by F. G. Cottam
‘Absolute peach of a volley,’ my daughter said. She sort of murmured it in her new-old Home Counties voice, the one breaking more and more into her speech, to me like some ghostly interruption. I’d been amused by it at first, but it didn’t strike me as funny anymore.
I’d heard the phrase before. I’d heard it used as a young child by the BBC TV commentator Dan Maskell describing a winning stroke executed on a summer lawn by Jimmy Connors or John McEnroe. Maskell’s received-pronunciation had been a quaint anachronism even in my youth. In his own playing days he’d been the All England Club pro who used to hit with Helen Wills Moody as the great American champion warmed up for a Wimbledon final in the decade when Blanche Underwood travelled to Rome and later read Mein Kampf.
Molly asked to sit in the back of the car on the way back, where she could look at the view of the sea without the obstacle to doing so of me driving beside her. She didn’t speak. Eventually I said, ‘Missing mum, Sweetpea?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Don’t you mind me calling you that?’
‘You can call me anything you like.’
‘The coach says you’ve a natural aptitude for tennis.’
‘He calls it feel. It’s funny, I had it from the start, from the first stroke, from the moment the ball hit the strings.’
‘Uncanny,’ I said.
She didn’t reply. She just gazed out of the window. I studied her reflection in the rear-view mirror, unsure if I was imagining that subtle upward slant I’d only just now noticed at the outer edge of her eyes. Then she said, ‘I’m only nine years old, so I don’t understand what that word means.’
‘It describes something you wouldn’t have expected and can’t explain.’
‘You mean like a surprise?’
‘Not necessarily a welcome surprise,’ I said.
When we got back to the house, Katie had returned. I hugged her and kissed her, remembering my earlier kiss of the morning in Ventnor, guilty though I’d neither sought nor expected that, guilty because the intimacy of it, however briefly, had thrilled me. Now I stood and looked at my wife’s golden curls and amber flecked eyes, drinking in the heady scent of her, wondering if I wasn’t actually going secretly insane.
‘After all the madness in London, I need some Molly-time,’ she said, ‘not to mention some fresh sea air. Molls? Fancy a bike ride this afternoon? Tea and scones at Blackgang Chine? ‘
‘She’s just hammered her knees through two hours of tennis coaching,’ I said. ‘They were on hard courts the whole session. Maybe do something a bit more laid-back than cycling this afternoon.’
‘I think her knees are fine, now,’ Katie said.
‘Don’t mollycoddle,’ our daughter said, smiling, apparently delighted at her pun. Then, to her mum, ‘I’m right as rain.’
I waited for fifteen minutes, which was long enough to be sure that they weren’t coming back for something they’d forgotten. Then I retrieved the Barrett journal from my bag and grabbed a windcheater from one of the hooks inside the front door. I didn’t really want the notebook in our home and certainly didn’t wish to read it there. I would go down to the edge of the sea, to where I’d first paused on noticing the spot our dream home now occupied. The weather was holding, sunny and warm, but I would be still, reading and immobile, so might need another layer if the wind down by the water strengthened or the sky got cloudy as the afternoon progressed into early evening. Or if the words Barrett had written and their implications delivered a chill all of their own.
Ruthie Gillespie’s words and numbers were done with a spidery elegance in blue fountain pen on the bright yellow of the post-it note. She’d written her initials at the foot of it, followed by three kisses. I began to read the first of the passages she’d marked, a little over halfway through the book.
April 15 1927
I spent as much of this morning as I could endure at the sanitarium. She’s there at my expense and will be until the end of her life. She’s as physically comfortable as her condition allows, but the high standard of the care Blanche is under offers not a shred of consolation. The intervals of cogent thought and speech are becoming less frequent, as the neurologist predicted they would when her illness was diagnosed back in the autumn. The bouts of physical violence and verbal abuse are becoming, as he said they would, more frequent. I don’t think Mr. Hardacre takes any satisfaction in being proven correct in his prognosis. His mission in life is to heal and the inoperable tumour growing in Blanche’s skull is a malignant cancer that will extinguish her existence.
I returned by motor car to the Hall in a foul mood. My disposition was not improved on being told that an emissary from Belgium awaited my return in the reception room. Some would-be patrons of the arts are extremely stubborn in their refusal to resign themselves to rejection. Apparently the collection accrued by Martens and Degrue in Antwerp boasts works by some of the most distinguished names ever to apply a brush to canvas. But with my muse as good as on her death-bed, I cannot paint. The commission they outlined when they first approached me is intriguing intellectually and would be technically demanding. But I could discover neither the energy nor the will to complete it. Not now.
My visitor doubled their offer to two million francs. It was a colossal sum and in other circumstances, would have flattered me. As courteously as I was struggling to remain, I turned him down.
‘Three million,’ he said, ‘that’s a million for each panel of the triptych, a princely sum, surely sufficient reward to inspire Europe’s greatest figurative painter to rise to the challenge.’
‘It’s an absurd sum,’ I told him.
‘But it’s on the table, to use an English phrase. And still you won’t accept?’
‘I can’t accept,’ I told him.
It was warm today for April and my visitor, considerably overweight, sweated heavily under the burden of the three-piece broadcloth suit he wore. The rings on his fingers, each mounted with a precious stone, signalled his foreign origin. They are more vulgarly flamboyant than we British, typically, these continentals. He carried a cane and affected canvas spats. I wanted him to leave me alone and in peace, except that there would be no peace, only mental turmoil following his departure. And I felt some margin of pity at the journey the fellow had wasted in coming. His return home would seem even longer, travelling empty-handed.
I’d reminded myself of my breeding and with that, my good manners. I rang for my housekeeper, Dora, to prepare iced lemonade and asked her to serve it to us on the terrace. Then once we were seated outside, I confided about Blanche to my visitor, without telling him her name. I explained, patiently, that no artist can work without inspiration and that she had long been mine. I confessed that since there was no hope for her, it had become inconceivable to me that I would ever find it within me to paint a picture again. There were artists who could channel anger and despair into great work; men as disparate in nature and style as Caravaggio and Van Gogh had done that. But I knew I could not.
He looked thoughtful, sipping lemonade, absently twisting the rings on his fingers when his hand was not occupied with the crystal tumbler he drank from. He said that he would like me to consider a proposal and I raised my eyes in exasperation to the sky.
Not another plea, or bid, or offer for services I felt unequipped presently to provide, he said. He merely asked that I attend what he called a demonstration. He said that this demonstration of his might convince me of the mutual benefit of furthering our association.
‘The Nazarene of the Gospels was not the only man in history capable of miracles,’ my visitor said.
‘You cannot cure her,’ I said to him. ‘You cannot make her well.’
He looked me in the eye. He was heavily moustached, swarthy, the pupils of his eyes as black as olives and with the same oily sheen. Quite seriously, he said, ‘We cannot. But what if we could discover a way to bring her back?’
April 22 1927
I have agreed to rendezvous with my new acquainta
nce tonight at the Jericho Redoubt above the shoreline to the west of Ventnor. It’s a strange building, a towering bulwark of black granite that despite its size, seems to squat and glower at the edge of the water. I’ve long thought there something sinister about the place. Viewed from the sea through a fog it seems to impend like a threat. I believe it to be some sort of spiritual retreat, a coven of cranks and students of theosophy. Blanche would call its existence a symbol of how soft and decadent we’ve become, encouraging irrationality. I could counter that some of Hitler’s closest acolytes are prey to strange and mystical beliefs.
It is not a conversation we shall ever have. Sadly, the woman I love no longer possesses the bright intellect she once did to debate such points. I visited her today and found her standing in the corner of her room, turning on and off the electric bulb depending from her ceiling by means of the wall switch. Each time it came on she emitted the same fresh gasp of surprise.
Just before I left, the tumour destroying her mind relented sufficiently to allow her a brief window of comprehension. She glimpsed through it, saw me, knew me and embraced me ardently. But by the time my arms released her I saw from the expression on her face that she had forgotten me again.
I am half-minded to miss whatever the delegation from Martens and Degrue have planned for me tonight at the Jericho Redoubt. In the past I would have gone driven by a natural curiosity, once invited, simply to see the inside of the place. That curiosity has gone. Whatever quasi-religious cabaret they have planned for me seems unlikely to alter my mood or shift a train of thought running on straight tracks towards a bleak destination. I will not endure Blanche’s demise. It is destroying what is best in me and what is left will not be worthy of survival.
That’s made me think of my wife, who lives in some splendour on the Italian Riviera between April and October. I don’t in truth think of her much. She will inherit everything. She’ll be richly compensated for the indignity of her husband’s assumed faithlessness. I don’t begrudge it her.
April 29 1927
I’ve given myself a full week now to ponder on what took place at the Redoubt. I’ve also been thinking about the triptych these people want me to paint. It is their wish to entitle it The Triumph of Lucifer and that is what it will describe. He is to be depicted as the great and glorious fallen archangel described in Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. The first panel will envision his arrival in the domain of hell. The second will show him at the head of his gathered legions ready to conquer the world. The third panel will show him in apocalyptic triumph at the End of Days, for Lucifer and Satan are one, they are the same and his final conquest of God’s earth is predicted in the Book of Revelations, a research source my new patrons have urged me to consult.
They wish for me to conceal a number in each depiction. There is a long tradition of doing this in western art, of codifying symbols and offering visual clues to long-guarded secrets. Holbein was its master at the Tudor court, but I doubt any artist of my stature and reputation has ever done it before with symbolism so sacrilegious as the Number of the Beast.
I can interpret the triptych as an elaborate act of blasphemy. A week ago I was permitted a glimpse of what the Jericho Society do, for they are the spiritual power behind their corporate agents Martens and Degrue and they allowed me too to hear a whisper about their beliefs. So I can see the work also as an exercise in propaganda. What it mostly is, though, is a tribute, an act of obeisance to the being they worship. That is why the cost is of so little concern to them. He has made them wealthier than dreams for their devotions and their rituals and of course, I am sure, for their sacrifices.
There was a gallery in the Redoubt, a vaulted space lit by torches dipped in pitch and burning fiercely in iron sconces on its walls. Into this gallery they wheeled a cadaver. I have no inkling of from where they were able to secure a fresh corpse, but I was a medical orderly in the war and saw my fair share of dead in the aftermath of our Western Front offences. There was no doubt that this woman, who was about 40, was deceased. The vital signs had entirely departed her.
There was no indication of what had killed her, though I suspected drowning, from her unblemished condition. They had concealed her modesty in a white shift or shroud which was neither here nor there to me. I have drawn naked women in life classes and their bodies do not offend or embarrass me. Perhaps it was her dignity they were respecting. What happened a little later suggested that might indeed have been the case.
A robed figure entered the room, his hood raised to cast his features into shadow. I could see nothing of his face. A gold cross hung from a gold chain, upside down, on his chest, a detail ritually blasphemous, I thought, as he began to incant above the corpse in church Latin. I recognised the accent and cadences of the language but had no idea of the meaning of the words. Abruptly, after a few minutes of this, the corpse shuddered on its wheeled metal trolley. It vibrated and beneath its cold flesh the metal sang. Then words rasped from its mouth as it repeated what the hooded man was incanting in a hoarse, whispery echo of life.
He stopped chanting after only a few sentences, too many yet for me and the corpse, in a ghastly collusion of living and dead, stopped precisely with him. My new friend, my corpulent Belgian visitor, stepped forward then and put an avuncular arm around my shoulder and led me back outside.
I gasped air, unaware of how shallow my breathing had become in the Redoubt until I was out of its clutch of cold, ancient corruption. The night sea frothed and sounded and there was a salt tang and I remembered what he’d said to me about miracles.
‘Did that woman die on my account, to facilitate your demonstration?’
‘Of course she didn’t. We are not some motley gang of callous thugs.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re better established than that, with deeper pockets.’
‘She was aboard a dinghy that capsized at Wooton Creek. The day was blustery, the water turbulent.’
So she had drowned. ‘What in God’s name did I just see?’
My new friend chuckled. ‘Nothing to do with God,’ he said. ‘What you just saw is the merest fraction of what can be achieved. There is a way of keeping animate the self after death. Thus there is a means of perpetuating a person’s existence. One needs skill and great power to summon and sustain their spirit. Then a suitable host needs to be located. Some of this will need to be orchestrated and the rest will be determined by fate. I’m telling you, though, that the woman you love need not perish when her afflicted body finally betrays her life.’
‘This only if I do a deal with the devil?’
‘The only bargain you will strike,’ he said, ‘is with me.’
‘Will I know her again?’
‘You will not,’ he said, ‘the host will need to be a child and the process is a long one.’
‘Why so long?’
‘It takes patience as well as power to cheat mortality.’
‘Can I really believe this?’
‘Do you honestly think us mere confidence tricksters, Mr. Barrett? Do you think we would deal only in bluster?’
‘No,’ I said, because I didn’t. ‘What do I do?’
‘When her time is at hand, contact me without delay. I will ensure that the rest is done.’
He didn’t tell me that in the meantime that I should begin to paint their triptych. That was understood without mention by both of us.
‘What was most precious to her?’
I wasn’t vain enough to think it me, ‘Her cause,’ I said. ‘She believed the Great War a revolution and hoped ardently for the strong leadership to follow it and sweep the old order away.’
‘Then perpetuate her cause, keep her flame burning in your heart and mind by so doing and enjoy the consolation of knowing that one day we will return her to vibrant, breathing actuality.’
He was talking about Blanche in the past tense. We both were. That was sad, but perfectly reasonable. I knew then with certainty that I would paint their hellish commission with her alive i
n my own soul.
I laughed.
‘What?’
‘In a few years, Adolph Hitler’s iron broom will sweep through Europe, perhaps through the world. He said in that book he wrote in prison that healthy nations need to fight regular wars to sustain them. I wonder if it’s Lucifer who’s inspired him.’
My new friend from Martens and Degrue, who was in truth a representative of the Jericho Society, simply shrugged and smiled at me in response. He took a leather cigar case from his breast pocket and offered me a Havana and then lit them with a wooden match for both of us. It was a celebratory moment, I think. We’d reached a mutually satisfactory accommodation and really, what more pleasurable and civilised way to escape the stench of recent death?
I’d read all I thought I needed to. I stood and dusted away the sand that had clung to my jeans as I’d sat and turned and looked at the house. It stood white, wooden, solitary, handsome; slyly complicit with a past determined to inflict an abomination on the present. What would Katie say about the contents of the book in my hand, given me by a woman after whom I lusted, someone I’d only met on the recommendation of a ghost?
I thought I knew what she’d say. She’d say it was a forgery, penned for mischief by Ruthie Gillespie, published writer of fiction concerned with elves and faeries. My encounters with Charlie Bradley, she’d dismiss as an imagined consequence of solitude and drink. She’d convince herself and it wouldn’t take long because she’d need little convincing. Her precious daughter was getting better of her own accord. A painful and very public surgical procedure was becoming less essential by the day. Katie wasn’t beyond spiritual belief, but that was the only miracle this very practical woman was prepared to allow into her life. Love and a mother’s unselfish devotion permitted that. They allowed for nothing else.