“She may turn out to be another Henry Moore,” Bobby remarked.
“Who is he?” Mrs Holcombe asked. “Irish poet, isn’t he? Thank goodness, Livia hadn’t got that far yet.” They were approaching now a small building, probably originally meant for a tool- or potting-shed. Outside it, by the door, was lying a great piece of limestone. Mrs Holcombe said: “We may find it locked and bolted.”
“Does she lock herself in when she’s working?” Bobby asked. “To avoid interruption?”
“Oh, it’s not that exactly,” Mrs Holcombe said.
However, when she lifted the latch the door opened at once, and Mrs Holcombe entered. Bobby followed. Livia turned to look up from a mass of wet clay she had been busy with. When she saw who it was she threw one cloth over her work and wiped her hands on another.
“Mr Owen wants to talk to you,” Mrs Holcombe said.
“What for?” grumbled Livia. “Sit down somewhere, won’t you?” She looked round vaguely, as if rather wondering herself if any seats were available, disembarrassed one from an accumulation of odds and ends of the most varied description, and pushed it more or less in the direction of her mother, indicated to Bobby another in the background that her gesture implied he could get for himself if he liked, “Well, get on with it,” she said, and threw into a corner the piece of cloth she had been using for a towel.
“I’m sorry to have to interrupt your work,” Bobby said.
“I’ll get on with it,” she told him. “Quack and swim.”
She produced some more clay and began to shape it between her strong, flexible hands. She was wearing a long white smock, torn and dirty, over a loose blouse and slacks. She had on sandals, and on one sandal was perched a lump of clay. A smear of clay adorned the left cheek, and a dirty streak of it across her upper lip gave a grotesque impression of a budding moustache. She worked swiftly and easily, occasionally obliterating what she had done and starting afresh. Mrs Holcombe, who had lighted a cigarette, watched her frowningly, impatiently. Bobby watched her with interest. He thought she seemed very different now from the memory he had preserved of her from their meeting of the previous evening. She seemed so much more self-assured, so much more at home. There was a kind of eagerness about her as she worked, as if she drew from it some sort of personal inspiration that lifted her to a different atmosphere. Mrs Holcombe said in that vibrant voice of hers, in it sounding that same impatience her attitude had already shown:
“Really, Livia, can’t you leave that stuff alone for a minute or two?”
“No,” said Livia, and went on working.
“Mr Owen has more important things to do than watching you fiddling about with it,” her mother said crossly.
“I haven’t,” said Livia.
“He wants to ask you about that mallet of yours you lost,” Mrs Holcombe said.
“I’m not stopping him,” Livia retorted ill-temperedly, and suddenly picked up the lump of clay she had been working on and threw it down flat on the board at her side.
“Why did you do that?” Bobby asked, for he had been interested in watching how form was gradually, in the creative act, emerging from shapelessness.
“Not what I wanted,” she said, eyeing the clay malignantly, as if she felt in it a hidden, hostile resistance she was fierce to overcome.
Bobby sat down then and looked round the room with that slow, intent and careful scrutiny that had become second nature to him. It was a fair-sized place, but looked smaller than it was, so crammed was it with all sorts and kinds of miscellaneous objects. In one corner stood a block of limestone, similar to, but smaller than, that outside, and showing signs of having been worked on. On shelves were ranged a number of small models of all sorts and kinds and shapes, in wax, in clay, in wood. Some, he noticed, were of the cocks and hens Mrs Holcombe had mentioned with a certain disdain. Of others, mingled with them, he could make neither head nor tail, since they seemed to him to resemble nothing on land or sea or in the heavens above. Some, concoctions in wire, he would have thought merely odd bits of it that had somehow got accidentally twisted into these queer shapes, had they not generally had added to them, evidently with some purposed end in view, bits of cork, feathers, and so on. Then there was a rich assortment of tools, large for heavy work, smaller for detail. One shelf seemed to have been intended for books, but most of them were lying about here and there, their place occupied by anything that had had to be pushed out of the way—tea-things, for instance, and some toilet accessories. The most noticeable feature of the room was an enormous gilt-edged mirror that occupied fully a quarter of one wall. In the middle of the floor was a large stove. Near it was what looked like a small lathe of some sort. Against one wall stood a small packing-case filled apparently with clay. Near it were two buckets of water. There were two ‘bankers’, as they are called—that is, high stools with a sort of turn-table top, modelling boards, and such other variety of objects as a sculptor’s studio soon accumulates, since he works in such a variety of media. As if to emphasize this, there hung on one wall the motto carved on wood ‘Clay is the life, plaster is the death, marble and bronze, the resurrection of the work.’ Mrs Holcombe said:
“You had better tell Mr Owen what you’ve got that mirror for?”
“To see myself in,” Livia said curtly.
“Without any clothes on,” Mrs Holcombe explained, this time Bobby thought with a touch of malice towards them both, as if she wished at the same time to embarrass Bobby and to disturb Livia’s composure.
But Livia’s tones were as calm and indifferent as before as she said:
“It’s essential. You’ve got to be familiar with, to understand, every movement of every muscle, nerve. Your body doesn’t remain the same in action and when it’s still. You’re not the same when you’re running as when you’re asleep, and one’s got to understand that. I paid a girl once to sleep in my room so I could watch her sleeping. It was very useful. I would have liked a man as well, only I suppose that would have shocked every one too much—people are so easily shocked,” she added regretfully. “Of course, if I were married it would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
“I must admit,” Mrs Holcombe remarked, in her voice rather more than a suggestion that she disliked making any admission and never did so if she could help it, “that Livia does take the precaution to lock the door when she’s what she calls studying the nude.”
“It’s a tip I got from Rodin,” Livia explained. “Do you know his work?” she asked Bobby, and without waiting for a reply went on: “He used to pay people to walk about his studio in the nude so he could watch them.”
“Disgusting,” commented Mrs Holcombe briefly; and to Bobby she said: “If you want to know anything about the mallet Livia lost, hadn’t you better ask her, without wasting any more time?”
CHAPTER X
“NO ANSWER TO DEATH”
BOBBY WAS not inclined to agree that there had in fact been any waste of time. His invariable practice was to start any interview with an attempt to make it seem, at any rate to begin with, merely a friendly chat. He thought this tended to put the person concerned at his or her ease, and it also gave him time to observe that person in more ordinary conditions, before possibly searching and disconcerting questions brought about a general attitude of defence and distrust. In this case what had so far passed rather suggested that Livia had nothing on her mind except her work.
Now, an artist can, as Bobby knew, be almost pathologically indifferent to, or even merely ignorant of, what is going on around him. But was that conceivable in the case of a murder committed so near by? and how did such ignorance or indifference in any way agree with the odd incident of the search of the scene of the murder Livia had been engaged on the night before? Or with what Bobby felt sure was the mere excuse of a lost wrist-watch she had thought it necessary to put forward?
Livia had picked up her clay again and was once more busy with it, moulding it into shape. It was she who, still busy with her work, answered her mother.
“Nothing I can tell him,” she said. “It was taken from where I left it—under the hedge, near the Felstead ’bus stop.” Speaking more directly to Bobby, and even pausing for a moment in her work to do so, she said: “Do you think it is what was used?”
“It might be,” Bobby said. “It is important to find it, if possible, so as to be sure.”
She began her work again. Bobby watched, fascinated, as he had been before, to see how form was beginning to emerge, how on the lifeless clay a pattern, a meaning, was being impressed. Livia said:
“I suppose you think it was what I was looking for last night?”
“Were you?”
“No, I wasn’t,” she answered with quick energy, so that this time at least he was inclined to believe her.
“Well, what was it?” he said.
“I told you. My wrist-watch. It’s turned up now. It’s no good my telling you again if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh, I don’t,” Bobby told her.
“All right, don’t,” she retorted; and went across to one of her shelves, returning with some kind of small wire tool. This she began to use on the clay with which she was busy. “I can’t help what you believe,” she said.
“Well, it might help if you told the truth,” Bobby suggested mildly.
Livia took no notice of this remark. Mrs Holcombe said:
“It’s rather a wonder it wasn’t her head she was looking for. It’s about the only thing I’ve never known her mislay.”
Livia ignored this remark also. She threw down the tool she was using, muttering something angrily to herself, and, using her fingers, continued working, obliterating what she had done, reshaping it, absorbed in her work, as though she were utterly alone. Bobby began to wonder if this feverish intensity she was displaying was not in part at least due to a desire to drive from her mind thoughts she dared not entertain.
“You feel there is nothing you can tell me about the loss of the mallet?” Bobby asked.
“What mallet?” she asked, as if the subject were entirely new to her. “Oh, mine. No, I can’t. It was there, and now it isn’t. That’s all I know. Gone like the wind. A winner, that book. Have you read it?”
“Really, Livia,” her mother exclaimed angrily. “You might try to understand all this is serious.”
Livia for once laid down her work—laid it down slowly and carefully. She had become very pale all at once, as if suddenly stricken.
“Serious?” she repeated slowly. “Isn’t death always serious? You can’t work when you are dead. There’s no answer to death. Some day I shall make a Death—carve it from shining marble.” She lifted slowly once more the clay she had been working on and once more put it down, and this time with a manner of being done with it for good. She said: “Or a messenger of death. He might come in any ordinary shape. The angel of death in a bowler hat. Why not?”
She had been looking closely, intently, at Bobby as, very slowly, very deliberately, she uttered these last few words. He was returning her gaze with one equally direct, intent, searching. He said, but very softly:
“What do you mean by that? Tell me.”
She shook her head slightly in a slow gesture of refusal. She turned towards her mother. Mrs Holcombe had risen to her feet. They each moved very slightly forward, so that they were quite close, staring hard into each other’s eyes, and what was it that they sought there, Bobby asked himself, this tall young daughter, the elderly, dumpy, rather dowdy mother? Both clothed now, or so it seemed to him with a kind of tragic dignity, as though terrible things were in their minds, things to which neither of them dared give utterance.
He did not speak. He had the feeling that to do so would be unpardonable, for it seemed to him that here two souls, so closely bound together by the inescapeable tie of blood, were yet at grips, questioning, probing, challenging, in terror and in doubt. To himself he was saying:
‘Each of them thinks the other may be guilty, but neither is sure. Or is it something else entirely different that’s between them?’
The tension lasted only a moment or two. It faded as swiftly as it had arisen. Suddenly everything became flat and commonplace. Livia turned back to her clay, picked it up, and once more threw it down on the board, flattening it with her hand, displaying in so doing the nervous muscular strength in wrist and fingers Bobby had already remarked. She dragged out from the corner where it had been hidden a wooden stool, on which she seated herself, her hands firmly clasped, as though only by holding them so could she keep them still. In an indifferent, rather bored voice, whatever crisis of emotion she had endured now apparently, for the time at least, entirely over, she said:
“It’s that mallet of mine you want to know about, isn’t it? You see, I was coming home by the copse path two or three weeks, ago, I really don’t remember exactly, and there was a tramp there, in the copse. He was sitting under a tree when I saw him, but he got up. He made himself rather unpleasant. If you must know, he asked me if I would like a little love. He was all in rags almost, and awfully dirty. I don’t think I was frightened exactly, just angry. I tried to push past him, and he tried to get in my way, but I got by. I heard him shouting after me. He was awfully ugly. I did a bust of him. I don’t suppose it’s a bit like. I can still see his face quite plainly, but very likely I remember it all wrong. I thought if I took the mallet with me and he turned up again I would just knock him down with it. It was a bit of a bore carrying it all the way to Felstead and back, and it made me feel rather silly having it. So I hid it under a hedge near the ’bus stop to pick up when I got back, and then one day it wasn’t there. That’s all.”
All this had been said in a quiet, conversational sort of voice, an afternoon tea-party voice, so to say. Mrs Holcombe had lighted another cigarette. She had an air of listening with calm approval, as if saying: ‘There you are. Quite simple, you see.’ It became difficult to believe there had ever existed that moment of fierce intensity when mother and daughter had faced each other as though each demanded from the other some truth they both equally desired and dreaded. Now they seemed exhausted, empty. The moment of tension had passed, and Bobby knew instinctively that whatever its cause, he would learn no more just then. He asked:
“May I see the bust you made of the tramp?”
Languidly, as if she had barely energy left to move, Livia went to one of the shelves, searched for a moment, and then found it where it stood in a huddle of other work of hers, in clay, in wax, in wood.
“No, I don’t expect it’s a bit like,” she said thoughtfully.
Of the degree of resemblance to the original Bobby could of course form no opinion, but he did think it gave an admirable impression of the sort of sly, weak brutality likely to characterize any one who behaved in the manner Livia described. In it he found a kind of force, vitality, not too evident in Livia’s other work. Possibly because it had been done under the influence of strong emotional excitement, and not merely as a routine exercise, or even to quieten itching fingers avid to mould and shape.
“Nice bit of work,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a good likeness, but it looks the sort of chap who would behave like that. May I have it?”
“Oh, if you like,” Livia said and yawned. “I don’t know what made me do it. To get rid of a nasty memory, I expect. I should only break it up.”
“Never give your work away, Livia,” Mrs Holcombe interposed. “You’ll never learn sense. You should have asked a guinea.”
Obeying a sudden impulse, Bobby produced a pound note and a shilling and put them down.
“Well, now,” Livia said, “there’s the first money I’ve ever earned.”
“Probably the last as well,” Mrs Holcombe said; and threw the cigarette she had just lighted into one of the pails of water standing by the studio wall. Bobby had the impression that she was displeased. She said, looking at her wrist-watch: “We’re late for luncheon already. It’ll be waiting.”
“That was a bust of me you had begun to work on,
wasn’t it?” Bobby said, looking at the now shapeless lump of clay Livia had thrown down on the modelling board and so carefully flattened.
“It wasn’t any good,” she told him. “You are difficult. I should like to try again, if you’ll sit. You are rather frightening, only not always. But you do just go on, don’t you?”
“Is that so alarming?” Bobby asked, rather amused. “Remember what they tell you in the nursery—if at first you don’t succeed...”
“I didn’t say alarming, I said frightening,” she told him. “What they tell you in the nursery often is—frightening, I mean. So is what goes on and you can’t stop it. Ever see flood-water rising?”
“I can see what you mean,” Bobby said.
“I want my lunch,” Mrs Holcombe interposed again. “It’ll be spoilt—if there’s anything to spoil.”
“I don’t want any, not after this,” Livia said, but she began to take off the dirty, clay-stained smock she was wearing.
CHAPTER XI
“THE ATTENDING TRUTH”
BOBBY HAD much with which to occupy his mind as he walked back to the ‘Black Bull’. There he lunched on bread-and-cheese and a glass of beer, for he had no wish to risk his life by enduring such another meal as he had experienced the night before. He shared this meal with the driver—a plain-clothes man—of a car he had been provided with by Mr Lawson. This man he now sent off to London with instructions to take the bust of Livia’s tramp he had just purchased to Scotland Yard and ask that photographs of it should be taken and circulated in the official Police Gazette, though not yet in the public press.
The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 8