by F. G. Cottam
The treatment for this is called mandibular distraction. It involves taking bone and cartilage from the ribcage and inserting this tissue into the lower jaw. It takes and grows – encouraged by metal braces, which retain the shape of the transplanted bone until it matures and hardens. It’s generally done to coincide with a growth-spurt most children experience at the age of 12. Still’s Disease is rare but this is an established procedure performed quite often at children’s hospitals such as Great Ormond Street in London’s Bloomsbury. It’s almost always successful. And it’s a surgical and recuperative ordeal no loving parent would honestly wish on their child.
Symptoms of JIA include nausea, bouts of fatigue and muscular weakness. Molly’s condition meant that she had almost no strength to her bite and her teeth were misaligned. She suffered headaches often and her tongue, positioned too far back in her head, restricted her breathing channel.
In the year following the diagnosis, we’d noticed just to what extent the weather affected her health. She didn’t do well in the winter but thrived in the sun and the warmth. Migrating to Australia and starting all over wasn’t an option because we needed the NHS. We had to stay in sometimes cold, damp old England. But Katie was right. It was Molly’s condition that turned the bolt-hole idea from something fanciful into something real. And I think my wife knew that as well as I did when I first mentioned it in a phone call and she tacitly sanctioned the purchase of the plot.
That year was tough, emotionally. In the weeks after the diagnosis was confirmed, Molly needed operations to have the corrosive fluid her condition engendered drained from her knees and then from her jaw. Both of these procedures required full anaesthetic and during the second of them, her final words before slipping into unconsciousness to her watching mother were, ‘I’m scared.’
Katie returned to the room where I was waiting at the hospital and broke down. And seeing someone so self-possessed and strong at handling pain, sobbing so uncontrollably, provoked my own tears. Molly was later returned to us with her face bruised and battered, after the struggle, it was explained, the anaesthetist had to keep her air channel open under the mask.
All of this - the procedures, the talk of our daughter’s deformity, the knowledge she was living with a chronic disease, the looming inevitability of major facial surgery, took its emotional toll. And during that year, as Molly got older and more self-conscious in her girlish maturity, she became aware that people stared at her. Other children in particular often pointed at her or commented or asked questions about her appearance, devoid as children are of the adult attribute of tact.
The rest of Saturday and most of Sunday on the island went by in a blur of happy activity and then on Sunday evening the girls were gone and I felt suddenly and utterly bereft. Alone, I began to think. My routine would have to change. Weekends and probably evenings too would need to be devoted to the house I intended to have built if it was to be ready for occupation by the school summer holidays. The thought was a cheering one.
Sunday evening found me sitting alone outside the Spyglass, watching the sunset from a seat at one of the empty tables there, the foam breaking pinkly on the rocks down below on the other side of the low pub perimeter wall. I raised a glass, offering mock condolences for the sad and sudden loss of my leisure time, actually delighted at the ambition of the schedule and the concrete nature of the challenge. Though actual concrete would, on this occasion, be limited to the foundations of what I’d planned to build.
The sea shimmered and I toasted my absent family with a sip of Admiral Ale. I thought I saw the same schooner I’d seen the previous day sailing at a remote distance, its stretched canvas gloomy shrouds as the night crept across the water, me with a landlubber’s awed respect for anyone capable of handling a wind-powered vessel out on that salty wilderness after dark.
I was pondering unknowingly on the magnitude of that task when I smelled the sweetish aroma of pipe tobacco and turned and saw my new and unwanted friend Charlie Bradley, he of the sharp memory and nautical attire, the buttons on his reefer jacket bloodshot discs in the setting sun, his face riven and pitted in it under the ribbed wool of the knitted watch cap he wore.
He took the pipe stem from between his teeth and his lips twitched in the slightest of acknowledging smiles and I saw that the back of the hand cradling the pipe bowl bore a deep semicircular scar, as though he’d been mauled by the teeth of a large and vicious animal. He saw me notice it, he was nothing if not sharp, but he didn’t offer comment and I thought it even ruder to ask than to stare and so I turned back, looking out to sea again. My eyes scanned the horizon for the white schooner, which had slipped out of sight.
‘Penny for them,’ Charlie said, from behind me.
‘I was thinking about pipe smoking,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite extinct, but you don’t see it much anymore. I did think a couple of years ago that the hipsters might revive it, because it would go well with their late-Victorian beards and passion for exotic coffee blends and full-sleeve tattoos. But it never happened. At least, it never happened in Hammersmith. Maybe it happened in Hoxton.’
‘Why there?’
‘The Hipster heartland.’
‘It’s a good job you’re an architect and not a spy, Mr. Aldridge,’ Charlie said after a pause.
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s because you’re a terrible liar. I’ve not the slightest notion of what a hipster is, but it doesn’t matter, because you weren’t thinking about pipe smoking at all. You were actually wondering how I got the scar on my hand.’
‘How did you?’
He came and sat down opposite me, a silhouette against the setting sun, his features disappearing in the glare of light now an orange nimbus outlining his head. He said, ‘Rich client I used to crew for sometimes, owned a bull mastiff named Toby. It was an evil creature, its name the only nice thing about it. I was only careless with that animal the once, but once was enough.’
‘You provoked it?’
‘I’d had a celebratory tot of grog after winning a race aboard his owner’s yacht. The mood was jubilant, none of us aboard her properly sober. For the first and last time, I felt inclined to stroke Toby. It was a mistake.’
‘We all make those,’ I said.
‘Aye, we do,’ he said, rising to his feet again. ‘But that was a big one. ‘
I shrugged.
‘The skill with big mistakes is in recognising them when they’re about to happen and having the humility to walk away before they do.’
‘That’s very philosophical,’ I said.
He knocked out his pipe against the side of the table and put it in the pocket of his coat. ‘It’s also good advice, Mr. Aldridge.’ He turned away.
‘It’s a bit too enigmatic for me.’
‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it’s as plain as day.’
‘I’d prefer you call me Michael,’ I said. I noticed that down by his side, he had tightly clenched his bitten fist.
‘Michael, then,’ he said, without turning back, walking away.
I became aware of music, then, drifting out from inside the pub. I knew they had performers play on a Sunday evening, though I’d always been back from London too late on previous weekends to have seen or heard any of them myself. This was a jazz combo by the sound of it, playing something antic and furious that sounded like it belonged in the early 20th century.
I thought then of my daughter’s penny from 1927, reminded of it probably by Charlie Bradley’s offer of a penny for my thoughts. I wondered what else I might uncover if I borrowed a metal detector and took it down to the site for a thorough hour or so of searching. And then I thought, with a shiver, of what an unsettling ordeal doing that would be alone, after dark, in such an isolated spot, if the coarse grass covering it did indeed conceal deliberately hidden secrets.
Two
After a night during which I didn’t sleep particularly well, I debated in daylight, as I had in the darkness, whether to try to find out more about th
e history of the plot I’d bought. I passed it running that morning with no sense of foreboding, despite what my wife had said about the site having been deliberately grassed-over. In the sunshine that seemed an innocent mystery and if I felt any strong emotion passing the twin oaks flanking it, it was pride in ownership of somewhere with such wonderful potential for us.
I showered before setting off for Ashdown Hall and it was as I soaped myself down and sluiced the suds from my body that the feeling of slight uneasiness about the site returned to me and I decided to do something about a mystery growing if not in actuality, then certainly in my mind. I knew that one of the blokes working on the restoration, a stonemason named Tony Carter, flew a micro-light aircraft as a hobby. And that gave me an idea.
English Heritage employed local people wherever possible on their projects and Tony was a native of the island, born and still living in Newport. Most of the Wight workers abseiled or wind-surfed or sailed or took to the hills on road bikes in their leisure time. They were young and energetic and they took full advantage of their recreational opportunities. Even Ryde’s Richie Mallard, the works foreman and a mighty beer drinker, regularly worked off his Friday night hangover walking the cliff-top Tennyson Trail, prior to slaking the thirst doing so gave him in the pub on Saturday afternoon.
With Tony, it was the micro-light. On the one occasion I’d seen him pilot it, the little aircraft had looked a lot more Heath Robinson than it did James Bond. But it flew, which was the point. Earth that’s been disturbed leaves a signature visible from the air for generations, even in some instances for centuries. It’s why archeologists study aerial shots of the sites they intend to dig before the blade of a single spade breaks the ground. Construction leaves tell-tale scars, even if all the rubble’s been taken away, even if the turf has been carefully re-laid.
I took Tony to one side during his tea break late that morning and explained what it was I wanted him to do.
‘You’ll have to stand close to the spot and wave something colourful,’ he said. ‘I know roughly where you mean, but wouldn’t be able to pin-point it precisely enough using trees, there’s just too many of them on that section of coastline.’
‘So you haven’t heard of any building having been there in the past?’
‘There’s been nothing there in my lifetime,’ he said. ‘It’s coastline, common land and then further inland, there’s a sheep farm. Don’t know if the farm’s wool or meat, but any buildings connected to the farm would be within its boundary fence.’ He shook his head. ‘Nope, never heard of anything man-made in that region, but I’m happy to take a few pictures, give you a better idea.’
The obvious thing to do was of course to ask Peter Clore about the history of the site. I did that at midday, getting through to him straight away. He sounded on the warm side of ebullient, which slightly surprised me. Maybe my hundred grand had resulted in a bonus windfall for him. Maybe he’d treated himself to a new bauble at my expense, once-removed. Or perhaps he was about to.
He listened to what I had to say about my wife’s observation concerning the texture of the grass and its fibrous and as I’d discovered, salty character, in silence. Then he said, ‘Above-and-beyond, in my view, Mr. Aldridge, actually chewing the green stuff, I mean. We have cows for that.’
‘Sheep, there, actually,’ I said.
‘Quite, except that they’d be trespassing sheep, on that particular spot, since the land’s now yours.’
‘Can you help me with its history?’
He paused. He said, ‘Cold feet?’
‘Not at all, Mr. Clore, I’m curious is all.’
‘To my knowledge,’ he said, ‘there’s never been anything there but what’s there now, which is sufficient accessible land on which to build a spacious residential property with a quite magnificent view of the sea, both in scope and scale. Climatically, so far as the British Isles is concerned, it is also a blessedly temperate locale. It was under those criteria, I’m fairly confident, that Martens and Degrue came originally to purchase it.’
‘But you don’t know that for certain?’
Clore could have told me then, exasperatedly, that I was wasting his day with questions I should have asked prior to purchase, if I’d had any real concerns. But he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘I shall endeavour to find that out for you, Mr. Aldridge. I’m fairly sure of my ground, as it were, but I shall do what I can to allay your fears.’
‘Fears,’ when he actually voiced the word, seemed an awfully dramatic one for the doubts I was fostering. Suspicions, would have been better, but even that seemed a bit strong, because suspicions of what? It was more just a general feeling of uneasiness and most of the time it wasn’t even that.
Handsome, the word curled in Charlie Bradley’s veteran-Wight-seafarer dialect into my mind and I wondered if I wasn’t simply guilty, with my property acquisition, of the old folkloric crime of looking a gift-horse in the mouth.
Then something occurred that made me forget about Charlie Bradley and mistakes about to be made and the fat, bling-prone Peter Clore. It made me forget anything else not to do with the Ashdown Hall and its very distinguished painter resident, the late Sir Arthur Sedley Barrett RA, OM. A discovery was made that day by a master carpenter working on the project. He exposed a sensational secret. He found something I’d suspected existed and had asked for his help in checking out.
English Heritage had been emphatic on the ground-rule that nothing whatsoever be done to damage the structural integrity of the building. From the outset, from my first survey of its interior, one glaring anomaly made me reluctant to comply with this cardinal rule. The ceiling of the library was two feet lower than that of every other ground-floor room. They were uniform, all 20 feet high in the exact reach of old imperial measurement, leading me to believe that the library ceiling was false, had been deliberately lowered and was very likely concealing something.
I’d become determined to find out what this was after reading a monograph about Barrett when I landed the commission and concluding that he was a secretive old cove, probably with plenty to hide. He was one of those upper-crust 1930s right-wingers who professed admiration for Hitler and Mussolini and got away with it, reputation intact after the war despite his earlier flirtation with Fascism. But he wasn’t outspoken after the conflict; he was discrete and private having learned his lesson and eventually he was utterly reclusive in that manner that only the very rich or the very poor ever seem to succeed at.
The library ceiling at Ashdown Hall wasn’t Georgian. The whole of the library had an early 20th century Arts and Crafts Movement character. The ceiling was supported by ornate wooden struts. They were beautifully individually carved and rendered and were, as decorative features, unique. All this made any tinkering with them totally unacceptable. Barrett had designed the room himself with the help of some of his Bloomsbury Group pals just after the Great War. He fell out with his Fabian chums later, but in that period they’d been close. Duncan Grant had done a fair bit of the carving. The library interior spoke more of Barrett’s taste and personality than any room there other than his studio. It was as such inviolate, untouchable.
I’d concluded that the way to get into the hidden space was from above, by removing a section of the hardwood floor in the room atop the library, which was Georgian and was a music room. It seemed odd to have a music room above a room demanding quiet, until I realised that of course the library had been built and stocked long after the grand piano and clavichord up there had fallen silent. Barrett wasn’t musical at all. And he hadn’t welcomed musical guests. He hadn’t, once the Second World War was fought, welcomed any.
Ollie Taplow was the master carpenter for consistency I’d involved in this confidential enterprise. His specialty was staircases, he was a genius at the going and the rise and the best chippie working with hardwood I had ever come across in my entire professional life. He’d heard out my Barrett stash theory, carefully studied the music room floor and then told me he could get in an
d out of the space and afterwards conceal the method of entry so completely that no one would ever know he’d done it.
My office was a Portakabin on the lawn at the start of the grounds to the rear of the Hall. When Ollie knocked on its door, looking a bit pale at 2.30 that afternoon, I knew he’d taken advantage of a lull in his own work schedule and gone and done what we’d schemed over together.
‘Paintings,’ he said. ‘They’re all his, they all bear his signature. They’ve been out of the light for God knows how long so they’re in perfect nick. Could’ve knocked ‘em up yesterday, except for the fact that he’s been dead forty years. They’re that fresh.’
‘Bloody hell, Ollie,’ I said. ‘How many canvases are we talking about?’
‘There’s a load of them up there, Dave. Upwards of a dozen, all in muslin sacks.’
‘Rolled?’
He shook his head, ‘On stretchers, ready to frame and hang.’
‘Jesus.’ My mind was reeling at the numbers. I knew what a Barrett fetched on the odd occasion one came up at auction. ‘I wonder why he hid them.’
‘I think that’s pretty obvious,’ Ollie said. ‘I think you’ll think it obvious too, when you see them, Dave.’
I called English Heritage straight away. Then I sent everyone home, after first swearing Ollie Taplow to secrecy. The paintings would need to be authenticated and valued and only then would news of their existence be made public. Barrett was esteemed as a great artist, but was not judged prolific, at least not in his lifetime. There were no more than thirty of his finished works known to be in existence. There were almost none any longer in private hands. These new pictures increased his output by more than a quarter. When I climbed through the aperture in the music room floor Ollie had so carefully fashioned, I saw that for myself.
They were all studies of the same subject, a woman in her mid-20s, vibrantly beautiful and in almost all of them, naked. I was no expert, but the artist seemed to have painted them absolutely at the peak of his powers. The colours around the central figure were rich and vivid and her skin-tones so subtly done she looked alive.