In Pale Battalions (44 page)

dye my hair. And let him look at me.”

“Why did he want you to dye it?”

“There was some resemblance he wanted, that he needed to capture in his paintings.”

“You were his model?”

“Yes.”

“But the only paintings here are landscapes. Where are the others, Zoë? Where have they gone?”

“Say nothing, Zo!” It was Lee’s voice, raised and peremptory. I turned to see him walking slowly up the stairs, a sullen look of anger on his face. “Any questions, ma’am, you direct ’em to me. But I have to tell you: you won’t get any answers.” He moved across to join us. “This is your house now, right enough, so if you want to give us notice to quit . . .” “I never . . .”

“If you want to, that’s fine. That’s your privilege. But as far as what went on here before you showed up, then I advise you to keep off. If there are any pictures missing, it’s because the old man sold

’em before he died.”

“But he promised Mr. Dunrich . . .”

“You heard what I said. That’s my last word.”

I too had grown angry. “Then here’s mine. I hadn’t made up my 296

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mind to ask you to leave. I wasn’t sure I had a right to. But now I am sure. You’ll hear from me through Mr. Trevannon. I dare say he’ll know what notice is reasonable. Good night to you both.”

I left them there and only silence followed me down the stairs.

The anger had gone by morning, but the resolution remained: I would be rid of them and shortly rid of the house. If Willis had left it to me because of a debt he felt he owed my father, then he could hardly object to what I chose to do with it. Niggling, undefined suspicions remained. He could only have obtained the telescope by buying it at the Meongate auction. Why hadn’t he told me of it when he’d visited me in Wells? What else had he bought there?

It was useless. I couldn’t interrogate a dead man. I returned from a walk to Readymoney Cove more sure than ever of what I would do.

At the hotel, the receptionist told me I had a visitor waiting in the lounge. It was Zoë. She was sitting by one of the picture windows that looked out over the estuary. She seemed out of place among the deep leather sofas and stately rubber plants, a vulnerable Cornish girl ill at ease in plush surroundings.

“Hello,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

She looked up at me with pleading, innocent eyes. “I wanted to apologize for what happened last night.”

I sat down beside her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was, partly.”

“Would you like me to order some coffee?”

“No. No thanks. Not for me.”

“It’s kind of you to have called. But I don’t think you’ll change my mind. Lee . . .”

“I’ve come to tell you the truth.” She lowered her voice. “We sold the other paintings. The day after Johnno died, Lee took them to a guy he knows in Plymouth. To be honest, we needed the money.

But we didn’t know Johnno had left the place to anybody then, so it didn’t really seem like stealing.”

“I can understand that. But why didn’t you sell all of them?”

“The rest weren’t worth anything. You see, the ones we sold weren’t by Johnno, except for the last one. He’d painted that in the style of the others—somebody else’s style.”

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“What do you mean—a forgery?”

“Not exactly. I don’t think he meant to pass it off as the other artist’s work. He just . . .”

“Who was the other artist?”

“I’d never heard of him. But Baz—that’s Lee’s friend in Plymouth—reckoned they were worth a bit. He said they were by somebody called Bartholomew.”

So. He had bought more than just the telescope. “How many pictures were there?”

“Three in all. Two genuine and the one that Johnno did. It wasn’t like his other work. It was kind of . . . weird. It’s the one he wanted me to model for. He had me dye my hair and wear an old-fashioned dress. Sort of Edwardian, I suppose.” “Was it you he was painting, Zoë? Or somebody you resembled?”

“I reckon you must know who it was. When I said he never mentioned your name, I wasn’t telling the truth—not exactly. I remember, when he’d finished the picture, he stood back and looked at it and said something. Just a whisper really. I don’t think he realized I could hear him.” “What did he say?”

“He just said your name. ‘Leonora.’ That’s all. But it isn’t you he meant, is it?”

“No. It isn’t me.”

I drove to Plymouth that afternoon. Zoë had given me the address: Barbican Fine Arts, Southside Street. It was in a cramped arcade near the fish quay, a ground-level display inspired by Dalí and Bosch luring the unwary to a cavernous, first-floor studio hung with trawling nets and skull-like seashells. Luridly coloured beams supported a bewildering array of the old and the new: eighteenth-century spaniels in torment alongside modern-day images of Dalíesque surrealism, with Wagner playing ominously in the background. I felt and must have looked absurdly out of place.

“Can I help you?” The assistant was female, emaciated and mini-skirted, shivering in the sail-loft chill and sniffing as she spoke.

“I’m looking for Mr. Basil Gates,” I said.

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“You a friend of his?”

“I’m a friend of Lee Cormack—you might say. Is Mr. Gates in?”

“I’ll go and see.”

She left me gazing at a vast and lividly wrought representation of some vaguely East European village. In every hut and hovel, a bestial act was in progress, visible through open doors or windows: a kind of advent calendar of sundry perversions. It was skilfully done and that only made it worse.

“One of mine.” The voice came from behind me, deep and mellow with a sickly sweetness. “Do you like it?”

I turned round. My questioner was tall, willow-thin and nordic blond, clad in jeans and a smock, beads hung about his neck. His bright little eyes glinted at me from behind circular, slender-framed glasses, a pointed Cavalier-style beard adding a narcissistic note to the bohemian air. “I think it’s very well painted,” I said.

He smiled, displaying a row of jagged yellow teeth. “You don’t like it. I’m glad. You’re not meant to.”

“You’re Mr. Gates?”

“The very same.”

“I believe you’re a friend of Lee Cormack.”

“I know him, yeh. What’s it to you?”

“I’ll come straight to the point. Lee sold you three paintings by the late-Victorian artist Philip Bartholomew earlier this month.”

“He could have.”

“They weren’t his to sell. They belong to me.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“I don’t want to cause you any trouble. I accept my neglect was partly responsible. I’m simply trying to recover them. Do you still have them?”

He smiled again. “Bartholomew’s not strictly my style. You can see I wouldn’t have wanted to hang on to them.”

“So what did you do with them?”

“I have contacts. Some are into that kind of thing. I’d have disposed of them that way.”

“I’m anxious to get them back. Would you be willing to give me the name of your contact?”

Once more the twisted grin. “You have to consider my expenses.”

“How much do you want?”

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“Look on it as a contribution to the struggle for artistic in-tegrity.”

“How much?”

“That’s up to you.”

I opened my purse. He reached forward, with slender, questing fingers, and drew out a five-pound note. “I took them to London.

Knew a feller mounting an exhibition of that kind of stuff.”

“His name?”

“Toby Raiment. He runs a shop in Camden Passage, Islington.

Don’t say I sent you.”

I phoned directory inquiries from the nearest call box and they gave me Raiment’s number. But the man who answered was only

“minding the shop.” He suggested I ring again in the morning.

I did so from my room at the Fowey Hotel. Mr. Raiment had one of those opulent voices which sound as if their possessor is per-manently engaged in chewing toffee.

“Bartholomews? Yes. I had three in my major retrospective on neglected late-Victorian artists. It runs until the end of February.”

“You say you
had
three—not
have
?”

“Sold one. They’re greatly in demand, you know.”

“Could I possibly come and see the other two?”

“Of course. Do you wish me to put them aside for you?”

“Yes. Yes please. Would Saturday morning be convenient?”

He took my name and we agreed on a time.

I climbed Bull Hill later that morning, conscious that it might be for the last time. The alley was silent but for my own footsteps and the distant bark of a dog. The door of number thirteen was ajar, so I knocked and went in.

“Hello?”

Zoë’s voice came to me from the front room. “In here.”

She was sitting on the sofa, reading, with her legs curled beneath her and the cat dozing against her feet. A Simon and Garfunkel record was playing softly in the background. She looked up as I entered and I saw at once that her right eye had been blacked.

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“Zoë! What happened?”

“Lee found out I’d been to see you—and why. That is, I told him why.”

I sat down on the sofa beside her. “You poor thing. Is there anything I can do?”

“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. Lee’s gone, you see.”

“Gone?”

“To London, I think. He has friends at the LSE. It’s been coming for a long time—since before Johnno died. And now—well, he didn’t want to answer any awkward questions about the paintings, I suppose. He can’t risk being sent back to the States as things stand at present.” “I’m sorry it’s come to this. I really am.”

“Don’t be. I reckon it’s for the best.”

“Will you stay here on your own? You can, you know. I never . . .”

“No. I wouldn’t want to do that. Now Johnno’s gone, I don’t really want to stay. My sister and her husband run a restaurant in Truro. They’ve often asked me to go and help. Now’s the time to take them up on it.” She smiled, proudly, through the bruise; seemed, for a moment, very like my own or any mother’s daughter.

She held up the book she’d been reading. “Do you know the poems of Stevie Smith?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll read you one. It’s called ‘Not Waving but Drowning.’ It always reminds me of Johnno.

“ ‘Nobody heard him, the dead man ,
But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning . . .’ ”

The images of the poem stayed with me as, later, I walked away down Bull Hill, images of drowning mistaken and strangely familiar, images that hovered at the edge of the mind like an often-used name which, suddenly and infuriatingly, one cannot recall.

“ ‘I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.’ ”

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After she left Fowey, Zoë sent me postcards at sporadic intervals over the next year or so. The last one said simply, “I’ve been happy for quite a while now,” and was postmarked Dublin. When I think of her, it’s not as Zoë Telfer, making her way in the world; rather, as she was that last day, reading poetry to me with a bruised face, the play of weak sunlight on her hair giving notice that soon, all too soon, the blond dye would be gone and, with it, an illusion, gone, like another illusion, at another time, for ever.

I was home again that evening. Tony seemed relieved to hear that Zoë would go without protest and volunteered to take charge of the house sale. As for my “shopping trip” to London on Saturday, he appeared blithely unsuspecting.

You probably don’t know Camden Passage and I’ve never been there since. It seemed, on a day of leaden skies and steady rain, merely one turning among many off the grey, congested streets leading north-east out of central London. The taxi driver dropped me at the corner. Raiment’s Gallery was flanked by an antiques shop and an Italian restaurant. I went straight in, setting a bell above the door jangling frantically.

Display cases in the centre of the shop held tinted county maps, illustrations from
Punch
and a miscellany of period prints. The walls were hung with Raiment’s “major retrospective,” comprising a mediocre array of family portraits, London sunsets and alfresco tea parties, interspersed with stags’ heads and stuffed badgers. As I surveyed them with growing distaste, a strip curtain at the back of the shop parted and I was joined by the proprietor: tall, fleshy, with a mane of ginger hair and a crested blazer. Signet rings, brass buttons and cufflinks glittered in the gloom. I introduced myself.

“Of course. The Bartholomew lady. Come with me.” He led the way through the strip curtain and down a short flight of steps to a longer, lower room, where prints were piled in disorderly profusion amongst empty frames and stretched canvases. He turned to the right-hand wall with a gesture of triumph.

They were the two paintings I’d rejected when offered them before the auction at Meongate, the same two unsavoury reminders of the artistic imagination of Philip Bartholomew. I might have guessed, but had dreaded to guess, that these were the two unsold.

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“I’m very sorry,” I said. “It’s the third one I was interested in.”

“You’re intimately familiar with the works, then.” Mr. Raiment sounded annoyed.

“As a matter of fact, I am. You bought all three from Basil Gates, the Plymouth dealer.”

“I really don’t see . . .”

“The point is that the third work was on the same theme, but somehow distinctive. Wasn’t it?”

“Possibly.”

“Would you feel able to tell me who bought it?” He smiled and was about to refuse, so I cut him short. “Mr. Raiment, I do appreciate that I’ve inconvenienced you. That was not my intention. If I could, in some way, defray the costs . . .” “I took them out of the sale. You may have cost me a customer.”