In Pale Battalions (43 page)

“Evidently not.”

“As I say, it’s funny. He didn’t seem to have any friends. Lived alone till he took those two in. And left you with a bit of a problem.

You’ll want to evict them, of course.” He peered at the last fragment of pasty, then screwed it up in the paper.

“Evict his only friends, you mean?”

“You could look at it like that.” He glanced up and down the

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street, apparently in search of a refuse bin. “Not his only friends, though. There was Eric Dunrich. You’d often see them together.”

“Could I contact Mr. Dunrich?”

“Why not? He lives over the estuary in Polruan. Seaspray Cottage in West Street. Just round the corner from the ferry.

Anybody will direct you. But I ought to warn you: he’s a bit odd.

Proves my point, really.”

Still uncertain what Mr. Trevannon’s point was, I crossed the estuary on the tiny, struggling ferry boat early that afternoon. The air remained clear and bright, a cold sun lighting the whitewashed housefronts of Fowey as they fell away behind us.

I walked alone up the slipway on the Polruan side, while three housewives, laden with shopping bags, bustled past me to reach the ferry. On the jetty, one brave amateur artist sat muffled in the lee of a low building, dabbing at his canvas with a brush held in one mit-tened hand. I asked him for directions to Seaspray Cottage.

“Just around the corner. But I fear you will find nobody in.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I am the sole occupant.”

“Eric Dunrich?”

“Yes.” He shot me a buck-toothed grin from inside his scarlet balaclava. At once, I took more note of him. A dumpy figure, wrapped in sweaters, perched obstinately on his camp chair. His painting, propped on an easel before him, had an air of stubborn inelegance.

“Perhaps you’ll have heard of me, Mr. Dunrich. I’m Leonora Galloway.”

“Mrs. Galloway!” In one maladroit movement, he jumped up from the chair, nearly capsizing his easel in the process, and swept off his balaclava, leaving a crop of grey hair spiked out at alarming angles. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.” He seized my right hand but, instead of shaking it, held it flat and bowed stiffly.

I laughed nervously. “I gather you knew Mr. John Willis.”

“Yes, indeed.” He grinned. “And you, I gather, are his beneficiary. Will you do me the honour of stepping back to my humble abode for tea? We might there discuss our mutual, much-mourned friend.”

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I didn’t know whether to take him seriously, but accepted the invitation none the less. He left his chair, easel and canvas where they were and took only his paints and brushes, bundled in a duffel bag, as he led the way up a narrow street between silent cottages that seemed to echo and amplify his high-pitched, piping voice.

“John never spoke of you, Mrs. Galloway, but it is evident that you stood highly in his esteem. I am therefore honoured that you should seek me out.”

We turned in at the green-painted door of his tiny home, a spot-lessly clean, strangely warm haven of potted plants and ceiling-high bookcases. He left me alone whilst he made the tea, but his voice carried clearly from the kitchen.

“I have no view of the sea from here, you understand, so, if I am to capture it on canvas, I must brave the winter chill.”

“Do you paint a lot, Mr. Dunrich?”

“Ceaselessly, Mrs. Galloway, ceaselessly.”

“Yet none of your work is displayed here.”

A serving hatch was flung open to admit his head and shoulders. “That is because my paintings are consistently dreadful. My ceaseless striving is to produce one that I actually like.” Steam began to rise from a kettle behind him. The head and shoulders withdrew.

“That’s a remarkably conscientious attitude.”

“To thine own self be true. Is that not essential? John reminded me of it, often enough.” He appeared suddenly at the door, teapot and cups rattling on a tray. “He had the advantage of me, of course, being a gifted painter himself. Yet still he hid his works from view.” He deposited the tray on a low table and gestured me to an armchair.

“He painted as well?”

“Why yes. It was a shared interest, but not a shared ability. The talent was all his.”

“Had you known him long?”

He applied one index finger to his forehead. “Sunday, the eighteenth of November 1962. A little over five years.”

“You can be that precise?”

“Precision, Mrs. Galloway, is a function of significance. Milk or lemon?”

“Milk, please.” He began to pour. “I’ve visited the house.”

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“A charming property, is it not?” He craned forward with my tea.

“Yes. Perhaps you can explain what nobody else seems able to.

Why did he leave it to me?”

Dunrich held his cup motionless, halfway between saucer and mouth. “Explanation relies upon understanding. Alas, I have insufficient. John was a good and loyal friend to me. To have asked for more would have been to trespass upon his privacy.” “If I were you, I think I might feel hurt that he left everything to a stranger and nothing to his friends here.”

“Oh, but he did. He left his memory.”

“Wouldn’t you have liked some memento?”

“You place me in a difficult position, Mrs. Galloway. The fact is that John promised me just that. He sat there—in the very chair you occupy—the afternoon before he died. Epiphany, it was. He said that when he was no longer here . . .” “He said that the afternoon before he died? He spoke about being no longer here?”

“An eerie coincidence, you mean? Neither, I would suggest.

John was something of a seer. Or so I felt. But yes. Those were the terms in which he spoke—a matter of hours before he died.”

“If it lies in my power, Mr. Dunrich, you’d be welcome . . .”

He held up his hand. “Too late, dear lady. Alas, too late. What he intended, and I desired, has been mislaid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I gathered from Miss Telfer that the painting he promised me was not amongst his possessions. Sold, we must suppose. But, if so, why did he mention it? He was not given to cruelty, nor much to jokes at all.”

“There must be some mistake, then. I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Pray cause no difficulty on my account. If John considered the two young people worthy of space beneath his roof, I will not fall to quibbling about the consequences.”

“Why did he take them in, do you know?”

“They were homeless. Also, there was, shall we say, an artistic purpose. Miss Telfer enabled him to complete a series of paintings.

I had thought the process would bring him the contentment he once helped me to find, but the reverse appeared to be the case.

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When I saw him last, he was a troubled man. Would that I had done more to assist him.” Dunrich had grown suddenly gloomy, all the effervescence gone from him. He returned his cup to its saucer with a dull clatter.

“There’s nothing anyone could have done about a heart attack.”

“No. Of course not.” He seemed to revive a little. “More tea?”

Later, I walked back with him to the harbour. The ferry was waiting at the bottom of the slipway. I thanked him for his hospitality and began to descend.

“Call again anytime, dear lady. I never stray far.”

“I forgot to ask, Mr. Dunrich. What happened on the eighteenth of November 1962 that enables you to recollect the date so clearly?”

“Did I not say? That was the day I was to have thrown myself from St. Saviour’s Point. It’s a sheer drop, you know.” He grinned.

“John dissuaded me.” I stared up at him in amazement. “Do not dally, Mrs. Galloway. The ferry is ready to depart.”

That night was still and frosty. The church clock was striking seven with leaden clarity as I climbed the steps to Bull Hill: the alley was deserted, inky black and silent.

Zoë welcomed me nervously. She was wearing a blouse and long skirt: I think it was her attempt to look smart. She showed me into the front room, where the paraffin stove had induced a humid warmth overlaid with the scent of smouldering joss sticks. The mournful voice of Bob Dylan was droning from a record player.

A figure rose from the sofa, where he’d been slumped out of sight. Tall, thin and sinewy in jeans and a black shirt, a mop of dark, curly hair reaching to his shoulders, several days’ growth of beard.

He didn’t smile or extend a hand in greeting.

“Hi,” he said levelly. “I’m Lee. You must be our new landlady.”

“In a sense. I’m Leonora Galloway. Inheriting this property came as something of a surprise to me.” I heard my own voice bounce back to me off his hollow-eyed stare. A middle-aged Englishwoman with an unfashionable accent: what must he have thought?

“Dylan your bag?”

I smiled. “Hardly.”

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“Reckon not. Make you uncomfortable, eh? The thought that the times may really be a-changing?”

Zoë came in behind me. “Turn that down, Lee, will you?” He shrugged his narrow shoulders and slouched across to reduce the volume. “Would you like something to drink, Mrs. Galloway?”

“Thank you. A sherry, perhaps.”

Lee sniggered. “No sherry, ma’am. How ’bout a beer?”

In the end, I had nothing. Lee took swigs from a can and smoked roll-up cigarettes, sitting on the carpet by the stove, as if he craved its warmth. I sat on the sofa and tried to make conversation while Zoë busied herself in the kitchen.

“Which state are you from, Lee?”

“New Jersey.”

“And what brought you to Cornwall?”

“Vietnam. You ain’t looking at a patriot. I’m here because we’re there. Shocked?”

“No.”

“Yes you are. ’Course you are.”

“Was Willis?”

He snorted. “How should I know? He didn’t exactly volunteer his feelings—on anything.”

“He gave you a home.”

“He gave Zo a home. He gave me . . . house room.”

Zoë had made some kind of flan. That, and a bowl of baked po-tatoes, constituted the meal, taken round the table in a corner of the room, lit by a fat red candle that cast its flickering glow on Lee’s drawn features and made him look gaunter than ever. On Zoë the effect was different. Her eyes, lambent and enlarged, regarded us both as from a distant plateau. Around us, Dylan’s voice wailed on.

“Had he never told you of his intention to leave the house to me?”

“No,” said Zoë softly. “He never so much as mentioned your name.”

“I can’t understand it. He made his will fourteen years ago.

Perhaps he forgot its provisions.”

“That man,” Lee put in with a slur, “never forgot a damn thing.”

“I went to see Mr. Dunrich this afternoon. He told me that Willis painted a good deal.”

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“Yes,” said Zoë. “He did.”

“He told me there was one particular painting, half-promised to him, that somehow went missing.”

“You talk to that creep,” Lee said, “and you’ll hear all kind o’

things.”

“You don’t like him?”

Lee scowled, but it was Zoë who answered. “Johnno liked him.

But sometimes he’s rather . . . confused.”

“Are there no paintings, then?”

“Yes. There are paintings. Johnno used the top floor as a kind of gallery. It was his . . . particular place.”

“Could I see them?”

Lee began to frame an objection, but Zoë cut him short. “Of course. Everything here is yours now. I’ll take you up after dinner.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Lee said. “Everything here is yours. We come with the property, body and soul.” He smiled defiantly.

Later, when Zoë showed me upstairs, Lee stayed behind, reclining by the stove, drinking and smoking, singing along with the music under his breath.

The narrow, enclosed stairs led to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor: I glimpsed a mattress and disordered blankets behind a bead curtain. Another flight led to a single room at the top of the house. Bare boards, with low windows set in the eaves, in one corner a strip of carpet and a narrow bed, elsewhere a jumble of easels, chairs and cupboards. I glanced around at the stray tea chests and irregular stacks of canvases, all with their faces turned to the wall.

Then I saw it. A shape by one of the windows, concealed by a sheet, too small to be an easel, somehow familiar. I stepped across and pulled off the sheet. It was the telescope from Meongate. I had no proof it was the same one, no way of being sure, other than the certainty I felt when I looked at its polished brass tube, the surface minutely pitted with scratches, or the splayed wooden pedestal, spotted with paint.

“What’s the matter?” said Zoë from behind me.

“I recognize this telescope. Was Willis an astronomer?”

She stood beside me in the black, uncurtained window, the light from a bare bulb falling coldly between us. “He was many things.

So many things.”

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“And the paintings?”

“They’re here.” She pointed to the stacks.

I went across and turned the canvases around, one by one. Local scenes: seascapes, river views, clifftops, crumbling castles, redun-dant tin mines. As Dunrich had said, there was skill in them. But, for all that, the subject matter was unremarkable.

“Eric came here a few days after Johnno died and sorted through them.”

I pushed the canvases back against the wall and rose to her eye level. “Mr. Dunrich suggested that Willis took you in because he needed your help—yours, not Lee’s—to finish a series of paintings.

Is that true?”

“We had a caravan out at Lankelly. It was meant to be just a summer let. We couldn’t have stuck it through the winter. We’d met Johnno in the King of Prussia several times. When he asked us if we’d like to share this house, we were in no position to refuse. And I didn’t want to. He didn’t charge us any rent. He only asked me to . . .