Honeybath's Haven

by Michael Innes

  ‘He’s asking about my husband. Shall I tell him the truth at once? I don’t see why not. Edwin’s mad.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Honeybath closed the front door of the flat behind him – Mrs Lightfoot having shown no disposition to perform this action herself. ‘What sort of madness, Melissa? It comes – doesn’t it? – in so many different forms.’

  ‘Delusions. He believes himself to be somebody else, and never the same person two weeks running. Or even something else. A few days ago he set up that system of mirrors you use when you’re going to do a self-portrait and don’t want your left ear to face the world as your right. As if it made any difference! But what appeared on his drawing board wasn’t a man at all. It was a motorcar. I wonder whether he’s brought anything to drink.’

  ‘If Edwin…?’ Honeybath realized his mistake. ‘I’m afraid not. I thought…’

  ‘He used to bring something to drink. Fortunately there’s plenty in the house. The two of them can talk twaddle to each other through the night, and let me get some decent sleep for once.’ Mrs Lightfoot had led the way into her sitting-room, and she now sat down. ‘Charles,’ she asked, ‘did you ever hear of a man called Flannel Foot?’

  ‘Never.’ Honeybath remembered that the third-person singular treatment was administered by Melissa only in a standing position. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s what Edwin has become now. It started with a horrible journalist calling on us three or four weeks ago. He’s writing something about Flannel Foot, and it seems that Flannel Foot was living in this flat when they caught him.’

  ‘You mean he is a criminal?’ By this time Honeybath had sat down too. There was no sign of Melissa’s husband appearing. Perhaps he was away from home, which would mean that this awkward visit was going to fail of its purpose. Honeybath didn’t know whether he would be disappointed or relieved. It didn’t sound as if resuming relations with Edwin Lightfoot was going to be an easy matter. Prout had certainly been playing down the oddity of his mental state.

  ‘Flannel Foot was a criminal. He died on the 18th of December 1942, after doing five years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced on the 2nd of December 1937.’

  ‘Good heavens, Melissa! Where have you collected all this rubbish?’

  ‘From Edwin. And he dug it out of some dreadful place where they keep all the old newspapers the world has ever seen. Dingley Dell, or some such.’

  ‘Colindale. Do you mean that Edwin has been researching into the life of this person?’

  ‘Yes, of course – and just because of this intrusive young man. Flannel Foot’s real name was Vickers, and he was a burglar in a petty line of business. Children’s piggy-banks and what could be got out of the gas meter. And he ended up, as I say, either in this flat or in another close by. It seems they can’t be quite sure.’

  ‘On the strength of piggy-banks, Melissa? It sounds most improbable.’

  ‘He was pertinacious, it seems, and achieved about two thousand successful burglaries before slipping up. That’s what has caught Edwin’s fancy. So Lightfoot has become Flannel Foot. Only for part of the day, of course, since Edwin’s madness is always a kind of bad joke. I believe he’s at it now.’

  ‘I can’t hear him at it.’

  ‘Of course not. That’s the point. Nobody ever did hear Flannel Foot. Or see him, for that matter. But you can see Edwin. And here he is.’

  Edwin Lightfoot had entered the room. He didn’t look much changed. Or rather his physical man didn’t look much changed. But he was wearing what might have been thought of as the Sunday attire of a respectable artisan of the Edwardian period, shiny and drab; a pair of shabby leather gloves; and a brown Homburg hat. Bright-eyed and apparently inwardly amused, he advanced soundlessly over the parquet floor. The soundlessness resulted from each of his feet being swathed in several yards of flannel. He might have been a gentleman of a past age, badly afflicted by gout.

  ‘Charles, my dear fellow, how nice to see you! It’s a shocking long time since we got together.’ Lightfoot sat down with perfect ease – or at least with perfect ease of manner, since he appeared not quite to have mastered the equipment that had presumably been Flannel Foot’s speciality in the burgling way. ‘We really have very few visitors nowadays, and Melissa and I have to entertain ourselves as we can. She has probably told you how we’ve invented this little game like charades. I’m being a burglar at the moment, and she’s not quite sure whether I’m after her placket or her purse. Would you care to join in? You can be Chief Inspector Thomas Thompson. “Youthful, black-haired Chief Inspector Thomas Thompson”, according to the Daily Express of the 4th December 1937. He’s my grand adversary, you know. We’re like Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The worthy Thompson has hundreds of coppers prowling the suburbs of London on the hunt for me, but he hasn’t caught me yet. It’s the flannel, you see. So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint, as Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence expresses it.’

  ‘I’m very glad to see you keeping up your spirits, Edwin.’ Honeybath managed to say this with difficulty. Although unexpected circumstances were apt to prove him a man of considerable resource, he didn’t yet quite see how to tackle this situation. He wondered whether Lightfoot – this time like Shakespeare’s Hamlet – was but mad north-north-west, and knew a hawk from a handsaw when other winds were blowing. But if this Flannel Foot business was a joke it seemed necessary to believe with Melissa that it was a bad one. Honeybath felt sorry for Melissa. That she was herself a tiresome woman didn’t obscure the fact that her husband’s freakishness – even if it was no more than that – couldn’t be a thing at all nice to live with. And Lightfoot’s deft rubbish about charades was alarming rather than composing. It somehow suggested the rapid cunning which the truly insane are reputed sometimes to command.

  ‘But enough of this nonsense,’ Lightfoot said. He spoke with a lightness of air that decidedly didn’t ring true. ‘Just let me remove these cerements, my dear Charles, and we’ll have a marvellous talk.’ He bent down and began unwrapping the ludicrous flannel from his feet. ‘And our compotations shall be in Château Leoville-Poyferre. Business is a little slack, you know, but I can still, praise God, run to a decent claret.’

  Melissa Lightfoot (née Prout) having already referred to the vinous resources of the household, Honeybath was prompted to wonder whether the couple had both taken to drink. He looked cautiously about him. The Lightfoots’ sitting-room had formerly suggested by various touches that it was only one floor down from a fully-functioning studio. This effect was absent now, and what Honeybath surveyed was a big and rather expensively furnished room of a neutral and uninteresting sort. Since the Lightfoots, whatever else was to be said of them, were neither of them personalities of the most conforming order, there was thus a kind of uneasy hiatus between themselves and their surroundings. They had lived here for a long time, but one felt them to be now perched in the place without attachment to it – a fact uncomfortably suggesting that they had ceased to feel much attachment to one another. Moreover there was a good deal of dust and even cobweb around, and in a large Chinese jar in a window embrasure Melissa had created a somewhat aggressive arrangement of hothouse flowers which had now been in evident decline for many days. This last appearance depressed Honeybath a good deal. Dead flowers in a dwelling over which a woman presides are a signal which it doesn’t require a psychiatrist to interpret.

  Lightfoot was having trouble with the flannel. The stuff had been cut into long slips, and had to be coped with in the manner of the puttees that Honeybath recalled having to wear when in the OTC at his public school. It seemed clear that Flannel Foot, or Vickers, had been a veridical and not a merely legendary burglar; but that he hadencumbered himself in this grotesque fashion in the interest of achieving a cat-like tread seemed hard to believe. It was just the thing, however, to catch Edwin’s fancy. Honeybath suddenly remembered an occasion upon which his friend had declared himself to be areincarnation of Katsushika Hokus
ai, provided himself with a becoming kimono, and executed some very colourable pastiches of popular things like The Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave. That had been genuine and innocent clowning of an artist’s kind that they had both enjoyed together. But this burglar-impersonation, apparently prompted by the discovery that Lightfoot kept the courts where Flannel Foot had gloried and drunk deep (supposing the late Mr Vickers to have been of intemperate habit) had something genuinely dotty to it. And Edwin had once been the painter he had been! Honeybath was much perturbed by the present state of the case. What Edwin had been was something that he himself could never be. But he had been Edwin’s friend, and it was now up to him to establish himself again as that. In fact it was his duty to sort Edwin out. Honeybath wondered whether the first step must be to give a good shake such as would disentangle Edwin from his idiotic wife. It was a dangerous thought, with something jealous and possessive lurking at the heart of it. Honeybath, being a perceptive person, was dimly aware of this. He was even prompted to withdraw and leave things as they were. But as the evening developed, the impulse to do something grew on him.

  Strangely enough, what was operative here was the instinct of a gentleman and a feeling of duty as much towards the tedious Melissa as towards the lost genius she had married. The Leoville-Poyferre (which turned out to be 1966, an outstanding year) did Lightfoot no good. The bottle had been produced and uncorked with proper care – and then its proprietor declared it wasn’t what he wanted to drink. What he wanted to drink was malt whisky, and the only malt whisky fit to offer his old friend was ‘that stuff from Islay’. Honeybath remembered what this obscure island produced; it had a peaty tang to it that was incomparable without a doubt. Moreover the hour for just such a species of delectation was appropriate enough. But this didn’t condone the turn Lightfoot now put on. Not that it was a turn; it was involuntary and compulsive in a most disturbing way. Lightfoot pottered here and there in quest of the desired elixir; he seemed resolved to turn the whole flat upside down; minute by minute his agitation increased; he ended up in a phrenetic condition such as no woman should be expected to live with. And Melissa didn’t suffer it with the patience which alone might have tided things over. She screamed at her husband to let up and sit down. Honeybath had to face the fact that the domestic life of the Lightfoots was a shambles.

  Yet there was still a great deal of enchantment about Edwin. In the middle of this ridiculous and demeaning brouhaha he would say things that could come only from an angel. Or from an archangel ruined – Honeybath thought, groping after some obscure literary allusion. Eventually they resigned themselves to the claret, and also to the loss of Melissa’s society, since she took herself off in a graceless if very understandable fashion to another room. For a short space of time this disappearance seemed significantly to relieve Edwin’s tensions and tantrums; he talked about contemporary painters from Rothko to Hockney in a manner showing that he still kept his eye effectively on the professional ball. But on a third glass of claret this faded out. Edwin began not to talk but to mumble. He mumbled about Edwin, and about Edwin alone. Life had given, and was giving, Edwin Lightfoot a raw deal. For an hour Honeybath listened, or failed to listen, to the resentments and obsessions of a grown man who was regressing to the condition of a frustrated and self-absorbed child. This was bad enough. Worse was the character of the glance that Edwin occasionally directed at him. It was the glance of a grown man who knew where he had arrived and was mutely begging that some lifeline be thrown to him.

  Or so it seemed to Charles Honeybath. The curious thought came to him that it was a case of regression going rather too far. He knew almost nothing about his friend’s childhood – except that it wasn’t to be regretted if one took the larger view. Whatever had wounded him then had armed him in his prime. Mighty poets are cradled forth in wrong. They learn in suffering what they teach in song. Shelley had said something like that. And Edwin had now simply moved back too far. If one could have started him off on a well-controlled time-machine, and then shunted him backwards only to the point at which his genius was in flower…

  Charles Honeybath was a sensible man, and this bizarre and vain idea naturally didn’t linger in his mind. He turned to consider what practical steps he could take to rescue Edwin from his present impasse. He had gained the impression that his friend hardly ever went out; he lived cooped up in this damned flat – and if he amused himself there it was by pretending to be some small-time crook who either had or had not been his predecessor as its proprietor. It was a state of affairs too grotesque and painful to be thought of. Couldn’t Edwin be got away, even if only now and then? Honeybath, although not a particularly sociable man, moved among his fellow-artists to a reasonable extent. There were plenty of informal groups – coteries and dining-clubs – where Edwin Lightfoot would be welcomed without question as the great painter he was or had been. Could Edwin be enticed into such company? Honeybath asked himself the question, and faced the fact that it must probably be answered in thenegative. Edwin felt himself to be a failure, and to be far too old for any sort of effective come-back. He simply wouldn’t want to meet his peers.

  But festina lente. Here wasn’t a situation to rush. The important thing was to establish that this attempt at reunion hadn’t been a fiasco; that there had been pleasure in it, and that it would happen again. In this interest Honeybath from time to time said what he could in a sympathizing and concerned way to the man hunched in a chair before him; and it was after midnight when he took his leave. Edwin hardly stirred, but there was again just that ghost of an appealing look. Honeybath would almost have preferred the air of factitious amusement which Edwin had contrived when hard at work being Flannel Foot.

  At the front door, and as he was letting himself out, he was intercepted, to his surprise, by Melissa. Melissa was carrying a rather dusty suitcase in the direction of what he recalled as her bedroom. She set it down with a bump.

  ‘Well,’ Melissa said. ‘He knows now. The old friend turns up at the eleventh hour – or just after the twelfth, as it happens – and learns all.’

  ‘Melissa,’ Honeybath said, ‘I’m afraid things aren’t going too happily with Edwin – or with yourself, either.’

  ‘And he has a wonderful sense of just what’s happening. Although not, perhaps, in my room.’

  ‘In your room, Melissa?’

  ‘It’s still that at the moment, but it won’t be tomorrow. I’m packing.’ Melissa gave a shrill laugh. ‘I’m going home to mother.’

  ‘But surely your mother…’

  ‘The man’s a fool. Of course she died years ago. I’m going off with a lover. Or perhaps I shall just buy a parrot. A parrot would be safer, on the whole.’

  ‘Melissa, surely you should consider…’

  ‘Before he starts preaching he ought to try living with him. When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling he’s hard at work boring his wife to death. Charles, goodbye.’

  With this quite irregular departure into direct address Mrs Lightfoot picked up the suitcase again and vanished into her room.

  3

  On the day following his pilgrimage to Holland Park Charles Honeybath stepped off a perfectly familiar kerb, appeared to trip over his own feet, fell, and broke a wrist. The accident upset him figuratively as well as literally. For a short time he suffered excruciating pain, and for a much longer time had to put up with considerable inconvenience, since the surgeons had for some reason decided to make quite heavy weather of what was surely a minor mishap. But the underlying reason for Honeybath’s being much disturbed was (as he perfectly well knew) that he belonged to a generation one of whose sacred books had been The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It would be absurd, he believed, to regard his friend the pianist’s accident as having been an accident; the poor man had seen his finger sliced off (and actually hurled into a gooseberry bush) because his earliest ambition had been to achieve distinction as an engine-driver, so that his deeper mind regarded banging away on a musical instrument as consti
tuting a humiliating second-best. Honeybath had renewed his acquaintance with Edwin Lightfoot, decidedly il miglior fabbro, even if it was now as un fabbro maledetto (or at least avariato) that one would have to describe him. So Honeybath’s genius had been rebuked, with the result that he never wanted to face an easel again, and had incapacitated himself accordingly. The fact that it was his left wrist and not his right that he had contrived to incapacitate did a little complicate the diagnosis. But a loss of nerve is a loss of nerve. And this was why Honeybath decided to make sure of his ground at Hanwell Court.

  Hanwell Court was to be his haven: the secure (and rather stately) harbour to which he was to retreat when, in five, or ten – or even fifteen? – years’ time, he was no longer up to facing the buffeting waves of Chelsea life. Hanwell Court was much sought after by the superior orders of society with this sort of end in view, and he had already put down a substantial deposit to ensure his place in the queue. But he was not without misgivings about it. Would it prove to be what Henry James had thought of as the Great Good Place, or would it turn out to be a well-upholstered funk-hole of a depressing sort? The inmates – an ironically tinged word it rather pleased him to have thought of, and which he regularly used when speaking of his intention to his friends – might turn out to be not, so to speak, hissort of inmates. They might walk across the park to church in a species of crocodile every Sunday. They might read detective stories or even ‘romantic’ fiction; they might treat as a pariah one who shirked his duty at the bridge table. He had of course cased the joint; been shown over it by a commanding female whom he had misdoubtfully suspected ought to be addressed as ‘Matron’. But the actual inmates had been little on view. It had been explained to him that this was on account of their all commanding their own spacious quarters, from which they emerged only to lunch or dine, or as they pleased. At Hanwell Court you were securely elevated above the miserable world of bed-sitters and shared ‘facilities’. You could have your private life, just as you had your private privy.