Apartment 16 (15 page)

You tried to do the best for all of us. But what was silenced began to speak again, and show itself. It still does, darling. It still does. I only hope you can no longer see it. The thought of you being among them would finish me.

I wish with all my heart that we had left when we had the chance. Why must fate be so cruel? You came back to me after so many missions when so many were lost, only for me to see you taken away again. Right from my hands. And before my eyes.

With the lights on as usual, and the mirror and painting now not merely turned around, but placed in the hallway outside her bedroom door, Apryl sank down among four fat pillows, half upright as if she neither wanted nor expected to sleep.

High up on the ninth floor the windows were occasionally whumped by the wind. Outside the apartment the faint whirr and clank of the elevator could be heard. Sometimes a front door closed and sent its noise up the dim stairwells and through her great-aunt’s flat. The knowledge that there were others in the building gave her comfort.

She pushed her drowsing thoughts into tomorrow’s activities – the wrapping of the photographs in cushioned plastic sheets, the bundling of the dead roses into bin bags, maybe a phone call to thank the taxi driver who brought Lillian home that last time. Maybe. Estate agents. Maybe.

Was she asleep? It was as if she was sleeping but somehow still aware of the room around her. Like she was just under but not completely. Not something that happened to her often, but the feeling was familiar, as she lay alone, the sole inhabitant of the apartment, but aware of what was around her in the bedroom.

So who was that, leaning over the bed?

Other people in the building must have heard her scream. For a while, after she sat bolt upright among the pillows, before scrabbling out of the bed, a foot caught in the sheets and then kicked away like it was a hand pulling her down to somewhere that terrified her, she heard voices. In the distance. Beyond her own heavy breaths and whimpers, she heard voices. Like the sudden burst of sound from a distant school playground carried on the wind.

The wind: it was outside the windows and walls, but elsewhere too. Up on the ceiling. The ceiling that had become dark and endless around something that had looked like a face, drawing away. Something red was tight about it. A face retreating into the darkness where the main light should have revealed cracks and yellowing paint and not that depth of no colour and such bitter coldness. A coldness that went through the skin and into the bones.

But where was the face now, and the voices, and the wind?

As Apryl stood by the bedroom door and looked back at the bed from which she had fled, her whole body shaking, dressed in just her underwear, her great-aunt’s room now looked the same as it had done before she fell asleep. The lights were on, the walls were bare, and there was no one else in there with her.

FOURTEEN

Thirsty and thick-headed, Seth sat up in the hot bed and reached for his tobacco and cigarette papers on the bedside table. Disoriented from another long and deadening slumber, he tried to remember the time before he had fallen asleep; it seemed so long ago, yet it was still dark outside.

He lit the cigarette with one hand, while the fingers of his other hand scrabbled on the bedside table to locate the small travel alarm clock. He turned his head to look for it, and then swore, clenching his eyelids shut. The light from the little table lamp, burning the whole time he’d slept, hurt the back of his skull.

Slowly, turning his face away from the scorching bulb, he raised the alarm clock up to his blinking eyes. Six thirty – though he didn’t know whether it was the evening or morning. Or precisely what evening or morning of which day. He even struggled to remember the date of the last day he’d been awake.

A litter of sketches were strewn about the floor and furniture. Aching muscles in his right arm and fingers, still stiff from cramp, attested to a recollection of frantic sketching. He’d slept all day then. Maybe two days. He’d slept through the hours of watery daylight and awoken in darkness. He wondered whether he should be back at work tonight, if the new shift pattern had started. No one had called. It must be a day off.

Wind shook the windows in their peeling frames. Rain pattered against the grimy panes.

Coughing, he clambered out of bed. Tasting the rich broth of cigarette tar in his mouth, he surveyed his work by the light of the bedside lamp. From the radiator to the blocked-in fireplace, under his desk and between the legs of the dining table, his drawings, or fragments of sketches, lay scattered.

A cigarette dangling from his bottom lip and his tatty overcoat pulled around his shoulders, he considered his work, that resembled something that a prison warden might find in the cells of the insane.

The images were shocking. Bestial in their savagery. Absurd. Sickening. Grotesque. But not without merit.

Hastily gulping at water from a plastic bottle, he saw with some satisfaction the life in these drawings. Vitality. A curious animation in the twisted limbs of the dark figures. And in the eyes a cruel intelligence, a sly appreciation of another’s misery, a gleeful seeking of mischief, an incinerating, glaring envy: the eyes of the world. It was like nothing he’d ever drawn, but seemed to be a glimpse of that incoherent inner force he’d always been too afraid to form with charcoal, paint or clay before. The only worthy parts of his pitiful former efforts were those bits that vaguely resembled what appeared before him now; the incongruous shadows and colours his tutors at art school had noticed and been mystified by. Something he was ashamed of. Something he quashed. A streak of expressionism he was too timid to explore. But not any more. It was the only part of his ability worth a damn. It just needed cultivation.

After switching the main light on, he crouched down and peered at the face of an unborn child pressed against glass, its features smudged by an umbra of pickling fluid, but the eyes were clearly Asian. Beside the sketch of the fetus, he found a depiction of Mrs Shafer’s head, messily wrapped in scarves, drawn from three angles, the eyes small as olives and black with fury. Then another of her head on top of an arachnid bulk, the shell smooth and polished like onyx, half covered by a kimono and risen in loathsome provocation to the silhouette of her wizened stick-husband, who teetered on baby steps towards his mate.

There was also a sketch of Mr Shafer’s death mask with grey crumpled papier-mâché features, and another of his puppet body, suspended in the gossamer threads recently excreted by his wife’s abdomen. A final sketch of the elderly residents featured a cluster of eggs, opaque like pearls with a wet sheen, and kept warm next to a radiator in a box of soil.

Seth smiled. It felt odd around his mouth.

But most of the sketches, desperately scrawled as some aperture of his mind opened for a short time, were studies of a single and familiar figure.

Hooded and withdrawn inside the parka coat, protected from unwelcome scrutiny, Seth had depicted the solitary child with the blacked-out face obsessively.

‘Jesus Christ.’ He suddenly looked around the room, at the pile of soup tins stacked on the refrigerator, at the broken wardrobes, at the lurid thin curtains billowing in draughts, at the dried-up carpet and its confetti of paper. He marvelled at how far he’d let things go. It was all the result of working nights. Had to be; the madness of sleep deprivation. And of struggling to get by in London. Of loneliness, despair, the difficulties of coping with the details of existence. Or maybe this was predestined. As though he’d always secretly needed to be here. Cornered and forced to unravel himself, to peel away every layer, to doubt and reconsider everything he had been taught until he was dragged to the depths inside himself where the dark things lived. He had been led to the discovery of a place where three decades of experience had amassed, filtered through, and then sunk, only to re-form as some vile underlying truth. His truth. The truth.

So here it was, his artistic vision.

But did he want it?

Face in hands, Seth peered through the cage of his fingers at the ceiling.

This could be an extraordinary gift he was about to spurn. A great gift carrying a heavy price. To engage with the world on this level – it was seductive. If he had integrity then it shouldn’t bother him what anyone else thought. If he was compelled to cultivate this vision then there could be no room for vanity or dignity. No restraint. He would have to give himself wholly to this submerged world until it consumed him or reached completion. There could be no thought of success or failure. No deadlines. Only a dedication to what he saw and felt.

Dare he?

He looked down. Another brief appraisal of his drawings filled him with disgust, but also with a peculiar excitement that made him uncomfortable. The vision would destroy him; he knew it at once.

Seth sat on the bed, lowered his head between his knees and rapidly sucked a cigarette down to the filter. He thought of the nightmares, the hallucinatory sightings of that boy. God, he was even talking to figments of his own diseased imagination. And there was his uncontrollable anger, his torpor, his inability to function, to clean himself, to feed himself, to communicate with others.

He had a chance to step back from the mad place now. Maybe the remains of his old self were issuing a final warning in a moment of sobriety. Or maybe it was some infuriating and in-built sense of caution that would always step in to prevent him achieving his potential as an artist. He could not decide what to do, and had no one with whom to discuss the crisis. All he knew for certain was that he was frightened of himself, could no longer trust himself, or predict how he might react in any given situation.

FIFTEEN

Something was taking a toll on Stephen. Dark flesh bruised his eyes, his face was too thin, and the movements of his head and hands were slow, as if everything about him as he stood behind the reception desk was delicate and required careful gestures. Apryl had begun to find this more noticeable, the last few times they’d met. And to pick up on his agitation, as if he was nervous around her. Anxious even. Not a reaction she was aware of ever having caused in others before now.

But then his wife, Janet, was ill. And she’d learned from Piotr in the middle of one of his attempts to chat her up that the couple lost their only child years ago in some awful accident. And on top of that, the poor man rose at six every morning to oversee the exchange of nightwatchmen and day porters, before working until six in the evening himself. A twelve-hour shift playing diplomat and servant to the residents. He had told her as much in his quiet, undemonstrative way. And though she did get the impression he liked to help her and that there was nothing inappropriate or amorous in his interest – it was kind of fatherly – she was beginning to suspect that her arrival at Barrington House was causing him grief. Not an inconvenience so much as a reminder of something difficult, even unpleasant. Maybe it was something in her American character that troubled a reticent Englishman.

‘Good morning, Apryl. Making progress?’

‘Oh, you know, two steps forward, three back. No, I’m kidding. It’s fine. Really.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly put your mind to the task. I saw the skip.’

One more day, I think, and I’m done.’

‘The new skip will be here by Friday.’

‘Thanks. Thanks for everything. You’ve been such a help. I don’t know how I would have got this far without you.’

He wafted the praise away, and almost smiled. ‘It was nothing. Glad to help.’

‘But I was wondering if I could ask you something else. About Lillian.’

He frowned, and returned his eyes to the ledger. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, she kept a diary. Diaries to be exact.’

He squinted and underlined whatever he was reading with a fingertip. ‘Oh?’

‘They are . . . well, pretty strange. Freaking me out if I’m honest.’ Her voice started to falter. ‘Kinda confirms the impression you gave me. She was like really paranoid. I think she was sick. Like really sick for a long time. In her mind.’

Stephen nodded sagely, but couldn’t conceal his discomfort whenever the exchanges became more than just passing the time of day.

‘But she often writes about other people in this building. There are no dates in the journals, but I’d guess I’ve kinda reached the seventies now. Just from picking up little details. And I was wondering if there are any residents still living here from way back then who knew her.’

Stephen pursed his lips and looked down at the desktop. ‘Let me think.’

‘Do you remember someone called Beatrice?’

Stephen nodded. ‘That’s Betty. Betty Roth. She has been here since before the war. A widow. But I’m not sure she knew your aunt. I never saw them speak.’

‘No way! That’s amazing. Beatrice is still here? She and Lillian were friends. Back when both their husbands were still around. I’d love to talk to her.’

At this Stephen winced. ‘It’s not often I hear that request.’

‘Why so?’

‘She’s a rather difficult character.’

‘And for you to say that, it means she’s a total bitch, right?’

‘I never said a word.’ Smiling, Stephen raised both hands palm outwards. ‘You can try, though I don’t think she’ll see you. And if she does you may come away either in tears or too angry to breathe.’

‘That bad?’

‘Worse. Her own daughter is the sweetest woman you could ever wish to meet, and she leaves here in tears after every visit. Her relatives are terrified of her. Most of Knights-bridge is and they won’t let her shop in Harrods or Harvey Nicks anymore. Not that she goes out much these days. And she’s the main reason I lose so many porters.’

‘But . . .’

‘I know. She’s just an old woman. But woe betide anyone who underestimates her. I think I’ve said enough.’

‘Thanks for the heads-up, but I have to try. She might know how my great-uncle died. And Lillian mentions a couple called Shafer. Pretty much said dynamite wouldn’t budge them from here.’

‘Well that’s true enough. They still live here and I’ve never known them go further than the shops on Motcomb Street, even before Mr Shafer’s hip replacement. They’re very old now and he has a nurse. He can hardly walk these days. He’s in his nineties, you know.’

But Apryl was still replaying Stephen’s remark about them going no further than the shop around the corner. Even so many years after she had written them, her great-aunt’s crazy journals suddenly resonated with something that was more than just paranoid fantasy. ‘Could you . . .’

‘Call them. Sure. Betty will be down at eleven thirty sharp for lunch. I’ll ask her then. She never misses her Claridges.’

‘Is that far away?’

‘No. Just the other side of Hyde Park Corner.’

Apryl nodded, unable to conceal a renewal of her discomfort. ‘That would be so cool. And say Lillian’s great-niece was asking after her. You know, family history stuff. And that she’d be real grateful for anything. Just a few minutes of her time.’

Stephen made a note on the desk pad. ‘I’ll call you upstairs. Or let you know if you’re passing.’

‘Cool.’

‘But I can’t make any promises. They tend to keep themselves to themselves.’

‘I understand. And there was one other person she mentioned. A painter who used to live here. Some guy called Hessen. Must be his surname.’

Stephen’s fingers paused as he scribbled his note on to the pad, but he didn’t look up at her.

‘You’ve heard of him?’ Apryl asked, her stomach tensing with excitement.

Stephen squinted, looked over her shoulder, then shook his head. ‘Painter? No. No. Not in my time. And we’ve no blue plaques on this building,’ he said, explaining how these signs commemorated the homes of famous people in London.

‘Uh huh. This would have been like ages ago. I think he was small potatoes too. Not famous.’

The desk phone began to ring. Stephen’s hand darted to the receiver. ‘You’ll have to excuse me while I take this call.’

Apryl nodded, trying to keep the disappointment from registering on her face. ‘Sure. I better fly. See you later. And thanks.’

She set out through the sodden green landscape of Hyde Park in search of a street called Queensway. It was in Bayswater on the north side of the great open common, beyond the Serpentine and through the maze of paths and trees.

Moving off the path and into the grass until it soaked through the canvas of her Converse, she moved at a diagonal trajectory, passing through an assortment of gardens, past the colossal Albert Memorial, and then walked alongside Kensington Palace where Princess Diana had lived. It felt refreshing to suck in the cold air. To see ordinary people doing normal things – nannies with prams, and children in their padded coats; joggers who staggered by, puffing, on steaming pink legs, or who strode lean and bony-shouldered past her. It wasn’t just her imagination – the further she moved away from Barrington House, the lighter she felt. Unburdened of the sense of gloomy enclosure in the cramped, brownish rooms of the apartment.

Taking a quick look at the white hotels and dripping garden squares and passing through a constant stream of tourists, she thought Bayswater would be the best place to relocate to from Barrington House. The idea of spending another night alone in the apartment made her feel sick with nerves.

She was scared of it. Afraid of the stained walls, the rotten carpets, and the silence so tense with expectation when night came. The prolonged incubation of a crazed and lonely woman had altered the place. Crumbling into dementia within the dour prison of her home where too many memories changed shape and flitted like spectres through the uncounted hours, it was as if Lillian had infected the place with a psychic damp that seeped its bottled terrors and paranoia into her own thoughts.

She couldn’t explain exactly how it had happened, or how her strange sensitivity to such things arose. But now she felt warm with foolishness at the absurdity of it all. That a place, a simple physical environment, could change her so much. But it could. Last night was proof again.

She wondered how she might explain her move into a hotel room to her mother. More white lies. The mere thought of breaking the news made her feel tired. Later, she could deal with that later. Because Bayswater had a kind of Mediterranean charm that she wanted to enjoy – even the sky broke into blue – and it seemed exclusively equipped for visitors from abroad. It was all luggage shops, chain restaurants and tacky tourist shit, but she liked the tall white buildings and Greek Cypriot groceries. She bought olives and hummus to snack on, from the Athenian grocery on Moscow Road where the old men behind the counter wore blue overalls and wrapped her purchases in white paper.

Once she’d bought an hour of time on a computer, and made herself comfortable with a cappuccino in the Russian Internet cafe on Queensway, she found that only three pages of a Google search contained anything relevant about a painter called Hessen. And there was only one artist by that name: a man active during the thirties in West London. He was known by few, but those still aware of him seemed enthusiastic enough. It was him. Had to be. The first name of her great-aunt’s nemesis was Felix. Felix Hessen.

Some guy called Miles Butler had written a book on him a few years before, so most of the links were to reviews of that book. It was published by Tate Britain, so she scribbled the details down: Miles Butler,
Glimpses into the Vortex – Drawings by Felix Hessen.
There was also an organization called the Friends of Felix Hessen. It was based in Camden and had a freakish website. All black and red graphics designed by an amateur. She read the gushing introduction about ‘Hessen’s rightful place as a great surrealist painter’, about his ‘contribution to Futurism’, and about him being ‘a precursor to Francis Bacon’, whom she’d heard of.

She clicked on the link to the biography, which ran for several pages, but there was no mention of Barrington House that she could see during an initial skim-read. He was a Swiss Austrian immigrant, but just about as obscure as an artist could be. For a ‘great painter’ he wasn’t exhibited in a single art gallery during or after his lifetime. His surviving sketches were now in America at the New Haven archive.

The biography webpage claimed his father was a successful merchant and sent the young Felix to medical school in Zurich. For some reason his wealthy parents then emigrated to England and Felix Hessen ended up studying fine art at the Slade, where he excelled as a draughtsman. The Introduction argued that his support of something called the British Union of Fascists, and a man called Oswald Mosley, before the Second World War, was responsible for a left-wing conspiracy in the arts banishing him into oblivion. Hessen was even locked away in Brixton prison for ‘acts prejudicial to public safety or to defence of the realm’ for the entire war. And there was speculation that he’d met the top Nazis in the thirties too – maybe even Hitler – to try and interest them in his art. Which they never liked. So he had to make do with being a communications officer for the British fascists, who didn’t like him either.

No wonder Reginald hated him.

After his release from prison he became a recluse at the family home in West London. And only his sketches from the thirties survived, along with one copy of some arts journal he started, called
Vortex.
It lasted four issues and had fewer than sixteen subscriptions when Hessen gave up on ‘a philosophical medium to ideas incommunicable in language’.

Apryl knew a loser when she saw one.

Hessen then disappeared in the late forties, but the website didn’t give an exact date. He was listed as missing by the family lawyer years before he was finally declared deceased in official records. The estate was sold by a distant branch of the family in Germany. He never married, never had children, and survived his parents, who both died before the war and before their son’s brief notoriety.

He was hardly mentioned in records of pre-war art either, although someone called Wyndham Lewis thought he showed ‘uncanny promise’ before they soon fell out, while Augustus John recommended his work to the Royal Academy, though Hessen had no interest in the institution. And in memoirs of the time there was only the briefest mention of him. One of the Mitford sisters, Nancy, thought him ‘unjustly handsome and vile’. He was even expelled from Crowley’s occult society, Mysteria Mystica Maxima, very quickly after they ‘doubted the path of his enlightenment’. Allegedly, he tried to bribe and then blackmail Crowley to hand over the knowledge required to conduct summoning rituals far beyond his status as a mere adept. Rumours in occult circles at the time suggested that Crowley did indeed impart both the knowledge and the relevant tracts for a significant fee in order to feed his morphine and prostitution habits. It was highly volatile material that the Great Beast Crowley had used himself, with some success, in a lengthy summoning ritual at Boleskin in Scotland, on the shores of Loch Ness, after a considerable period of fasting. A poet called John Gawsworth remembered Hessen being ejected from the reading room of the British Library for conducting rituals between the desks that had made the lights dim throughout the entire building.

But soon after the war he was gone. Vanished. Probably a suicide.

There was no mention of him being a lousy neighbour in Barrington House.

The Friends of Felix Hessen organization dismissed the Miles Butler book as part of the liberal arts campaign against Felix Hessen.

The website also published over thirty essays on his missing oil paintings, the sketches for which were allegedly only preparations for Hessen’s ‘great vision of the Vortex’. According to the website, the missing paintings were part of another conspiracy. They had been suppressed or hidden to this day by arts councils because of the painter’s associations with fascism.