The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (9 page)

As he waited till she was safely in, then turned back toward the farmhouse, Declan meditated that the fact that the girl had got a bad dose of fundamentalist religion shouldn't lead him to assume that she was stupid.

His working hours as well as his free time were developing into a routine. Outdoor work, which came before and after his sessions with Byatt if it was fine, came to be a matter of seeing what needed to be done and doing it. Melanie and Martha did not intervene, unless there was something needed doing, like repair of furniture in their bedrooms, which he could not know about. His independence seemed to suit not just him but the ladies as well:
they had their own business and their own preoccupations, though Declan had no idea what they were. So he pottered around the house, mending things that were broken, giving emergency first aid to things that were going in that direction, and on fine days he gratefully took himself out into the open air.

In the gardens and field, though he was often bent double, he could better observe what he still thought of as “the community.” He was also more exposed to advances from its members. These advances did not change his opinion of the essential loneliness of everyone at Ashworth: it was because they were solitary that they pestered him with unwanted attention. But he also began to get the idea that each of them had some kind of function in the group of acolytes. From glimpsing the mail on Mellors's table when he had been there, and from seeing him drive off in the Byatts' car with canvases stored on the backseat, he got the idea that Mellors was Byatt's intermediary with galleries and other potential sellers. That car, though unreliable, seemed to be the only car at Ashworth. It was very old, and Stephen tinkered unconvincingly with it now and then in the stables. Charmayne, sometimes with Mrs. Max in tow, seemed to do most of the shopping, to collect prescriptions and get them made up, and to take anyone who needed anything major such as clothes or books or new electrical appliances to Bradford or Keighley to get them.

Jenny Birdsell was used as a second-string nurse when Melanie and Martha were exhausted. She was called on less often now that Declan was installed, but he still found her officiating upstairs from time to time when he came back of an evening. She had that artificially bright tone he
associated with nurses of a bygone era (“Before I was born,” he said vaguely to himself, being too young to have much idea of time or history). He himself instinctively preferred a lower-keyed, more natural approach when he was around his charge, and he thought it both more appropriate and more modern.

The function of Colonel Chesney and Ivor Aston in the little community he reserved judgment on, only registering that Chesney appeared to serve as a butt for Ranulph Byatt's blackest jokes, yet didn't seem to resent it, and that Ivor Aston was the only one whose pictures showed any signs of talent. Another artistic judgment, but he made it the more confidently because he was so sure everyone else's pictures were self-evidently awful. Also he told himself that he seemed to be getting an eye for paintings.

It was Charmayne Churton who showed herself most keen on having the sort of chat that might go any deeper than conventionalities or mere Ranulph worship. She watched Declan when he was mowing the back paddock one day, and when he came close to her side of the field, she said, “You look as if you could do with a break. Feel like a tea or coffee?”

Declan paused. He was certainly feeling tired and sweaty. He detected no lust in Charmayne's voice. He had no taste for being lusted after by middle-aged women, particularly (it had unfashionably to be said) by fat middle-aged women who had all the fleshly allure of a tugboat. He was conventional in his tastes.

“Thanks,” he said. “That would be great.”

He took his muddy shoes off on the doorstep, and once he got inside saw that this had been the right move. The ground floor of the tiny cottage had been turned into a
combined living space and kitchen, and the decor was twee in the extreme: flowery curtains and furnishings that were definitely pre-Laura Ashley, frilly lampshades and antimacassars, with cozy and humorous pictures of animals covering the walls. He was willing to bet that the china would be decorated with tiny flowers and very thin, and when Charmayne came back with a tray, that was exactly what it was.

“This is cozy!” she said cheerily.

A sight too cozy, thought Declan gloomily. The only thing that wasn't cozy was Charmayne herself. Changing the image in his mind, he told himself that her body had all the grace of a concrete mixer, even though it was clad in a billowy navy dress with the odd tape or streamer hanging down in the same material from random parts of it, suggesting that if you pulled one the dress would either fall to the floor or draw apart, like curtains. Declan put the thought from him.

“You take sugar, I bet,” said Charmayne in a conspiratorial, brown owl sort of voice. “Help yourself. How are you getting on at the big house?”

“Really well,” said Declan with rather more confidence than he felt. “Mr. Byatt and I don't have any problems with each other. Not so far, anyway.”

“Call him Ranulph. We all do, when we are not in the Presence.” She giggled. “What is he painting now?”

“He's just finished a painting of fields. He's looking at old pictures of his now, and photographs. I think it will be a painting of a seashore with cliffs. Though he's also talking about painting something angry. He was going to begin last week, but he says he's got to meditate it a lot more.”

“How exciting!” said Charmayne, relentlessly girlish. “I would so like . . . but it's naughty of me to ask!”

“What?”

“To
tiptoe
in some time when Ranulph is asleep and won't be disturbed, to have a peek at the work in progress.”

“You mentioned that. You'd have to ask Melanie. It's her house.”

“I suppose so. It's just that she always asks my brother at the same time as she asks me. I'd so like to
drink
in a new painting on my own.”

“You'd have to sort that out yourselves,” said Declan doggedly, ignoring the disappointment in her pale green eyes.

“If you say so. Of course, I do realize that Ivor is much more of an artist than I am. My own work”—she waved her arm around the room—“is popular art, and it doesn't even have the merit of being particularly popular!”

She laughed, a hollow sound that embarrassed Declan. He got up to hide his discomfiture and looked at the pictures which crowded the walls to an extent that suggested their unsalability. They were all of animals—moles, badgers, foxes, hamsters, mingling with the more frequent dogs and cats—and even when the creatures were not wearing aprons or policemen's helmets or chefs' hats they were given a human touch that some might have thought delightful, others might have considered landed the pictures in no-man's-land where the animals were interesting neither as animals nor as humans. Declan sat down again and took up his tea.

“I do sell some,” said Charmayne, unnerved by his lack of the conventional politenesses. “To greeting card manufacturers,
or people who make pottery for children. I make no claims for them.”

“They're . . . very pretty,” said Declan.

“Oh, they're nothing. Of course as I say, I realize that Ivor is much more of an artist, but I always feel . . .” She paused, threw him a look that was birdlike, and could be imagined coming from a carrion crow, and then leaned unpleasantly forward in her chair. “I don't know whether you've
heard
.”

“Heard?”

“About Ivor. Well, you're bound to hear sooner or later, so I may as well tell you.” Declan was not so innocent of the big world that he didn't recognize this ploy. He found the relish with which the woman thrust herself still farther forward distasteful. “He's been inside. For quite a long while.”

“I see,” said Declan. He felt himself being willed to ask what for, so he said nothing.

Charmayne looked disconcerted, but then flicked her tongue all the way around her lips.

“For possessing and disseminating material calculated to deprave and corrupt. Child porn. Kiddies doing awful things and having unspeakable things done to them. Doesn't it make you sick?”

“It's . . . very unpleasant,” ventured Declan. It was a subject on which you could hardly say less.

“I brought him here to live with me because he needs
some
one, but . . . well, we've never
jelled
, if you know what I mean. And it's always seemed to me that in Ivor's pictures there are . . . traces of his obsession, his tastes, if you catch my meaning.”

It would be difficult not to.

“I must be going,” said Declan, setting his cup and saucer down on the table and beginning the process of getting up. Charmayne Churton ignored him. She was gazing ahead of her in a pose of deep thought, as if meditating a pronouncement.

“I can accept that depravity can contribute to great art,” she said, as if she were fulfilling an engagement at Delphi. “But when it contributes to third-rate art it neither enriches it nor excuses itself.”

Declan slipped out to return to his mowing. He did not meditate on Charmayne's words because he had already decided there was no meaning to them. What did interest him was her relationship with her brother: being jealous of him, broadcasting his unsavory past, yet sticking close to him, in some way
needing
him. There were relationships in Declan's own family that made him recognize the twin, contradictory impulses, though he could not explain them.

That evening Ranulph Byatt was too tired to go down to dinner. Having heard the women go down the stairs Declan went along to the bathroom to put a flannel over his face, only to find Stephen there cleaning his teeth.

“Hi,” he said, waiting.

“Hi.” Stephen spat out toothpaste and water. “I saw you going into Charmayne's cottage this afternoon. George medals have been awarded for less.”

“Just for a cup of tea.”

“I should hope so. Well, at least you got out alive.”

Declan grinned, playing it cool.

“She didn't make any advances. In fact, I didn't get the idea that was what she was interested in.”

“No, straightforward lust isn't the Ashworth gang's besetting sin.”

“Isn't it?” said Declan. Then, feeling rather daring, he added: “But husband hunting is what your grandfather accuses your mother of.”

Stephen stood up and looked at him, an expression of amused incredulity on his face.

“Isn't language a strange thing? Is that the idea you got? That my mother is desperate to find a new husband?”

“What else could I think? That is what your grandfather said, isn't it?”

“It's what he said. But his meaning was quite different. He wasn't saying she was desperate to find a new husband. He was saying she was desperate to find her old one.”

“So what do you think?” said Ranulph Byatt to Declan about a week later, during a morning session in the studio.

Declan toyed with the idea of buying time by saying “Think?” but rejected it. Byatt was old, but he was not a fool. By now they understood each other very well, could almost be said to like each other, and Declan knew that he was being asked his opinion of the situation at Ashworth.

“I think you've got yourself a little group of disciples here,” he said, “without . . . without seeming to want them.”

Ranulph laughed wheezily.

“You were going to say ‘without doing anything to deserve them,'” he said, in a tone of good humor. “That's not true. My painting got me my disciples.”

“Of course,” said Declan. “But you don't feel the need to be nice to them, treat them well.”

“I don't. They're fools. Admiring my paintings, or anybody's paintings, is no guarantee of high intelligence. Fools they remain. Encourage fools and you confirm them in their foolishness. What else do you think?”

Declan considered. He realized he was being asked to bring into the open any stray thoughts he had about his employer's habits and situation.

“You're a painter, but you don't seem to care about your surroundings.”

“You mean the house I live in? I'm too old, I don't care any longer, I don't like fuss. As you probably know by now I was bequeathed this place by a silly old thing who thought I painted beautiful landscapes, and I just left it as it was.”

“Yet you've a stack of pictures in the corner there, and others around the house just piled up. For some reason you don't feel the need to put them on the walls.”

Ranulph Byatt shrugged.

“Now you are sounding naive. Not every picture is to be lived with, certainly not all of mine,” he said. “And most of the recent stuff is not worth hanging.”

“Yet you go on painting.”

The old man stared up fiercely, waving his paintbrush in Declan's face.

“Of course I go on painting. It's my whole existence, the thing everything in my life has been
about
. It's the
only thing that keeps me alive, mentally alive. If I couldn't paint at all I'd—take something. And who knows? Something may come back, the spark light itself again, or whatever silly, inadequate image one uses for the glory of being able to paint. Meanwhile”—he gestured at the canvas—“the junk keeps the wolf from the door.”

“I'm sure you're not in want.”

“What would you know about it? Do you think I should just live off the old age pension or something?”

“No, of course not.”

“I've always been used to the best—well, not always, but for years now: the best wines, the best food, someone making sure of my well-being. Living comfortably is what Melanie expects, and she's right. Even that fool Stephen is right in his way: the grandson of Ranulph Byatt should go to Oxford, even if the college has to be bribed to take him. It's a matter of pride, my boy, knowledge of my rightful place. I'm not having a grandson of mine going to the Polytechnic of Solihull, just as I wouldn't be fobbed off with a mere knighthood.”