The Dark Clue (55 page)

So it was not enough that Walter should betray me, his wife, his children, himself.

I must betray them all, too.

He gave a cry. It was not even his voice, but the desolate yelp of a
beast. And then he lay there, so rigid that I thought the demon had fled, leaving him insensible or dead.

I was weeping too much to speak or shout for help, but at length I found the strength to move, and try to push him from me.

At once, without a word, he got up, and left the room.

My sense of time is awry. My sense of everything.

A moment ago Mrs. D. knocked.

‘Pardon me, miss, but we were just wondering …?'

Wondering what?

I looked at my clock and saw that it was past eleven.

‘I'm sorry, I'm not well,' I said.

‘Oh, dear. Can I get you anything, miss?'

‘No. Thank you.'

‘Shall I call Dr. Hampson?'

‘I think I'll just rest.'

‘Very good.' Footsteps receding, then returning. ‘Did Mr. Hartright say he was going out early, miss?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘Only he didn't come down to breakfast this morning. And Davidson says he isn't in his bedroom, or in the studio.'

I have washed. And washed and washed. But I cannot look at myself in the glass.

Cannot even pray.

Later

It is after four-thirty. Mrs. D. again. Was I sure she could not bring me anything? Yes. Was there anything else? Yes – could they please telegraph my sister, to tell her we have been delayed? Very good.

A pause. Then: Mr. Hartright has still not returned. Did I think he would be requiring dinner? I could not say.

I hope not.

Let him go hungry. Let him know he can never enter this house again. Let him understand that what he did has put him for ever beyond the protection of society, the comfort of home, the love of family, the respect of friends.

Let him suffer.

Later still

Just midnight. He is still not back.

I feel as if I have just passed two sleepless nights without an intervening day. And now am beginning yet another.

Each has its own mood. The first: horror. The second: rage. The third:

What?

I am standing at the edge of a great ocean, that stretches as far as the eye can see. If I lived for a thousand years, I should not be able to pass to the other side.

Sadness.

Is he out there somewhere, cold and wretched and at his wits' end? Aghast at what he has done, and utterly at a loss to know what he should do now?

Is he dead, even?

Six hours ago I should have been happy enough to think so. Six hours ago I should have been glad to kill him myself, had I had the means to do so.

To know that he had been punished. That I should never have the anguish of seeing him or talking to him again. That
my
power, in the end, had turned out to be greater than his.

But now I cannot help remembering him, not as he was last night, but as the Walter I knew before. Or rather, the many Walters – for over the past ten years he has been to me teacher, friend, confidant, colleague and brother. And in every one of those characters I would have trusted him – more completely than any man I have ever met – with my honour and my life.

What drove him then to act as he did?

Am I in some part to blame?

Sunday

I can scarce hold the pen.

I have never known such fury or such shame.

He did not return during the night. At nine o'clock this morning I forced myself down to his studio, thinking he might have let
himself in by the garden gate and gone there rather than to the house.

But he hadn't. The air was cold and stale. The great murky picture was still on its easel, and looked no more finished than before. When I touched it the paint was not quite dry, but a skin had started to form on the surface.

It was as I turned away from it that my foot struck something heavy beneath the painting table. I could not tell what it was, for it was hidden behind the old sheet Walter uses as a cover. I bent down and lifted the cloth.

There, jammed against the leg, was a small locked deed-box.

I drew it out. It was shiny and unblemished, and so light that at first I thought it was empty. Perhaps Walter had only just bought it, and not had a chance to use it yet. Or removed the contents, and taken them with him.

But as I set it down again, I heard something slither along the bottom, and knock against the end.

Not loose papers. Too solid for that.

A diary?

I scoured the room for a key. I opened drawers, peered into the chipped jug he uses as a brush-holder, looked under rags. Nothing.

I carried the box into the house and ordered Davidson to break it open. At first he was reluctant; but when I said, ‘Mr. Hartright's life may depend on it,' he immediately went and fetched a poker, and set to with something like enthusiasm – for he is now desperately anxious about Walter, though he is at pains not to show it, and was clearly relieved to feel he might at last do something to help him. When he was done, I took it to my room, and locked the door behind me.

Inside was nothing but a plain notebook. I opened it at random. The first lines I saw were:

Others may read a journal. No-one must read this.

I felt a small bitter shudder of revenge.

I told myself I should try to be dispassionate, like a doctor examining a patient, with but one end in view: to diagnose the disease that had changed him so dreadfully.

But I could not do it. I would master myself for a few pages, and then come upon something that suddenly swept away my puny defences, and made me weep and tremble. When I reached
his account of what happened after my reticule was stolen, I was sick in the wash-bowl.

I still cannot bring myself to set down the details of what I read.

But I think I can now at least partially understand why he acted as he did.

And I know I must accept some responosibil

When I had finished I went down again to the studio. I found the scalpel he uses to sharpen pencils, and stood before that vile picture, and slashed it until it was no more than a tangle of stained threads.

Then I steeled myself, and wrote to Laura:

Walter is not well.

Must remain in London for the time being.

Return as soon as it is safe to do so.

My poor sister.

Later

After an early luncheon (no more than a plate of soup and some bread; but enough to fortify me, and to persuade Mrs. Davidson that I was strong enough to go out) I returned to my room, and put on a mourning dress. My greatest horror was of people brushing against me, for my skin felt so sensitive that I feared even the slightest contact would make me sick. Wearing black, I thought, would protect me, since people shrink instinctively from grief; and if without warning I suddenly started to weep – as I have done often over the last two days – the veil would both account for, and partially conceal, my tears. I waited on the landing until I heard the Davidsons going into the kitchen (for to explain my appearance to them in the present circumstances would have been quite beyond my power) and then crept downstairs and out into the street.

I had no definite plan: only the certainty that to take action of some kind – however fruitless it might turn out to be – would be preferable to staying passively in my room, with nothing but Walter's notebook and my own tortured reflections to occupy
me. I had thought of walking through the park, and hoping some inspiration would strike me; but as soon as I stepped outside I realized that it was too cold, and too slippery underfoot. I went only as far as the end of the road, therefore (where I knew I should not be visible from the house), and looked about me for a cab.

But there was not a cab to be seen. Or, rather, there were hundreds to be
seen,
but none to be
had;
for they were all taken. I watched them pass in an almost unbroken stream: men going about their business; mothers returning from the shops with presents for their children; servants sent out at the last minute to get a bottle of sherry or some more glasses or another side of beef for tomorrow.

All that purpose. All those places to go. What should mine be?

I pondered the question for perhaps a quarter of an hour as I stood there, stamping my feet and rubbing my hands together inside my muff. I had almost given up all hope of finding either a destination or a vehicle to get me there when a hansom drew up on the other side of the street and a woman laden with parcels got out. And all at once I seemed to have the answer.

I struggled across the road and called to the cabman: ‘Are you free?'

He nodded. ‘Where to, miss?'

‘Fitzroy Square. And then to wherever I tell you.'

He looked at me curiously for a moment, and then nodded again.

‘Long as you got the money,' he said, with the off-handed assurance of a man who knew he could find another customer more easily than I could find another cab. ‘Get in.'

I had, of course, no intention of calling on Elizabeth Eastlake. Wherever else Walter was, he would not be with her. And in my present state she would succeed in prising my secrets from me in ten minutes, whereas I had no prospect of learning
her
secrets at all.

But 7 Fitzroy Square was where this quest began, and I felt a sudden urge to see it again – to see again
all
the places to which the search for Turner had taken us. Partly, I think (though I was barely conscious of it) because of a primitive belief in coincidence,
which made me suppose I was more likely to find him again where I had seen him before – as a child will seek his dead mother in the rooms and haunts he associates with her in life. But partly also because, after being trapped for so long in the confusion of my own inner world, I felt that seeing the
outer
world again – the solid, incontrovertible world of stones and bricks, of streets and crowds – would help to clarify my mind, and perhaps offer me a clue to Walter's own thinking, and to his probable whereabouts now. And I think – I hope – I was right.

The last few days have made me a stranger to myself. Before, when setting out to revisit some familiar place, I have generally known what response it was likely to evoke in my breast – elation or gloom, relief or regret. Now, though the register of my emotions is pitifully shrunk, I can no longer predict with any certainty which part of it will be touched. I had supposed that seeing 7 Fitzroy Square again would make me anxious, or depressed, or even weaken my resolve, and tempt me to confide in Elizabeth Eastlake after all; but I had not imagined it would make me angry.

Everything – the imperious windows; the well-swept steps; the wide front door – looked exactly the same, as if it were altogether too grand and self-satisfied even to notice the cataclysm that had struck me in the two weeks since I had seen it last. And I was scandalized by it. I wanted to break the glass – splinter the wood – mar the perfect paintwork.

But I did not get out. After glowering at it for a few moments, with something like hatred in my heart, I told the driver to take me to Queen Anne Street. Turner's house was still there, though (unlike the Eastlakes') it seemed to have borne its share of the world's suffering. It looked careworn and dilapidated, and the windows were covered with a fine dust, which gave them the dull opacity of a blind man's eyes. I wondered whether the gallery still stood behind it – the gallery where Calcott and Beaumont and Caro Bibby had once marvelled and debated. I could not help picturing them there; and thinking how those passionate lives, which but forty years ago had burned so hotly, and felt the causes they espoused so fiercely, were already cold and forgotten – as if a man is of no greater moment than a match, that gives a
second's brilliance, and is spent. Somehow,
their
stories, and Turner's story, and our story, worked themselves together into a kind of melancholy thread, and I began to follow it, like Theseus – though with no thought or hope of slaying the monster when I reached the end.

I followed it across the sluggish tide of traffic in Oxford Street; and down New Bond Street, where the brightly lit shops were decked with sprigs of holly and ivy, and seemed to taunt me with their promise of innocence and merriment. I followed it into Piccadilly, where I saw the Marston Rooms, and thought for a moment of the woman Walter had met there, and of how even now she must be dressing, and putting on her musk in preparation for her night's work; and then down St. James's and into Pall Mall, and so past Marlborough House, where we had first glimpsed the unimaginable beauty of Turner's work, and its dreadful power.

I followed it into Trafalgar Square, where it wound into the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, and became more complex yet – twisting into itself the machinations of Sir Charles, and the furious martyrdom of Ruskin, and the despair of Haste; and so by a natural progression to Haste's house in Cawley Street, where I stopped the cab. The lower windows were all boarded up, and it struck me with a jolt (the force of my own feelings again took me by surprise; for the thought of it made me cry) that Haste's son must have finally lost his long battle against the bailiffs. But then I glanced up, and saw a defiant glimmer from the attic casement, and felt suddenly quite unreasonably cheered.

I descended from the cab, and gazed up at the tiny flickering light (no gas here; not even a lamp; only a candle) as a storm-lashed sailor must gaze at a distant beacon. Here was a man who had been robbed of almost everything that most people consider essential to human existence, and yet who still had the spirit to fight on. For a moment I wanted to rush inside and join him. Since our last encounter, life had reduced me almost to his level – or beneath it, even, since no-one, at least, had deprived him of his honour; and now, I suddenly thought, we might make common cause. Leading a life of monastic simplicity – labouring together in some great enterprise – might not
that
become my cross, and restore to me my self-regard?