Gently Where She Lay

by Alan Hunter

  He smiled suddenly, but it was the rueful smile that gave him such a forlorn look. Yet so appealing. Not hard to understand why a Vivienne Selly would make a pass at him.

  ‘Why did you turn her down?’

  ‘I didn’t believe her. She was too damned unemotional.’

  ‘Too calculating.’

  ‘Not even that. More as though she didn’t believe in herself, either. It should have been romantic, rather touching: the beach, the sun, the rustle of the surf: a woman talking about herself, flattering, offering an open-ended proposition. And she wanted it too, I think. It was all there in her eyes. Yet it wasn’t quite real, wasn’t going to get acted. She knew it, and so did I.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I made tea on a primus, and found up some biscuits for the dog.’

  I laughed. ‘Was it so easy?’

  ‘Absolutely. She wasn’t upset. She’d tried, I’d said no, and there we let the matter rest. No fireworks. She drank her tea and told me some more about her husband.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘Oh, about his womanising. Nothing that would help you. Except perhaps the apathy of her attitude – which doesn’t surprise me, now I’ve met him.’

  ‘Did she mention a divorce?’

  ‘She said he would be getting one.’

  ‘Was she apathetic about that?’

  ‘Entirely so. I couldn’t have told if she was for it or against it.’

  ‘And you saw no more of her?’

  ‘No. She gave up hanging about the beach. The one or two times I met her in the street, she kindly looked another way.’

  In short, another defeat of Vivienne’s: with the pattern already harshly familiar. Defeat expected. She was playing a game that didn’t have any prizes. It read almost as though she’d played it on purpose, to establish its character of negation. A loser ‘doing her thing’. Vivienne not-winning. Proof . . .

  I drank quickly, emptying my glass. ‘What did Eyke’s men ask you?’

  Reymerston jerked his head. ‘The predictable things. What I saw and heard on Tuesday evening.’

  ‘You were here?’

  ‘Yes. Painting.’ He motioned towards the easel with his glass.

  ‘You didn’t go to your friend’s lecture?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. ‘Marianne says I make her nervous.’

  ‘You saw and heard nothing.’

  ‘Nothing interesting. A car passing by was what they were after – latish, probably, after I was in bed – going up the loke here, on to the Common. But that’s daft anyway, when you think about it. He’d be drawing attention to himself going out past those houses. If he took the harbour road nobody would notice, and nobody did. Q.E.D.’

  ‘Around nine p.m. you saw nothing of interest?’

  ‘You mean, like a woman with a dog, strolling out there?’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t watching. That’s where the light comes from: I paint with my back to it.’

  ‘Nothing, then.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve given you my little bit.’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘Wish it could have been more use to you.’

  He finished his drink, too, and remained gazing at the books for a few moments. Then his eyes lightened; he grinned at me. ‘Do you still have time to spare?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll show you my paintings. I imagine you’ll appreciate them more than friend Selly.’

  I grinned back. To hell with the job: I needed a breath of free air.

  Paintings.

  In a modest way, I claim to have a critic’s nose: to smell talent. And I could smell it here, the vigour and grasp of major painting.

  Pointillist art. Reymerston was a pointillist. He had taken lessons with Seurat. But not slavish lessons: just the sort of lessons one master accepts from another. His vision was new, dynamic, primitive, using a wider spectrum of tone, in compositions of bended space that filled each canvas with majestic constructions. Seascapes mostly, and landscapes, with one or two fantasies of still-life. All the brilliant image of the coast was strangely captured in Reymerston’s paintings.

  At first I couldn’t tell if I liked it, but I could tell it was forcing a decision upon me. Like it or not, it was adding a dimension of which I could never again be unconscious. A new vision. Reymerston had it: had found a way to transmit it. Working alone here, to my knowledge unknown: his name a cipher to the metropolitan galleries.

  ‘Why haven’t you exhibited in London?’

  ‘Do you think I’m ready for that yet?’

  ‘You’re ready for anything.’

  His eyes were doubtful. Yet surely he knew the point he had reached?

  ‘I haven’t always been a painter, remember. This is the work of a year or two. Since I gave my whole time to it. I’m not impatient for notoriety.’

  ‘But you need that. You need a public.’

  ‘No. I can still be my own public. I like obscurity. As Lao Tzu said, by not presuming, one can develop one’s talent.’

  ‘Only your talent is mature.’

  ‘I’m not convinced of that.’

  ‘Why not ask the question in public?’

  He smiled. ‘You talk like Marianne! She’s always trying to give me a shove.’ He slid some pictures away in the racks, then leaned on the racks, his eyes serious. ‘But it’s not simply a question of my maturity. I’m not convinced of the validity of art, either.’

  ‘Its validity . . . ?’

  He nodded. ‘Art has been a long time with us. It has had its youth, maturity, its age. Who dare say it is not now senile? Look at the market prices. Already they suggest that painting is a dead art. The work has been done. The masterpieces are counted. We can add no more to the stock. What I do here is painting ghost-pictures, illegitimate visions with no application. It isn’t I but art that has lost contact – died: become the key of a lost world.’

  ‘This . . . you believe?’

  ‘Say it’s a feeling. The mood I go about my work in. That I’m apocryphal, outside the canon. Painting simply in search of myself. From that point of view my maturity is irrelevant and I have no business with exhibitions. Art has no voice: we’re a post-art generation. Perhaps the vacuum has been filled by technology.’

  I shook my head blankly. ‘But that’s just impossible. You couldn’t have painted these pictures from such a standpoint. They’re not egoistical, and you don’t believe they are. Otherwise, why have you bothered to show them to me?’

  ‘Perhaps as a subject for this conversation.’ He slanted his face a little, watching me. ‘But ignore the logic of it. That’s unimportant. What matters, really, is the mood. All art is the product of a mood, and the mood we’ve fallen into is the mood of inanity. Listen, here’s a better set of words. These will tell you more than logic.’

  He felt in the hip-pocket of his jeans and brought out a creased notebook. He began reading, but without changing his tone, so that for a moment I didn’t realise it was verse.

  ‘Because words in their combinations

  Notes, brush-strokes

  Are infinite, or appear so in the mid-flood of creation,

  Men, critics

  Have thought art inexhaustible,

  Are blaming us now for our wilful poverty.

  But we were born poor. We are the new underprivileged.

  Look, look

  Our riches are spent.

  There Beethoven carved, there Shakespeare, da Vinci,

  Hewing great empires from the virgin centre.

  And we, poor beggars, are left with the wrappings,

  Cursed, inarticulate, empty, sterile,

  Crucified on the lie that art is infinite

  Whereas, in truth,

  It too has an end.

  Pity us, brother.

  We are the men we used to be.

  We have Shakespeares among us going in tatters.

  We draw the rags round us, pretending, pretending,

  Arguing about
our millions

  As we beg for an alms.

  On the little footing the rich have left us

  We perform these last few tricks,

  Bitter, defensive

  At the wrong end of time.’

  He closed the book and tossed it on the racks, then sought my eye with his glimmering smile.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Are these pictures just a last few tricks?’

  He laughed. ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t allow that, would I? But the mood moulds them, determines their essence. Because of the mood I’m an alien worker.’

  ‘The mood is decadent. You’re aligned against it.’

  ‘Yes – but dare I depend on that alignment being valid? Setting aside the profound feeling that art is completed, and beating a track, still, in the direction of the sun? There is no world now behind me to receive the messages I may relay. The receiver has closed down, is content with tapes of old transmissions. I may be an authentic artist or merely a fool in love with an illusion. I can’t know. My point of reference is lost. There is nothing to measure with any longer.’

  ‘You will know in yourself how far you’ve succeeded.’

  ‘But that knowledge exists in a vacuum.’

  ‘So exhibit. Take it out of its vacuum.’

  He laughed again. ‘It may be extending the illusion.’

  ‘Exhibit,’ I said. ‘You’ve gone far enough alone. The mood may turn out to be a chimera. Or you may be the bomb to explode the mood, the catalyst the situation has been waiting for.’

  ‘It’s just possible,’ he laughed.

  ‘You’re a man of decision – at least, you gave me that impression earlier. “The rest will come” – that’s what you told me. So why are you vacillating now?’

  He shook his head. ‘No answer. Except that at this one point I am vacillating. Not for ever, I’m sure: but at this time. As though I sense a great deal is hanging on the throw.’

  ‘Probably it is.’

  ‘So – I vacillate. Even “a man of decision” like me.’

  I wasn’t satisfied; but before I could begin again we heard a key turn in the outer door. Reymerston glanced at me quizzically: ‘That’ll be Marianne. I hope she’s had time to blow off steam.’

  But Marianne hadn’t. She entered the room hurriedly, to pull up short: seeing me. Her face flamed, then suddenly was pale, her rich eyes flashing and large.

  ‘You!’

  I nodded stiffly.

  ‘I thought you’d be too busy to waste time on pictures.’ She moved quickly to Reymerston. ‘Andy . . . oh, Andy. The Rede girl has just tried to kill herself.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  WITH CODEINE: ABOUT half a small bottle. Sitting in her Mini down at the harbour. While near her the caravan-hirers were packing, and driving by in their laden cars. It was two youngsters who first noticed the lady drooped over the wheel of the Mini, her face flushed, mouth sagging; breath coming in raucous snores. At first they’d stared a bit, expecting that if anything was wrong someone would come along and take care of it, but nobody did; so they told an older boy, who told the harbour-master, who rang the police. Followed squad car and a S.J.A.B. ambulance and a sirening, bell-clanging rush to Eastwich General. She’d live. Eyke brought in the Mini; and the note found propped against the windscreen.

  We read it together, that pitiful scrawl, with its hectic writing going all-ways. A confession, no less: a clean breast. In writing that halted and sprawled and trailed as though the mind that made it was already in dissolution. Confession: credible confession. That she’d picked up Vivienne in the Mini. That she’d driven across the Common, suggested love-making, smothered the naked woman with her own clothes. Why? Did the motive matter? If because she knew that Vivienne was blackmailing the Major? If because, after the interview with Miss Swefling, shame had suddenly transmuted itself into violence? Possible, plausible, confessed to, and sealed with a lethal dose of codeine: our case: death resulting from a homicidal attack by a disturbed teenager. At that, she might even get off. Sudden, irresistible impulse of moral revulsion.

  I touched the note gently. ‘But of course . . . suspect.’

  Eyke lifted his head. ‘I’m not so sure, sir.’

  ‘Where’s the Major?’

  ‘He’s gone to the hospital. Mrs Rede too. With Sergeant Campsey.’

  ‘Campsey’s waiting there?’

  ‘Yes. But he won’t get a word with her just yet.’

  ‘There’s no hurry.’

  ‘Not very much, sir. If she never came round, we’d have enough.’

  I moved away from the desk, went to stare through the window: at the gravelled yard with its weight of sunlight. Still in my pocket the Major’s spool and the tape round it, and the signature. Which was the most suspect – that heavy little disc, or the scrawled paper? Who had been protecting who . . . or were these two sides of a single coin?

  ‘You spoke to Miss Rede on the Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes sir. I took her statement.’

  ‘What was your feeling about her then?’

  Eyke hesitated. ‘She was a bit defiant.’

  ‘Defiant about what had been going on?’

  ‘That’s what she was most concerned about, sir. But I didn’t put a lot of pressure on her. I didn’t know for certain the girls were mixed up with it.’

  ‘What was her attitude about the death of Mrs Selly?’

  Eyke hesitated again. ‘Rather quiet.’

  ‘Shocked?’

  ‘She didn’t make a lot of fuss. None of them did, if it comes to that.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to you then that she might be guilty.’

  A longer pause. ‘No sir.’

  ‘And certainly not that she was likely to attempt suicide?’

  ‘No sir.’ Eyke sounded huffish.

  ‘So what are your comments on that?’

  I heard his chair creak slightly behind me. ‘Sir, I don’t think it is very relevant, not the impression I got when I took her statement.’

  ‘Why isn’t it relevant?’

  ‘Because she’d have thought she was in the clear, sir. She’d be acting confident, just like her friends. But that would wear off when we kept going at it, when she realised we were going to get her in the end.’

  ‘What would give her that impression?’

  ‘We didn’t arrest Selly.’

  ‘And that was enough to bring about the change?’

  ‘She knew we weren’t satisfied. Then you saw her again, sir, which would have given her the idea we were after her.’

  I shook my head at the sparrows on the gravel. ‘I can tell you what brought about the change in Miss Rede. It was Selly’s putting into her head that her uncle was guilty, and her belief that she had betrayed her uncle to me. I know that’s the case. I’ve been talking to Miss Swefling. She got it out of the girl after I’d questioned her. On the face of it, Pamela Rede confessed and attempted suicide to protect and make restitution to her uncle.’

  ‘On the face of it, sir . . . ?’

  I simply shrugged. Another idea had scratched at my brain. Though I wanted to forget it, Marianne Swefling still remained in the area of suspicion. Suppose Pamela Rede had had a third shock: had somehow gathered from Miss Swefling that the latter was guilty. Then the price of undoing the betrayal of her uncle became the alternative betrayal of a, perhaps, much-admired mistress. Out of that, it was easy to believe, such an act and confession might come.

  I turned. Eyke was staring hard at me; had read my little moment of doubt. ‘On the face of it, sir, I would have thought that this confession sounded very likely. Whatever her motive, Miss Rede had opportunity, and her account of what happened does square with the facts. It goes even further. It explains why we found the body naked and unmarked. In the situation described Mrs Selly may very well have been taken by surprise and have put up no fight.’

  ‘Not even a reflex grab at her assailant?’

  ‘I think it’s a credible assumption, sir. The shock,
the unexpectedness may have paralysed her, and she lost consciousness without a struggle.’

  I grunted. So improbable! Yet something of that sort must have happened. And out of all my much experience, I had been able to suggest nothing more likely.

  ‘What about the dog?’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve given it too much importance.’ Eyke was well-abreast of my wavering confidence. ‘The dog may never have entered into it, sir, may have been just an irrelevant incident. The lead could have broken at any time, say when Mrs Selly was walking the dog. It may have seen a cat or another dog and jumped after it, breaking the lead. Then it took off and wouldn’t be called back to her. There’d be nothing she could do about that. She’d just have to leave it to find its way home, to come scratching at the door when it was tired of its jaunt.’

  True. True. The cottage door was scratched.

  ‘There’s nothing in the note that isn’t public knowledge.’

  ‘Actually, that’s the point I was about to make, sir. The note is convincing, very convincing, but in court it may not stand up.’

  ‘By itself it will never get to court!’

  ‘Exactly what I’m leading up to, sir. As far as we’re concerned, this is most likely what happened; but it’s a case we’re never going to win. There can’t be any evidence. We have the car, but whatever it gives us will be inconclusive. It may often have been driven on the Common, and Mrs Selly may often have been given a lift in it. As for the girl, you know the Major. He’ll have a solicitor talk to her before we do. And if we did get confirmatory details from her they could be easily discredited in court. She may even be persuaded to retract this confession. And we know where the jury’s sympathy will lie.’