An Artist and a Magician

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘I think that’s a splendid idea,’ Wilbur said, wondering for a second how young the young writers and painters had to be.

  ‘You don’t think it’s foolish and sentimental, and that it might not be better just to give some large lump sum to various charities?’

  ‘Oh, I think a foundation would be a far better idea, though admittedly I’m prejudiced. Really, my dear, the world is quite bad enough as it is. But without art it would be delivered totally into the hands of the barbarians. And then not all the charities in the world could feed the hungry or look after the sick. First things first. And after all,’ he concluded, becoming quite passionate now; but he felt quite passionate, ‘not to be too pompous about it, art is life and discovery and exploration and revolution and movement and all that, and carries all the rest of the world in its wake. Without it there’d only be armies and money-making and death.’

  Bobbie laughed, and read the inscription on Keats’s tomb, to which Wilbur had led her as if to underline his point.

  ‘All right, you’ve convinced me,’ she said. ‘I mean I almost was convinced anyway, but I thought that maybe—’

  ‘Oh no, my dear.’

  ‘There is one other thing,’ Bobbie said, looking down at the ground now, and then bending over to stroke a white cat who was lying in the flowers. ‘I mentioned about giving some little things to some of mother’s friends. But also—well. I saw the photograph of the gravel where poor mother was lying. And I know the papers said she was trying to write Viva il something. But that sounds like a lot of nonsense to me.’

  Wilbur, who had been about to bend over and stroke the white cat himself, stiffened and looked instead at the silvery stone pyramid at the back of the cemetery, where St Paul had been martyred.

  ‘I’m sure she was trying to write your name.’

  ‘Oh,’ Wilbur said.

  ‘And if she was, the only reason I can think of is that—well, as I say, you were her closest friend. And I know she was terribly grateful for everything you did for her over all these years. So I’m sure she was trying to tell me something.’ Bobbie stood up again, and smiled. ‘Not that I needed telling. What I mean is, I’d like you to accept a gift, Wilbur. But you mustn’t think it’s from me. It’s from mother. I know that’s what she wanted.’

  ‘Oh my dear, I couldn’t,’ Wilbur demurred, trying not to flush—and trying, also, to silence the little voice within him that only yesterday he had tried to banish, which was starting to howl with laughter. Oh the irony of it, it cackled. You wizard you. You number one enchanter of the western world.

  Shut up, Wilbur told it.

  But it had been right to be smug, right to realize it would make a comeback—even if it hadn’t realized this comeback would be so very soon—and it wouldn’t be so easily silenced. Oh, you magician you, it howled. You magician….

  ‘Oh come on. Don’t be coy with me please,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘Well then, thank you my dear.’

  ‘Is there anything of mother’s you particularly like?’

  Wilbur smiled. ‘Well there is that little silver monkey….’

  ‘Oh Wilbur, you’re too much,’ Bobbie laughed. ‘Of course you can have it.’

  And have it he did. And two Georgian silver candlesticks. And an inlaid enamel eighteenth-century French musical box. And inside the musical box, carefully folded, a dollar cheque for the equivalent of twenty-one million lire….

  And that, Wilbur thought a week later, having seen Bobbie to the airport—she had been a virtual whirlwind of activity, and apart from the sale of the actual villa, which was in the hands of an agent, had done everything there was to be done, and disposed of all that was disposable—was that. His problems, at least for a while, were over, the tax department could be paid, and he could quite easily sit with his feet up until Jim returned from his trip round the world, Betty sorted her finances out, and Bernard—as Wilbur was certain now that he would—got sick of his family, and changed his mind about settling in California. Not that he did sit with his feet up of course, and in his own whirlwind of activity actually managed to get through all the translations he had been neglecting for so long, and start on several new projects as well. But just the idea that he was free for a while gave him strength and energy; just the knowledge that his problems were over made him work. He did decide, however, that some time in the winter he would take himself off on a long holiday, to somewhere he had never been. To somewhere, possibly, where no one had ever been.

  Oh, how happy he was, he told himself. And what an artist he was!

  And that would have been that—but for the fact that on the fifth of September—a Monday—he received three letters. They were, naturally, from Jim and Betty and Bernard, and all of them said almost the same thing. Which was that they had not only gotten his note telling them about Pam’s death, but they had also gotten other notes, from other friends in Rome, telling them about Pam’s death. And included in those other notes had either been a photograph, cut from the paper, of Pam’s last message, or an exact report of it. And they, like Bobbie, were quite unfooled by any theories of Pam’s madness and Viva il whatever. Only they, who knew Wilbur better, did not interpret the first three letters of his name as Bobbie had done. They knew what Pam had been trying to write in the gravel….

  ‘Oh, you wicked old thing,’ Betty wrote from Davos, ‘you killed her. Oh Wilbur, I adore you. But you are naughty.’

  ‘You murdering old motherfucker,’ Bernard wrote from San Diego. ‘Why the hell didn’t you do it years ago?’

  ‘I wish you were here,’ Jim wrote from Rio. ‘You’d be able to dispose of the creature for me.’

  They all of them enclosed a cheque in their letters; Betty for five hundred dollars, Bernard for seven, and Jim for one whole thousand….

  FOUR

  Wilbur was on his terrace when he read these three letters, and though it was a glorious morning, with the September sky startlingly blue after the whiter days of August, the sun warm and kind, and the colours of the city softer and more harmonious than they had been just a week or two ago, he couldn’t help feeling a stab of winter in his veins, and seeing a cloud of grey shroud over the domes and terraces and roofs. Because if the events of the past few weeks, with all their ups and downs, had been, however exaggeratedly, just episodes in the comedy of life, these letters were something quite different, and belonged somehow to quite another world. An unsettling, disturbed, slightly nightmarish world. For while all three of them seemed to treat the subject of Pam’s death—Pam’s murder—in the lightest, airiest way, as a great big joke, there was, beneath their easy tone, a sort of menace. Possibly because murder, however one laughed about it after, couldn’t really be made a joke of, and possibly because neither Betty nor Bernard nor Jim, under their various exteriors, were really light or airy people. They hadn’t gotten where they were, nor stayed where they were, by being light and airy. And while of course all three of them might just be teasing, not seriously thinking for a moment that he actually had killed Pam, he was fairly sure that none of them were. Otherwise why would they all, without a comment, have sent him those cheques?

  What was more: while it could—looking back on it dispassionately—have been mere chance that in the space of just a few days in the middle of August he had not only found himself falling flat on his face, but also having himself stamped on simultaneously by all four of the people he relied on, it wasn’t, simply could not be mere chance that he had now received these letters all on the same day, all saying the same thing, and all announcing mutely that he was going to be stamped on no longer. Obviously there could be an explanation; he had written himself on the same day—to Bernard in California, Betty in Switzerland, and Jim c/o the American Express in Rio (Jim had said before he left that they would be passing through Rio, though he hadn’t said when)—and they had all written back on different days—Jim first, Bernard second, and Betty last—but even so, that just wasn’t good enough. And while before, when he’d been
attacked, he had favoured the theory that his friends were acting, however improbably, in concert, now he no longer did. Now he suspected that the simultaneous arrival of the letters depended not on any planning—which in any case would have been extremely hazardous, owing to the erraticness of the mail—but on some sort of—well, if not precisely divine intervention (because he didn’t when it came down to it, believe in any divinities) at least the intervention of what he could only call the forces of magic, or the efforts of some particularly neat artist. That had to be it. And that was what was really scaring, and really made grey winter fogs seep out of the invisible fractures of the clear September sky. Because art and life seemed to have become confused. Of course he had always held that they couldn’t be divided, but even so—

  It was scaring in precisely the same way as it had been scaring to read of the manner of Pam’s death. But while he had been able to get over that particular fright quite quickly, acquit himself of any blame there without too much effort, these letters, or the attitudes of their writers, wouldn’t, he was afraid, be so easily shaken off, explained away. To make matters worse, since all three of his friends did, without any apparent doubt, believe that he had murdered Pam, now even that ghost rose again from the dead and came to haunt him. Had he killed her, he asked himself once more. Not literally, perhaps, but just by sending out such waves of hatred from the chemical box of his brain that she had, left alone with them in her garden, been powerless to resist them—her only revenge being the writing of the name of her killer in the gravel? Had he, the artist and magician, done that?

  No he had not, Wilbur said sternly to himself, and stood up. He was a great believer in the powers of the human brain, and undoubtedly that unpleasant looking lump of matter was capable of remarkable feats. But to kill people—no. That was going too far. Though—and now he sat down again, and felt somewhat less stern—witch doctors were apparently able to kill people—even if just by inspiring them with so much fear and self-hatred that they died by themselves. Was that what he had done to Pam then? Made her realize just how shabbily she had behaved, so that shame and mortification had knocked her over? Or had she behaved shabbily, and talked of a new exciting life, simply because she knew her own, which hadn’t been quite as brilliant or exciting as she would have liked, was over?

  Oh, he didn’t know. But he did wish she hadn’t written that message, whatever it meant. And he did wish that Betty and Bernard and Jim hadn’t written those letters to him.

  The only thing he didn’t wish in fact was that Pam would come back to life. Because, he couldn’t help telling himself, much as he was grieved by her passing, her death, which couldn’t have been delayed much longer anyway, really had solved a number of his more pressing problems—and looked, if the evidence of the three cheques were anything to go on, as if it were going to go on solving even his future problems. After all, frightening or not, winter-bearing or otherwise, five hundred plus seven hundred plus a thousand did equal two thousand two hundred. And two thousand two hundred dollars were not to be sneezed at, even if they had been gained, as it were, by false pretences.

  That day, for the first time in twenty-five years, Wilbur wrote two poems. He didn’t plan on doing them—they just came to him as he sat at his typewriter. And they came to him, he had to admit—bright, allusive, deceptively slight and subtly deep—really rather well….

  He wrote several more poems in the days that followed; and while wondering about the mysterious springs from which art flowed, paid the three cheques into his account….

  However, if the next three weeks—full of parties and poems and even a start on a painting—passed so pleasantly and quickly that he was almost able to forget that there was an unidentified and possibly blight-bearing worm in the rose of his life, the first of October brought him a reminder; a reminder that came, as he had been afraid it would, with the return to Rome of one of his three friends. And oh, he told himself, he had been right to feel disturbed, and apprehensive.

  First because Jim—for Jim it was—had hardly stepped off the plane before he came puffing and chugging round to hear exactly what had happened to Pam; and second because—and this was the greater cause for alarm—when it came to it, Wilbur found that he was unwilling, for some reason, to admit that he hadn’t killed the old woman. He didn’t actually say he had—but he let the assumption drift in the air like cigar smoke in a closed room. He just didn’t feel like opening the window….

  Quite why, he asked himself afterwards, he honestly wasn’t sure. Because it added a touch of drama to his life? Because he liked, at least in his dreams, to wear exotic clothes? Because Jim expected it of him and he hated to disappoint people? Because it enhanced his reputation as a magician and an artist? Perhaps it was for all of these reasons. Or perhaps it was only because he had an illogical feeling that if he did come out and positively state that he hadn’t killed Pam, even if Jim didn’t ask for his thousand dollars back, he wouldn’t be so forthcoming about advancing any more when the time came. And however bright the financial picture of one’s life was at the moment, one could never tell what might happen, and when the time would come….

  But if he didn’t tell Jim precisely how his afternoon with Pam had ended, he did tell him everything else; how Pam had described the very way she was so shortly to go, how—and this involved admitting that Pam had been lending him money, which was still another cause for misgivings later—Pam had asked him to pay her back what he owed her, how he had been tempted to give her a push as she was standing up to turn the hose on, how she had talked about her new life, and how she had said she didn’t want to go back inside when he said he had to leave; wanted to stay out and savour the peace and quiet….

  He described it brilliantly, creating that hot August afternoon all over again there in his living room; making the willow weep, the cherub pee, the gravel crunch beneath his feet…. He conjured the whole scene up until it was palpable, until Jim himself could see it there, in front of his eyes, as clearly as if he had been hiding behind a bush and peeping through the leaves. He was, in fact, as he rewove the fabric of that day with the flimsiest of materials—mere words—quite dazzling; and Jim was suitably dazzled. He sat enraptured, chortling and chuckling, his little knees pumping up and down in excitement.

  ‘Oh ha ha ha,’ he cried. ‘Oh I do think that’s funny Wilbur. Oh poor Pam. Oh ha ha ha ha ha.’

  Wilbur sat there modestly, and made no comment.

  ‘And they didn’t find her till the Tuesday morning. Oh poor Pam. Oh ha ha ha. Oh you must do something about Chuck.’

  ‘Well, tell me James,’ Wilbur said, glad for a chance to change the subject, ‘now I’ve told you all our little local news, how did the trip round the world go?’

  That sobered Jim up immediately, and he seemed to find nothing to laugh at there. On the contrary, he became quite indignant at the very mention of the past few weeks.

  ‘Oh, don’t talk about it. Psychotic little whore. We went round the entire world in twenty days. Sixty countries. Three hours here, two hours there. I think he was hoping I’d collapse. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to do anything when we arrived everywhere. Oh gosh no. It was rush here, rush there, in and out of taxis, museums, churches, temples, shops, bars. Good God, it was dreadful! I think the longest time we spent anywhere was in Paris. Thirty-six hours.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ditch him somewhere?’

  ‘I tried to, but he always seemed to have my passport in his pocket when I needed it.’

  The memory brought a little colour to the Pickwickian face, and a shake to the shoulders; but one couldn’t have called it a laugh….

  ‘Well, where’ve you been for the last few weeks if your trip was over so soon?’

  ‘Oh, resting in Mexico City. He decided he had to go back to New York to see his poor old mother. But he’s coming here tomorrow. Oh dear.’

  ‘Does he have money?’

  ‘He should have. He robbed me blind.’

  ‘B
ut what does he want from you, James?’

  ‘Oh everything, I think,’ Jim almost sobbed. But then, suddenly, he recovered his normal high spirits. ‘You must do something Wilbur.’

  ‘I’ll put a spell on him if you like.’

  ‘Oh, that would be wonderful. Turn him into a tortoise. Oh yes. Oh—’ and off he went again into paroxysms of laughter, as he thought of Pam lying in her garden,

  ‘I think you’re very mean James, laughing like that.’

  ‘I’m mean? Oh heavens. Oh Wilbur. Oh—oh—oh—’ And now Jim was reduced to tears of mirth, and for a full minute was bent double on the sofa where he perched. Finally, though, he gathered himself together enough to gasp, ‘Oh I’d love to have seen her expression. And then writing your name like that on the gravel. She might have had you arrested, vindictive old bitch. Though I guess—’

  ‘Bobbie had quite another interpretation of those letters,’ Wilbur interrupted tartly. ‘She thought Pam wrote my name because I’d been her closest friend and wanted to remember me. In fact,’ he added, ‘Bobbie gave me those candlesticks there—and that silver monkey, and an eighteenth-century French musical box.’

  He didn’t mention what had been inside the box; he thought it wiser not to….

  *

  Jim stayed for another half an hour; laughing, talking, and still visibly excited by what he thought Wilbur had done; though it wasn’t till he was leaving that he said, once again, ‘You must do something about Chuck for me.’

  ‘Oh, come on James,’ Wilbur smiled, steering his friend towards the door. ‘My spells are precious. I can’t just toss them around. And you’re quite capable of taking care of all the Chucks in the world yourself.’

  ‘Oh goodness yes,’ Jim puffed, and laughed; though what Wilbur had said was no more than the truth. In fact, of all the various young men with whom Jim had been involved since Wilbur had known him—and while some were even worse than the dreadful Chuck, some had been really quite pleasant—hardly one had survived to enjoy the money that they had managed to squeeze out of the dapper little man. Some had taken to drink, some to drugs; some had been smashed up in the fast and expensive cars Jim had bought them, some gone mad and killed themselves. There was even a story that Wilbur had heard somewhere—he couldn’t remember where—that once there had been some young man who, having money himself, and being genuinely and disinterestedly attached to Jim, had actually been murdered in rather obscure circumstances. Though whether this was true, Wilbur neither knew nor cared to know.