notebook? ‘The white radiance of eternity, and I am White!’ or something along those lines. I’d take another look at that.
I slipped the envelope back in the Bible, then, snapping it shut, got up in a sort of exaltation and began to pace the room, for all the world like some hellfire preacher, with the Good Book under my arm. I fingered the top edge restlessly, and became aware of a bump. I raised the volume to my eyes – the cloth marker – of course, all old Bibles had cloth markers like shoelaces. Since the inspiration seemed to be on me that evening, I opened the Bible at the marked page and read the top line: The woman thou gavest me, Lord, tempted me. I looked upwards and felt a tingle run up my spine as I found myself looking into my grandfather’s large, unquiet eyes, as they seemed to reach out to me from the framed photograph on the mantelpiece. The eyes seemed to be more anxious than ever over the fine features and discreetly bearded, pointed chin. It was as if he was trying to warn me about something.
Chapter Three
Sunday was a day of rest – I suppose. Up at ten past eight after an informative late night read of the Rawbeck biography, and there’d been progress on the sleeping pill front – none needed to go over. A long, hot bath, ditto breakfast, then a quick drive along the headland and sharp right down the willow lane to the village for a paper and a pinta, and so back again. The paper didn’t detain me long – nothing of interest in the reviews – and so straight out into the high-skied, April glory to sow my onions.
I favoured the traditional varieties, and I glanced with satisfaction at the sterling names on the three packets I’d be sowing that morning: Bedfordshire Champion for firm keeping, Ailsa Craig for size and sweetness, and, if you liked the violet-tinged, French type, the chosen variety of the Breton onion men, Rouge Pâle de Niort. Niort again – Madame Odette Pidgeon had written the begging letter to my grandfather from there, the letter I’d found the evening before, spatchcocked in a too-small envelope. I wondered if, on a fine April morning just like this, way back in the pre-war, poor Laurent Pidgeon had sown the same variety in his potager before his ‘affected lungs’ had done for him? Just as my reverend namesake had pronounced his solemn Latin peace on him in his enigmatic note on the back of the letter, I paid my own tribute.
‘This row’s in your memory, Laurent,’ I said superstitiously as I stooped and sprinkled the hard little black carapaces along the drill in the stiff loam.
I worked on in silence till the packets were empty, then I covered the drills gently with the rake before standing up straight awhile to stretch my back as the sun soaked through my closed eyelids. I thought of my next port of call: salty-tanged Mersea Island and the super fish restaurant in the village there. A couple of bumpers of chilled, bone-dry Chablis with my fish would soon dispel any stray fantods.
The roads were empty for a Sunday – the gathering cloud and the northwester explained that – and I’d a clear run past the bird sanctuary and on to the B1025, then straight down among the creeks and willows of the flatland, and so over the bridge to the island and West Mersea. I pulled up and parked outside the rough-and-ready little building with the whitewashed walls – half a dozen cars outside already – and got out and stretched my legs. The northwester was gathering strength – I instinctively zipped my old bomber jacket further up my chest – but the sky was clearing into the buoyant vastness of a Constable flatscape. There was a Thames barge out on the Nass – ‘Red sails in the sunset, way out on the sea . . .’ Brrr . . . parky, though, out in the wind.
I hurried inside the restaurant, which was chock-a-block, and amid the hubbub – oh, no! – Pat Hague. In a rollnecked sweater and waving to me from a window table – the only one I could see with a free seat. She’d obviously not come in her big old vintage car, or I’d have been forewarned outside: here we go . . .
‘Let’s order!’ she said brightly, as if we’d been on a date, and I slid helplessly into the facing chair and smouldered, half at her importunity, and half at my own gutlessness in not just walking out again.
‘I thought a couple of nice chunks of cod with their white sauce,’ Pat was going on brightly, rubbing her rather large, shapely hands, ‘and a bottle of Alsace –’
‘Chablis,’ I countered firmly, ‘and how did you know I’d be here?’
A hoarse laugh, and the freckled skin stretched taut on either side of the characterful prow of a nose.
‘You’re a creature of habit, Seb, and, besides, it’s a pretty good place – first-rate, fresh fish, done simply to perfection – and so real, don’t you think? You can catch the Essex drawl above the EastEnders voices.’
I did tend to gravitate here of a Sunday – it was a ritual I didn’t like to interrupt – but latterly with Leah sitting where this clever, loose cannon of a woman was sitting now. What the hell was she up to? Just then a bustling little body in a green overall with a navy-blue cardigan over it and with frizzy coal-black hair came over and took our order, and was soon back with our wine. She poured out our first glasses.
‘Fish’ll be ready in a jiff: d’you want chips with it?’
We both nodded eagerly, and the patronne bustled away. Pat fixed her bold eyes on mine, and took a sip from her glass.
‘Frank and I popped over to see Reet after the auction last week in Walberswick,’ she said evenly, by way, I suppose, of mental torture.
‘I wish you wouldn’t . . .’
‘She’s our friend, too, Seb,’ Pat replied, without batting an eyelid. ‘She still talks about you – a lot . . .’
I’d have said something hot and strong, but just then our food arrived.
‘Here’s some parsley,’ the coal-haired missus said, plonking a china dishful of the stuff on to the table.
‘Smallholding’s flourishing,’ Pat went on about her visit to my ex-wife and son, as she tucked into her fish. ‘That’s Paul’s side – he’s developed into such a hunk, hasn’t he? He’s got your shoulders . . . The Long Barn’s fitted up now, and they’re expecting students in –’
‘Why did Frank ask me up yesterday?’ I interrupted. ‘There wasn’t really any more to be done to the website.’
‘He’s fascinated by you – you’re so different from him.’
I must have looked puzzled, for Pat laughed.
‘Seb, what hand does Frank write with?’
Pat laughed again, spontaneously and loudly.
‘God! You’ve known him for forty years and never noticed he was left-handed, have you? You’re priceless – the last of the great egotists! He often tells me about your fight at school with Neill, the bully, you know . . .’
‘Oh, that . . .’
Neill had been a chubby, determined chap – good at games – and had given Frank, as well as others, a pretty bad time in our first year in Big School. Not that I’d come to the rescue, or anything like that – I’m a firm believer in keeping your head down in unfavourable situations, such as school – but when Neill had taken it into his head to smash the lid off my pencil case in a Latin class, I’d seen red and jabbed the jagged end of the lid into his fat mush. He’d clutched his bleeding face and run screaming to Matron, while ‘Pablo’ the Latin master had just blinked and quietly escorted me to the Head’s study. We didn’t have any more bother from Neill, and Frank had just sort of tagged along behind me after that.
‘Neill had it coming to him,’ I replied to Pat, ‘but I didn’t do it for Frank. All ancient history now.’
‘And is that what you and I are to be in future? Ancient history?’
‘We’ve been over that, Pat. I want you while you’re there, and I like your talk, but we’re bad for each other – do I have to draw a picture?’
Brutal enough, but Pat’s smile was as bright and tiger-ish as ever, though I fancied I glimpsed something hard in her eyes, and in my mind’s nostril I thought I caught a tang of burning boats. She held my gaze for quite five seconds.
‘What are you staring at, Pat? Are you all right?’
‘Oh, just looking deep into your eyes, Seb. It’s always rather intriguing, you know, what with one being brown and the other green.’
‘You’ve had time to get used to that.’
It was my turn to be disconcerted when my rather compulsory lunch date burst into a rorty hoot of mocking laughter.
‘Perhaps I see the truth in them.’
From then on, the conversation turned on Pat’s book on Dylan Thomas, then she left the table, and I went on alone, eating the excellent meal without tasting it. My Sunday had been bitched, my lunch had been bitched, and I felt as if I’d been violated by this clever, restless woman, whom I now definitely hated. Would she take my words of dismissal to heart?
‘By-ee!’ she cried from the counter, jacket on again. ‘I’ve already settled.’
She gave me a silly, parting twinkle with her talons and threaded her way through the surrounding tables, and so out of the restaurant. I wriggled my bomber jacket off the back of the chair, dragged it on, got up, and with a nod to the missus, left the place, too.
I kicked around the edges of the car park and looked over the flats for a couple of minutes, just to clear my mind. Pat – damn her! – in mentioning my son, Paul, had reopened the reverie I’d had not long before, about my final row with him two years previously. I suppose that had marked the beginning of my breakdown; at any rate, I couldn’t remember a thing between the row with Paul in the cottage in Northumberland that morning and finding myself at the wheel of my car late in the evening of the same day, staring out to sea from the edge of some cliffs. Or had it been some other cliffs somewhere else? The thing seemed important, somehow. Just then the wind got to me again, and, with the reflection that at least there weren’t any bloody cliffs to speak of in Essex, I made for my car and the road back home to some work, followed by a nice, foody, blotto evening with the rest of the Rothenstein biography of Julian Rawbeck that I’d borrowed from the library in Wivenhoe the previous afternoon.
Next morning, Monday, I’d an appointment with my agent, Eve Solander, in London, and I decided that, after we’d done our business, I’d check out the crosses I’d found on my grandfather’s London street map. In her little perch in Lisle Street, Eve brought me up to date with my writing projects: the prospective English publishers of my book Tod Slaughter, His Life and Crimes were holding out for the US rights, and the sales of my last book were dwindling fairly rapidly – the usual tidings of imminent insolvency.
After I’d left Eve’s office I pressed on with the second agenda of my London visit: the mysterious pencilled crosses on what I assumed to have been my grandfather’s street plan. I chose King’s Cross station as the starting point of my recce, since the crosses on the map were clustered round there. The first two crosses led me south-east to Clerkenwell, and seemed to mark a couple of old pubs in corners of the district as yet untarted up for residence for the upwardly mobile. The sort of hostelries where tourists tend not to tarry for long at the opinionated bars or on the gashed vinyl seats.
I ordered a half-lager in the nearest one, to be joined at the bar by a twitching, bare-armed youth with greenish skin and white eyelashes. He seemed high on something, and his glottal jargon was beyond me, so I just drank up and went, glancing up the stairs as I left the pub. I was on the lookout for the staircase described in my grandfather’s notebook, the one in the pub, where, according to his account, the artist Rawbeck had been so gorily done in in an upstairs room in 1899. No luck here, though, no stained glass windows, beguiling or otherwise, being visible on the top landing.
The next water-hole on the map – if the cross had been to mark the pub – was surrounded by humdrum, low-rise business premises, refaced in the Fifties and Sixties. The pub itself was another rough-and-ready one. It seemed to be one where codgers hung out, judging by the characters with baseball caps and trainers to their BHS suits, who stood at the bar parroting the usual tabloid rant. I ordered another half-lager, and, just to live a little, a bagful of smoky bacon crisps, then casually asked mine host if he knew how old the pub was.
‘1910 – George the Fifth’s coronation’s stamped on some of the bricks.’
Eleven years after Rawbeck’s disappearance, then, so no good for my purposes.
‘What I say is,’ a tipsy oldster next to me spluttered in my ear, ‘this country can only take so many –’
‘Yeah, I’m bailing out now,’ I said, finishing my lager and leaving.
Outside, I made for the third cross on the map, which answered to a narrow little ethnic cafeteria in a backwater behind Farringdon Road station. I didn’t even bother to go in there – for one thing, the lager and crisps I’d taken earlier on were bloating my stomach uncomfortably, and for another, I knew there could be no possible connection between this post-war pastiche art deco building and the murder pub of my grandfather’s horrified account of 1899. I stood glumly outside for a moment, and faced the opposite buildings, which were equally humdrum and out of period. The banality of the building immediately opposite was relieved a bit by its garish white-and-blue fascia, and a stationary van in matching colours outside it. The Greek colours, I reflected idly, as I made my way back to the station.
I hadn’t found the fatal pub, then, on this first sortie, and my thoughts turned naturally to the corpse, Julian Rawbeck RA, Impressionist master, Diabolist, cadger and conman. I’d glanced at his stuff in the galleries, of course, but maybe a look-in at the National Gallery would expose an aspect I might have missed. At last I reached the station: next stop Charing Cross.
At the Gallery off Trafalgar Square, I didn’t need to borrow a soundtrack headset in the central hall: thanks to my reading of the excellent Rothenstein biography of Rawbeck, I’d now a fair idea of the basics of his life. Born in Halifax in 1852, of Swedish parents – the name had originally been spelt Råbäck – Julian had been educated at the Moravian Brothers School in the Black Forest and the University of Paris. On summer excursions to Dieppe he’d hung round the Impressionists, living on an allowance from his wool-broker father, then on air after his father’s death in 1875, while trying to be an artist. Then there’s a gap – the biographers had given free rein to their imaginations concerning this – till Rawbeck resurfaced in London in 1883, and this time he was an artist.
He brought bags of talent, and plunged into do
pe, Diabolism, a brief marriage for money, affairs, and a grudged RA status in 1891. And lots of controversy, appearing as a witness in the Bowness Trial in 1893: did young Lord Bowness fall over the cliffs under Stairs Castle while under the influence of something illegal, or was he pushed? Horsewhipped by Major Giffard-Chant on the steps of the Reform Club in 1895 for writing in praise of Oscar Wilde in the Mercure de France, and so on, and so on. There was no knowing now whether Julian Rawbeck had been mad or bad, but he’d certainly been dangerous to know.
I found his exhibits in the East Wing. A modest four canvases – two of early derivative stuff from his Paris period, but the third, his self-portrait Harlequin, glowed. I stared into the level, self-confident gaze of the cold grey eyes, set close into the thin nose, in the square, pink face. The eyes gave nothing away, but the artist’s supreme mastery of colour worked its usual magic. I recalled my grandfather’s notebook rhapsodies about actually tasting colours.
Then I came to Rawbeck’s acknowledged masterpiece: Colour in the Shadows, with the dazzling white of the cancan girl’s frou-frou as she held her shapely leg under the knee muting the tone of the receding scarlet of her dress and of the curtains behind her into the near-black of the background.
‘Some see a parallel with Sickert,’ a fruity hoarse whisper in an Irish accent came from somewhere behind my shoulder, ‘but the treatment of colour is quite different – none of those dull reds and browns.’
I turned to meet the humorous blue stare of a shortish, bullet-headed man of about forty. He’d a camera case slung over the shoulder of his buff macintosh, and his already-silvering hair was cut militarily short.
‘Both artists were interested in the music hall, weren’t they?’ I replied.
‘Because it was trendy in France then – they were all trying to be French.’
‘She certainly wasn’t French,’ I said, nodding at the ginger-headed cancan girl in the painting, whom I knew from the account in my grandfather’s notebook to have been his youthful femme fatale of the music hall, Carrie Bugle.