The first stunning impact over, he became absorbed in the technical details of the work, the painterly qualities, the strong lines of the drawing, the pure colours, the balanced calmness and serenity of the compositions. He was—and made no apologies to himself for it—reminded of the one he considered the greatest Old Master of them all, Raphael, and the simplicity and power of his Sistine Madonna.
The theme of the frescoes was the Seven Ages of Woman. Against intricately depicted and finely finished backgrounds of fields, foliage, flowers and small animals, starting with spring and moving through the months towards winter, each age was shown: rosy baby, sturdy child, budding adolescent. Next, a radiant young woman gazing towards her lover, shown as a tall figure in breeches, with his back to the viewer; then, a madonna-like mother nursing an infant—followed by a mature grandmother, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. The seventh fresco depicted not, as might be expected, an aged crone ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, but a figure forever young, lying prone and encased in ice, hands crossed on her breast.
Lillie Cortis had been twenty-two, he reminded himself, when she had painted these. Twenty-two.
‘I know nothing about art, but I could just gaze at them for hours.’
He had been so absorbed he’d forgotten the woman behind him. ‘Tell me what you see, Meg?’
She thought for a moment. ‘An affirmation of life?’ she ventured, rather shyly.
‘Don’t you see death, too?’
‘Yes, of course, if you look closely, you can’t fail to see that.’ She shivered.
In each picture, there was indeed a representation of death, so tiny and concealed that one had to strain to look for it: a skull and crossbones; old Death himself, with his scythe; a hanged human figure; a coffin, a skeleton, and what he took to be a mummy. Six memento mori. But in the seventh panel, above the door, Andrew could find no such. Instead, he discovered water gushing from a spring, an obvious symbol of life which then, however, turned into the frozen ice block around the dead figure.
Amazing! Yet . . . the more he looked at the painted panels, the more oddly disturbing Andrew was finding them. Disturbing, and puzzling. Perhaps the feeling was caused by those intimations of mortality, that last ice-enclosed corpse eerily foreshadowing Lillie Cortis’s own death. Astonishing as they were, he found himself revising his earlier, rash comparisons with Raphael.
‘She must have died soon after completing these?’ They had been, as far as he knew, her last work.
‘Yes, two weeks later she was dead. So sad, such a waste.’
‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’
‘A flying accident, horrible. Neither she nor the pilot survived.’
She didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, but his reading before he came had given him the story, which had made newspaper headlines at the time. During the year before her death, Lillie Cortis had been involved in a scandalous affair with a man called Johnny de Souza, whom the gossip columnists liked to describe as a rich playboy and philanderer, already twice divorced and on his third marriage. Drink and cocaine were variously put forward as the reason why his small aircraft, while heading across the Channel towards Le Touquet with himself and his passenger on board, after having been waved off from his private airfield, should have crashed into the sea. Nothing of the wreckage had ever been recovered.
Andrew dragged himself away from contemplation of the wall. It was time to concentrate on practicalities. Meg Landers was watching him anxiously, and said abruptly, obviously misinterpreting his long silence, ‘They’ll have to deal with Richenda before they pull this place down.’
‘Richenda? Who is she?’
‘Richenda Leigh.’
The name bobbed about on the edges of his consciousness for a while before he could capture it. Then he had it. Richenda Leigh had been another artist of the same generation as Lillie, lesser-known, now almost forgotten.
‘She was Lillie’s greatest friend, and she’s still painting, you know. She’s rather—well, eccentric. I’m not really qualified to judge, but her work seems lovely to me, though that’s not something she can accept. She comes in here and looks at Lillie’s frescoes then goes back to her rooms and destroys what she’s done.’
‘She’s still painting? Good God, how old is she? And she lives here?’
‘She’s nearly ninety, though you’d be hard-pressed to believe it. I think she’s holding on because she’s afraid if she dies, there’ll be no one left to care or protest about the orangery being demolished, and the frescoes with it. But she’s no need to fear. The house belongs to me now, and there’s no question of them being destroyed.’
He wanted, very much, to help her, touched by the combination of vulnerability and courage, perhaps stubbornness, the unexpected steeliness that wouldn’t even admit the possibility of defeat. But how could she contemplate coping with the weight of all this? He’d been told that, in addition to the house, she’d been left a small inheritance—which the house was certainly capable of swallowing whole. The frescoes themselves, in situ as they were, could not be realized for cash—and it had to be admitted that, exciting as they were to him, and would be to Cortis aficionados, they weren’t of such overriding interest to the general public as to draw in big crowds.
‘But why,’ he asked, ‘hasn’t Richenda Leigh ever made known the existence of her friend’s work? She obviously recognizes its virtue.’
Meg studied him cautiously, assessingly. ‘She might tell you herself. She was staying here when the frescoes were done, and she’s lived here since Lillie died. No one ever told her to go, she says, so she just stayed on. Come on, she knows you’re coming.’
They left the orangery the same way they’d entered, by way of the recessed door in the exuberantly painted wall, and came eventually into a set of rooms which Meg told him had once been used as the servants’ quarters, and where Richenda Leigh had lived her reclusive existence ever since Lillie’s death more than sixty years ago, venturing out only once in a blue moon, her wants now attended to by a woman from the village, who brought in her supplies.
Richenda Leigh was tall and thin, her gaunt frame clad in cotton trousers and a shapeless sweater, a woman who fell into that category of persons who seem ageless. She could never have been beautiful, but might have been handsome once, in a dark, gypsyish way—her hair, even now, was not white, but iron-grey, and her eyes were still luminous, dark and full of a bright and somewhat intimidating intelligence. When she spoke, it was with the voice and the vitality of someone much younger.
Meg said, ‘Do you want me to make the tea before I leave you, Richenda?’
‘You’re not staying, then?’
‘You told me you didn’t want me to. I will if you’ve changed your mind.’
An unfathomable look passed between them. ‘Please yourself.’
‘Well, then, I will.’
Meg went out, and came back presently with a tray. But it wasn’t until after the tea had been left to draw thoroughly and then poured that the old woman showed any signs of being willing to talk about the reason for his visit, and began to speak of the summer when Lillie had painted the frescoes.
‘So, what did you think of them?’ she interrupted herself. Andrew manfully sipped the now dark and bitter tea. ‘I thought them—extraordinarily beautiful.’
She became very still. ‘Did you now?’ For a long time she was silent, then she said, ‘I helped her, you know. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the technique of fresco painting?’ He was, but she went on without waiting for an answer. ‘Well, you have to work with watercolours on to wet plaster, so you must arrange to do only as much work in one stint as you can complete. First of all the cartoon of the whole conception, complete with every last detail, has to be sketched on to the plastered wall, then the section to be worked on is chipped away, replastered the next day, and the painting done straight on to it while it’s still wet, joining up to the parts still to be painted—and so on.
We’d been in Italy earlier in the year, studying techniques, but oh, it was hard, mucky work, I can tell you! Enormous fun, though. We worked from scaffolding, did the plastering ourselves. You have to finish each day’s painting before the plaster dries—that way, it reacts chemically with the paint and becomes durable, unlike paint on dry plaster. She worked like one possessed; we both did. She was like that, you know, absolutely filled with passion for something and then letting it drop. Besides, she wanted the work finished before she went off to France with de Souza.’ She paused to drain her teacup, then gazed unseeingly out of the window. ‘We had never been so happy.’
There was a silence.
‘Who gave her permission to paint the frescoes?’
‘Permission?’ She laughed, then shrugged. ‘Lillie owned the house. Her father had died six months before and she couldn’t wait to cover up what she called that indecently naked wall as soon as there was no one to stop her!’
‘Do you have any more of her work?’
A guarded expression replaced the smile. ‘A little. But I won’t sell, you know.’
‘I’d just like to see what there is, if I may.’
Another long silence. At last, she indicated a portfolio leaning against the wall. When he’d placed it on the table beside her, she laid a hand on it in an unconsciously protective gesture.
Even now she seemed undecided, then she began to hand him an assortment of work—pen and ink sketches, woodblocks, designs for book covers, several portraits done in pencil or in oil. Andrew looked through them with a mounting sense of disappointment, even bafflement. Most of them were dated and signed, and spanned several years from when Lillie must have been still at school, through her years at the Slade, right up to her death. Like the other work of hers he’d seen, they were unusual and appealing, but with little to hint at that sudden glorious blooming into maturity, evident on the orangery wall. Yet some of them were dated the same year as the frescoes.
The old woman was watching him with an inscrutable glance. She must always have been a deep and unknowable person with secret thoughts. He closed the portfolio, thinking that either Lillie’s had been a somewhat uneven talent, or the frescoes had provided some sort of spur she’d been needing to express herself properly. ‘What happened? To make her suddenly able to paint like that?’
She only asked, after a while, ‘Are you going to recommend their preservation, then?’
It was his turn to avoid a direct answer. ‘Before I go, will you show me some of your work, as well?’
‘It’s not for public consumption. I don’t keep much anyway.’
The silence which followed was as uncompromising as the words themselves, until Meg broke it. ‘Oh, rubbish! At least let him see those you showed me yesterday.’
Richenda gave her a severe look, but as if belatedly recognizing the need to placate this man from the Heritage Foundation, she changed her mind. ‘Very well, if you must. On the table by the window. But they’re of no account.’
Andrew crossed the room. Watched by a huge, malevolent tortoiseshell cat occupying the outside windowsill, he turned over the paintings and drawings in the big folder—strong, bold colours and sweeping lines, forceful work of the sort he might have expected from her. But he wasn’t prepared for the shock of realization that hit him. He finished examining them and stared through the window, so hard that the cat jumped off and ran away. He looked blankly over a neat kitchen garden with brick paths and flourishing rows of lettuces, clumps of herbs and a row of peas and beans, probably Meg’s doing, he thought inconsequentially. He understood several things—above all, the significance in one of the frescoes of the figure of the lover, the tall young man with his back to the viewer.
‘Well?’ Richenda demanded. He turned to face her. She was dunking a ginger biscuit, and as she sucked in the sloppy result, her cheeks hollowing, he felt how old she really was, saw the skull beneath the skin, the dark hairs bristling on her chin, the cunning old eyes. She was not a woman he would ever have trusted.
He said, speaking with great care, ‘You’re an exceptionally gifted artist, Miss Leigh. What made you give Lillie Cortis the credit for painting those frescoes?’
An old-fashioned clock with a loud tick measured the seconds away. ‘Since you’re so perceptive, I thought you’d have known,’ she said at last, in an attempt at mockery which didn’t succeed. Over sixty years had passed, and something still hurt, very much.
He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t imagine.’
‘It was the least I could do.’
Did she mean as a tribute to her friend? The figure of the lover in the frescoes, yes, its back to the viewer, might well have been either a young man, or a woman. He had thought that the face common to all the female representations was perhaps Lillie’s own face, a self-portrait, though he hadn’t been sure, having only seen one grainy photograph. Now he knew for certain that it was Lillie’s face—but it was not Lillie who had put it there.
‘If I’d said I was the one who’d painted them, who would care?’ The bitterness was evident in her voice. ‘But consider what Lillie’s work is fetching nowadays, how popular she’s become! There are people who’d do anything to save whatever she created.’
Deliberate obscurity was not, in Andrew’s experience, a condition which most artists willingly sought. He still couldn’t understand why Richenda had chosen to hide her talents all these years; he was appalled at the waste. Above all, why was it so important to her now that the frescoes be saved?
Later, when she lay in the hospital bed, her face drawn sideways in a stroke, he was to regret that he hadn’t chosen his words more carefully. At the time, he just spoke as the thought came to him:
‘It isn’t the frescoes you want to keep, is it? It’s the wall.’
* * *
‘Did you know, Meg?’ he asked as he was walking with her at the front of the house a month later, two days after the second stroke had killed Richenda.
She was wearing plimsolls. She kept her eye on them as she spoke, pushing the gravel forward into tiny hillocks as they walked.
‘I wondered. But I couldn’t work it out,’ she said at last, looking up to meet his eyes. ‘And even after she’d told me everything, in the hospital, I wasn’t sure of her reasons; I’m still not. I did guess it was Richenda who’d painted the frescoes. Apparently Lillie had asked her—she knew Richenda was the better artist, the one capable of executing something like that.’
‘Were they lovers?’
‘Richenda and Lillie? I don’t know. I think Richenda . . . yes, perhaps . . . but Lillie . . . ? It’s hard to say. She was certainly heavily involved with this Johnny de Souza character, and she’d quarrelled with Richenda over going to France with him. But in the end, by the time she met him at his private airfield, her better nature had prevailed and she’d told him she couldn’t go to Le Touquet with him after all, that she must keep her promise to Richenda to help her with the fresco painting as she’d agreed. The scaffolding had been set up weeks before, with Richenda waiting for the go-ahead, camping in the empty house. It would have been a tremendous job to tackle without any help, and she decided she couldn’t let Richenda down. Whatever de Souza felt, I suppose he realized there wasn’t much he could do about it. His mechanic saw them both get into the plane and saw it leave, and that’s why it was assumed she’d been in the crash with him. What no one except Richenda knew was that Lillie had persuaded him to land on the big field beyond Margent House and leave her there. Even Richenda hadn’t known she was coming until she arrived.’
They said nothing for a while. ‘I wish she’d never told me, Andrew.’
He wished that, too, or that he himself had never made that fatal utterance, which had come from Lord knows where. But Andrew never repined at what might have been. Meg, and what she felt, were more important. Encouraged by the unconscious pleading as she put her small, square, capable hand on his sleeve, he took hold of it and drew her down to sit on the edge of the empty stone bas
in. Sparrows, using it as a dust-bath, flew away in a chirruping cloud, affronted. ‘Don’t go on, if you’d rather not.’
‘I’m all right.’ She brushed away damp tendrils of hair from her forehead. It was hot, out here in the sun. ‘Well, they began on the frescoes . . . but it was far from the fun Richenda made it out to be when she was telling you. In fact, they ended up having what seems to have been a humdinger of a row, something to do with Johnny de Souza. They were working on top of the scaffolding at the time and she says Lillie was so angry she stepped too far back, fell off and was killed.’
And so Richenda had broken into the space which had been created years before when a new brick facing was built in front of what had been the outer stone wall of the house, in order to make a new, smooth, inside wall for the orangery. She had put Lillie’s body in the cavity, bricked it up again and plastered over it, afterwards covering the whole wall with that vibrant creation.
‘Or that’s what Richenda says happened, Meg.’
‘It’s possible. She must have been a strong woman then, she had the expertise. She’d already completed the cartoon on to the wall, so she’d only have needed to chip away as much of the last panel as necessary and then work at the brickwork until there was enough room to push Lillie through. Brick it up again, replaster, redraw that part of the cartoon, and continue the painting as though nothing had happened.’
‘I’m not questioning that it’s possible—but why did she need to do it, if Lillie’s fall was an accident, as she says? Don’t you think it’s more likely the quarrel ended with her somehow killing Lillie, in a way that would leave no room for doubt if ever her body were found? But then, when she heard of de Souza’s plane crash and the report that Lillie had apparently been killed with him, she knew she’d only have to pretend—if it were ever queried—that Lillie had painted the frescoes before she left with him.’
Meg stared into the empty pool basin as if seeing her reflection in imaginary water.
‘Who’s to know now what the truth really is? Except that she must always have been terrified that one day the orangery would be dismantled and Lillie’s remains found—proving Lillie couldn’t have painted the wall. One can almost pity her—it stopped her from ever letting her own work be seen—after all, anyone who saw both and knows about such things would have seen straight away they were the work of the same person—as you did. She’s had to live with what happened all her life—she couldn’t have lasted much longer and she probably thought she was going to get away with it. Then I came along. Her only hope was that the frescoes being attributed to Lillie would provide a good argument against destroying the wall.’ She paused, and trailed her fingers along the friable stone of the basin, gave him a quick glance. ‘And it will . . . Won’t it?’
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