by Francis King
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Francis King
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty One
Chapter Forty Two
Chapter Forty Three
Francis King
The One and Only
Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.
‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge
Dedication
for Stanislaw
Chapter One
He could have written of my years in the Black Box. He could have written of the sunny years before that, and of the shadows that from time to time slanted across them, bringing a warping dampness. He could have written of our friendship; of Kensington and Como and Gladbury; of Dad, and Ma’s lovers, and the particular lover, the one we called The One and Only. He could even have written about It, though I should have preferred him not to do so. But why did he have to reveal that it was Noreen, eleven years older than I (he specifies the precise difference), who prised open the lid of the Black Box and let me out; that we live seven miles from Brighton; that, as an antique dealer, I specialise in Staffordshire? Why did he have to give all those clues? Anyone with a pair of compasses can pinpoint our village; and anyone can look there for an antique shop with Staffordshire figures crowding the window. That he calls Noreen Nesta and that he calls me not by my former name and not by my present name but (why choose something so weird?) by the fictitious name Otto Cramp, is not going to put anyone persistent off the scent.
When I write ‘anyone persistent’, I mean, of course, any journalist. I have begun to feel like one of those war criminals who, after decades of hard-working and respectable obscurity, suddenly find themselves blinking in terror in the arc-light of publicity.
He’s a distinguished scientist, a Nobel Prize winner; and of course any distinguished scientist has the right to write his own life. But does he have the right to write mine too? I can hear his answer: ‘if you wished to photograph a rambler rose and the rose was intertwined with another rose, then you would have to photograph both roses, wouldn’t you?’ But does an autobiography have to have the accuracy of a snapshot? Can’t the photograph be a studio one, tactfully air-brushed here and there?
I put down the typescript on the sofa. Then, in case Noreen or Mrs P. should pick it up (like most women, they are as inquisitive as sniffer dogs) I stuff it into the bottom drawer of my desk under the used cheque books, the bank statements, the dividend vouchers.
It is time that I carried Noreen’s breakfast up to her.
‘Well, how are you, old dear?’
‘Not so much of the old!’ Noreen is now eighty-three. She no longer plays tennis, accompanies me on my long walks on the downs, or runs up the stairs to this bedroom, as she used to do a year ago. But she still hobbles out, leaning on the blackthorn stick which belonged to her father, to post a letter at the post box at the first corner of our street or to arrange the flowers in St Cuthbert’s at the second.
I set down the tray on her kneehole desk and pull back the curtains. Then I fetch the bed-rest. I do all these things with love and gratitude. ‘You’ve married your mother,’ Bob told me years ago, before we had stopped seeing each other. But I never felt such love or such gratitude for poor old Ma.
‘So how are we feeling this morning?’
With others she is courageously dismissive of her illness, but never with me. ‘Oh, I had a ghastly night. I hardly slept a wink.’
I do not tell her that through the early hours I lay awake in the room next door, listening to her snoring. Instead I put an arm round her: ‘Poor darling! Why don’t you have the morning in bed?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing!’ She raises a hand, knobbly with the arthritis which has made an invalid of her, up to my cheek and strokes it. ‘ I want to finish that picture for Ellen’s birthday.’ She no longer paints as she used to do when she rescued me from the Black Box; but she makes these collages out of dried leaves and flowers, which I must now collect for her, since she is no longer strong enough to collect them for herself. I take the hand in mine, turn it over, and kiss the palm.
‘Has the post arrived?’
‘Oh, it arrived ages ago,’ I say without thinking. ‘ It’s that new postman – far better than old Harry.’
‘Anything interesting?’
If I were truthful, I should answer: ‘Only something which may destroy our lives.’ But I shake my head. ‘Nothing. Some circulars, that’s all. What they call junk mail.’ Then to change the subject, I ask her: ‘Would you like me to butter that toast?’ On a good day she can manage the task; but I have a feeling that today may be a bad one.
‘Would you, dear? Thank you.’
After I have left her, I have almost an hour before I open the shop.
Instead of reading The Times, as I usually do, I go to the drawer and take out the typescript. Once again.I read that chapter about our school-days, this time slowly, not racing through it with a palpitating heart, as on the first occasion after I had looked in the index, still without page numbers, and seen all those entries under not my own name, Mervyn Frost, and not under my present name, Maurice Yates, but under that absurd name Otto Cramp. I should never have realised that Otto Cramp was I, were it not for that first entry, ‘first meeting at Gladbury’, and that second entry, ‘holiday with mother of’,
and all those subsequent entries, at least a dozen of them.
This will kill Noreen, I think in fury and despair; and then I think: This will kill me. I am like a fox gone to earth; and now, because of this book, I can hear the panting of the hounds. Somehow I must destroy the book. But how can I do that? And why did he send it to me, still only in typescript, with no covering letter of explanation or excuse? Long ago, I finished with him and I thought that he had finished with me.
Noreen is calling. I shout up the stairs. ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Sony, darling. I wonder if you … The blasted paper has fallen off the bed.’
I run up the stairs and pick up the Guardian for her.
‘There you are, old thing.’ ‘I told you not so much of the old!’ She is laughing that ageless laugh of hers.
My first customer is a middle-aged woman in a black velvet beret pulled over one ear. Her insteps bulge over court shoes which seem uncomfortably small for her feet, and her midriff bulges over a skirt which seems uncomfortably tight for her stomach. She has a sunnily optimistic expression on her face, as she begins to unwrap the parcel which she has been carrying under her arm.
‘I’ve got to sell this,’ she explains, without revealing what ‘this’ is. ‘ The usual problem. My old man’s been made redundant after seventeen years with the same firm. I ask you!’ She drops the brown paper on to my desk. ‘There! It’s been in the family for yonks. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It’s only a drawing, I know. But it ought to be worth quite a lot. I wonder if you’d be interested. Would you?’
I peer at the drawing, a head and shoulders of Elizabeth Siddal. Then I realise that it is one that I have seen in the V & A. I sigh my regret. ‘I’m afraid – I’m terribly afraid … It’s not an original drawing, you see, it’s a print.’
Chin pulled in, she draws herself up, affronted. ‘Oh, I don’t think you can be right about that. I’m sure you can’t. It was given to my in-laws as a wedding present years and years ago. By some rich relative. When we got married, they passed it on to us.’
‘I’m terribly sorry.’
She begins to rewrap the picture, with angry, flustered movements. ‘Perhaps I should take it up to Sotheby’s. Or Christie’s. Let an expert see to it.’
‘Yes, you could certainly do that. But I think you’ll find you’ll be told the same thing.’
‘Well, thank you for your trouble.’ She gives her head a toss and then puts a hand up to straighten the beret.
‘Thank you.’
Even before she has shut the door of the shop decisively behind her, I succumb to the pathos of the incident. For a moment it distracts me from the devouring pain, as of a duodenal ulcer, occasioned by that book. Then the pain returns. What is to happen? What am I to do?
I lower myself into the bergère chair which Colonel Sprott has been dithering whether to buy for most of this summer, and begin to think of the Black Box, hemmed in by its dripping privet, of the months of silence, and of my deliverance by Noreen.
Chapter Two
Len was one of the Guardians (that was what, male or female, I used to call them, giving them a capital letter in my mind). He was young and, since his lard-coloured body was huge, one might have supposed that during those years of War he would have been in the forces. But he had what he called ‘my condition’, necessitating that he inject himself each day with insulin. Once, entering what I thought was the deserted assembly room, I found him lying on his side, his buttocks and legs on the dais and his head and torso on the floor below it. I concluded with satisfaction: Well, he’s dead, and left him there, for someone else to find. Someone-else, his wife, who worked in the kitchens, did find him; but he wasn’t dead, he was merely in a coma.
Len would lean over my armchair or he would squat beside it. ‘How are we, Merv?’ No one else had ever called me anything other than Mervyn. ‘How are we today then? Aren’t we going to say something? Come on, Merv! Speak to me! Say something! I’m your pal!’ But I never said anything to anyone. That silence of mine tantalised him and even drove him to frenzy. He was like a small child with a jar of sweets or a money box that he was unable to open. Once, enraged, he slapped me across the back of my head, the small child hurling the jar or money box to the floor. ‘You bloody well answer when you’re spoken to!’ he shouted at me. I merely blinked at him, my eyes watering from the violent blow. Then he put a hand, tattooed with a swallow (could it be that he had once done bird?), on to the back of my neck and gently stroked it. ‘Sorry about that, Merv. But you can be terribly irritating, you know. A real pain.’
All day, except when summoned to meals, I used to sit in that armchair and stare at the garden. Because of a wartime shortage of staff, it was overgrown, a few rose-beds excepted. Was it always overcast or raining or did I, because of my illness, imagine that? I can still see the laurels glistening. I can still even hear the rain-drops lisping off them. Perhaps my illness, which the psychiatrists constantly argued about, induced in me a hyperaesthesia. How otherwise could I have heard those drops when I was separated from them by thick panes of glass?
I had seen Noreen on a number of occasions, but without any interest. I did not then know that she had been released from the ATS (she had been working in camouflage) because her mother was dead and her elderly father was dying; or that, twice each week, she gave art classes which any of the inmates could attend. No doubt Dr Unwin or Dr Lazarides had mentioned the classes to me, suggesting that they might be of benefit to me. No doubt Len had urged me: ‘Why don’t you attend one of these art classes, Merv? Could give you an interest.’ But those were days when I took nothing in.
Noreen was larger and more upright than she is now. Thirty-three years old, she had the ruddy complexion and the sturdy physique of the farm girl that once she had been. Her hands were big and capable, and she wore her thick, straight blonde hair parted in the middle and caught up at each side by a tortoiseshell clasp shaped like a butterfly. She had been at the Slade and had had a single picture, of harvesting on the farm below a thunderous sky, accepted by the Academy in 1938. Whenever she hurried through the living-room to the art room beyond it, she would look over to me, as I sat in ‘ my’ armchair (by now, every other inmate knew that it was mine and made no effort to usurp it), staring out of the window. But I would pretend to be totally unaware of her. In fact, for most of the time I was totally unaware of her.
Then, one day, instead of clattering in her lumpy, flat-heeled shoes straight over the worn linoleum to the door to the art room, she veered towards me. ‘Come on!’ she said briskly. ‘Join us! You don’t want to sit there mooning day after day.’
I made no answer. I continued to stare out of the window.
‘Oh come on!’
Many people had said, in effect, ‘Come on!’ to me, and I had ignored all of them. Why did I not ignore her? Was it some prescience, a leap of the mind into the future in place of its constant dawdling in the past, so that I knew, knew at once, that here was my rescuer and that, if I seized my opportunity, somehow, at some time, I should escape from the Black Box?
That first day she gave me some glitterwax to model, and from it I made for her – yes, it was for her, not for myself – a rose with stiff pink and white petals, smelling vaguely of paraffin. ‘Well done!’ she told me. ‘I think you’ve got a talent. A real talent.’ I had heard her say the same thing or something like it to many of the other people also at work. But nonetheless I was delighted.
Every Tuesday and every Friday morning I used to wake in a state of expectation and happiness. She was coming, there would be a class. I still did not speak, to her or to anyone else. But when I saw her, I would give her a smile, such as I gave to no one else. ‘You have the most wonderful smile in the world,’ she was later to tell me. When she once opened her desk while I was standing by it, I noticed, with rare pleasure, that there, among the crayons and tubes of paint and scraps of paper, was my glitterwax rose.
When I at last spoke, I surprised myself as much as her.
All that week snow had been falling, smothering the laurels and lying thick on the garden paths. In the art room she wore her tweed overcoat and the tip of her nose was blue. In those days I myself was impervious to both cold and heat. I was never aware of the temperature, often prompting Len to fuss over me – I should put on a pullover, it was perishing; or why didn’t I take my jacket off, I’d be boiled to death?
Noreen came over to me at the work table where I was moulding another lump of glitterwax. ‘I think you’ve progressed beyond that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you try some painting? It could be more fun. It’ll stretch you more. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
It was only a monosyllable. But it was, literally, the first word which I had spoken since I had entered the Black Box. Had she realised that? I asked her much later, for her to answer that yes, she had realised it, and then to add, in a puzzled tone: ‘And, you know, I knew, I just knew as soon as I’d put the question, that, after so often refusing to answer me, you were going to answer me then.’
Yes.
It was a Yes to her, to myself, above all to life.
That was when she first fitted the key into the lock on the Black Box. The opening of the lid would come much later, long after the War was over. But that was when my deliverance was first put in train.
Chapter Three
Noreen’s head, an ancient Jaqmar scarf covering it (she often used to wear the scarf when bicycling over from the farm to the Black Box), appears round the door. ‘No customers?’
‘Only one. And she wasn’t here to buy but to sell.’ I tell her about the affronted woman with the print which she believes to be an original drawing.
Noreen sighs at the end of the story. ‘This recession!’ she says. It is fortunate that, because of the money left to her by her father, we have never had to live on the proceeds of the shop. ‘I’m just going to toddle up the road to the post.’