Читать книгу Crackpot - Philip Loraine - Страница 7

The tower of Crestcote House—crenellated, with a pepper-pot turret at one corner—was the crowning extravagance of the East Wing, brainchild of Hector Drummond-Fitch, 1802-1889, who had designed it himself. But not as a wing, oh no! In his opinion, in the opinion of his time, the original manor was nothing but a Jacobean farmhouse; he designated it the ‘South Wing’ and built his addition in a vaguely Gothic style to take its place, complete with baronial hall, drawing-room, library and some fourteen bedrooms. This now became Crestcote; the old building housed servants and a few unimportant guests. But during the years after his death the compass of architectural taste had swung back towards the South; his grandiose conception, tower, baronial hall and the rest of it, became the East Wing, a curiosity, and the beautiful old house reclaimed its original title and importance.

The great-great-grandson of this same Hector had fallen off his horse in such a disastrous manner that he’d been unable to sire any children. Eschewing various collaterals who didn’t please him, he left Crestcote, in toto, to his wife, who hated the house only a little less than she hated the English climate. Before departing for Antibes she willed the whole place to a niece, Sarah, already married to a gentleman-farmer, Oliver Langdale. But the money which accompanied the estate was not, in days of inflation, enough; and although Oliver made full use of its many acres for farming, lumber and horse-breeding, most of the house lay empty and useless. Also Sarah grew bored, after bearing three children.

‘Farmers’ wives,’ said her husband, a handsome block of good old county oak, ‘usually do garden produce and eggs, that sort of thing.’ Sarah had different ideas. Long ago, in her mid-twenties, she’d realized that her own artistic talent was an illusion (a few paintings survived to prove how right she’d been), but she still longed for the company of artists. Livestock and bloodstock were not, to her, limitless subjects of conversation.

After a certain amount of careful conversion, paid for out of her aunt’s money, she was presently able to insert a discreet advertisement in one or two of the right publications. Original apartments and studios were, it seemed, now available in and around a remote country house on the Wiltshire-Dorset borders and would be let only to ‘artists of recognized stature’. Peace was assured; rents would not be low but were negotiable; the main line station was nine miles away—Waterloo 1 hr. 40 mins. Oliver Langdale maintained that his wife was around the bend; he presumably foresaw a group of freaky, unwashed, stoned youngsters who would foul up the house and get in the way of his tractors, his horses and their grooms. Sarah told him not to be silly; hadn’t she specified ‘artists of recognized stature’? And why, he asked, would that kind of artist want to live in a commune?

‘It isn’t a commune,’ said Sarah, ‘it’s a community. And they’ll want to live here because creative people fundamentally need security. They’ll come, you see if they don’t.’

And come they did.

Johnny Ash, the well-known ‘East End’ painter, had been the first to settle in, and might well have left almost immediately (like many Londoners he didn’t like the country and was indeed afraid of it); but then he’d met young Rosamund Turner, and since his foremost wish was to keep her away from London, for excellent reasons, he had changed his mind and stayed. His studio was in the tower at the north end of the Victorian Wing, and thus commanded the best light, as well as staggering views to north and east—which was yet another reason for the jealousy of his neighbour, another painter, Ben Elliston. Between these two and the old house lived Lisa MacDonnell, the sculptress. Whether or not this beautiful and recently divorced young woman needed the security of Crestcote, she’d have had to go a long way to find a better studio than her ex-coach-house in the stable-yard: also ideal for the delivery of stone or marble.

The stables themselves were huge: so large that not even Oliver Langdale minded sacrificing a chunk of them to make two more dwellings, one occupied by Laurence Otterey, the writer, and the other by Vicky Lind whose wild-life paintings, much reproduced, were known worldwide. The Lodge was rented by Edvard Kusnik, composer: well removed from the main house so that his pianos, synthesizers and massive stereo-system disturbed nobody. The same went for Harold Newson who worked in iron, producing a din which was every bit as loud but (some of his colleagues claimed) a lot more musical than Edvard’s compositions. He had chosen his own workshop, an abandoned cottage on the far side of the walled kitchen garden. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, giving him the height he often needed. It had never been Sarah Langdale’s intention that anyone should inhabit this shack, but when Harold moved his single suitcase and his sleeping-bag into what remained of the upper floor, she hastened to make it passably habitable: not that rain and wind seemed to worry the ironworker in the very least.

Of course the Lord of the Manor’s fears regarding these, to his mind, odd customers were quite unfounded. Indeed, he had to admit that his wife’s ‘community’ not only made use of the place and brought it to life, not only paid well, thus taking care of many estate expenses, but also gave Crestcote an interesting cachet in county circles. Most of the county had heard of Johnny Ash and Lisa MacDonnell, and all of them knew the lovely work of that clever Vicky Lind: those lifelike badgers and hedgehogs, foxes and owls, not to mention the minutely realistic flora among which her fauna reposed.

Needless to say, none of the other artists considered Vicky Lind to be an artist at all, pairing her with Johnny Ash’s Rosamund; but whereas Rosamund admitted that she was only ‘an arts and crafts kind of person’, Madame Lind affected airs and was thought by all to be a stuck-up bitch.

A certain confusion surrounded the exact standing of Harold Newson. Could an iron-worker properly be called an ‘artist’? Harold himself, tall and sinewy with a long Scandinavian face and almost white fair hair, didn’t care what he was called. He kept himself to himself, living in flurries of fire, black-faced, like some mythic figure from a Norse folk-tale. Newson—Cnutson. Harold, son of Canute: and he looked it!

When it became known that he’d been commissioned to design and make a pair of gates for Westminster Abbey the doubts about his artistic status faded away, and he was accepted as a fully paid-up member of the creative (and self-evidently snobbish) community: though Oliver Langdale persisted in calling him ‘the farrier’, but not to his face.

As will become all too apparent, there were quite a number of such mockeries, rivalries, and even hatreds, festering beneath the calm of Crackpot Castle: a nickname invented by some village wit in Crestcote St Michael and gleefully adopted by the inmates themselves.

On this brisk sunny autumn morning the denizens of Crestcote House were going, industriously or sluggishly, about their everyday occupations, naturally unaware of the fact that even these were soon to undergo peculiar changes, as if some malicious fairy had touched them with her wand, and that the beautiful day would soon become emotionally overcast.

In the tower-studio, Rosamund Turner—fair, blue-eyed, with a fresh young beauty only slightly smudged by the assaults of life—was sitting upright on the bed, naked, stitching deftly at a sampler: Honoria Temple 1832. Johnny Ash, who always collapsed after sex, turned his head and watched her; he would presently do some preliminary sketches for yet another portrait, he never tired of painting her. He was thirty-five, not tall, but dark, wiry, good-looking in a gipsyish way. He was also inclined to be jealous, but had been forced by life with Rosamund to see what a selfish and self-defeating emotion it was.

She herself was so popular with everyone at Crestcote that it would have taken an excessively churlish man, which he was not, to complain on that account. Indeed, he now felt quite proud of the fact that even Ben Elliston, who would barely speak to him, was always overjoyed to talk to her; and she was surely the only resident of the place who could rely on a warm welcome at Harold Newson’s forge.

Gently mocking, he said, ‘Honoria Temple 1832, my arse! Who’s going to believe that?’

‘You’d be surprised.’ This was another of the reasons he loved her: she was a bit of a con.

The sampler had been commissioned by an ‘antique’ dealer in London. When it was finished, she’d bleach it a very little to fade the colours, put it in one of her large collection of old frames and take it, with three others already finished, to his shop in Marylebone. Not looking up she asked, ‘What happened in Bristol yesterday?’

‘They’d like to do a show all right.’

‘But?’

‘I don’t know, I wasn’t too impressed. Who needs a half-cock provincial show?’

‘You were awfully late back.’

‘Yes. I got boozing. I hoped I hadn’t woken you.’

‘You didn’t, not really.’ In fact she knew that he was lying; if he’d been boozing she’d have smelt the alcohol on his breath as soon as he climbed into bed. That meant he’d gone to London, there were fast trains from Bristol. How she wished he’d admit to these periodical visits and their purpose, but he wouldn’t, and so they’d become an un-spoken secret between them. (At least no woman was involved, she wouldn’t have stood for that.) She guessed what it was all about, and so guessed that it had the power to hurt him; and she would never, never hurt him, she loved him too much. Also she owed so much to him—her life, for God’s sake. If he hadn’t met her, stoned, at that party and dragged her down to Wiltshire she would certainly be dead of Aids by now; it could only have been a matter of time before she progressed to heroin and the contaminated needle.

So when he asked, ‘How did your day go?’ she answered with care: ‘Good. Fortnum’s want as many of those baskets as I can produce, and Freda’s ordered two dozen scarves. I told her I was going to charge her more this time—she marks them up to high heaven.’ She didn’t mention that she’d only just got into bed when he came home at 2.30 a.m. She hardly ever felt an urge to see any of her disreputable old friends, but yesterday, having finished her business at tea-time, she’d been overcome by nostalgie de la boue and had gone to visit Mad Hattie down Portobello; and Mad Hattie being what she was, one thing led to another—a round of various pubs and clubs. No hard drinking, just Perrier or Coke (the fizzy kind, not the white stuff) and several joints. She hadn’t smoked any marijuana for months and had forgotten what fun it was, within reason: no hangover either.

When he was engrossed in drawing her, she said, ‘Johnny, is it really a good idea, this show?’

‘Great gimmick.’

‘Just pictures of me?’

‘It’ll be a sell-out. I’ll do a fantastic poster. ROSAMUND, and then in small letters at the bottom, THIRTY PORTRAITS BY ASH—THE VANGUARD GALLERY.’

Still, after so many years, he could hardly believe that he really was the kind of successful painter who could get away with an idea like this: little Johnny Ash from Romford (East End indeed!) Not that he’d found success right away. Following Art School, there’d been a long, at twenty-one an endless, period of rejection and disappointment. Every artist can do with a lucky break, and Johnny Ash had eventually stumbled over one; but he still woke up in the night, sweating, because he had dreamed of the time before, dreamed that he had never been recognized and never would be. The very thought of it urged him to go and get his easel and to start, without further preliminary work, on Rosamund No. 21. His model embarked on ‘Honoria Temple’s’ final x, y, and z.

In his studio next door, Ben Elliston sat sunk in hangover and guilt. He was a big, big-bearded man, but his paintings were surprisingly small and detailed. He had sprung to eminence in his twenties when there had been a vogue for his exquisite icon-like works; now, when he was thirty-seven, the pendulum of fortune or fashion had swung the other way and he found himself ignored, forgotten, and geographically placed so that he could neither ignore nor forget the close proximity of a younger man who, it seemed, couldn’t put a foot or a brush wrong. To make matters worse, Johnny had Rosamund, so kind and beautiful, whereas Big Ben (how bored he was with that old joke!) had no one. In certain ways he had to admit that having no one was an advantage, but there were times when he hankered after a steady girlfriend, and thought wistfully of Rosamund or lustfully of his other neighbour, Lisa Mac-Donnell.

Lisa was certainly a very attractive woman: Australian, in her early thirties, with dark auburn hair which tended to fall over her left eye unless, when working, she fixed it back with an elastic band. She also had the most remarkable greenish eyes: opal eyes. But on the only occasion Ben had grown overtly amorous, at last year’s Christmas party, Lisa had not been encouraging; in fact she’d recounted to him the grisly story of her marriage and the wreck of it. Even drunk, he could appreciate that the experience had made her cautious of emotional entanglements; she readily admitted that the caution was rather neurotic, but then Lisa was nothing if not honest. As a result, she had bruised an ego or two at Crestcote. Madame Vicky Lind declined to speak to her following Lisa’s contention, a fair one, that she ‘humanized’ her animals and thus demeaned them. She had also crossed swords with the resident musical genius, sharing the general opinion that three courting cats on a wall made better music than Edvard Kusnik. Since Edvard was trying to lure her into his bed, the criticism was doubly irritating.

It was because of such frank opinions that Ben had decided to search her out, hoping he had the courage to confess his guilt and seek advice. He found her in the coach-house/studio, already watched by Sam Langdale, the seven-year-old. She had started work on the Lavenham Memorial, a commission which had earned her much publicity. It was the most ambitious project she had ever undertaken, involving two great blocks of marble, one white, one black. As ever, she refused to discuss it with anyone, not even her good friend Ben. As ever, she kept all her drawings and maquettes well hidden. Lisa MacDonnell was a very private artist.

Watching her, Ben could tell that quite soon the door of the studio would be closed and bolted. When she began the detailed work, complete concentration demanded complete seclusion. One mistake might mean starting again from scratch: valuable time wasted, and a new beginning on a new and expensive block of stone. His confession would have to wait.

Seven-year-old Sam had come to the coach-house expecting magic: faces emerging from the rock, hands, feet; but it would be a long time, Lisa had told him, before she reached that stage. In fact she was by nature as impatient as the small boy, but had learned over the years how fatal it could prove. Impatience had driven her from a rich and comfortable home in Melbourne long before she was emotionally ready to leave, and sent her winging to London: Earls Court naturally; impatience had thus landed her in a succession of shared flats and squats, and a succession of equally disgusting jobs. She was too proud to send home for money. She had, through thick and thin, found ways to study her difficult art, and refused to give it up even when impatience finally drove her into that impossible marriage: no children, thank God.

She would doubtless have fled back to Melbourne, defeated, had her first two exhibits not earned her grudging praise from a couple of powerful critics. The Sunday Times printed a small story about her, and luckily accompanied it with a photograph; this was seen by a fashionable photographer who was unable to resist her looks, and who did two pages featuring the sculptress and her work for one of the glossiest of glossy magazines. Her first commission resulted.

Lisa could tell from the expression on Ben Elliston’s bearded face that he was hoping for a heart-to-heart, but this was one occasion when she was determined to evade him. She knew from past experience that his personal problems, and not least his protestations of love, could occupy an entire morning. She had no objections to being an attractive woman—there were times when it was fun, and times when it had practical advantages, but work was work and it came top of her priorities; she gave the big man a glassy, abstracted look and turned to her two blocks of marble; in her mind’s eye the finished piece was absolutely clear, the contrast of gleaming black and white, something new to her and also new, she was sure of it, to present-day sculpture.

So Ben’s problem, whatever it was, would have to wait; and she was praying that her last refusal of Edvard’s Kusnik’s ardent advances (no love there, just sex) had perhaps convinced him that she’d no intention of going to bed with him, in spite of the fact that she found him sexy. This contradiction he refused to accept: ‘Typical English crap!’: which gave her the chance to reply tartly, ‘I’m not English, I’m Australian.’ He had thrown up his hands in exasperation; for a Russian there was clearly no difference.

However, she smiled at the disappointed little boy and said, ‘Sorry, Sam, too early. Another five, six weeks, and there might be something to see.’

He sighed deeply. Weekends bored him, he really preferred being at school. Always polite, he said a punctilious Thank You and Goodbye, smiled shyly at Ben Elliston and trailed away to see what might be going on in his mother’s kitchen. Sarah Langdale was plump and tawnily, lazily attractive; on the far side of thirty, she didn’t mind the plumpness, better than being scraggy. Sam found her at the kitchen table, sharing elevenses with Mrs Merritt, the live-in housekeeper, and Kevin Short, the live-in gardener-cum-odd-job-man. Mrs Merritt was in her fifties and had worked at Crestcote all her life, having been handed on to Sarah, with the house and the money, by her Aunt Drummond-Fitch who had merely remarked vaguely, ‘You won’t be able to get on without her.’ Sarah had found this to be an understatement; in many ways Mrs Merritt (her name was Jane but nobody used it) was Crestcote: wonderfully efficient and, despite her long, severe face and neat grey bun, a source of constant laughter, much of it bawdy.

It was Mrs Merritt who commanded Crestcote’s platoon of helps and cleaning ladies, recruited from surrounding villages and lifted to and fro in a Volkswagen minibus driven by Kevin: with care, because he worshipped Sarah and wanted her chattering chars to survive in one piece. Otherwise he was a bit of tearaway, a local boy who had fled to Bristol when his mother died, had fallen in with the worst that city had to offer, and had been rescued from prison and a career in crime by Sarah’s intervention. Not for nothing was she born a Drummond-Fitch, not for nothing was she Lady of the Manor of Crestcote.

Kevin, now nineteen, wore his black hair cut short, flue-brush style; he had a pleasant, as yet unformed face, out of which stared quick brown eyes, alive with intelligence; these belied his half-open mouth and country-bumpkin way of laughing, her-her-her.

Sam said, ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Buying a horse, you know he is.’

‘Why does it take days?’

‘Because the horse is in Ireland.’

Mrs Merritt and Kevin glanced away; they both knew a thing or two about Oliver Langdale, were both fond of Sarah, and both imagined that she knew nothing. This wasn’t so. Admittedly she had no idea exactly where her husband had gone, but she was damn sure he wasn’t in Ireland. Sensing the general awkwardness caused by Sam’s mention of his father, she said to Mrs Merritt, ‘How’s the dinner coming along? I hope those pheasants are all right.’

‘Nice and ripe,’ replied that lady, who had already roasted them and intended to serve them, neatly jointed, in a mushroom and white wine sauce finished with cream.

Sarah and Oliver Langdale had long ago decided to preserve the East Wing’s baronial-style hall and the large dining-room: ideal for giving parties; and sometimes the whole community, including the three Langdale children, would dine there with whatever outside guests, lovers or ex-spouses happened to be around. The expense of these evenings, often feasts, was shared out between them, except at Christmas when the Langdales acted host. Mrs Merritt liked nothing better than a fierce day’s cooking, not to mention the praise which always crowned her labours. She said, ‘Clementines are in. I’ve cooked some whole to serve alongside a nice Crème Brûlée.’ The incumbents were hearty eaters, not afraid of rich dinners.

‘I hope,’ said Sarah, ‘they’re all at home and in good shape.’

Mrs Merritt, always a mine of information, replied, ‘Stables A is a bit under the weather.’ ‘Stables A’ indicated Laurence Otterey, resident writer.

‘Oh. What’s wrong?’

‘’Flu, he thought.’

Kevin said, ‘Hangover, more like. Come in at midnight, woke me up.’

Mrs Merritt snorted. ‘The Last Trump wouldn’t wake you! Only just come in yourself, hadn’t you?’

Kevin shrugged. ‘Yeah, I was a bit late. Skittles.’ He belonged to the White Hart team which took itself seriously. When it wasn’t matches it was practice. When it wasn’t practice it was beer.

Sarah said, ‘Poor old Laurence, he’s got writer’s block. I bet ’flu’s just an excuse.’

As they rose from the table Sam said, ‘What am I going to do all afternoon?’ His older brother, Jonathan, was at boarding-school, and though Sam and his sister, Olivia, attended the same day-school (delivered and retrieved by Kevin in the cleaning ladies’ bus) Olivia played hockey on Saturdays and the small boy was left alone.

Sarah replied, ‘You can come and help me pick damsons.’

Sam was all for this because the orchard lay on the far side of the walled garden, and on their way to it they could look in on Harold the Norseman. Amid his hammering and his roaring furnace and the fierce hissing of steam, he was to the small boy a figure as fascinating as he was fearsome. Sometimes Sam, alone, dared not enter the forge but peered through a dirty window at the Wagnerian scene within.

Harold Newson was aware of the scrutiny and would have liked to talk to the boy; he enjoyed the direct simplicity of children which was much like his own. He was twenty-nine, and had always been solitary. His mother, a widow, had grown increasingly deaf towards the end of her life, and by the time she died he found that six years of caring for her, devotedly, had robbed him of the desire for speech. It seemed to him that everybody talked far too much, usually about nothing at all.

Trained in the foundry which had killed his father, he had eventually, via a solid Northern polytechnic, gained the sponsorship of a local firm, enabling him to study under the great Giles Petheridge. He had a natural talent which Petheridge had fostered, and, as his own strength diminished, he pressed his apprentice forward for more and more complex commissions, finally enabling him to branch out on his own.

Living by himself, talking hardly at all except to Rosamund, his good friend, and occasionally to Johnny Ash, Harold often wondered if he was quite right in the head. Sometimes, not always, he wished he could meet a decent quiet girl (another Rosamund) and marry her, but wherever he looked in the world of creative people he either saw men who ruined their talent through marriage or men who ruined the marriage because of their talent.

When Sam and his mother peered into the workshop on this particular day the forge was inert and black, the magic flown. Harold was upstairs, re-designing his gates. He was used to this; his drawings were often too fanciful for the iron, and the iron would tell him so in no uncertain terms.

In the kitchen of the manor Mrs Merritt had found time to make a fine game soup for lunch. She’d take some up to big Ben Elliston because he was unhappy and short of cash: also some to the novelist chap who, whether he had ’flu or hangover or writer’s block, could only profit from it. While she was making preparation for these errands of mercy she heard an unmistakable banging of doors and stamping from the front of the house. So the Lord and Master had returned—from Ireland, ha!

His handsome head appeared around the kitchen door. He was sandy-haired, outdoor-faced, a man’s man with the kind of good looks men could just about stomach. ‘’Morning, Mrs M. Mare foaled yet?’

‘Not as I know of, sir.’ But wasn’t that typical? No questions about his wife or children who all might have died in his absence, oh no! His only thought was of his precious horses. She watched him through the window, stalking across the yard to the mare’s stable. Men!