Before the Poison (14 page)

He led me to the spacious living room, which had French windows, like my hotel room, and looked out on the tops of the buildings opposite. In the distance, just behind the low-pitched rooftops, I could see the massive monolith of the Montparnasse
tour
sticking up high into the clear blue sky.

‘Look at me,’ he said, ‘inviting you into my home when I don’t even know who you are. I don’t often get visitors from England here. You could be a burglar or a murderer, for all I know. Or worse. A
critic
.’

‘I’m not,’ I assured him. ‘Actually, I’m a musician. A composer.’

‘Would I have heard of you?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I compose film music. My name’s Christopher Lowndes.’

‘I’ve seen the name. I must say, I have always found music to be one of the most essential elements of film, so I do tend to notice these things. Of course,’ he went on, sitting down and bidding me do likewise, ‘I don’t get out to the cinema quite as often as I used to do, but I occasionally watch DVDs.’ His English was precise and mannered, rather posh, in fact, and there was no way of guessing he was a farmer’s son from North Yorkshire.

I noticed a slight grimace of pain as he bent his knees to sit and wondered whether he had arthritis or rheumatism. Perhaps that was why it had taken him so long to answer the door. It was hard to believe, but I had to keep reminding myself that he was in his late seventies. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I seem to be forgetting my manners. Can I offer you something? A drink, perhaps?’

I didn’t really feel like a drink, but I thought it might be the kind of thing that would break the ice.

‘I usually take a small Armagnac, myself, around this time of day. Purely medicinal, of course. The French doctors are far more understanding about alcohol than their English counterparts. Would you mind? My legs aren’t what they used to be.’ He gestured towards a cocktail cabinet by the door.

I could see glasses and several bottles. ‘Of course.’ I went over and poured us each a small measure of Armagnac and passed him a glass.

He took a sip and smacked his lips. ‘Mm. I used to be a cognac man, you know, but once I tasted this . . . Nectar of the gods.’ I smiled and we clinked glasses. ‘So,’ he went on, a curious and suspicious glint appearing in his eye. ‘What brings the composer of music for films to visit the ageing doodler of pictures?’

I swirled the Armagnac in my glass, inhaling its scent. ‘It’s a rather delicate matter, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘I’ll quite understand if you don’t want to talk about it.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Now you do have my attention. But in order to know whether I wish to talk about it or not, I need to know what it is.’

Now I was here, I felt nervous and embarrassed. I didn’t know how to explain my interest in Grace Fox to him other than as a prurient one, though I remained convinced it wasn’t that. There was nothing for it but to take the plunge. ‘It’s about Grace,’ I said. ‘Grace Fox.’

His expression didn’t change. In fact, he sat there frozen, drink halfway to his mouth, staring beyond me. I couldn’t read him. I didn’t know whether he was remembering the past or simply stunned by my audacity. I shifted nervously, sipped some more Armagnac. Too much; it made me cough.

After what seemed like hours, he turned back to me and said, ‘It was a very long time ago, but I don’t see any reason
not
to talk about Grace, so long as you are who you say you are.’ He paused. ‘You know, the day Grace died, a part of me died with her. It’s still difficult.’

‘But you’re still here, still painting, a success.’

‘A fluke. What was it Beckett wrote? “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Story of my life.’

‘Story of most of our lives, if truth be told,’ I said, thinking about Laura. There was something else Beckett had written that had always stuck in my memory, too, from my student days: ‘They give birth bestride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’. But, oh, I thought, that instant, and the things we do to fill it, the way we try to grasp who we are, why we are, the love we give and the cruelties we inflict. That instant is a lifetime. For some reason, I remembered the young jazz singer at Ronnie Scott’s the previous evening, how she brought ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ to life, how she made it new. If she had gone on singing for ever, I would have been listening for ever, and that would have been the instant between darkness and darkness. But life is made of many moments like that.

Sam grunted an end to the philosophy. ‘It’s an awful long way to come just to talk about a long-forgotten incident.’

‘I don’t quite see it like that,’ I said, ‘but I’m on my way to visit my brother in Angoulême, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of calling on you on my way.’

‘Well, would you at least satisfy an old man’s curiosity and tell me
why
you want to talk about it?’

I tried to explain to him as best I could about how I had been drawn into the whole Grace Fox business through moving into Kilnsgate House, how finding out about the murder and the hanging had stimulated my interest, along with the family portrait, my brother’s memory of the day of Grace’s execution, and my conversation with Wilf Pelham.

‘Wilf Pelham? Now there’s a name to conjure with. So he’s still alive, is he?’

‘Do you remember him?’

‘Of course I do. I may be old, but I’m not senile. Besides, it’s the short-term memory that goes first. I remember those days as if they were yesterday. We used to play together when we were kids during the war, then we lost touch for a few years, as you do. I spent most of my time up at the farm, and I don’t think we had a book in the house if it wasn’t to do with giving birth to calves. But Wilf’s parents were both teachers, educated, cultured people, and they lived on Frenchgate. Much more middle class, you know. But later, when we were fifteen or sixteen, Wilf was one of the few young town lads I could talk to. He knew about art and music and literature. You’ve no idea how rare that was. I liked him, and I think I actually learned quite a bit from him, even though he was younger than me. I was raw, unformed. Mostly up to that point I’d been sketching cows in a field or trying to capture an interesting landscape. Wilf wasn’t as stupid or as limited in his outlook as the rest. They were just . . . well, you know, sport, sheep and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Wilf had a good eye, but music was his real passion. He and I had the occasional pint together later. He even used to come and help out up on the farm at lambing and shearing times.’

‘Didn’t you go to art college?’

‘No. Never. Everything I learned, I learned from other artists.’

‘Where was the farm?’

‘Up Dalton way. I grew up there, but I went to school in Richmond. Farming wasn’t the life for me. I left when I was seventeen, went to live in town in a poky little flat over a hat shop on the market square, but I went back to help out occasionally.’ He sniffed. ‘That was one of the things the press held against me, what made it all so much worse. I was only a farmer’s boy, see. Sort of the equivalent to Mellors in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, had it been readily available back then. Funny, isn’t it, but have you thought that the only people who seem to have made a decent movie out of
Lady Chatterley
are the French? It always seems such an
English
story.’

‘What about Ken Russell?’

‘I was never a fan.
Women in Love
? Maybe. Anyway, I digress. So it was Wilf who told you about me?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how does he know where I live? We haven’t met in sixty years or more.’

‘He doesn’t. Once I knew you were still alive, I tracked you down myself through an art dealer colleague. It wasn’t difficult. You do have a public reputation, you know. A good one.’

‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

‘So can you tell me anything?’

‘Oh, there’s plenty I can tell you. It’s a matter of knowing where to begin. I suppose I could start by telling you that Ernest Fox wasn’t a nice man.’

‘Wilf Pelham said as much.’

Sam nodded. ‘Fox was an arrogant, cold and cruel bastard.’

‘Why did Grace marry him, then?’

‘A man’s true face is not always apparent from the start. Besides, he was a friend of the family, Daddy’s ultimatum, a man of substance.’

‘It was arranged?’

‘
Advantageous
. We English don’t do arranged marriages. You should know that.’

‘Did he abuse Grace?’

‘Depends on what you mean. He didn’t hit her, I’m certain of it. She wouldn’t have stood for that. But he did treat her like a chattel, and he was cold towards her. That was the cruellest thing you could do to someone like Grace. She needed . . . she . . . I’m sorry.’ He sipped some more Armagnac and cleared his throat. He wasn’t crying, but it was clear that he had been rather more overcome by emotion than he was used to. I began to feel guilty for putting him through it. And what if he had a heart attack or a stroke? ‘What I meant to say,’ he went on, ‘was that she needed nurturing, tenderness, kindness and passion. Romance. She was damaged. Ernest was insensitive and callous. He shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near another human being in pain.’

‘Grace was damaged? How?’

‘The war, I think. She never spoke about it, but it was there in her silences, her black moods. It seemed to come out most of all when she was confronted with great beauty. She always used to cry when she looked at a great painting, or when she heard a superb musical performance. She was a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, you know, and she was overseas a lot. Nobody says much about their heroism, but they went through much the same horrors as the fighting men.’

‘She never mentioned her wartime experiences?’

‘No. But people don’t, do they? They just want to forget, not dwell on it. It’s different when you’re just a kid, though.’

‘What sort of experience was it for you?’

‘Me?’ Sam laughed. ‘Well, in my case there’s nothing
to
talk about. Oh, it was all very exciting at the time, though we tended to be quite away from it all up on the farm. I mean, we didn’t get the bombing raids or anything. Mostly it was the usual stuff. Missing sheep, a foot-and-mouth scare, a bad harvest, dealing with ministry officials and government directives about how much to grow of what.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Lived in a world of make-believe. Pretended I was a soldier, or a spy. I had my fighter and bomber identification charts, my Mickey Mouse gas mask and my steel helmet. My father even put an Anderson shelter in the garden. We grew vegetables on top of it. We heard a doodlebug once, miles away, and sometimes the German bombers passed overhead on Teesside raids. Once a Messerschmitt crashed in a field near Willance’s Leap. That was as exciting as it got. Of course, we still got plenty of local gossip from town.’

‘Like what?’

‘Blackout violations, bossy Home Guards, and one of the ARP slipping it to someone else’s wife. That one ended in a big showdown. The whole town came out for it. We had the occasional house fire, shortages, a row about the POW camp being too close, a missing person.’

‘Who went missing?’

‘A young lad called Nat Bunting. Bit of a local character.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. He simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Never seen again. He wasn’t quite all there, if you know what I mean, but he was always going on about joining up, doing his bit. Maybe he did join up and went off to war, got killed. He could have got lost in a cave or fallen down a pothole. Anything. Or maybe he just moved on. He didn’t have any family as far as anyone knew. I only remember him because he used to come by the farm sometimes and my father would give him a few scraps of food. I’d talk to him sometimes. He was about my age, mentally, when I was about six or seven.’

‘But Grace missed all this?’

‘From what I could gather. I didn’t know her then.’ He paused. ‘They called her a cradle-snatcher, but she wouldn’t snatch as young as an eight- or nine-year-old boy.’ He smiled to himself then turned to me again and sighed. ‘No, Grace didn’t talk about the war. Look, I’m still rather tired. As I said, I have no objection to carrying on this conversation, but perhaps we could eat dinner together this evening?’

‘I’d like that,’ I said.

‘Where are you staying?’

I told him.

‘Then let’s meet at Le Dome. It’s right on the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and Rue Delambre, just down the street from your hotel. You can’t miss it. Marcel will find us a quiet corner. Mention my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be there. Say eight o’clock?’

I knocked back the rest of my Armagnac and stood up. ‘Eight o’clock it is,’ I said. ‘Don’t get up. Please. I’ll find my own way out.’

He nodded, and I walked down the hall to the front door, then down the stairs and out into the street.

I must confess that I had a brief nap myself when I got back to my hotel. I’m not seventy-eight, but the years are definitely catching up with me. Or perhaps it was the wine and the Armagnac. Gone were my days of two-martini-and-a-bottle-of-wine lunches followed by late nights in smoky bars lingering over the fifth single malt Scotch. The bars aren’t even smoky any more.

Just before eight, feeling a little refreshed, I set off down the Boulevard Raspail towards the bright lights of Montparnasse, past a couple of cafés and a fitness centre, where dedicated members were still running the treadmills and riding the exercise bikes, pouring sweat. I felt guilty. I hadn’t had a good workout in ages. But not
that
guilty. When I reached the broad, busy intersection, I spotted Le Dome easily on the corner just to my left.

I could see the waiter sizing me up with a surly, truculent expression on his face as I walked in and deciding at which of the Siberian tables he should seat me. As Sam Porter had told me to, I mentioned his name, and suddenly it was all smiles and ‘
Oui, oui, monsieur. Suivez-moi.
’

It was a large split-level restaurant which gave the impression of being divided into several distinct areas. No doubt the waiter knew the pecking order. I took in the thirties art deco ambience as I followed him up the stairs and around a corner by the bar. It was all fabric-covered light fixtures, paintings on the walls, shiny brass rails, mirrors, plush red velvet banquettes and polished wood. Probably the kind of place Hemingway or Scott and Zelda used to eat when they were flush. Same waiters, too.