“It was wonderful,” Edith told him. “I did cry, but I laughed a lot as well. That fishing boat.”
“Coward would have appreciated that,” he said. “If you hang on, Tess should only be a few minutes.”
“Good. I want to thank her. This is actually the first time I’ve seen Private Lives again. I don’t think I mentioned that when we met the other day.”
As the four of them neared the exit gate into the car park, they passed Agnes Thorpe’s statue, setting sun-cast shadow stretching behind it. The life-size figure held a book in stone hands, eyes eternally fixed on centre stage below. Maltravers stopped to read the inscription carved on the large square plinth on which it stood: “Agnes Matilda Thorpe, 1912-1951, founder of the Botallack Theatre. Lost at sea. Erected by her friends.” In the bottom right hand corner he could just make out the initials MS.
“Did Martha Shaw carve that?” he asked. A few paces ahead, Dorothy glanced back at him.
“Yes. It’s a very good likeness.”
As the others walked on, Maltravers examined the statue’s face. High cheekbones, long chin and I940s-style rippling hair touching shoulders in waves of stone indicated intelligence and captured the streak of stubborn individuality she would have needed to build her theatre. The face reminded him of Edith Sitwell, but masculine, Plantagenet angles were softened by greater femininity. Sinking sun flushed the features with ghostly reality, amplifying Martha Shaw’s skill in imitating life. He realised that Helen and the others had not stopped and followed them over the rise leading to the car park.
“Would there have been a Porthennis School without Agnes?” he asked as he caught up with them.
Edith shrugged. “We might have got together somewhere else, but it all happened here because of her.”
“But how did you all come?” he persisted. “Did you know each other before? During the war?”
“I met Belvedere after I ran away to France in 1932,” Dorothy said.
“Ran away?”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled. “I was quite the little Bohemian. My parents died in the First World War, father in the trenches and mother in the 1918 influenza epidemic the year after I was born. I was adopted by a wicked aunt and uncle straight out of a fairy-story. I took off when I was about fifteen and met Belvedere two years later.”
“That was after he vanished, wasn’t it? Helen’s told me about him disappearing after his initial success.”
“He’d got tired of the meaningless praise they poured on him,” she replied. “He was very good — even brilliant — but he knew a great many people were only saying it because he had become fashionable. So he just walked away from it. He was living in a village in the French Pyrenees when we met, earning a living painting portraits for what local gentry there were.”
“But when did you come to Porthennis?”
“After the war. We’d returned to England and London was depressing, so we came down here and offered to help Agnes. The School grew out of that. Frank Morgan arrived next — he and Belvedere had known each other years before — then … When did you come Edith?”
“The year after you, 1948. Remember I met you both on holiday?”
“Of course you did. My mind’s going.” Dorothy seemed annoyed with herself at forgetting. “Anyway, then Martha and Ruth moved in and Patrick brought Edward. They’d known each other in Spain. That was the lot of us … Oh, apart from Jonathan Bright, but we never really counted him, because he was such an appalling painter. In fairness he was the one who organised us though.”
The last vehicles were crawling out of the car park, noise fading as cinder dust thrown up from the surface settled again.
Tess waved as she appeared from the direction of the theatre in the twilight and Edith smiled and took hold of both her hands as she joined them.
“No, not Gertrude Lawrence,” she said. “Nobody could be, of course. But you were awfully good.”
“Thank you.” Tess glanced out across the bay. “And at least we’ll be ready for the interruption next time.”
“You may not get it,” Edith told her. “Newlyn fishing boats don’t work to any timetables. They usually set off once they’ve collected the crew from the pub and return any time they’ve finished. They’ve operated like that since the Middle Ages and I don’t imagine they’re going to change their habits now. One might pass at the same time, but the odds are against it.”
She smiled and touched Tess’s hand again. “Anyway, we must be getting back. It was wonderful seeing you again and I hope you sell out for the whole week. You deserve to. Goodnight.”
Maltravers appeared thoughtful as he watched the two women walk to where Edith had parked her car. It juddered into life then she drove off with a roar of acceleration reminiscent of Le Mans.
“If they’ve been going down to the sea in ships around here since the Middle Ages, they obviously know the tide movements backwards,” he said to Helen. “Who’s the best person to ask about where Agnes Thorpe’s body should have been washed up?”
“Virtually any of the locals,” she replied. “It doesn’t even have to be a fisherman. But what on earth do you keep going on about Agnes for? That was forty years ago.”
Maltravers shook his head in irritation. “I just keep coming back to that lady, but I’m damned if I can explain it.”
“You mean you were serious when you suggested she might not have drowned?” asked Tess. “Could she have run away?”
“On what facts we have, it’s possible,” he argued. “Her body never turned up and there are questions about who told her she had cancer. It could all have been a cover story.”
“But what for?” Helen demanded. “She was engaged to be married. Why should she run away?”
“Bad attack of cold feet?” Maltravers suggested. “With all the wisdom of hindsight, it would have been better for all concerned if Fiona had suffered from that rather than marrying me.”
“Gus, it doesn’t make sense,” Helen objected. “She would have known it would look suspicious when her body wasn’t found.”
“But if it was suspicious once, it’s not any more,” he replied. “Now it’s just the Porthennis mystery. She could have got away with it.”
“And done what?” Helen sounded impatient. “As far as I know, she left all her money behind. What did she live on? Where did she — ?”
“Money?” Maltravers interrupted. “How much?”
“I can’t remember exactly, but several thousand pounds. Quite a lot in the 1950s.”
“And what happened to it?”
“After she was presumed dead, her solicitors carried out the instructions in her will. Part of it went to finishing the Botallack with the rest left to the Porthennis School. They spent most of it building an art gallery, but that was a disaster. They had to sell it in the sixties and it’s a teashop now. So if she ran off, she had nothing.”
“Not necessarily,” Maltravers corrected. “How does anyone know that was all she had? If they’d discovered she had transferred all her money before her death, that would have been suspicious. But if she’d put part of it to one side … Come on, it’s possible.”
Helen turned to Tess. “How do you live with him? His imagination’s worse than ever.”
“He wasn’t a writer when you knew him,” Tess told her. “But he does make occasional guest appearances in the real world.”
“When you’ve quite finished being a monstrous regiment of two women, perhaps you’d like to produce some proof that I couldn’t be right,” Maltravers said. “It is possible — all right, no more than that — but possible that Agnes Thorpe didn’t die.”
“And if she didn’t, where does it get you?” Helen demanded. “What’s it got to do with Martha’s death?”
“There would have to have been a reason for her running away,” he said. “Apart from her fiancé, the people she was closest to were the Porthennis School artists. Mortimer’s convinced me that one of them could now have been murdered. There could be
a connection.”
“After all this time?” Helen protested. “That’s insane.”
“This thing’s insane wherever you take a core sample. When dealing with the Porthennis School, it’s best to put your rationality on hold.”
“But if …” Tess paused, trying to adjust her mind to Maltravers’s thinking. “But if you’re right, then Agnes Thorpe could still be alive and … Are you saying she could have come back?”
“All suggestions gratefully received,” Maltravers said cheerfully. “In this guessing game, it’s impossible to be too outrageous. Yes, Agnes Thorpe could have come back, quite unrecognisable, perhaps just another old lady on holiday.”
“And murdered Martha?” Helen shook her head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Any more ridiculous than it could have been Belvedere? Or Dorothy? Or Edith? Or one of the others?”
“People that old committing murder?”
“I’m not aware there’s an upper age limit on the activity.” Tess had turned to look towards Agnes Thorpe’s statue. “But what is it … What could still be so urgent at the end of people’s lives, that it would drive them to kill?”
“God knows,” said Maltravers. “Perhaps some don’t grow old, grey, full of sleep and resigned. Perhaps they keep the anger of being young.”
“But I’m not thirty yet and what was important to me ten years ago doesn’t matter now.” Tess shook her head. “Gus, you’ve got to be wrong. It’s out of all proportion.”
“It’s impossible,” Helen added. “Things like that don’t happen in real life.”
“Real life?” Maltravers took Tess’s hand as they walked towards his car. “Never underestimate what that can throw up. You’ve both travelled around this country a bit. Have you ever come across a village, however obscure, which doesn’t have a war memorial?”
“A war memorial?” Helen frowned at him. “I’ve never thought about it, but I don’t think I have. What are you getting at?”
“I know of one in Gloucestershire,” he said. “Men, and presumably women, went from it to fight in both world wars, but they all came back alive. When you see the crosses in the tiniest hamlets with the names of their dead, you realise just how incredible that is. Even Porthennis has one by the harbour, and a place as small as that lost thirty-six men in the First World War alone.”
“And?” prompted Helen as he paused. “What’s your point?”
“The village I’m talking about is called Upper Slaughter.” Maltravers looked at both of them. “There’s real life for you, and that’s pretty damned impossible as well, isn’t it?”
*
The dead leave little hauntings in the homes they shared with those they loved. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, Ruth Harvey found Martha Shaw everywhere. An old stain of spilled red wine on a carpet; a library book borrowed and never returned; a chipped Staffordshire pottery figure bought at a jumble sale; a blackened cigarette burn on the edge of a table; the sticking kitchen drawer which she had grumbled about for years. Every corner of the cottage bore echoes of her voice, reminders of her presence, touches of her personality; the very walls seemed to hold the living woman within their stones.
Ruth sat on a padded window-seat, evening light filling the alcove, and sadly turned the pages of a photograph album, snapshots dated in fading ink recording half a century. The earliest black and white pictures, taken on a box Brownie, were of vibrant young people; Belvedere Scott, the bearded golden giant, posing amid the chaos of building the Botallack; Edith Hallam-West, slim elegance unsullied by crumpled corduroy trousers and torn shirt; Dorothy Lowe with only the first suggestions of excess weight to come, sitting triumphant on the shoulders of Patrick Dawson and Edward Cunningham; Agnes Thorpe caught in a rare moment when her quiet smile had bubbled into open laughter. And Martha, eyes filled with secret messages that only Ruth could read. As the photographs became coloured, the people in them imperceptibly inched into age. Hair went grey and thinned, bodies thickened, flesh fell slack, life drew patterns across faces, personalities matured out of the roots of youth. The last picture showed Martha in the garden, sitting on the faded canvas of a deckchair beneath pink cherry blossoms, metal frames of reading glasses catching the spring sun of three months before. Ruth stared at it for a long time, then gently laid her fingers on its surface like a pilgrim touching the relic of a saint, seeking some impossible, ameliorating sense of recaptured physical contact.
She put the album on the tapestry cover of the seat and looked through the diamond lead lighting of the window at Martha’s studio, twenty yards away across flower beds and lawns. Who had slipped through that door while she had been preparing the evening meal at the back of the cottage? Martha must have known them, because she had continued with her work. Ruth’s growing conviction that the death had not been accidental had not been voiced to the police because exposure of the murderer could reveal a motive she shuddered away from. But she had to know who it had been. Then she would decide what to do, how to expiate grief and anger as vivid in a woman of seventy-one as in tempestuous passions that only the young thought they felt.
*
While Helen was making coffee back at the cottage, Maltravers stood by the bookcase screwed to one wall, idly glancing through her collection of art books. One name on a spine caught his eye and he pulled the volume from the shelf and began flicking through the pages, stopping occasionally to look at coloured plates, mainly of Suffolk countryside. The paintings were skilful but not remarkable.
“I presume this is the Porthennis Frank Morgan,” he said as Helen came through from the kitchen.
“Yes. Look at the section starting on page a hundred and two.” She handed Tess her cup. “They’re his masterpieces.”
She watched as Maltravers reached the place, then slowly turned ten pages, eyes hardening with horror, then filling with pity.
“My God,” he said softly. “Eat your heart out, Goya. Where can I see the originals of these?”
“Tel Aviv,” Helen replied. “He gave them all to Israel when the state was formed in 1948. He refused to make a penny out of them.”
“Which camp was it?”
“Belsen. He was among the first troops to enter it. He painted them later from memory.”
Maltravers handed the book to Tess. “I don’t think I could live with memories like that.”
“The paintings helped him exorcise them,” Helen said. “But nearly all his later work had some darkness in it.”
Tess looked at no more than three paintings before closing the book with a shudder. “I can’t stand that just before I go to bed. They’re incredible, but they’re too horrible.”
Maltravers had gone to stand in front of the uncurtained window, looking out across the sleeping village.
“And when you’ve seen things like that, is Porthennis where you come to try and forget?” he asked reflectively. “Somewhere as far away as possible?”
“Frank Morgan didn’t forget,” Helen corrected. “Every year he made a pilgrimage to Israel. He didn’t tell them he was the artist. He just spent hours standing in front of his own paintings again.”
Maltravers’s dreams that night were tormented by Morgan’s terrible images of bestial inhumanity which dissolved into an awareness that he was in the Steamer watching a grinning dwarf who insanely changed into a baboon. Then he was irrationally standing on a deserted beach as the sea grew higher and higher and he was powerless to move. As the water relentlessly covered his face, he suddenly knew that he was dreaming and deliberately closed his eyes so that he could sleep within sleep and escape. He awoke sweating.
Chapter Eight
Tragedy struck the Porthennis School in 1951 when Agnes Thorpe, founder of the Botallack Theatre, which staged its first performances the following summer, was drowned. On the evening of July 18, she went for her customary swim at Cat’s Head cove and did not return. Subsequently it was learned that she had been suffering from an incurable cancer and an inquest decided that she ha
d taken her own life. Despite every effort, her body was never found.
Other members of the School erected a statue in her memory, the figure carved by Martha Shaw, and each year on the anniversary of her death, they visit the spot from where she disappeared as an act of homage to the woman who brought them together. There was an additional personal tragedy in that her death occurred only a few weeks before she was due to be married. The reputation of the Botallack is a permanent testimony to her dedication and …
Maltravers impatiently turned the page as The Porthennis School and its Art embarked upon another apotheosis of praise. The author had a sycophantic tendency to write about the School as though, comparatively, the Renaissance, Impressionists or pre-Raphaelites were no more than a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs who could paint a bit. But from almost reverent obeisance, occasional facts emerged, adding to the random pile in his mind which he would eventually have to try and sort out.
“It’s the sixteenth today, isn’t it?” he asked without looking up.
Tess remained behind the morning paper. “Yes, but don’t worry. I’ll remind you when it’s our anniversary.”
“Our anniversary is the twenty-ninth,” he replied, lowering the booklet. “We met at a dinner party in Chelsea when Harriet Meredith paired me off with an advertising agency copywriter called Jessica Beaumont. We were meant to have literature in common. You were stuck with Daniel Carlyle, a BBC television director who’d had a charisma by-pass operation. Jessica later had an affair with Harriet’s husband, and Danny boy came out of the closet like an Olympic sprinter on steroids. Harriet is not one of nature’s matchmakers. You wore a green Planet dress and had a stinking cold and fell madly in love with me when I produced endless Kleenex. The following week I invited you to —”
“All right, you’ve made your point,” Tess interrupted. “Why are you suddenly interested in the date?”
“Because in a couple of days our neighbourhood geriatric arts colony is going to creak its way down to the beach for the umpteenth time in memory of Agnes. I’m thinking of being a fly on the wall, or at least behind a rock.”
The Dying of the Light Page 9
