Honeybath's Haven

by Michael Innes

  ‘Very military – very military, indeed. Here he is. I’ve done him rather after Blake. It’s called The Spiritual Form of the Duke of Wellington surveying the Iberian Peninsula. Pure nonsense.’

  ‘So it is.’ Honeybath studied the latest of Edwin’s small extravagances. ‘Are you going to show it to him?’

  ‘Oh, yes – Dacre will be rather pleased. Dotty, but a good sort, Dacre. And then I’m going to send it to some exhibition of contemporary drawings that one of those odd councils is proposing to trundle round the country.’

  ‘It strikes me as a little trivial for the purpose.’ Honeybath sipped his gin, and resolved that the time had come to tackle Edwin. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you a straight question. Are you sitting on a number of things you did a long time ago – and that are a good deal more important than most of what you’ve done since?’

  ‘Now, that’s a difficult one, Charles. A really hard question. Quite a philosophical conundrum. Have some more gin.’

  ‘I’ve barely begun this. And don’t talk in riddles. Is it by hiding certain things away that you’re contriving to twist Ambrose’s bloody tail, as you express it?’

  ‘Ah, now – that’s easier. Yes, in a way. But Ambrose isn’t important. I’d even call him the quintessence of unimportance. The point is I’m not going to be a freak – not if I can help it. I’m mad, of course. Everybody says that. But not even a madman need be a freak. Keep a joke a joke, I say. All men have their honour. Even artists.’ Edwin raised his glass. ‘To art, Charles.’

  ‘Edwin, do try…’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘Very well – to art.’ Honeybath raised his own glass, and drank. ‘Edwin, am I being intrusive? I’d like us to get on well together. Really well, as we used to do. And – do you know? – I’ve had an idea. I’d terribly like to get back to Italy. You’ve heard that Piero’s Flagellation has been returned to Urbino? The thieves seem to have abandoned it in the odd way they do. Shall we go and have a look? We could do Monterchi too. You remember our getting to the lady there when we hadn’t so much as a bus fare? We could visit her again.’

  ‘And then to Borgo San Sepolcro for the really great thing.’

  ‘And to Arezzo for San Francesco. Put up in the Chiavi d’Oro, and dine in that place in a cellar.’ Honeybath broke off in these bold proposals, suddenly aware that Edwin was weeping. It was like being back on square one.

  Edwin’s sobs died away into a constrained silence. Honeybath didn’t know what to say. He had a sense that some essential factor in the situation was eluding him; even that Edwin had hidden it away in that last flood of quirky talk before his abrupt breakdown. Something terrible had happened to Edwin – or at least something bewildering and disorientating. And it was new, or fairly new. It had happened after that first occasion upon which he had wept. So it wasn’t square one. In this seemingly so sheltered place, this funk-hole for the affluent aged and the affluent potty, something undermining had occurred. For Edwin Lightfoot, Hanwell Court was not the Great Good Place. It had turned out – utterly mysteriously – to be the GreatBad Place instead.

  There was nothing for it – for the present there was nothing for it – but to play the whole situation down. And it was essential to see young Dr Michaelis at once, and to see him privately rather than in the company of Ambrose Prout as had been proposed. Nor was there any point in longer pretending that Edwin had graduated, as it were, to the position of a mere eccentric at Hanwell Court; to the category in which one could place the golf-ball man or Colonel Dacre or Mr Gaunt of the nasty daggers. Edwin was a man subject to some dreadful sickness of the mind. Or he was an artist subject to that. Something had happened to him in that character, and it was something distinct from his now long-established loss of what sports commentators might call his form. This was a very obscure conception, in the light (or darkness) of which it was difficult to see how to act. The simplest step was to secure for Edwin an almost immediate change of air. Honeybath resolved to cling to that Italian project.

  Even more immediately, it would be a good idea to get Edwin briefly out of this studio, with its disheartening daub on the easel and its litter of futile little drawings of Hanwell Court worthies.

  ‘Let’s take a turn in the garden,’ Honeybath said, and got briskly to his feet. ‘We can plan the thing during a stroll there.’

  ‘Plan the thing?’ It was quite blankly that Edwin repeated the words. But he too had got to his feet. He was, in his way, a very amenable, a suggestible, man.

  ‘We’ll fly to Pisa, and hire a car there. It can be waiting for us, so we can spend our first night in Florence. Unless one is a rabid Byzantinist, it’s the only place from which to start. We can be in the Carmine or the Pazzi, my boy, forty-eight hours from now.’

  With chat like this, Honeybath got Edwin on the move. As they were going downstairs they met Ambrose Prout coming up. Prout passed them without a glance or a word. He was evidently very much offended still. It was a displeasing incident. Honeybath was so struck by it that it didn’t occur to him to wonder where the confounded picture-pedlar was heading for.

  11

  It had been a good idea to get out into the open air. Edwin, although his attention strayed from time to time so that he walked on in a frowning and muttering abstraction, did talk rationally about Italy. He didn’t fall in explicitly with Honeybath’s plan, but did begin to make random remarks which seemed to indicate that his mind was moving in that direction. He was just recollecting (in the sanest fashion) that there is a thoroughly satisfactory hotel outside Gubbio when his train of thought was interrupted by the appearance of Honeybath’s earliest Hanwell acquaintance, Mr Richard Gaunt. Gaunt was nursing what might have been taken from a distance to be a particularly villainous Panzerbrecher of gigantic size, but which proved to be merely a garden fork. The inmates of Hanwell Court, it was to be observed, were fond of providing themselves with small tasks in the gardens. Gaunt remembered Honeybath at once.

  ‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘I am delighted to see you. Lightfoot, how are you, my dear fellow? I believe I observed you, Mr Honeybath, in conversation with our friend Brown.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I’d just met him.’ Chatting up Edwin being hard going, Honeybath welcomed this brief diversion. ‘I was rather curious about him.’

  ‘Not quite from the usual stable, eh? Our mystery man, I sometimes call him. Retiring fellow. Impossible to get anything out of him.’

  ‘He seemed to take a certain interest in crime.’

  ‘Very true. Precisely so. And – do you know? – Luxmoore has told me he got the most valuable advice from Brown about rendering the place burglarproof. Brown concerned himself with the job vigorously. Lightfoot, you recall that?’

  This was an unfortunate subject, and Honeybath was rather alarmed by his friend’s reaction to it. Edwin, in fact, was tiptoeing round his two companions in a grotesque manner undoubtedly occasioned by revived memories of Flannel Foot. But Mr Gaunt appeared unperturbed by this, being presumably accustomed to Edwin’s little ways. He continued to be informative.

  ‘I have myself entertained the conjecture,’ he said, ‘that Brown was at one time connected with the police. He may even have begun as a bobby on the beat. The highest positions in the constabulary are now, as you know, frequently filled by men coming up from the ranks. There is here an explanation, conceivably, of Brown’s somewhat unpolished speech. And now, here is another curious fact about our friend. Lightfoot, I wonder whether you have remarked it? Brown very seldom leaves Hanwell, or even ventures beyond the grounds. But when he does occasionally go away it is for a week or a few nights at a time. And he is collected, and brought back, by a personable young woman driving a discreet but powerful car. It is a vehicle that itself for some reason suggests the police to me.’

  ‘Most interesting,’ Honeybath said. Hanwell Court, he reflected, must be a place where a great deal of this close observing of other people’s business went on. It wasn’t an a
ctivity that Edwin would take kindly to having directed upon him.

  ‘But there is something further, my dear Mr Honeybath. It is a circumstance of which I have become aware as a consequence of reading my daily paper with some attention. Those absences of our friend Brown almost invariably coincide with the perpetration, somewhere around the country, of some large-scale robbery of the highly organized sort.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Honeybath, although he had other things to think about than the mysterious Brown, was startled by this striking piece of intelligence. ‘You mean you have reason to suppose the man a criminal? Haven’t you told the police?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind, my dear sir. Such an idea is obviously absurd. But it has struck me that Brown, before his retirement, was a highly qualified police authority on that sort of thing. Safe-breaking, and so on. A thoroughly scientific business, including the controlled use of high explosives – which brings it almost within the field of my own interest, as you will remember. I take it that when these sensational robberies occur Brown is recalled from retirement in an advisory capacity. But this is mere conjecture, needless to say.’

  Honeybath agreed privately that it didn’t need saying. Probably everybody at Hanwell Court had some mildly crazy notion about everybody else. This was almost certainly not true of Gubbio. The sooner he got Edwin to Gubbio the better.

  But his first task – he reminded himself as he and Edwin took their leave of Gaunt and walked on – was to have that talk with Michaelis and see if any light could be thrown into the darker corners of Edwin’s condition. As for Prout, the problem of getting rid of him resolved itself, a little disconcertingly, by Prout’s own initiative. Prout had left a scrawled note in the studio, couched in highly offended terms. Edwin had addressed him in such a way that it would be better if they did not again meet for some time. He had no thought of a permanent breach, but an interval for reflection and apology there must be. He proposed to walk to the railway station and catch the next train.

  This communication from his brother-in-law failed in turn to offend Edwin; on the contrary, it induced in him one of those rapid changes of mood in which Honeybath understood that neurotic subjects are prone to indulge. He even capered round the studio before momentarily settling down to sketch Brown from memory. Honeybath didn’t doubt that Brown’s feet would be represented as swathed in flannel. And this harmless absorption on Edwin’s part made it feasible to go off and seek out Dr Michaelis at once.

  The Medical Superintendent occupied a curious crypt-like room in the bowels of the building. At some time presumably in the earlier nineteenth century its décor and appointments had been pervasively Gothicized by some owner of the house who had grown tired of the Palladian decorum around him. Since a varied paraphernalia of medical science was now disposed around the room the total effect was of a slightly necromantic or even alchemical order. Here, one felt, Paracelsus might have laboured.

  But there was nothing of this suggestion about Dr Michaelis himself, or about his more personal goods and chattels. These latter seemed designed to suggest that he was in the full enjoyment of the general affluence diffused throughout Hanwell Court. There were good eighteenth-century watercolours on the walls, Chinese pottery of a plainly authentic sort on a shelf, Hepplewhite chairs that had been sat upon in George Hepplewhite’s day. Honeybath, sensitive to these appearances severally, was also capable of a sense that they didn’t quite compose or cohere. They reflected nothing in Dr Michaelis himself. He didn’t suggest aesthetic feeling; and if he had a concern it was to appear entirely up-to-date.

  But he also displayed the same easy manner, correctly short of familiarity, that Honeybath had approved on his previous visit. It was possible to wonder why so capable and alert a young man had relegated himself, so comparatively early in his career, to the medical backwater that caring for the inmates of Hanwell Court must presumably be. Perhaps the pay was particularly good. Or perhaps Michaelis, whom Honeybath recalled as having been rather uncomfortably interested in the psychopathological side of things, himself suffered from some mild disorder in that region. Gerontophilia, it was probably called. The condition of doting upon the aged.

  ‘I didn’t regard the business of Lady Munden’s portrait as in the least sinister in itself,’ Michaelis said. ‘A mere foible on your friend Lightfoot’s part. We must admit, of course, that he is a man of foibles.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Honeybath felt this to be quite a temperate judgement.

  ‘And working in that way must be normal enough with you artists. Easier than simply imagining people.’

  ‘I’d say not.’ Honeybath was less satisfied with this last remark, which he even judged rather silly. ‘One’s first impression of a sitter is much conditioned by types or schemata pre-existing in one’s own head. The labour comes in peeling away that layer of facile generalization, and arriving at the unique visual phenomenon that is in fact before one.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Michaelis didn’t seem particularly interested in this; indeed, he might almost have not been listening. ‘And he has been doing other sketches of the same sort. One or two have been seen by some of his fellow guests, and have gone down quite well. But the activity might cause embarrassment. I shall try to persuade Lightfoot to take up something else.’

  Although Honeybath judged this to be a good idea in itself, he wasn’t too pleased with the notion of Michaelis proposing to boss Edwin around in his vocation.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he asked, ‘anything in the quality of my friend’s work? The larger things in oils, I mean. I gather he has been painting a good deal.’

  ‘Indeed, he has. I have encouraged it very strongly. Such things absorb Lightfoot most usefully over long periods of time. When not so engaged he can be – well, a shade tiresome all round. In fact there have been some episodes of real difficulty. But the painting is splendid. I feel he couldn’t be doing better. Therapeutically regarded, it is a first-rate occupational resource.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it.’ Honeybath, of course, was nothing of the sort, and he had uttered these words with a severe irony. He was conscious of something undesirably equivocal in the cocksure Medical Superintendent’s role. But this no doubt proceeded from the fact that the place discreetly played down its function as in part at least a receptacle for mildly loopy persons. ‘What I was curious to know,’ Honeybath went on (easing off only a little on the irony), ‘is whether you have examined any of the individual paintings with any attention. Would you say they were good, or bad?’

  ‘Oh, good. Decidedly good, many of them. Most interesting. Tell me, Mr Honeybath – did Lightfoot lose his mother in infancy; and, if so, was she almost at once succeeded by a stepmother?’

  ‘My dear sir, I have no idea whatever. And I cannot imagine…’

  ‘There has been one very interesting landscape painting. It is dominated by a large tree; one may say a sheltering and sustaining tree. Only it is impossible quite to tell whether it is one tree. It might almost be two trees, with their several trunks at once distinct and confused. A really beautiful picture. I made some careful notes on it. Tell me, do you know whether in infancy Lightfoot ever had an alarming experience with a cat?’

  ‘Again I have no idea.’ Honeybath’s astonishment and indignation mounted. ‘Nor, I imagine, has he.’

  ‘Indeed not. It would be entirely a matter of repressed memory. But there it was – in one of the pictures. Ostensibly the shadow cast by a man haymaking. But in fact the perfect silhouette of a cat.’

  ‘Most enlightening.’ Honeybath had a dim memory of nonsense of this sort being rendered persuasive by the formidable creative endowment of Sigmund Freud. Michaelis, on the other hand, was no artist. Carousing cardinals in red, or darling puppies in a basket, would be very much the same thing to him as Las Meninas or The Burial of Count Orgaz. He’d search them all indifferently for evidence of the traumata of childhood.

  ‘And at first,’ Michaelis was saying, ‘it wasn’t easy to get Lightfoot going. He seem
ed to have taken against painting. And he’d wander around the place in an agitated way, often pretending to be somebody else.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It’s a kind of game he plays. He associates it with charades.’

  ‘Charades. Thank you.’ Michaelis turned to his desk and made a rapid note. ‘As I was saying, I had difficulty in getting Lightfoot to settle down with his materials. It was the same for a time with the elder Miss Pinchon and her basketwork. But, of course, we have our techniques. There are the resources of science.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Honeybath was outraged. ‘Do you mean that you drugged or doped Lightfoot into labouring at work he no longer had any spontaneous prompting to?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort, Mr Honeybath.’ Michaelis appeared shocked in his turn. ‘Apart from a few reliable psychotropic drugs, I view all chemicotherapy as undesirably hazardous. Irreversible side effects may always turn up. Not that related hazards may not attend other techniques. I had to break off with Lightfoot, as a matter of fact. Happily, the habit had been substantially restored. He has continued to paint, one may say, pretty well by rote.’

  ‘And uncommonly badly. Dr Michaelis, I am constrained to say that I don’t care for the sound of all this at all.’ Honeybath felt that the time had come to stand up and be counted on his friend’s behalf. ‘And I may add that I have been discussing future plans with Lightfoot. We intend to visit Italy together very shortly. There will be details to settle about his possible later return to Hanwell, and so on. But that can readily be arranged, and I shall take it upon myself to discuss the matter with Brigadier Luxmoore.’ Honeybath recalled with some satisfaction that Dr Michaelis was no more than a second-in-command at Hanwell Court. ‘And I am sure,’ he added with grim formality, ‘that Lightfoot will always be grateful to you for the interest you have shown in his work. May I ask whether you told him about your remarkable discovery of the cat?’

  ‘We had a number of instructive discussions, of course.’ Michaelis was entirely unruffled and urbane. ‘I hope you intend to lunch with us?’