The Going and the Rise

by F. G. Cottam

  I didn’t get the impression she was a professional sitter, a mere model. Altogether, this hidden stash looked to me like nothing other than a labour of love and of secret love at that. Barrett had married in the early ‘20s and his wife had died in 1938 and this emphatically wasn’t her. The question of who she was, who she’d been, would of course need to be answered. It was a historic find.

  I knew this was a view shared by my employers when the fist-pumping and back slapping began shortly after their delegation arrived. They could have sacked me and they certainly had a case for giving me a cosmic bollocking, but when they saw the haul, they were in the mood only for congratulation. I accepted their praise modestly. You have to keep a sense of proportion. I’d followed a hunch and so the paintings had been found. The immediate conclusion was that they were a series of masterpieces. But locating them was hardly in the same league as having painted them myself. I’d been shrewd and quite daring I supposed, but that didn’t make me a genius, not even a genius of the Hitler-loving variety.

  Of course I told Katie as soon as I could. Mobile reception was touch and go in Ventnor, so I was outside to get a signal, actually on the beach, when I called her an hour earlier than I ordinarily would that evening and committed my second sacking offence of the day by breaching my employment contract’s confidentiality clause.

  ‘This is going to be worth millions to them,’ she said, after a pause. ‘Tens of millions, I should think, every major gallery in every country in the world would like a Barrett in its collection.’

  ‘They’re only worth tens of millions if they’re authenticated, darling.’

  ‘We both know that they will be. You wouldn’t hide forgeries, what would be the point?’

  ‘They’re genuine, alright,’ I said.

  After another pause, she said, ‘Can’t help wondering whether English Heritage will show the finder any gratitude.’

  I laughed. ‘You mean like with treasure trove?’ I suddenly had a picture in mind of Molly, exalted, with her copper penny burnished in her palm two days earlier. ‘Treasure!’ she’d said.

  ‘Took a call from the head of their Legacy and Acquisitions department this afternoon,’ I said. ‘There’s some very early and strictly off-the-record talk of a discretionary award.’

  ‘A reward, you mean.’

  I laughed again. ‘Maybe it’s a finder’s fee. Anyway the figure of a hundred thousand pounds was mentioned. So I don’t care what they call it.’

  ‘It’s exactly what you’ve just shelled out for our plot on the island. Is that why you asked for a hundred grand?’

  ‘I didn’t ask for anything, Katie. The offer’s come completely unsolicited and out of the blue and obviously it’s yet to be officially confirmed. But assuming the paintings are authenticated, that’s the figure they’ve come up with. It’s just a slightly spooky coincidence.’

  ‘It’s not spooky at all, it’s more like divine providence from where I’m sitting, you clever, clever man. Now say something cheerful to your daughter. Someone was unkind to her again today at school.’

  It took only a matter of days for the paintings to be authenticated. It was done on-site, Ashdown Hall staked-out by a team of security people, crews from the BBC and Sky News harassing everyone, all work on the restoration project temporarily halted. Then the canvases were shipped off to London, the long way, by road to Cowes and then a boat to Southampton and then road again in a secure convoy with police outriders advertising their valuable cargo to any aspiring art-thieves.

  I was interviewed by a couple of highbrow journalists from The Times and The Telegraph in the company of an English Heritage chaperone and that was it, things returned to normal, except that my side-kick in the caper, Ollie Taplow, got a hefty bonus when his wages were paid. And he did restore the section of music room floor he’d lifted to an immaculate state. He was as good as his word. You really couldn’t see the join.

  I should say something about the woman or girl in the paintings Barrett had hidden from the world and posterity because of course there was intense speculation as to her identity. Some informed guesses were thrown around by the daughter of his official biographer and the author of the monograph on him I’d read and one or two other highly qualified cultural commentators, but no one actually knew and Barrett, who’d died childless, had no living descendants of his own to spill the beans. He’d dated them, which was a clue, on the rear of each canvas in charcoal, showing that they’d all been painted from 1923 to 1926.

  This fact made them all the more valuable on the open market, because it meant that the works pre-dated his ideologically tainted fascist period. No one buying them need feel overly morally compromised, the theory ran. It didn’t help identify their subject, though.

  She had the boyish figure made fashionable by flappers back then. She had small, pert breasts and long legs and was fairly narrow-hipped and athletic looking. She had the muscle-tone of a swimmer and flawless, honeyed skin. Her tawny hair was worn bobbed and she possessed eyes with the faintest outward, upward slant to them. Her mouth was her most dramatic feature, painted crimson and pouting deliciously when it wasn’t twitching slightly in a secretive half-smile. She was stunning and exotic and you’d have said right out of Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald stories of the time, if she hadn’t been someone real, portrayed by an artist born in Sussex.

  It was almost halfway through May before I stood one morning between the oaks flanking the frontage of the house I hadn’t yet built and waved a bright red bath towel above my head. I heard the faltering whine of Tony Carter’s micro-light engine growing louder behind the hill to my rear. And then he was a hundred feet above me, snapping away with a camera we’d borrowed from my employers and had loaded and mounted, advised that a particular black and white Agfa stock was the best film for the job. I’d managed to source a roll of this on eBay. It would in theory provide us with twelve shots, which so long as Tony was capable of taking reasonable aim, was more than enough on a day as bright and clear as this one already was to deliver conclusive results.

  He performed four passes, skilfully piloting the little craft slowly, at a steady height, no pitch or toss in the stable, cloudless air and then he swooped to fifty feet or so and gave me the thumbs up and opened his throttle and was away, back over the hill behind my un-built dream home with something between a wobble and a roar.

  I had the pictures developed at a print shop in Yarmouth where they still employed someone old enough to remember how to do it. I sent one of our site interns off on his bright shiny Bianchi road bike to pick them up when the shop texted to say that they were ready for collection. I didn’t look at them until just after 6 o’clock that evening, seated outside the Spyglass in the sunshine, seeing immediately that my clever and alert wife had been absolutely right about the disturbance and repair to the turf on the ground.

  I called Bullen and Clore immediately. I thought that I might still catch Peter Clore, twinkling plumply at his desk, turning to admire whatever he’d bought with his percentage of the money I’d paid them in the slanting sunlight through his office window.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to call you,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever it was, it was rectangular and it was substantial.’

  ‘It was a place of worship, Mr. Aldridge.’

  ‘You’re telling me there was a church there?’

  He cleared his throat, ‘I believe more accurately, a temple.’

  I was pretty ignorant on the subject of organised religion. Did Methodists have temples? I thought vaguely that freemasons did, but freemasonry wasn’t actually a religion, it was more a self-help group with added frills.

  ‘I knew nothing about it,’ he said, ‘because it happened so long ago. It was destroyed by an arson attack in the late 1920s.’

  ‘Arson wouldn’t do much but blacken stone or loosen the mortar between bricks. Was this temple made of wood?’

  ‘It was constructed from stone. When it was rendered derelict, all trace of it wa
s removed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr. Aldridge. Perhaps the stone was re-cycled. The island then was not the prosperous place it is now for the majority of its inhabitants. Perhaps a forensic archeologist might find fire-scorched stone from that original structure in fisherman’s cottages built in Ventnor or Niton during the Great Depression. Does the fact of the temple’s existence materially affect our transaction?’

  I thought about this. Fortune had recently smiled on me. Better than that, fortune had given me a ripple-eyed grin, shaken my hand heartily and slapped me on the back. Temples were places of worship. Spirituality, even to an agnostic like me, seemed on balance to be a positive thing. I was still thinking when Peter Clore spoke again.

  ‘What I mean is, are you thinking of throwing in the towel?’

  I looked at the photographs on the table before me, each of them afflicted with the shadow of something not there, the rectangular shade on the ground of a structure lost violently to time and history eighty or ninety years ago. I thought of the crimson towel I’d waved to signal the location to Tony Carter, taking the pictures above me in his micro-light and wondered for an insane moment whether someone from Bullen and Clore, who were really Martens and Degrue, had been all the while observing us.

  Not snooping, Sir.

  Handsome.

  ‘No, Mr. Clore,’ I said. ‘I’m encouraged. The fact that something so substantial was there means there’s no risk of subsidence. The ground will support my build.’

  ‘It will.’

  I had another thought then though, a disturbing one. ‘There wasn’t a crypt attached to this temple, was there?’

  He laughed at that. ‘Nothing so sinister,’ he said. ‘You’ll uncover no bodies there.’

  ‘No ghosts, then.’

  ‘Not a one.’

  I ended the call and put the photographs back into their envelope. I had my laptop with me and did a Google-search for Ventnor temple and got nothing. Ventnor arson temple also drew a cyberspace blank. I thought that Ventnor Rare Books would likely have some antique volumes on the more interesting buildings in the locality, but it was a quarter to seven by then and I knew that they’d be closed. There was also the local library. Not everything is on the internet. Not yet it isn’t, anyway.

  Then I spotted my unwanted friend, Charlie Bradley, filling and then tamping his pipe before lighting it, over by the furthest seaward extent of the pub’s exterior, facing the west and the rocky headland, where waves broke a sullen evening green, creaming and lathering as they collided with the rocks. He’d poked his nose into my life enough for me to feel entitled to retaliate, so I switched off the laptop and got up and walked over to where he stood.

  ‘Pleasant evening, Mr. Aldridge,’ he said, without turning. I thought that maybe he’d recognised my aftershave. Except that I wasn’t wearing any.

  ‘I’d prefer you’d call me Michael,’ I said, was getting sick of saying.

  ‘Michael it is.’

  ‘I’ve discovered something about the history of that plot of land I’m about to build on.’

  ‘You’re still intent on that enterprise, then.’

  ‘Not only am I still intent on it, I’ve a strict deadline to meet,’ I said, failing to add that it was a deadline set by my impatient nine-year old daughter. ‘I’ve found out there was a substantial construction there, deliberately destroyed 80 or 90 years ago. Do you know anything about it, Charlie?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,’ he said. There was that familiar, studied neutrality to his tone, as though he was again voicing some warning or threat the words he actually spoke denied him the liberty to disclose. It was becoming infuriating.

  He still hadn’t faced me. I wheeled away from him to go, unwilling to waste any more time on his portentous riddles and infantile evasions and he said, ‘If you want your curiosity satisfied, and I would in your shoes, you should ask Ruthie Gillespie about it.’

  ‘Ruthie Gillespie being the resident expert on the property I’ve bought?’

  ‘She’s a local historian. She’s Ventnor born and bred, Ruthie. She might know something about your construction, is all I’m saying.’

  ‘It wasn’t my construction. I wasn’t born until 1983.’

  ‘I was merely using a figure of speech, Mr. Aldridge. Ruthie might know and she might not but even if she doesn’t, there’s no one better equipped or cleverer when it comes to finding something out.’

  ‘Your tone suggests that this ‘something’ might have been deliberately concealed.’

  He chuckled at that. He said, ‘My tone’s dictated by a lifetime of breathing sea air, swallowing rum and smoking tobacco. It signifies nothing other than necessity and what the world nowadays sees as bad habits. Ruthie Gillespie’s your woman, should you wish to determine more about your land than the little you already know.’

  Our conversation was over. I walked away from him and retrieved my laptop from the table I’d been sitting at. There was music playing inside the pub, some sea shanty I’d heard my wife play and my daughter sing along to. It was “The Wild Goose”, performed by Kate Rusby. She was one of Katie’s favourites, listened to while my wife made lampshades by hand at our kitchen table before the business really took off towards the end of the previous year. I felt a strong pang of nostalgia, which morphed into home-sickness, then, and resolved to spend the evening sourcing and pricing the materials for what would, in a matter of only a couple of months, be our home from home on the island.

  I didn’t resort as much as I’d thought I would to the friends and family build haggling I’d planned at the outset of all this. This was partly because the English Heritage windfall made the striking of cheap deals a less urgent priority than it would have been otherwise. It was mostly, though, because Wight is an island with an island economy. I thought it hypocritical not to support that if my family were going to be taking such advantage of its natural beauty and open hospitality. There was also the fact to consider that we weren’t going to be guests, we were going to be home-owners and residents and I’ve believed all my life you should look after your own.

  I bought the concrete for my foundations from the Chale-based contractor who did a great job of laying them at a competitive rate. I bought my timber from a Cowes-based yard recommended me by Ollie Taplow. Richie Mallard, Ashdown Hall site foreman and thirsty weekend Tennyson-Trailer quietly claimed his brother-in-law’s building firm to be the most efficient and reliable he could think of. And since they were Shalfleet based and as good as he’d promised they’d be, they were an honest godsend to me.

  The weather was kind. Progress was rapid. Katie, sent regular pictures documenting the build, took for a week or so to calling it our Barrett Home. The joke didn’t survive because the house didn’t permit it. It took shape with individuality, character and a style all of its own. I know it was built to my blueprint, but I can make that statement in the knowledge that it’s true. My wife was my sternest architectural critic and she could think of nothing negative to say about our bolt-hole as it took physical shape, other than ‘bolt-hole’ didn’t anywhere near do it justice.

  Clement weather is more than half the battle when you’re doing exterior work and so the Ashdown Hall restoration went smoothly too, even creeping ahead of schedule and under-budget, with a happy workforce confident they’d qualify for the bonuses they’d been promised if they hit target for completion. Short of an earthquake intervening, I knew they would.

  That all finally and successfully wrapped up at the end of May with a beery on-site celebration held in a marquee in the grounds. There was a trad-jazz quintet and some odd-couple copping-off I’d never have predicted, and the mood was generally jubilant as we all hugged and kissed and said our teary goodbyes to one another with drunken pledges to keep in touch.

  I stayed on the island after that. I still went home to London at weekends, but the English Heritage windfall meant I could stick around until the completion of my person
al build. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but I was after a sort of perfection more practically achieved if you’re there to see it through in the flesh. The practice back in Hammersmith had a couple of substantial ongoing commissions, but I trusted the people I employed and could supervise those jobs via computer and email and phone.

  I’d made a conscious decision to delegate more, shortly after Molly’s diagnosis. By the time our dream home on the Wight coast started to take physical shape, I’d established good procedures and a hands-off approach the people working for me seemed to appreciate and clients saw as an inevitable consequence of business expansion. I think they liked working with my young and energetic creatives, in the secure knowledge that any real crises would still come hammering at their boss’s door.

  By the end of June, the house was materially complete and equipped with most of its fixtures and fittings. That was a fortnight before the start of Molly’s school holidays. I bought some nautical bits and pieces from a ship’s chandler in Cowes before my wife could arrive to object that I was turning our bolt-hole into a pastiche Spyglass Inn. Even our wood burner came, in the end, from the island. It was manufactured by Charnwood at their works at Newport and was the Bembridge model and sat very handsomely in the sea-facing sitting room where only a couple of months earlier I’d shared a picnic blanket with the girls and chewed on a fibrous blade of grass.

  I moved in less than a week before my family was due to arrive. I watched the dusk descend over the headland to my right from our first-floor balcony. The sunset that evening was late, we’d almost reached the summer solstice and the longest day and it was even more glorious than I’d imagined it would be back in April, pausing beside one of the two oaks that now flanked our island house. I raised a toast to the orb that gives us life, dipping and bloodshot, dripping crimson briefly over the green land and the emerald sea before casting the visible world into darkness.