Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  I followed her down Albion Street past St Simeon’s and onto the promenade which runs at right angles to it. I did not know what hour it was but it must have been very late because I could hear no voices or vehicles, nothing but the sea hurrying to and fro across the shingle.

  When we came within sight of the West Pier she led me down onto the beach and began to run towards the sea under the West Pier. There among the dark forest of cast iron girders and struts, she was lost to view, but I still followed until I came to the water’s edge below the wooden deck of the pier.

  Almost at my feet I saw a little bundle of something floating and rolling just where sea met land. The waves wagged it to and fro, so that it seemed animated, moving restlessly, though I knew it to be lifeless. I longed not to approach it, but I did, and then I saw that it was a child, about seven or eight years old, plump and well nourished, richly dressed in velvets and white lace petticoats. The sea played with her hair, washed over her drowned face, then withdrew with a sigh. Something was tightly knotted around her throat, and evidently it was this that had caused her death. In the brilliant winter moonlight I could tell that the ribbon was scarlet.

  YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR

  I knew Lord Charles Purefoy in the 1970s, but then so did everyone. I had also known him in the 1960s when we were at school together, and in the same house. Though I was a year or so junior to him, he would visit my room regularly, but it was the room, not I that attracted him. In it was a chimney breast protruding from the wall half way up which was an air vent. On entering my room Charles would close the door, light up an illegal cigarette, crouch by the vent and dispose of his smoke by blowing up it. During this activity we would engage in desultory conversation. If I happened to be studying, the time would be passed in amicable silence.

  Nettleton, our house master, was a vigilant man and kept his eyes and spies on the recreants in his charge, one of whom was Lord Charles. I was dull and innocent by comparison. In retrospect, I think Charles came to my room as much because of the unlikelihood of his being found there as for the smoke dispelling properties of the air vent.

  We did, however, have one thing in common which we used occasionally to discuss, a passion for the visual arts. His taste was more avant-garde than mine, but we coincided over impressionists and surrealists. He was the younger son of the Duke of Darlington and he was always promising to show me his family’s collection of Rubenses and Canalettos at Kentworth, their family seat, but he never did. Occasionally we would meet at the Drawing Schools where I was engaged in laborious pencil renditions of classical plaster casts while he experimented with collage and mixed media.

  Then one term Charles simply wasn’t there, and the general consensus was that he had been ‘asked to leave’. Nettleton was a strict disciplinarian and a secretive one, so we never knew the reason. It could have been something as comparatively innocent as the possession of cigarettes or alcohol. I did not see Charles for another ten years.

  There was a time in the early 1970s when I had left art school and worked for an advertising agency because I was not yet earning enough from painting portraits. Charles, in a similar position, albeit on a much grander level, had set himself up as a photographer. He covered social events and did fashion shoots for the glossy magazines, occasionally crossing over into advertising, which was how we met again.

  I am a painter and so not a connoisseur of photography, but I would say that Charles had a real talent for it. There were those, of course, who said that he owed his success chiefly to the fact that editors liked to have the by-line Photography by Lord Charles Purefoy on their photo spreads, but nobody could deny his competence.

  Our agency had been commissioned to produce a superior knitwear catalogue and the idea was to show models, male and female, in their jumpers and cardigans, lounging about the interior and grounds of an old country house. They chose Charles to do the photographs while I supervised the shoot. Charles, with an eye to convenience and an extra fee, suggested that the shoot should take place at Stanhill Manor, a family property in which he was living rent-free.

  Stanhill lies on a gentle slope of the Cotswolds not far from Broadway. It is an exquisite little Jacobean manor of honey-coloured Cotswold stone, and its grounds, much improved in the eighteenth century, contain a nice selection of fake ruins, tempietti, statuary, water features and other picturesque ornaments.

  I arrived at Stanhill one June afternoon the day before the shoot, and Charles seemed delighted to see me again. He called me Robert, as if he had called me this all our lives, when in fact we had called each other Purefoy and Smith at school. He even offered to put me up at Stanhill itself instead of the Purefoy Arms in the nearby village. I would have preferred the greater comfort and privacy of the hotel into which I had been booked, but thought it would be impolite to refuse. The weather augured well as we wandered about the house and grounds deciding where to place our models the following day. My job was made almost superfluous by the fact that Charles had a very clear and intelligent idea of where he wanted to take the photographs.

  ‘Who are your models?’ he asked. I handed him the list which he read. ‘Yes. I know most of these,’ he said, then added with studied casualness: ‘Had a couple of them.’ I couldn’t be sure whether he was trying to impress me, or simply speaking the truth. He looked at the list again. ‘This girl, Gloria Munday, never heard of her. Is it a made-up name?’

  ‘I understand it’s absolutely genuine. Perhaps she had witty parents. I rather doubt it though. She’s eighteen, blonde, very beautiful and quite staggeringly vacuous, even for a model.’

  ‘How absolutely fascinating! Fucked her?’

  ‘My wife wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘Bloody Ada!’ (It was, for some reason, a favourite exclamation of his.) ‘You’re married already! How did that happen?’

  Not wanting to go into details, I said: ‘I gather you’re still a bachelor.’

  ‘I’m an artist. Marriage would cramp my style. One of the few advantages of being the younger son of a Duke is that one’s under no pressure to produce a son and heir. My elder bro, Kentworth, is already ludicrously sprogged up, which leaves me free to play the field.’

  I could imagine that he enjoyed considerable success. While not conventionally handsome, he had the look of an attractive vagabond. His shoulder length auburn hair, was abundantly curly, his brown eyes were large, his smile lopsided and mocking. His clothes, like those of many photographers at that time, were vaguely gipsyish. He went in for jeans, cowboy boots, collarless striped shirts and embroidered waistcoats which suited his wraith-thin figure. He favoured a discreet gold ring in his left ear.

  That evening, after we had consumed two bottles of Riesling and an enormous curry cooked and left by his housekeeper, I drew Charles in sanguine chalk on the block of good paper that I always carried with me. It was one of my first completely successful portraits and has over the years earned me quite a number of commissions.

  As I drew we talked. I told Charles about my own ambitions to be a full-time painter, but very soon Charles took over the conversation and expanded on his own aspirations. They surprised me. I was naïve enough at the time to think that someone of his moneyed and privileged background would have no ambitions other than to extract the maximum of fun out of his advantages in life. Though it was clear that he was not planning to stint himself where pleasures of the flesh were concerned, there was, underneath, a deeper passion burning: he was going to be a great artist.

  ‘I haven’t cultivated your drawing skills, Robert,’ he said, as if he could have done so had he wanted to. ‘I’m not really interested in that sort of thing. What the artist of today is up to is not so much creating the image as manipulating it, exploring it, exploiting it. Like Warhol. Those Marilyn silk screens. He has taken a popular icon and given it significance. That’s what I’m looking for. This photographic work is just bread and butter stuff, but I’m building up my conceptual vision the whole time. The art of tomorrow is goi
ng to be conceptual.’

  I’m surprised I remember what he said because at the time I thought it was just blather, but it obviously stuck in my head. It now seems to me to be in one sense very prophetic, though I am still not sure whether I agree with him.

  The following morning the models arrived with their accompanying retinue of dressers, make-up artists and hair stylists. The sun shone and the shoot went smoothly. I decided that Charles’s boast that he had ‘had’ two of the models could well have been true. One of the girls habitually froze in his presence and would not look at him; another called him ‘Chazza’ which clearly annoyed him. At every opportunity she engaged him in banter which on both sides was seasoned with barely concealed malice.

  Having committed myself to a verdict on Gloria Munday the previous afternoon I took to observing her. I had called her vacuous. It was, I realised, a superficial judgement, based on brief acquaintance, and partly motivated by a desire to impress Charles with my sophistication. It was true that Gloria was quiet and unforthcoming and that her expression was often rather blank; on the other hand she had natural ability as a model. Her poses were unselfconscious, and she responded to direction with an intuitive quickness.

  All the same, there was something a little strange about her. She kept slightly aloof from the others, and did not go in for gossiping, giggling and complaining, the default activity of most off-duty models of either sex. At times, I was conscious of a nervous wariness in her manner.

  I remember we were doing a shot in the library: mixed boys and girls, lounging about in sweaters. Gloria had been placed near one of the bookshelves. During a break I saw her pull out one of the leather bound volumes and start to read it. When she became aware that I was observing her, she immediately put the book back into the shelf. I went over and told her she could look at the books if she liked, but she shook her head fearfully.

  Charles appeared to be fascinated by Gloria and used her prominently whenever he could. For the last shot of the day he wanted to take a picture of her among the classical columns of a little folly that had been built on an artificial hill in the grounds. It was in the form of a round colonnaded temple from which one could look westward down the slopes of the Cotswolds to the Vale of Evesham below. A golden sunset shot was what Charles had in mind and the weather favoured him.

  Gloria would be photographed in a plain black ball gown over which she wore a kind of knitted evening coatee, or cardigan, glistening with silver thread among the wool. She was to be shown in the colonnade of the tempietto being plied with champagne by a dinner-jacketed swain as she stared out upon the tranquil gloaming landscape.

  The set-up was easily achieved, but then Gloria, who had been very good throughout the shoot, suddenly began to be tiresome in the ways that models can be. Things were wrong with her hair, her make-up; the dress was so tight that she couldn’t breathe. Above all, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she disliked the location. Couldn’t we do the shot elsewhere? ‘No!’ she was told.

  For the first time that day she became vocal, and the effect was not attractive. She spoke in a weak, nasal South London whine. It was the end of a long day, and tempers were fraying, yet Charles’s behaviour was exemplary. He was firm, but expressed sympathy whenever he could. Above all he worked quickly and managed to get the pictures he wanted in half the time expected. There was great relief all round when a ‘wrap’ was declared.

  I congratulated Charles on his work. He smiled slyly in that way of his, as if he were holding back a secret joke.

  ‘Yes. That last one was a bit like getting a nervous thoroughbred into the starting gate, but we managed in the end. It’s funny, though. Do you think young Gloria knew anything about Stanhill?’

  ‘Highly unlikely.’

  ‘Mmm. Didn’t think she would. Only, you see, that folly where we took the pictures—it seemed to bug her. I was just wondering if she possibly knew that someone had died up there. Topped himself actually.’

  ‘In the tempietto? When?’

  ‘Oh, not that recently. Around 1800 as a matter of fact. Beau Purefoy, he was called. Lost his all in a card game at Whites and decided to do himself in with a duelling pistol to the temple. Rather unwise. Pistols weren’t that reliable in those days, but he managed it all right.’

  For a while Charles and I watched from a distance while the models and their retinue prepared to climb aboard the minibus which would take them back to London. The girl who had called Charles ‘Chazza’ and the other one who had looked at him so frostily were conferring on the drive in front of the minibus. There was something conspiratorial about their behaviour. Then, as one, they turned towards where we were observing them, waved vigorously and shouted very loudly in unison: ‘’Bye, Chazza!’

  As they collapsed into giggles, Charles turned towards me very deliberately and said: ‘Gloria seemed really spooked up there at the folly. Did you notice how her face suddenly comes alive when she’s frightened?’

  I said I hadn’t noticed, but, as my memory hastily reconstructed events at the folly, I began to feel he had been right.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Charles, ‘would you mind getting hold of Gloria’s address and phone number for me?’

  Charles had that upper class habit of trying to make people do things for him that he could perfectly easily do himself. I took it to be a ritual demonstration of caste superiority and resented it. So I stuck my hands in my pockets and said: ‘Why not ask her yourself? There she is.’

  The others by now had got onto the minibus, but Gloria was still standing on the drive. She was staring up at the façade of Stanhill Manor vacantly. Or was it fearfully? The girls started shouting from the bus.

  ‘Gloria! Come on, you dozy cow!’

  Gloria woke from her trance, turned from the house and clambered aboard. Charles’s moment of opportunity had passed. He shrugged, and, without a backward glance, began to stroll towards the house. It was a fairly convincing show of indifference.

  II

  I heard later that Charles had badgered the receptionist at my advertising agency, not only for Gloria’s agent, but for her home address which we weren’t supposed to give out. I have to admit that I myself was not totally immune to his powers of persuasion. He had managed to get me to have my drawing of him mounted and framed in London. Then he invited me to bring it down to Stanhill and spend the weekend with him. He seemed rather relieved to hear that my wife, an art historian, was in Florence, so he would not feel obliged to invite her. I wondered, as I drove down to Stanhill, if he was going to offer payment for the drawing, or even the frame. I knew I was going to be too proud to ask for either.

  As I came up the drive towards Stanhill Manor I saw a girl standing on the front steps. She waved. It was Gloria. She wore a simple summer dress and her feet were in flip flops. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever.

  ‘Hi!’ She said. ‘Charlie told me you were coming.’

  Her voice had changed. It had become less nasal and she had started to lose her South London vowels. Replacing them were the beginnings of an upper class drawl, not unlike Charles’s. I found that vaguely troubling, but I kissed her on the cheek as if she were an old friend. She neither accepted the kiss warmly, nor drew away from it. Her cheek was cold and smooth as silk.

  She led me into the entrance hall, an airy space with stone flags, lit by a great south-facing oriel window which went from floor to ceiling. In the bay formed by the oriel was a great circular table on a central pedestal in the form of a Corinthian column, a ‘rent table’, Charles had informed me on my previous visit, to which tenants came to pay their dues and in drawers of which the moneys were deposited. Its leather and mahogany surface was completely covered with photographs of Gloria, many of them outstandingly beautiful. Charles had been busy. I noticed, though, that few of them showed her smiling.

  Gloria called: ‘Charlie!’

  He came eventually and greeted me warmly. I showed them the finished drawing in its frame. Both Gloria and Charles
were so enthusiastic that very soon I found that I had agreed to do a matching drawing of Gloria that weekend. I suppose I did not need much persuading, but I felt daunted. The problem I knew was to make her look properly alive and not like the marble statue of a goddess. Even while she was showing enthusiasm for my work I was conscious of a certain restraint, as if she were doing what was expected of her rather than what she felt.

  It was a fine summer evening and we ate and drank outside on a western facing terrace, the sun honeying the Cotswold stone façade behinds us, and turning the mullioned panes to plates of burnished gold. Charles monopolised the conversation. He was full of a project to bring one of the water features in his park back to life. There was a large stone basin in which stood a bronze statue of Neptune taming a giant seahorse. The seahorse was meant to spout water, but had not done so for many years. This, he told us, was going to be rectified, but he was somewhat vague about the means by which it was to be achieved. Eventually Gloria began to ask the question that was on my lips.

  ‘But how—?’ She got no further than that.

  ‘ “Heoaw”?’ said Charles. ‘What’s this “Heoaw?” Bloody Ada, how many times have I told you? We don’t want to hear those vowels here. The very stones of this ancient seat protest. Come along, Gloria Munday: how now brown cow? Come along, say it: “How now brown cow?” ’

  This was obviously a discipline to which he had subjected her before. Reluctantly she repeated the words, but he was not satisfied, and he made her say them again and again until I could stand it no longer.