by Peter Helton
‘This one’s a record producer. Reuben Hitchcock.’
‘Never heard of him.’ Not being a musician, I could not have named a single record producer.
‘Another friend of Stoneking’s. He went for a swim at his pile and “absolutely loved” my mural. He produced the last two Karmic albums and a lot of others I’ve never heard of, and he must be rolling in it. He lives in a huge house called Bearwood Hall near Ufton in Wiltshire and wants me to do two murals, no less.’
I stifled a groan born of deep green jealousy, possibly viridian green. ‘Don’t tell me: he’s got two swimming pools.’
‘Just the one. He wants one mural in there. And he has an Italianate colonnaded walkway terrace thingy in his garden – forty feet long. He wants another one there. I’ll be gone some time.’
‘Gone?’ I said in my best horror-struck voice. ‘Gone?’
Annis furtled about in the back of the studio, dragging a couple of wooden crates into the light. ‘Yeah, I’ll be staying there; it’s too far to commute and he’s offered me accommodation. I’ll be staying at the gatehouse.’
‘Gatehouse,’ I mused morosely. ‘Why haven’t we got one of those?’
‘We can’t even afford to repair the gate. One of the hinges is knackered. I’ll be starting each day with a swim and will get to work straight after breakfast.’
‘You’ll get wrinkled toes.’ Then it hit me. ‘What about the tea break stuff? The baking stuff?’
‘Baking stuff? Haha, baking stuff,’ she cackled gleefully. ‘You’ll have to come up with something yourself, I’m afraid.’
‘But I don’t bake. I cook, you bake – that’s how it works.’
‘I thought there was more to it than that. Looks like you’ll have to extend your repertoire, doesn’t it? It’s not rocket science. ’Nuff books in the kitchen.’
‘But …’ But I couldn’t really think of a but.
‘Look, you only have four classes left until the term finishes. The watercolour class ends tomorrow, then one drawing class tomorrow evening, so the same cakes or whatever you decide for that, and then two more drawing classes and the term is finished.’ She began clearing her painting table and packing paint supplies into the crates: brushes, large tins and tubes of oil paints, three-litre cans of turps, stand oil and liquin. While my painting kit had shrunk to that of a mobile watercolourist, hers had inflated to that of the mural painter.
‘When are you going?’ I asked pitifully.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘You couldn’t find it in your heart …’
‘No, too busy. I still have things to buy in town.’
‘What do you need? You can have any of mine.’
‘That’s kind of you, Chris, but your cozzie wouldn’t fit me.’
All thoughts of painting were driven from my mind by the sheer panic the word ‘baking’ had induced in me. I went back down to the house to consult some of Annis’s books on the subject. Calm down, I told myself, you’re a good cook, so you’ll master baking too. Ah, said the undeceived voice of unclouded memory, but you started by being a lousy cook and produced a string of disasters before you got the hang of it.
On our shelves of cookbooks I found a tome called The Great British Bake Off – Everyday: One Hundred Foolproof Recipes. Foolproof sounded good but there was no guarantee they were Honeysett-proof. I opened it. It started with countless pictures of baking paraphernalia, in silhouette. Did we have all those? Would I recognize them? What were they all called? This was not reassuring. I turned pages until I got to the recipes. Demerara? Buttermilk? Baking powder? Vanilla pods? Rum? I obviously had shopping of my own to do. And what on earth did ‘base-lined’ mean? I made a shopping list as long as my arm and drove into town, spent a small fortune because I hadn’t checked what was already in the house and came back with enough ingredients to feed every artist in the county with chocolate cake. Eventually, I produced two uneven, surprisingly heavy lumps of which I nevertheless felt as proud as if I had personally given birth to them on the kitchen floor.
Annis stood and looked at the cakes, then at the devastation in the kitchen. ‘Wow, you made them blindfolded.’
‘Come and try some.’
‘No, no, I’m sure they’ll be fine. Don’t cut them until tomorrow.’ She ran a finger through some leftover chocolate icing in the bowl, sucked it thoughtfully and said, ‘Mmm, unusual.’
The next morning she kissed me awake, then kissed me goodbye and deserted me to go and mix with the rich and probably famous while I had to wait anxiously until it was tea break time to hear the watercolourists’ judgement on my baking efforts. The verdicts ranged from the polite ‘quite interesting’ via the more honest ‘a bit heavy’ to the encouraging ‘not too bad for your first cake’.
I was a bit more relaxed for the life-drawing class in the evening. Verity stuffed half a slice into her mouth and then said something that sounded like ‘It’s OK’. When she had done away with the rest of the slice, she added, ‘Why don’t you make a Victoria sponge for next time? Victoria sponge is my favourite and they’re dead easy to make.’ I promised I would.
So far everything seemed as it should.
The weather had warmed up again so I planted myself outside The Chestnuts and, in agonizing slow motion to drag it out as long as possible, started a new pen-and-wash sketch of the house and the lane. This time a second car stood on the drive – a small black BMW. It belonged, as I found out after a wait of ninety minutes, to a blonde middle-aged woman in a twin set who wore loud make-up and every bit as much gold jewellery as Mrs Blinkhorn, as well as a pearl necklace and earrings. The two women said goodbye on the drive, kissed the air beside their cheeks, then the BMW backed carefully out of the drive with Janette Blinkhorn’s aid and disappeared down the lane. Janette gave a small wave but did not come over. Nothing at all happened after that, and when it clouded over again, I was glad to pack up and go home.
Victoria sponge didn’t require any shopping. In case we had a full house and the students liked it, I baked two. I was generous with the vanilla and very generous with the French strawberry jam and buried them both under an avalanche of icing sugar. Then I had to brush most of it off again so people might recognize them as cakes. Verity had been right: Victoria sandwich is dead easy to make and since it was her favourite I looked forward to her tasting notes. Normally, Verity turned up in good time and ‘starving hungry’ from her bicycle ride out to the valley, but today her usual time passed and there was no sign of her. The first students arrived. I watched them park their cars in the yard and waved hello from the front door, keeping an eye on the track and my ears pricked for the rattle of her boneshaker, but there was no sign of her. Five minutes after the class ought to have started, I went up to the studio to apologize. ‘It appears the model has let us down, I don’t know what could have happened. She does have both my phone numbers.’ But she had no phone of her own and it was quite possible she didn’t have the price of a call from a phone box.
The students were not happy. There is very little you can do in a life-drawing class without a life model. ‘You’d better get your kit off, then,’ said one woman. I smiled at her but she just raised her eyebrows. ‘Unless you want to reimburse everyone their fee? And for me it’s a twenty-mile round trip in the car.’ There were nods and murmurs of agreement. Oh, no, they were serious.
Now, I’m not so shy that I undress in the dark, but Annis has had plenty of time to get used to my less-than-athletic shape and no longer makes fun of it. Getting my kit off in front of ten strangers, all but one of them women, was quite a different prospect. ‘Ah. Right. OK. Erm … I’ll be getting my dressing gown, then. Won’t be a tick.’
My dressing gown was in the laundry basket, I now remembered, because the back of it had collided with some bright-red and airborne sweet-and-sour sauce (don’t ask), so I rummaged around and found one of Annis’s insubstantial kimono-style things – pale jade green with a print of golden dragons, made to look like embroidery
. It would make me look ridiculous, of course, but a dressing gown was a must. It is a curious convention of life modelling that despite the fact that the model will spend most of the time in the nude, he or she will not emerge naked from the changing booth or room but walk to wherever the pose will be set and then remove the dressing gown. It has to do with professionalism and dignity. I rushed into the improvised changing booth where there was very little room for manoeuvre and changed into the kimono. It was very short on me and did absolutely nothing for my dignity as I stepped out among my students. To give them credit, they didn’t laugh too loudly. I turned on the blow-heaters which wheezed and clattered into action, placed a wooden chair we often use to pose the model between them and disrobed. Then I sat down and took up what was meant to look like a casual pose of ‘man sits on chair, just happens to be naked’.
‘Fifteen-minute pose – someone else will have to keep an eye on the time.’ I had taken off my watch because naked with a watch is more naked than naked without a watch. Don’t believe me? Try it in a crowded room sometime.
When you are drawing, time is always too short. Whatever the length of the pose – ten, twenty, thirty minutes – you could always do with another five. When you are teaching a class, you move around, observe what people are doing, talk, offer advice and solutions for the students’ problems and keep an eye on the time. But when you are trying to sit absolutely still, it is near impossible to construct a measurement of time from the scratching of charcoal on paper, the odd mumblings and sighs. One of the heaters stood a little too close to my left leg but I was determined not to move, while the other’s wheezing breath managed to miss me altogether. There are two ways in which humans keep warm: wearing clothes to prevent heat loss or burning energy by moving their muscles. As an artists’ model, you can’t do either, so if the air temperature is anything less than blood heat, you will feel cold. And, of course, your nose will itch. Also the back of your right knee, for some reason. This is a good thing, because it will help take your mind off the fact that the room has mysteriously turned arctic and that time has turned to treacle, and the realization that this pose will never end and that wooden chairs are objects of torture invented by sadists.
‘Is anyone keeping an eye on the time?’ I asked casually.
‘Yes,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘Another ten minutes.’
Impossible. Apparently, I had only done five minutes of sitting still. We usually had a thirty-minute pose in the second half; I was sure I would never survive it. I would freeze solid or go mad from boredom and start howling and biting people’s ankles. When I was finally relieved from my frozen state, I announced that we would do a lot of short poses in the first half. And possibly in the second half too, I said to myself as I tried to come up with different stances and poses I could actually hold without my muscles screaming at me.
It was during the last pose before the long-awaited tea break that I saw a man’s face at one of the old sash windows I had bodged into the wall of the barn. The face looked as if it belonged to a slightly overweight man in his forties, with bleached hair and eyebrows. I did not recognize the face and it appeared at the window slowly, peering through one corner of it; then it disappeared again. ‘Time for our tea break,’ I announced and slipped on my kimono. Whoever had peered through the window had not come in. I opened the door, still in my dressing gown, and was just in time to see a man reach the bottom of the meadow, jog across the yard and get into the passenger seat of a black Porsche. The car drove off, disappearing behind the hedgerow along the track, moving quickly, its engine note receding fast.
Of course, since the drawing classes were available as a block or as single drawing sessions, someone might have arrived late, taken one look at my uninspiring nude form and decided to give it a miss, yet the man had not been carrying any art supplies and the waiting Porsche did not seem to fit that scenario. I had no time to worry about it then because I had to change back into clothes and then run down the meadow myself to make teas and coffees and fetch the cakes.
‘You’re quite the one-man band today, aren’t you?’ said one lady good-naturedly (though admittedly before she had tasted the cake). The fact was that even I could not mess up a Victoria sandwich cake and so I received rather more praise for my baking than my modelling.
The second half of the session felt like an eternity of aches and pains, chill drafts, persistent itches and leaden boredom. But eventually, when I had already given up all hope that it ever would, the session came to an end. ‘I hope Verity is all right’ was how more than one of the students took leave of the one-man life-drawing experience that evening, and I fervently hoped so too. Trust me to hire a model who has no phone and cannot be contacted.
On Thursday morning, the Bath Chronicle landed on my doormat in time for my breakfast. The city of Bath is not exactly a seething hotbed of crime, although it does have its fair share of drug addicts, pickpockets, hotel thieves and marriage swindlers. Any place that attracts a lot of tourists also draws those who will try to take advantage of them, but crime rarely captures the front page of the Chronicle. Today was different. ONE DEAD IN WEDNESDAY’S HOUSEFIRE, Fire Department Suspect Arson. A piece of croissant suspended halfway to my mouth, I quickly read on. For a few brief seconds my mind had connected Verity’s failure to show up with the discovery of a dead body, and I was relieved when I read that the body was that of the young man who had been living in the rented basement bedsit in Upper Weston, a suburb of Bath. Fire investigators had discovered the presence of ‘an accelerant’. The fire had been started around four in the morning. My mouth closed around the piece of croissant but the quivering dollop of quince jam jumped off it. I had lost interest in the article, yet, while I scraped jam off the newspaper, one word in the lengthy article seemed to jump out at me. Porsche. I returned to the article and found that one witness described seeing a Porsche drive away quickly and noisily from the area around the time the fire broke out, describing it as ‘black or possibly dark blue’.
Apart from having enough patience to enjoy watching paint dry, being of a suspicious nature and having a tiny paranoid bone in my body contribute to my suitability as a private eye. Normally, this is tempered by Annis debunking ninety per cent of my hare-brained theories, but Ms Jordan was at that moment baptizing her new minimalist bathing costume in a record producer’s swimming pool, which probably cheered him a lot but was of no use to me at all. And this meant that my little paranoid bone kept on vibrating irritatingly. It was no good telling myself that there must be dozens of black-or-possibly-dark-blue Porsches driving around Bath because I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever having seen one of that colour until last night. ‘The victim has been named as twenty-three-year-old Joshua Grant,’ the article continued and described him as ‘unemployed’. But what could an unemployed young man in a rented basement flat in Upper Weston possibly have to do with me?
THREE
Thick September mists hung in the trees, the sheep that had kept the meadow cropped all summer had been collected and returned to my neighbour’s farm, and Mill House lay quiet. I stood breakfasting on crumbly cake at the back door in the kitchen; the kitchen door opened on to the damp and neglected herb garden. I indulged in a moment of picturesque melancholy; summer would soon be over. I had not painted nearly as much as I had hoped and the teaching I had done instead had barely earned me enough money to keep me in paint. Annis had used virtually all her commission earnings on paying off our mountainous debts. This meant I could not afford to let my private-eye job slip. In my mind I called it The Blinkhorn Affair, which allowed me to imagine myself as a latter-day Paul Temple who would no doubt soon toast the miraculous solution of the enigma with bottles of vintage champagne. In reality, I usually celebrate with paying bills. One such bill was the last repair invoice for my 1960s Citroën, variously described as ‘a fine example of a classic French car’ – by me – or ‘that Frog rust bucket’ – by Jake who keeps the thing on the road. Jake runs his classic
(British) car restoration business from a farm near Ford (he had originally tried to breed ponies and failed) and over the years he has supplied Aqua Investigations with many of its vehicles, usually so clapped-out that he didn’t mind in what state they were returned, if at all. Sometimes, though, he lets me borrow one of the more contemporary cars he has standing around because, as he never fails to point out, an ancient French car in your rear-view mirror is hardly inconspicuous. (He usually adds some insinuation that I am not very bright and a hopeless amateur.) I scraped some money together for the outstanding repair bill and drove to Ford.
There was hardly space to park in his yard, which was nearly as potholed as mine, except that his had the added hazards of car axles, engines on bricks under tarpaulin, empty body shells of British cars so ancient I didn’t recognize them, naked chassis, worn-out car seats and doors and bonnets in various states of decay. Next to the workshop rose a hill of discarded car exhausts that would have sent any first-year sculpture student into raptures of delight. The double doors to Jake’s workshop, a cement-brick and corrugated-iron barn, stood open. From inside came the sad sound of a starter motor draining a battery in an attempt to start a reluctant engine.
Jake was sitting at the wheel of a curvaceous 1948 Bristol 400 in a pastel shade of green that hasn’t been seen on a car body for more than sixty years. The bonnet was up. Below it Jake’s mechanic, with white mad-professor hair and the oldest overall in the West, was fiddling with the engine and shaking his head, which he did a lot. It took them a while to notice me. When Jake did, he acknowledged me with a nod, then got out of the car and talked incomprehensible West Country car gibberish with his factotum before eventually turning his critical eye on me. ‘Whatever is wrong with your swivel-eyed French chariot will have to wait until the last bill is paid, and I haven’t even touched Annis’s Norton – that’ll need parts made for it, so don’t even ask. We’re bloody busy up here. Half my regular clients went on some idiotic run down to Cornwall and virtually all of them broke down and then rang me. Some of them still haven’t made it back a week later. Bugger me! Is that real money or did you paint it yourself?’
