The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (10 page)

“I see, sir,” said Declan, who found the sentiments prehistoric.

“But it all costs money,” said Byatt ruefully.

“Maybe Stephen shouldn't be thinking about university at all.”

Byatt grinned bitterly.

“Maybe you would be right—if he had other skills. He hasn't even got what today they call ‘social skills.' He can't get on with people, and nobody likes him. He's no bent for selling things, or making money out of thin air, like the yuppies used to. And he hasn't got a smidgen of creative talent. No, universities are made for people like him.
If you've got the responsibility for a boy without any of the talents, you buy time, and maybe a third-class degree to boot, and you hope you're dead by the time a decision has to be made. . . . If only Catriona had lived.”

“Catriona?”

Byatt was looking ahead, a sharp, unfathomable expression on his face. Declan looked at him as intently as he dared, and wondered if what he was seeing, for the first time, was a sign of love. If so it was not a sort of love he recognized.

“My other daughter. The brilliant one dies, and the fool lives on. Punishment, do you think? It's like a sort of bargain: I'll give you all
this
”—he waved his hand around the studio, as if it symbolized all his creative gifts—“and I'll surround you with fools. Beethoven seems to have had plenty of fools around him, and Dickens too. I bet Shakespeare did as well, and he
married
one, which no one could say I did. . . .”

Declan registered the sort of artistic fraternity in which Ranulph Byatt would like to include himself but he was in truth only half listening. He was watching the man's hands. On the canvas was suggested the broad outlines of a cliff landscape, but they were outlines only: nothing had been filled in when they resumed work that morning. But in the past few minutes Byatt had been worrying at the blue and white and gray tints on his palette, and now he began in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture to paint a boiling, surging foam, a sea both angry and destructive, and he did it with strokes that had an energy and range such as Declan had never seen in all the twenty or more sessions they had had in the studio thus far.

Byatt didn't speak again, but worked in silence until he
signaled that he wanted to be taken back to his room. Once there he made Declan take him straight to his bed, where he lay down, still fully clothed, and immediately went off to sleep. Declan diagnosed complete exhaustion, and tiptoed to the door. It was a revelation to him of how creative work at a high pitch could drain body as well as mind.

That evening Stephen came to dinner, knowing that his grandfather had said that he was too tired to. He made no contribution to the conversation, and sat immersed in his own thoughts—not glowering (which he could do very powerfully, when he had a mind to), but mentally absent on other business.

“I see that work has started on the new picture,” said Melanie in her social voice, over a starter of duck pâté.

“Yes, isn't that marvelous!” chipped in Martha. Both women looked toward Declan.

“He started on the sea quite suddenly,” he said. “I'd thought it was going to be a summer scene, but he seized the brush and suddenly I saw it was a very rough sea—stormy, wintry, all froth and foam. He was going at it with great energy for twenty minutes or so, using actions I didn't know were in him, not any longer. I'm afraid he tired himself out.”

Melanie nodded wisely, asserting her role as the one who knew him best.

“That's the problem,” she said. “But of course if he's doing good work that compensates him.”

“Of course.”

“What had he been talking about?”

“Oh—” Declan stopped when he realized that if he mentioned Ranulph's dead daughter, he could distress her mother and sister. “Oh—old family matters.”

Melanie was not deceived or put off.

“Was it Catriona?”

“Yes, it was.”

Martha made a noise into her plate. Declan decided it was a sob. Melanie looked at her, then went back to her food.

“What was the letter you had this morning?” she finally asked Martha, as Mrs. Max cleared away plates.

“Oh, just my man in Peckham.”

“Your private detective in Peckham,” said Melanie with scorn in her voice. “Doesn't it sound seedy? Something out of Muriel Spark. I presume he had no news?”

“He thinks I ought to go down and have a talk with him before too long,” said Martha. “Discuss strategies.”

“He has no news, but he's stringing you along.”

Martha pursed her lips.

“You really ought to be glad, Mother, if I can save Daddy some of the expense of Stephen's education.”

“To do that you will have to first find Morgan, he will then have to be in reasonable financial circumstances, and you will then have to begin the process of extracting money from him. Stephen, if he gets a degree at all, will be graduated and, one would hope, started in a profession before we will see a penny.”

Martha's face assumed an expression of obstinacy, or rather its habitual expression was intensified.

“I don't anticipate it taking anything like as long as that. In any case, we can recoup the money retrospectively. It's right that Stephen's father should pay for his education.”

Melanie sighed. Her attitude resembled her husband's when he talked about being surrounded by fools.

“You've been happy enough to rely on your father for the last twenty years, Martha. Even when he was around, Morgan was hardly a whiz kid financially. He found it difficult to earn anything, and if by any chance he did he was reluctant to let go of it any way except across a bar. You're on to a very bad wicket, Martha.”

“That's not what my man in Peckham says.”

Melanie sighed theatrically.

“He wouldn't, would he? I really don't know why you need this. You've got plenty of interests.”

“The Women's Institute,” said Martha, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Oh, yes—I do get a great deal of stimulation from the Women's Institute.”

The rest of the meal passed largely in silence, but as they got up after the gooseberry fool, Melanie turned to Declan.

“Catriona was our elder daughter. She died in an accident many years ago.”

“He told me she was dead, but not how.”

“It is better Ranulph doesn't talk about it.”

“He brought it up himself. It's difficult to—”

“Of course Ranulph is not to be contradicted,” said Melanie, as if this were something laid down in the Pentateuch. “But don't bring it up yourself, and if he does, try to lead him tactfully away from the subject.”

“I'll try,” said Declan, mentally adding that in his view Ranulph Byatt was the most unleadable person he had ever had to do with. Declan lingered behind in the dining room while the women went out slowly, Martha adapting her pace to Melanie's, her bitterness seeming evaporated. At the door they turned toward the living room. Declan followed Stephen up the stairs.

“Do you remember your father?” he asked him. Stephen paused at the bend of the flight, his face a mask of blank mystification. Declan realized he hadn't the slightest idea what had been talked about at dinner. At last he said, “I suppose if I do at all it's as a
presence
, a shape. Anything I know about him comes from things I've been told.”

“That wouldn't necessarily be reliable.”

Stephen shrugged.

“A child's memories wouldn't necessarily be reliable either. Everyone seems to agree he was nothing very much, and if my mother does succeed in finding him she'll be in for a big disappointment. Someone has said that his most likely address is cardboard city. Still, I suppose it gives her an interest.”

“Is that what she needs?”

Stephen shot him a look that said he was getting much too interested in family matters.

“It's a lot healthier than being obsessed with her own father.”

He turned abruptly, marched up the remaining stairs, and went to his bedroom, slamming the door.

Declan had thought to go out that evening, but then decided against it. He lay on his bed reading Wilbur Smith until he heard Stephen leave his bedroom, closing the door more quietly this time, then tripping down the stairs and out the front door. Declan lay his book on the little table beside the bed.

The women, he was sure, were still downstairs. He opened the door quietly. The landing was dimly lit as usual. From Ranulph's bedroom he could hear the familiar sound of stertorous breathing. He closed his door and
walked lightly along the length of the corridor toward the studio. The door was shut, as he had left it, but it opened quietly, and in the deepening twilight he felt for the light switch. The room flooded with artificial light, making the encroaching night outside seem blacker. On the stand was the new canvas, with the raging sea already painted and pointing excitingly forward to a disturbing picture. But it wasn't the new canvas that interested Declan.

He crossed the room to the corner where the older paintings were stacked. He bent down to go through them, but found that even the bright studio light didn't penetrate to this corner powerfully enough for him to get a good view on a mere flip through the stacked canvases. He stood up and began going through them one by one, holding them at arm's length, so as to take them in.

The ones at the outer end of the stack seemed to be recent ones: they
felt
new, smelled new, and were natural scenes, not unlike the two paintings Declan already knew. He decided these were paintings that had not yet been sent for sale, or perhaps ones that Ranulph adjudged failures even by the lowered standards applied to his current work. That latter judgment seemed to him justified when he went farther into the stack, and decided that the older pictures there seemed to his inexpert eye all unsatisfactory in some way.

Declan nearly gave up but, stifling his disappointment, he persisted. The pictures he was looking at were simply framed in a thin wooden band, but he saw that farther back there were more elaborate frames. He took up the first of these, however, without any great feeling of anticipation.

The picture hit him. It was like getting a sock on the
jaw from someone you'd just been having a decorous conversation with. He stood there paralyzed by a horrific energy. The painting spilled over from the canvas onto the frame, with red and black daubed roughly over the dark, handsome wood. Red predominated on the canvas too, but gradually Declan perceived other elements: two touches of blue came to suggest eyes, strands of brown crisscrossing down the picture from top to bottom suggested disheveled hair. He stood transfixed: this was a face, but it was not a living face. It was a face that was dead, and dead in a horrible way. It was, he felt sure, recently dead: it was viewed as a sudden nightmare discovery. It was a scream of—what?—surprised horror, or gut-wrenching shock. And slowly, as he gazed on, the frame became not just nominally but really part of the picture: the face was seen through an opening—quite what sort of an opening, Declan was unable to decide. It seemed more than just a hole or a gap. Some jagged lines of bluish white low down in the picture suggested broken glass. Looking, trying to let the picture tell him something, Declan became convinced he was looking at a face through a window. A broken window. Of course, it suddenly came to him: a
car
window. A road accident—and was this the face of the elder daughter of the family?

“And what exactly do you think you're doing, young man?”

 • • • 

“Sure I felt I was frozen to the spot, Patrick,” wrote Declan next evening to his favorite brother, the one a year older than himself, the one to whom he felt closest. “It wasn't just the surprise—how the old woman had got up those
stairs without my hearing her, I'll never know, but I suppose I was so taken up with the picture I heard nothing—it was the whole look of her, standing there with her back as straight as a ramrod, and her voice too, the tone of it. It was cold, threatening, like a judge's when he's going to hand out a really tough sentence. Like Father Rafferty at school, when you'd done something that really riled him. All I could do was stammer out that I wanted to look at the pictures because I was hoping there would be a really good one, one he'd done when he was in his prime, so I could see why he was considered such a great artist.

“That seemed to satisfy Melanie (that's what she tells me to call her, though it's difficult, and doesn't seem right, her being so old). Her whole body relaxed, but she said, ‘I think you've seen enough for today,' and waited while I put the picture back in place and went out onto the landing. She turned off the light, then waited while I walked back to my bedroom. I swear it was like those stories of boarding school we used to read, with me as the boy who's been up to something, and her as the matron!

“I felt upset, because they'd all been so nice to me up to then. Making me comfortable, like, and I appreciated that because I don't think it's really in their natures to make people comfortable—or to be comfortable, come to that. They're more prickly than companionable, if you take my meaning. But Melanie and Martha had always been nice to me, and said how well I was doing. ‘I realize you won't be here forever,' Melanie said once, ‘but Martha and I enjoy the rest while you
are
here.' And then to come down so heavy just because I was taking a look at the great man's pictures! He's an artist, for God's sake. Doesn't he want people looking at his pictures?

“Sometimes I think they're mad as hatters, Patrick. Sometimes I catch him looking at me, and it's like he's sizing me up to make a picture out of me, though he says he doesn't paint portraits. I can't put it into words, but it's like I'm with people who are out on an entirely different wavelength from mine. And I'm on my own trying to get the hang of them. I miss having you to fight my battles for me, the way you always used to. I've never felt so alone in my life!”