The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  Sitting on a tall bar-stool, Charlton read the morning paper propped up against the radio blaring pop music on the table as he ate. It was not the sort of paper which would report Martha Shaw’s death; its readers had never heard of her. He paused at the statutory picture on page three, carnal female perfection artificially created by patient hours in a photographic studio; provocative smile, promising eyes, casually displayed breasts, flawless naked skin. Such women were not available to men cruelly stunted by nature, another tormenting reminder to underline his physical restrictions.

  Years earlier he had worked as a circus clown, perpetual greasepaint smile masking hatred of laughing audiences; a cripple forced to dance as a grotesque, a lunatic taunted behind bars at Bedlam. When his mother died, guilt-wracked with a false conviction of responsibility for his condition, she had left him a small unmortgaged house and a surprisingly large insurance policy, legacy of a penny-pinching life dedicated to repaying him the only way she knew for cheating him of normality.

  Based on the memory of a childhood visit with his special school when he was fourteen — the first time he had seen the sea — Charlton had put nearly all his legacy into buying his own home in Porthennis. He now survived on odd jobs for residents, casual employment in the tourist business during the summer and occasional wins on dogs and horses. His wardrobe was from jumble sales or charity shops and he scrounged more food than he bought. It was a miserable, demeaning existence, but better than being chased round a sawdust ring in wobbling, delirious mock panic before falling into a bowl of sticky paste, hysterical glee at his humiliation loud in his ears.

  But now — automatic lust at the girl in the picture was replaced with a glitter of anticipation in his eyes — now he had a chance to make people who patronised him out of pity squirm and obey. He knew there was something, all he needed was the details. He had not been able to trick the information out of Martha Shaw, but there were others who must know. One of them, he was certain, would let it slip. Meanwhile he had to continue as the grateful menial, waiting for his chance to make others dance to his tune. Charlton finished his breakfast and tossed the plastic cereal bowl into the sink. Driving his invalid car out of Porthennis towards Penzance and his summer job operating the roundabout at a travelling fair, he wondered what conclusion the police had reached over Martha Shaw’s death and whether Ruth Harvey would be home again by the time he returned in the evening.

  *

  Maltravers sat among tumbled rocks on Porthennis beach — there was scarcely enough sand around him to fill a bucket, let alone build a castle — throwing pebbles at a target of stones he had set up twenty feet away. Forearms on raised knees, Tess gazed across empty, crinkled cellophane sea buttered with sunlight. Voices of scattered holiday families floated in lazy morning quietness.

  “Where the hell has he got to?” she demanded impatiently.

  “God knows.” Maltravers’s arm hurled forward and a stone ricocheted among boulders like a steel ball in a pinball machine. “He must have gone out early, because I was up by seven.” Another stone missed and bounced high in bright, languid air before rattling into a crevice. “But he seems to enjoy playing the man of mystery.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” Tess’s voice was sharp with rejection. “He wasn’t like that. He was absolutely serious, and very unhappy about it.”

  Maltravers abandoned his target practice. “All right, calm down. But friend Mortimer has left too many loose ends hanging. I can accept he picked up your thoughts last night — I’ve come across stranger things than that which can’t be explained in this life — but what has Martha Shaw’s death got to do with us?”

  “Martha Shaw’s murder,” Tess corrected. “I believed him when he said that, and you would as well if you’d been there.”

  “And you believe we’re going to become mixed up in it in some way?”

  Tess looked at the sea again for a few moments. “Frankly, yes. But it would help if he could tell us how.”

  “Then it would help if he reappeared.” Maltravers lobbed a larger stone across the rocks and his target tumbled noisily. He had gone to Lacey’s cottage earlier that morning, but there had been no reply. Passing time on the beach while Helen drove into Penzance to do her weekly shopping was becoming frustrating.

  “Perhaps he’s back now,” Tess suggested. “We’ve been down here more than an hour.”

  As they left, they passed a concrete reservoir built into the beach, refilled twice a day by the tide to leave a shallow pool of clear water. Children were sailing toy boats or hurling sparkling bead curtains of water over each other with waving arms as parents watched. One woman nudged her husband and said something as she indicated Tess; it was her daughter who had been sick during the previous afternoon’s matinee. The man looked up from his newspaper, then shook his head disbelievingly. More people were arriving, excited, chattering family safaris equipped with new shrimping nets, inflatable dinghies, woven raffia beach mats, dogs and transistor radios. An unremarkable Saturday morning in a Cornish holiday village, where visitors had been animated by news of a local sculptor killed when a statue fell on her; something more interesting than the weather to mention on picture postcards home.

  Helen had returned but Lacey had not, and she suggested they asked round the harbour if anyone had seen him; his continuing absence was becoming unbearable. His eerie awareness — and now his disappearance after promising he would talk to Maltravers — had transformed him from the intriguing into something sinister.

  It was less busy as they walked along the harbour front; Saturday was changeover day when many holidaymakers left in the morning to be replaced by new ones in the afternoon. While Maltravers was buying an Independent in the newsagents, Helen spoke to a couple of villagers, but neither had seen Lacey. As they stood outside the general store, Dorothy Lowe came out and saw them.

  “Heard about Belvedere?” she asked before Helen could speak, booming contralto voice gloomy with satisfaction. “Silly bugger fell down his own steps on his way home last night. Out of his tree, of course. Hardly able to stand up straight when I left the Steamer at closing time.”

  Helen looked dismayed. “How is he?”

  “Alive.” Dorothy almost sounded disappointed. “Nothing worse than a crack on the back of his thick head. His dignity would be dented if he had any left.”

  “Sympathetic soul,” Maltravers murmured to Tess.

  “Is he in hospital?” Helen asked.

  “Of course he isn’t. They took him there about midnight after someone found him, but he discharged himself as soon as they’d patched him up.” She indicated her basket of groceries. “First thing this morning he’s ringing me up asking for iron rations.”

  She snorted impatiently. “He’ll expect us all to wait on him hand and foot like the Great Panjandrum. Probably want one of us to finish off some of his work for him. Don’t bother visiting. He’s in an even fouler mood than usual.”

  “And what about Ruth?” Helen added. “We’ve heard what happened to Martha. She’s staying with you isn’t she?”

  “Only for the time being. Wants to go home. Still in a state of shock of course.” Dorothy’s weather-beaten moon face shivered. “Must have been awful finding her like that. Can’t have felt a thing though. Ruth came to me as soon as the police brought her back. Keeps going on about Martha not having been given the last rites, as if that mattered.”

  “But what are the police doing?” Helen added.

  “Wasting their time with a lot of damn fool questions,” Dorothy replied impatiently. “When I first saw Martha working on that stone, I told her she was mad not to put some supports round it. Probably thought that God would look after her. Anyway, I’d better get back with this lot. Goodbye.”

  As the old woman — who had ignored Maltravers and Tess — stalked away up the street by the clock tower, Helen called after her.

  “Dorothy! Have you seen Mortimer anywhere?”

  “Mortimer?” She turned back. “Yes. He w
as driving off when I was walking the dog first thing. About half past six.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “Didn’t stop to tell me. Didn’t even wave back. Seemed in a hurry.” Having given the information, she resumed up the hill. “Going towards Penzance,” she called without looking round again.

  “Who’s she?” Maltravers asked.

  “Dorothy Lowe,” Helen replied. “Sorry, I should have introduced you. Another of the School. Belvedere said last night she’d taken Ruth in.”

  Maltravers looked after the retreating figure. “Is callousness written into their constitution? One old friend killed, another obviously distressed and Belvedere nearly breaking his neck. What does it take to make her show some sympathy?”

  “They’re all like that,” Helen replied. “They insult each other as casually as they insult everyone else. It’s all part of the act. Anyway, let’s see if anyone in the Steamer knows where Mortimer’s got to.”

  Wide open doors and windows had dispersed the concentrated smog of tobacco smoke and beer fumes laid down the previous evening. There were few people inside, one couple taking an early lunch of traditional star-gazy pie, heads of cooked pilchards poking through the crust, staring at the diners reproachfully. Jack Bocastle, the landlord, had not seen Lacey, then scowled when Helen mentioned Belvedere.

  “Set new benchmarks last night,” he replied. “In drink and bloody bad manners. Some Yank believed everything he said — he even threw in the one about getting Greta Garbo to show him her tits — and bought him half a bottle of rum. Without my knowledge, or I’d have put a stop to it sharpish. Next thing he’s trying to touch up the ladies until me and a couple of the lads told him to behave. He quietened down after that.”

  “How was he when he left?” Maltravers asked.

  “Paralytic.” Bocastle slurped coffee through an ornate Edwardian moustache, wiping away the remains and drying his hand on a bar cloth. “And he was in a funny old mood in the last half hour.”

  “Funny? How?”

  “Maudlin.” Bocastle indicated where a polished brass ship’s propeller stood on the end of the bar against the wall. “Sat over there, mumbling to himself. When I threw him out — he’d still be here if I hadn’t — he started going on about someone called Nancy. Grabbed hold of me at the door shouting ‘Wasn’t my fault!’ I told him if he didn’t pipe down I’d call Mike Nicholls and he could sober up in the cells. Then he went.”

  “Who’s Nancy?” Maltravers looked enquiringly from the landlord to Helen, but both shook their heads.

  Bocastle shrugged. “Probably some bird he got in the club fifty years ago. Excuse me.” He left them to serve more customers.

  “Definitely a drinker’s drinker our Belvedere,” Maltravers remarked. “He was lucky not to hurt himself more than he did.”

  “He could have been killed,” Helen told him. “Those steps up to his cottage are horrendous. I bet he’s in here again tonight though. They’ll have to nail him in a box to stop him.”

  “I wonder who Nancy was?” Maltravers looked thoughtful. “It sounds as though he was upset about her, which is not the sort of reaction I’d expect from Belvedere under any circumstances.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” Helen said. “Given half a chance, they bore you stiff with nostalgia about all the ones who’ve come and gone and I’m certain that name’s never come up.”

  Tess glanced at the clock behind the bar. “Even allowing for that being fast, I’ve got to go to work. You won’t need the car will you?”

  “I’ve no intention of leaving until our wandering mystic returns,” Maltravers said. “Then I’m going to pin him to a chair and find out exactly what he’s talking about.”

  Tess slid off the bar-stool. “Tread softly. He’s a walking land mine.”

  Maltravers and Helen ordered lunch, and, as they waited for their food, she went to ask some other locals about Lacey. Maltravers opened the Independent, which had a front page paragraph reporting Martha Shaw’s death with a cross-reference to an obituary inside.

  G K Chesterton once said that journalism consists of telling people Lord Jones is dead when they had been unaware he was alive in the first place. The obituaries included a civil servant who had spent his entire career hidden from public gaze in Whitehall, the next for a woman with an unpronounceable Polish name, her contribution to Western literature as unreadable as it was forgotten, followed by a racing driver, fleeting success thirty years ago earning his seven brief sentences. Martha Shaw had done rather better and even merited a picture.

  The sudden death of sculptress Martha Elisabeth Shaw ends a career which began as a disciple of Henry Moore and finished with a reputation blossoming too late.

  Born in Uppingham, where her father was assistant art master at the public school, Martha Shaw showed early promise as a portrait painter before turning to sculpture under Moore’s influence, although her early work was too derivative of the master to have any status of its own.

  After living in France between the wars, she moved to Porthennis in Cornwall shortly after the Second World War, becoming one of the self-styled and frequently self-indulgent artists’ School which flourished there until the 1960s. The painter Frank Morgan, the only one to enjoy any reputation (although the fallen idol Belvedere Scott was also a member), became her mentor, guiding her towards a style which owed little or nothing to previous influences.

  Throughout most of her life, commissions were scarce and only Morgan’s support enabled her to keep working. But in recent years she was tardily recognised as arguably comparable to Hepworth and worthy of a significant, if minor, place in late twentieth century art.

  A passionate Communist in her youth — although perhaps more by association than conviction; the philosophy was embraced by several members of the Porthennis School — Martha Shaw was also a lifelong atheist until her conversion to Roman Catholicism almost at the end. It will be a savage irony if as first reports indicate, she died when a statue of the Virgin and Child she was completing for Westminster Cathedral fell on her while she was working.

  Helen rejoined Maltravers as he finished reading. “No Mortimer?”

  “No. There’s apparently been no sign of him since Dorothy saw him this morning. Heaven knows where he is.”

  “Tell me more about the School,” he said. “I’ve met Belvedere and Dorothy and I know about Martha and Ruth. Anyone else left?”

  “Edward Cunningham, who was also a sculptor but now makes pottery because there’s more money in it, Edith Hallam-West, who’s a calligrapher but better known as a wildlife artist, and Patrick Dawson,” Helen said. “Patrick’s the most interesting. He paints very bleak and lonely pictures of beaches with enigmatic figures. They don’t sell well because most people find them depressing, but they’re good and I rather like them. I’ve got one at the cottage.”

  “So there’s …” Maltravers counted rapidly. “One, two three … six still around and Martha was alive and working up to yesterday? They should bottle the air round here and sell it.”

  “They’re indestructible,” Helen said. “Martha’s only the fourth of what are regarded as the originals to die. The others were Morgan, Jonathan Bright — and he was turned seventy when he finally went a couple of years ago — and Agnes Thorpe of course.”

  “Agnes who built the Botallack? I didn’t realise she was part of it.”

  “It happened because of her,” Helen explained. “Belvedere and Dorothy were the first to arrive after the war to help build the theatre.”

  “Incidentally, you did say they were lovers didn’t you?” Maltravers put in. “From her reaction just now they’re not singing love’s old sweet song. She obviously detests him.”

  “I don’t think they ever really loved each other,” Helen said. “Not properly. In the early days Dorothy had as many men as Belvedere had women. They even rebelled against each other. Anyway, that’s how the School started and the others drifted in over the next few years. They were a s
ort of commune, fighting the philistines. They wanted to establish Porthennis as a great cultural centre with its own theatre and art galleries and God knows what else. Quite mad of course. Before the roads improved and everybody had cars, this place was beyond nowhere.”

  “And what happened to Agnes? She didn’t make it to ripe old age.”

  “Ah, the Porthennis mystery. You haven’t walked the coast path to Morsylla yet have you?”

  “No. Tess and I were planning to go tomorrow when she’s free.”

  “Look at this.” Helen led him to a framed tidal map of Mounts Bay on one wall. Her finger traced pecked lines of a footpath along the cliff edge. “There are coombes through the undergrowth to the beach and …” She indicated one spot. “Just here it was, Cat’s Head cove below the old coastguard lookout. Agnes was fanatical about keeping fit and went swimming there alone every evening in the summer. One night in 1951 she didn’t come back and they found her clothes and towel on the rocks.”

  “Drowned?”

  “That’s what everyone thought of course, but her body was never washed up.” Helen momentarily switched into mock-Cornish. “And the bay always gives up its dead, moi dear. That’s not strictly true, because a few years back a fishing boat went down and they never found any of the crew, but given the sea conditions and where she went in, there was no reason at all why Agnes shouldn’t have come ashore. According to the tides, she should have been found less than a mile along the coast. But she wasn’t … Then the suicide note turned up.”

  “Did it indeed? Who found it?”

  “One of the other members of the School, I can’t remember which,” Helen replied. “It said she’d been told she had cancer and couldn’t face it. After a while, her death was presumed even without a body and there was an inquest. Dorothy and Belvedere and some of the others said she’d been depressed but wouldn’t tell them why. The coroner had no option but to say she took her own life.”

  Bocastle called from the bar with their meal and they took their plates to one of the tables.