Fear in the Sunlight (9 page)

Bridget Foley stood on a stepladder outside the Salutation Restaurant, putting the finishing touches to the mural that had occupied her for the past ten days. It had seemed an insurmountable task at the beginning, but she knew by now that the trick was to treat it as a game of patience, mentally dividing the wall into grids and concentrating on one small square at a time, working her way inch by inch across the hot stone without any thought for the picture as a whole. She engrossed herself in her work each day, following the branch of a tree or the path of light on water as if it were the only image that concerned her; now, when the mural was almost complete, patience became less important than faith – and if art was anything, it was an act of faith. She had learnt long ago that creating one thing did not necessarily mean you had a God-given right to do it again, and – successful as she was – a blank space still frightened her as much as it had when she had first begun to paint; more so, in fact, because the fearless arrogance of youth was such a distant memory that she sometimes wondered if it had ever existed.

There was something very satisfying in continuing a tradition that was as old as humanity itself. As a child, she had been fascinated by the medieval wall paintings which dominated the churches that her father preached in – terrifying lotteries of judgement and salvation that stretched from the chancel arch to the timbers of the roof. A sense of honouring the past made the first few strokes of the brush even more nerve-racking than usual, especially when every movement was under public scrutiny; out here, she didn’t have the protective shell of a studio, where mistakes could be destroyed before they saw the light of day. She hated being a public spectacle, but Portmeirion forced a choice between solitude and fine weather: its fertile, almost tropical climate meant that it was impossible to find a dry wall except at the height of summer. Fortunately most people were happy to watch quietly while she worked. Only a few were rude enough to offer a constructive comment or two along the way, and she had perfected a smile which dealt with them effectively. Crowds were never really a problem: even now, with Portmeirion’s increasing popularity, the village still felt like an island, unthreatened by an influx of people and cut off from the outside world. To deter too many visitors, daily admission charges altered according to the privacy needs of its residents and had hit an all-time high with the arrival of the Prince of Wales a couple of years ago; Alfred Hitchcock, she noticed, was a couple of shillings cheaper.

The sky was the lightest part of the painting, pale blue at the top‚ fading down through white and yellow; Bridget stretched cautiously up to her right to add some warmer tints just above the treeline. The ladder wobbled precariously, much to the delight of two small boys who were standing nearby, threatening to have some fun with the tantalising array of paints that she had laid out on the floor, and she sent them scuttling back to their families with an unnecessarily vigorous stroke of the brush. There was a great sense of freedom in working here: Clough’s ‘home for fallen buildings’, as he affectionately referred to it, was a continual experiment in form and colour. Nothing was considered too bizarre, and the shades of the buildings mirrored the flowers and plants which filled the woods behind the village, bridging the gap between the natural and the man-made, the real and the illusory. In all her life, even among artist friends who were notoriously selfish, she had never known anyone to do exactly what he wanted in the way that Clough did – and yet that single-mindedness was such a benevolent gesture, an assurance that here, at least, trees would always be trees, streams would continue to tumble into the sea, and rocks would stand unthreatened. It was no longer the fashion in art to glorify a property or a landlord, but it made what she was doing more important, somehow, if she thought of it as a tribute to his sense of beauty and permanence.

She had known Clough for most of her life. Her father had met him at Cambridge and presided over his marriage to Amabel Strachey, and the families had remained friends – part of a circle of influential writers, artists and political activists which had enriched her childhood with its ideas and eccentricities. As a young girl, she had spent most of her summers in North Wales, staying in one of the farmhouses near Clough’s family home. It was long before Portmeirion existed‚ but, even then, the love that she developed for the landscape was tempered by an awareness that families like hers were not welcomed by the local people. She felt the same resentment these days from some of the older staff in the village, though she couldn’t fault them for it: there was precious little housing for them and their families, yet extravagant buildings sprang up at Portmeirion each year to be played in during the holiday season then left empty and useless over the winter months. Not everyone blessed Clough the way she did.

Bridget swapped to an old decorator’s brush, conscious that she was running out of those cowardly finishing touches which served to put off the moment of truth. She had painted a carved arch to frame the mural, and she added some darker tones at its edges to give it a more solid look, using the roughness of the surface to create a mottled effect and subtly ageing her painted stone until it resembled the wall around Portmeirion’s original kitchen garden. Knowing that she risked ruining the whole image if she added anything else, she got down from the ladder and walked a few steps back from the building, picking her way carefully through the detritus of her work. Her body ached from another day of bending and twisting at odd angles, but she was quietly excited: when her work was going well, it was almost as if she were uncovering what was already there rather than creating something from nothing. She turned round and saw with relief that her excitement was justified: she had created a fine illusion, worthy of its place in a village where nothing was quite what it seemed. Her mock arch enclosed a woodland scene, a glorious profusion of trees, rhododendrons and ferns with a lake in the foreground; the mural brought the wild gardens of Portmeirion into the heart of its ordered piazza‚ and, if you glanced at it quickly, you would believe you were looking through the wall of the restaurant into the woods beyond.

But it was missing something – a bird in the trees, perhaps, or a sign of life on the lake. She reached for some white paint, then changed her mind and picked up the black; like many of her brushes and artist’s materials, she had inherited it from a friend who had died too young, and she had found herself using the paint sparingly, wanting to create as much as possible with it to compensate for what had been destroyed. The swans she had in mind would need all that was left, but somehow that was fitting. She sketched the outline, making sure that the figures were balanced within the overall composition. As the birds began to take shape, she smiled.

Satisfied at last, she decided to call it a day. The café had shown no sign of dwindling in popularity as the afternoon wore on, and she was glad to leave the families behind and head for her own small cottage on the southern boundary of the village, just beyond the hotel. White Horses, so called because waves had been known to beat at its door and flood the property, was unique among the buildings of Portmeirion in that it was neither available for hire by the public nor simply decorative. Formerly a fisherman’s cottage, the building had been variously used by Clough as a storeroom, a workshop for weaving and dyeing and temporary lodgings for builders and craftsmen employed in the village. She made her home there whenever she was at Portmeirion, feeling comfortable in that final category and using her dogs as an excuse to fend off repeated invitations to stay at the hotel. While she appreciated Clough’s hospitality, Bridget had no liking for a life governed by other people’s routines.

The lower terrace seemed quieter, so she chose that route past the hotel, conscious that a woman in paint-splashed overalls carrying a stepladder wasn’t the illusion of perfection which most of the clientele paid for. Up ahead, moored at the quayside, the
Amis Reunis
– a graceful old trading ketch from Porthmadog, used now as a houseboat – shone proudly in the sunlight, giving the wharf a deceptive air of seafaring activity which always made her smile. As she drew closer, she noticed a man standing alongside the boat and hesitated when she recognised him, instinctively calculating how many years it must have been since they last saw each other. He was filling a pipe, and she watched as he packed the tobacco into the bowl, remembering how he had always given even the simplest of tasks his full attention. It was one of the things she had loved most about him, that intensity which relaxed so easily into laughter whenever she teased him about it, like the sun breaking suddenly through a cloud. Looking at him now, she was pleased to see that she had been right: the face she had drawn so often – still young then, if aged prematurely by war – had grown leaner and stronger in the intervening years and was now more attractive than ever.

‘You never could get that damned thing to stay alight.’

‘Bridget!’ He looked at her in astonishment, and she was touched to see how quickly delight followed surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

She glanced down at her paint-covered clothes. ‘I would have thought that was fairly obvious,’ she said, trying to transfer everything she was carrying to one hand in order to hold out the other. The stepladder defeated her, but it was an oddly formal gesture anyway‚ and he pre-empted it by bending to kiss her.

‘I learnt a long time ago never to take anything about you at face value,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘It’s always sensible to check.’

Bridget laughed. ‘And how often did I tell you that sensible is overrated?’ She dumped her bags on the quayside so that she could embrace him properly. ‘Here, give those to me,’ she said, taking the matches out of his hand. ‘We could be here all day.’ She held the flame up to the bowl, surprised at how easily the first traces of pipe smoke erased twenty years, and nodded to the
Amis Reunis
sign on the ship’s bow. ‘Looks like this old lady’s very well named. How are you, Archie?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘and I don’t need to ask how
you
are. Whatever you’ve been doing, it suits you.’ He gazed at her, and she brushed the hair away from her eyes, unusually self-conscious. ‘You’ve hardly changed at all,’ he said, and flushed slightly at his own cliché. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever said that truthfully, although the paint could be hiding a lot – is there
any
on the canvas?’

‘On the walls,’ she corrected him. ‘I’ve been doing some work for Clough up at Salutation. He fancied a mural to liven up the café terrace. Every now and then, he gets bored with a wall or ceiling and decides it needs Cloughing up a bit.’

‘Your phrase or his?’

‘Neither. I think someone used it in a novel and not necessarily as a compliment. He doesn’t mind, though – he always says he’d rather be vulgar than dull.’

‘I’m sure his mural’s neither. Is he pleased with it?’

‘He hasn’t seen it yet. He’s off in Flintshire, saving a vaulted ceiling that no one else can find room for. God knows where he’ll put it if he gets it.’

‘Somewhere ludicrous, no doubt. We’ll all say he’s off his head and then marvel at how good it looks once it’s in place.’ He nodded at her paints. ‘Is the mural finished?’

‘Just about, although I’ll probably see a hundred things I don’t like about it when I go back tomorrow.’

‘But it’s safe for me to look?’ Bridget nodded. Funny, she thought, after all these years, that he should remember how much she hated people seeing her work before it was finished. ‘I’ll go up there later then. I haven’t been that way today, and it was getting dark when we got here last night.’ The ‘we’ hung awkwardly in the air between them for a moment, as she resisted the temptation to ask and he avoided seeming overanxious to explain. ‘It’s a friend’s fortieth birthday,’ Archie said eventually. ‘That’s why I’m here – a few of us have come over for the weekend.’

‘I see.’ She didn’t, but was determined not to flood him with questions when they had only just met. In any case, it made no difference to her with whom Archie had come to Portmeirion; they had never had that sort of relationship, and she was surprised to find herself more curious now about his life than she had ever been when they were young.

‘How are your parents?’ he asked, and the clumsy change of subject made her burst out laughing, even though she could see that it hurt his pride. Embarrassment made him irritable, and he added tetchily‚ ‘I don’t see what’s so funny. It was a straightforward question.’

‘Oh, Archie – you were always so polite,’ Bridget said, still laughing. ‘I’d quite forgotten what good manners you have.’ She looked at him affectionately. ‘They’re both very well, thank you.’ He smiled grudgingly, and she took his arm. ‘Come on – you can help me get this lot home. I’m staying at White Horses.’ It was late afternoon, but the heat still shimmered over the estuary, blending with the ripples on the water until it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. ‘You’re not connected with this film circus, then?’ she asked as they walked along.

‘Not really, no.’

‘When I first saw you, I thought the Yard might have been called in to take care of Mr Hitchcock.’

He stared at her in surprise. ‘How did you know I was a policeman?’ he asked. ‘Please tell me it’s not obvious.’

She laughed. ‘Of course it isn’t. I wouldn’t be walking along here in daylight with you if it were. No, I’ve just seen your name in the paper a few times. It beats the wireless, you know. Inspector Penrose of the Yard – he’s quite a hero.’

‘Chief Inspector now, I’m afraid.’

‘Good God, that’s even worse.’ The combination of admiration and gentle mockery in her tone was unfamiliar, and she tried to think of someone else she used it for. ‘Actually, it makes me realise what a lucky escape I’ve had. All that effort I’ve put into bucking the trend and being radical, only to end up on the long arm of the law. It takes a lot of discipline to be a free spirit, you know. What would Dover Street think of me?’