“There is no such fantasy on my part, I assure you,” said Colonel Chesney in clipped yet somehow heartfelt tones. “Pure dabbling, I realize only too well.”
“Yes, you are to painting what Florence Foster-Jenkins was to singing and William McGonagall was to poetry,” said Byatt, his meal pushed aside, sitting in a pensive and somehow doubly dangerous pose. “Or Stephen is to any intellectual endeavor.”
Stephen sat still. He had, his body language suggested, been waiting for this, and now his burning eyes showed only an eagerness to get it over.
“Stephen’s delusion is rare,” said his grandfather, with the magisterial wisdom of old age and long experience. “It’s common enough to come across people who are convinced they can sing, or act, or paint, when they haven’t the first idea. But it’s very seldom that someone with a mediocre brain is convinced he’s one of the world’s great minds.”
“Of course Stephen doesn’t think anything of the sort,” said Martha.
“But how else can one explain his determination to grace one of the world’s great centers of learning? It’s not as though he hasn’t had people trying to get the message of his mediocrity across to him in the course of his life. Schoolmasters have tried: his reports were uniformly unenthusiastic, and his exam results pretty much what those reports predicted. Family and friends have taken him aside and tried to tell him he’d be happier if he didn’t aim so high. But to no avail: the message has never got across. My grandson’s education has to culminate in Oxford, no less.”
“It’s hardly an outrageous ambition,” said Martha. “Lots of people have it, and Stephen’s father went there.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. If Stephen’s father hadn’t gone there he’d have had no chance at all of going there himself. Leeds offered, Reading offered, Essex—God help us—offered. But, no, it had to be Brasenose College, and since their enthusiasm for the son of their undistinguished old boy was minimal, it had to be done by the usual sordid bargain which has secured mediocrities a place at Oxford over the years: the bribery in this case being a large—large to me—sum of money to refurbish the library, and the gift of one of my best paintings.”
“You swindled them,” said Stephen, the contempt in his voice undisguised. “The picture wasn’t from your red period, as you claimed.”
“The whole deal was a swindle,” said Byatt complacently. “Swindling swindlers is a venial sin in my book. And so in October Stephen will go up to Oxford, with all the prestige that that implies, and with a self-assessment as a first-rate brain. And I, who have shelled out the bribe that got him in there, will shell out his upkeep there, and probably shell out for debts he incurs by mixing with the sort of fast set outside his class that he probably thinks all brilliant young Oxonians have to be in with. What a prospect! And all because Stephen, who is the child of mediocrity, has convinced himself that he has a great brain and deserves a place among the great minds of this country.”
Stephen sat for a moment, considering his response. Then he stood up, crumpled his napkin, and made for the door. In the doorway he turned. He had at least, Declan decided, a considerable sense of drama, of using his body and his hatred to make an effect; he looked, standing there, surprisingly large, menacing, and forceful. He directed his gaze with loathing on his grandfather.
“If I was a mediocrity I would probably worship you. Because that’s the type you attract: people who are nothing very much, and people who are weak, pliable, malleable. That’s the sort all tin-pot dictators surround themselves with. You can’t stand me around because I’m not like that. You’re willing to buy me a place at Oxford because I’m the only one here who sees you as you are: sheer poison. You’re cyanide made flesh. You’re vitriol in human shape. You kill the spirit of everyone around you. That’s why I have to get out.”
The door banged behind him.
“He doesn’t mean it,” said Martha feebly. “He’s just going through a phase.” Her father ignored her.
“Well!” he said, in a voice that sounded almost happy. “The boy is developing a vocabulary. I expect he’s set himself the task of studying the thesaurus for half an hour over breakfast. That’s the sort of thing mediocrities do.”
And as they were toiling up the stairs when the meal was over Ranulph said nothing about the scene he had just manufactured, still less apologized for it, but he did say cheerfully, “I think I’ll begin a new picture tomorrow. Something a little less factory-made. Something angry.”
6
THE DISCIPLES
As he pottered around Ashworth and the surrounding country in the days that followed, Declan began to fall into a routine. He realized as he got his bearings on the place that he now knew people in all the dwellings that made up the little community. Mrs. Birdsell, in the row of three tiny cottages, had Ivor Aston on one side of her and his sister Charmayne Churton on the other. The siblings were together yet not together, it seemed. Declan had a strong impression that Jenny Birdsell did not relish the closeness of the pair. Arnold Mellors had a rather larger cottage built on to one end of the main farmhouse. He asked Declan in for a drink one evening, and they talked in a relaxed and general way—politics, weather, painting, but nothing directly about Ranulph Byatt. The relaxed nature of the talk was something Declan never felt with Colonel Chesney, mainly because the man himself never was. He lived in a semidetached cottage, the other half of which was occupied by Mrs. Max. They nodded to each other if they passed or met on their front doorsteps, sometimes chatted in the lane, but they did not seem close in any way except geographically.
Stephen was someone Declan saw little of. After the scene at dinner he seemed to make himself as scarce as possible, ranging the fields and moors, his camera slung over his shoulder, or shut up in his room reading. Any “natural” closeness between two young men, both apparently without any circle of friends, was avoided and when they met he was polite to Declan, no more. His hobby, photography, was not one that could bring them together, Declan being ham-fisted with a camera. If Stephen went out to a pub it was with people from Ashworth, and Declan felt he did not want to get involved with any drinking set in his immediate vicinity. So he avoided the pub in Stanbury and roamed the district if he fancied a beer after the evening meal, sampling pubs in Crossroads, Oakworth, and Oxenhope. There he found uncomplicated conversation, companionship that might or might not blossom, and even now and then an audience: with a badly out-of-tune piano to accompany him he sang Irish ballads and folk songs in Oakworth, and was told by more than one beery customer that he ought to go professional. After that he sometimes took his guitar with him on these excursions.
It was in a pub in Crossroads, oddly enough, that he met Jenny Birdsell’s daughter, Mary Ann. She came in in full Salvation Army gear, in the company of an older man wearing the male equivalent, and together they went around the two bars rattling their collection boxes and selling The War Cry. Declan was among the last to have the box thrust under his nose, and he was surprised when the girl said, “I know you.”
“Do you?” he asked, looking up at a pleasant but insignificant face behind round rimless spectacles. “I don’t think—”
“You’re the new help at Ashworth, looking after that dreadful old sinner.”
Declan felt awkward.
“He’s probably that, but he treats me fine and we get on OK. How do you know?”
“I’ve seen you around. From my bedroom window. I’m Mary Ann Birdsell, by the way.”
“Declan O’Hearn.”
Mary Ann made a quick decision, handed her box to her partner, and sat down.
“I’ve finished for the day, Jack. See you same time tomorrow.”
Declan thought he ought to buy her a drink, and he got up, feeling in his pocket for coins from his first week’s wages.
“You don’t have to,” said the girl. “They won’t turn me out or anything. Well, a Coke if you must.”
When he got back from the bar with her drink she was sitting on her bench seat, her mouth primly set, her
hands clasped in front of her on the table. She was looking around her at the locals, nearly all of whom she seemed to know.
“Do you often drink in pubs?” Declan asked.
“Quite often. Why not? I go round pubs twice a week, trying to bring people to salvation.”
“No reason, of course. What else do you do?”
“We bear witness in Keighley market twice a week, and we do a lot of work among the homeless—”
“No, I meant what else do you do apart from, well, this?”
“Apart from my Christian witness? I work in the SPCK bookshop in Keighley. I have decided that my whole life must be devoted to Jesus. It’s the only way I can give it a meaning. You don’t find that?”
“Well, no.”
“You will,” she said with serene confidence. “I’m sure you will find Him, perhaps quite soon. You must feel the need to, to get you out of the terrible atmosphere at Ashworth. I’m there as little as possible—that’s why we’ve never met. We call on sinners to repent, but to be always in their company is to invite contagion.”
“I’m not sure I see the Ashworth people as sinners,” said Declan.
“Then you can’t have met them yet. But you’ve seen Ranulph. He’s the greatest sinner of all.”
“He’s nothing but a poor old man sliding toward death,” said Declan with conviction. Mary Ann shook her head vigorously. “But there’s one thing I have noticed about the Ashworth people.”
“What’s that?”
“Almost all of them are alone,” said Declan. “The two old men, Chesney and Mellors. The brother and sister, living close but not together. Mrs. Max, who Martha tells me has a son, but he’s not with her. Even the four at the farm seem to live in separate worlds: you’d think there’d be something between mother and daughter, mother and son, but there’s really practically nothing, not a spark. You and your mother—”
“We’re the most alone of all.”
“That’s what I suspected.”
“Of course, I’m not alone now I’ve found the path to Jesus. You can’t be alone with Him, can you? But before that . . . And when we’re together in the house we . . . we have nothing to say to each other.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Why is what?”
“Why does Ranulph Byatt seem to attract these lonely types around him?”
She shrugged.
“I suppose he is a sort of false messiah. Mrs. Max is different: she has a son, like you say, and he’s grown up, got a job in Burnley, and moved away. Nothing odd there. They’re close, even if they don’t live together any longer, and they’re quite normal. But the others seem to need something in their lives, and they’ve chosen him. They need to find the True Way, but they blind themselves to it.”
“How long has the community been in existence?”
“Community? That’s not a community. Just a collection of sad, lost people. Ranulph inherited the house and cottage from an admirer about fifteen years ago. An old lady who loved his early landscapes. He moved then, and the rest of us have moved in over the years. But I think many of them have been sort of around him for years before that.”
“What do you mean ‘around him’?”
“I mean known admirers of his work who were sometimes admitted to the Presence. People living off of the crumbs from his table. My mother is typical. She went to an exhibition of his work at the Hayward Gallery in 1982, and she’s been a sort of groupie of his ever since. It’s pathetic.”
“So let me get this straight—Ranulph Byatt inherited the farm and all the cottages from an admirer?”
“Yes, an elderly spinster, as you might have guessed.”
“Right. And all the cottages were empty?”
“Derelict, more like. Ashworth hasn’t been worked as a farm since just after the war.”
“So he had them done up and let them to admirers?”
“Yes, bit by bit. Sometimes they did the renovations themselves: Chesney did, and my mother did all the interior decorating. People use words like ‘striking,’ which is their way of avoiding saying it’s embarrassingly awful.”
“And they all pay him rent?”
“Of course. Ranulph likes money and Melanie adores it. The rent they charge isn’t exorbitant, but it’s certainly at market level.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture. He needs admiration, and currently he needs money as well. He’s managed to get both. And have Martha and Stephen always lived with her father?”
“Pretty much so, I think.” She wrinkled her brow and looked very young indeed. “Certainly since Stephen’s father took off. But I’m not sure they weren’t all living with him and Melanie even before that.”
“He keeps his hold on people,” commented Declan.
“Not on me, he doesn’t,” piped up Mary Ann. “I’ve escaped.” She beamed around. Declan wondered whether escape was possible: whether she might still be chained by hatred and opposition, like Stephen, or whether she might simply have jumped from one bondage to another.
“But what are we talking about us for? You’ll find out everything about us soon enough, and by then you’ll probably want to leave. Tell me about yourself.”
But Declan wasn’t going to tell her any more about himself and his family than he had told the other Ashworth people. That was something he always preferred to keep under cover. And he’d found that if he talked about Ireland—about small Irish villages, about the priest and the schoolteacher, the pub and the church—he could flannel most people into thinking he’d been telling them about himself. In general folks were interested but had little idea about the country, apart from notions picked up from Ballykissangel on television. They usually liked his stories, and Mary Ann certainly did. The topic lasted them through another half for Declan, and on the walk back to Ashworth. But as Declan watched Mary Ann inserting her front door key into the door, she said, “You really must tell me about yourself some time.”
As he waited till she was safely in, then turned back toward the farmhouse, Declan meditated that the fact that the girl had got a bad dose of fundamentalist religion shouldn’t lead him to assume that she was stupid.
His working hours as well as his free time were developing into a routine. Outdoor work, which came before and after his sessions with Byatt if it was fine, came to be a matter of seeing what needed to be done and doing it. Melanie and Martha did not intervene, unless there was something needed doing, like repair of furniture in their bedrooms, which he could not know about. His independence seemed to suit not just him but the ladies as well: they had their own business and their own preoccupations, though Declan had no idea what they were. So he pottered around the house, mending things that were broken, giving emergency first aid to things that were going in that direction, and on fine days he gratefully took himself out into the open air.
In the gardens and field, though he was often bent double, he could better observe what he still thought of as “the community.” He was also more exposed to advances from its members. These advances did not change his opinion of the essential loneliness of everyone at Ashworth: it was because they were solitary that they pestered him with unwanted attention. But he also began to get the idea that each of them had some kind of function in the group of acolytes. From glimpsing the mail on Mellors’s table when he had been there, and from seeing him drive off in the Byatts’ car with canvases stored on the backseat, he got the idea that Mellors was Byatt’s intermediary with galleries and other potential sellers. That car, though unreliable, seemed to be the only car at Ashworth. It was very old, and Stephen tinkered unconvincingly with it now and then in the stables. Charmayne, sometimes with Mrs. Max in tow, seemed to do most of the shopping, to collect prescriptions and get them made up, and to take anyone who needed anything major such as clothes or books or new electrical appliances to Bradford or Keighley to get them.
Jenny Birdsell was used as a second-string nurse when Melanie and Martha were exhausted. She was called on le
ss often now that Declan was installed, but he still found her officiating upstairs from time to time when he came back of an evening. She had that artificially bright tone he associated with nurses of a bygone era (“Before I was born,” he said vaguely to himself, being too young to have much idea of time or history). He himself instinctively preferred a lower-keyed, more natural approach when he was around his charge, and he thought it both more appropriate and more modern.
The function of Colonel Chesney and Ivor Aston in the little community he reserved judgment on, only registering that Chesney appeared to serve as a butt for Ranulph Byatt’s blackest jokes, yet didn’t seem to resent it, and that Ivor Aston was the only one whose pictures showed any signs of talent. Another artistic judgment, but he made it the more confidently because he was so sure everyone else’s pictures were self-evidently awful. Also he told himself that he seemed to be getting an eye for paintings.
It was Charmayne Churton who showed herself most keen on having the sort of chat that might go any deeper than conventionalities or mere Ranulph worship. She watched Declan when he was mowing the back paddock one day, and when he came close to her side of the field, she said, “You look as if you could do with a break. Feel like a tea or coffee?”
Declan paused. He was certainly feeling tired and sweaty. He detected no lust in Charmayne’s voice. He had no taste for being lusted after by middle-aged women, particularly (it had unfashionably to be said) by fat middle-aged women who had all the fleshly allure of a tugboat. He was conventional in his tastes.
“Thanks,” he said. “That would be great.”
He took his muddy shoes off on the doorstep, and once he got inside saw that this had been the right move. The ground floor of the tiny cottage had been turned into a combined living space and kitchen, and the decor was twee in the extreme: flowery curtains and furnishings that were definitely pre-Laura Ashley, frilly lampshades and antimacassars, with cozy and humorous pictures of animals covering the walls. He was willing to bet that the china would be decorated with tiny flowers and very thin, and when Charmayne came back with a tray, that was exactly what it was.
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 6
