The women, he was sure, were still downstairs. He opened the door quietly. The landing was dimly lit as usual. From Ranulph’s bedroom he could hear the familiar sound of stertorous breathing. He closed his door and walked lightly along the length of the corridor toward the studio. The door was shut, as he had left it, but it opened quietly, and in the deepening twilight he felt for the light switch. The room flooded with artificial light, making the encroaching night outside seem blacker. On the stand was the new canvas, with the raging sea already painted and pointing excitingly forward to a disturbing picture. But it wasn’t the new canvas that interested Declan.
He crossed the room to the corner where the older paintings were stacked. He bent down to go through them, but found that even the bright studio light didn’t penetrate to this corner powerfully enough for him to get a good view on a mere flip through the stacked canvases. He stood up and began going through them one by one, holding them at arm’s length, so as to take them in.
The ones at the outer end of the stack seemed to be recent ones: they felt new, smelled new, and were natural scenes, not unlike the two paintings Declan already knew. He decided these were paintings that had not yet been sent for sale, or perhaps ones that Ranulph adjudged failures even by the lowered standards applied to his current work. That latter judgment seemed to him justified when he went farther into the stack, and decided that the older pictures there seemed to his inexpert eye all unsatisfactory in some way.
Declan nearly gave up but, stifling his disappointment, he persisted. The pictures he was looking at were simply framed in a thin wooden band, but he saw that farther back there were more elaborate frames. He took up the first of these, however, without any great feeling of anticipation.
The picture hit him. It was like getting a sock on the jaw from someone you’d just been having a decorous conversation with. He stood there paralyzed by a horrific energy. The painting spilled over from the canvas onto the frame, with red and black daubed roughly over the dark, handsome wood. Red predominated on the canvas too, but gradually Declan perceived other elements: two touches of blue came to suggest eyes, strands of brown crisscrossing down the picture from top to bottom suggested disheveled hair. He stood transfixed: this was a face, but it was not a living face. It was a face that was dead, and dead in a horrible way. It was, he felt sure, recently dead: it was viewed as a sudden nightmare discovery. It was a scream of—what?—surprised horror, or gut-wrenching shock. And slowly, as he gazed on, the frame became not just nominally but really part of the picture: the face was seen through an opening—quite what sort of an opening, Declan was unable to decide. It seemed more than just a hole or a gap. Some jagged lines of bluish white low down in the picture suggested broken glass. Looking, trying to let the picture tell him something, Declan became convinced he was looking at a face through a window. A broken window. Of course, it suddenly came to him: a car window. A road accident—and was this the face of the elder daughter of the family?
“And what exactly do you think you’re doing, young man?”
• • •
“Sure I felt I was frozen to the spot, Patrick,” wrote Declan next evening to his favorite brother, the one a year older than himself, the one to whom he felt closest. “It wasn’t just the surprise—how the old woman had got up those stairs without my hearing her, I’ll never know, but I suppose I was so taken up with the picture I heard nothing—it was the whole look of her, standing there with her back as straight as a ramrod, and her voice too, the tone of it. It was cold, threatening, like a judge’s when he’s going to hand out a really tough sentence. Like Father Rafferty at school, when you’d done something that really riled him. All I could do was stammer out that I wanted to look at the pictures because I was hoping there would be a really good one, one he’d done when he was in his prime, so I could see why he was considered such a great artist.
“That seemed to satisfy Melanie (that’s what she tells me to call her, though it’s difficult, and doesn’t seem right, her being so old). Her whole body relaxed, but she said, ‘I think you’ve seen enough for today,’ and waited while I put the picture back in place and went out onto the landing. She turned off the light, then waited while I walked back to my bedroom. I swear it was like those stories of boarding school we used to read, with me as the boy who’s been up to something, and her as the matron!
“I felt upset, because they’d all been so nice to me up to then. Making me comfortable, like, and I appreciated that because I don’t think it’s really in their natures to make people comfortable—or to be comfortable, come to that. They’re more prickly than companionable, if you take my meaning. But Melanie and Martha had always been nice to me, and said how well I was doing. ‘I realize you won’t be here forever,’ Melanie said once, ‘but Martha and I enjoy the rest while you are here.’ And then to come down so heavy just because I was taking a look at the great man’s pictures! He’s an artist, for God’s sake. Doesn’t he want people looking at his pictures?
“Sometimes I think they’re mad as hatters, Patrick. Sometimes I catch him looking at me, and it’s like he’s sizing me up to make a picture out of me, though he says he doesn’t paint portraits. I can’t put it into words, but it’s like I’m with people who are out on an entirely different wavelength from mine. And I’m on my own trying to get the hang of them. I miss having you to fight my battles for me, the way you always used to. I’ve never felt so alone in my life!”
8
STORM CLOUDS
Declan felt more than a little chastened next morning, during the painting session with Ranulph. He did not know how much of his visit of curiosity to the studio the night before had been reported to the painter. He hoped nothing at all, and certainly there was at first no observable difference in Byatt’s behavior, which surely there would have been if he had known. He was quiet, and volunteered no confidences and no reprimand. The routine in the studio was the same as it had been every day since Declan had come to Ashworth. Declan got him to his chair, and then stood silent while the old man surveyed the canvas. He could see him contemplating the space that would become the sky, and he imagined him seeing it with his mind’s eye: an angry, vengeful expanse of gray-and-black cloud flecked with white. But in the end Byatt settled on the cliff top as his next area of concern, and had Declan mix up a dark green mixture of shades, and began applying it, with black streaks, to the central area of the picture.
Yet there was a difference. Declan didn’t notice it until he was squatting, back to the canvas, presenting the palette for his employer’s use. Normally he could have been a dumbwaiter or a hat stand for all the visual notice that his employer took of him—he might talk to him, a phrase or two, or shout at him, insult him, even, but he never looked at him with the slightest interest beyond that of seeing that the palette was being held in the best position for his work. When he gave him the looks that Declan had reported to his brother was at other times, when he was helping Ranulph to dress, for example, or getting him into bed. That day, however, he twice contemplated Declan for some time—really looked at his face, as if he was trying to fix it in his mind’s eye. Whatever he may have said about portraiture, Declan could not help wondering if he was being looked at with a view to a picture in the future. He felt he was being sized up not by one person judging another, but by a painter judging a subject. The experience made him uneasy.
The next day Ranulph expressed dissatisfaction with the green of the cliff top, and sat glumly in front of the picture for some time.
“I should have gone at the sky first.”
Declan wondered whether to say he had expected him to, but thought he shouldn’t venture into the practicalities of picture making. So he just said, “The sky should be really interesting.” Byatt’s response was something close to a harrumph.
Grays and blacks and blues were the chosen colors of the day, and Ranulph went at the top of the picture with a will that took the form of excitement, tension, and aggression, emotions that al
ternately seemed to take control of his frail body.
“Keep still, you bloody fool!” he bawled at Declan at one point. Declan, who had not moved, continued to do nothing.
At the end of the session the area around the cliff top had been painted: a lowering, changing, threatening sky, but flecked as Declan had imagined it with white. The area farther away and closer to the frame remained to be done. Declan wondered whether the sky would spill over onto the frame before the picture was finished. At one point Byatt muttered, “The cliff top will have to be done over,” but at the end of the session Declan was gratified to see for the first time Byatt looking at the results of his morning’s work with something approaching satisfaction. It was a revelation, the happiness, the savage happiness, on his face. Declan was still more surprised when the old painter said, “Tell Ivor Aston he can come and take a look.”
Declan had in fact seldom spoken to Ivor Aston since the evening in the Grange.
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to do that,” he said. “Shall I ask his sister as well?”
Ranulph snorted.
“That silly bitch? Not on your life. She’d suggest I put a bunny rabbit in a sou’wester on the water’s edge.”
Declan burst out laughing, the first time he had done so in Byatt’s presence. When he stopped he realized he was being looked at again, through narrowed eyelids.
The permission for Ivor Aston to see the picture, which was almost a summons to view it, was unprecedented, and Declan decided he should convey it as soon as possible to the chosen acolyte. Ranulph Byatt, after a snack for lunch, went into a sleep that Declan could see was born of exhaustion, and was going to last through the afternoon. When he saw Aston returning home along the lane from Stanbury, sketchbook in hand, he slipped out of Ashworth and met him at the gate.
“Mr. Aston—”
“Call me Ivor, dear boy.”
Declan’s quick glance took in the thin legs, and the baggy shorts and rakish straw hat that were the man’s current gear, and decided he would rather not.
“Er, I have a message from Mr. Byatt. You know he’s started a new painting?”
“So I’d heard.”
“Well, he said to tell you that you could come and take a look at it.”
“Really? Really?” Ivor Aston looked up at Declan with a surprise, a gratification, a conceit that Declan found very comic. “Now, that is unusual. That is an honor. Have you any idea why he should have asked me to look at this one?”
The man was oozing self-congratulation like a bullfrog who had received a testimonial to its bullfroggery. Declan would have rather liked to put him down, but couldn’t think of any way of doing it.
“Well—I have an idea, but I don’t know anything about painting. Perhaps it would be best if you judged for yourself.”
“Yes, indeed. When should I come to—to view?”
“Maybe this afternoon, around teatime? He should be still asleep, and I shan’t see him before then, so he won’t have a chance to change his mind.”
Ivor Aston’s face fell.
“You think it might be a whim?”
“He has a great many whims, Mr. Aston. Best to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, of course. . . . He hasn’t asked Charmayne?”
“No, he hasn’t.” Ivor Aston’s perkiness immediately returned. “I don’t think you should mention it to her till after you’ve seen the picture.”
“No, I shan’t. But I shall certainly mention it after!”
They arranged to meet outside the farmhouse around four o’clock. Declan said that, to cover his back, he would tell Melanie. When he did so he had the impression she bridled.
“I don’t know why Ranulph needs any other judgment to tell him he’s doing good work again,” she said.
She could have meant “any judgment other than his own,” but Declan rather got the impression she meant “any judgment other than mine.”
Ivor had, slightly comically, spruced himself up for his special viewing. When he came over from his cottage to the gate of Ashworth he was wearing his best (though still baggy) trousers, a collar and tie, and a jacket that had strange suggestions of early Beatles. He looked around nervously toward Charmayne’s cottage, and urged Declan inside as quickly as possible.
“She’s quite capable of coming over and making a scene, even of forcing her way in,” he said in urgent but muted tones.
Once inside they tiptoed upstairs, registered the heavy breathing from Ranulph’s bedroom with a conspiratorial wink, then silently made their way to the studio. Declan, leading the way, felt like some kind of impresario. Once there, in the room flooded with afternoon light, Ivor Aston looked at the picture on its easel and said, “Oh!”
He stood in front of it for several minutes, his affectation suddenly sloughed off. His face was intent, absorbed. He looked like a technician surveying some wonderful new piece of equipment. He subjected the painted sections to close scrutiny, then stood well back, as if trying to imagine the completed work.
“It’s like a miracle,” he said, his voice hushed. “A return to old form. Not his greatest periods, of course—that would be altogether too much to hope for at his age. But the energy! The eye for effect! The command!”
“His greatest period—would that be his red period?” Declan asked.
“One of them, one of them. Some would say that was the very greatest.”
“There’s a picture in the stack over there . . .”
Aston ignored his pointing hand and rushed into speech.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to pry. It would betray Ranulph’s trust. This is sufficient joy for the moment.”
Yet somehow Declan felt sure that Aston knew the picture. He pretended to be abashed.
“I just wondered if that was the red period.”
“There are examples in all the best galleries,” said Aston in rather a lordly voice. Declan persisted.
“And this—?”
“Oh, not in the same league. One couldn’t expect it, with his physical condition, and at his time of life. But the power, the energy—I just can’t imagine how he’s recovered it. The effect is almost frightening.”
And, looking at the picture, Declan could see what he meant.
Aston stayed for some minutes longer, still intent on the half-finished canvas. Then he said, “Mellors ought to be told he’s not dealing in gallery fodder any longer, but real pictures. The man’s got no visual sense, and probably wouldn’t realize.”
The switch to money talk surprised Declan a little, but the remark confirmed his impression that Arnold Mellors was an intermediary with the galleries that marketed late Byatts. The comment that he had no visual sense he dismissed as the routine spite and jealousy of a close but not united community.
After all this concentrated art worship, or hero worship, Declan felt the need for fresh air. He left the house with Ivor Aston, but at the gate he felt his hand on his arm, detaining him there.
“I hope Charmayne is watching,” Aston hissed, ostensibly looking in any direction except his sister’s cottage. “She’ll be livid with rage.” Unable to continue the pantomime any longer, he opened the gate, and the pair ambled in the direction of Aston’s little cottage. To Declan’s alarm the talk turned to personal matters. “Can you imagine what it was like, coming out—she’ll have told you I’ve been inside—coming out and finding her here?”
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“Good God, no! I’d arranged it all with Ranulph and Melanie from Strangeways. I’d known them both from before, of course—worshiped his work for years. I knew I could make a modest living from my own painting. It seemed ideal—idyllic, almost, though I knew Ranulph could be difficult. That’s always been his reputation: difficult and demanding. And then to come out and find her already in residence!”
Declan was too young to avoid asking the obvious.
“You don’t get on?”
Ivor Aston turned and faced him, utterly serious.
; “Sometimes I feel I could murder her. That wouldn’t be sensible, would it? I’d be the first to be suspected. Everyone around here knows how I feel about her. Mind you, she asks for it—by Jiminy she does! She attaches herself to me, especially if I’m likely to meet anyone, talk to anyone, have a drink anywhere. It’s as if she’s saying she’s my warder, taking me everywhere in handcuffs. She’s trying to convey the idea that I can’t be trusted, that I’m a man of unbridled and disgusting passions, and if she wasn’t around I’d let rip with them and do dreadful things to people. Do I strike you like that?”
“Er, no, no—of course not.”
“Thank you, dear boy. I am not. I was put away for looking at pictures, and sharing them with other like-minded people. It was a substitute for doing! I know doing would be wrong, and I accept that. But if I asked you in now, within thirty seconds she’d be banging on the door.”
“To protect my virtue?”
“To make people think your virtue was under threat. She doesn’t give a damn about who does what or to whom. If Ranulph was in question he’d have carte blanche in her eyes to do whatever he liked with whoever he fancied doing it with or to. Down to the farm animals. That woman is evil, quite relentless. I have become her obsession, the mainstay of her existence. Her whole aim in life is to make mine a misery.”
“Why don’t you leave? Move somewhere else?”
“She’d follow. Anyway, why should I?” He puffed himself up very unattractively. “Why should I leave Ranulph? Being close to him is the greatest joy imaginable, and I organized it. I’m the only person here who is intellectually and creatively equipped to appreciate his genius. You can tell that, can’t you, by today—by his wanting me to see the new picture? I’m not a great artist, but Ranulph’s life would suffer if I were to leave, not just mine. She’s the interloper. If anyone is to leave, it should be her. . . . I won’t ask you in.”
And he slipped through the front door of his cottage and shut it decisively. Turning, Declan saw that they were being observed, but on the instant of his seeing it Charmayne’s head disappeared from the downstairs window of her cottage. Declan wandered down to the field, said hello to Hector the horse, looked in on the stables and wondered when they were going to get the old car that was garaged there repaired. It had gone wrong a week ago, and since then had been forgotten. Declan rather fancied learning to drive. He could become handyman-chauffeur—if he stayed that long.
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 8