Winner's Loss

by Mel Bradshaw

  “Well! At this point in the meeting, a leading member of the congregation, son of the Methuselah in the front row and father of that merchant sailor I mentioned earlier, said — here, I’ve written down his exact words — ‘Naturalization of an individual does not make him a Canadian in the true sense of the word. He may be naturalized, but he does not come in on an equal footing in any sense.’ This gentleman went on to say that asking Koch to paint the memorial mural was ‘like asking the relatives of a murdered man to accept a memorial or tomb constructed by the cousin of the man who committed the murder.’

  “Our church wardens both agreed. One, an art collector in a minor way, claimed the style of Koch’s design was Germanic, not British in the least. Sir Joseph knew his brief and wasn’t about to yield a single point. He replied that Lawren Harris had studied art for four years in Berlin and that it was much more likely that his work showed German influences than that they should be found in the work of a painter who had received his artistic education exclusively in North America. Chicago, Montreal, and New York.

  “In the end, however, evidence and reason stood no chance. A war amputee, who before 1914 had been a telephone lineman and keen amateur football player, said that a mural designed by a German-born artist would dishonour our war dead, and that he’d sooner spit on it than look at it. Plainly the tone of the assembly had become too intemperate to allow for the viewing of Sir Joseph’s slides. Herman Koch’s design, however admirable, was now a lost cause. As a way out, I suggested we award the mural commission to the runner-up in the competition. Sir Joseph wouldn’t hear of it; he didn’t want to sit in his pew week after week confronted with artwork that the most perceptive judges of painting had certified second rate. When he’d delivered that ultimatum, my only course was to calm passions with a moment of prayer and adjourn the meeting. Do you smoke, Mr. Shenstone?”

  Hutchinson opened a silver cigarette box and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head.

  “Bad lungs,” I said. “Don’t let me stop you, though. I can see your flock’s a handful.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But, as I’m sure you’ve found for yourself, every group — however well-conducted in general — has its unstable elements.”

  “What happened next?”

  The rector adjusted his pince-nez and continued with his lighted cigarette in one hand and his notes in the other.

  “The turmoil in our parish reached the bishop’s ears, and he telephoned to ask me how I intended to calm the waters. I told him and told our committee I could not permit Mr. Koch’s design to be executed, even if turning it down meant the loss for Christ Church Grange Park of a very valuable gift. I was prepared to hear Sir Joseph say he would be taking his largesse to another church. St. Simon-the-Apostle is actually closer to his home. My suspicions were misplaced: Sir Joseph Deane is a bigger man than that. Disappointed as he was, his first concern was that Herman Koch receive the promised prize money of $500. I agreed that was only just, at the same time pointing out that we still had to make some provision for memorializing our war dead, even if only by attaching a bronze plaque to a wall of the chancel. Sir Joseph then offered to sponsor a second competition, the conditions of which would stipulate that entrants must have been born in this country or in one of the countries with whom we were allied in the war.”

  “I understand that Nora Britton was born in Aurora, Ontario. Is that correct?”

  “A village thirty miles north of here. Yes, that’s what I told the constable that came to the church on Tuesday morning.”

  “And she won that second competition?”

  “Once we had screened candidates for eligibility, the judgement of artistic merit was again blind. An altogether different trio of experts agreed that the best design was that of Nora Britton.”

  “Do you have a copy of the design here?”

  “Sir Joseph Deane has a copy. You’d have to see him about it. I couldn’t even give you a description, but he’ll enthuse about it and point out its many excellences. He’s just as keen on this idea for the memorial mural as he was on the one before. Perhaps more so: he recognized Miss Britton as an artist that had painted sympathetic streetscapes and portraits in the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of our own parish. The mural committee breathed a sigh of relief.”

  A happy ending, I thought, if you didn’t take later events into account. I understood that a long road remained to get us up to the winner’s death three days ago.

  “Pin down some dates if you have them,” I said. “The announcement of the results of the two competitions for a start.”

  Hutchinson put out his cigarette and re-sorted his notes. “April 1, 1926 for the first and for the second February 2, 1927.”

  “Eight months ago. And when did Miss Britton actually start work in your church?”

  “This past August. Not incidentally a time when church attendance falls off and some of what I’ve called our unstable elements are out of town.”

  “These elements objected to Nora Britton’s getting the mural commission?”

  “Not immediately. Well, there were murmurs that such a large and important job should have been given to a man. And the murmurs gained currency when members of the congregation met Miss Britton for the first time. As I say, she was small even for a woman. Doubts were raised as to whether she’d have the strength to execute a painting of over four hundred square feet. But our Women’s Auxiliary raised their voices for her loudly enough to drown out the early naysayers. No, the real trouble started later. In May of this year, someone brought it to the congregation’s attention that Nora Britton was married to Herman Koch. Neither artist had made any secret about the marriage, and it was mentioned in passing from time to time in various periodicals. But the objectors among us are not the sort to follow art news closely. The fact that Miss Britton was indeed the wife of Mr. Koch was exclaimed upon as if it had taken industrious sleuthing to break through a conspiracy of silence and bring this scandalous connection to light.”

  “Was the marriage taken as a disqualification?”

  “It seemed to license the know-nothings to pronounce Miss Britton’s design ‘Teutonic in conception.’ It was even suggested that the design was not Nora Britton’s at all, but rather her husband’s. In any event, it was totally out of accord with how ‘we British people’ think of our dead.”

  Hutchinson raised an ironic eyebrow and looked for a reaction. I nodded him on.

  “A fact conveniently overlooked is that many of our parishioners are not British at all but hail from a variety of European countries. Some are from the Far East. Not a few are former Catholics or Jews.” The rector waved a hand to one side. “Well, we handled the mural dissenters differently this second time around. No meeting was called. Sir Joseph Deane was adamant that we stick to our guns. I myself advised the church wardens that I should not want to continue as rector of Christ Church Grange Park if Nora Britton were deprived of the commission. In two or three weeks, the clamour died down. I heard no more complaints through the spring and summer. Which brings us to September.”

  “What happened last month?” I asked. Having done without breakfast as an economy measure, my stomach was starting to think of lunch.

  “When the people that had taken a vacation from church in August returned after Labour Day, they were disturbed to find a scaffold erected at the east end of the chancel. The mural became less theoretical and, for the few anti-German zealots, more threatening. This was when I heard language that, in the light of Nora Britton’s death, I now think it my duty to report.”

  “Did these threats come from the family you alluded to — the sailor, his father, and grandfather?”

  “Principally.”

  “It’s time to tell me their names, Mr. Hutchinson.”

  “Stillwater. Archie Stillwater is the sailor.”

  “And what did you hear him say?”

  “That women are no good with heights. Most likely ‘Frau Koch’ would fall off her scaff
old and break her neck, and Christ Church would be rid of her. He’d even be happy to climb up there with her and show her the dangers.”

  “And did he seem in earnest?”

  “He might claim now he was making a joke, but I didn’t take it as one. Mind you, I don’t imagine he actually pushed her to her death. She was alone when we broke into the sanctuary and found her. All the doors had been locked from the inside.”

  I got the rector to look up Archie Stillwater’s address for me. He didn’t make a fuss about it. Then I asked what else he’d heard of a similar nature.

  “Archie’s grandfather, Jordan Stillwater, is a retired pharmacist. He lives at the same address. Some think he’s getting senile; others say he’s just outspoken. He said, not to me but in my hearing, that his work had taught him how to prepare poisons the police had no way of detecting, and that if he wanted to he could rid Christ Church of this German-loving … woman. He used another word I won’t repeat. He was addressing one of the church wardens, a man Mr. Stillwater thought opposed to Miss Britton’s being granted the commission.”

  “How about the amputee, the man that talked of spitting on Mr. Koch’s mural? Was he equally opposed to letting Nora Britton do the job?”

  “His name is Carl Moretti. I didn’t hear anything from him one way or the other. All the same, I’ll jot down his address for you too.”

  “Any nastiness from anyone else?”

  “A few grumblings, no explicit threats. I should assure you that hostility to Miss Britton was by no means universal. I’d say rather that most people, when they actually met her, took to her right away. Some became ardent admirers.”

  “Including you,” I said.

  “Including me,” Eric Hutchinson replied simply. “I have a photo here I’ve been meaning to frame and hang with the others in this room.”

  The rector went to a bookshelf and between a Bible and a hymnal found a manila envelope. From it he drew an eight-by-ten-inch photo and looked at it a moment with a softened expression on his face before handing it to me. It was of the rector and a woman, both in profile, standing in a church. The picture showed him pointing up to the left at what I thought must be the wall to be decorated, the east wall of the chancel. At his side, a half step back and nearer the camera, Nora Britton was looking where he pointed. She was indeed small and striking. Dark, straight hair was pulled tightly back from a centre part into a chignon low on the nape of her neck. If a face appeals to you, as hers did strongly to me, it’s usually a waste of breath to try to break it down into the constituents of beauty. Other people may have no use for a straight nose, full lips, a clean jaw line, and pale, unblemished skin. All I can say is they looked good on her. She wore a loose white smock with wide lapels and cuffs, wore it unbuttoned and secured around the waist by a man’s wide leather belt. Under her right arm she held a portfolio case.

  “What you can’t see in the photo,” Hutchinson said, “is that she was kind and soft-spoken, quietly courageous, and immensely talented. I want to do what I can for her. I wish it were more.”

  Chapter 3

  I got Hutchinson to show me the church. On the outside, like the rectory, it was red brick for the most part, with yellow brick at the corners, over the windows, and wherever else the Victorians thought it would look good. The windows and door frames of the church, but not the rectory, were pointy. So were the belfry and the gables. Hutchinson said the style was Gothic; I didn’t argue. I thought the steep slope of the roof would come in handy in two or three months for shedding snow.

  Up against the east wall, I spotted Swagger Handwear — a plain, grey-brick cube — through the open windows of which sang out a chorus of sewing machines. Across the east–west street that paralleled the south walls of factory and church stood a shabby-looking row of shops with one floor of flats above them. The west door of Christ Church faced a side street at the north end of which lay a patch of grass I recognized as Grange Park and beyond the grass, the gallery. A mixed neighbourhood in sum, with industry, culture, and commerce cheek by jowl.

  While I was taking in the geography, Hutchinson was finding his key among several on a metal ring. The west door had been fitted with a lock well-regarded in police circles. That the installation was recent I inferred from the rector’s apparent unfamiliarity with what the key looked like and which way it turned.

  Once we got inside, I was impressed by the amount of natural light. Each one of the windows in the side walls was nine-tenths plain glass with just a few coloured pieces depicting a flower. Roughly a dozen rows of pews faced something like a very large alcove at the east end. This alcove area I took to be what Hutchinson had referred to as the chancel, for a scaffold made of wooden sticks stood up against its rear wall. The chancel, two steps up from the body of the church, had no windows, so I had to get the rector to turn on some electric lamps. By their light, I saw that the raised floor was made up of broad boards of bare polished wood. No possibility of a soft landing there. Hutchinson walked me across them to the base of the bamboo frame and pointed up to its top.

  “That’s where she was last working.”

  “Do you know what time she arrived at the church?”

  “She had a key, so as a rule she came and went as she pleased without notification. But last Monday evening, just after seven, she stopped by to let me know she intended to paint all night. She came straight here from the rectory. I’ve kept the sanctuary locked since Tuesday morning. I didn’t think the scaffold should be touched in case the authorities wanted to look at it.”

  I looked. I hadn’t encountered anything like it before. There was a building boom on in Toronto, so you saw lots of construction scaffolding, but all of it was metal tubes with metal couplers. Wood was used only for the deck elements men stood on to do their work. This scaffold in the church was apparently bamboo poles lashed together not with rope or wire but with fibre strips. The poles formed squares of a little less than a yard each side, with the occasional reinforcement of poles lashed on diagonally.

  I didn’t know what artists customarily stood on for mural painting. Perhaps bamboo scaffolding was standard. Indoors there would be no worry about weather rot. But still it seemed a remarkable structure. I tugged at it experimentally and chinned myself on one of the cross members just above my head. Nothing budged. Still I hesitated before climbing the ladder incorporated into one end. It was possible that Nora Britton’s death had resulted from some accidental defect or deliberate sabotage of this jumble of matchsticks. In neither case could the surviving portion be counted on as sound.

  What the hell, I thought, and went up.

  Because of the slope of the chancel roof, the scaffold was higher in the centre, where Hutchinson had pointed. To get to this highest level, I had to leave the first ladder and proceed along some deck planking to the centre, where a shorter ladder took me the rest of the way. Looking down, I judged the artist must have fallen a distance of between twenty-two and twenty-five feet.

  On the deck at this point sat what I presumed were Nora Britton’s art supplies and knapsack. The portion of the plaster wall adjacent to where she had been working was painted green. I hadn’t seen her design, so had no idea what this represented — whether sky or foliage — or whether it was a foundation layer of colour meant to be painted over later. None of this set off any alarm bells. It did seem as if Miss Britton had spilled a lot of something on her canvas knapsack. It was so stained and encrusted that in places its original khaki colour disappeared entirely. It smelled bad too: after one sniff, I kept it as far from my nose as possible. But what did I know about a muralist’s materials? An expert could have told me that paint only binds to plaster with a mixture of rotten eggs and skunk’s urine and I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

  If there was anything at all screwy about the set-up, it was the railing that ran between the deck and the drop. Nothing was broken or loose, but the horizontal bamboo poles had been lashed on too low, I thought, to provide any measure of safety. It might
not have been hard for Nora Britton to topple over. On the other hand, Hutchinson had said she was an uncommonly small woman. I left the paints and brushes and took the knapsack back down with me.

  “What did Miss Britton normally carry in here?” I asked Hutchinson when I got back to floor level.

  “Food and drink, I suppose.” The rector drew a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and gave it a quick glance. “She worked through mealtimes, and sometimes through the night. Mr. Shenstone, I’m afraid I have a meeting with the local branch of the CETS at twelve. So if you have more questions, you’d better telephone me later in the afternoon.”

  Waiting while I clambered about the scaffolding had made Hutchinson impatient. I tried to hide my satisfaction. Now he would have no time to listen to himself talk; his answers to my questions stood a much better chance of being brief and to the point. And if they were incomplete, I could, as he said, always come at him again later.

  “Working through the night can make you woozy. Was she under pressure to meet a deadline?”

  “No pressure from me,” said Hutchinson. “I may have asked her what she thought the chances were of having the mural completed for Armistice Day.”

  “But neither you nor Joe Deane nor anyone associated with the project held a gun to her head?”

  “Emphatically not. She knew we’d never have wanted her to endanger her health.”

  “November 11 is less than a month away. Given how little colour is on the wall now, it looks like she hadn’t a prayer of finishing by then. Not on her own. Did she have anyone to help her with the painting?”

  “There was talk, but nothing definite. She told me frankly we should be thinking of a dedication closer to Christmas.”

  “The former pharmacist mentioned poison.” I jiggled the knapsack I had hooked over my arm. “Would Jordan Stillwater have had access to Miss Britton’s food?”

  “Not in a regular way.”

  “Irregularly?” I persisted.

  “I’ve told you she won admirers in the congregation. Women knew how hard she worked and quite often prepared treats or snacks for her — cake, sandwiches, fruit baskets, salads.”