“What happened to … What was his name? … Gerald something or other?” he asked idly. “I had the impression that was getting serious.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Helen did not look round. “It ran into some problems. Specifically a wife and two children in Plymouth that he somehow forgot to mention.”
“Oh, dear. How did you find out?”
“I had a phone call.” Helen turned to him, cynical amusement on her face as she pushed bright, pink-framed glasses back into position on the bridge of her nose. “From another lady who thought I ought to know he was screwing her as well. We had quite an interesting chat.”
“Not another one,” Maltravers protested. “You’ve developed a virtual genius for choosing ratfink boyfriends. He must be about the tenth.”
“I chose you once.” Helen looked nostalgically at very blue eyes and unexpectedly feminine mouth contrasting with slightly flawed, quasi-Grecian features. “I should have hung on in there.”
“That was long ago and in another country,” Maltravers reminded her.
“But the wench is not dead.” Tess was regarding them amusedly from the stage. “There’s been enough passion around here this afternoon without you two fanning old flames.”
“Don’t play quotations with me,” Maltravers warned her. “You know I’m better at it than you are. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara … And you can complete that one as well if you want.”
“Well you can bet your sweet life that my shadow’s going to fall between your lips and hers like the wrath of God, whoever she is,” Tess countered drily.
She flopped down next to him and lay back, closing her eyes as she raised Raphaelesque face to shining sky. Slender, tanned, naked legs stretched from cream shorts in a manner which would have ruined the already troubled reputation of Brabantio’s daughter.
“Why do people bring young children on a day like this? If I’d been dragged off at that age to watch Shakespeare when I could have been on the beach, I’d have thrown up.”
“One of them did,” Maltravers told her. “Trying to keep it quiet with chocolate and ice cream wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t you notice?”
“There’s so much happening in the audience in the afternoons you have to work hard to ignore it,” Tess replied. “Most of the time it’s the seagulls that worry us. They tell endless stories about surprisingly accurate droppings.”
“It’s said to be good luck,” said Maltravers.
“Not in the middle of a speech it isn’t. At least we didn’t have to worry about the weather today. Michael Church told me he once played the first act of The Master Builder in a downpour.”
Maltravers nodded sympathetically. “Anyone who could build a theatre like this in a climate like ours has to be mad. English eccentricity at its finest.”
“It’s still an incredible place to play,” Tess said. “When it’s right here, it’s unbelievable. Tonight it will be an audience of grown ups and a beautiful evening. Why don’t you come again?”
“It’s booked solid,” Maltravers reminded her. “Even sleeping with the leading lady can’t find me a seat. Anyway, your corpse is too lifelike for my peace of mind. I’ll pick you up at the end. Come on, you’ve got three hours to recover.”
They climbed deep steps, through a gate and past the box office to the car park. Maltravers drove out to where the road immediately dropped, twisting along the cliffs overlooking Porthennis. Miniaturised by distance, its houses fell among trees in a crumpled fan shape from sliding moors and farmland to the focal point of the harbour, stone walls curved like open pincers. From the highest point they could see clear across Mounts Bay, the great scoop of sea grasped in a huge claw where England pushed to its extreme points west and south. Distant white seafront hotels catching the sun, Penzance shone in the claw’s palm, then vanished as they dropped towards the old fishing village, its population swollen for a few summer months by tourists. The approaches to Porthennis dwindled from narrow roads to single car lanes until a coiled and knotted network of alleyways and streets shadowy between granite houses barely ten feet apart in places meant that second gear constituted reckless driving. Crawling down Fern Hill into the outskirts, Maltravers stopped to let a delivery van through where a police car and another vehicle blocked half the road.
“That’s Martha and Ruth’s cottage.” Helen peered at two men standing by the front door. Another man emerged from a high white clapboard building further along the lane and crossed the garden to speak to them.
“Who are Martha and Ruth?” Maltravers asked.
“Martha’s a sculptor and Ruth’s her friend,” Helen replied. “Her very good friend. They’ve lived here for years. But what’s happened?”
“Do you want to go and ask?”
“I’ll call Dorothy when we get back. She’ll know.”
“And if she doesn’t, somebody will tell you in the Steamer tonight,” Maltravers added as he drove on. “Nothing happens in Porthennis that the public bar isn’t aware of.”
He cautiously negotiated the maze past the harbour that took them back to Lifeboat Row, half a dozen cottages set at right angles to the beach, originally built for the lifeboat captain and crew. Their walls had been patiently fitted together from different sizes of stone, making them all subtly different, unlike newer homes built out of regular, machine-cut blocks. Helen opened the stable-style front door and picked up the telephone as Tess went upstairs for a shower and Maltravers headed for the kitchen to make tea.
Number One Lifeboat Row had originally been the home of the skipper, presumably a man with a diminutive wife and one child; a family of more than three in such a tiny two-up, two-down would have been uncomfortably crowded. The ground floor rooms had now been knocked into one, a plain wooden plank — dignified with the status of a beam in estate agent’s hyperbole — running across the ceiling to reveal where the divide had been. It was furnished with Helen’s share of the salvage of her marriage. A 1930s Tudor-copy court cupboard; circular rosewood dining table with Baroque-style centre pedestal and tapestry seat chairs; hooded leather club porter’s seat and carved mahogany lyre-back chair facing each other by the wood-burning stove; Edwardian chaise-longue with wine-dark velvet and original brass studs and two bulbous easy chairs. Rough plaster walls were crowded with Helen’s own water-colours and pen and ink sketches of cats, mixed with tinted West Country prints and assorted other pictures and the stone floor was covered with fitted plain avocado green broadloom carpet. It was an ad hoc collection no interior designer would have put together, but it worked.
In the kitchen, little bigger than a telephone kiosk tacked on the back, Maltravers heard Helen twice ring off and redial as he measured Lapsang tea into a plump brown pot — Helen loathed tea-bags — and waited for the kettle. Then she spoke for a few moments and he was pouring in the water when she appeared in the doorway.
“I’ve tried Dorothy and Belvedere, but there’s no reply,” she explained. “Edward’s at his shop, but says he’s heard nothing.”
Maltravers shrugged. “Accident perhaps?”
“I didn’t see an ambulance.”
“We don’t know when whatever it was happened. It could have gone. Tell me more about … Martha and Ruth was it?”
Helen took a tin from the fridge to satisfy a ragamuffin cat giving the unlikely impression it had not been fed for a week.
“Martha was one of the founders of what was called the Porthennis School,” she said. “Just after the war a whole group of artists settled here. They were quite fashionable at one time. The best known was the painter Frank Morgan, who exhibited at the Royal Academy, and Martha has built up a reputation as a sculptor in recent years. Here, piglet.”
She stroked the cat as it began to eat. “She’s had commissions from firms in London who want something for their receptions. You know the sort of thing. Commercialism making a token gesture towards art. Several of her pieces have been sold to America as well.”
Maltravers began pouring the tea
. “And Ruth?”
“Very bad poet, very nice lady. Doesn’t earn a penny of course, but she’s been Martha’s lover for ever — they’re both in their seventies now — and Martha makes enough to keep them both.”
“And how did Porthennis react to the arrival of a couple of lesbians?” Maltravers asked. “People were still getting hot under the collar about The Well of Loneliness in the 1940s.”
“I don’t imagine it occurred to anyone at the time. All the Porthennis School were considered fairly mad. The men had long hair and the women read the Webbs and Russell and believed in free love with birth control. It was sort of a Bloomsbury-on-Sea. They were ahead of their time round here. By the time the locals worked out the relationship between Martha and Ruth, society had caught up and it didn’t matter.”
They went back into the sitting-room. Sunlight streamed through the top half of the front door Helen had left open and sounds of activity from the harbour faintly reached them.
“Does the School still flourish?” Maltravers asked.
“They kid themselves it does,” Helen said. “It was the big thing in their lives, but Martha is the only one who’s made it apart from Frank Morgan, and that was years ago.”
“Is it why you chose Porthennis? Because of the artists?”
“Partly, but the real reason is that I used to love coming here on holiday. I remember some of them from when I was little. Belvedere Scott used to do his Augustus John act in those days, painting on the harbour front in a felt hat and filthy smock. He claimed to lay at least ten women during the season … He made a pass at Mummy once when we stopped to watch him.” Helen laughed in recollection. “He growled something about wanting to paint her naked straight after he’d ravished her.”
Maltravers had an instant image of Helen’s mother, pillar of the Women’s Institute, matronly rectitude in sensible shoes, put on earth for the sole purpose of being the suburban bank manager’s wife she inevitably became. “What did she tell him?”
Helen paused, then quoted. “‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I am a respectable married woman and this is my daughter!’ I must have been about twelve at the time. Belvedere leered at me and said something I didn’t understand about unripe fruit. After that we started going to Eastbourne.”
Maltravers grinned. “Does he still carry on like that?”
“Only out of habit. He’s turned eighty now. Most of the time he just cons drinks out of visitors with stories about what he and Picasso used to get up to in Paris. All lies of course, but nobody minds.”
Maltravers heard the latch click on the front gate and someone walking up the short path to the door, but from where he was sitting he could not see who it was.
“Helen? Are you home?” The voice was male, but light and gently modulated. She twisted round in her chair.
“Hello, Mortimer. You’re back. Come in.” There was the sound of the bottom half of the door being opened.
Maltravers never forgot his first impression of Mortimer Lacey, the figure carried with natural elegance, erect head crowned by perfectly coiffured grey hair. He could have been aged anything between fifty and seventy — as it turned out, he was fifty-eight — and the gaunt face, swarthy skin tight over hollows exaggerating pointed nose, was straight out of a Phiz drawing. He was wearing pencil-grey slacks and pale-blue shirt with a matching paisley pattern cravat. His neck was chicken-thin, and bony wrists tapered into slender fingers with manicured nails. Matching Maltravers’s six feet, he would have been emaciated by the loss of a single ounce of flesh. Deep-violet eyes turned to Maltravers, who had the unnerving feeling that he was being instantly analysed. For a moment the eyes pierced, then filled with warmth.
“Hello. You are a friend of Helen’s.”
Maltravers was conscious of the phrasing as he took the extended skeletal hand. Not “you must be”, but “you are”; a statement of fact instead of the usual supposition. The eyes twinkled and Maltravers’s sense of caution heightened; it was as though his interpretation had been picked up and he was being silently complimented on his awareness. Lacey released his hand and sat on the chaise-longue.
“I got home last night,” he told Helen. “Your lights were still on, but it was late so I didn’t call.”
“You should have. I wanted you to meet Gus and Tess.” Helen turned to Maltravers. “This is Mortimer Lacey, my next-door neighbour. This is Gus Maltravers and … and this is Tess Davy his girlfriend.” Tess appeared at the bottom of the stairs running behind the wall in one corner of the room. “She’s playing Desdemona at the Botallack this week.”
“Of course.” Lacey stood up, took Tess’s hand and kissed it. The gesture indefinably escaped affectation. “I am going tonight and am greatly looking forward to it.”
“Thank you.” Tess regarded him guardedly and Maltravers knew she had also immediately sensed something about Lacey’s personality which intrigued her. “I hope you enjoy it.”
“I’m sure I will, just as I would enjoy a cup of tea.” Lacey smiled impishly at Helen.
“Coming up.” Helen walked towards the kitchen. “How was London?”
“Nasty, brutish and much, much too long,” Lacey replied as he sat down again. “I can’t imagine now how I once enjoyed it so much. It’s not the same place of course. Places never are.”
“Oh.” Helen stopped by the kitchen door and looked back at him. “Have you heard anything about what’s happened at Martha and Ruth’s? We saw a police car outside the cottage when we came back this afternoon.”
Maltravers instinctively turned to Lacey as Helen asked the question and saw the spasm of something slip in and out of his eyes. Shock? Fear? Grief? It was replaced by a cold, almost grim, acceptance.
“Martha?” he repeated softly. “I knew it was close.”
“Pardon?” Helen said. “Knew what was close?”
Lacey waved the question aside. “It doesn’t matter. Do you know any more?”
“No. I’ve tried ringing a few people, but nobody seems to know anything. There must have been an accident.”
“Perhaps, but …” Lacey appeared to be talking to himself, almost as though the rest of them were no longer there. “Could it have been?”
After a moment he shook his head then stood up abruptly and went to stare out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. Maltravers frowned at Tess and Helen, but they all remained silent until Lacey spoke again without turning round.
“Whatever’s happened, I’m sorry to have to tell you that Martha Shaw is dead.”
Silence returned, then Maltravers broke it. “You seem very certain.”
“I am. I felt her die.”
Chapter Two
Spontaneous song burst through the public bar of the Steamer, baritones and basses combining in a chorus of West Country defiance in support of a Bishop of Bristol imprisoned by James II for opposing legislation granting greater religious tolerance for those who did not share his Grace’s image of God; the Porthennis Male Voice Choir — including several Nonconformists whom the Bishop would presumably have hanged given the opportunity — were relaxing after their Friday night rehearsal.
And do they know the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
There’s twenty thousand Cornishmen
Will know the reason why.
The singing did not interrupt relentless chatter and clamour between stone walls and dark panelled wooden partitions beneath a low anaglypta ceiling pickled nicotine yellow by years of pipe and cigarette smoke. Beer gushed from taps beneath decorated porcelain hand pumps, glasses clinked, dominoes clattered as they were shuffled on a table in one corner. Coarse laughter at a joke involving the unlikely sexual encounter of a monk and a female trapeze artist mingled with a barmaid yelling the number of someone’s food order and the rattle of falling coins marked the computer-regulated appearance of three pears in the windows of the fruit machine. Behind customers crammed round the bar, people shouted drinks orders above the racket. Visitors and loca
ls jostled together, a liberal attitude towards children on licensed premises adding the raucous crying of a baby and an adolescent argument over some board game brought along to amuse teenagers while the adults enjoyed themselves. Squeezing between bodies with his pint and Helen’s vodka and lime, Maltravers indicated the door leading outside with a movement of his head and took their drinks across the narrow street to where an iron rail topped the harbour wall.
The tide was in and gulls rode between rocking cabin cruisers, rowing boats and a two-masted yacht, dripping mooring ropes creaking as they tightened and fell slack again. A boy and girl paddled a blue and yellow inflatable dinghy, peering into the water for crabs. The sky was a translucent shell of ivory, mint green and pale turquoise as the sun gathered and flushed as it lay down behind the headland to their right. Holidaymakers on evening walks strolled past, tired after a day spent on beaches, walking moors or visiting theme parks. The muffled cacophony from inside the Steamer amplified the air of quietness.
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Maltravers swallowed a mouthful of beer as he gazed across to the entrance gap in the harbour wall. “Martha Shaw was killed when a half-finished statue fell on top of her and Mortimer instantly knew it had happened half a mile away.”
“All he knew was that someone had died suddenly,” Helen corrected. “He only knew it was Martha when I told him what we’d seen.”
“But all we saw was a police car outside her cottage,” he argued. “There could have been other explanations. It’s only in the last hour that you’ve managed to confirm it. But Mortimer wanders in and calmly announces that Martha is actually dead. And I’m quite prepared to believe he never left his cottage or made any phone calls.”
Helen flicked a fragment of rust from seawater corrosion coating the railing. “Mortimer’s fey. He can do things nobody can explain. His grandmother was a gipsy, and not one of your diddicoys and tinkers. Guaranteed Romany.”
The Dying of the Light Page 2