A Deep Deceit (6 page)

He greeted us warmly as he always did, unfolding himself from his chair as we entered the shop and stretching out his arms in welcome. He was exceptionally tall, about six foot five, and spent most of his time in old St Ives ducking to avoid smashing his head – somewhat protected though it was by a thick, almost bouffant halo of silver hair – against doorways and low ceilings.

He kissed me rather theatrically on both cheeks and his arms quickly wound themselves round my waist. I well was aware that Will grasped every opportunity to touch me with considerable enthusiasm. I wished he wouldn't, but he didn't mean any harm. He was just a tactile sort of person. Sometimes I quite enjoyed the attention, to tell the truth, and he never really took liberties. He looked a bit like Peter O'Toole with big hair, had a penchant for velvet jackets and capes, and was certainly the most unlikely shopkeeper. I suppose he reckoned he could at least look like an artist, although I always thought he resembled an actor playing the part.

He was, however, physically overwhelming, partly because of his size and partly because of his personality. The bear-hug in which he grasped me took the breath from my body.

‘Will, be careful,' I admonished him.

He backed off at once. ‘Sorry, darling, just
so
pleased to see you,' he cried and winked at me in that way he had, which demonstrated that he wasn't in the least bit sorry and would actually like to hug me again.

I nearly always accompanied Carl to the Logan Gallery because I enjoyed looking around and I liked chatting to Will. He was the kind of man who accepted you for what you were and didn't ask too many personal questions. I even liked the name he had chosen for his much loved gallery – Logan, after the famous Logan Rock, a sixty-five-ton hunk of granite balanced impossibly on a clifftop at Treen right down at the bottom end of Cornwall not far from Land's End.

‘As wondrous a piece of natural sculpture as you'll ever be lucky enough to encounter,' was Will's opinion of the Logan Rock. And you had to warm to a man who could see the world like that. He was a true romantic, right enough, and I liked romantics.

Will took the three wrapped paintings from Carl, but at first merely put them to one side unopened. ‘Coffee?' he enquired. This was part of the ritual.

While Will busied himself with the kettle in the little back room, Carl and I studied the work of the opposition, as it were. There was a small Clive Gunnell bronze called
Windows
– an abstract of intertwining ovals, their inner curves finished in a beautiful green patina – which I particularly admired, but Carl and I weren't into buying other people's art. Sadly, we could not afford to.

‘Turn it round,' instructed Will, when he returned to the gallery and noticed me studying the Gunnell. The bronze was mounted and balanced on a plinth, which allowed it to be rotated. Slowly I turned it a full circle.

‘See, it looks right from every angle,' said Will. ‘You should be able to do that with any piece of work that is truly sculptural. And if you can't, then whatever it is and whoever it's by, it's too one-dimensional and not really a sculpture at all.'

Will had a habit of always having to know more than you did and a rather condescending way of lecturing in a schoolmasterly fashion, but he did know his business, there was no doubt about that, which was why Carl had so much respect for him.

Only when we were sipping our coffee from brightly coloured mugs did Will start to unwrap Carl's paintings. Then he propped them one by one against a wall and stood back, hands on hips, head thrown back, legs akimbo. A flamboyant pose.

The first he looked at was
Balloons
, black-edged and framed in white wood – Carl did all his own framing; he said he had no intention of sharing his meagre profits with anybody else.
Balloons
was a large painting, slightly more than three foot square, just a little bigger than my
Pumpkin Soup
. Its vibrant colour and dramatic shapes seemed to dominate the gallery. I reckoned it was the finest piece of work in the room – apart from the Gunnell bronze, perhaps.

Will was silent for what seemed a lifetime. ‘You get better with every canvas, Carl,' he said eventually.

Carl beamed. I glowed. We both respected Will's opinion enormously – don't take my description of him to suggest that we regarded him as a figure of fun, because we didn't. Rather, we considered him a true eccentric, but also a true expert.

The other two paintings, smaller but equally original and striking, also met with the gallery owner's approval.

‘You'll take them all?' queried Carl anxiously. He knew that his abstracts weren't easy to sell.

‘Of course I'll take them,' said Will. ‘I just wish I could sell them for what they're really worth, that's all.'

Carl and I knew exactly what he meant. Art is a world of great contrasts, like show business really. Those at the top of the tree are mega-earning superstars and those at the bottom barely make a living at all – particularly if they try to be original.

Carl's name was not well known and two or three hundred pounds was the most that Will could ever ask for one of his paintings – even those large abstracts he sweated blood over. Not a lot for something Carl had worked on over several weeks.

Nonetheless we left the gallery in high spirits.

‘How about a little celebration in the Sloop?' Carl asked, clutching my hand and swinging both our arms. I happily agreed and we began to amble down to the harbour.

Although for various deep-seated reasons neither Carl nor I approved of excessive drinking – we had each in different ways seen the damage it can do – we both liked pubs. Carl had the fascination common among Americans for English pubs and I think we both saw public houses as somewhere we could enjoy a certain conviviality without involvement. Mind you, perhaps to ensure we didn't get too involved, once a week was about the limit of our pub-going, more often than not at a lunchtime rather than the heavier evening session. However, the promise of a decent sale changed things.

It was late afternoon, almost five o'clock. The day had been quite glorious and the setting sun glowed amber and orange. Carl actively disliked going down to St Ives harbour or to the beaches during the tourist season when the place was overrun with people. He had made an exception for the eclipse, partly because I had been so determined that we should watch it from the waterside, but normally he preferred to remain in our little bit of town, up on the hill and way back from the harbour and the beaches, which stayed much the same throughout the year. I wasn't quite so fussy, but he did have a point. I remembered my noisy summer lunchtime visits to the seafront with Mariette and thought how there was just no comparison with the joy of being down by the waterside on a fine, holidaymaker-free, November day like this one. In the quiet off-season times Carl and I loved to walk together along the beach at low tide and, indeed, to visit the Sloop, which was one of the places we avoided in high season because it was always packed with tourists.

As we approached the famous old waterside inn, a familiar figure emerged through the pub doors and began to totter somewhat unsteadily towards us.

‘Oh, no,' muttered Carl. ‘I really can't stand that woman.'

‘At least she's leaving,' I said in his ear.

‘Whisky must have run out,' Carl responded uncharitably.

We both half stopped in our tracks, wondering if we could turn round and escape notice, but by this time Fenella Austen was already upon us. In some ways I was less concerned by this than Carl, because in the six years we had lived in the town Fenella, still widely regarded as the matriarch of the local artistic community even though her fortunes as a painter and sculptor had fallen dramatically in recent years, had totally failed to recognise my existence. I was actually quite relieved by this since, although I tried not to let on to Carl in case he thought I really was a complete and utter wimp, the bloody woman scared me to death – particularly when she was drunk, which seemed to be most of the time nowadays.

Fenella walked straight up to Carl, ignoring me as usual, and flung her arms round him, possibly to ensure she remained upright. Nonetheless it annoyed me.

‘And so how's our new bright young thing,' she bellowed, slurring her words only slightly. Fenella had only one level of speech – full volume.

‘Fenella, I'm neither new nor young, I'm forty years old, I've lived in St Ives for six years and, although you and I may think I'm bright, the rest of the art world is showing no sign of catching on,' said Carl in a tone of exaggerated patience.

Fennella was probably only in her late fifties but had been playing the part of cynical elder for many years, certainly ever since we had moved to Cornwall. She leered at Carl. Maybe it was supposed to be a smile, I really didn't know. She carried with her a strong stench of beer and whisky, and her hair looked as if it could do with a wash. She dyed it a mid-brown colour but not nearly often enough. A grimy yellowish grey displayed itself in a two-inch wedge at the roots. Come to think of it, her face looked as if it could do with a wash too. She wore heavy black eye make-up which had become badly smudged. Her skin was pale and blotchy. I suppose you had to admit it was all a bit of a shame, really, because Fenella still had striking dark-brown eyes and the remains of what must once have been a formidable high-cheeked bone structure. We had seen a sharp deterioration in her looks even in the few years we had been in St Ives.

The local perception was that she was killing herself with drink. She also smoked like a chimney and if one didn't get her before her time it seemed inevitable that the other would.

‘You're just a lad to me, Carl, sweetheart,' continued Fenella in that deep, throaty voice which was the product of her sixty-fag-a-day habit.

She was, as usual, overplaying her hand – literally as well as metaphorically, as it happened. Her right hand had closed itself around Carl's left buttock. I watched as her fingers squeezed him.

He winced and removed the offending hand smartly from its target. ‘If I did that to you it would be sexual harassment,' he said, lightly but unwisely.

‘Harass away, darling,' invited Fenella, as Carl managed to manoeuvre his way past her. ‘I can hardly wait . . .'

Having lost her support she staggered dangerously and for one lovely moment I thought she was going to fall over. She didn't, of course.

‘Don't turn her down for me, Carl,' I whispered in his ear as we hurried along the promenade to the steps.

‘D-do me a favour,' muttered Carl. The slight stammer meant that the woman had definitely got to him. Certainly he was no longer amused. I suppose you couldn't blame him. She was a pest.

He took my hand as we jumped from the quite high bottom step on to the beach. The tide was out and the sun had almost dropped from the sky and hovered deeply golden now, glowing the last of its fire just above the horizon, bathing the entire bay in a truly wonderful light. I was a Londoner born and bred but I had grown to feel a sense of belonging in Cornwall greater than anything I had known before. Its past and its present both suited me. I liked to imagine the harbour in the great days of pilchard fishing when the whole town was kept alive by its one industry. The huge shoals of pilchards that used regularly to frequent the north Cornwall coast in the autumn, were caught by net in shallow water, a process known as seining. Great mountains of the small silvery fish would be dumped on the harbour side, then salted in big wooden tubs and exported to the Mediterranean in sailing ships. I could see the scenes so clearly: the men on their boats emptying their nets and on shore women, children, the elderly, picking up the fish, sorting them, carrying them to the salt vats, everyone involved in gathering this extraordinary autumn harvest. Maybe I romanticised it inside my head, but I couldn't help it. Neither could I help being enthralled by the tales of the wreckers and smugglers whose wild exploits form such a part of Cornish history. St Ives had relied almost entirely on its tourist industry for decades but, in my opinion anyway, the old fishing port had not to lost its unique character, its special magic.

I gazed out to sea, blinking against that last brilliant fire of the sun. The light in St Ives is almost always special, which is why artists still flock there, but that day it somehow seemed more spectacular than ever.

Switching my gaze briefly inland, I saw Fenella Austen disappear into the narrow streets of the town, no doubt to pester somebody else.

‘Let's forget the b-bloody woman,' said Carl.

‘Too right,' I replied. ‘Stand still.'

I used his shoulder to lean against as I removed my shoes and socks, something I almost always did on the beach unless the weather was really bitterly cold. I loved the feel of the coarse damp sand against my bare feet. I dug my heels in and curled up my toes.

Carl grinned at me. ‘Come along, Robinson,' he said and he grasped my hand and led me along the beach at a trot.

Laughing together, the way we did so much of the time, we eventually slowed to a walk and spent several dreamy minutes enjoying the sunset and looking at the boats before we decided to double back and have that drink as intended in the Sloop.

A few days later, right out of the blue, Mariette invited me to her house for what she described as a ‘girls' night in'. ‘A good gossip and a few drinks,' she said. ‘Bring a bottle.'

I was quite excited. In spite of everything it seemed that I was beginning to exist as an individual. It felt as if I were being invited into some kind of inner circle.

Carl seemed pleased for me too, although, as we were meeting well after dark at 7 p.m., he insisted that he walk me to Mariette's house and pick me up later, and he cautioned me to take care when he left me at the door of her cottage at the top end of Fore Street, just a few minutes walk from the library.