The Dark Clue (47 page)

‘Not fond!' he boomed, in the over-loud voice of the deaf. ‘Filthy dirty. Corrupt. Squalid's not the word for it.'

And then he embarked on a seemingly interminable anecdote about how he had been obliged to go to Naples on business (nothing less would have induced him to set foot in the place); how he had acquired there a Botticelli
Virgin and Child,
of whose true value the shifty peasant who sold it to him had not had the faintest conception; and how he intended to leave it to the National Gallery, together with the rest of his collection – the whole to be known as ‘The Cussons Bequest'.

This, at least, answered one question that had been perplexing me all evening: why the Eastlakes had invited such a morose and unsociable individual to dinner? But by the time he had finished, Turner had entirely disappeared from view.

Most hostesses, at the end of such a meal, would have either apologized
sotto voce
to the other ladies while they were withdrawing, or else tried brightly to pretend that nothing was amiss. Elizabeth Eastlake did neither; which surprised me (for I felt the ordeal we had passed through demanded some acknowledgement), until I saw that it arose not from thoughtlessness but from delicacy – for both courses, in this instance, would have only further compounded Mrs. Kingsett's anguish: the first by criticizing her husband in front of other people, and the second by requiring
her to affect normality and make polite small talk when she was clearly too upset to do so. Instead, Lady Eastlake calmly helped her friend upstairs (even then, Mrs. Kingsett was so close to collapse that she had to clutch the banister rail like an old woman), and settled her in a quiet corner in the boudoir before returning to Mrs. Somerville and myself in the drawing room.

‘My poor Marian,' she said. ‘This is not at all what you imagined, I'm afraid.'

‘Oh, no,' I said, wondering at my own mendacity. ‘It's been very pleasant.'

‘Don't lie,' she mouthed, tapping me in mock reproach (at which I heard Mrs. Somerville laughing softly at my side). ‘Did you bring your notes?'

‘Well…'

Her eye fell on my reticule; and she must have seen the bulge of my notebook, for she nodded.

‘Only because you asked me to …' I began.

She pulled a rueful face. ‘I know I did.'

‘But it doesn't matter. It can …'

‘I'm so sorry, my dear.' She touched my elbow impulsively, then turned to Mrs. Somerville. ‘I'm afraid I shall have to leave you to your own devices.' She glanced discreetly towards Mrs. Kingsett. ‘You do understand …'

‘Of course.'

She nodded gratefully, then started back towards the boudoir, with the quiet purposefulness of a doctor approaching his patient.

‘I dare say we shall manage, Miss Halcombe, don't you?' said Mrs. Somerville. She sat on the sofa, and patted the place beside her. ‘Come. Please. I fear nowadays I don't hear very well.'

I sat next to her. She smiled conspiratorially.

‘Just think what the gentlemen are having to endure,' she said – with a stress on
gentlemen
that clearly implied:
At least we don't have to suffer that.

I laughed, and sat next to her. Here at last, I thought, was an opportunity to retrieve something from the evening. I was about to raise the subject of Turner again when she spared me the trouble:

‘And what, may I ask, do your notes concern?'

I briefly explained.

The Eastlakes are always so busy,' she said, in the gentle tone of someone trying to excuse a friend's behaviour. They try heroically to attend to everything, they really do, but. . 'she shook her head … ‘but I should be delighted to hear your ideas, if you'd care to tell me.'

And with some trepidation, I took out my notebook.

I began with my (or rather, since I felt I must maintain the fiction that these views were Walter's as well as my own, with ‘our') earliest findings; and at first her response was very gratifying. When I spoke of Turner's relations with the Regency art world, and why they might have made him careful about money, she nodded approvingly, and murmured, ‘Yes, yes, how true.' My delineation of his character – his sensitivity to criticism; his shyness about his odd appearance and uncouth speech – seemed to please her even more; and she clapped her hands with delight when I concluded:

‘Small wonder, then, that he shrank from the eyes of the world; and was willing that people should think him a miser and a fool, if only they would leave him alone.'

‘Excellent, Miss Halcombe!' she cried out. ‘May I ask – was that your phrase, or your brother's?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘“Shrank from the eyes of the world”?'

‘Mine, I think,' I said. ‘Though I fear it's an unremarkable enough image.'

‘Not at all,' she said. ‘Very apt. The watchful eye. The cold eye. The censorious eye.'

Perhaps I looked perplexed; for she smiled, and touched the corner of her own eye, as if to clarify the point. ‘That's what he feared. But it's also what fascinated him.'

I only half-saw her meaning; but the ghostly outline of one of Turner's doll-figures suddenly entered my mind, like a bookmark placed in a page that may repay further attention.

‘And he was very knowledgeable about it. I have seldom known anyone – besides other scientists – with such a keen interest in optics, and in the theory of light and colour. Or with such a sound grasp of the principles. You'd see him at Rogers', deep -'

‘Roger?' I said; and then, before she had time to reply, realized

I had misheard her. ‘Oh, you mean
Rogers'?'

She nodded.

‘The banker,' I said, recalling that I had heard Lady Eastlake talk of him more than once.

‘I think he would have preferred to be remembered as a poet,' she said, with a wistful smile. ‘At all events, we all regularly met at his house. My husband and myself; Herschel, Faraday, Babbage, Tom Moore, Campbell. And Turner could speak to any one of us on our own subjects, and with great authority.'

‘Indeed?' I said, astonished; for this seemed entirely at odds with the impression I had gained from Lady Meesden's papers.

She nodded. ‘Most of the great men I have known – and Turner was, indisputably, a great man – have possessed the same quality. Which leads me to wonder whether genius is not so much a highly developed aptitude for one thing, but rather a kind of general intellectual capacity, that may be more or less equally applied to any field. Certainly Turner might have been a successful scientist or engineer, had he chosen. Anyway -'

‘But what, then, of the people who said he was inarticulate?'

She shrugged. ‘He could be hard to understand when he spoke publicly. But not when he was relaxed, and among friends.' She paused, struck by a sudden recollection. ‘The only complaints you ever heard then were from dullards, who could not soar to the same heights. I remember once we were at a
conversazzione,
and I had been snared by a gentleman who talked of nothing but the funds, and the price of corn. And Turner came up to me, and plucked from his pocket a yellow handkerchief. “Now, Mrs. Somerville,” he said' – and here, to my surprise, she dropped into a gruff cockney voice that I took to be a fair imitation of Turner's – ‘“what d'you say this is?”

‘“Why, a handkerchief, of course.”

‘He put it back in his pocket. “And where is it?”

‘“In your coat.”

‘“And what colour is it?”

‘“Yellow.”

‘“You're sure?”

‘Naturally, I was laughing by this point – I had some idea what was in his mind – but I said: “Of course.”

‘He wagged a finger at me and shook his head. “A consciousness
of the fallacy of our judgement is one of the most important consequences of the study of nature, which teaches us that no object is seen by us in its true place. And that colours are solely the effects of the action of matter upon light, and that light itself is not a real being/'

‘Well, needless to say, Miss Halcombe, my dull companion had been shifting from one foot to the other during this performance, and rolling his eyes; and now he could contain himself no longer.

‘“If you don't mind my saying so,” he said, “that's absolute gibberish.”

‘“Really?” said Turner. “Then perhaps you should read Mrs. Somerville's book.'”

She laughed, with a complicit glint in her eye, as if I were in on the joke with her and Turner – rather than (as I had shamefully to admit to myself) in the same predicament as the gentleman who talked of funds and the price of corn.

‘I'm sorry . . .'I stumbled. ‘I –'

‘It was a quotation, almost word for word, from
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.'

‘I'm afraid I didn't quite understand …' I said. ‘Could you perhaps explain. ..?'

‘I was talking about the constraints of the scientific method,' she replied. ‘Which Turner, I think, found disturbing. Despite making light of it.'

‘Because …? Because .. .?'I said, hoping to tempt her into saying something more before I had to.

‘Because
thought -
the exercise of reason – will only take us so far,' she said at length. ‘And then we reach the limit of its competence. For my part, I am content to leave it to faith – the grace and cohesion of what we
do
know, through mathematics, are enough to convince me of . . . of . . .' she hesitated, carefully formulating the right words … ‘of the unity and omniscience of the Deity. But Turner, I suspect, didn't have that consolation.'

‘He was not a believer?'

‘We did not discuss it,' she said shortly. ‘But I think he saw the chaos and destruction in Nature before he saw the beauty – or rather I think he saw them together, as expressions of the same awful power. And our incapacity to grasp it, to understand it, was humiliating confirmation of our fundamental impotence.'

‘That's very interesting,' I said. And I immediately started to explain my conjectures about Turner's childhood – his mother's madness; his terror of storms, both natural and human – which seemed to accord precisely with what she had just told me. To my surprise and disappointment, however, she regarded me with an expression of growing distaste; and, when I had finished, said:

‘Forgive me if I am being old-fashioned, Miss Halcombe, but I think a biographer should confine himself to ascertainable facts, and to the recollections of those who knew his subject,' Her tone was measured, but two little angry spots on her cheeks betrayed her. ‘This, it appears to me, is neither; but merely unfounded speculation.'

I was about to try to defend myself; but before I could do so the gentlemen entered.

I am unclear exactly what happened next, and in what order; for this (or so it seems, looking back) is the moment when the waking world suddenly gave way to nightmare, and from now on everything has the jumbled logic of a dream. I recall Mr. Kingsett, very drunk, stumbling on a rug by the fire; I remember Lady Eastlake reappearing from the boudoir, and saying, ‘I hope, gentlemen, you're going to entertain us; for we've been a bit sombre'; I remember Mrs. Kingsett standing like a spectre in the doorway behind her.

And then we are all sitting, and one of the gentlemen is saying something about a new American medium called Mrs. Mast, who has been doing a brisk trade among fashionable ladies in London – ‘for she doesn't use rapping or table-turning like the others, but talks in the voices of the dead themselves'. Lady Eastlake laughs – ‘People are so
gullible
' – but Sir Charles mentions a Mrs. Somebody-or-other who swears she heard her dead son speaking to her. ‘What's the harm', he says, ‘if it gives her comfort?'

Lady Eastlake snorts.

Mr. Kingsett looks at his wife, and says:

‘We could employ Mrs. Mast permanently, my dear, could we not? To communicate with your mother. Might improve your spirits, to hear her complaining about me.'

Then confusion: sharp intakes of breath; Mrs. Kingsett crying; Mr. Kingsett saying she is unwell, and must go home; Walter and
me both, simultaneously, offering to go with them (for the thought of their being incarcerated alone in a cab together is unbearable); Mr. Kingsett saying it is quite unnecessary; Lady Eastlake thanking us, and insisting on our behalf.

The street outside: helping Mrs. Kingsett into the Eastlakes' carriage. And then her husband – as if he had not insulted me enough already – suddenly putting his arm about my waist, and saying (why?),'
Please
, Miss Halcombe, we shall do perfectly well by ourselves.'

And then, as I have recovered myself, and put one foot on the step, it happens: a figure appears from nowhere – I am conscious only of a warm, dark bulk too close to me, and the stench of gin and dirty clothes – and there is a tremendous tug on my wrist, and my reticule is gone.

Running footsteps. Two sets of running footsteps. Walter crying ‘Stop, thief!', and disappearing after him round the corner of the square.

I wept. I shook. I could not help myself. Elizabeth Eastlake was very kind, and sat up with me, and said I might stay the night; but when Walter had still not returned after an hour, I thanked her and returned to Brompton Grove, thinking I might find him there.

I didn't.

I could not sleep. I sat at my writing table, waiting – as I had on the night of our visit to Sandycombe Lodge – for the sound of his key in the door.

It never came.

I tried not to imagine what might have happened to him, but I could not keep his image from my mind – injured, or murdered, or broken in some dreadful accident; nor the awful reflection that in some way this was my doing.

If only I had been more alert. Taken more care. Never introduced him to Elizabeth Eastlake.