‘How beautiful she is,’ he said, softly. ‘The painting. How sweet of Maria to say whatever she said. She probably wanted to bless it. “Like a mother”. The best compliment she knew. That’s the way to look at it. She is not lucky, Maria.’
‘Are you related?’ Elisabeth asked, apropos of nothing, on an impulse. His back was turned and his voice a distant negative, ‘Oh no, no, not as far as I realize.’ A faint giggle. There was that delirious glug, glug, glug, as her glass, a goblet as heavy in the hand as the original brandy glass, was topped up again. My cup runneth over. She forgot unease, forgot any shade of suspicion and her eyes were tired.
‘Well, you don’t really need anything from home, do you?’ said Thomas lazily. ‘Nothing tomorrow, anyway. You go home whenever you like.’
‘I hear these footsteps,’ she announced suddenly, leaving the wine untouched. ‘Funny steps. Round my house, strange places. Railway station, places like that. I see someone in the distance with a knife. I always imagine my father and his stick, but I know it can’t be that.’ She was ashamed of the confession, blamed the wine.
‘Why didn’t you say? How absolutely, utterly dreadful for you.’ His voice was shocked, indignant, full of belief and care, with none of the incredulity she had dreaded. ‘You don’t hear them here?’
‘No.’
He heaved a large sigh: Butler followed suit, the shadow of the man, his alter ego.
‘Thank God for that. I feel I should be a terrible host if you did. You must be quite safe here. I couldn’t live with myself else. Give yourself a break, please, dear Elisabeth, please. Don’t go home yet.’
The frozen supper was turning itself into something eminently edible. There was a waft of it, trouble-free food which did not even have to be carved. She had freedom of his kitchen, had not taken advantage, was hungry and still thirsty.
‘You’re very kind,’ she murmured. ‘But no one goes into my home. I forbid it, you see. I’ll go back. Not tomorrow. Too much to do tomorrow, but after that I might invite her home, your madonna. If you see what I mean. Lovely here, if you see what I mean, good lights, good everything, but I prefer to work at home. If you see what I mean.’
‘A private person,’ murmured Thomas in his small and pompous voice, no hint of offence in its timbre. ‘Yes, of course, I see what you mean. The last person here went poking in cupboards.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of doing that.’
They had moved to the room which faced north. He turned right away from her to take off his glasses and polish them on his handkerchief. Always correctly dressed, this man, a jacket, a shirt, a tie. The fire lit his averted face, small, benign, tranquil, and in that second all the familiarity came together and she knew with a flood of anguish who he was.
Not what he was, who he might have been. The sensation passed, leaving her blushing. She was used to being wrong.
Enid’s house was empty, the building free of residents, the cat owners on holiday, the others simply out until late at night, in the bosoms of families such as Enid did not have. All she could hear was the plumbing as the machinery creaked into life. In the long evenings, so much longer since the changing of the clocks, she sat still in her bedroom and listened. There was no ringings of the bell for Elisabeth, none of those irritations, those delicious cues for outrage and intervention, no rug in the hall, nothing to scold, nothing to grumble about when she met the other few and disagreeable retired women in the street. Everyone in this street pretended to spend their lives in a state of constant movement, as if that made them less of a target for conversation.
There was a dripping sound downstairs, into the yard which flanked the garden. She could not even hear those footsteps outside any more. Steps, one two click, one two click, the stuttering footfall of a pirate with a crutch, pausing on the pavement, reminding her of some half-forgotten story. It was as if all life had gone from the vicinity in the absence of Elisabeth, who had departed without so much as a by your leave, a message, a request to water pot plants, leaving that drip, drip, drip. She had gone with the same hurtful indifference to any offer of Enid’s ministrations, and the absence hurt as much as the presence.
Enid knew there were strange things in Elisabeth’s apartment: she had smelt. She had a vague inkling of flammable poisons, worse, of woodworm, dust, decay, things eating through. That and the curiosity and the silence, compounded by the drip which she really knew was her own problem, drove her downstairs. To listen at the door with a creeping sense of glee and nothing else to do.
Only listening at first. Looking at the door, inviting it to open so she could take this chance and see inside at long last. Then after another day’s silence, she went away to fetch a hammer and a screwdriver. Who would know? Who would ever know if she did what she wanted to do? She should have let me in, Enid justified to herself, she should have done that: I only want to help and, besides, she could be dead.
‘O sacred heart, sweet fount of love and mercy …’
Maria was crooning, less because of her uncritical devotion to religious ritual, than because of the reminders on her walls. The current favourite was an effigy of Jesus, wearing a heart as big as his torso on the chest of a pristine white shift, the brilliant red of it lit from within and surrounded by a graphic crown of thorns. Blood oozed from the thorns; one, long, aesthetic hand of the saviour pointed to his afflictions, the other was raised in benediction. Flowing brown locks cascaded on to his shoulders, framing a pointed and mournful face and a perfectly barbered beard. There were red holes in his hands, clean little wounds which did not bleed. Now that was art, thought Maria, that really was. Why did Thomas upstairs not collect art like this, the kind which comforted and inspired and told you something? Maria chided herself, because looking at Jesus she remembered the woman in blue, the madonna upstairs. The two madonnas, to be precise; the one in the painting, then the perfect maiden who was Thomas’s guest and spent her time washing the other one with such gentleness. Veronica wiped the face of Jesus, Mary Magdalene washed his feet; she had pictures to prove it and, yes, that was perfect art, although of course the lovely girl upstairs who bent with such suppleness about her task could not be confused with a Magdalene. She was too sweet: she would never have been a sinner, and, besides, Thomas said so. The new ménage was all very confusing, but comforting. Good to have this nunlike woman about the place with her quiet humility. Someone who encouraged Thomas in purer tastes.
Maria’s own walls held many depictions reminiscent of the beautiful madonnas above stairs. Virgins in robes of a similar blue, differing only, in Maria’s eyes, because of the lack of sharp definition in their haloes. A beautiful touch, the haloes: it would be nicer if Thomas had more people with haloes about himself, either in person or on the walls. Nicely perfect, like the girl. Maria’s mouth fell open with the sudden fear of her own reflections. She could not sing any more.
It was cold down here. Kneeling by the side of her bed on her bare knees, Maria surveyed her own art gallery, offered her suffering up to God. She saw this chilliness as something to be held on deposit against her own sins and those of others.
Lord, she prayed, save my brother. Save him from what he might do. He has always been a sinner, because he cannot believe in what is good. Save him, Lord.
CHAPTER SIX
‘A painting is only in perfect condition when it is new and painted by a careful hand. There is a minimum of three levels to the structure; first the support, which may be canvas, wood or paper. This is lined with sizing of various kinds, glue, casein, gesso, to make the surface suitable for oil paint. Then there is the first sketch, in pigment, thinly dilute by oil for the easy creation of outlines. On that is built the picture itself, in layers, the thickest paint ideally coming last. Each layer should dry before the next: the process must not be rushed. The careful artist does not apply a quick-drying paint below one which dries slowly (all mixtures, all pigments vary), unless he wishes to encourage serious cracking of the surface. If the paint is scientifically ap
plied in this manner it will grow its own skin and become perfect because all layers are fused, the one with the other. Later, lack of care in the choice of material will show …’
Pompous. Not even quite true, surely? The Pre-Raphaelite technique, to get those jewel colours, was to paint on to a layer of fresh white oil paint while it was still wet. The treatise he read sounded like the history of a man and his emotional and physical development, and there were times, few and far between, when Francis Thurloe found his pictorial possessions irritating, still more thinking about them. He had become excessively tidy out of a desire to control his environment, expected things to stay in place although he no longer anticipated the same from people. Deposits of dust were controllable but the beauty of possessions should be static, and their mysterious movement was beyond him. Perhaps that was why he collected at all, to share that vision of the painter’s eye and, then, control it. He did not like ‘perhaps’. The word had no place in his language.
What infuriated him now was the shifting of a picture painted on hardboard by some artist who could not afford canvas. Oil on canvas was best, oil on seasoned panel next best (there was some argument about that), and the use of convenient alternatives progressively more hazardous. That much he guessed. The cheaper support of this bargain masterpiece was warped by the heat in the room and the thought made him resentful. Was he supposed to live his whole life in a cool cellar like a case of wine in order to preserve his investments?
Not only warped, but ever moving. It was a figurative picture of a housemaid in a blue dress sitting near a colourful kitchen range reading a book, and it would not hang straight, crept up, crept down or sideways as soon as his back was turned. He swore with loud energy, shaking his fist at the wall. The picture did not respond; remained precisely as crooked and impertinent as before. Museums might employ staff with the express task of straightening frames for all he knew. He, on the other hand, left strict instructions with his cleaning woman not to touch anything hanging on the wall, an order which shamed him as much as forbidding a clumsy grandmother to touch a favourite child. Why not just brace them to the wall, lock them in place? he had asked in bewilderment, innocent in his controlled enthusiasm. He had met the baleful stare of Elisabeth. They are supposed to move, she said: if you keep them still they will buckle and rebel and find some way to shift: the support will shrug off paint to teach you a lesson. They will do what they must, crack if they must; you never really own them, you know.
‘Thanks,’ Francis said aloud. ‘Thanks a million. And for nothing.’ Over the past few days he had rationalized the denouement of his unexpected and highly passionate affair with Elisabeth. He liked his ladies slender, he told himself; he liked them fun and he preferred them, like his possessions, to lack complications. There had been a great gulp of conscience last Sunday, all of five days ago, about that conversation with Elisabeth. He had to acknowledge it as cruel because he knew that he would have been ashamed to overhear himself. And he would not have liked to be the target of his words.
‘She deserved it,’ he had repeated, recognizing in those words an all too familiar, all too shallow, timbre. So said his clients when asked to explain beating their wives. So had said the client today when asked to excuse the wrecking of a stolen picture. Without that case assigned to him by his clerk who knew Francis’s art-collecting proclivities, he might have chosen to forget Elisabeth, forget her as another in the chain of girls who had become inconvenient to remember.
‘You’ll like this case, sir. Just up your street. Culture and all that. Burglary, with criminal damage on the goods. I ask you.’
‘I didn’t ask you.’ Francis was mild in the frostiness which had typified his behaviour all week.
‘Well, I’m telling you. Not getting our oats, are we? The client’s in for a conference. No one else can do it.’
And the client, oh, the client, little and brittle and sour. Seventeen years old, a seasoned burglar who for reasons best known to himself had taken two paintings from a house, kept them in his bedsit pending disposal, which was difficult because he did not know where to start except in the pub at the end of his road, not an imaginative thief. I could have pointed you in the direction of a dealer or two, Francis thought: some are less fussy than others. Instead, the client had hung his spoils on the walls, admired for a while one picture of children playing, the other of a smiling couple, and, then, cut them to pieces.
The photograph of this carnage reminded Francis of the stark advertisements which revealed, in a depiction of tearing skin, the ravages of multiple sclerosis. To his jaundiced mind, this damage was infinitely worse than burglary, something akin to rape: he had suffered a brief reminder of the outrage caused when he had kicked those damaged oils in Elisabeth’s larger, equally spartan room. He had a brief and painful recall of the geography of her apartment, remembered the existence of the other room, her studio, where he had never been allowed and never sought entry. He did not know why he had been so incurious. The client did not know why or how he had done such a thing.
‘They deserved it,’ he had said. ‘They looked at me.’
‘Looked at you?’
‘Yeah. All the time. Talked to me and all. They made my room crowded, those paintings.’
A very crowded room, the burglar’s, cramped as it was with all the impedimenta of living as well as the proceeds of burglaries, a certain siege mentality about these four rented walls.
‘They looked at me, them paintings. All the time. Alive they were: they tried to get into bed. Like my mother.’
‘Like who?’ Francis knew he sounded pompous.
‘Nothing. Nothing.’
A painting has life then, as if he did not know. He remembered some traveller’s tale, of a place where the inhabitants believed that a photograph took some of your soul, that some little finite bit of you would remain on the print, diminishing the rest. If there was life in this canvas wrecked by a bread knife, but not beyond restoring, like a man injured but well within the competence of an Elisabeth, what price her obsessions? She had found society with her inanimate friends, where the client, this lonely little burglar, this moving unit of harm, found enemies.
‘All right,’ said Francis wearily to the client, himself out-manoeuvred, his own motives somehow called into question. ‘Could you have done this damage accidentally?’
Francis took his route home that day past the street where she lived, saw the blinds drawn down across her windows. I am only a lawyer and an ordinary human being, he told himself, nothing special, although he believed the opposite: I should not be so confused or abused by the silent indifference of any woman. I am like a painting cracked, no longer fused in all my layers and I cannot be bothered to care. My paintings can be fastened to the wall, that burglar’s sentence can be minimized, he is only young, but I feel elderly, a little conscience-stricken.
The evening was bitterly cold, a sudden snap to teach the unwary that clock-changing did not merely herald winter but provoked it. Snow soon, they said on the radio. The same who said a stiff breeze tonight, on the eve of a hurricane. Francis Thurloe had his first acquaintance not with loneliness, but with the fear of it. Pictures, he thought: I shall have pictures and undemanding women for company. He was ashamed of his sentiments.
Thomas was faintly gratified, ever so slightly triumphant that Elisabeth should jump when he came into the room. Even more gratified when, once recovered, she could actually behave as if he were not there, carry on with her absorption. Hidden in that was the faintest insult which he could not quite formulate, a lingering resentment of the long-established fact that women ignored his presence. All they have ever done, he thought to himself, is to ignore me and cripple me and control me: I cannot imagine why they should remain so charming. Elisabeth bent with her back to him, squatting on the floor to rummage in the paint box, the broad curve of her rump draped gracefully by the worn blue smock. There were attitudes in women which so emphasized their contours as to make them unreal. Like the Rokeb
y Venus in the National Gallery: the woman lying with her back to the spectator, the valley of her waist accentuating the enormous curve of hip and tapering legs, the dramatic features of nudity, which upright, in clothes, would look merely slender. How small women were dressed, how enormous naked.
‘I see you’ve begun on the next one,’ he remarked. ‘I don’t know why I thought you would do them one at a time.’ There was no hint of annoyance in his voice, merely that mild curiosity, tinged with admiration, which she found alternately comforting and uncomfortable.
‘Well, no. I want to distance myself from this lady. I’ve cleaned, removed a bit here and there, but there’s all this overpainting round the neck, you know. I’m not sure how much to take off. Don’t want to damage what there is underneath. I’ll think about it, dabble with it while I start here. I need to stand back from her.’
There was another painting on the easel, the beckoning lady, unvarnished, propped against the wall, the surface blind in the light, forever radiant.
‘You did say,’ Elisabeth was adding, ‘that these three are the crucial ones. The ones you wanted restored more than any of the others. The ones you desperately wanted to see perfect, the best ones. There can’t be any paintings better than these. You must find out who did them.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m only looking for perfection,’ he said. ‘Not identities.’
The second painting was no ordinary still life. No fruit, flowers, cheese, game, eating utensils or hung birds, no scrubbed surfaces, pottery, china or brass, but an unstill still life, full of things which seemed warm to the touch. The focus was a bedroom chair, hurriedly festooned with clothes in layers as if they had not been placed there all at once but were the accumulation of a month’s untidiness, a lifetime of rushing and flinging. Two odd shoes beneath the chair, a crumpled stocking, a spew of spilt art deco earrings, a few letters sticking out of a jacket collared with fox fur, a glorious muddle of textures. A tidy mind would want to reach into that interior in order to fold and put away, retrieve the spectacles which lay against an abandoned book, straighten the crumpled pages of the letters, sort out which of the clothing needed a wash. All that, visible and shocking, a brilliant and insolent piece of revelation, despite the damage of damp, the patches where the canvas, slowly gorged with moisture, had swelled beyond the endurance of layers of heavy paint and shrugged off the colour. Like the fox collar, where the paint was thickest, and in one corner of the painting, reflected in a mirror, the half-naked figure of a woman, looking at the mess she had made, full of early-morning confusion.
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