The Dark Clue (12 page)

‘And her brother-in-law, Mr. Hartright,' said Lady Eastlake. Walter can usually extort a smile from the stoniest misanthrope, but the old woman was as frosty with him as she had been with me; and it was, I thought, with some relief that Lady Eastlake turned away from her to present us to the other members of her party: Lady Meesden's daughter, Mrs. Kingsett; her husband (who appeared, among his other misfortunes, to be called Mauritius); and their own daughter, Florence, an awkward, coltish seventeen-year-old who blushed when you looked at her.

‘Marian is a particular friend of mine, Lydia,' said Lady East-lake.

‘Indeed?' said Mrs. Kingsett. She was about fifty, with plaited greying hair coiled neatly behind her head, and wearing a loose-fitting walking dress in a fine red-and-white check that looked wonderfully free and comfortable. She was too square and craggy to be considered beautiful; but there was a certain vivacious charm to her voice when she smiled and said:

‘Well, there can't be a better recommendation than that.'

‘Perhaps “By Appointment to the Queen”?' said Lady East-lake.

Mrs. Kingsett laughed; and – as if trying to make up for her mother's coldness – shook my hand in the most easy and affable manner imaginable.

‘Sir Charles and I are away on our autumn visit to Italy next week,' Lady Eastlake went on. ‘And I have come to remind myself what great
English
art can be.'

‘What do
you
think, Miss Halcombe?' said Mrs. Kingsett, casting her eyes about her in a way that seemed to include the whole exhibition. ‘Are you quite overwhelmed?'

‘Quite,' I said.

‘I, too.'

At this, her husband, who was standing at her elbow, gave a derisive ‘tk' – which she studiedly ignored – and looked away with a long-suffering smile. Nature had not dealt kindly with him; for he had a turned-up nose like a pig, and a pulled-down mouth, with too many teeth, like a wolf; and whiskers so curled that you'd think they'd been singed by his hot and florid complexion; and in his little gesture of defiance, and his wife's pointed refusal to acknowledge it, I suddenly fancied that (as sometimes happens) I could read the whole history of their connection. Here were a plain man and a plain woman, who had married – as they thought – for mutual advantage: he for the respectability that came with her station, and her mother's title; she, poor thing, for fear that a shy and ungainly girl like herself might have no husband at all if she refused him. But over the years, both had come to realize that she was his intellectual, as well as his social, superior; and as she had grown in confidence, and blossomed into maturity, so he had dwindled into sourness and disappointment. Any true feelings they might have had for each other had been eaten away by the acid of his resentment and her contempt – leaving the marriage an empty shell, into which she had steadily expanded, by developing as independent a life as was consistent with respectability, and he had been reduced to sulking in a corner.

You could not help but feel sorry for both of them, but I must own that the balance of my sympathy lay with her – if only because her fate, or something like it, might all too easily have been my own. Perhaps Mr. Kingsett sensed this; for, though he shook my hand (he really could not do otherwise, when his wife had already done so), his grip was as slack and uninterested as a dead fish, and he immediately turned away with an inaudible mumble, and fixed his watery gaze on the fireplace. To my surprise,
as I moved myself, I noticed that Lady Meesden was scowling at us, with a ferocity that suggested she had witnessed the whole episode.

Certainly, Mr. Kingsett's hostility cannot have arisen from any consciousness of social distinction, for he received Walter as one greets an old friend – or, perhaps it would be truer to say, as a drowning man greets a log, for here was a promise of rescue from the ocean of females in which the poor man found himself, and he clung to it for dear life. Within less than a minute he had manoeuvred Walter away from me and established a small gentlemen's club, with a membership of two, in the corner. A moment later I heard him opening the proceedings with: ‘I think a picture should be
of
something, and you should be able to see what it is.'

Not wanting to add to Walter's embarrassment by eavesdropping on his reply, I turned back towards Mrs. Kingsett; but she – doggedly pursuing her policy of disregarding her husband altogether – was already deep in conversation with Lady Eastlake again, and I felt I could not intrude. Rather than brave the bellicose Lady Meesden or her tongue-tied granddaughter, therefore, I decided to study the picture before us.

It was another classical subject:
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus.
Again, we are close to the bottom left-hand corner, looking diagonally across the canvas to a brilliant sunrise on the low horizon, which casts its rays into the sky, burnishing the underside of the clouds and veining them with bloodshot streaks. The foreground is dominated by Ulysses' ship, its gilded hull trimmed with stripes of black and red, moving from left to right into the centre of the canvas as it makes for the open sea. The water is soporifically calm, with tiny lapping waves that seem barely to have the energy to reach the shore, but on board everything is bustle: the decks are crowded, the oars are out, and sailors swarm up the mast and yards, frantically setting the ornately decorated sails or raising their red flags. Behind them, almost in darkness, is the dark mass of Polyphemus's island.

I knew, I think, even before I had consciously noted any of the details, that this picture was unlike the others – or, rather, that it somehow
fulfilled
the others; for, like a song, of which, up until now, you have only a few notes and half the chorus, it seemed to
bring together all those peculiarities which I had glimpsed elsewhere, and miraculously fuse them into a glorious whole. Here was the beautiful but merciless sun; here the entrance to the underworld – the mouth of Polyphemus's cave, its blackness broken this time not by the gleam of a serpent, but by a single smear of reddish gold, which could be the glow of a fire within, or of the sun without; here, above all, those weird hybrid objects that seemed to be two things at once, or one thing in the process of turning into another. The prow of Ulysses' ship was a gaping fish-jaw, its shape echoed by two great arch-like rocks in the sea beyond, while about it, in the foam, played silvery figures – nymphs? spirits? – which gradually faded into transparency, until they were one with the water, and disappeared. Saluting it, on the right edge of the canvas, was the figurehead of another ship, which rose up like a clenched fist – or one of those odd flipper-limbs: fish, and flesh, and wood, all at once – before a cluster of clouds that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the horses of Apollo's chariot, drawing the sun into the sky. And the wounded giant himself, rearing in agony above his island, was so vague that he, too, might be a cloud, or the mist-covered peak of a mountain.

Each of these effects taken on its own could have been merely disturbing, but in their totality they seemed to achieve a kind of dreamlike enchantment which made me think for a moment that I had at last glimpsed (though I could not put it into words) Turner's purpose. The subject was sombre enough, and its treatment strange to the point of insanity: yet (in this picture, at least) the beauty seemed finally to outweigh the horror and the madness – and to be, indeed, all the greater for having absorbed the base elements of our experience, and transmuted them into gold. Exhilarated, I opened my notebook and wrote: ‘Magician. Alchemist.'

I had barely finished when I was startled (the ‘t' of ‘Alchemist' has a long squiggling tail to prove it) by someone speaking at my elbow:

‘I sing the cave of Polypheme,

Ulysses made him cry out…'

Astonished, I looked round. There was Lady Meesden – one
hand raised, to signal to the manservant that he should stop – gliding into place at my side. Without pausing, she continued:

‘For he ate his mutton, drank his wine,

And then he poked his eye out.'

Her voice was rather faint, but there was something commanding about it – not the imperious tone you might imagine from a woman in her position, but rather a kind of operatic flourish that made you think you were listening to a performance rather than a conversation. I noticed several other people glancing at her as if they expected her to break into song; and, in truth, I half-expected it myself, for I had no idea what she was talking about, and it seemed as likely as anything else that she was mad, and merely reliving some entertainment from her youth – like Walter's old woman in Hand Court.

‘Tom Dibdin,' she said, as if by way of explanation.

The name was familiar – it somehow conjured in my mind a world of stage-coaches and sailing-ships and breezy spring mornings, before railways and factories turned England into a great machine, and swaddled it in smoke – but I could not for a moment place it.

‘Melodrame Mad.
1819.'

And then I remembered: Thomas Dibdin's
Reminiscences
had been a great favourite of my father's when I was a child – although, fearful that it might corrupt me, and make me run away, and become a travelling player like its author, he forbade me to read it. (This interdiction, of course, only increased its romance for me, prompting me to sneak into the library whenever I could, and stealthily devour two or three pages of an anecdote about a theatre manager or an actress, before approaching footsteps forced me to make my escape.) I still could not see the relevance to Turner's work, however; and the perplexity must have shown on my face, for, pointing a wavering finger at the picture, Lady Meesden said:

‘His inspiration for that. Or so he claimed.'

‘Turner, you mean?' I said.

‘Of course Turner,' she snapped; but then softened it by (for a marvel) smiling at me, and saying more gently: ‘But he might not have meant it.'

‘Why should he say it, then?'

‘Why, to shock,' she said, as if nothing could be more natural, and I must be an idiot to ask. ‘It was some damned silly woman, as I recall, whispering to a clergyman.
So misty, so spiritual, so ethereal, Mr. Whatever-his-name-was. Upon my word, I don't know how Turner does it. He must be a magician.
Or some such nonsense.'

I confess I felt myself blushing, but had the grace to smile.

‘And he told her he'd got the idea not from
The Odyssey,
as we'd all supposed, but from a ditty in a comic spectacle.' She shook her head, and started to laugh, almost silently. ‘I bet she never dared offer another opinion in her life.'

‘Were you there yourself?' I asked.

‘He told me of it afterwards.'

‘Oh, so you knew him personally?'

‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,' she replied, with a knowing emphasis on the T and the ‘Tur' that immediately made me wonder if their acquaintance had been more than mere friendship. The same thought, I fancy, must have struck the little audience that had gathered around us; for a stout woman who had been listening (and pretending not to) from the beginning, shot Lady Meesden a stern glance, and turned her back; and a man behind us took his wife by the arm and hurried her away.

‘He was a great lover of the theatre,' Lady Meesden went on, entirely heedless of the stir she had created. There was something proprietorial in her tone which suggested that the theatre was
her
world, and she would therefore naturally know anyone who frequented it; and for the first time it occurred to me that – improbable as it might seem – she might, from her appearance and the way she spoke, have once been an actress.

‘Did you appear there yourself?' I said – with just enough levity to be able to pretend, if necessary, that I was merely joking.

‘Lord, yes,' she said, laughing; and then, to save me from the need for a further question (which I was already trying to devise): ‘I'm Kitty Driver.'

‘Mrs.
Driver?'

She nodded. ‘Or was, until Meesden plucked me from the green room, and set me down in the drawing room.' The phrase had a worn, over-rehearsed air, and I wondered how many times she must have resorted to it over the last fifty years, hoping that a show of wit in discussing her origins might disarm disapproval of them.

‘I was never fortunate enough to see you – 'I began.

‘Of course, you're too young.'

‘But Walter's mother still speaks of your Lady Wurzel.'

She shook her head, but the faintest glow of pleasure appeared beneath the white mask.

‘That was the end of my career. My Mrs. Mandible, 1810, now, there was a thing. Or Lucy Lovelorn in
All in a Day.
Meesden saw it thirty-nine times.'

‘Really?'

She nodded again. ‘He wrote to me every night; and at the end he met me at the stage door and said: “There's no denying it, by God, you've got my heart, fair and square, Mrs. D. And if you give it back again, I'll go straight into the street and offer it to the first woman I meet there, damn me if I won't – for, if you won't have me, I don't care what happens to me.”'

There was another ripple in the crowd about us, which, again, Lady Meesden seemed not to notice; for she guffawed and went on: ‘What could I do but marry the dog?'

I laughed. ‘And what of Turner?' I said – a trifle clumsily, for I could think of no other way to guide the conversation back to its original subject. ‘Was he also an admirer?'

She did not answer directly, but rested her chin on her hand and stared at the floor for a moment, as if the idea surprised her. At length she said. ‘He was a sly, secretive fellow, Miss . . . Miss … Miss …'

‘Halcombe.'

‘Miss Halcombe. He felt a hurt more keenly, I think, than any man I ever knew – and, as a consequence, was morbidly careful to avoid any risk of public humiliation. Few of us knew anything of his private affairs – save that he lived with his father, and had a mad housekeeper. There were
les on-dits,
of course, about a woman, but…' She paused, and shook her head.