The Dark Clue (13 page)

‘An actress?' I said, with some trepidation.

‘A pretty widow, so the story went. Who gave him a bastard or two. But you can't credit everything you hear.'

A gentleman at my shoulder – of whom I was only aware because of the strong smell of cigar smoke – cleared his throat noisily, and clumped off; and I must have looked discomfited myself, for Lady Meesden said:

‘Lord, woman! – what's the matter with that? It ain't natural for a man to be alone, nor yet a woman, neither.' She suddenly fixed me with her gimlet eyes, discomfiting me further. ‘Sooner one warm bed than two cold.'

How foolish to feel embarrassed and confused, yet I did; and, for fear of hearing more such confidences (or rather, if I am honest, of being
seen
to hear them in that place), I started towards Walter, saying:

‘My brother is writing a biography of Turner, did you know that?'

And I wish now that I hadn't; for, had I been less delicate, I might have learned more.

‘Don't fetch the men,' said Lady Meesden plaintively. ‘They're all such infernal prigs nowadays – like lawyers and schoolmasters.'

I paused, but it was too late. I heard Walter say, ‘I, too, have a daughter called Florence' – as if all topics of conversation, beyond the coincidence of their children sharing a name, had already been exhausted – and then he caught my eye, and gave me an imploring look that would have melted an iceberg, and made it impossible for me to withdraw.

‘I'm beginning to think we should have called ‘em “Venice”,' said Mr. Kingsett, with a snorting laugh, and a wave towards
The Bridge of Sighs.

Walter edged in my direction, his face frankly saying what his lips could not:
Save me!

‘Lady Meesden was a friend of Turner's,' I said. ‘Did you know that, Walter?'

‘Oh, no,' he said, moving towards her. ‘How interesting.'

But Mr. Kingsett, with a nimbleness I would not have suspected, was there before him; and a moment later, as if some signal had passed between them (though I own, if it did, I saw nothing), his wife had joined him, and was saying:

‘Now, Mama, we mustn't detain Miss Halcombe and Mr. Hartright any longer. If we don't continue on our way, we shall be here all night, and most of tomorrow.'

I was, for a moment, quite furious; and then I remembered my own response to the old woman, and was forced to reflect that, had she been
my
mother, and I had heard her chattering indiscreetly
to a stranger, I should probably have acted in the same way.

It was when I had shaken hands with them all, and Walter was exchanging a few polite words with Lady Eastlake on the subject of his researches, that I suddenly thought – like a sailor with time enough to snatch only one treasure from a sinking ship – of a final question for Lady Meesden. Leaning down, I said:

‘Which painting here do you think is truest of Turner the man?'

And without a moment's hesitation she replied: ‘
Calais Pier.'

After they had gone, Walter and I sought it out. It is another marine picture, with a marbled grey sea churning and breaking beneath a stormy sky. On the right-hand side, a ramshackle wooden pier lined with disorderly knots of figures juts out towards the horizon – where two distant ships appear in silhouette, and a crack in the clouds lays a pencil-stroke of sunlight on the water. Closer at hand, in the centre of the picture, is a chaos of boats trying to put into, or set out from, the harbour. In the nearest – which an oarsman with only one oar is frantically trying to keep from being dashed against the wooden piles – a man in the stern, far from helping, is angrily shaking a bottle of cognac at his wife on the pier above. Only the approaching English packet, its sails confidently set, appears to be under control.

The bluff, John-Bullish air – a crowd of drunken, cowardly, disorganized French people being shown up by English seamanship – is echoed by the full title:
Calais Pier, with French Poissards Preparing for Sea: An English Packet Arriving;
for, according to my dictionary,
poissard
means not (as one might suppose) ‘fisherman', but ‘base' or ‘vulgar'.

We stood before that picture for perhaps fifteen minutes, and I must have thought of it every hour since; for although it was easy enough to imagine the author of this jaunty, humorous, patriotic satire quoting Tom Dibdin, I could find not the slightest evidence to suggest that the same artist could also have painted
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus.

XIV

Letter from Colonel George Wyndham to
Walter Hartright, 29th August, 185–

Petworth,
29th Augt, 185
–

Dear Sir,

I have received yours of 17th August, and will be glad to see you here if you are near Petworth. I fear, however, that you may find it a wasted journey, for there is very little I can tell you about Turner, or my father's dealings with him.

Yours truly,

George Wyndham

XV

Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
19th September, 185–

Brompton Grove,
Tuesday

My dearest love,

I fear you may have begun to grow anxious about me, so long is it since I last wrote; but the truth – which I hope you guessed – is that what with being rattled about in coaches and railway carriages, and twice nearly thrown from a fly, and having to make so early a start (on the one morning when I thought I should have leisure to write) that I was still half asleep as I left, I have scarce had thirty minutes together in which to put pen to paper. But here I am, home again at last, with nothing worse to show for my adventures than a bruise or two, and a pair of boots scuffed white by the downland chalk.

The new railway to Brighton is a marvel of speed and convenience (as you will see; for I am resolved that when we are next in town together, we shall astonish the children by taking them to the seaside, and bringing them back again, all in the same day!); but for this very reason I found that it depressed my spirits. Every mile seemed to be putting a greater distance not merely
between me and London, but also between me and Turner; for
his
journey to Michael Gudgeon, all those years before, must have been an entirely different affair – a jolting, jostling, daylong lurch from one inn to the next, by dusty roads where the only sound was the clop of hooves and the squeak and rumble of wheels, and the only steam the vapour from the horses' flanks. Just at the moment when I felt I had finally glimpsed his elusive figure, in those extraordinary pictures at Marlborough House, I now seemed to be losing sight of it again, in the smoke and bustle of the modern world.

But matters soon mended after we arrived. I took a fly at the station, and within ten minutes we were driving through streets of white stuccoed boarding-houses, with square, cheerful faces, that must have been there in Turner's day; and after ten minutes more we had begun to climb into the downs – which it was hard to imagine had changed greatly since Caesar first saw them, or for a thousand years before that. On every side stretched a rolling, billowing ocean of grass; and when I looked behind, I saw, in the distance, a broadening ribbon of silver-gilt sea.

After perhaps three miles, at the entrance to a small village, we bore left down a narrow lane lined with bramble hedges. It soon dwindled into no more than a cart-track, and it was here that the first near-accident occurred; for, while the driver was momentarily distracted, the horse trotted blithely ahead on to the rough surface, where it missed its footing, and – twisting violently to right itself – dropped one of our wheels into a deep ruck with a tremendous bang that almost overturned the fly. The driver had to hurl himself across his seat to avoid being flung out. The next moment he pulled up abruptly.

‘I'm sorry, sir,' he said. ‘I can't go no further. Another knock like that, and I shall want a new axle.'

‘Is it far?' I said.

‘Not half a mile,' he said, pointing to a smoking chimney just beyond the next brow.

So I paid him, and picked up my valise, and set off on foot, picking my way carefully between the ruts. The soft wind stroked my face; and for a moment everything that connected me to the humdrum world seemed to be vanishing with the retreating fly, and I was left with nothing but the cuff and slither
of my own boots, and the cry of the larks urging me back to some great task, or reminding me of some great grief, that I had somehow forgotten in the noise and distraction of everyday

As I came over the brow I saw below me what appeared to be a small farm, with a muddy yard, bounded on two sides by ranges of ramshackle outbuildings, and on the third by a long, low house of whitewashed stone, protected to the rear by a line of trees. It was so unlike the snug cottage I had expected that I immediately supposed the driver must have brought me to the wrong place, and by the time I reached the gate I had quite persuaded myself that I should have to retrace my steps to the village, or even go back to Brighton and start afresh.

A gaunt black-and-white dog signalled my approach by springing up and barking furiously, jerking on the end of its chain like a child's toy, and scattering a troupe of chickens which were strutting across the yard. Moments later, a red-faced woman of perhaps sixty-five, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, appeared from one of the outbuildings and started rapidly towards me. She moved with the rolling, exaggerated gait of the comic widow in a pantomime, which at first made me think she might be drunk; but then I noticed that she was merely working on to her feet a pair of stout wooden clogs to lift her above the mire.

‘Good morning,' I called. ‘I'm looking for Mr. Gudgeon.'

The cacophony of squawks and barks must have drowned my words; for she frowned and shook her head, and then – shooing the last of the hens on its way, and shouting to the dog to be quiet – cupped a hand behind her ear, and raised her eyebrows, and opened her mouth, in a charade of “I beg your pardon?”

‘Mr. Gudgeon?' I said again.

‘Are you Mr. Hartright?' she asked, in a gentle Sussex brogue; and, when I nodded, she held out her hand in a forthright manner, and said: ‘I'm Alice Gudgeon.'

‘How do you do?' I said.

‘The man's in his study. Will you forgive me if I take you through the back?'

She led me across the yard and into a warm kitchen filled with steam and the tang of boiling bacon and the sweet smoky fumes of meat roasting on a spit. From the low beamed ceiling,
and the black range cluttered with pots, and the brace of hares just visible through a half-open pantry door, you would have supposed – again – that this was the home of a prosperous yeoman. Only the table seemed out of place; for, beneath the old sheet which entirely covered its surface, you could just see four finely turned mahogany legs, which suggested that it might have once adorned a dining room, but had fallen on hard times.

We entered a cool hall, floored with polished flagstones, where Mrs. Gudgeon stopped. ‘Will you leave your bag here,' she said, pointing to the foot of the stairs, ‘and we'll show you to your room after?' Something in the way she spoke – slowly and loudly, and with an eye on a door opposite – made me suppose that this was as much for her husband's benefit as for mine. Having thus alerted him to my arrival, she huffed and fussed and muttered over my valise for a few seconds, before standing back with her hands on her hips and saying: ‘There, no-one'll break their necks on that now.' Then, without knocking, she opened the door.

What I noticed first was the paper – single sheets, and rough heaps tied loosely together with ribbons, and old notebooks piled into rickety columns that looked as if they would collapse if you breathed on them – which seemed to cover almost every square inch of floor and furniture. The air was heavy with the smell of mildew and old leather, and the dust so thick that you could see a great funnel of it floating before the window like a muslin curtain. Here, I immediately decided, was something I had never thought to see: a room even more disorderly than Lady Eastlake's boudoir.

But this impression was immediately dispelled when I turned to Gudgeon himself. He was a slight, dapper little man, with amber eyes and a shock of white hair sweeping up from his forehead, wearing a snowy cravat (as white and plump as a swan's breast) and a well-cut brown worsted coat which made him look fastidiously neat. As he came to greet me, he picked his way carefully between the papers like a general anxious not to disturb the disposition of his troops.

‘Mr. Hartright?' he said, looking at his wife. She nodded; and he extended his left hand towards me. ‘How kind of you to come, sir.'

The kindness is yours -' I began, surprised at his tone; but he stopped me with a shake of the head.

‘You're an angel,' he said. ‘Sent from heaven to save me.' He swept his hand about him, like a sower broadcasting seed. ‘You see what I am reduced to.' He shook his head sorrowfully, and broke into a rueful smile – from which I took courage to ask:

‘Why – what is all this?'

‘The work of forty years,' he said. ‘And it will take me forty more to organize it, if I do not make haste.'

I looked at the stack nearest to me. It was bound with a piece of twine, and beneath the knot someone (presumably Gudgeon himself, or his wife) had slipped a small card, marked with an alpha, and the number ‘7'. Above it, in faint pencil, was written ‘Chap. 1? Chap. 3? Chap. 4?'

‘You are planning to write a book?' I asked.

At this, his wife – who stood still in the doorway, watching him fondly with bright indulgent eyes – began to laugh; and, after glancing sharply at her for a moment, he joined in himself, with a deep, self-mocking chuckle.

‘When I was younger, Mr. Hartright,' he said, ‘I was elected to the Beef-steak Club in Brighton; where, at the monthly dinner, you might be required, at the whim of the chairman, to compose an
extempore
epitaph – either for yourself, or for another member. And Jack Marwell, of the Theatre Royal, who was a humorous fellow, wrote this on me: