The Dark Clue

by James Wilson

  ‘Meg?’ I said, in case I had mistaken her.

  ‘I’m a good lass, I am,’ she said, as if she hadn’t understood. ‘I can ‘elp tha. I know what tha wants.’

  It was maddening, but there was no point pursuing it. I gritted my teeth. ‘What do I want?’

  ‘Tha wants ‘e.’

  This sounded like a ploy to draw me out further, so – remembering my resolution – I said nothing, but waited for her to continue.

  ‘I sees . . . canvas,’ she said uncertainly, at length. ‘I sees paint…’

  And so would anyone, I thought, who had first seen a brush.

  ‘I sees a name … the beginnin’ of a name … I think i’s a “T”.’

  I started; but then told myself it was not such a wonder – ‘T’ is a common enough letter, and there is a reasonable chance that at least one part of an English name will start with it.

  ‘I’ that right?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Or is i’… is i’… “J”? Ay, I think tha’s i’! “J”. An’ then “O”. No, “E”.’

  I started again; and this time could not stop myself blurting out: ‘Jenkinson!’

  ‘Ay,’ she said (though what ‘she’ was, exactly, I still could not say), ‘“Jen” summat, all right. Oh, but ‘old ‘ard.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sssh!’ A pause; then, puzzled: T tha’ tha, or ‘e?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That “Jen”? Tha name, or ‘is?’

  I could not answer. After a moment she said:

  ‘I’m a’ felted.’

  And then I seemed again to be half-hearing a distant conversation between her and somebody else. But this time the other voice was a man’s, gruff and short.

  Eerily, I have to confess, as I imagine Turner’s.

  I forced myself not to reflect on where I was, or what I was doing; but merely to hear and remember what they were saying, like a scientist or a reporter, without judging it. But try as I might, I could still only pick out fragments:

  Slippin’

  Taste

  Why won’t -?

  Appre’end

  ‘O?

  Windsor Usurp

  Aloud (allowed?)

  A moment’s hesitation. Then the girl’s voice:

  ‘There’s no call for tha’.’

  I could hear her clearly enough now, but the indignant tone suggested she was still talking to somebody else.

  ‘Ask him,’ I said. ‘Ask him -’

  ‘Wha’?’ she snapped irritably.

  ‘Ask him his occupation.’

  A pause. Then:

  ‘P … p … pain …’

  Painter. But again, of course, the brush had effectively told her that.

  ‘In what medium?’

  ‘Mrs. Mrs. Wosser -’

  I shook with frustration. ‘What kind of paint?’

  ‘Oi.. . oi.. .’

  ‘Is that all?’ Silence.

  ‘Ask him to name one of his pictures.’

  ‘See … see …’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘No! See!’

  ‘Oh, seal Waves, you mean? Water?’

  ‘Ay … ay … war. Wa’er. Wa’ercolour.’

  I saw I must take another approach, or risk losing my mind altogether. I said:

  ‘Lu.’

  She seemed to wait for me to continue. When I didn’t, she said:

  ‘Wha tha mean?’

  ‘Did he know a woman called Lu?’

  ‘Mm.’ There was a kind of frowning puzzlement in her voice, as if she were struggling to make sense of something – an impression strangely belied by the placid vacancy of Mrs. Mast’s face. ‘By t’river?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a murmur I couldn’t make out, and then a giggle.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  “E says Wa’erloo.’

  She laughed again. It took me a second to see why. Then an odd spasm – half fear, half exaltation – passed through me: for surely there was something unmistakably Turnerish about this reply? It could just be coincidence, of course; or it could be that Mrs. Mast was an exceptionally gifted fraud, who had guessed whom I was trying to contact, and had sufficient knowledge of him to make his ‘spirit’ speak in Napoleonic puns, and refer repeatedly to water – but at that instant, for the first time, I believed I really might be communicating with him.

  The thought of it – the hope of it – made me reckless.

  ‘Is it true – is it true,’ I said – for a moment forgetting entirely about Mrs. Mast and her mother – ‘that he bound her, and placed a hood over her head?’

  Silence.

  ‘What does he say?’

  “E don’ say nowt.’

  I wanted to beg. I wanted to plead for my sanity. Only by a great effort of will did I stop myself.

  ‘What of Sandycombe Lodge, then?’ I said. ‘Why did he design the basement so?’

  Silence. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘One question. One question only. What does he know of a man who calls himself Simpson?’

  There was no response. I waited, resolving to say nothing more. As I did so, an image drifted into my mind, so suddenly and powerfully that it was as if someone had placed it there directly.

  A Turner picture. Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus.

  But I was not merely watching the scene, I was a part of it. Everything moved before me – the jeering figures on the ship, the horses bearing the sun into the sky, the giant clutching his eyeless face in agony.

  I whispered: ‘Are you there?’

  Still nothing. Just an unbroken silence, that seemed to grow deeper and more final by the second.

  Remembering Mrs. Mast’s injunction at the beginning, I did not move or interfere. But as the minutes passed I could not help wondering if this were entirely normal. And when at length the old woman – who up until now had remained calm and still – suddenly shifted in her chair, and looked (or so it appeared in the darkness) into her daughter’s face, I concluded that something must be wrong.

  And then, without warning, it happened. From less than a foot in front of me, the man’s voice spoke again. No more than a whisper, this time, and only three words – but they were absolutely clear:

  ’Leave me be!’

  I somehow found the strength to sit there quietly as Mrs. Mast returned to consciousness, grunting and muttering as before, and her mother relit the lamps, and the familiar shapes and colours of this world once again formed before my eyes. I contrived to answer politely when she asked if the seance had been helpful, and to offer to pay, and to find two guineas when she told me she did not charge, but would accept a contribution from those she had assisted, in order that she might be able to further her work, and bring consolation to those who mourned.

  But once outside I began to weep – to sob and quake and wail uncontrollably, so that people looked strangely at me, and stepped off the pavement to avoid me.

  I have no pride left. Tomorrow I shall go to see Ruskin.

  Friday

  Record.

  Just record.

  I take a cab to Denmark Hill. ‘Young Mr. Ruskin is not at home. You will find him working at the National Gallery.’

  Another cab, to Trafalgar Square. A half-deaf functionary, who at first affects not to understand me. Then he sees murder in my eyes, and conducts me to the basement.

  It is dark and humid and close. The walls are lined with boxes, piled two or three high. In the feeble glow of the two gas-lights I can see that behind them the plaster is stained with mould and moisture.

  Ruskin sits at a table, working by the light of a single oil-lamp. Before him are stacks of notebooks, hundreds of them – mildewed, tattered, frayed into holes, eaten away by damp and mice. He is painstakingly unbinding one of them, and does not pay us any attention as we enter.

  ‘Mr. Hartright,’ grumbles the functionary.

  Ruskin raises his head. The blue eyes are a
s brilliant as ever, but he is pale with tiredness. He stares into my face for a moment – fails to recognize it – looks at the functionary for an explanation.

  But the functionary is already leaving. Closing the door.

  The biography of Turner,’ I say. T came to see you about it, a few months ago.’

  ‘Ah, yes, yes, of course.’ He half-rises, leans across the table, touches my hand. ‘How are you?’

  I say nothing, and he does not press me. He slumps back in his seat, his eyes already returning to his work.

  ‘You said I might talk to you again, when I had gone further.’

  He nods without looking at me. He lifts a page from the open notebook, carefully blows the dust from it, and lays it on a sheet of clean writing-paper. I can see nothing of it but a disc of radiant orange dissolving in darkness, but it is enough to jolt me. To shame me.

  ‘Why are you not at home, preparing for Christmas, like the rest of the world?’ he says, taking out another page and peering at it.

  I have not the energy to ask him the same question. ‘I am desperate.’

  He sighs. ‘I cannot say I am entirely surprised.’

  ‘No. You warned me.’

  ‘Did I?’

  There are two other chairs. I clutch the back of one of them, hoping he will invite me to sit down.

  ’Sometimes,’ I say, ‘we may deceive ourselves into thinking we are capable of some great task which is beyond us.’

  ‘Is that what I said? Dear me.’ He waves a hand at the laden table, and tugs his misshapen mouth into a smile. ‘If hypocrisy were a capital offence, my prospects would be poor indeed.’

  ‘It was beyond me. I need your help.’

  At last he looks at me. That is a sad state for any man to find himself in,’ he says slowly. ‘And if it is the case I am truly sorry for it.’

  ‘What is the truth about him?’

  ‘Ah, the truth!’ He shakes his head morosely. ‘How do you find the truth about a man who eschewed the literal, and spoke in riddles? It will end by making you mad.’

  ‘I fear it already has.’

  He stares deep into my eyes, and then nods. ‘The truth about Turner’, he says, ‘is never direct. Always oblique. There are hints of it in the pictures, of course, but you can never fully comprehend it. It cannot be reduced to its component parts, or to any simple proposition. There will always be something beyond, that defies our attempts to imprison it in words.’

  I feel I am about to faint. I drop on to the chair. He appears not to notice.

  ‘Perhaps the same might be said of all of us. I certainly hope it may be said of me. But most of us may be represented by a kind of tapestry, in which the principal elements – honesty, dishonesty, intelligence, stupidity – are clearly visible. In Turner, by contrast, the cloth is twisted and folded and wound in on itself. When you glimpse a thread you never know whether it is a part of the subject, or a chance trick of the weaver’s art, or a false trail deliberately woven into the fabric to puzzle or mislead.’ He pauses. Examines his own fingers. Fastidiously blows the chalk dust from them. ‘You are familiar, of course, with the fallacies of hope?’

  An odd expression, but the meaning is plain enough. ‘If I wasn’t before, the last five months have made me so.’

  He cannot resist a smile. ‘I was not referring to your own experiences, Mr. Hartright, but to Turner’s poetic magnum opus.’

  ’The Fallacies of Hope?’

  He nods. ‘You have not heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  He raises one shaggy eyebrow. I have fallen still further in his estimation, if such a thing is possible. He shuts his eyes, in the effort of remembering, and declaims:

  ‘Craft, treachery, and fraud – Salassian force,

  Hung on the fainting rear! – then Plunder seiz’d

  The victor and the captive, – Saguntum’s spoils

  Alike, became their prey …

  That was the start of it. The caption to Hannibal Crossing the Alps in 1812. He’d used verses as captions to his pictures before, of course, but they were always taken from other poets, though often garbled or misquoted. The attribution here was: MS. Fallacies of Hope. Thereafter, it appeared on his paintings again and again, each time with a different verse. So what does everyone naturally assume?’

  It is too remote from my thoughts for me to grasp it immediately.

  He prompts me: ‘What is the implication?’

  ‘That. . . that… he has – or has written – a poem. An unpublished poem. And is extracting pertinent passages from it, to serve as captions.’

  ‘Exactly. And he must have known that was the impression he was giving. But it wasn’t true.’

  ‘It didn’t exist?’

  ‘Not in its entirety. He merely composed lines, or adapted them from other writers, when he needed them. It’s a false trail, you see?’ He lifts his finger, and traces its progress on an imaginary tapestry. ‘A flash of colour here – a flash there – you think they belong to the same continuous strand, but they don’t. It’s an illusion.’

  I can barely muster the strength to ask:

  ‘Can we then trust nothing?’

  He shrugs, and looks at me curiously, as if he were seeing me for the first time. At length he says:

  ‘What is troubling you, Mr. Hartright?’

  And I tell him. I tell him about Farrant and Hargreaves – about our dinner at Fitzroy Square, and my abduction afterwards – about Lucy, and the hood and the ropes. I tell him about Travis, and Marian’s notebook, and my growing suspicion of the Eastlakes (at which he cannot suppress a wintry smile). And about my meeting with Simpson, and my uncertainty as to whether or not it was a dream, and the seance with Mrs. Mast. I tell him I don’t know what to believe.

  But I do not tell him I fucked two whores, thinking it would make me a genius.

  He does not even seem surprised. He nods, and then stares at me in silence.

  And I am conscious only of the relief of having said so much, and not being vilified or rejected or laughed at for it. And of the intolerable burden of what I have not said, which sits in my belly like a small hot coal.

  O, God, to be rid of that too! To have said it all – to have revealed those things in myself so dark and terrible that even I had not suspected their existence, and to find myself still accepted – that would be a kind of redemption. The only kind I can now conceive.

  But it is impossible. Even as I write these words I know

  O God

  Write. Write. Record.

  At length he gets up. He surveys the wall of boxes, finds the one he is looking for, and carefully removes it. Then he brings it to the table and – reaching in his pocket for a key – unlocks it.

  ‘He was, unquestionably, a man of deep, strange errors and failures,’ he says. ‘And I find myself more and more helpless to explain them. Save that they all arose from his faithlessness, or despair. For this is the century of despair; and it has corroded the greatest minds as perniciously as it has the lowest.’

  He opens the box, takes out another notebook, and turns to the last few pages. Sketch after sketch of men and women in bed together. Nothing is complete – a pair of buttocks here, a raised leg there, a hand clutching a bare shoulder – and the faces cannot be seen at all; but it is plain enough to what they refer. Pictures not of people – not even of entire bodies – but merely of an act.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s ugly. But is there any evidence that he – that he could have been capable of… of …?’

  ‘I am an art critic, Mr. Hartright, not a detective. I can only tell you – as I told you before – that there is a dark clue running through Turner’s art, and it is the darkness of death. There is another running through his life, and it is the darkness of England.’ He pauses, and shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘What he might have done for us had he received help and love, I can hardly trust myself to imagine. But we disdained him. For seventy-six grinding years we tortured his spirit, as we torture the
spirits of all our brightest children. And we are torturing it still, now that he is dead.’

  ‘Because of the will, you mean?’

  ‘Ah, yes, the will. We say it is the will, because a will concerns money and the law, and those are things we can comprehend. They are all we can comprehend. But Turner stirred something deeper in this blind, tormented country – something of which, with our bluff good sense, we are barely aware in ourselves. Turner foresaw our end, which few of us can face. Worse still, he dared to love the light – something without a price on it, which could not be defined and contained in the dreary little counting-house of our minds. And we punished him for it. Whatever he was guilty of, it is we who drove him to it.’

  I struggle for breath. I have to whisper it:

  ’But what do you believe?’

  ‘One thing one moment, another thing the next, like most men. Only I accept it, with as much grace as I can. To contradict yourself is no more than to acknowledge the complexity of life.’ He gets up again. ‘Let me show you something.’

  He picks up the lamp, leads me out into the stairwell and into a room on the other side. It is absolutely dark, save for the soft glow of burning oil. Leaning against the wall is a stack of unframed canvases, five or six deep.

  ‘These are his last works,’ says Ruskin in a hushed voice, as if we have entered a church. ‘The last works of our greatest genius. See how we value them.’ He runs a finger down one and then turns it towards me. It is glistening with water. ‘See what they tell us about ourselves.’

  He hands me the lamp, and slowly pulls the canvases away, one at a time, to let me view them.

  I have never seen

  Write

  Nothing. Swirls of nothing. Smear

  Whirlpools. Pulling you into nothing.

  Whirl

  Nothing

  Whirl

  LXIV

  From the diary of Marian Halcombe,

  23rd-26th December, 185-

  Saturday

  I shall not kill myself.

  But I know now why people do.

  Nothing rational keeps me from it.

  Today we were meant to be travelling to Cumberland, to join Laura and the family for Christmas.

  Instead