The Painter

by Will Davenport

  She laughed.

  'I mean it,' he said. 'It's all right, this job. Don't mind him. There's good blokes working here, mostly.'

  Blokes, she thought, oh yes, the blokes, and discovered that untrustworthy creature prowling in her mind again. I am not on the look-out, she told herself firmly. I always make mistakes when I start feeling that way. Screw that.

  'Mostly?' she queried.

  'That's what I said.'

  They climbed sloping planks which covered damaged steps to an impressive doorway surrounded by carved stonework. Inside was a long hallway with a staircase rising in a curve to a landing above. There was an infantry attack in progress somewhere above, loud hammering and two men shouting at each other in echoing tones of derision. Dennis opened a temporary plywood door on the right, looked inside and then waved her in. In an elegantly proportioned downstairs room, with the fresh plaster on the walls still mottled with damp islands, a man in his sixties was sitting at a table, studying a mound of drawings. He looked around and when he saw Amy, he got up quickly.

  'Hello, Who have we here?' he said smiling, and put out a hand. He was tall and just a little bent, as if it was starting to be all a bit too much for him, and his green tweed jacket had a splash of cream paint on the shoulder. Amy looked at it, remembering her own efforts with the tin of Azzurro Blue, but he didn't look like the sort of man anyone would have tipped paint over on purpose.

  'My name's Amy Dale,' she said.

  'How absolutely extraordinary,' he said. 'Do sit down.'

  That seemed an unlikely response, but she sat down anyway.

  'She's here for the job,' put in Dennis from the doorway. 'I'll leave you two together, then.'

  'Oh!' said the man. 'I see.' It didn't sound as though he did. He smiled at Amy and there was mystification on both sides. 'I'm Peter Parrish. I'm the historical, sort of liaison person, I suppose you would say, I look after the ancient architectural questions, the history of the place, you see? Very hot on the detail, you know, North-East Heritage. Everything's got to be just exactly as it was. That's why they're stumping up the money. Good thing too, if you ask me, but it does mean constant attention. It's a funny old house, two different periods of course, thirteenth-century towers, seventeenth-century domestic range in between. You'll have spotted that I'm sure. What's this about a job?'

  'Why did you say my name was extraordinary?' she asked, sitting carefully on a rickety folding chair.

  'Do forgive me. How rude I was. I was just reading an excerpt from the journal. At the moment it's my absolute Bible. The best reference source one could ever hope for on a job such as this, A first-hand account of life here when the house was built. Better than that, while it was actually being built. We're so lucky to have it.'

  He was holding in his hand a modern exercise book, hard black board covers and a red cloth spine. She looked at it and frowned.

  'It doesn't look very old.'

  'Oh, it's not the original,' he said quickly. 'Dear me, no. They keep that safe in the Hull archives. We just typed up all the bits that mattered so we could have it on hand. You know, all the bits that touch on the house and the furnishings and so forth. It's terribly useful, do you see? She was so involved, such an enthusiast for what she was creating. I mean look at this.' He put on a pair of half-moon glasses and flicked quickly through the book tilting it to the light. This is it, January the third. She says, let me see, um, All the morning, in the house with Maskell and his joiners to see the doorway made less wide as my husband commanded before he departed. They have made new the plasterwork and narrowed the panels of the door with great skill. I have shown them how the moulding may be relieved and cut so that the light will play upon it to full effect. I believe he will be greatly pleased. Wonderful stuff, and so helpful. It's that very doorway right behind you. We could see it wasn't the original width. Tampered with, clearly. Might even have tried to put it back to the way it started off but with this to tell us, we knew straightaway it was meant to be like that. Terrible tragedy narrowly averted, do you see?'

  'How amazing. When was that written?'

  'Didn't I say? Sorry, 1662. From the journal, written by the lady of the house. The very first lady. Runs from the beginning of January when they had just moved in, right through to summer of the year after. All right, it's not Pepys by a long chalk, not this stuff, anyway. It's very, well, domestic I suppose, but it's absolute gold dust as far as we're concerned. Are you related by any chance?'

  'Related to who?'

  'Well, the Dahls of course.'

  He'd said it in an odd way, she thought, an affected drawl. Perhaps that was the way they pronounced it around here.

  'The Dales? Yes, I am. That's sort of why I'm here. My er … my parents always talked about the old family house, I mean, my great-grandfather was the last one who actually lived here but he was the youngest son. The older son got it, so we're sort of cousins, I suppose.'

  'So you are a descendant.' Parrish looked on the verge of clapping. 'Well, well. They weren't always Dales, you see. They were Dahls from Norway, before they Anglicized themselves. What a wonderful coincidence! And you're here to help us with the work, are you? We're on the home-straight now but there's still so much to be done. Did you see the advertisement?'

  'No, not at all. I just happened to pick up Dennis, hitchhiking, and one thing led to another.'

  'Dennis?'

  'The man who showed me in.'

  'The wandering plasterer! Dennis the Menace as they call him. I'm with you. And he told you about it?'

  'Yes.'

  'But you are an experienced restorer?'

  'Yes,' she lied, and immediately felt terribly guilty. She hadn't been the least bit bothered when she'd made the same claim to the foreman but Parrish reminded her of a nice old schoolmaster. That is, I'm a very experienced artist in all sons of different fields. What sort of work do you need doing?'

  'I'll show you,' he said. 'Come and look at this.' And led her upstairs.

  On the landing, a man was at work on the ceiling coving, perched on a plank between two tall step-ladders. He glanced down and she had a quick glimpse of a dark face smiling at her in surprise before they passed out of his sight.

  She heard him call out something indistinct behind her which had the quality of an alert. There were answering whistles from above and she found herself wishing for a pair of high heels. In a bedroom at the back of the house, where a newly repaired ceiling showed large patches of mostly dry plaster, fragments of old plaster had been laid out on a folding table showing a floral border painted in faded colours.

  'That's what you've got to do. We have a rough idea of what the pigments should be,' said Peter Parrish. 'Amelia has a list of some of them, a sort of shopping list, I suppose.'

  'Who's Amelia?' asked Amy, immediately worried at the idea of working to the orders of some unknown woman.

  'Amelia? Oh, Amelia Dahl,' said Parrish. 'The first lady of Paull Holme, the writer of the journal. Bless my soul, didn't I say? That was why I was a little startled when you told me your name. I was just reading the words of Amelia Dahl and in walks her living, breathing embodiment, Amy Dale. Quite something, don't you think?'

  At that moment, for the first time, Amy felt a sense of connection with this old house – more than a connection, she felt a sudden sense of pride, almost of ownership. She thought of the juggling ducks. 'Well, maybe nothing happens entirely by chance,' she said.

  'You know, I really do think you'll have to do the job,' he said. 'I mean, it's too good to be true, isn't it? Amelia Dahl's descendant coming to put things back the way they used to be. Do go and tell the foreman chap, Mr Hawkins, that I said it was all right, then perhaps we can have a talk tomorrow about how you might go about it. We'll sort out the pigments and all that stuff. Do you have your own brushes?'

  'Oh yes,' she said, looking at the faint paintwork on the plaster. 'I always carry those with me.'

  'This is the best room to start in,' Parrish said as he p
aused in the doorway. 'We're still trying to piece together the patterns in the rest of the house. We'll have to do some thinking about that.'

  Running halfway up each of the walls was wooden panelling, coated with old paint so thick that it more or less hid the curves and channels of the mouldings at the edge of each panel. He tapped the wall above the panelling with his knuckles. 'It's pretty sound. The ceiling was the worst but it'll be dry enough to paint tomorrow. We'll be getting to work on the panels next. It's all got to be stripped off. Three centuries' worth of paint, I should think. Do you live nearby?'

  'No,' said Amy. 'I'll be sleeping here.'

  'Gosh,' said Parrish. 'Is that wise? I could probably find a room for you in town if you like.'

  Amy, sensing dangerous adventure, did not like.

  Outside in his portable office, the foreman told her about the hours expected, made her sign a form about tax and National Insurance numbers and then squinted at her suspiciously.

  'Breakfast's bread and cereal. Help yourself. Food's laid on at lunchtime,' he said. 'Sandwich van comes round. Takes orders if you fancy something special. Supper's your business. Pubs in the village or there's a gas ring in the back pantry. Sleeping, now,' He pulled a face, 'Don't have no women's wing here,' he said. 'Only one working bathroom and that's got no lock on it. I told Greener to fix you a bolt. Make sure he does. Until then, you better pick a room with a door handle you can wedge a chair under. Top floor only. Should be one spare somewhere.'

  'I can manage,' she said. 'Do you only employ rapists?'

  'Boys will be boys.'

  'I know,' she said sweetly, 'but I prefer men,' She took a backpack out of her car and slung it over her shoulder. Taking her painting-case in the other hand, she set off to find herself a room.

  A narrow back staircase led up from the kitchens straight past the first floor without stopping and up into a corridor running along the back of the house, halfway into the roof-space so that its ceiling was cramping in with the slope of the beams. It was lit dimly by the afternoon light coming in through two very dirty roof lights. Small cell-like bedrooms led off the corridor towards the front of the house. The doors were all open but each one she looked in was covered in an almost identical sprawl of dirty clothes, boots, overalls and sleeping bags. There were eight of them and they were all very clearly in use. For a moment, Amy wondered whether she would have to sleep in the car after all, but then in the gloom at the far end of the corridor where a wall seemed to bar the way, she saw that behind an old blanket hanging from two nails there was a rough opening in the stonework, apparently newly made judging by the stones now stacked to one side. She lifted an edge of the blanket cautiously. Seeing that the darkness beyond it was not after all entirely dark, she stuck her head through and found herself looking into another age. What lay beyond the blanket was a wide hallway with a floor of rough boards. It ended at the outer wall, pierced by an arrow-slit, and she realized it had to be the top floor of the square stone tower. In the scam light from the slit she could see two doors opening off this space towards the front of the house. More rooms. Both doors were shut.

  Feeling the need to walk almost on tip-toe, she hesitated before tapping on the first door. The corridor back there on the other side of the wall had felt much more inhabited. People had gone on living there, moving through it and letting their life soak into its walls. This space was much older, much more lost to view and to humanity. Medieval. She pushed the door and looked cautiously inside. It was stacked with dusty junk. Something scurried, too fast for her to identify it, into a pile of broken wooden crates in the corner, something probably too small to be a rat, but only probably.

  Light filtered into the room from a Gothic arched window in the front wall its glass panes opaque with dirt. It showed a broken chair, a pair of picture frames and a rusty hip bath. They could easily have been there for a century or more.

  She went out into the hall and turned the handle of the further door expecting the same. It stuck in the frame and she pushed harder so that when it suddenly opened, she was carried into the space beyond by the violence of her movement.

  In that grey and ancient room Amy was confronted by a scene from a childish nightmare. A claw stretching out. Something behind it, twisted and swathed in black, eyes glaring from a distorted face, swivelling to stare at her. In the moment before her brain saw it for what it was, her mouth let her down by screaming her fear.

  Frozen in the silence excavated by that scream she found, without anything changing except her perception, that she was looking at the back of a man, a man dressed in black overalls sitting on a hard wooden stool. He had been holding out a hand towards a tall mirror propped against the wall straight opposite her. The mirror was cracked and dulled around its edges, the occasional remains of gilt mouldings clinging to its frame. This man had twisted round towards her when she screamed and his pale face was marked by a savage scar from his right temple, down past the outer edge of his eye to the point of his cheekbone, a scar still healing in shades of pink and purple. The scar dragged her gaze to it and he flinched, twisting his face away.

  Worse, she now found herself staring at his hand – the hand he had been holding up to the mirror, a claw of a hand which lacked its outer edge and its two smallest fingers.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I just screamed because …' Because what? Because you're a sight to make anyone scream? 'Because I didn't think anyone would be in here.'

  'Who are you?' he said in a young man's voice, and his voice sounded as shocked as she felt.

  'I'm Amy,' she said, 'I'm going to be working here. I was just looking for a room. Can I use the one next door?'

  'Next door. Here? In the tower?'

  The tone of his voice said it was his tower.

  'The others are full.' She surprised herself by sounding ingratiating, not confrontational.

  He had turned his face back towards the mirror and he addressed her over his shoulder.

  'They're not my rooms.'

  'But … you don't mind?'

  His silence showed he clearly did mind – that he had purposely sought out this isolated room on the other side of the tower wall. He was still looking away and she didn't want to cheat by looking at him in the mirror, knowing he was hiding this too-fresh scar.

  'I won't bother you,' she said as the silence dragged out.

  'Go ahead. Do what you want,' was all he said in a listless and deeply tired voice.

  She closed the door on him and stood in the gloom outside, irresolute, an intruder with no real choice. The other room or the cramped back seat of her car – those seemed to be the only options open to her. It looked no more inviting than before when she went back into the first room, but Amy was a pragmatist so she started making space, dragging the junk which half-filled it out on to the landing beyond, stacking the heavy wooden boxes against the back wall. They were old wine crates and, rubbing away the dust, she could read the words stencilled on the end of one of them. 'Chateau Ponsardine. Bordeaux'. Woodworm had been feasting on them for years and three of them came apart at the joints so she stacked the remaining slabs of powdery wood against the wall. Further down the stack she found one even strong enough to serve as an impromptu table and it still had a bottle in it, a heavy wine bottle in dark green glass. Wire staples held in a cork that projected just a little from the neck. The lacy remains of a paper label still clung to it and as Amy blew away the dust, she could read Terrier-Jouet 1902' and 'Epernay'. A swirl of sediment twisted through the brown liquid as she lifted the bottle to look through it against the light. No bubbles.

  An hour's hard labour followed with a borrowed broom, a pile of rags and a mop and then she had a room of her own, with her air mattress on the floor, her sleeping bag stretched out on it and a series of drawers retrieved from the back yard, lacking only the chest which had once surrounded them. Set on her wine-box table were the objects she had saved from the rubbish pile, a delicate porcelain cup with no handle, a very old atlas, its pages a
ll stuck together, and a smaller wooden box which looked as if it had once been a vanity case. Fragments of the ivory which had once covered it were still pinned to its outside but inside there were just broken strips of wood which had made up its compartments.

  Eric, a shaven-headed electrician, had tried to chat her up on one of her trips downstairs and wound up running a cable into the tower room for her so she now had a naked sixty-watt bulb hanging from a nail in the wall above the air bed. A minute after Eric left, there was a tap on the door and Dennis put his head round it.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'This won't do.'

  'This room?'

  'Yeah. I'll come in here. You have mine. Much better.'

  'No, I'm all right, I like it. Anyway, I've cleaned it up now.'

  Dennis looked uncomfortable. 'Better off in the other bit, eh? People around you, you know. Better for you.' He was speaking in a low voice.

  'Surrounded by men, you mean? It's all right, I'm fine here.'

  He frowned. 'I mean it. There's a good reason.'

  'Which is?'

  He looked away for a moment, towards the wall, towards the room next door.

  'I've met him,' she said.

  'Just trust me.'

  Too many older people had tried to tell Amy what was sensible and what was not. 'Dennis, I'm staying here,' she said.

  He looked at her, considering, and accepted the inevitable. 'I'll get you a bolt then. Mind you use it.'

  'Stop fussing.' She wanted to ask Dennis more about the man next door but he'd turned and gone.

  Walking back from her car a little later, carrying a bag over each shoulder, she saw Peter Parrish waving at her.

  'I was about to come looking for you,' he said. 'I've got to be in town tomorrow. Why don't you drop into my office there, about nine thirty or so? We can sort out paint and stuff like that. Do you know your way round Hull?'

  'Not at all, I'm afraid.'

  'It's just a few doors up from the library. Big blue sign. Ask anyone. Here's my number just in case.' He handed her a business card. 'Architectural Consultant' it said.