SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (27 page)

A large red-brick house. Its rooms were not so much filled as stuffed. Ragged bookshelves, ancient furniture, crooked pictures all over the walls. It had a curious atmosphere of dusty encroachment, the sense that time was beginning to scent a victory. It was all mostly indifferent stuff; Henry was about to say that he wasn't interested at all, when he spotted it in a corner. It wasn't even hanging on the wall, so it was a fair bet that no one had ever noticed its worth. It was a Ben Nicholson.
19
30s. Henry had the eye, at least about things that interested him. He was hardly ever wrong. He looked it over and did a quick calculation. He remembered that the old lady had died. Everything was going to some distant relative, who probably had hardly seen her for the last few decades. No need for any great compunction then.

'I'll give you six hundred quid for th
e lot,' he said to the antique
dealer.

'Make it six-fifty.'

'Split the difference.'

'Six-twenty-five.
'

'When can you shift it?'

'Tomorrow. I'll get Martin to come over.'

'Done.' With that, the antique dealer was on his way. Henry waited until he could no longer be seen before going back upstairs and picking up the Nicholson. Might as well take it with him, but he didn't want anybody noticing. He wasn't sure, but thought he might be looking at the better pan of £
I
0,000.

Back in the gallery, he put the picture in a corner and stared at it. He poured himself a glass of red wine, then he thought he would phone Sylvie. He'd been meaning to do it. Now that he and Marie had discovered their compatibility, he wanted to let Sylvie know there were no hard feelings. It all made much more sense. Marie had had her children; she wouldn't be having any more. Henry had managed to avoid having any; what with one thing and another, and he suspected that now was probably not the time to start. But he had been aware that children would have to become an issue sooner or later with Sylvie. She had told him one night about the miscarriage, and then how she couldn't face all the treatment because of Owen's affairs, but at her age she surely wasn't just going to forget about it. In fact, had she let him get further than he did with his proposal that evening, then conception and motherhood would have been pan of his proposition. Such an accommodating fellow, aren't I, Henry thought. But he hadn't got that far, had he? Just as well, perhaps. Or maybe he was rationalising again.

'Sylvie. Hello. It's Henry.'

'Henry.' He was genuinely pleased at the warmth with which she said his name. 'Henry, how nice to hear your voice. I've been going to phone you. Can I come over and see you?'

'Well, yes,' he said. 'When?'

'How about now? The pizzas are on me.' Henry thought for a moment. Marie had gone to London for two days.

'All right. There's something I should say. I've met someone called Marie. Well, met her. I met her a long time ago. But ... I can't offer you a bed for the night any more, Sylvie. It could be misconstrued by my new companion.'

'Well, I must say, you don't hang around, do you?' She had expected this remark to elicit laughter. It didn't. 'Sorry Henry, I was only trying to be provocative. Who is Marie?'

'She owns the Hilltop Gallery.'

'Then you have a lot in common. No, don't worry, I shan't need a bed. I'll forgo the wine, and drive back, but I'll bring a nice bottle for you, all the same.'

'Then I'll get the pizzas.'

Sylvie put her notebook in to her bag and threw on her leather jacket. She couldn't be bothered having a shower. She'd been making some decisions on the drive back over from Liverpool, and she did need to make her final notes on the
Vo/lard Suite,
but she wanted to see Henry too. It made it easier that he'd been the one to phone.

The music on Henry's CD-player wasn't Thelonius Monk, but Beethoven's
Opus
III
, his last sonata of all. Music seemed to confront silence here. If the two realms ever wanted to meet, whether it was the animal and the human or the angelic and the demonic, this would surely be their background track. It was music for the end of the world. Henry could never hear it without also hearing the river out there rising again. But now he let it play while he contemplated his new purpose and sipped his wine.

One of the other images of an artist on Henry's wall, apart from the photograph of Picasso with his
mirada fuerte,
was the

woodcut of Beethoven that had embellished so many thousands of books. Batt had painted the composer in his middle years, almost bursting out of his skin with energy. Henry was greatly intrigued by this image and its implications. In it Ludwig is almost dementedly intense, surrounded by the debris of his life and trade: scattered coins, conversation-books in which visitors had to write their questions for a man who couldn't hear them, fragments of food, a candlestick, quill pens, a broken coffee cup. There is also the Graf piano, its strings looping out like springs from a burst mattress. He'd wrecked it trying to hear the sounds. What the woodcut didn't show was the chamberpot underneath the Graf, as reported by Baron de Tremont in
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09; the bowl containing the minotaur's faeces, but you can still smell them if you look hard enough and listen hard enough, the way Picasso said he wanted you to be able to smell the armpit of a woman once he'd painted her. Beethoven is oblivious to all the chaos that surrounds him, focused entirely on the string quartet he's now composing.

What was a sonata exactly? Henry had never entirely managed to work this out. He listened hard to this one as he stared equally hard at the Nicholson. It had to have a theme. The theme was then developed, which was another way of saying that the simplicity it craves is attacked by all the other musical possibilities surrounding it until it fights its way through.
En route,
by a process of osmosis, it absorbs much of the power of the surrounding forces until by the time it's finished, it's no longer the same as when it started. If the theme's not strong enough, the work fails. Sounds like all the rest of us there then, Henry thought to himself He had to go outside, to make sure the river wasn't rising.

An hour later she was there. He offered her a glass of wine but she said no, she'd stick with water, having to drive back later. Then they went and sat in the Picasso Room. He'd already put the pizza in the oven.

'I'm glad about Marie,
’
she said. Henry shrugged. So was he, but he didn't necessarily assume it would all go on indefinitely. Take what comfort you can where you find it: that had become Henry's philosophy. 'And I'm glad there are no hard feelings.'

"
T
ry
not to go in for those any more. I'd better check that pizza.' When Henry returned, Sylvie was taking notes with such concentration that he said nothing and went back for the salad. It struck him (unworthily?) that she might have wanted to see the
Vollard Suite
at least as much as she wanted to see him. Finally she seemed to have what she wanted and sat down to eat.

'So, what's happening with Owen?'

'He's moved out. We're getting divorced.'

'What will happen with the house? I thought you said you couldn't afford it without him.'

'I can't. I don't know, Henry. It's a very confusing time. And now there's a problem at the Signum too. This pizza's nice.'

'It's the one I give all my vegetarian ladies. That minotaur in the corner has started giving me a very old-fashioned look.'

'I suppose vegetarianism wouldn't be very good for business, if you were a minotaur.' They paused and ate until Sylvie spoke again.

'Thanks for everything, Henry. You were a real help sometimes.'

'Well, you got me through one or two dull evenings too.'

'Is that a new painting on the floor?'

'Early Ben Nicholson. It's been a good day.'

'Gl
ad somebody's had one.'

*

When Sylvie arrived back in Chester later, there was a message for her on her answering machine. It was Patrick Gregory, wondering if he might possibly be able to speak to Mr Owen Treadle. The name meant nothing to her. She phoned him back.

'He doesn't actually live here any more. Is it about business?'

'It is about business, yes.' The voice was quiet and professional.

She gave him John Tamworth's number. 'You should be able to find him there.'

Ten minutes later John T
amworth picked up his phone and listened as the voice explained its identity, and the reason for wishing to speak to Mr Owen
T
readle.
Patrick didn't feel like any more subterfuge. He knew the newspaper piece would be coming out about the Delta Foundation the following Sunday: Now he just wanted to understand something, however fragmentary, about the way human beings behaved with one another Particularly the ones who'd
had dealings with his daughter.

'I can arrange the meeting,' John said. 'Would you mind it being filmed?'

'No. In fact I might prefer it. Is the filming for any particular purpose?'

'Not a specified one, yet. We're doing some work on memory and identity. Oh, there's one other thing.'

'What's that?'

'Mr
T
readle won't know that you'll be coming.
So I'll be introducing you in front of the camera.'

'Suits me.'

*

That night Henry had one of his most vivid dreams. The river was rising again. The river was always rising in Henry's dreams. The images had become so specific that Henry felt they could be filmed; now why was that?
Was it because he spent his life staring at images, so that part of his brain had grown in powe
r -
the way one hemisphere of the human mind grew in size the more we'd used language?
Who was he supposed to ask to find out? Sylvie certainly wouldn't know and Marie would merely laugh at him again.

'They have the new floo
d walls now, for heaven's sake.
'

Walls against water. Might work for a while. In the dream they had a supply of sandbags. And Sylvie (what was she doing there?) had acquired an information sheet which she placed before him. About all the infections flooding often brings in its wake. The pathogenic organisms one might cautiously expect. The nastiest type of flood water was apparently labelled Category C, which arrived after brownsludging it up from the sewers, sticky with unwanted matter from faeces and urine and the decomposing carcasses of drowned animals. Sylvie was weirdly detached as she explained to him the immemorial traditions of the deluge, and how industry had recently joined in with its own liberal sprinkling of lethal substances. Put all the hazards together and it appeared that everyone needed to be on the look-out for
E.coli,
particularly the sinister and apocalyptic strain known as 0
15
7. Then there was salmonella, and the protozoa parasite cryptosporidium. There was also that age-old stand-by, cholera. Not forgetting Weil's disease. This apparently made its merry way through life by means of water contaminated by rats' piss, the Chardonnay of the damned. 'It's all one long litany of delight, isn't it, Henry?' Sylvie said, in a tone of insouciance which enraged him. He was locked in the immoveable paralysis of dream-rage. 'I daresay the minotaur's faeces are in there too. He's certainly roaring today, isn't he? Is that pizza ready yet?'

But dreaming Henry had no time for pizzas. He was already heaving the paintings upstairs, except that now he wasn't in Shropshire any more. He was in Florence in the middle of the
19
60s. He stood above the Arno, for he seemed to be walking on water, and all around him he could see a town full of antique beauty drenched with the present's raging filth. He was shouting up to the Ponte Vecchio: It's going to take months, it might even be years, to scrape all the mire from those faces. Saints, madonnas, whores. And he knew with a thump in his heart that some of these things, things made through years of craft and devotion, would be lost for ever. So many things he loved.