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Honeybath’s Haven
First published in 1977
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1977-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121198 EAN: 9780755121199
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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About the Author
Michael Innes is thepseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director ofEducation and as was fitting the young Stewart attended EdinburghAcademy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtaineda first class degree in English.
After a shortinterlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria,he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays andalso took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he wasmarried, Professor of English at the Universityof Adelaide in Australia, andhad completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. Thiswas an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on hischaracter Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed andoverall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning tothe UK in 1946 he took up apost with Queen’s University, Belfast beforefinally settling as Tutor in English at ChristChurch, Oxford. His writing continued and hepublished a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories andsome major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writersfor the Oxford History of English Literature.
Whilst not wantingto leave his beloved Oxford permanently, hemanaged to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washingtonand was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whomhe had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children,one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 ina nursing home in Surrey.
PART ONE
AN ARCHANGEL DAMAGED
1
Charles Honeybath had been out of touch with Edwin Lightfoot for years. There had been no sort of breach between the two painters, but for one reason and another the flow of sympathy between them had turned to a trickle and then dried up altogether. Reflecting on it, Honeybath (who was a reflective man) judged that here was one of the vulnerabilities of later middle age. Now one man and now the other is preoccupied with this or that; each believes that the other is turning rather dull, rather prone to slip into repetitive conversational routines sadly differing from the stimulating sparkle of yore; the intervals between meetings stretch themselves out, until eventually there has come a gap so long as to be awkward to explain. Acquaintanceships can wind themselves up more or less harmlessly in this way. But when it is a matter of friendship each party can be left feeling (quite correctly) that he hasn’t behaved well.
They were, of course, different sorts of painter, Honeybath and Lightfoot, and the pattern of their careers had differed too. Neither could very sincerely have congratulated the other on the curriculum vitae he had elected or that had befallen him. Honeybath’s had been the steadier course. As a young man he had painted portraits well, and as an old man he was painting them that way still. As he became better known his fees went up. He would have been named now by the knowledgeable as one of the top men at his job; ‘academic’, perhaps – but hadn’t Sir Joshua himself been that? Honeybath wasn’t inspired or inspiring; he never had been either; all the more credit to him for preserving all his sensibility, all his integrity, through a long career.
Ut pictura – it used to be said – poesis; you can compare paintings with poems, and mark the same wellsprings in artists as in writers of verse. Pursuing this thought, one might have said that if Honeybath was a kind of superior Robert Southey Lightfoot was a William Wordsworth of sorts – or that with a dash of Samuel Taylor Coleridge thrown in. Lightfoot’s earlier career had come close to being a blaze of glory – although it wasn’t, indeed, until that phase of his achievement was over that the fact had come to be widely recognized. By the time people were acclaiming ‘early’ Edwin Lightfoots Lightfoot himself had declined inexplicably into a seesaw between unremarkable accomplishment and disconcerting occasional vagary. He was still technically a good painter; but when people thought of him it was as a man who had once been something else.
This was very sad, and the sadder because those marvellous early works were almost oddly scarce; were by no means abundantly displayed for the delectation of frequenters of public galleries or exposed to the cupidity of collectors in the sale rooms. Those who knew Lightfoot – and they were comparatively few, since he had become something of a recluse – were apt to declare that what hadonce been the power to project a unique vision upon canvas had declined into a fairly generous measure of personal eccentricity.
It has always been a canon of English society that the wealthier you are the more eccentric are you permitted to be. The poor are scarcely allowed to indulge in outré behaviour of any kind, unless it be occasionally under the influence of drink. Try anything more, and the neighbours turn first censorious and then nasty; the ‘social services’ descend on you, and after them the police. The comfortably established can be comfortably odd, and the rich may comport themselves as if they still lived in that paradise of aberrancy, the eighteenth century. Edwin Lightfoot wasn’t affluent, but he had always commanded rather more money than came to him from his paintings. This was the reason, no doubt, for those phases of hiscareer in which his productivity had been low. Moreover his wife, who was his junior by a good many years, was understood to have an income of her own. It had been a prudent marriage (such as artists are commonly supposed not much to favour or achieve), since the lady’s brother was a picture-dealer in a substantial way, who had thereafter in effect acted as his brother-in-law’s agent. All this meant that Lightfoot could mount a freakish turn if and when it took his fancy. In addition to which it must be re
membered that artists are expected to be a little out-of-the-way. It wasn’t so long ago that they were almost obliged to dress in awkward cloaks and enormous hats if they were to command the full confidence of their clients.
Charles Honeybath, although Lightfoot’s exact contemporary, had the appearance of belonging to a later generation at least in this last regard. His attire had never been bizarre, and it had long since ceased to be casual either. When punctually each morning he left his modest little Chelsea flat (for he was a widower and childless) for his considerably more spacious studio not far off it might have been supposed from his appearance that his destination was some respectably managerial or directorial cubby-hole in the City. Not that he didn’t own a certain presence. Take a second look, and you might conjecture that he was on his way to a studio, after all, where he was to be represented, sitting in an otherwise untenanted and slightly nebulous board-room, by that well-known limner of such spectacles, Charles Honeybath, RA.
We now meet Honeybath, however, on his way to Edwin Lightfoot’s home. This was at the instance of Lightfoot’s brother-in-law the picture pedlar, whose name was Ambrose Prout. Honeybath had run into Prout a few days before at the Savage Club, and Prout had tackled him about Lightfoot almost at once.
‘My dear Charles,’ he had said, ‘I do wish you would drop in on poor old Edwin and pass the time of day. He says he hasn’t seen you for months.’
‘Years, I’m afraid.’ Honeybath came out with this honestly. ‘No estrangement, you know. I suppose it’s simply that I grow less and less sociable.’
‘“Months” was Edwin’s word. But probably he wasn’t just being charitable. I’m sometimes not very sure that his sense of time is as it should be. But come, Charles! You surely wouldn’t dump Edwin in a category of social duties?’
‘Certainly not – and of course I’ll look him up. Are you saying that things aren’t quite as they should be with him?’
‘There’s nothing to be called sinister, that I can see – or not so far as his physical man goes. Hale but not hearty might express Edwin’s condition. That spare type – only just short of desiccation – commonly lives to be a hundred.’ Prout offered this on a faintly resentful note. He was himself a corpulent man.
‘When you say he’s not hearty is it in the sense that he’s sunk in gloom?’
‘Intermittently he’s that. Of course I don’t see him all that frequently myself. But he’s also irritable and agitated. I’m afraid Melissa must find him uncommonly trying on the whole.’
Melissa was Ambrose Prout’s sister and Lightfoot’s wife. Honeybath had never greatly taken to Melissa, so this last reflection of Prout’s didn’t much disturb him. But about Lightfoot himself he was beginning to feel guilty.
‘What does he get agitated about?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he just fusses over this and that, and can’t stay put. There’s probably some medical term for it, simply as a manifestation of senescence.’
‘Dash it all, Ambrose, our generation isn’t exactly in its dotage yet! And can’t Edwin settle to his work? He still turns something in to the Academy year by year.’
‘Well, yes – usually a portrait-sketch, or something of that sort. Pencil or pastel that he can fudge up in no time with that devilishly clever smudging thumb. But he gets down to no serious work at all.’
‘I see.’ What Honeybath thought he saw was the occasion of the irritable note to be detected in Prout’s own voice. An Edwin Lightfoot adequately toiling in his studio more or less automatically augmented his brother-in-law’s bank balance. ‘But, Ambrose, why should Edwin sweat away if he has no mind to it?’ Honeybath asked this challengingly. ‘The man’s well enough off, and your sister is said to have her little packet. Age asks ease – as some poet or other says.’
‘A poet ought to know better than to say anything of the sort.’ Prout’s tone had changed. He was a merchant who, when speaking seriously, was always careful to regard creative endowments with respect. ‘When any sort of artist stops off, Charles, he’s finished there and then. He can’t just get out his golf-clubs like a stockbroker, or find all his satisfaction in helping his wife prune the rose-trees.’
‘Does Melissa go in for roses?’ This question struck Honeybath as flippant even as he uttered it, and he realized that he was now feeling quite bad about what could be viewed as a desertion of his old friend. ‘Of course I’ll drop in,’ he said. ‘I’ll take along a bottle of wine and insist on our finishing it together. It was a ritual Edwin and I had in the early days. It was usually a stuff from South Africa calling itself burgundy, and not half bad.’ This time, Honeybath managed to laugh the comfortable laugh of a modestly prosperous man. ‘It was two bottles, as often as not,’ he said. ‘We’d talk into the small hours. I remember our once arguing about the Demoiselles d’Avignon as if it had been painted the day before, although it must have existed before either of us was in his cradle.’
On this reminiscent note the conversation with Ambrose Prout had ended, and now Honeybath was fulfilling his promise. Only he had thought better of the bottle of wine. The gesture might have worked as a tacit acknowledgement of neglect. On the other hand it might have appeared a gesture clumsily contrived. He would do best simply to arrive empty-handed and manage an honest expression of contrition at an early stage of the meeting. Not that he must make too much of that. For the break in intimacy that had occurred was a regrettable fact for which he and Lightfoot would do best to acknowledge a joint responsibility. If they accepted this without any pother they would probably come together again easily enough. But if Honeybath were to make a to-do about his own culpability the effect might be of his elevating himself into a position of patronage towards Lightfoot the duties of which he had failed to discharge. And their relationship had never had anything of the sort about it.
These considerations accompanied Charles Honeybath as he sat on top of a bus on his way to Holland Park, and they suggest that, like most artists, he was sensitive in the sphere of personal relations. But he also had other thoughts in his mind: thoughts, as it happened, on artists in general. The serious practice of any art is obsessional, and that rather commonplace fellow Prout had been perfectly right in declaring that an artist simply can’t stop off. If he does so, he virtually loses the sense of his own identity. He is, of course, luckier than most men in that society refrains from ordering him to stop off; from handing him a watch or a television set or an enormous cheque corresponding to his consequence hitherto in its fabric, and at the same time telling him to clear out. Society, on the whole, likes its artists to be immensely aged – perhaps because it feels itself safer from them when they have become eminent and doddering. Titian and Picasso, Voltaire and Bernard Shaw: their standing mounts with their years, and it occurs to nobody to tell them they ought to retire. The physicist loses his laboratory, the surgeon his beds, even the judge his bobbing barristers. But the artist goes on on his own: painting, scribbling, creating harmonies from catgut and a capful of wind.
Only – Honeybath told himself as his bus turned into Goldhawk Road – Degas’ sight dims, Beethoven’s ear dies on him, Shakespeare is probably bedevilled by a mounting nominal amnesia and doesn’t even have Roget’s Thesaurus to help him out. So what then? The artist too has to pack up, sharpen not his wits and sensibilities but his secateurs, and get out among his wife’s roses.
Honeybath had no roses, and no wife either. He often tried to look ahead – and this present mission, which was to pick up the threads with another artist as old as himself and perhaps wearing not quite so well, put him in mind of the problem now. One could make prudent plans, and this he had done. He had put money by as carefully as any stockbroker, and a kind of old folk’s home – one adequately corresponding to his station in life and his modest distinction – was already awaiting him. He wondered about Lightfoot. But Lightfoot’s situation was different. He had a wife, and a wife younger than himself. He must be reckoning that, with luck, she’d see him through without any radical
alteration in his domestic circumstances. Unless, of course, there were any strains and stresses in the Lightfoot ménage here in Holland Park that were likely to militate against that sort of easy decline into the shades.
Honeybath stood up, moved with caution along the swaying platform on which he was perched, and waited at the top of the stair until the bus jerked to a halt. Quite recently a friend of his, a famous pianist, had behaved incautiously with a rotary mower, and was now without an index finger. Honeybath had developed a mild phobia as a result of this. What terrified him was the thought of falling and breaking a wrist. If that happened they would patch it up marvellously, no doubt; within weeks it would be the same old wrist again for all common purposes. But in close proximity to paper or canvas how might it behave? The speculation was somehow even more alarming than the thought of an insidiously developing intention tremor.
He got off the bus, and set out vigorously in the direction of Royal Crescent, the abode of the Lightfoots. At this reunion, he warned himself, he must keep clear of gloomy themes.
2
Melissa Lightfoot opened the door of the flat. She stared at Honeybath and allowed herself a moment of blank non-recognition before she spoke. Since there was a good light on the landing, and since Honeybath was bareheaded, this was either offensive or absurd.
‘It’s Charles,’ Mrs Lightfoot said, apparently for her own information. ‘Charles Honeybath. Something must have happened. Somebody has hit him on the head, and he doesn’t know where he’s wandering. Or is he a fugitive from the police?’
‘Good evening, Melissa.’ Honeybath remembered that this sort of nonsensical banter had been Melissa Lightfoot’s notion of fun long ago. There was no particular animus in it. She might have made just these remarks if he were calling on his friends after no more than a fortnight by the sea. Melissa was a tiresome woman. It was perhaps one reason why Edwin had become (if Prout was to be believed) a tiresome man. ‘How are you, my dear Melissa?’ Honeybath asked firmly. ‘At least you look uncommonly well. And how is Edwin? I’m ashamed not to have seen either of you for so long.’
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