Blood on the Wood (2 page)

Looking away from the house and down at the road, I saw two hikers ahead of us. They were going in the same direction as ourselves, heads bent down and invisible behind huge knapsacks. The road was sloping quite steeply uphill at that point and if I hadn't been on my best visiting manners I might have suggested that we stop, and offer to carry their packs to the top of the hill. There would have been just about room for them on our laps, although the gig could carry only two people. But I said nothing, then felt guilty when we passed them and I turned back to see their sweating faces through a cloud of our dust. They were oddly dressed for hikers, in dark and crumpled suits like city clerks, with pale indoor faces. It seemed to me that they looked resentful and I couldn't blame them. I said something to the groom about it being hot weather for hikers.

‘Oh, they're not hikers, miss. They're Scipians. Mr Daniel's got a whole lot of them coming here.'

‘Scipians?'

‘Yes, miss.'

He didn't seem to think it needed explaining, and soon after that we turned through a gateway and up a drive between two lines of elms with sheep grazing underneath them. When we drew up on a sweep of gravel outside the front door, a plump man in a pale linen suit came down the steps to meet me, full of anxious enquiries about my journey.

‘Was your train on time? Isn't Paddington intolerably crowded these days? Aren't you simply gasping for a glass of lemonade?'

A kind man, a fussy man with a neat tonsure of grey hair that looked as soft as a baby's round an otherwise bald pate, eyes brown and protruding like a spaniel's. No obvious sign of mourning, unless you counted the mauve silk cravat that he wore instead of a tie at the neck of his crisp white shirt. The bereaved husband, Mr Oliver Venn. A maid appeared to take my hat and travelling coat.

‘It's nice and cool in the studio.' He put a tentative hand on my elbow and guided me towards a door on the right. ‘Unless you'd rather go upstairs first.'

His anxiety to make me comfortable came close to being irritating. I let myself be guided into the studio and stopped too suddenly a few steps inside it so that he cannoned into me.

‘What a beautiful room.'

Because he and Philomena came from an older generation, I'd expected something mid-Victorian and heavy, but the big room was full of sunlight, light furniture in elm and oak, curtains and upholstery swirling with leaves and birds. Mr Venn had been spluttering apologies for stepping on my heel, but this seemed to calm him. He came alongside me, spaniel eyes shining.

‘It's Carol's taste mostly. They use it as a display room for the workshop.'

I was too busy admiring it to ask who Carol was and what workshop. It was full of blues and greens in the curtains and upholstery, woven cream and blue rugs on the polished wood floor. Blue and white hand-painted tiles surrounded the fireplace. Long windows extended almost down to floor level on the side facing the garden, with late white roses and vine leaves framing them from the outside, echoing the leaf and flower patterns on the fabrics. I found out later that it had once been a Victorian conservatory. The size and lightness of it meant that it could take a lot of furniture without looking crowded. There were oak tables, robust enough for farm kitchens but finely proportioned, simple ladder-backed chairs with woven rush seats, carved and painted chests, an oak three-seater with immense cushions in a honeysuckle pattern. The pattern made me feel as if I'd come home – not that I'd ever lived in a place half so grand. In my earliest memories of my mother she was wearing a dress in it.

‘William Morris.'

‘You admire his work?' Oliver Venn sounded reassured.

‘I certainly do. He and my father used to be friends.'

It was politics, not art, they'd discussed for hours on end, my father and that gentle bear of a man. My father was as ignorant of art as I am but he liked Morris for his ideas.

‘Carol's a great admirer, of course. The workshop is run very much on his principles. That's his work too.'

More confident now he was talking about art, he turned me round to a tapestry that took up the whole wall behind us, a pale long-necked woman in a flowing blue dress holding a pomegranate, with doves and rabbits in the grass at her bare feet. ‘That was one of my birthday presents to Philomena.'

A maid entered the room, with two glasses of lemonade on a tray. Mr Venn was too absorbed in the tapestry or his memories to notice her and I didn't like to help myself unasked so all three of us stood there in a row staring at the long-necked woman until the maid gave a little cough to alert him.

‘I'm sorry, Annie. Do forgive me, Miss Bray. Would you care to sit over there?'

I liked the fact that he'd apologised to the maid as well as to me. He and I sat at opposite ends of a couch, looking out at the garden through the long windows.

‘We thought perhaps, Miss Bray, that you might like to have lunch first and I can show you Philomena's picture afterwards.'

I thanked him, glad he'd brought up the subject. In spite of the civilised surroundings, my main interest was getting back to London with it as soon as politely possible.

‘Carol's not here but Felicia's out in the garden. If you'll excuse me, I'll go and call her.'

I nodded. He opened a door to a terrace and carolled ‘Fe-lic-i-a' out to the garden, every syllable as precise as a bird's call. While he waited, I puzzled over who Felicia and Carol might be. As far as I knew, the Venns had been childless. Felicia appeared between the swags of roses and when she stepped into the room, it looked as if she'd been designed by nature to match it. There was a simplicity and neatness about her that carried an invisible label of quality, much like the furniture or hand-painted tiles. She was wearing a cornflower-blue skirt and a white blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves with a high neckline and a matching cornflower ribbon tied in a bow. Her hair was a light glossy brown, put up in a simple pleat at the back, her complexion creamy.

‘Miss Bray, may I introduce my nephew's fiancée, Felicia Foster. Felicia, Miss Bray.'

We smiled at each other, made the usual murmurs. The ring on her engagement finger had diamonds and sapphires in an old-fashioned setting, quite small and modest. Her hands looked younger than the rest of her; rounded and childish, they had nails nibbled down to the quick. She and Mr Venn must have exchanged one of those little signals that well-run households have, because she left the room as soon as we'd been introduced and soon after that a gong sounded from the hallway. It was a tactful, unaggressive bong, in keeping with the atmosphere of this very civilised household.

*   *   *

Felicia was already waiting for us in the dining room, standing next to a good-looking man in his early thirties. Quite tall, dark brown hair, light tweed suit with a black mourning band round the right arm. Mr Venn introduced us.

‘My nephew, Adam Venn.'

He smiled and asked some conventional question about my journey. Quite how you tell, from the first contact, that a person is intelligent I've never known, but it's unmistakable, like a little jolt of electricity. Adam Venn was intelligent. More than that, he was glinting me a look that said: Yes, I know this thing has its ridiculous side but let's see it through, shall we?

I said yes, it had been a very good journey thank you. Then we sat down and Annie served lamb cutlets and green beans. The picture wasn't mentioned over lunch. I suppose that would have counted as business. Most of the talk was of Philomena and her work in the suffrage movement, which her husband had supported with great enthusiasm. His admiration and love for her were clear in every look and word and more than once his bulging eyes filled with tears and his voice broke. When that happened, Adam and I would carry on talking about nothing in particular until he recovered. Felicia didn't say much, but organised unobtrusively the clearing of plates and the arrival of plum compóte and cream, then coffee. Over the coffee cups, Mr Venn apologised for his show of emotion.

‘Philomena would have hated that, positively hated that. She even made me promise not to wear mourning for her.'

I glanced without meaning to at the broad band on his nephew's arm. Adam Venn said, catching the glance, ‘It takes too much energy to defy all the small conventions. Don't you think so, Miss Bray?'

‘But how do you decide which are the small ones?' I said.

I'd have enjoyed a discussion with him, but Mr Venn was still talking about Philomena.

‘She said life would go on quite well without her. She was really quite angry when we decided to delay the wedding because she was taken ill. Young people shouldn't be made to wait for an old woman, she said.'

Felicia was blushing, an attractive peach shade. Was she so much in the grip of the small conventions that it embarrassed her to have her matrimonial arrangements discussed in front of a stranger? To give her time to recover I turned the conversation to Adam.

‘Thoughtful of your aunt, not to want to delay your wedding.'

For a moment he looked alarmed. When he recovered, his eyebrows went up and the smile on his face told me I'd said something stupid. ‘Not my wedding, Miss Bray. Felicia is engaged to marry my younger brother, Daniel.'

I dare say I blushed, and not as attractively as Felicia. I was annoyed too, feeling that Mr Venn had let me fall into a social trap.

‘Adam's wife Carol is away for a few days in London,' he said. ‘As for Daniel, he's hunting in Berkshire at the moment.'

‘Hunting!'

It wasn't the season for it and anyway they didn't seem like that sort of family.

‘In fact,' Adam said, a little edge to his voice, ‘if all has gone according to plan – which it won't have necessarily with Daniel – by now he'll be in Faringdon workhouse.'

‘Workhouse?'

Mr Venn came anxiously to the rescue again.

‘Daniel has a great interest in collecting English folk-songs. He tells me that there are old men in some of the workhouses who know an astonishing number of songs that will be entirely lost to the world unless collectors can write them down in time. He's been spending most of the summer doing field work in Wiltshire and Berkshire.'

That at least got us back on safe conversational ground. I had several friends who were interested in the folk-song and dance movement, going along as it did with many of the left-of-centre political causes. Neither morris dancing nor ‘here we come a-wassailing' were great interests of mine, though I'd been coerced into the occasional session. So we talked about that until Mr Venn, at long last, suggested that I might care to come up to his study and see Philomena's picture.

As I followed him up the beautiful curved staircase, something odd struck me. As fiancée of the missing Daniel, you might have expected Felicia to put in a word or two about him and his folk-song enthusiasms. She hadn't. Not one.

*   *   *

The picture was facing us when he opened the door. Standing on the floor, it was propped against a chair. I admit my first reaction when I saw it was: Well, we couldn't have hung that on the wall of the office. The woman in the picture was as naked as a baby, sprawled stomach down on a cushioned sofa, with one knee bent and the sole of her foot upturned. It rested on its own velvet cushion, offering a curve of little pink toes like sweets on a plate. Her rounded face, turned over her shoulder towards the artist, was part welcoming, part petulant as if she reserved the right to sulk but might be kissed out of it. Her flesh was as pink and puffy as cumulus cloud at sunset. You had the impression that if lawn tennis had existed in eighteenth-century Versailles it wouldn't have been her game. I felt Oliver Venn's eyes on me, sensed his anxiety.

‘The model was a young lady who, um, gained quite a reputation at the French court. There's a more famous version, of course,
La Blonde
Odalisque at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Unmistakably the same model and much the same pose, but the angle of the head is different.'

He wanted me to like it. I did, in a way, only I'd expected something more in the line of swains and shepherdesses and didn't know what to say.

‘She looks very, er, at ease with herself.'

He nodded several times, as if the comment had been sensible.

‘Philomena and I spent our honeymoon in Paris. I bought it as a surprise for her.'

Surprise for me too. It was hard to connect the veteran campaigner I'd met or the decent elderly man standing beside me with a young couple of nearly half a century ago who'd carried this back as their souvenir.

I said, ‘You'll miss it.'

That aspect of Philomena's bequest hadn't struck me until then. A glaze of tears came over his eyes. Quickly I turned back to the picture.

‘She'll be doing good work for us, I promise you. We really are most grateful to Mrs Venn, and to you.'

There was a clean linen tablecloth lying folded on a chair. He picked it up and began to wrap the picture, as if he didn't trust himself to look at it any more. When I knelt to help him, I could feel his whole body shaking.

‘Cord, on that table there, if you'd be so kind.'

Soft cord, so as not to damage the frame, everything carefully prepared. I felt guilty depriving him of his treasure, and tried to console myself by thinking of all the campaigning she'd pay for. How much for a picture like this? A thousand? Five thousand? Once we'd got her decently covered and corded up we wrapped her in another layer of brown paper and the job was done. He suggested sending for Joseph – the groom, presumably – to carry her downstairs but I thought we could manage. He walked down backwards, none too steadily, while I tried to take most of the weight. It was a relief when we got it down to the hall and propped it against the umbrella stand.

‘I've asked them to have the gig ready. There's a good train in just over an hour you should be in time to catch – unless you'd like another lemonade first?'