‘I suppose,’ he asked, ‘you know my friend Lightfoot, whom I’ve come to visit? He has been here for a couple of years now. And so, I believe, have you.’
‘Oh, yes – I know him.’ Brown had produced a swiftly wary glance – rather in Edwin’s manner, Honeybath reflected, but considerably more intense. ‘One of the nutters, some of them take him for. But you can never tell, you know. I’ve read a story somewhere of a man who faked it he was loco, just to seem harmless and innocent-like when he had it in for another guy.’
‘I believe it to be an archetypal theme.’ Seeing that this learned comment made little impression on Mr Brown, Honeybath added, ‘But you wouldn’t think of my friend Lightfoot as being like that? He couldn’t entertain malign designs against you.’
‘You can’t ever be sure, if you ask me. Not of anybody.’
This was a distressing remark. It suggested – as seemed only too probable – that mildly paranoid feelings blew rather freely around Hanwell Court.
‘Oh, come, Mr Brown!’ Honeybath essayed a robust note. ‘You’ve known me for about ten minutes. But you’d trust me with your wallet, wouldn’t you, with no misgiving at all? One knows at once these simple things about a man.’
‘I don’t say you’re wrong there, Mr Honeybath. Not in certain cases that is. Sometimes I can take a good look at a man – keeping my distance, mark you, and my head low – and I can see he’s on the square.’
‘Perhaps you’ll put me in that category sufficiently to join me in my short walk?’ Honeybath asked this on an odd impulse; it was as if he felt that with Brown he was on the tip of the tail of something he wanted to get hold of. It was a wholly irrational feeling. ‘Just up to that statue, perhaps, at the head of the drive.’
‘I’ll be very happy, I’m sure.’ Brown said this with a considerable air of magnanimity. ‘And one gets out of this maze in no time, you know. It’s easier to get out than to get in. Which isn’t the case with you know where.’
As this could only be a further reference to incarceration under penal conditions, Honeybath was constrained to conclude that Mr Brown was the victim of something like an idée fixe. The condition, he believed, could be an extremely painful one – almost as bad as an agonizing phobia. Brown didn’t, indeed, have the air of a man positively haunted, but this was perhaps due to the ministrations of Dr Michaelis – whose main function, Honeybath had by now come to understand, was to assist those of the inmates who had come to Hanwell under the quota system. Yet this explanation didn’t quite account for Brown, and particularly for his perplexingly plebeian facet. And now Honeybath had another brilliant idea. (He was surprisingly prolific in these.) Brown belonged to that rapidly increasing number of persons who have been highly successful financiers in their time but who, having been a shade neglectful of certain niceties of the law, have been obliged to spend a considerable term of years (as Brown would express it) ‘inside’. Much in the manners, and even mode of speech, of those with whom they had thus for long associated would almost unavoidably rub off on them. Brown, in fact, was what was vulgarly termed an old lag. Before being ‘nicked’ he had providently salted away a competence adequate to maintain him in his present honourable retirement.
‘This way out,’ Brown was saying. ‘The middle of the maze isn’t at the middle at all – twig? It’s right at one side. Half-a-dozen steps this way, and we’re out in the garden again.’
This proved to be so, and Honeybath and his new companion set out on their short walk. Honeybath, although that latent curiosity in him had been stirred again, wasn’t quite easy in his mind. It was really time that he was returning to the house and discovering how Prout was getting on with Edwin. There was also the difficulty of finding a fresh topic of conversation – and one that might at least temporarily relieve Brown from the oppressive compulsion under which he seemed to labour. Brown’s fellow residents were a possible resource here. The golf-ball man wouldn’t do, since Honeybath had never got round to learning his name. Mr Gaunt of the misérecordes and mains gauches might serve, but had better be ruled out as himself somewhat morbidly disposed. And Lady Munden belonged to that category of females over sixty which had prompted Brown to his discontented remark on the absence of birds.
‘Do you know Colonel Dacre?’ Honeybath asked.
‘Ah, a useful chap, Dacre.’ Brown had paused in his stride. ‘Dacre could get a man with a mere revolver at thirty yards. Which takes that amount of doing, you’d be surprised. As for that rifle of his – why, he could make it lethal at a quarter of a mile.’
‘Could he, indeed?’ Having given this appreciative reply, Honeybath felt prompted to ask, ‘Is that how he got Admiral Emery?’ But this might sound unsuitably frivolous. ‘I suppose,’ he offered instead, ‘it could be useful. Under wartime conditions, that is.’
‘Or take a gang.’ Mr Brown was walking on. ‘You know how it is nowadays. The swamping trick. Learnt from the fuzz themselves, that is. You turn up – at a bank, say – ten or a dozen strong. Suppose they came at us like that. Not in spies but in a bloody battalion. Why, Dacre could pick off half of them before you said six. And a splendid sight it would be.’
Brown had offered this last comment with a sudden malignant glee that Honeybath judged alarming. They were now approaching the perimeter of the park. The park was totally deserted, and so was a stretch of high road immediately beyond. Honeybath found himself wondering whether it had perhaps been just here that Admiral Emery had been innocently wandering when picked off by the colonel – absorbed, with an equal innocence as it might have been, in the charms of a new telescopic sight. Honeybath noticed that Brown’s wariness had now increased. He was scanning the road, and the drive leading from it, as if himself under the influence of some fantasy equally absurd.
‘And here we are,’ Brown said presently. They had come to a halt before Poseidon urging the Sea-Monster to attack Laomedon. ‘Looks like he was going to clobber somebody, doesn’t he? Something nasty gone missing from that right hand, if you ask me. It ought to be restored, it should. I often come and look at him. A wonderful thing, art is. It can say something to a man. Some heathen, I take him to be.’
‘The sea-god Neptune,’ Honeybath said instructively. ‘Homer calls him the Earthshaker.’
‘Is that so?’ Brown’s tone was becomingly respectful. ‘Then those would be his sharks, I suppose. I’ve always supposed they were dogs. Heathen dogs, of course, since dogs don’t come like that nowadays. Man-eating sharks, they’ll be. And he’d feed you to them, once he’d taken care of you.’
‘I must be getting back to the house,’ Honeybath said. He spoke a little abruptly, having decided that Brown’s imagination was agreeable in short spells only.
‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’ Surprisingly, and perhaps recalling the conventions of those distant days before the shades of the prison house had closed on him, Brown formally doffed his Panama hat. ‘I’ll just hang around for a bit. I like it here.’
10
The big room that had become Edwin Lightfoot’s studio at Hanwell was untenanted. Perhaps Edwin and Prout had themselves gone for a stroll. Honeybath surveyed the place at leisure, and found the general effect reassuring. Whatever labour force was here the equivalent of Mrs Plover must insist on regularly doing its stuff. Edwin had accumulated quite a number of pleasing possessions during the past two years, and a great deal of junk as well. But everything was scrupulously clean, and of disorder there was no more than tends to declare itself in the surroundings of any vigorously creative person. And it looked as if Edwin was in a phase of being such a person. He had a big landscape composition on hand. The pigments were still wet on it, and on a table beside the easel there was a litter of sketches and sketch-books. Unfortunately – for the effort was quite far advanced – Honeybath could see at a glance that Edwin was still painting very badly. It was even possible to infer from the canvas what his current behaviour would be like. ‘Jumpy’ would be the word for it. Edwin inhabited an agitated uni
verse. So, finally, had Van Gogh. But Edwin’s vision of all things turned to flame and light (if he had it) went badly wrong as it was handed on. There were also a few more of the odd portrait affairs around. It was almost – Honeybath reflected – as if these limited and unimportant felicities were by another chap. Honeybath had a dim sense that Edwin might be splitting up.
It also occurred to him, more prosaically, that Edwin might be in the next room, a comfortable apartment to which it would be natural that he and his brother-in-law, perhaps accompanied by Dr Michaelis, had retired for a quiet chat. But this room was untenanted also. Honeybath lingered in it for a couple of minutes, marking the fact that here, too, a great many of Edwin’s former possessions were on view. He must have moved in quite a lot of stuff in recent months – perhaps from that depository to which it had been consigned upon the break-up of the Royal Crescent ménage. This, in a limited way, seemed a good sign, suggesting that Edwin had come to feel moderately at home in his new environment.
Honeybath returned to the studio, and became aware of Ambrose Prout emerging from the third room in the suite, which was Edwin’s bedroom.
‘Where is Edwin?’ Honeybath asked. ‘He’s not ill, I hope?’ That Edwin was confined to bed seemed the only explanation of Prout’s behaviour.
‘Oh, no. Edwin’s quite all right. Or as right as we’d expect him to be.’ Prout added the qualification with his customary gloom. ‘He must have missed you. I sent him to look for you in the garden. It struck me a spot of fresh air might do him good.’
Prout was detectably confused – as he might well be when thus discovered in one of his bouts of nosing around. But then Honeybath, too, had been doing something of the sort in the interest of estimating his friend’s present nervous condition.
‘Have you seen Michaelis?’ Honeybath asked.
‘Yes – but only briefly. I’ve arranged that the three of us should have a quiet talk later.’
‘Which three of us?’
‘You and I and Michaelis, of course. Have you had a look at that thing on the easel, Charles?’
‘Yes, I have. It’s much the same as what we came on that day we had to have him hospitalized. It’s sad.’
‘It is, indeed. I couldn’t sell that affair to a wandering sheik for a five-pound note.’
‘I don’t suppose they carry round anything as pitiful as five-pound notes. But you’re probably right.’
‘It’s damned puzzling, Charles. I can’t get to the bottom of it.’
‘Just what is damned puzzling?’ Honeybath was puzzled himself. ‘It seems all too clear to me, the decay of Edwin’s talent.’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing. You’re quite right. Absolute decay.’ Prout glanced in a curiously furtive way at the door of the studio, as if fearing that its owner might return at an awkward moment. ‘I don’t know that we should spend long here. There’s really nothing to be done.’
‘We can at least support Edwin with a little familiar companionship. He can’t make much of many of the people in this confounded place.’
‘Quite true, quite true. I say – do you think Edwin can be up to some deep game? He’s always been as freakish as they come. Capable of anything. That about the burglar, and so on. Quite mad.’
It came to Honeybath that Prout was not merely puzzled. He was also in some abnormal state of excitement. Perhaps it was just something that could be put down to the general atmosphere of Hanwell Court.
‘Do you think we should get him away?’ Honeybath asked. ‘It has been in my head. You remember how he once went off to Italy on his own, and it didn’t work? It might be different if he were travelling with a friend. And I could manage to get away for a couple of months myself.’
‘It’s something to consider – and very generous of you, of course. Something to think over. Perhaps we ought to get away and plan things. Not even bother about that talk with Michaelis.’
‘We needn’t scurry off just like that.’ This new attitude in Prout seemed to Honeybath uncommonly odd, and deserving to be got to the bottom of. It was almost as if something had happened. Not for the first time, he was conscious of a strong instinct to distrust Edwin’s brother-in-law. ‘Ambrose,’ he asked sternly, ‘are you being quite frank with me?’
‘Frank with you?’ Alarm rather than reproach had sounded in Prout’s voice, and he gave another covert glance at the door. ‘There’s nothing not to be frank about. But I think, you know, we’re meddling with something like a mare’s nest. About this affair of the Munden woman. I did have a word with Michaelis about that. And it’s blowing over. It seems Edwin has been treating other of the folk here in the same way. Sketching them from memory, that is, with that streak of caricature and in rather ludicrous situations. One or two of them have gone round, and it turns out that the subjects like it. Edwin’s an RA, after all, and his attentions flatter them. I gather he’s quite popular.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, Ambrose. But the main point…’ Honeybath broke off. Edwin had entered the studio.
‘Charles, so here you are! Ambrose told me about your going to take a look at the orangery. I must have missed you.’ Having uttered these words, Edwin Lightfoot embraced Honeybath, stood back, and rubbed his hands with what seemed to be genuine if somewhat febrile pleasure.
Honeybath was about to say, ‘I didn’t even know there was an orangery.’ But thus to expose Prout in prevarication might be to upset Edwin, who was (as forecast) in a jumpy state. It was clear that Prout had sent Edwin on a fool’s errand – and that this had been to get him out of his living quarters while Prout did that poking around which now seemed habitual with him. What on earth had the man expected to find in Edwin’s bedroom? Did he suspect that it harboured some Paphian girl or rural trollop? And what business of Prout’s was it if it did?
Suddenly an extraordinary idea came to Honeybath. It was one of those away-out conjectures that can only visit a man of imaginative endowment. Prout’s constant obsession nowadays was with those missing masterpieces of Lightfoot’s early period, the existence of which he, and he alone, was obstinately convinced of. Mrs Gutermann-Seuss had proved unproductive – but what about Lightfoot himself? Was Edwin crazily hoarding pictures painted long ago – pictures which, if now given to the world through the world’s sale-rooms, would vastly enlarge the artist’s reputation overnight, to say nothing of vastly enlarging his agent’s bank-balance as well? Frequenting Hanwell Court was constraining Honeybath to believe virtually all men mad. Was Ambrose Prout sufficiently mad to believe that Edwin Lightfoot’s madness (which he was so constantly asserting) could take so bizarre a form as this? Or was it bizarre? With a suddenness equal to that of his first thought on the matter, Honeybath told himself that it was all perfectly possible. One sort of miser irrationally hides away his gold. Mightn’t another sort hide away creations of his own far more precious than sovereigns and louis-d’or? And wasn’t Edwin just the kind of perverse creature of whom such conduct might be predicated? Honeybath was surprised that he hadn’t thought all this out before. He would challenge Edwin on it as soon as the two of them were alone together. And this, as it happened, came about almost at once.
‘My dear Charles,’ Edwin said, ‘let me get you a drink. Ambrose, go away.’
‘Really, Edwin!’ Not unnaturally, Prout was offended by this brisk injunction.
‘You and I have had our little chat. It’s Charles’ turn now. And too many people upset me. And too many people is just what you are. Get lost, old boy. Or try the orangery. Orangery, indeed!’
Producing this childish rudeness, and thus indicating his awareness that he had been imposed upon, seemed to put Edwin in good humour. He chuckled gaily (if also maliciously) as he watched Prout withdraw with what dignity he could.
‘Boring chap,’ he said, as he rummaged among bottles on a side-table. ‘Worse than Melissa herself.’ He poured gin liberally into glasses. ‘Do you know, I miss Melissa quite a lot. Nobody could imagine themselves missing Ambrose.’ He chuckled again �
� this time on a higher note. ‘Impossible not to want to twist his bloody tail at times. And I’ve found the way to do it. But let’s forget about him. I’ll show you what I did this morning.’
‘To that painting?’ As he asked this question, Honeybath glanced towards the easel, and felt embarrassed. He had a notion that Edwin was embarrassed too.
‘No, no – just another of those little jokes.’ Edwin fished about on another table. ‘Have you met a chap here called Dacre?’
‘No, I’ve only heard about him.’
Honeybath's Haven Page 8