The Dark Clue (54 page)

‘Is that what I said? Dear me.' He waves a hand at the laden table, and tugs his misshapen mouth into a smile. ‘If hypocrisy
were a capital offence, my prospects would be poor indeed.'

‘It
was
beyond me. I need your help.'

At last he looks at me. That is a sad state for any man to find himself in,' he says slowly. ‘And if it is the case I am truly sorry for it.'

‘What is the truth about him?'

‘Ah, the truth!' He shakes his head morosely. ‘How do you find the truth about a man who eschewed the literal, and spoke in riddles? It will end by making you mad.'

‘I fear it already has.'

He stares deep into my eyes, and then nods. ‘The truth about Turner', he says, ‘is never direct. Always oblique. There are hints of it in the pictures, of course, but you can never fully comprehend it. It cannot be reduced to its component parts, or to any simple proposition. There will always be something beyond, that defies our attempts to imprison it in words.'

I feel I am about to faint. I drop on to the chair. He appears not to notice.

‘Perhaps the same might be said of all of us. I certainly hope it may be said of me. But most of us may be represented by a kind of tapestry, in which the principal elements – honesty, dishonesty, intelligence, stupidity – are clearly visible. In Turner, by contrast, the cloth is twisted and folded and wound in on itself. When you glimpse a thread you never know whether it is a part of the subject, or a chance trick of the weaver's art, or a false trail deliberately woven into the fabric to puzzle or mislead.' He pauses. Examines his own fingers. Fastidiously blows the chalk dust from them. ‘You are familiar, of course, with the fallacies of hope?'

An odd expression, but the meaning is plain enough. ‘If I wasn't before, the last five months have made me so.'

He cannot resist a smile. ‘I was not referring to your own experiences, Mr. Hartright, but to Turner's poetic
magnum opus.'

'The Fallacies of Hope?'

He nods. ‘You have not heard of it?'

‘No.'

He raises one shaggy eyebrow. I have fallen still further in his estimation, if such a thing is possible. He shuts his eyes, in the effort of remembering, and declaims:

‘Craft, treachery, and fraud – Salassian force,

Hung on the fainting rear! – then Plunder seiz'd

The victor and the captive, – Saguntum's spoils

Alike, became their prey …

That was the start of it. The caption to
Hannibal Crossing the Alps
in 1812. He'd used verses as captions to his pictures before, of course, but they were always taken from other poets, though often garbled or misquoted. The attribution here was:
MS. Fallacies of Hope.
Thereafter, it appeared on his paintings again and again, each time with a different verse. So what does everyone naturally assume?'

It is too remote from my thoughts for me to grasp it immediately.

He prompts me: ‘What is the implication?'

‘That. . . that… he has – or has written – a poem. An unpublished poem. And is extracting pertinent passages from it, to serve as captions.'

‘Exactly. And he must have known that was the impression he was giving. But it wasn't true.'

‘It didn't exist?'

‘Not in its entirety. He merely composed lines, or adapted them from other writers, when he needed them. It's a false trail, you see?' He lifts his finger, and traces its progress on an imaginary tapestry. ‘A flash of colour here – a flash there – you think they belong to the same continuous strand, but they don't. It's an illusion.'

I can barely muster the strength to ask:

‘Can we then trust nothing?'

He shrugs, and looks at me curiously, as if he were seeing me for the first time. At length he says:

‘What is troubling you, Mr. Hartright?'

And I tell him. I tell him about Farrant and Hargreaves – about our dinner at Fitzroy Square, and my abduction afterwards – about Lucy, and the hood and the ropes. I tell him about Travis, and Marian's notebook, and my growing suspicion of the Eastlakes (at which he cannot suppress a wintry smile). And about my meeting with Simpson, and my uncertainty as to whether or not it was a dream, and the seance with Mrs. Mast. I tell him I don't know what to believe.

But I do not tell him I fucked two whores, thinking it would make me a genius.

He does not even seem surprised. He nods, and then stares at me in silence.

And I am conscious only of the relief of having said so much, and not being vilified or rejected or laughed at for it. And of the intolerable burden of what I have
not
said, which sits in my belly like a small hot coal.

O, God, to be rid of that too! To have said it all – to have revealed those things in myself so dark and terrible that even
I
had not suspected their existence, and to find myself still accepted – that would be a kind of redemption. The only kind I can now conceive.

But it is impossible. Even as I write these words I know

O God

Write. Write. Record.

At length he gets up. He surveys the wall of boxes, finds the one he is looking for, and carefully removes it. Then he brings it to the table and – reaching in his pocket for a key – unlocks it.

‘He was, unquestionably, a man of deep, strange errors and failures,' he says. ‘And I find myself more and more helpless to explain them. Save that they all arose from his faithlessness, or despair. For this is the century of despair; and it has corroded the greatest minds as perniciously as it has the lowest.'

He opens the box, takes out another notebook, and turns to the last few pages. Sketch after sketch of men and women in bed together. Nothing is complete – a pair of buttocks here, a raised leg there, a hand clutching a bare shoulder – and the faces cannot be seen at all; but it is plain enough to what they refer. Pictures not of people – not even of entire bodies – but merely of an act.

‘Yes,' I say. ‘It's ugly. But is there any evidence that he – that he could have been capable of… of …?'

‘I am an art critic, Mr. Hartright, not a detective. I can only tell you – as I told you before – that there is a dark clue running through Turner's art, and it is the darkness of death. There is another running through his life, and it is the darkness of England.' He pauses, and shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘What he might have done for us had he received help and love, I can hardly trust myself to imagine. But we disdained him. For seventy-six
grinding years we tortured his spirit, as we torture the spirits of all our brightest children. And we are torturing it still, now that he is dead.'

‘Because of the will, you mean?'

‘Ah, yes, the will. We
say
it is the will, because a will concerns money and the law, and those are things we can comprehend. They are
all
we can comprehend. But Turner stirred something deeper in this blind, tormented country – something of which, with our bluff good sense, we are barely aware in ourselves. Turner foresaw our end, which few of us can face. Worse still, he dared to love the light – something without a price on it, which could not be defined and contained in the dreary little counting-house of our minds. And we punished him for it. Whatever he was guilty of, it is we who drove him to it.'

I struggle for breath. I have to whisper it:

'But what do you believe?'

‘One thing one moment, another thing the next, like most men. Only
I
accept it, with as much grace as I can. To contradict yourself is no more than to acknowledge the complexity of life.' He gets up again. ‘Let me show you something.'

He picks up the lamp, leads me out into the stairwell and into a room on the other side. It is absolutely dark, save for the soft glow of burning oil. Leaning against the wall is a stack of unframed canvases, five or six deep.

‘These are his last works,' says Ruskin in a hushed voice, as if we have entered a church. ‘The last works of our greatest genius. See how we value them.' He runs a finger down one and then turns it towards me. It is glistening with water. ‘See what they tell us about ourselves.'

He hands me the lamp, and slowly pulls the canvases away, one at a time, to let me view them.

I have never seen

Write

Nothing. Swirls of nothing. Smear

Whirlpools. Pulling you into nothing.

Whirl

Nothing

Whirl

LXIV

From the diary of Marian Halcombe,
23rd-26th December, 185-

Saturday

I shall not kill myself.

But I know now why people do.

Nothing rational keeps me from it.

Today we were meant to be travelling to Cumberland, to join Laura and the family for Christmas.

Instead

Some time in the night I was woken by the sound of my door opening. There was a little light left from the fire. The figure of a man crossed before it and then stopped and looked at me. No more than a dim silhouette, but I knew him at once – though to see him there, and at such a time, was as strange as looking in the glass and finding another face where my own should have been.

‘Walter?' I said.

He did not answer. I thought perhaps I was dreaming, and reached for the box of matches to light the lamp. Immediately he lunged towards me and put his hand over mine.

‘No.'

‘Why?' I said. ‘Walter, what are you doing?'

He said nothing, but sat on the bed, with his face turned away from me. After a few moments his shoulders hunched and his neck arched and he started to sob.

‘What's the matter?'

He dropped forward, his head in his hands, crying almost silently.

‘What is it?'

He tried to speak, but could not catch his breath. I stroked his back.

‘Tell me!'

After perhaps half a minute he said:

‘Futile.'

‘What is?'

‘Life.'

‘Your life? My life?'

‘Ev-' he began; and then had to gulp for air, and broke off abruptly.

There! You've given yourself hiccups,' I said, in the smiling voice I have heard Walter himself use, to cajole his children from tears. But instead of soothing him, I succeeded only in provoking a renewed outburst of sobs.

‘It's not futile,' I said, hastily changing tack, ‘it's not!' – though since I had no idea what ‘it' was, I felt as foolish as a doctor trying to treat a wound he could not see.

Walter did not respond at first; but then suddenly turned, and laid his face on my breast.

As a child must on his mother. A man must on his wife.

And like a mother and a wife I comforted him. Without reflecting. I held his head against my cheek. I fondled his hair. I whispered: ‘Ssh. There. There.'

He grew quieter. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep; but then I was conscious that his arms had tightened about me, and he was starting to caress me, as I have never been caressed.

Dear God, what did I think? That he was incapable of harming me? That it was normal for a brother to touch his sister so?

The truth is I did not think anything. I merely obeyed some impulse in me that must have lain slumbering all my life, and now awoke, and told me what to do. I caressed him too, as I have never caressed anyone. There was no beginning to it, and no clear notion in my head of any end. We seemed suspended – as if someone had abstracted us from the world, and set us down in a strange place where we could act without consequences.

Until Walter began pulling at my covers.

‘No,' I whispered.

But he did not stop.

‘No!' I said more loudly, trying to push him away.

But he was too strong for me. In a moment the blankets were gone, and he was tearing at my nightgown.

‘Walt-!' I began; but he drew the nightgown over my eyes and mouth, forcing the word back between my lips, and held it there.

‘Do you not love me?' he whispered.

I heard his boots clatter to the floor; and then he was struggling to remove his own clothes. But with only one hand he was slow
and clumsy, and at length, in his frenzy, he forgot himself for a moment, and uncovered my face.

All these years I have called him my brother.

He is not my brother. He is -

He was staring at me. Staring at what no man has ever seen. But not like a man. His mouth was wet. He was panting. I thought of a cat about to eat.

I could have cried out again, but what then? The only help at hand was Davidson. How could
he
intervene between Walter and me?

I tried to appeal: ‘Walter. Please.'

He dragged my hair across my face, pressing it down so tightly I could barely breathe.

I did not try to speak again. I feared he would hurt me.

I had not known before what the gospels mean by
possession
. I had thought it perhaps no more than a primitive word for
madness.

But Walter was possessed. A demon had subdued his true nature, and taken control of his faculties and his will. A demon that was not content to destroy innocence and trust and hope, but must enter every cranny, and turn what it found there to evil.

Not only in Walter, but in myself.

For was not this the hellish parody of something that – despite myself – I had thought of? Had I not sometimes dreamed about it, even; and for a moment after I'd woken fancied I felt him beside me?

I had pitied myself for it, and cursed my own folly – but not
hated
myself, for by bearing it alone I was, in my own small way, heeding our Saviour's injunction to take up my cross and follow him. As He had died to save the world, so by my own inward death I might keep those I loved from harm.

But even this consolation was taken from me. For mixed with the horror and the pain – I cannot deny it – there was throb of pleasure too. A mockery – an inversion, like a Black Mass – of the joy I had imagined.