A lawyer to his bones, his affections subsumed by his objectivity, Raymond hated the shocked silence that followed. Di was fully aware of his surprise and his ambivalence. She seemed to have retreated to a world of her own. Thomas said she did that sometimes. Time in prison does that, makes them infantile or hideously mature. Contemplative or angry. She’s claustrophobic; we can never have the doors closed.
Raymond had a sudden regret that he had let certain facts slip to Gayle. Given her the clue as to how to undermine the enemy, as if she did not know already.
He prompted Di, with a polite cough.
‘There is a possibility,’ he said carefully, ‘that you’re already a suspect. I fear I cannot tell you what the children might do with the facts at their disposal. Or what enquiries they might have initiated to date. They seem to have … sources of information. They might accuse … There was the … delay.’
‘It wasn’t my finest hour,’ Di said, flatly. ‘I was relieved. I told Jones.’
‘Jones?’
‘Never mind. Anyway, I can’t imagine the children would ever think I hurried up Thomas’s death. Gayle thanked me for taking care of him. And come on, nobody’s that bad. I mean, they don’t like me, but it isn’t personal.’
They hate you and it’s highly personal.
‘We could try to compromise,’ he suggested. ‘Offer them a portion of the estate, something like that. Offer to settle it, before it gets nasty.’
She considered.
‘Yes, for sure, but not if it means breaking up the collection he wants me to continue and not if it means selling this house; Thomas had plans for this house, we both did. He said he never really thought it belonged to him, and I don’t think it belongs to me. He said if we gave them a half or a quarter, you may as well burn it all. He also said they’ve got to learn to live. But yes, in principle, and only on certain conditions.’
Raymond left that aspect alone.
‘There’ll be an inquest, postponed. He hadn’t been seen by a doctor for two weeks.’
‘Not for lack of effort,’ she said. ‘Either he wouldn’t or the doctor couldn’t. Have you ever tried? I had to fight for everything. Should I compromise? I reckon that was the last thing he wanted me to do, but I would if it could be done in a way he’d approve. If it would keep the collection safe and me to continue it. And keep his reputation, perhaps that most of all. I want Thomas to be famous, one day. That would be the condition, they honour his reputation instead of slurring it, and they let their children come and visit, if they want.’
He thought about it, looking at the cheerful fire in the hearth which gave him courage and drained all memory of the November cold outside, reminded him of the days when he had loved a good fight. The conversation with Edward had indeed been illuminating. Raymond was refraining from telling his client exactly how much both Di and her deceased husband were hated by his kin. And how little the preservation of a blasted collection of paintings for posterity mattered to someone in need of money to which they felt entitled. He shook himself. There was fight in him still, and he still relished the idea of a fight. Besides, there was no way this lot would settle for less than everything.
‘Consider it, certainly, and I shall, too, because it’s going to be a rough ride if you hang on. The law’s one thing and fact’s another. They’ll tear his memory to shreds to prove entitlement and they’ll accuse him of everything to gain sympathy. They’re entrenched; they have the moral high ground. I’m not sure if they would compromise. They want it all, and they’d rather destroy it than you have it.’
They’d like Di dead and buried, Thomas had said. They would cut off their own noses to spite their own faces. They are their mother’s children, Goneril and Regan. And Edward is a thief.
‘But it isn’t mine to give them,’ Di said. ‘I simply hold it in trust. And they’ve wasted so much already. So did their mother.’
‘Ah yes, the earlier Mrs Porteous.’
The real Mrs Porteous, Raymond reflected, who took her children away and accepted an irrevocable financial settlement she later regretted. A bitter, violent, attractive woman, who might have been a young man’s dream and the nightmare of his middle age. Mrs P who kept on coming back.
‘Those who have, want more,’ Raymond said. He hesitated, wondering how much of his own experience in these matters to explain without being condescending, pessimistic or alarming. ‘There is a level of hatred in some families which goes beyond the rational. These daughters believe that their mother was the victim of great cruelty, as they were themselves. They believe Thomas was responsible for her unhappiness and for the failure of their lives. Such hatred knows no boundaries. None at all.’
He could tell she couldn’t quite get it. Collectors could be so naïve. They couldn’t quite believe that other people simply didn’t care about things.
‘I don’t hate anyone,’ Di said. ‘I can’t. Gayle and Beatrice were half Thomas’s flesh and blood. That means, whatever they’ve said and done, they can’t be totally bad.’
Was she really naïve, or was she pretending? There was a clock on the wall with an audible tick. The day marched on.
‘Whatever happens, whatever comes next, you and I have to do an inventory of the possessions. The London flat, too. Where shall we start? In the attics or the basement?’
The attic floor vibrated with the wind. Heat rose up the two open stairways, dissipating as it went. There were three casement windows in a long narrow room, spanning the whole of the house, and the other light came from the windows at either end. The room looked upon nothing other than sea and sky. The ceiling was low enough for a man as short as Raymond to walk through the centre but not around the edges; taller Thomas would have stooped in here. The casement windows were floor level and the ceilings sloped to join them. The floor was wide boards of mellowed pine, creaking gently with every step. It was the room with the fewest paintings, confined to the side walls, since even Thomas could not find a way to hang a painting on a sloping attic wall. Small, cameo paintings in here on those end walls, miniatures and tiny works of art on one side, and on the other, a large painting of flowers. Three pristine beds and minimal furniture in this room, bathroom off. It would have been a dormitory, once.
Descending the alternative stairs, he found three large, higher-ceiling rooms. Doors interconnected the rooms and there were also doors into a corridor; all the rooms were made to move through, and move round; it was if every room in this house had two doors. He was already lost, had stopped looking at the pictures and was thinking instead of how well it would have worked as a public space. These rooms had no particular dedication: study rooms, bedrooms, elegant whatever they were, always with one door in and one door out.
Raymond could not understand why the corridor curved, but curve it did.
The next floor down housed the gallery. It was formed, mainly, of two huge rooms, again with doors, more interconnecting doors between them as well as those leading on from the corridor. Raymond could see one room as the headmaster’s office, perhaps, with its grander accoutrements, the other as a classroom. They merged together when the doors were flung open. Brilliant rooms with long windows, full of grey light. The gallery room, the heart of the place. Thomas’s old partner’s desk was in the finer end, complete with computer and files of neatly assembled paperwork. It was a library room, shelved in oak down one wall, while the rest of the walls were covered in pictures. Thomas’s ancient office chair was a Victorian model, precursor of the modern equivalent in terms of comfort, but with twice the authority. There were fireplaces at each end; he could imagine them blazing. Today there was a distinct chill in the air, a different temperature to the rooms above and below. Despite the magnificent view of the sea outside and the pictures within, Raymond could understand why Thomas had abandoned this place of command for the snug downstairs at the back, at least for the winter.
‘You know what Thomas wants, of course,’ Di said. ‘It’s to be a gallery, museum, for everyone, b
ut especially for children who wouldn’t otherwise ever see real paintings.’
Raymond could see it: for the first time, he could see it.
‘And is that what you want?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And sometime along the line, his daughters are going to see it, too, and be proud of him.’
Fat chance, Raymond thought. They think it all belongs to them anyway. They think it’s theirs. They will snatch. The word stuck in his mind, a mean word, snatch, reminding him of a sneak thief who came up behind and punched, hard.
‘We did a complete inventory of the existing paintings,’ Di said, handing him a copy from the desk. ‘You don’t need to do it again, just check it. The valuations are pure guesswork, except for the recent stuff. I’m in the process of writing descriptions, my own record, writing sketches of paintings, if that makes sense, so I remember them. Saul’s making a proper catalogue. I wish I knew where he was.’
Raymond nodded. The inventory would be correct, insofar as it went, with whatever omissions the client chose. If Thomas had not already hidden things, he would be markedly different to any other client Raymond had had. Likewise, he was sure there would be immaculate accounts, fit for the severest scrutiny. Thomas knew his tax law. He had planned for death long before it came over the horizon, planned it for years to make sure that Di got governance of the lot, the tax man got the least and the children nothing at all. There was simply not enough to do everything. The pot of money was deep, but not bottomless.
Raymond consulted his favourite painting above the fireplace on the left in the gallery room. A swagger portrait of a man about town, circa 1880, the man dressed in evening clothes and cloak, lounging in a chair, one hand in his lap and the other resting on a cane. There was a red flower overflowing from the lapel of his jacket, the only colour in the piece. A man in his prime without a care in the world, looking across at the painting of a lady at the other end. Raymond wondered if there was any theme in the Porteous collection, such as were all the portraits celebrations of youth and beauty, or were the landscapes and interiors pieces of wish fulfilment, places where Thomas would have liked to have been? Had he been creating another, alternative world with his seemingly random eye and his voracious, acquisitive appetite for line and colour? Were these his alternative family, his dreams, to replace what he had either driven away or lost? And his father, the headmaster, before him? Raymond plodded on, thinking what a pedant he was, with his composite roles of lawyer and liaison, walked down the last set of stairs, lost. Whatever the theme was, he had certainly not collected as an investment: the theme, if there had ever been one, was blurred now. He had relied on Di’s eyes. And she might have killed him.
She whisked him round like a tour guide and then they were back where they had been. Back in the snug room, with the comfortable nude, illuminated by the fire that granted a kind of benediction. Di produced food with the automatic efficiency of someone long practised in the art of the picnic and he forgot his reservations about that. Good bread, cheese, tangy green leaves. ‘You have to eat before you go,’ she said. He was surprised by the simple sophistication of it, not only because he had never supposed this faded town to provide anything of the kind, but also because he had assumed that she would be incapable of assembling it. Then he remembered triumphant Thomas, when he, Raymond, had advised him against the marriage. She can cook, dear boy … doesn’t that persuade you of her immaculate taste? She has eyes, Ray, in the back of her head as well as the front. I’m a lucky man and I owe her my life. A man either besotted or convinced.
‘So,’ Di said, pushing food in his direction rather than eating it herself, then lighting a cigar, which suited her, ‘how bad is it going to get?’
She got up to rattle the fire, shoving on another log, sparking it back to longer life. The fire had been dead by the time she called the ambulance. It took hours for this fire to die. She had done nothing to revive or warm her wedded husband; she had let the fire go out. That would be remembered. All she had to do was contaminate the food.
He cleared his throat and reached forward for her to light his cigarette. There was nothing seductive about her action, but it was still intimate. She was all sharp angles, shrill, comforting, charming and graceless, all at the same time. Distracting.
‘Well,’ he said, more cheerfully than he felt, wishing she had more of a sense of the dangerous pathways ahead, wanting to spare her and yet wanting to shake her with his own sense of dread. ‘The house is beautiful and you should do what he wanted to do, to the letter. It would be helpful if you were the model of good behaviour in the meantime. A demure and grieving widow, perhaps. A connoisseur, leading a gentle life. That kind of thing. No loud noises.’
She shook her head, smiling.
‘The inventory? Haven’t we forgotten to look in the basement?’
She clapped a hand to her brow. ‘So we have, I forgot, but you know there’s nothing much in there. Too damp, too cold, too … this time of year. The sea comes through from underneath, you see, sometimes.’
There were stone steps leading down from the heavy door inside the snug room. Raymond did not want to go but knew he must, for the sake of duty as well as curiosity. He hated the dark and longed for the light upstairs. She was fooling him, leaving this until last, but then again, maybe she wasn’t. The lights were fused, she said; she had taken a torch which swept round the vaulted ceilings of what was once a wine cellar, with arched alcoves in glorious patterns of brick in pale, russet stone. There were wine racks and rubbish, boxes and baskets, cardboard containers, tidily stacked, and to his inner ear, a faint shuffling sound, as if of someone breathing. The floor at the furthest end away from the inside steps sloped upwards towards the steel shutters leading into the yard.
‘You can hear the sea down here,’ Di said. ‘And there were mice and rats and things, but I think they’ve gone now.’
Again, half lost in admiration of the room itself, Raymond asked a question.
‘The late Mrs Porteous … did she know this house well?’
The torch wavered alarmingly in the large space. Even a claustrophobic could function here.
‘Thomas said so. She would have known it when his parents lived here and they came to visit. She hated it and hated bringing the children, but admired it, too, when it was never as valuable as it is now. She had no idea then that Thomas would inherit it. Yes, she must have known it, but probably not well. I only know what Thomas told me. There’s been changes since.’
He was accepting stray pieces of unverifiable information in the dark and he wondered why he had asked. He knew Christina Porteous had visited Thomas in this house before her death, to plead for money: he was unsure if Di knew, or how much she knew of that unstable, poisonous woman. Raymond needed no encouragement to go back upstairs as fast as his legs could carry him. He hated mice and the very thought of rats unnerved him so he went back upstairs, sat back and accepted coffee, again experiencing the strange sense of comfort she offered. Excellent coffee, as it happened. He was particular about that, took a sip and shuddered with the thrill of it, sipping it like an old lady who had never tasted the taste before, and looked at his watch. A train would go at fifteen minutes past the hour and he had time for the next, if he went now, resisting the comfort and the urge to stay. He heaved himself to his feet, sat down again, remembering there was more to discuss.
‘Look Di, you’ve got to make your own last will and testament, and make it soon. Thomas said so. I’ve got a draft, setting up a trust. I know it might seem ridiculous at your age, but it’s got to be done. He was very keen about that.’
‘Yes. He knew very well that if anything happened to me, and I died without making a will, my father would claim as my only relative. So, yes, it better be done soon, and publicly. So that he has less of an incentive than he already does to kill me.’
She said it so calmly, he almost choked.
‘Your father? You’d better explain this to me, Di. Thomas never did.’
�
��Perhaps because he didn’t want to shock you,’ Di said, calmly. ‘Or force you to consider the violent propensities of his wife’s parent.’ Sometimes her speech had the modulations of Thomas and his dedication to precision, so that she sounded like an echo of a scholarly brain.
‘I have a father who is rather a bad man,’ Di said, matter of factly. ‘A sort of undertaker, outside of the law. About whom I know rather too much for his comfort. Still alive, as far as I know. The last thing he ever said to me was to wish me dead. He’s lived away for a long, long while, haven’t seen him for years. A decade, at least. So, no worries, hey? And anyway, he’s not a murderer and Thomas thought of everything.’
The speech has lost its careful intonation.
‘Good Lord,’ Raymond said, faintly, thinking to himself that maybe this was a little over the top, not to say creative and stress-related. It had already occurred to him that Di was in danger, for the simple reason that the hiring of an assassin was a far cheaper expedient than the expensive business of contesting a will. He had known those who had contemplated it, but it did not happen in polite society. Edward would have thought of it: Edward had contacts, but not that kind. And now there was this other string. A homicidally inclined father, dear God, what overdramatic nonsense. It made him suspect her all over again. What was it Edward had said about Di’s father? Something and nothing. It was all too much.
‘The will,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on with it, shall I? Because in any event, Di, you’re a bit of a hostage to fortune without one.’
Gold Digger Page 8
