In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Could I possibly come and see the other two?’

  ‘Of course. Do you wish me to put them aside for you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes please. Would Saturday morning be convenient?’

  He took my name and we agreed a time.

  I climbed Bull Hill later that morning, conscious that it might be for the last time. The alley was silent but for my own footsteps and the distant bark of a dog. The door of number thirteen was ajar, so I knocked and went in.

  ‘Hello?’

  Zoë’s voice came to me from the front room. ‘In here.’

  She was sitting on the sofa, reading, with her legs curled beneath her and the cat dozing against her feet. A Simon and Garfunkel record was playing softly in the background. She looked up as I entered and I saw at once that her right eye had been blackened.

  ‘Zoë! What happened?’

  ‘Lee found out I’d been to see you – and why. That is, I told him why.’

  I sat down on the sofa beside her. ‘You poor thing. Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. Lee’s gone, you see.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘To London, I think. He has friends at the LSE. It’s been coming for a long time – since before Johnno died. And now – well, he didn’t want to answer any awkward questions about the paintings, I suppose. He can’t risk being sent back to the States as things stand at present.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this. I really am.’

  ‘Don’t be. I reckon it’s for the best.’

  ‘Will you stay here on your own? You can, you know. I never …’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t want to do that. Now Johnno’s gone. I don’t really want to stay. My sister and her husband run a restaurant in Truro. They’ve often asked me to go and help. Now’s the time to take them up on it.’ She smiled, proudly, through the bruise; seemed, for a moment, very like my own or any mother’s daughter. She held up the book she’d been reading. ‘Do you know the poems of Stevie Smith?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ll read you one. It’s called “Not Waving but Drowning”. It always reminds me of Johnno.

  ‘“Nobody heard him, the dead man,

  But still he lay moaning;

  I was much further out than you thought

  And not waving but drowning …”’

  The images of the poem stayed with me as, later, I walked away down Bull Hill, images of drowning mistaken and strangely familiar, images that hovered at the edge of the mind like an often used name which, suddenly and infuriatingly, one cannot recall.

  ‘I was much too far out all my life

  ‘And not waving but drowning.’

  After she left Fowey, Zoë sent me postcards at sporadic intervals over the next year or so. The last one said simply, ‘I’ve been happy for quite a while now,’ and was post-marked Dublin. When I think of her, it’s not as Zoë Telfer, making her way in the world; rather, as she was that last day, reading poetry to me with a bruised face, the play of weak sunlight on her hair giving notice that soon, all too soon, the blonde dye would be gone and, with it, an illusion, gone, like another illusion, at another time, for ever.

  I was home again that evening. Tony seemed relieved to hear that Zoë would go without protest and volunteered to take charge of the house sale. As for my ‘shopping trip’ to London on Saturday, he appeared blithely unsuspecting.

  You probably don’t know Camden Passage and I’ve never been there since. It seemed, on a day of leaden skies and steady rain, merely one turning among many off the grey, congested streets leading north-east out of central London. The taxi-driver dropped me at the corner. Raiment’s Gallery was flanked by an antique shop and an Italian restaurant. I went straight in, setting a bell above the door jangling frantically.

  Display cases in the centre of the shop held tinted country maps, illustrations from Punch and a miscellany of period prints. The walls were hung with Raiment’s ‘major retrospective’, comprising a mediocre array of family portraits, London sunsets and alfresco tea parties, interspersed with stags’ heads and stuffed badgers. As I surveyed them with growing distaste, a strip curtain at the back of the shop parted and I was joined by the proprietor: tall, fleshy, with a mane of ginger hair and a crested blazer. Signet rings, brass buttons and cufflinks glittered in the gloom. I introduced myself.

  ‘Of course. The Bartholomew lady. Come with me.’ He led the way through the strip curtain and down a short flight of steps to a longer, lower room, where prints were piled in disorderly profusion amongst empty frames and stretched canvases. He turned to the right-hand wall with a gesture of triumph.

  They were the two paintings I’d rejected when offered them before the auction at Meongate, the same two unsavoury reminders of the artistic imagination of Philip Bartholomew. I might have guessed, but had dreaded to guess, that these were the two unsold.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s the third one I was interested in.’

  ‘You’re intimately familiar with the works, then.’ Mr Raiment sounded annoyed.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am. You bought all three from Basil Gates, the Plymouth dealer.’

  ‘I really don’t see …’

  ‘The point is that the third work was on the same theme, but somehow distinctive. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Would you feel able to tell me who bought it?’ He smiled and was about to refuse, so I cut him short. ‘Mr Raiment, I do appreciate that I’ve inconvenienced you. That was not my intention. If I could, in some way, defray the costs …’

  ‘I took them out of the sale. You may have cost me a customer.’

  ‘I doubt it, don’t you?’

  For whatever reason, his mood softened. ‘It’s unlikely, I grant you. The third one was better than I’d have expected of Bartholomew.’

  ‘You’re sure it was authentic?’

  He gestured to the walls. ‘My gallery, madam, is a shrine to authenticity. I have nothing to hide. Not even’ – he sighed – ‘the name and address of a customer.’ He moved to a filing cabinet in the corner and pulled open a drawer. ‘The purchaser of the Bartholomew had the painting delivered. Copies of the invoice and delivery note should be here … Ah yes. Indeed they are.’

  By now, I was standing next to him. Over his shoulder, on the flimsy sheets of paper, I saw a name I knew. Miss G. M. Fotheringham, 121 Catesby House, Dolphin Square, Pimlico, London SW1.

  I walked along the Embankment early that afternoon, the rain having given way to flecked skies and a bitter wind. Battersea Power Station loomed reassuringly on the other side of the Thames whilst, behind me, beyond railings, above tended gardens, an ordinary, prosaic block of windows held the answer I’d sought so long to the questioning blanks of my childhood. Why did I wait? Why did I hesitate? Mostly, we don’t know when life is about to present its greatest challenges. But this was different. This couldn’t be disguised as a social call on a Saturday afternoon. What I was about to learn could never again be forgotten.

  A porter showed me the way through the well-appointed warren of apartment blocks. Windowless, carpeted corridors between stern, spy-holed doorways. Somewhere, the faint hum of a heating system. Through one door, the plangent notes of a piano: somebody was playing Chopin.

  The porter left me by the door of number 121 and walked slowly away. I waited until he was out of sight, then rang the bell and waited again, wondering if I was being observed through the spy-hole.

  The door opened. The woman who stood there was slightly taller than me, had once, perhaps, been athletic and still carried herself erect, was obviously old but not unfashionably dressed, her grey hair simply but elegantly styled, her face lined but far from drawn.

  ‘Miss Fotheringham?’

  ‘Yes.’ She conveyed as she looked at me none of the meekness or vulnerability often associated with old age. Whether from the inclination of her character or the necessities of an independent life, she seemed to have
drawn a robust and quiet dignity which was at once disconcerting and yet intriguing.

  ‘I’m … Well, you don’t know me. But, in a sense, you do. My name …’

  ‘Don’t say it. I know who you are.’ She smiled as she spoke, deepening the dimple in her cheeks and melting at once the challenging directness of her gaze. ‘Had your mother lived, she would have come to resemble you. Hello, Leonora. I’ve waited a long time to meet you again.’

  We did not kiss, or close the gap of nearly fifty years with anything more than a stilted handshake. That was how, at last, I found my pretty lady.

  We sat in her lounge overlooking the Embankment and took tea with every semblance of normality. I looked around but hardly noticed my surroundings, may have declined a slice of cake and certainly did not taste any of the tea that I drank.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  I described the trail that had led me to her and she listened attentively, in the way the schoolmistress she’d once been might have listened to a pupil’s exposition.

  ‘I was surprised when I saw Bartholomew’s work advertised for sale,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Your mother had often referred to him, so I went along to take a look. Since buying one of the pictures, I’ve half-expected something like this to happen.’

  ‘You expected it to lead me to you?’

  ‘Nothing as definite as that. But I sensed buying it wouldn’t be the end of the matter. I sensed it would put me back in touch, however indirectly, with all those people and places I thought I’d left behind.’

  ‘So why did you buy it?’

  ‘Because I knew it couldn’t be genuine. Because it depicted my friend, your mother – and Bartholomew could never have met her.’

  Before seeking answers to all my other questions, I had to satisfy a more urgent longing. ‘May I see the painting?’ I asked, as calmly as I could manage.

  ‘Of course.’

  She led me down the short hallway to the bedroom, pushed the door open and stood back to let me pass.

  The painting was hanging on the opposite wall, where daylight from the window clarified its every detail. The gilt frame and sombre colouring were reminiscent of Bartholomew’s pictures as they’d hung at Meongate and the scene – a castle bedchamber – seemed, at first sight, identical. Yet there was something different, something strangely deceptive, in the similarity of style and subject. I stepped closer.

  Then I saw the third Bartholomew for what it really was. It’s hard to recall now what I noticed first, hard to be certain how quickly I perceived all of its poignant associations. They declared themselves selectively, as if content in the knowledge that to all save a few they were merely an amalgam of imitated impasto. Yet towards the few, of whom I was one, meaning crept from beneath the layers of paint.

  It was not a castle bedchamber. The grey-hued walls which had suggested as much were papered, the floor-length curtains woven of some fine and modern fabric. Nor was the point of view the same. In the foreground were two figures cast in shadow, silhouetted against the only source of light in the room. So indistinct were they that only implications of shape and position identified them as the man and the woman from Bartholomew’s paintings, the woman reclining on the bed, propped on one hip, her back to the light, the angle of a raised elbow suggesting that she had thrown her head back against her hand, as if to look, or laugh, at the man now stooped above her. He appeared to be in the act of quitting the bed, the spread of his arms and the angle of his back hinting at haste and dismay, perhaps even the panic of one discovered. Certainly his head was turned anxiously towards the light, as if its source embodied his worst fears.

  As well it might. The door of the room stood open, revealing, on the threshold, a woman holding aloft a silver candelabrum, whose three flickering flames shone on her face and clothing. The play of candlelight on this central figure was the most strikingly artistic feature of the painting. It caught the dark blue folds of her gown, the blonde, unbraided lustre of her hair, the pale, open features of her face. It sparkled in the pained, enlarged circles of her eyes and glistened in the slender band of gold on one finger and her left hand where it grasped the stem of the candelabrum. It revealed enough to suggest that the woman was pregnant. It declared too much, and that too well, to doubt who the woman was.

  ‘Is this,’ I said at last, ‘a true likeness of my mother?’

  ‘Uncannily so,’ Grace replied from just behind me. ‘When I saw it, I felt it could only have been painted by somebody who knew her well, who had, perhaps, loved her. I thought at once of your father.’

  Of course. The deception was clear. Willis had completed Bartholomew’s series in his own way, making amends for what he’d once suspected my mother capable of by reviving his fear of being capable of it himself. Yet to Grace Fotheringham, who did not know all that I knew, Franklin was long dead and only my father could have seemed responsible for the portrait of her friend.

  ‘I have no way of knowing when he might have painted this,’ Grace said, ‘although it doesn’t look very old.’

  ‘It was painted last year,’ I murmured.

  ‘Last year? Then he’s still …’

  ‘Alive? No. My father died many years ago. There is a great deal I have to tell you.’

  We returned to the lounge and there I recounted the story Willis had told me fifteen years before. Grace listened in virtual silence, with concentration and a measure of scrutiny. She remained distant but vigilant, as if comparing what I said with what she knew, as if verifying my every word by reference to her own knowledge. When I’d finished, it was growing dark outside.

  In the silence that followed, Grace moved around the room, switching on sidelights. She turned up the fire and drew the curtains. Then, quite deliberately, she walked over to me and kissed me on the forehead and smiled for the first time. The warmth of her spirit emerged, as if a door had been opened, leading from a wintry house into a scented spring garden.

  ‘Bless you, Leonora,’ she said suddenly. ‘Bless you for finding me.’

  ‘Since Willis – or should I call him Franklin? – came to me, you’re the very first person I’ve met who could corroborate his story.’

  ‘We first met in just the way he told you.’

  ‘And you last met?’

  ‘Again, just as he told you. Leonora convinced herself – and me – that John had taken his own life. Accordingly, the only visitor I expected after her death was Franklin. At first, I couldn’t understand why he left Sea Thrift so abruptly, but, when he didn’t return, I began to think about what he’d said – and realized that he didn’t think John was dead after all. I went to the churchyard – but there was no sign of anybody. I told myself that he must have realized he was wrong, that if John were alive, he wouldn’t have abandoned his daughter. Suicide seemed the only possible answer, the only honourable alternative to coming forward and being tried as a deserter. When I read of Franklin’s death a few months later, I had no idea that I was actually reading of just such an honourable alternative.’

  ‘Yet you thought my father was alive when you saw the third Bartholomew.’

  ‘It seemed the only possible explanation. In a sense, that’s why I bought it – to hide the evidence, if you like. I’m glad it also served … to reunite us.’

  ‘Did it have to wait for me to seek you out?’

  I’d tried to erase all hint of condemnation from my voice, yet Grace leant forward in her chair and frowned when she replied, as if some implication had reached her none the less. ‘You must understand, Leonora, that I thought you knew nothing of me. And so you would, if Willis hadn’t …’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been looking for you far longer than that. In fact, for as long as I can remember.’

  She looked at me incredulously. ‘How can you have been?’

  I told her then of my earliest memory, of the strange parting at Droxford station dimly recalled.

  When I’d finished, she said: ‘So you remembered. We didn’t think
you would.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Charter and I. You were barely three.’ Suddenly, she began to cry. When she pulled a white handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan, I thought instinctively of the last time I’d seen her cry and realized what I should have done when she’d first opened the door to me. I sat beside her on the sofa and hugged her and she dried her tears. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I thought you would forget, that I thought you would be happier if you forgot.’

  ‘Hardly. Meongate was not a happy place.’

  ‘No. I feared it wouldn’t be.’

  ‘Then why did you let me go back there? I’ve spoken to Olivia’s lawyer. He says you could have been forced to – but that it never proved necessary.’

  ‘I was forced – but not by the law. Olivia persuaded the Headmistress of East Dene to dismiss me. How she achieved it I never knew. In those days, one had few sanctions against dismissal. I had simply to pack my bags and go. Sea Thrift was owned by the school, so I found myself homeless as well as unemployed. In the circumstances …’

  ‘You had no choice but to hand me over.’

  ‘That is how I excused my abandonment of you, yes. But there is always a choice. I’m sorry I failed you.’

  ‘You didn’t. If Olivia was determined to get me back, you couldn’t have stopped her. What I don’t understand is why she wanted to.’

  ‘I don’t understand that either. I only met her once and she was in no mood to explain her reasons. She seemed to me a woman used to indulging her whims – and her vices. Leonora told me nothing good of her. And my one attempt to defy her ended in total failure.’

  ‘What did you do after leaving Bonchurch?’

  ‘What I’d have done I can’t imagine – if Charter hadn’t come to my rescue. Dear old Charter, the only one from Meongate who attended Leonora’s funeral. He came to see me just before I was due to quit Sea Thrift and loaned me money with which to set up a private school in Yorkshire. Thanks to him, I pulled through. Thanks to him, I had that last sight of you at Droxford.’

  ‘I was told he moved to Yorkshire himself.’