“This is cozy!” she said cheerily.
A sight too cozy, thought Declan gloomily. The only thing that wasn’t cozy was Charmayne herself. Changing the image in his mind, he told himself that her body had all the grace of a concrete mixer, even though it was clad in a billowy navy dress with the odd tape or streamer hanging down in the same material from random parts of it, suggesting that if you pulled one the dress would either fall to the floor or draw apart, like curtains. Declan put the thought from him.
“You take sugar, I bet,” said Charmayne in a conspiratorial, brown owl sort of voice. “Help yourself. How are you getting on at the big house?”
“Really well,” said Declan with rather more confidence than he felt. “Mr. Byatt and I don’t have any problems with each other. Not so far, anyway.”
“Call him Ranulph. We all do, when we are not in the Presence.” She giggled. “What is he painting now?”
“He’s just finished a painting of fields. He’s looking at old pictures of his now, and photographs. I think it will be a painting of a seashore with cliffs. Though he’s also talking about painting something angry. He was going to begin last week, but he says he’s got to meditate it a lot more.”
“How exciting!” said Charmayne, relentlessly girlish. “I would so like . . . but it’s naughty of me to ask!”
“What?”
“To tiptoe in some time when Ranulph is asleep and won’t be disturbed, to have a peek at the work in progress.”
“You mentioned that. You’d have to ask Melanie. It’s her house.”
“I suppose so. It’s just that she always asks my brother at the same time as she asks me. I’d so like to drink in a new painting on my own.”
“You’d have to sort that out yourselves,” said Declan doggedly, ignoring the disappointment in her pale green eyes.
“If you say so. Of course, I do realize that Ivor is much more of an artist than I am. My own work”—she waved her arm around the room—“is popular art, and it doesn’t even have the merit of being particularly popular!”
She laughed, a hollow sound that embarrassed Declan. He got up to hide his discomfiture and looked at the pictures which crowded the walls to an extent that suggested their unsalability. They were all of animals—moles, badgers, foxes, hamsters, mingling with the more frequent dogs and cats—and even when the creatures were not wearing aprons or policemen’s helmets or chefs’ hats they were given a human touch that some might have thought delightful, others might have considered landed the pictures in no-man’s-land where the animals were interesting neither as animals nor as humans. Declan sat down again and took up his tea.
“I do sell some,” said Charmayne, unnerved by his lack of the conventional politenesses. “To greeting card manufacturers, or people who make pottery for children. I make no claims for them.”
“They’re . . . very pretty,” said Declan.
“Oh, they’re nothing. Of course as I say, I realize that Ivor is much more of an artist, but I always feel . . .” She paused, threw him a look that was birdlike, and could be imagined coming from a carrion crow, and then leaned unpleasantly forward in her chair. “I don’t know whether you’ve heard.”
“Heard?”
“About Ivor. Well, you’re bound to hear sooner or later, so I may as well tell you.” Declan was not so innocent of the big world that he didn’t recognize this ploy. He found the relish with which the woman thrust herself still farther forward distasteful. “He’s been inside. For quite a long while.”
“I see,” said Declan. He felt himself being willed to ask what for, so he said nothing.
Charmayne looked disconcerted, but then flicked her tongue all the way around her lips.
“For possessing and disseminating material calculated to deprave and corrupt. Child porn. Kiddies doing awful things and having unspeakable things done to them. Doesn’t it make you sick?”
“It’s . . . very unpleasant,” ventured Declan. It was a subject on which you could hardly say less.
“I brought him here to live with me because he needs someone, but . . . well, we’ve never jelled, if you know what I mean. And it’s always seemed to me that in Ivor’s pictures there are . . . traces of his obsession, his tastes, if you catch my meaning.”
It would be difficult not to.
“I must be going,” said Declan, setting his cup and saucer down on the table and beginning the process of getting up. Charmayne Churton ignored him. She was gazing ahead of her in a pose of deep thought, as if meditating a pronouncement.
“I can accept that depravity can contribute to great art,” she said, as if she were fulfilling an engagement at Delphi. “But when it contributes to third-rate art it neither enriches it nor excuses itself.”
Declan slipped out to return to his mowing. He did not meditate on Charmayne’s words because he had already decided there was no meaning to them. What did interest him was her relationship with her brother: being jealous of him, broadcasting his unsavory past, yet sticking close to him, in some way needing him. There were relationships in Declan’s own family that made him recognize the twin, contradictory impulses, though he could not explain them.
That evening Ranulph Byatt was too tired to go down to dinner. Having heard the women go down the stairs Declan went along to the bathroom to put a flannel over his face, only to find Stephen there cleaning his teeth.
“Hi,” he said, waiting.
“Hi.” Stephen spat out toothpaste and water. “I saw you going into Charmayne’s cottage this afternoon. George medals have been awarded for less.”
“Just for a cup of tea.”
“I should hope so. Well, at least you got out alive.”
Declan grinned, playing it cool.
“She didn’t make any advances. In fact, I didn’t get the idea that was what she was interested in.”
“No, straightforward lust isn’t the Ashworth gang’s besetting sin.”
“Isn’t it?” said Declan. Then, feeling rather daring, he added: “But husband hunting is what your grandfather accuses your mother of.”
Stephen stood up and looked at him, an expression of amused incredulity on his face.
“Isn’t language a strange thing? Is that the idea you got? That my mother is desperate to find a new husband?”
“What else could I think? That is what your grandfather said, isn’t it?”
“It’s what he said. But his meaning was quite different. He wasn’t saying she was desperate to find a new husband. He was saying she was desperate to find her old one.”
7
STRAWS IN THE WIND
“So what do you think?” said Ranulph Byatt to Declan about a week later, during a morning session in the studio.
Declan toyed with the idea of buying time by saying “Think?” but rejected it. Byatt was old, but he was not a fool. By now they understood each other very well, could almost be said to like each other, and Declan knew that he was being asked his opinion of the situation at Ashworth.
“I think you’ve got yourself a little group of disciples here,” he said, “without . . . without seeming to want them.”
Ranulph laughed wheezily.
“You were going to say ‘without doing anything to deserve them,’” he said, in a tone of good humor. “That’s not true. My painting got me my disciples.”
“Of course,” said Declan. “But you don’t feel the need to be nice to them, treat them well.”
“I don’t. They’re fools. Admiring my paintings, or anybody’s paintings, is no guarantee of high intelligence. Fools they remain. Encourage fools and you confirm them in their foolishness. What else do you think?”
Declan considered. He realized he was being asked to bring into the open any stray thoughts he had about his employer’s habits and situation.
“You’re a painter, but you don’t seem to care about your surroundings.”
“You mean the house I live in? I’m too old, I don’t care any longer, I don’t like fuss. As
you probably know by now I was bequeathed this place by a silly old thing who thought I painted beautiful landscapes, and I just left it as it was.”
“Yet you’ve a stack of pictures in the corner there, and others around the house just piled up. For some reason you don’t feel the need to put them on the walls.”
Ranulph Byatt shrugged.
“Now you are sounding naive. Not every picture is to be lived with, certainly not all of mine,” he said. “And most of the recent stuff is not worth hanging.”
“Yet you go on painting.”
The old man stared up fiercely, waving his paintbrush in Declan’s face.
“Of course I go on painting. It’s my whole existence, the thing everything in my life has been about. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive, mentally alive. If I couldn’t paint at all I’d—take something. And who knows? Something may come back, the spark light itself again, or whatever silly, inadequate image one uses for the glory of being able to paint. Meanwhile”—he gestured at the canvas—“the junk keeps the wolf from the door.”
“I’m sure you’re not in want.”
“What would you know about it? Do you think I should just live off the old age pension or something?”
“No, of course not.”
“I’ve always been used to the best—well, not always, but for years now: the best wines, the best food, someone making sure of my well-being. Living comfortably is what Melanie expects, and she’s right. Even that fool Stephen is right in his way: the grandson of Ranulph Byatt should go to Oxford, even if the college has to be bribed to take him. It’s a matter of pride, my boy, knowledge of my rightful place. I’m not having a grandson of mine going to the Polytechnic of Solihull, just as I wouldn’t be fobbed off with a mere knighthood.”
“I see, sir,” said Declan, who found the sentiments prehistoric.
“But it all costs money,” said Byatt ruefully.
“Maybe Stephen shouldn’t be thinking about university at all.”
Byatt grinned bitterly.
“Maybe you would be right—if he had other skills. He hasn’t even got what today they call ‘social skills.’ He can’t get on with people, and nobody likes him. He’s no bent for selling things, or making money out of thin air, like the yuppies used to. And he hasn’t got a smidgen of creative talent. No, universities are made for people like him. If you’ve got the responsibility for a boy without any of the talents, you buy time, and maybe a third-class degree to boot, and you hope you’re dead by the time a decision has to be made. . . . If only Catriona had lived.”
“Catriona?”
Byatt was looking ahead, a sharp, unfathomable expression on his face. Declan looked at him as intently as he dared, and wondered if what he was seeing, for the first time, was a sign of love. If so it was not a sort of love he recognized.
“My other daughter. The brilliant one dies, and the fool lives on. Punishment, do you think? It’s like a sort of bargain: I’ll give you all this”—he waved his hand around the studio, as if it symbolized all his creative gifts—“and I’ll surround you with fools. Beethoven seems to have had plenty of fools around him, and Dickens too. I bet Shakespeare did as well, and he married one, which no one could say I did. . . .”
Declan registered the sort of artistic fraternity in which Ranulph Byatt would like to include himself but he was in truth only half listening. He was watching the man’s hands. On the canvas was suggested the broad outlines of a cliff landscape, but they were outlines only: nothing had been filled in when they resumed work that morning. But in the past few minutes Byatt had been worrying at the blue and white and gray tints on his palette, and now he began in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture to paint a boiling, surging foam, a sea both angry and destructive, and he did it with strokes that had an energy and range such as Declan had never seen in all the twenty or more sessions they had had in the studio thus far.
Byatt didn’t speak again, but worked in silence until he signaled that he wanted to be taken back to his room. Once there he made Declan take him straight to his bed, where he lay down, still fully clothed, and immediately went off to sleep. Declan diagnosed complete exhaustion, and tiptoed to the door. It was a revelation to him of how creative work at a high pitch could drain body as well as mind.
That evening Stephen came to dinner, knowing that his grandfather had said that he was too tired to. He made no contribution to the conversation, and sat immersed in his own thoughts—not glowering (which he could do very powerfully, when he had a mind to), but mentally absent on other business.
“I see that work has started on the new picture,” said Melanie in her social voice, over a starter of duck pâté.
“Yes, isn’t that marvelous!” chipped in Martha. Both women looked toward Declan.
“He started on the sea quite suddenly,” he said. “I’d thought it was going to be a summer scene, but he seized the brush and suddenly I saw it was a very rough sea—stormy, wintry, all froth and foam. He was going at it with great energy for twenty minutes or so, using actions I didn’t know were in him, not any longer. I’m afraid he tired himself out.”
Melanie nodded wisely, asserting her role as the one who knew him best.
“That’s the problem,” she said. “But of course if he’s doing good work that compensates him.”
“Of course.”
“What had he been talking about?”
“Oh—” Declan stopped when he realized that if he mentioned Ranulph’s dead daughter, he could distress her mother and sister. “Oh—old family matters.”
Melanie was not deceived or put off.
“Was it Catriona?”
“Yes, it was.”
Martha made a noise into her plate. Declan decided it was a sob. Melanie looked at her, then went back to her food.
“What was the letter you had this morning?” she finally asked Martha, as Mrs. Max cleared away plates.
“Oh, just my man in Peckham.”
“Your private detective in Peckham,” said Melanie with scorn in her voice. “Doesn’t it sound seedy? Something out of Muriel Spark. I presume he had no news?”
“He thinks I ought to go down and have a talk with him before too long,” said Martha. “Discuss strategies.”
“He has no news, but he’s stringing you along.”
Martha pursed her lips.
“You really ought to be glad, Mother, if I can save Daddy some of the expense of Stephen’s education.”
“To do that you will have to first find Morgan, he will then have to be in reasonable financial circumstances, and you will then have to begin the process of extracting money from him. Stephen, if he gets a degree at all, will be graduated and, one would hope, started in a profession before we will see a penny.”
Martha’s face assumed an expression of obstinacy, or rather its habitual expression was intensified.
“I don’t anticipate it taking anything like as long as that. In any case, we can recoup the money retrospectively. It’s right that Stephen’s father should pay for his education.”
Melanie sighed. Her attitude resembled her husband’s when he talked about being surrounded by fools.
“You’ve been happy enough to rely on your father for the last twenty years, Martha. Even when he was around, Morgan was hardly a whiz kid financially. He found it difficult to earn anything, and if by any chance he did he was reluctant to let go of it any way except across a bar. You’re on to a very bad wicket, Martha.”
“That’s not what my man in Peckham says.”
Melanie sighed theatrically.
“He wouldn’t, would he? I really don’t know why you need this. You’ve got plenty of interests.”
“The Women’s Institute,” said Martha, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Oh, yes—I do get a great deal of stimulation from the Women’s Institute.”
The rest of the meal passed largely in silence, but as they got up after the gooseberry fool, Melanie turned to Declan.
“
Catriona was our elder daughter. She died in an accident many years ago.”
“He told me she was dead, but not how.”
“It is better Ranulph doesn’t talk about it.”
“He brought it up himself. It’s difficult to—”
“Of course Ranulph is not to be contradicted,” said Melanie, as if this were something laid down in the Pentateuch. “But don’t bring it up yourself, and if he does, try to lead him tactfully away from the subject.”
“I’ll try,” said Declan, mentally adding that in his view Ranulph Byatt was the most unleadable person he had ever had to do with. Declan lingered behind in the dining room while the women went out slowly, Martha adapting her pace to Melanie’s, her bitterness seeming evaporated. At the door they turned toward the living room. Declan followed Stephen up the stairs.
“Do you remember your father?” he asked him. Stephen paused at the bend of the flight, his face a mask of blank mystification. Declan realized he hadn’t the slightest idea what had been talked about at dinner. At last he said, “I suppose if I do at all it’s as a presence, a shape. Anything I know about him comes from things I’ve been told.”
“That wouldn’t necessarily be reliable.”
Stephen shrugged.
“A child’s memories wouldn’t necessarily be reliable either. Everyone seems to agree he was nothing very much, and if my mother does succeed in finding him she’ll be in for a big disappointment. Someone has said that his most likely address is cardboard city. Still, I suppose it gives her an interest.”
“Is that what she needs?”
Stephen shot him a look that said he was getting much too interested in family matters.
“It’s a lot healthier than being obsessed with her own father.”
He turned abruptly, marched up the remaining stairs, and went to his bedroom, slamming the door.
Declan had thought to go out that evening, but then decided against it. He lay on his bed reading Wilbur Smith until he heard Stephen leave his bedroom, closing the door more quietly this time, then tripping down the stairs and out the front door. Declan lay his book on the little table beside the bed.
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 7