“Here we are.”
It was a small room with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a tiny wardrobe, and a desk. It had not been decorated for many years, though the wallpaper had originally been unusual. Declan went over to the window. It looked out over a long field at the back of the house, with stables at the far end.
“It’s heaven,” he said.
“Hardly that. But I hope you can make it your own. The bathroom is there and your lavatory over there. There’s another one at the other end. We eat at half past seven. Make free of the house until then, and the grounds too, but best not to come upon Ranulph before he’s been prepared. I do hope you’ll be happy here.”
And sitting on his bed, Declan looked around him oozing contentment. This was his room. Not his and Patrick’s, or his and Stephen’s and John Paul’s, but his. He felt sure in his mind he could cope with the people in the house, their oddities, their animosities, their passions. He sat there for all of twenty minutes, savoring his luck, then he got up and looked out the window again: a long field, horses in the distance, high hills beyond them. This was good, this was natural, this was like home. He could have sung out one of those deceptively simple Irish ballads he had charmed the paying customers with in Haworth. More than the people in the house, this room, the field outside his window and the hills beyond, made him feel immensely contented, at peace, secure.
4
THE ARTIST AT HOME
Breakfast next morning was a slightly uneasy affair, as dinner the previous evening had been as well. Declan sensed that it was nothing to do with his own relationship with the people around the table, only apprehension about how things would go when he encountered the only member of the household he had thus far been kept away from. He reserved judgment on the situation at Ashworth, but his initial impression was that they were all terrified of that unseen presence—and that included Stephen, the only one who was willing to formulate anti-Ranulph sentiments.
Was he the only one, he wondered, to feel them?
It was made clear to him that, today at least, he would be wanted only when Ranulph Byatt was ready to paint.
“Daddy paints when he needs to paint,” said Martha Mates, with a metallic brightness in her voice. “Of course we don’t know when that will be, but probably around mid-morning. I’m sure you can find things to do until then.”
Declan decided it would be impolitic to just mooch around, and still more so to practice his guitar. Still, he needed something to calm his nerves. Nervousness was not usually a problem with him, and he concluded it was something he had caught, as one might catch the flu, in this house. When he had had his last piece of toast and marmalade he told Melanie (as he had studiously been calling her) that he would be in the front garden weeding when they needed him.
He enjoyed working in a garden: it was something he was very used to, it was conducive to thought—he had always been accustomed to think through any situation he found himself in—and he had considerable expertise at it, never for a moment being in doubt as to what should be torn out, what left to flower. He had been at it for nearly an hour and a half, and had come to the conclusion that if Ranulph Byatt was at all tolerable he could well stop at Ashworth for quite a while, when Melanie came to the front door and beckoned him. He went to the kitchen and washed his hands, and then together they proceeded again slowly up the dingy staircase. Declan felt a bit like a minor functionary accompanying the Queen.
“He’s quite excited, you know,” said Melanie, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice, or a sort of nannyish condescension. “I think it’s the prospect of seeing a new face.”
At the top they turned left instead of right, and progressed nearly the whole length of the landing. Eventually Melanie stopped at a door, gave Declan an encouraging smile, then tapped on it and opened it.
It was the atmosphere of the room that struck Declan first—or more accurately, the smell. It was an invalid’s room, and an old-fashioned invalid’s room at that. It breathed sickness and decrepitude. Embrocation, herbal inhalers, all manner of ancient remedies that some would call natural, others would call quack, gave the room a close, sickly feel.
“We air it as soon as he goes out,” whispered Melanie.
The next thing that Declan registered was the invalid. He was dressed—shirt, waistcoat, trousers—and sitting in an armchair, his daughter, Martha, standing beside him. He was the remains of an impressive, even intimidating man. Now he was long, very skinny, and his gaunt face was fallen in, only the intensely living eyes bearing witness to the force his personality had once had. But the glow that came from them was a burning, not a warming one, and Declan, educated by priests and nuns, immediately thought of hellfire.
“Hello, sir,” he said.
Ranulph Byatt harrumphed, and even that sound showed Declan that there was force in the voice as well as the eyes. It was a voice that he would have associated with a general more readily than with an artist.
“Come and help me up,” the voice said, after regarding Declan intensely for a second or two. “They’ve dressed me, you notice, my womenfolk. Why, you ask? Because they don’t want you to be revolted on your first morning by the sight of my ancient flesh.”
“I wouldn’t be that, sir,” said Declan, going over. When Martha Mates made to take her father’s other side, he said: “I think it’ll be easier if I do it on my own. I learned the technique with me old gran.”
He put his arm around the stooped shoulders and gently but deftly raised the old man to his feet. Once standing, Ranulph Byatt needed to pause to get his breath.
“So, I’m the successor to your old gran, am I?” he asked with the first trace of bitterness in his voice. “Well, you seem to have learned a thing or two. Forward now.”
Together they walked slowly to the door, then turned right. Martha and Melanie lingered in the background. The next door down, at the end of the landing, was open, and light was flooding out of it. Step by step they approached the light, then turned and entered the long room. Declan was astonished at its size. Two bedrooms had been made into one large studio by the removal of a wall, and also of the ceiling. The windows had been enlarged by making them into one long one, and part of the roof had been turned into a massive skylight. All this Declan registered only subconsciously, because he was helping Byatt slowly forward to a high-backed padded chair in front of an easel. Finally he positioned the old man directly in front of the chair, then eased him down into it.
“Well done, boy. You’ll do,” said Byatt.
Declan registered a glance passing between mother and daughter, one that mingled gratification and surprise.
“Sure, you’re no problem at all, sir,” he said.
Ranulph Byatt was again out of breath, and it was some time before he spoke.
“Now,” he said, “I want you to watch this carefully. We’ll only show you this once, mind. It may look difficult but it’s not. Martha!”
Martha Mates came over and took up a palette that stood on a stand beside Ranulph’s chair. There followed a process, which Declan followed intently, in which the artist gave instructions and Martha obeyed expertly.
“More of the blue—too much—a dash of the green. A little more. I’ll need some of the yellow.”
The process took ten minutes or more, and Declan registered carefully the paints that were currently in use. Martha was good at the job, but Declan had an odd sense that she was doing it without understanding and that this irritated Byatt. Yet her words always suggested that she loved and admired her father. Perhaps she was jealous of his art? Loved the man, hated the distraction of his genius? And perhaps it was because she did it without the devotion of the artistic acolyte that the job was now to be taken over by himself. If so there was a real danger that he would be found to be inadequate.
“Sometimes you have to sit in front of him and hold the palette close,” whispered Melanie. “Often for quite a long time.”
Declan nodded.
“Right,”
said Ranulph Byatt. “Did you get that, boy?”
“I think so, sir, most of it,” Declan said. Then he added modestly: “I expect I’ll get things wrong at first.”
“I expect you will. Well, let’s get on with it. Shoo!” Byatt turned his neck painfully to look at his womenfolk. “Don’t come back unless you’re sent for.” Then he turned to the easel, as if he had put his wife and daughter entirely out of his mind, and was glad to have done so. He took a broad brush from a jar beside the easel and sat considering.
Declan didn’t know much about art, and wasn’t even sure he knew what he liked. He recognized that the half-finished picture on the easel was not an abstract, but beyond that he could make no judgment on it. The colors were predominantly green and blue—a natural scene, then—and they were in great blocks of color: blue toward the top, a central section of green, with some yellow to the sides and at the front. Fields, Declan thought, and sky. But when by a natural association of ideas he raised his head and looked through the long window, he could see no resemblance between the picture and the long field and stables behind Ashworth, which the studio overlooked.
“Keep your mind on what you’re doing, and not on what I’m doing,” snarled Ranulph. Fine, thought Declan. Except that I’m not actually doing anything at the moment.
He soon was. Byatt eased himself forward, took a more delicate brush from the pot, and gazed intently at the picture. There was silence in the room for a minute or two.
“Take the palette and keep it close to my hand,” directed Byatt at last. “Kneel or sit—whichever is easier.”
Declan sat with his back to the canvas, holding the palette immediately under it. Now he had the best possible view of Byatt, who did not seem to mind, or even to register his gaze. Declan amused himself by trying to imagine the man as he had been in his prime. There were one or two photographs around the farmhouse, but he had not yet inspected them closely. He knew all about the effects of aging, though, from his own family, who were long-lived.
He saw Ranulph Byatt in his forties as tall—maybe six foot two—upright, with a good pair of shoulders and a decisive manner. The face had probably always been gaunt, and the gauntness had inevitably given him a forbidding air. That, combined with the glinting devilment in the eyes, must have made relationships difficult. Had he been capable of softness, of tenderness? Declan reserved judgment on that. Certainly Byatt seemed capable of inspiring devotion, discipleship. So had Adolf Hitler.
He kept returning in his mind to the eyes. They were not things Declan could study closely, because it seemed like impertinence while Byatt was painting, and Declan sensed that impertinence was something the man would never tolerate. But he did, finally, manage to get a sidelong look at those eyes, and it struck him still more forcibly that they were the last things to age; pale blue, piercing, merciless. If Byatt had been a schoolmaster, children would have quailed beneath that gaze. Headmasters too. He stared ahead at his picture, seeming to analyze, dissect as he painted. To him, Declan thought, nothing else seemed to exist as the brush—slowly, calculatedly—applied strokes sometimes bold, sometimes delicate. Nothing else exists, least of all me, he thought. So he was surprised when Ranulph Byatt spoke.
“Not the field,” he said. “Not the field I see in front of me. A field.”
Declan was quiet for a moment, then realized he was responding to his first action when looking at the picture.
“I see,” he said.
“I am brought down to painting imaginary landscapes,” Byatt went on, his voice harsh as he paused between strokes. “My field, a field I’ve seen, a field in a photograph, a field in someone else’s painting. Then they come together to become a field picture. . . . Pap. That’s all I can paint now. Small-gallery fodder. But I have to paint.”
“Do you never paint portraits?” asked Declan naively. The eyes were turned momentarily on him.
“Never! Cash-on-the-nail, painted-to-order stuff. I wouldn’t prostitute myself. I sometimes paint—how can I describe it to someone like yourself?—I paint my reactions to people, what effect their personalities have on me, pictures based on people, springing from them. Events, happenings too: I paint the impression they have on me, the force with which they impress me. But rarely, rarely . . .”
“And when you do that, would they be a more abstract kind of picture?” Declan asked.
“You could say that.” Byatt started painting again. Declan had the odd sense of being played with, as an angler plays with a fish. There was relish in the performance, as if Byatt enjoyed talking to someone totally ignorant of art more than he would have enjoyed talking to a fellow artist or a connoisseur. “I did think of ending my days painting hundreds of different views of that field outside, like that charlatan Bacon and his bloody popes. Couldn’t face it. And they wouldn’t even be gallery fodder. No one would have been interested at all. No, better as it is. Perhaps that fool Stephen will make me hate him so much that I can get a picture out of my hatred. . . . All right. That’s enough. Now I must sit and think.”
He waved Declan away. Not quite knowing what he should do, he got up and stood beside the palette stand. Ranulph Byatt sat back in his chair, gazing at the easel. Time passed. There was a total silence. Not even a clock ticked in the studio, and the rest of the house seemed to Declan almost exaggeratedly quiet. Declan felt as if he were mounting guard at some enormously impressive state funeral. When Byatt spoke, however, it was in tones of dissatisfaction and frustration.
“Why do I bother? Why do I plan tomorrow’s work? This stuff is on a level with my art-student work just after the war. I should be ashamed. . . . Come on: lift me up.”
So the earlier journey from room to room was done in reverse. Declan first put his arm across Byatt’s hunched shoulders and eased him up. The old man seemed already to be used to the routine, happy to rest his depleted height and weight on the young man. When, slowly but confidently, they reached the landing, Byatt paused: he had heard, as Declan had, a slight sound from the bottom of the stairs. He waited to get his breath, then roared:
“You don’t need to spy on us. He’ll do. You’re redundant for the moment, Martha. You can come and teach him about care of the brushes, then you can take your cards. Resume the husband hunt. I’m well suited with the lad here.”
As they continued with their walk, Declan’s mind registered two things: first, that Byatt’s hearing was as acute as his sight; second, that he dismissed his daughter from her place as his helper with all the relish of a Victorian mill owner sacking his hands. Whatever inspired his womenfolk’s devotion to him, it was not considerate treatment.
• • •
That evening Declan went with Stephen to the Grange. They picked up Jenny Birdsell and Arnold Mellors on the way. They had been standing by the big gate, talking and gesturing, and they volunteered their company rather than waiting to be asked. Stephen looked as if he could gladly have done without it.
The Grange was a nondescript pub, but one with angles and crannies, and the Ashworth party made for a corner that seemed to be theirs by tradition. While Stephen made for the bar to get the first round—and probably because he was not with them, Declan thought—Mrs. Birdsell said, “I hear things went awfully well today.”
“Not so bad,” said Declan.
“That’s wonderful. Because Ranulph doesn’t take to everybody.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“It must feel such a privilege to be approved of by him, and to be able to help him.” She looked up, and saw Stephen handing over a note at the bar. “But I mustn’t say any more, or I’ll be accused of sentimentality! The most terrible of crimes! Isn’t it odd to be called sentimental when you care passionately about England’s greatest living artist?”
Declan said nothing. He felt himself on unknown terrain, where silence was the best policy. He had an odd sense of being drawn into a conspiracy that he felt was nothing to do with him. People who said they cared passionately about something usually were usi
ng this as an excuse for any kind of shabby conduct or dirty trick. Stephen’s sardonic expression when he sat down with them showed that he knew the direction the conversation had taken.
“Now tell us about yourself,” he said, handing Declan his half pint. “And about Ireland. If you went by your countrymen’s reputation, you wouldn’t think there was an Irishman alive who drank half pints.”
Declan was relieved—and he saw Jenny and Arnold were disappointed—by the change of subject. He started hesitantly. He didn’t tell them about his drunken father, or his drunken uncle, or, come to that, about his occasionally drunken aunts, but he got into his stride when he talked about growing up in rural Ireland, the perpetual fight against poverty, the struggle for education, the still-powerful priests. Soon he was talking well: in that respect, at least, he was the Englishman’s stereotypical Irishman. When he finished it was time for the next round.
“I’ll get these,” said Arnold Mellors, getting up. “Same again, Stephen? Declan?”
“And I’ll have another vodka and tonic,” said Jenny Birdsell. “Then my daughter won’t smell it on my breath.”
“That’s a legend, Jenny,” said Stephen with a world-weary sigh. “Anyway, she guesses you’ve been drinking when you fall upstairs.”
“Sure, it’s a terrible thing,” said Jenny in a stage Irish voice, and smiling at Declan, “to have a pious daughter who’s always shakin’ her head at her ould mother’s lapses from grace.”
Declan smiled noncommittally.
When Mellors returned with the drinks he was followed by a short, squat, waddling figure in a frilly navy blue frock; she in her turn was followed by a man, slightly taller but hardly more easy on the eye, dressed in baggy trousers that seemed to date from decades past, with shirt open at the neck, and a straw hat at a rakish angle that did nothing to dispel his air of bile and self-preoccupation. He was carrying two glasses.
“Mind if we join you?” the woman said. Jenny Birdsell nodded unenthusiastically.
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 4