Mystery in Moon Lane
Page 4
I left the school in a state of mind I find hard to describe. I was not quite in the haze that seemed to envelope me through the day, but still not appreciating my surroundings with normal clarity and lucidity. I supposed I was simply tired through the intense exertions of the day and, on reaching my flat, I had a quick bite to eat and turned in. In no time, I fell into a deep sleep.
Once, I awakened, suddenly recalling the sound of hooves in the street outside the studio window and the voice of the newspaper vendor and questions hammered at my brain:
When was the constant clatter of horses last heard as a regular part of London street noise? When did a newspaper boy last call his wares in a London street? Come to that, when was such a thing as a newsboy last seen?
Certainly not in my time. And what was he shouting? Something about the Prime Minister and his statement. And the Prime Minister’s name—Mr. Asquith! What did I know of Asquith? Not much except that he was Premier when the First World War started, and was eventually replaced by Lloyd George…all well before my time…long, long before my time.…
I drifted into sleep once more and woke refreshed and eager for work.
Curiously, the questions of the night hardly surfaced as I breakfasted briefly and hastened back to the school.
Some inner conviction told me I should find the model waiting in my curtained-off cubbyhole and so she was. After hastily greeting my students and making a cursory check of their progress with a few words of advice or encouragement here and there, I found the girl already perfectly posed on the podium.
I suppose my greeting was almost offhand because I was so consumed by a desire to be working on the canvas. She replied with a beaming smile over her shoulder as she held the backward-looking pose, and I plunged at the work, deeply and intensely striving to render as much a living likeness of that perfect feminine form as I could. There was no question of my talking to the girl; no curiosity concerning how she came there or from whence she came. I wanted only to work and I was soon deeply absorbed—and hearing again, dimly, the clopping of hooves and the occasional note of a motor horn, which I knew was created by an antiquated instrument, the kind in which a rubber bulb was squeezed in the hand. None of it mattered. My only consideration was finishing this painting.
I finished with what must have been record speed after a day in which I had no concept of time. I now have no recollection of taking a break for a meal or even, in defiance of the school’s regulations, allowing the model to have regular spells of rest. Somehow, I knew she would not require them. Finishing the work was everything and, with the bell for the close of classes sounding, I knew I had achieved exactly what I strove for. In still-wet colors, I had a superb full-length nude, standing with her back to the viewer and with an expression part inviting and part innocent vulnerability on her exquisitely formed face as she smiled over her shoulder. It was a masterpiece—yet I knew it was not my masterpiece.
I considered it with a sigh of satisfied relief, then turned towards the podium. The girl was gone, but I almost expected that would be the case, just as I had known in an uncanny way that she would be there, ready posed, that morning. Equally, I knew that none of my students would have caught sight of her.
The studio was emptying rapidly, the students eager for seats in the lecture theater, that evening’s guest speaker being a noted portrait painter. Miss Clatterbridge, the middle-aged student who seemed to hold me in such awe, lingered.
“You were doing it again, Mr. Jevons,” she said. I felt she was close to alarm.
“Doing what?”
“Well, grunting and muttering as you worked at your painting, It was as if you were in a kind of trance. Oh, I wasn’t prying, but I looked in on you again for some advice, and you were hard at it so, again, I didn’t disturb you.”
“The grunting and muttering is just a habit I’ve fallen into, Miss Clatterbridge,” I said. “I get deeply absorbed when I work. I don’t suppose you noticed my model.”
She looked a little more frightened. “No, I—I think you were alone.” She hastily gathered her gear and was the last student to leave the studio.
Alone, I suddenly remembered a television interview with Tinsley, the remarkable art forger of some years before.
Tinsley, undoubtedly a fine artist in his own right, produced remarkable forgeries of works by the eighteenth-century landscape specialist James Needham. They totally fooled all the art world, so Tinsley and the crooked dealer with whom he was associated enjoyed a brief spell of ill-gained prosperity. It fell apart when questions were asked as to why so many previously unknown Needhams came on the market through one dealer. Tinsley and the dealer were imprisoned for fraud.
After his release, Tinsley was featured on a television program in which he made the astonishing claim that, when producing the forgeries, he was taken over by the spirit of James Needham. He gave a demonstration on camera, resulting in a painting faithful in every way to the work of Needham. As he worked at great speed, Tinsley’s eyes appeared glazed over, and he continually grunted and gasped. He was either in some kind of abnormal state or he was an accomplished actor.
Recalling it set off a mosaic of recent memories: the haziness in which I worked; the street noises from another time; the realization that I had produced a masterpiece manifestly not my masterpiece, and Miss Clatterbridge’s harping on my muttering and grunting.
I returned to my cubbyhole, looked again at the finished painting which was a masterpiece, but certainly not mine. I needed no telling as to whose that distinctive style of brushwork and whose that vibrant sweep of outline. This was the painting of Fred Costigan’s lost love, had he completed it instead of defacing it in an angry fury
The whole school was eerily empty as I carefully carried the not-yet-dry canvas through silent corridors lit by shafts of late afternoon summer sunshine. Everyone, it seemed, had gravitated to the lecture theater.
Suddenly, just as I reached the point where the Life corridor made its sharply angled turn, I was face-to-face with the girl. She was wearing her blue robe and looking at me levelly with that enigmatic smile, and now I realized how, throughout the whole of my working from her pose, we had held almost no conversation. Now, free of the haziness that surrounded me during two days of painting, I wanted answers to questions from this young woman who seemed to have been seen only by myself.
Breathlessly, I asked: “Who are you?”
The smile became yet more enigmatic and she responded in a gentle near-whisper: “Oh, come now, you really don’t need to ask, do you?”
Then, as if to confirm what I already knew, she turned and slipped the robe from her left shoulder. Throughout the whole of her posing on the podium, she held that shoulder slightly twisted back and away from me so that I never saw the forward part of it. Now, I saw that it bore the outline of a tattooed heart that enclosed the name: ‘Fred’.
“Thank you so much for what you have done,” she murmured just before she stepped back and slipped quickly around the corner.
I followed, protesting: “Wait! Listen! I want to ask you.…” But she was gone as totally as she disappeared when I first encountered her on this same corridor a couple of days before.
Attempting to regain some composure, I carried the canvas through the quiet building and across the forecourt to my car. While carefully manoeuvring it into the vehicle to lay it on the back seat, I saw a line of writing penciled on the lower part of the canvas stretcher. It looked freshly rendered but it was not in my hand. It read: F. Costigan, Readly’s School of Fine Art, London WC1. February 1914. I stared at it long and hard on that summer afternoon in a month that was certainly not February and certainly not in 1914, and recognized the hand as that in which the yellowed diary from the trenches was written.
With the painting safe at home, I spotted something else for the first time: Costigan’s familiar signature in a bottom corner. But I had no recollection of so signing the work, just as I had no really detailed memory of producing any of it.
I suppose I can only keep it safe with a written record of how it came to be created, ensuring that everything will eventually come to light through my will, with the hope that my account of the painting’s provenance will be believed.
Every time I look at it, I seem to hear, faintly but distinctly, the words of a silly popular song from a near-forgotten era:
“I’ll make you my own
In our own little home.
My mad time, gladtime,
Ragtime girl.…”
It is sung in unison by two voices, one male and one female.
And they sound blissfully happy.
SONG OF THE SEA
I thought seal, then woman, the instant I caught sight of the sleek and gleaming form sprawled on the verge of the road.
It was visible only briefly as we passed with our headlights piercing the night and the slashing rain. Then there was blackness again save for the twin shafts of light filled with a hail of wet bullets driving in from the sea. The windscreen wipers creaked and sighed and my wife, Leonora, leaned across from the passenger seat, trying to peer beyond them.
“Dan, there’s a woman lying beside the road!” she gasped. “I saw her there for sure. At least, I think it was a woman, someone in black. Maybe it wasn’t a woman—could have been a seal.”
I bit my lip, thinking again: woman, seal—seal woman. An old story from my County Mayo ancestry came swimming up in my mind almost as soon as I saw the slumped form. I did not want to think about it, but I did a U-turn, which was not easy on the narrow coast road and in stormy darkness.
“Must be someone needing help,” murmured Leonora with her hazel Indian eyes almost pressed against the windscreen. “I had the idea she was in a black dress. Maybe she’s a nun. You’re never far from a convent in the west of Ireland, but there was a sort of wet gleam, like it was a stranded seal. Maybe the poor thing was hit by a car.”
Seal woman, I thought again. Dammit, why does that notion keep coming back?
“There!” exclaimed Leonora. “It is a woman!”
I halted the car so that the lights shone on the still form on the verge of wild grass which sloped up to a gray rock wall beyond which lay the vast Atlantic, unseen in the turbulent blackness. From the ocean gusted the wind-driven rain, direct from America, as local usage had it. We left the car and, humped against the storm, traversed the puddled coast road. All the time, foreboding was mounting in me.
She was lying face down and, soaked by the rain, the seal-like appearance was imparted by a dress, which was a close-clinging sheath. Oh, God, why must I keep thinking of her as a seal? harped the voice of foreboding.
Leonora reached her a fraction before myself, knelt and gently turned the woman over.
“She’s alive—breathing but unconscious,” she reported.
“Any sign of an injury? Any blood or an open wound?”
“Can’t see anything. We can’t leave her lying here. Hell, Dan, she’s only a girl—and beautiful.”
In the beam of the headlights, I saw an ivory white face. Her beauty was stunning, and her eyes were closed as if in peaceful sleep. Her face was framed by long black hair that glistened richly and there was an antique quality to the way it was parted in the center. It fell in two tresses over shapely breasts that were enhanced by her tight dress of curiously modest style in spite of the way it clung. It was jet black and totally plain, with a high neck that was fastened at the throat. The sleeves were long. The skirt, too, was long and finished at the ankles, the whole garment being little more than the sort of shift worn by women in many ages and many places. It looked as if it might be made of sealskin.
Damn and blast! Why did I keep thinking of seals?
“Get her into the car and we’ll take her home,” said Leonora. “Let’s hope there are no bones broken, but we’ll have to get a doctor to her if need be.”
“Maybe she’s just some drunken tinker woman,” I growled and, at once, I became acutely aware that I was showing appalling received prejudice against the traveling people of Ireland. I knew she was something other than that, but I was hedging because I was scared. That ancient story persisted in shoving itself to the front of my mind, and there was a spell in the girl’s beautiful face that was working in me.
Then, for an instant, Leonora turned her face away and hid her eyes as she brushed away strands of her own black hair that had straggled wetly into them. At that moment, the girl’s eyes opened and she looked directly at me. Her eyes were huge and black—and yet not wholly black, for they also seemed to contain a sea-green of unfathomable depth, deeper by far than any ocean of this world.
Then came the smile. It must have been fleeting, but it caused me to become detached from time and space; to hang in eternity, enraptured by it.
And I heard the song for the first time. It combined with the girl’s smile to draw my very soul out of present reality to some other plane of existence. It was sung by voices that were not human, and its cadences and phrases were not assembled by any human composer. It was ancient, far more ancient than even this tradition-soaked edge of Ireland, and I knew it belonged to the secret realms of the sea and it was enticing me away into those realms.
Abruptly, the experience ended, and the girl’s more-than-angelic face was in repose again, with the eyes closed.
Leonora was all American bustle and efficiency, and she had obviously seen and heard nothing that I saw and believed I had heard.
“For God’s sake, Dan, take her feet and I’ll take her head. Hurry up, she could catch her death in this weather. Sometimes, you can be so all-fired indecisive.” As always when she was annoyed, she lost her slow Oklahoma drawl.
In taking the girl’s feet, I saw her shoes for the first time. There were black stockings, again of that indeterminate sealskin-like material, but it was her shoes that particularly took my attention as we carried her through the headlight beams. They were leather and of archaic pattern. I had seen such shoes before, in England, among the cultural treasures found in the Mary Rose, the long-sunken Tudor warship recovered from the deep. I knew that shoes of that kind were common throughout Europe from at least the early Middle Ages.
We placed her more or less lying on the rear seat of the car and Leonora perched on the edge of it, holding her hand. In the dim gleam from the roof-light, I saw the haunting face, once more apparently asleep.
“There’s a pulse which I think is normal,” reported Leonora. “We’d better make her comfortable until the storm blows over, then perhaps we should contact the Guards. If she’s been in a road accident, they’ll need to know.”
I put the car into a cautious three-point turn and we set off homeward on the black, drenched road snaking along the edge of the ocean.
Leonora said: “Too bad we don’t have a phone yet but, at least, we have a guest-room of a kind since Dave’s visit.”
Her younger brother, Dave, had graduated from Oklahoma State University a few months before, soon after we came to rest in Mayo, and he dropped in for a couple of weeks in the course of a tramp around Europe. The cottage we bought at rock-bottom price was of unguessable age, and it was perched close to the brink of a headland jutting into the Atlantic. It had no sophistications, but its tiny back room made an acceptable enough guest-room provided the guest did not expect the standards of a luxury hotel. In our modest little home, I set about concluding my study of the impact of modernity on traditional Irish kinship ties, and put my Ph.D. to use, writing on anthropological and sociological themes.
The cottage was thatched and had the feel of the “real” Irelan
d I had known as a youngster, when my father brought me on holidays from England to his home place nearby. With breathtaking rapidity, homes such as ours, which had sheltered generations of the same family, became forlorn shells. Beside them rose dwellings of social-climbing brashness in which lived the newer generations.
Once, the sleeping west of Ireland was synonymous with the static state, but change came upon it with the power of an earthquake. Yet, there were things deep-rooted and ancient beyond time that did not change, and I felt them, sensed them, and knew them instinctively. Thus, I knew what the creature found beside the road really was from my first glimpsing, of her which sent the equation woman-seal, seal-woman juggling through my brain.
We reached our cottage, only just visible through the sheeting rain. Such of it as could be seen had, for me, taken on an unreal appearance, just as there had been an edge of unreality to everything since we found the waif of the storm—everything, that is, save the beckoning sea song and the lure of those ocean-deep eyes.
The headlights touched the gray stone wall surrounding our small garden, and even the wall, with the new rocks only recently put in by little Sean-een Durcan, seemed no longer to have the harsh solidity of Mayo rock. I thought of talkative Sean-een as we approached the house.
Leonora and I, searching for someone to repair the numerous gaps in the wall, found him in his little mason’s yard in Westport. He was intrigued to learn that we were to settle on the coast and that my grandfather had been a sergeant of Civic Guards in the region, for he knew him when he was a boy.
“A grand man,” he said. “I remember him well and why wouldn’t I? He often called into our house for a sip of tea and a smoke. He was a great one for telling yarns. Him being a Galwayman and a son of a fisherman, he had many a tale of the sea and many a tale to make you shudder, too. He told me his father heard the Banshee herself, roaring something terrifying. And on the night before a death in the family, too. Arragh, he told me your family was followed by all manner of things and, begod, he wasn’t joking in the way he told it, either.”