‘Apart from Mappa Mundi,’ Helen informed me on arrival. Damaged in transit from one part of the building to another, the painting itself unharmed, but one corner of the frame smashed and a horizontal gash running along the top. Nothing to worry about, but: ‘Thirty years hidden safely away, unblemished. Yet once the “professionals” get their hands on it…’ Giles paused as a group of rowdy sixth-formers pushed past us up the stairs. ‘Given my way, I’d lock them up for five years in a cell with that lot and throw away the key.’
He’d brought a specialist in to deal with the repairs. A Swedish lady of impeccable reputation but few words, who spent an expensive afternoon striding about the building in search of a suitable location to use as a workshop. Having finally selected the Mauve Attic, part of the old servants’ quarters with a large skylight running the full length of the ceiling, she supervised our heaving of the Mappa Mundi up two flights of stair, ensuring it was positioned precisely to her taste, before ushering the three of us from the room and settling down to work.
Some three-quarters of an hour later, she came looking for us.
‘Not more problems?’ sighed Giles.
‘No, more picture.’
She led us back to the attic and we squeezed in behind her. The floor was now covered with what that morning had been a white sheet, and the tools of her trade – chisels, hammers of various sizes, a set of intricately shaped knives – had been arranged purposefully on a small table. An angle-poise lamp was set up bedside them whilst, somewhere in the background, a radio promised us fair weather for the coming week. Mappa Mundi’s frame, reduced now to splinters, lay scattered about the room, the picture itself propped drunkenly against one of the walls.
‘Two for the price of one.’ Kicking the debris aside the restorer hefted it up, turning it round as she did so. ‘Same artist. Less colourful. Modern art, yes?’ And she was right, there was a second painting on the reverse.
A picture of sorts. Two green brushstrokes, slashed diagonally corner to corner, all but obscuring figures – joking, plotting, gambling? – an old man, Harlequin, a dog – or was it a rabbit? – clustered around the periphery. With the centre left empty.
A daub, I’d called it. Something he’d given up on, had difficulty with, or hadn’t the heart to finish. And there it was again: rough-edged, released from its frame, just as I’d first seen it. With the furniture stacked up around us, precisely as it was now, complete with radio broadcast.
‘It was the way he worked,’ I heard Giles explain. ‘Grabbing the nearest object to hand: canvas, wood, paper, tin trays, old pictures even. Palimpsest, isn’t that what they call it?’
I heard, yet was barely aware of, what he said, back as I now was with Jimmy, meeting him that last time, at Third Class Cottage…
… dimly lit. The radio playing, tuned on this occasion to the Home Service. A weather forecast: dry, overcast, rain expected. There’d been a scrambling before he let me in, reversing the picture on its easel.
‘By no means uncommon.’ The Swedish lady, unimpressed, was reeling off numerous examples.
He attempts to assuage my guilt. “Conned by the power of the press… happens to the best of us, Peter… a lesson well learnt.” Relief; he knows nothing of my disloyalty.
‘Not “boxed in”… “preserving the immediacy”… “the unity of experience and expression”. Giles quoting Jimmy directly now, his voice reaching me from afar.
I’m unable to make out the details. ‘My Last Duchess’, he calls it. Not a portrait, though. I crane forward to get a better look. A Shakesphere? King Lear? Othello? Twelfth Night?
‘… only natural boundaries permitted.’ He was always sounding off about it…
“time I was moving on”… “no need to worry”. He brandishes the medallion. “A talisman as looks after me”. “Constant Companion”, where I go she goes…
They’d stopped talking, were staring at me.
Was it then or later he hushes me, eager to catch the news broadcast, gives it his full attention. Very un-Jimmylike. Unemployment at all-time low; ramifications of the General Election; theatregoers upset by ‘Waiting for Godot’; Ruth Ellis executed…
…‘Peter!…’
…the body of Julius Soroyan, an American academic, missing for several weeks, discovered. Murdered along with his disciples. Those who’d not fled. The police seeking to contact those that had. The closer they’d been, the greater the danger, the more urgent the appeal. Jimmy switching off the radio. Ushering me out, returning to his packing with renewed vigour.
Soroyan! The name mentioned by Geraldine the last time we’d met. Which I’d been struggling with ever since. Benefactor of Pendarrell House, Jimmy’s mentor whose influence had been so crucial in his early days, who’d taught him the value of solitude, to ‘embrace the emptiness’. From whom he’d caught a penchant for reticence, his self-reliance, a belated love of Browning. The American whose scholarship he respected and whose privacy he’d guarded. From religious fanatics whose vindictiveness was equalled only by the extent of their tenacity. And from whom he’d escaped so narrowly with his life.
I was back at Amberstone Hall once more. BERCEN rather. Mappa Mundi returned to its easel, the gilt frame in shreds about the floor, struggling to explain the significance of that broadcast.
‘And you’re sure that’s the reason for his leaving?’ Giles kicked idly at a piece of debris.
‘Would explain why he got out in such a hurry, without telling anyone.’ The perfect fit? Two opposites coming together: what I knew of Jimmy and Geraldine’s revelations about his early days – the ‘dark side of his moon’?
‘And Peter’s right about one thing.’ Helen had taken the torch and was examining the picture. ‘It’s the Duchess’ backside, if you’ll excuse the expression.’ A crudity by which Mappa Mundi came to be known by all three of us – probably the Swedish lady also, who, for the moment, stood dumbfounded.
‘An English joke, my dear, nothing to worry about.’ Taking her by the arm Giles ushered her from the room.
‘Which leaves Jimmy on the loose somewhere out there.’ Helen had begun gathering up the remains of Mappa Mundi’s frame. ‘If he’s alive, that is.’
‘You’d have thought he’d have made contact if that was the case.’ Giles moved the easel and began folding the sheet.
‘Must be into his eighties now,’ I said.
‘But intending to return, surely, once it was safe to do so?’ Helen seemed to have come to a more equitable view of Jimmy’s motivation.
‘With bookcase empty, chairs on table, every stitch of clothing packed? The Night Watch removed from the wall, talk of “outstaying his welcome”, “pastures new”?’ Jimmy was off for good, and he knew it. Entrusting Miss Quintock’s book, her Songs of Innocence and Experience, to my safe keeping. And, as far as Jimmy was concerned, you couldn’t get more final than that.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Catch 22
At last, a plausible explanation for Jimmy’s sudden departure. Peter, though, was assailed with doubts. A coincident. He’d confused Soroyan with Stoyan; misheard the radio broadcast; jumped to conclusions. That part, at least, was easy to check. We had the man’s name, a rough idea as to the date and the whereabouts of his death. Patience, a little ingenuity and access to the combined resources of the county library service were all that was needed. Ten minutes to be precise, cross-checking the records, followed by quarter of an hour’s crash-course on operating the somewhat dilapidated microfiche. And there was the information, spooled up before us in all its grainy detail.
The discovery of the body had been a national sensation, the tabloids revelling endlessly in the gruesome details, the more sober of the dailies searching endlessly for a motive. All of them linked his murder with the Ruth Ellis case, their letter pages fulminating with the pros and cons of capital punishment
. Agency photographs, blurred and indistinct, showed the man as he had been in the States, some fifteen years previously. On his own two feet, before an explosion confined him permanently to a wheelchair. Deliberate according to one source; accidental claimed another. Both limbs blown off stated the former; amputated according to the latter. Aged anywhere between fifty-five or seventy-six depending on which of the papers you read. An agnostic; no, an atheist. Wealth acquired or built upon his father’s/grandfather’s tobacco/sugar/oil empire. Millionaire/billionaire. Pay your money, take your choice – the press barons’ rather.
The local press proved rather more fruitful. Pendarrell House had been a religious retreat bankrolled by the man himself. Quite a bit of damage had been done on the night in question, but nothing of note stolen. The gang, about a dozen in number, had broken in and ransacked the American’s apartment. They’d burnt his manuscripts, dumped all the books they could find into the sea and murdered two of his closest ‘disciples’. All that remained of Soroyan was the wheelchair. Till his mutilated corpse was recovered a few hours later. Mystic rites, hinted one of the papers. At high tide added another; by moonlight, with Saturn in the ascendency.
Not much else had been discovered about the man himself. Nor could journalists – whether based in London or North Wales – shed much light on the eccentric semi-religious group that he’d founded. We discovered little trace of them in the records. Pendarrell House had become the Penreath Holistic Health Centre – affluent, expensive, access by appointment only, letters of reference also required. Unlikely that either of us would gain admittance, let alone afford one of their exorbitant cures. No point in following up the Liverpool connection either. The churchyard where Derek had been buried was long gone. Grassed over, its tombstones removed; the paperwork untraceable in the county archives. Little to show for our efforts, but all of it adding to what we already knew about the ‘dark side’ of Jimmy’s moon.
Developments on the home front were by now occupying a lot of our time. The library was in the process of moving to new premises and threats of internal reorganisation hung over all our heads. Much the same thing was happening down at the University. For some time now it had depended upon government grants, hand-outs from a decreasing circle of benefactors – most recently the largesse of industry. New faculties were being established, older ones encouraged to develop programmes of a more vocational nature: sandwich courses, technological transfer, industrial placements and the like. Liaisons dangereuses according to Peter, but he need not have worried. Quite the opposite in fact. This ‘entrepreneurial’ venture in which he was involved, just the kind of forward-looking ‘go-out-and-get’ initiative those in high places were looking for. ‘Networking, not grandstanding’ – most commendable. Peter had stalled, not knowing just what it was he’d gone-out-and-got. Nor the language with which they spoke. His hesitation was taken as a ploy for greater remuneration. A research assistant or more office space? Neither of them available. They admired his strategy, though. Just what they’d have done under the circumstances. Worthy of a Chair? And why not make it a personal one? After which…
‘It wasn’t till then I realised it was the exhibition they were talking about,’ he told me later. ‘Professor Emeritus. How am I going to explain it to the others? All of them just as qualified and far more deserving.’ True, Peter was not among the most eligible or pushy within the faculty. ‘And what did they mean by that last bit. After which – what?’
‘You poor innocent,’ I said, kissing him lightly on the forehead. ‘Don’t you know, it’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a University man in possession of a Chair must be in want of a seat on Council?’
The aftermath was to prove just as rewarding. But for the new spirit of enterprise we might never have met Professor Brady Alegandro. As Numero Uno guru of the new management techniques his lecture was obligatory for all members of the academic staff. Peter sat backstage, decked out in full regalia amid a phalanx of departmental Chairs. I’d been placed in the front row, the Vice Chancellor to my right, with an ageing Uncle Henry snoozing a little further down the line. Alongside him a gaggle of University wives. And there was the man himself, up there no fewer than ten feet before us. Shorter than I’d expected, about Peter’s age, a scholarly pair of frameless glasses perched between defiantly non-academic sideburns, his dark suit and pale features contrasting with the multi-coloured hoods and gowns arrayed behind him. Ostentatiously detaching the microphone from its stand, he advanced to the edge of the stage, and declared how delighted he was to be with us.
He’d taken Five Protocols of Progress as his title, the transatlantic accent – ‘Sir Winston Choichall’, ‘absoid notions’, ‘take my woid for it’ – holding my attention for a while. But: there were preparations for the exhibition to consider… the booking of next year’s holiday… what to wear at the graduation ceremony. I made it through to Protocol Three before drifting off.
‘Goid’s Intent being a prime example…
I was wrenched back suddenly to the present, straining desperately to recall what the man had said. Something about the influence of dynamic individuals on the companies they ran? The force of their moral principle driving the enterprise forward, religion often having a key part to play. Lord Reith, Cadbury, Rowntree for example.
Not to worry; there it was, set out neatly on the screen behind him. With the professor still in full flow: ‘O.E.I’ – ‘Omnipresent Enterprises Incorporated’, providing one of the best, but a very rare example: ‘that of a woild-wide oiganisation emoiging from the narrowest, most rigid of religious precepts. Those of Goid’s Intent. Their founder, christened – I kid you not – Praise the Lord, spent a foitune expunging what he took to be wickedness from the face of the oith but went to the chair for foist-degree moider. Not an oispicious beginning you’d have thoit, considering what Omnipresent has achieved since then. It’s success in no way hindered – and here’s da poynt – despite retaining those self-same restricted values. Or could it be the ruthlessness with which they’ve carried them through? Remember the Finnish Markka Conspiracy. The run on the Mexican silver market. The so-called “Outback Shoires Swindle”.
‘And there was that problem you had with them this side of the pond a few years back. Nothing like it since the dissoilution of the monasteries, but coisting one of my compatriots his life. Pure fabrication accoiding to O.E.I’s spokesman; stories put about by their rivals, the kind of thing so many top-noitch oiganisations endoir these days. And I’ll go along with it.’ His body language told us it was the last thing he’d do. ‘Guess I have to considering the moinumental sums they receive in damages.’ There was sympathetic laughter from the audience, amid which Brady passed quickly on to Protocol Four.
The man knew more than he was saying, but no point pressing him in the question-and-answer session. He’d only have clammed up. We missed out at the reception as well, the distinguished visitor led from group to group with never a moment to himself. No chance in the toilet either, where Peter spent a good ten minutes discreetly scrubbing his hands. He’d checked out of the hotel by the time we reached it and there was no chance of waylaying his taxi. But we cornered him in the VIP lounge at the airport, his retinue departing and only thirty minutes to spare. Peter relieved him of his hand luggage as I commended the quality of the presentation and together we steered him to a quiet table in the corner. The professor, however, proved as wary as ever. Till a bottle of whisky was purchased; several drams downed.
‘All seems far-fetched to me,’ I challenged him. ‘A leading company, listed on the stock market, controlled by a bunch of maniacs. More like a novel.’ I refilled his glass. ‘And not a very good one at that.’
‘Which is moist people’s reaction. Like I say, part of the reason for their success.’ Which seemed all we’d get out of him.
Till Peter took a hand. ‘A chance of a lifetime, meeting you like this. It would help my career enormously to know
more. Some ice perhaps?’
‘Best stay well clear of them is my advice. Surprised you’ve not coight up with them already.’ The cubes cracked as the American dropped them in his drink. ‘Happy to tell you all I know, but we haven’t got much time and moist of it covered in the lecture. Goid’s Intent hiding all these years behind a larger, respectable oiganisation. Tiny, anonymous, yet controiling all O.E.I’s activities. Thanks to the old man’s successor. The son, every bit as bigoted as his father, but a genuine businessman, with a real flair for commoinication. Built himself a woildwide netwoik of contacts; access to market trends, insight into commoicial ventures in all continents. All adding to the wealth he’d inherited.’
Rather more sensational than we’d expected, but not much here we didn’t already know. Still, there could be more to come. ‘Sounds like the son’s a real go-getter.’ I replenished Brady’s drink. ‘Could teach my husband a trick or two by the sound of it – both of us for that matter.’
‘Go-getter? That’s soitenly one way of putting it.’ The American smiled ruefully. ‘Driven, more like. Set on cleansing the woild of evil, just like his daddy toit him.’ He swirled the dregs of his whisky grudgingly around the glass. ‘Clever though, I’ll give him that. Ninety-eight percent of Omnipresent’s operations legitimate. Raking in the cash, keeping the investors happy. Looking the other way whilst he uses infoimants the woild over to fund the remaining two percent. Which don’t bear scrutiny in any language. Finland, Australia, Mexico, like I said in the lecture. To say nothing of his dealings over here. But you’d know about that.’
‘Only what we’ve read in the papers and way before my time. The murdered man an American, you said. Commercial rival was he? Here, let me top you up.’
Chorus Endings Page 24