On the way back to the farmhouse he heard voices from Ivor Aston’s cottage, one male, one female. They were raised in anger. Sibling rivalry, he might have thought, if he’d been familiar with the term. Or just plain sibling antipathy. But Declan had no personal experience of either emotional state: in his family the children were closely united, in opposition to their father and in defense of their mother.
That evening Ranulph Byatt came down to dinner, but in an unusually good mood. That did not mean a sunny demeanor or jokes, but it did mean he was uncharacteristically quiet and directed no barbed remarks or brutal insults at anyone. Stephen not being there helped. He complimented Mrs. Max on the meal, which was no more than she deserved: her cooking was superb in the traditional English mode, being solid and satisfying if not particularly imaginative. It was a kind of cooking that Declan could relate to, being not too far from the sort of meals his mother might have cooked for him at home. Mrs. Max accepted the compliment with no pleasurable embarrassment, as only her right. Mrs. Max, Declan thought, was the most stable person in the Ashworth community. The reason, perhaps, was that she was the one least impressed by Ranulph Byatt’s fame.
After dinner Melanie did an unusual thing. Instead of going back to the drawing room as she usually did, she followed Declan laboriously upstairs, and after a minute or two knocked on his door. When he called “Come in” she entered, leaning heavily on her stick, and went over and sat on his bed. Ah, ha! thought Declan. What’s up? He went on strapping his guitar into its case.
“You’ve been a remarkable success, Declan,” Melanie said, looking at him in a thoughtful way.
“Thank you, Melanie,” he said, genuinely pleased.
“You only have to look at the new picture. The transformation is remarkable.”
“Oh, I claim no credit for Mr. Byatt’s picture,” protested Declan, almost blushing. Melanie ignored him.
“You can’t fake that kind of confidence, that commitment, that strength. You either have it or you don’t. When Ranulph loses it the pictures—though perfectly competent, technically accomplished—become somehow listless, inert. They proclaim, ‘I am competent,’ but they also proclaim, ‘I am no more than competent,’ because everything in Ranulph tingles with the sense that he could do more. Do you understand me?”
“I think I do, Melanie.”
“I think you do too, Declan. You’re a remarkable boy.”
Declan seized on the word as a diversion, and for once looked her straight in the eye, with new confidence.
“I’m a man, Melanie—in my own estimation, at least.”
She considered this for a moment.
“You’re quite right,” she conceded, with a little bow of the head. “Forgive an old lady. A young man you are. . . . But the wonderful thing is, the power is returning. I can’t tell you how that warms me. One puts up with so much. I don’t need to tell you that Ranulph is a difficult man. Stephen exaggerates, in the bitterness of his mediocrity, but Ranulph is ruthless, selfish, totally inconsiderate—that I couldn’t deny.”
“He’s never been too bad with me,” said Declan. “Not after the first day or two.”
“No, I think he likes you.” She said it as if it was the most astonishing thing in the world. Declan, who was not conscious he had ever been disliked, decided that the remark was flattering rather than insulting. “We are very grateful that you . . . put up with him. You have a remarkably tolerant and equable nature.” She paused, as she had several times in the conversation, as if she found the next stage of it difficult. “And, with all his faults, we have to recognize that he has genius. Artists are very different from the rest of us, Declan.”
“I accept that, ma’am.”
“Melanie. I’m sure you will have got some inkling of it from your weeks here, from being close to Ranulph as you have been. You mustn’t wonder if he sometimes . . . surprises you.”
“Surprises me? Sure, I’m not used to that kind of person. He surprises me all the time.”
“I mean that Ranulph sometimes has fancies—needs—and he may ask you to do things that . . . surprise you. Maybe even shock you.”
“I see,” said Declan slowly. “Could you give me some idea of the kind of things you mean?”
Melanie waved her hand.
“Who can say? He has fancies. Ranulph is a genius, and we ordinary mortals could never predict his whims. I’m just letting you know he may have them, and I hope that you will be able to . . . go along with them.”
Declan looked at her steadily.
“I’m a country boy, and haven’t seen anything of the world yet, but I’ll do my best to be broad-minded.”
“That’s it: be broad-minded. If you’re that I’m sure you’ll want to go along with anything Ranulph suggests.”
“If it doesn’t go against my religion, Melanie.”
She looked nonplused. Then she frowned, in puzzlement or perhaps annoyance.
“I didn’t know you were religious, Declan. Catholic, of course. Personally, I’ve never found religion very helpful in making my decisions, but then, religion has never been very . . . vivid for me. I’m afraid I find such a remark from a young man rather odd.” She got up and made slowly for the door. “I’m sure Ranulph wouldn’t ask you to do anything that was wrong. But I hope your religion doesn’t prevent you being tolerant, seeing things in perspective. That’s all I was saying.”
Declan let her go without further comment from him. He rather suspected that Melanie had been saying quite a lot more than she now pretended, but he had no idea what it was. He listened while she tapped with her stick along the landing and then down the stairs. When he thought she was safely in the drawing room he slung his guitar over his shoulder and went out onto the landing himself. His destination was a pub in Oxenhope where his ballads had found an enthusiastic audience. In the hall, however, he was detained. Martha darted out from the kitchen, where she was helping Mrs. Max with the washing up, and put her hand on his arm, her face its usual mixture of worry, uncertainty, and inner obstinacy.
“You had a long conversation with Mother.”
“That’s right.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Mainly the fact that your father is doing good work again. She said she was very grateful, though it’s nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, we all think you’ve had a wonderful effect.”
Declan shrugged and turned back toward the front door.
“Was that all you talked about?”
“She said your father sometimes had odd whims, but that’s not unusual with an old man, is it? She said she hoped I’d be able to go along with them, whatever they were.”
“And will you?”
He turned back to her, looking directly into her upturned face.
“That depends on what they are, doesn’t it? I’m not a man who’s game for anything, you know. I wouldn’t want anybody here to think that of me.”
“I . . . I should hope not. I’m very glad to hear it, Declan.”
And, red-faced, she turned and retreated to the kitchen.
9
TREMORS OF FEAR
Outside, summer was turning into a rather dreary autumn. In the studio the more dramatic weather on the canvas began to assume its final form: angry sky and violent sea being complemented by slatelike cliffs and a newly painted cliff top in which the green had become still darker, still less inviting. This was no lush oasis: nature in the picture was at its most minatory, a nature in which man could only feel a beleaguered outsider. It was as uncomfortable a landscape as one could imagine.
News of the painting, Declan found, spread quickly through the Ashworth community. This was not surprising. Ivor Aston was cock-a-hoop at his privileged viewing, and he spoke of it at every opportunity. There was considerable jealousy. The community as a whole felt some sympathy for Ivor, burdened by a sister who represented a sort of ball and chain that he was constrained to take around with him wherever he went. On the other hand, no
one actually liked him. Some managed pity, some professed wide tolerance, but he was in the community a man set apart, and this was not simply Charmayne’s doing. He was perhaps best described as unappetizing.
And of course if his news of the picture aroused jealousy, that was precisely the emotion it was intended to arouse. Aston had no love whatsoever for any of his fellow acolytes. Where other communities might be described as united around a central figure, Ashworth was disunited around theirs.
Nevertheless, the excitement at Ranulph Byatt’s renewed powers, though complicated by personalities and jealousies, also had its generous side. From some of the little community Declan did get a sense of genuine pleasure that, in the airy, light-filled studio at Ashworth, work was again being done that was on a high level. This was a pleasure that was both human—pleasure for Ranulph, that he should enjoy artistic fulfillment again after months or even years of journeyman’s work—and also artistic and selfish—pleasure for themselves, that they should be close observers during a new and probably a last intensely creative phase.
“I wonder if you would like to try my rhubarb wine,” Jenny Birdsell called to Declan early one evening as he returned with shopping from Oakworth. Declan was used to homemade wine, and by no means turned up his nose at it. He smiled back at her, knowing why he had been asked, and turned into her little garden. “Arnold is sampling it,” Jenny went on. Declan nodded.
“I expect you can guess what we’re talking about,” said Jenny Birdsell brightly, her head birdlike to one side as she poured the purply pink liquid into a thick glass.
“The new picture,” Declan said. They both nodded. “Nobody seems to be talking about anything else.”
“Not surprising,” said Arnold Mellors. “If this really is the beginning of a new period it will be immensely exciting for all of us. Certainly it will be a big challenge for me.”
Declan sat down on a pinewood chair with strips of canvas across the seat and back. Mary Ann Birdsell had been a little unkind about her mother’s taste in interior decorating, but not very: the room was certainly odd. There was a lot of pine, including the staircase, which was open and without banisters—slats for steps, with metal rods reaching to the floor, giving it a perilous appearance. It was against a wall that was painted a dark beige, and the same color bisected the adjacent wall diagonally from bottom left to top right, the rest of the wall and the other walls being painted a bright purple. Both colors tended to kill the pictures hung on them, but the paintings didn’t have much in the way of vital spark to start with, being very dim watercolors of corners of moorlands and sections of dry stone walling, without an ounce of the Haworth moorlands’ starkness and savagery. They could have been painted anywhere or nowhere.
“Why will it be a big challenge for you, sir?” Declan asked, though he thought he knew the answer.
Mellors, modest little man though he was, preened himself a little.
“I handle Ranulph’s pictures for him. Quite informally, of course. His agent was a high-powered one who lost interest when—well, we can be brutally frank now, can’t we?—when the pictures became comparatively tame and conventional. Ranulph was very angry, and said he’d have no more agents. I’ve learned the business by doing it to the best of my ability, going round to galleries and auction rooms. Now . . . well, I don’t know what we shall do.”
“Get a new agent?” suggested Jenny.
“I suppose that would be best, if we’re looking to have a series of fine canvases. But if Ranulph doesn’t want an agent, then I must say I would welcome the challenge of handling them myself, after having had to push hard for the less interesting pictures. Marketing is what we have to look at here. A special exhibition, that’s what I have in mind: ‘Ranulph Byatt—Recent Paintings.’ I would enjoy the excitement.”
“It is awfully exciting,” said Jenny Birdsell, fussing around them both. “Do you think the Tate?”
“Not for what would be sure to be a smallish exhibition. Perhaps Manchester.”
Jenny pouted.
“I’m not sure you’re right when you say it could only be smallish. Ranulph is only seventy-eight. He may have plenty of working years ahead of him. Like Verdi or Ibsen. Autumnal masterpieces.”
“I don’t think from what Ivor has said that this new one is in the least autumnal,” said Mellors, looking inquiringly at Declan. Declan nodded.
“It’s very vigorous,” he said. “Almost frightening. But Byatt himself isn’t vigorous. He works slowly most of the time, and he can’t manage long each day—less time than he used to have on the more ordinary paintings. So I can’t see him producing a whole stack of paintings in a hurry.”
“No-o-o,” said Jenny, though clearly reluctant to give up her notion of a sort of harvest festival period of Byatt activity. “But hasn’t someone said . . . haven’t you said to somebody, Declan, that he’s using movements now when he’s painting that you never realized his body still had?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s something I noticed quite often when I used to be a nurse. It could be, you know, that there’s some kind of physical renewal in him, a sort of renaissance.”
Heard only by Declan, so absorbed were the others by the topic, Mary Ann Birdsell had let herself in quietly through the front door, and had heard her mother.
“He’s your messiah, and you’re expecting a resurrection,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s really blasphemous. But you’ll be disappointed.”
She shot a shy smile at Declan and ran upstairs.
“What have I done to deserve a Salvation Army daughter?” asked Jenny of her guests, looking from one to the other, not so much complaining as mildly puzzled. Her manner suggested that her daughter was little more than an irrelevant distraction in her life. “But then, I’m forgetting, you’re religious, aren’t you, Declan?”
“Within reason,” muttered Declan, embarrassed that his convictions should be a matter for Ashworth gossip. “Not that sort of religion. And I don’t make a song and dance about it.”
“Well, that’s an improvement on Mary Ann!”
“But there’s things I’d never do.” It came out in a rush, and Declan was very conscious of sounding naive.
“But of course there is!” said Arnold Mellors with a scoutmaster’s heartiness that did not ring true. “That’s how it should be. Religion shaping your life and keeping you on the straight and narrow.”
“More wine, anybody?” asked Jenny brightly. And Declan, holding out his glass, was conscious that she had approved his keeping his religion under wraps, but had said nothing about his declaration that his beliefs limited his actions. He also had the impression, as the cloudy wine flowed into his glass, that Jenny and Arnold were for some reason not looking at him.
The conversation at Jenny Birdsell’s was typical of many that took place in Ashworth as September set well in, and the first traces of brown appeared in the fields and the trees around the little community. The excitement that Jenny and Arnold expressed was no more than was felt by everyone there, and in all of them it was mingled with a strong sense of anticipation. A new golden age was approaching. Only Stephen was exempt from the excitement, and he was particularly contemptuous of the anticipation.
“They’re getting so worked up it’s positively orgasmic,” he said with a sneer to Declan one day, poking his head out from under the old car in the stables, on which he was working, and looking up at Declan, who was standing beside the car, wishing he would ask him to help. “If the excitement gets through to the old man he’ll have a heart attack, and where will the masterpieces be then?”
“Your grandfather is excited already,” said Declan quietly. He always spoke respectfully of old people. “He knows he’s doing good work again.”
“Know a lot about painting, do you?” asked Stephen, and slid back under the ancient Volkswagen Golf.
“Nothing at all,” said Declan. “I know a little bit about cars.”
“Well, if I find I need
the help of someone who knows a little bit about cars, I’ll know who to call on,” came Stephen’s muffled voice.
Walking away Declan registered the waves of hostility that their brief conversation had revealed. When he analyzed the words, it would seem that the hostility was personally directed at himself. But when he looked at the situation, the feeling of the encounter, he felt that Stephen’s frustration and aggression were directed first at his own little world of Ashworth, the family and the acolytes, and then at the world as a whole. He was a young man who had never found a place in either, and was beginning to fear he never would. That was how Declan saw the situation.
Over the succeeding week the canvas was brought toward completion with the addition of small touches and changes which Ranulph Byatt said no one would notice, but which represented the last stages in the struggle toward the ideal painting he had had from the beginning in his mind’s eye. It was a bold, dramatic, forbidding work, imbued with an energy that none of them, only a month or two before, would have imagined possible. The dominant colors were grays and near blacks, in spite of the fact that the greens of the cliff top and the white of the foam also had prominent parts to play. Declan loved the picture. He felt he knew the weather, knew the sort of landscape depicted. There was an element of egotism in his love too: he felt this was a picture in which he had played a part.
His “part” was put before him in a less flattering light one day when Stephen emerged from an unused bedroom that served him as a darkroom. Stephen was a dabbler in photography, but an energetic and persevering one. Of the few specimens that Declan had seen, he had found the landscapes unremarkable—Stephen failed, as every amateur snap-taker failed, to take in the grim immensity of the moorlands surrounding Haworth—but one or two pictures of people, taken when they were unawares, had intrigued and amused him: a view of Jenny Birdsell’s backside when she bent over weeding in her scrap of garden: a zoom lens view of his mother’s face—anxious, pleading, middle-aged yet somehow unformed. Such pictures seemed to him in a way unfair, taking advantage as they did of their subjects, yet giving a more truthful view than a photograph taken when they were conscious of being snapped could have done.
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 9