In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘He painted as well?’

  ‘Why yes. It was a shared interest, but not a shared ability. The talent was all his.’

  ‘Had you known him long?’

  He applied one index finger to his forehead. ‘Sunday the eighteenth of November 1962. A little over five years.’

  ‘You can be that precise?’

  ‘Precision, Mrs Galloway, is a function of significance. Milk or lemon?’

  ‘Milk, please.’ He began to pour. ‘I’ve visited the house.’

  ‘A charming property, is it not?’ He craned forward with my tea.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps you can explain what nobody else seems able to. Why did he leave it to me?’

  Dunrich held his cup motionless, halfway between saucer and mouth. ‘Explanation relies upon understanding. Alas, I have insufficient. John was a good and loyal friend to me. To have asked for more would have been to trespass upon his privacy.’

  ‘If I were you, I think I might feel hurt that he left everything to a stranger and nothing to his friends here.’

  ‘Oh, but he did. He left his memory.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have liked some memento?’

  ‘You place me in a difficult position, Mrs Galloway. The fact is that John promised me just that. He sat there – in the very chair you occupy – the afternoon before he died. Epiphany, it was. He said that when he was no longer here …’

  ‘He said that the afternoon before he died? He spoke about being no longer here?’

  ‘An eerie coincidence, you mean? Neither, I would suggest. John was something of a seer. Or so I felt. But yes. Those were the terms in which he spoke – a matter of hours before he died.’

  ‘If it lies in my power, Mr Dunrich, you’d be welcome …’

  He held up his hand. ‘Too late, dear lady. Alas, too late. What he intended, and I desired, has been mislaid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I gathered from Miss Telfer that the painting he promised me was not amongst his possessions. Sold, we must suppose. But, if so, why did he mention it? He was not given to cruelty, nor much to jokes at all.’

  ‘There must be some mistake, then. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘Pray cause no difficulty on my account. If John considered the two young people worthy of space beneath his roof, I will not fall to quibbling about the consequences.’

  ‘Why did he take them in, do you know?’

  ‘They were homeless. Also there was, shall we say, an artistic purpose. Miss Telfer enabled him to complete a series of paintings. I had thought the process would bring him the contentment he once helped me to find, but the reverse appeared to be the case. When I saw him last, he was a troubled man. Would that I had done more to assist him.’ Dunrich had grown suddenly gloomy, all the effervescence gone from him. He returned his cup to its saucer with a dull clatter.

  ‘There’s nothing anyone could have done about a heart attack.’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ He seemed to revive a little. ‘More tea?’

  Later, I walked back with him to the harbour. The ferry was waiting at the bottom of the slipway. I thanked him for his hospitality and began to descend.

  ‘Call again any time, dear lady. I never stray far.’

  ‘I forgot to ask, Mr Dunrich. What happened on the eighteenth of November 1962 that enables you to recollect the date so clearly?’

  ‘Did I not say? That was the day I was to have thrown myself from St Saviour’s Point. It’s a sheer drop, you know.’ He grinned. ‘John dissuaded me.’ I stared up at him in amazement. ‘Do not dally, Mrs Galloway. The ferry is ready to depart.’

  That night was still and frosty. The church clock was striking seven with leaden clarity as I climbed the steps to Bull Hill: the alley was deserted, inky black and silent.

  Zoë welcomed me nervously. She was wearing a blouse and long skirt: I think it was her attempt to look smart. She showed me into the front room, where the paraffin stove had induced a humid warmth overlaid with the scent of smouldering joss sticks. The mournful voice of Bob Dylan was droning from a record player.

  A figure rose from the sofa, where he’d been slumped out of sight. Tall, thin and sinewy in jeans and a black shirt, a mop of dark, curly hair reaching to his shoulders, several days’ growth of beard. He didn’t smile or extend a hand in greeting.

  ‘Hi,’ he said levelly. ‘I’m Lee. You must be our new landlady.’

  ‘In a sense. I’m Leonora Galloway. Inheriting this property came as something of a surprise to me.’ I heard my own voice bounce back to me off his hollow-eyed stare. A middle-aged Englishwoman with an unfashionable accent: what must he have thought?

  ‘Dylan your bag?’

  I smiled. ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Reckon not. Make you uncomfortable, eh? The thought that the times may really be a-changing?’

  Zoë came in behind me. ‘Turn that down, Lee, will you?’ He shrugged his narrow shoulders and slouched across to reduce the volume. ‘Would you like something to drink, Mrs Galloway?’

  ‘Thank you. A sherry, perhaps.’

  Lee sniggered. ‘No sherry, ma’am. How ‘bout a beer?’

  In the end, I had nothing. Lee took swigs from a can and smoked roll-up cigarettes, sitting on the carpet by the stove, as if he craved its warmth. I sat on the sofa and tried to make conversation while Zoë busied herself in the kitchen.

  ‘Which state are you from, Lee?’

  ‘New Jersey.’

  ‘And what brought you to Cornwall?’

  ‘Vietnam. You ain’t looking at a patriot. I’m here because we’re there. Shocked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes you are. ’Course you are.’

  ‘Was Willis?’

  He snorted. ‘How should I know? He didn’t exactly volunteer his feelings – on anything.’

  ‘He gave you a home.’

  ‘He gave Zo a home. He gave me … house room.’

  Zoë had made some kind of flan. That, and a bowl of baked potatoes, constituted the meal, taken round the table in a corner of the room, lit by a fat red candle that cast its flickering glow on Lee’s drawn features and made him look gaunter than ever. On Zoë the effect was different. Her eyes, lambent and enlarged, regarded us both as from a distant plateau. Around us, Dylan’s voice wailed on.

  ‘Had he never told you of his intention to leave the house to me?’

  ‘No,’ said Zoë softly. ‘He never so much as mentioned your name.’

  ‘I can’t understand it. He made his will fourteen years ago. Perhaps he forgot its provisions.’

  ‘That man,’ Lee put in with a slur, ‘never forgot a damn thing.’

  ‘I went to see Mr Dunrich this afternoon. He told me that Willis painted a good deal.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zoë. ‘He did.’

  ‘He told me there was one particular painting, half-promised to him, that somehow went missing.’

  ‘You talk to that creep,’ Lee said, ‘and you’ll hear all kind o’ things.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  Lee scowled, but it was Zoë who answered. ‘Johnno liked him, but sometimes he’s rather … confused.’

  ‘Are there no paintings, then?’

  ‘Yes. There are paintings. Johnno used the top floor as a kind of gallery. It was his … particular place.’

  ‘Could I see them?’

  Lee began to frame an objection, but Zoë cut him short. ‘Of course. Everything here is yours now. I’ll take you up after dinner.’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ Lee said. ‘Everything here is yours. We come with the property, body and soul.’ He smiled defiantly.

  Later, when Zoë showed me upstairs, Lee stayed behind, reclining by the stove, drinking and smoking, singing along with the music under his breath.

  The narrow, enclosed stairs led to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor: I glimpsed a mattress and disordered blankets behind a bead curtain. Another flight led to a single room at the top of the house. Bare
boards, with low windows set in the eaves, in one corner a strip of carpet and a narrow bed, elsewhere a jumble of easels, chairs and cupboards. I glanced around at the stray tea chests and irregular stacks of canvases, all with their faces turned to the wall.

  Then I saw it. A shape by one of the windows, concealed by a sheet, too small to be an easel, somehow familiar. I stepped across and pulled off the sheet. It was the telescope from Meongate. I had no proof it was the same one, no way of being sure, other than the certainty I felt when I looked at its polished brass tube, the surface minutely pitted with scratches, or the splayed wooden pedestal, spotted with paint.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Zoë from behind me.

  ‘I recognize the telescope. Was Willis an astronomer?’

  She stood beside me in the black, uncurtained window, the light from a bare bulb falling coldly between us. ‘He was many things. So many things.’

  ‘And the paintings?’

  ‘They’re here.’ She pointed to the stacks.

  I went across and turned the canvases around, one by one. Local scenes: seascapes, river views, clifftops, crumbling castles, redundant tin mines. As Dunrich had said, there was skill in them. But, for all that, the subject matter was unremarkable.

  ‘Eric came here a few days after Johnno died and sorted through them.’

  I pushed the canvases back against the wall and rose to her eye level. ‘Mr Dunrich suggested that Willis took you in because he needed your help – yours, not Lee’s – to finish a series of paintings. Is that true?’

  ‘We had a caravan out at Lankelly. It was meant to be just a summer let. We couldn’t have stuck it through the winter. We’d met Johnno in the King of Prussia several times. When he asked us if we’d like to share this house, we were in no position to refuse. And I didn’t want to. He didn’t charge us any rent. He only asked me to … dye my hair. And let him look at me.’

  ‘Why did he want you to dye it?’

  ‘There was some resemblance he wanted, that he needed to capture in his paintings.’

  ‘You were his model?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the only paintings here are landscapes. Where are the others, Zoë? Where have they gone?’

  ‘Say nothing, Zo!’ It was Lee’s voice, raised and peremptory. I turned to see him walking slowly up the stairs, a sullen look of anger on his face. ‘Any questions, ma’am, you direct ‘em to me. But I have to tell you: you won’t get any answers.’ He moved across to join us. ‘This is your house now, right enough, so if you want to give us notice to quit …’

  ‘I never …’

  ‘If you want to, that’s fine. That’s your privilege. But as far as what went on here before you showed up, then I advise you to keep off. If there are any pictures missing, it’s because the old man sold ’em before he died.’

  ‘But he promised Mr Dunrich …’

  ‘You heard what I said. That’s my last word.’

  I too had grown angry. ‘Then here’s mine. I hadn’t made up my mind to ask you to leave. I wasn’t sure I had a right to. But now I am sure. You’ll hear from me through Mr Trevannon. I dare say he’ll know what notice is reasonable. Good night to you both.’

  I left them there and only silence followed me down the stairs.

  The anger had gone by morning, but the resolution remained: I would be rid of them and shortly rid of the house. If Willis had left it to me because of a debt he felt he owed my father, then he could hardly object to what I chose to do with it. Niggling, undefined suspicions remained. He could only have obtained the telescope by buying it at the Meongate auction. Why hadn’t he told me of it when he’d visited me in Wells? What else had he bought there?

  It was useless. I couldn’t interrogate a dead man. I returned from a walk to Readymoney Cove more sure than ever of what I would do.

  At the hotel, the receptionist told me I had a visitor waiting in the lounge. It was Zoë. She was sitting by one of the picture windows that looked out over the estuary. She seemed out of place among the deep leather sofas and stately rubber plants, a vulnerable Cornish girl ill at ease in plush surroundings.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’

  She looked up at me with pleading, innocent eyes. ‘I wanted to apologize for what happened last night.’

  I sat down beside her. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘It was, partly.’

  ‘Would you like me to order some coffee?’

  ‘No. No thanks. Not for me.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to have called. But I don’t think you’ll change my mind. Lee …’

  ‘I’ve come to tell you the truth.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We sold the other paintings. The day after Johnno died, Lee took them to a guy he knows in Plymouth. To be honest, we needed the money. But we didn’t know Johnno had left the place to anybody then, so it didn’t really seem like stealing.’

  ‘I can understand that. But why didn’t you sell all of them?’

  ‘The rest weren’t worth anything. You see, the ones we sold weren’t by Johnno, except for the last one. He’d painted that in the style of the others – somebody else’s style.’

  ‘What do you mean – a forgery?’

  ‘Not exactly. I don’t think he meant to pass it off as the other artist’s work. He just …’

  ‘Who was the other artist?’

  ‘I’d never heard of him. But Baz – that’s Lee’s friend in Plymouth – reckoned they were worth a bit. He said they were by somebody called Bartholomew.’

  So. He had bought more than just the telescope. ‘How many pictures were there?’

  ‘Three in all. Two genuine and the one that Johnno did. It wasn’t like his other work. It was kind of … weird. It’s the one he wanted me to model for. He had me dye my hair and wear an old-fashioned dress. Sort of Edwardian, I suppose.’

  ‘Was it you he was painting, Zoë? Or somebody you resembled?’

  ‘I reckon you must know who it was. When I said he never mentioned your name, I wasn’t telling the truth – not exactly. I remember, when he’d finished the picture, he stood back and looked at it and said something. Just a whisper really. I don’t think he realized I could hear him.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He just said your name. “Leonora.” That’s all. But it isn’t you he meant, is it?’

  ‘No. It isn’t me.’

  I drove to Plymouth that afternoon. Zoë had given me the address: Barbican Fine Arts, Southside Street. It was in a cramped arcade near the fish quay, a ground-level display inspired by Dali and Bosch luring the unwary to a cavernous, first-floor studio hung with trawling nets and skull-like seashells. Luridly coloured beams supported a bewildering array of the old and the new: eighteenth-century spaniels in torment alongside modern-day images of Daliesque surrealism, with Wagner playing ominously in the background. I felt and must have looked absurdly out of place.

  ‘Can I help you?’ The assistant was female, emaciated and mini-skirted, shivering in the sail-loft chill and sniffing as she spoke.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Basil Gates,’ I said.

  ‘You a friend of his?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Lee Cormack – you might say. Is Mr Gates in?’

  ‘I’ll go and see.’

  She left me gazing at a vast and lividly wrought representation of some vaguely East European village. In every hut and hovel, a bestial act was in progress, visible through open doors or windows: a kind of advent calendar of sundry perversions. It was skilfully done and that only made it worse.

  ‘One of mine.’ The voice came from behind me, deep and mellow with a sickly sweetness. ‘Do you like it?’

  I turned round. My questioner was tall, willow-thin and Nordic blond, clad in jeans and a smock, beads hung about his neck. His bright little eyes glinted at me from behind circular, slender-framed glasses, a pointed Cavalier-style beard adding a narcissistic note to the bohemian air. ‘I think it’s very well painted,’ I
said.

  He smiled, displaying a row of jagged yellow teeth. ‘You don’t like it. I’m glad. You’re not meant to.’

  ‘You’re Mr Gates?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘I believe you’re a friend of Lee Cormack.’

  ‘I know him, yeh. What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point. Lee sold you three paintings by the late-Victorian artist Philip Bartholomew earlier this month.’

  ‘He could have.’

  ‘They weren’t his to sell. They belong to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘I don’t want to cause you any trouble. I accept my neglect was partly responsible. I’m simply trying to recover them. Do you still have them?’

  He smiled again. ‘Bartholomew’s not strictly my style. You can see I wouldn’t have wanted to hang on to them.’

  ‘So what did you do with them?’

  ‘I have contacts. Some are into that kind of thing. I’d have disposed of them that way.’

  ‘I’m anxious to get them back. Would you be willing to give me the name of your contact?’

  Once more the twisted grin. ‘You have to consider my expenses.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘Look on it as a contribution to the struggle for artistic integrity.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  I opened my purse. He reached forward, with slender, questing fingers, and drew out a five-pound note. ‘I took them to London. Knew a feller mounting an exhibition of that kind of stuff.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Toby Raiment. He runs a shop in Camden Passage, Islington. Don’t say I sent you.’

  I phoned directory enquiries from the nearest call box and they gave me Raiment’s number. But the man who answered was only ‘minding the shop’. He suggested I ring again in the morning.

  I did so from my room at the Fowey Hotel. Mr Raiment had one of those opulent voices which sound as if their possessor is permanently engaged in chewing toffee.

  ‘Bartholomews? Yes. I had three in my major retrospective on neglected late-Victorian artists. It runs until the end of February.’

  ‘You say you had three – not have?’

  ‘Sold one. They’re greatly in demand, you know.’