Borrowed Time (18 page)

“Robin!” said Sarah, jumping up. “How lovely. I was hoping to see you before you left. I’m sorry to have neglected you. But it’s been
so
hectic.”

“Of course,” I said, smiling. “I quite understand.”

“You’ve been well looked after?”

“Absolutely. Couldn’t have been better.”

“Just what I was saying,” her companion remarked. “I’m Sophie Marsden, by the way.” She rose and stepped towards me, extending a kid-gloved hand.

“Robin Timariot.” I looked at her as we shook, my attention raised now I knew who she was. Louise Paxton’s friend. The one who’d shared her enthusiasm for Expressionist art. And who’d shared a few secrets along the way, perhaps? There
was
a similarity to Louise. Not in looks so much as manner. A hint of distance. An involuntary implication that much of her mind dwelt on subjects no-one else could understand. It was there in Sophie, albeit more faintly—more impermanently—than it had been in the woman I’d met on Hergest Ridge. But it
was
there. Like a palm-print. An impression. A dried flower preserved between the pages of a book. No scent. No sap. No life. But stronger than a memory. More than chance likeness or fading recollection. More than could ever be forgotten.

“Sarah’s told me about you, Mr. Timariot. What a help you’ve been to her and Rowena. And to Keith, of course. In introducing him to Bella.”

“Well, I . . .”

“Louise was a great believer in life, you know. In making the most of it. In casting off past sadnesses. She really would have been pleased at how things have turned out.”

“I . . . I’m . . .” I groped for an adequate response. Part of me wanted to echo her sentiment. To draw a neat straight line with Louise Paxton on one side and me incontrovertibly on the other. But another part of me wanted to protest. To rage against a travesty I couldn’t define. To cross the neat straight line. “I’m so glad . . . to hear a friend of hers say so, Mrs. Marsden.”

“Actually, Robin,” said Sarah, “I was about to take Sophie to see Mummy’s grave. She’s not visited it since the funeral. Rowena’s asked me to put her bouquet on it along with mine. Would you like to come with us?”

“I’d be delighted,” I said. With sudden and utter sincerity.

The graveyard of St. Kenelm’s Church had been full for fifty years or more. Since then, burials had taken place in a small cemetery just outside the village. I drove Sarah and Sophie there at the start of my journey home. Though it was less than a mile from The Old Parsonage, we seemed to have been transported a vast distance from the gabbling gaiety of the wedding party. The cemetery was still and silent, its graves clustered around an avenue of yew trees at one end while the other end stood empty and overgrown, awaiting future use. I didn’t ask why Sir Keith hadn’t come. Why Rowena had felt unable to do this herself. Why Sarah had asked Sophie and me to go with her. Did she, I wondered, regard us as more likely to understand her feelings than her father? Were we the only two she could trust with a share of this experience?

We walked slowly and self-consciously along the gravel path, Sarah a few steps ahead, cradling the bouquets in her arms. She went straight to the grave and placed the flowers beneath the headstone. Sophie and I stood behind her and watched as she knelt beside it. Dew still clung to the grass in the shadow cast by the nearest yew. Its moisture was darkening the hem of her full-skirted dress, turning rose pink to blood red. There was meaning everywhere, if you cared to look. As I looked now, at the inscription on the headstone.

LOUISE JANE PAXTON

11 NOVEMBER 1945
–
17 JULY 1990

FIRST KNOWN WHEN LOST

The phrase was from a poem by Thomas. Only Sarah could have chosen it. Only she could have known what the choice meant. Though in that moment I seemed to as well.

We stayed a few minutes, no more. Then Sophie and I started diplomatically back towards the gate, while Sarah lingered by the grave. They meant to walk back to the house, so I’d soon be on my solitary way. There was much I wanted to ask Sophie, but there was too little time and no obvious pretext for extending it. Besides, my curiosity about her dead friend would have seemed odd, suspiciously inappropriate. A few mumbled trifles were all that should have been expected of me.

“A peaceful spot,” I ventured, as we reached the gate and looked back at Sarah.

“Yes. I’m glad to have come back. You’ve not been here before?”

“No.”

“You didn’t come to the funeral, of course. But I thought perhaps afterwards . . .” She glanced round at me, her eyes narrowing beneath the brim of her hat. I sensed suspicion on some score I couldn’t fathom. I sensed there was a question she longed to ask me. But something held her back. “Sarah told me you manage a cricket-bat factory in Petersfield. Is that right?”

“Yes.” The point seemed deliberately banal, provoking me to respond in kind. “What about your husband, Mrs. Marsden? What line is he—”

“Agricultural machinery. But you don’t want to hear about that.
Very
boring.”

“No more so than the cricket-bat business, I’m sure.”

“Believe me, it is.” Abruptly, she changed the subject. “Have you heard from Henley Bantock, by the way?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oscar Bantock’s nephew. He’s writing his uncle’s biography.
Has
written it, I suppose. It’s due out next spring. He came to see me a few months ago. I have two Bantocks on my drawing-room wall and he wanted to photograph them for the book. Wished I hadn’t agreed in the end. Appalling little creep.”

I smiled. “He is rather, isn’t he?”

“Oh, so you
have
met him?”

“Once, yes. But not about the book. There’s nothing I could have told him anyway.”

“No?”

“Of course not.” Her questions were becoming more and more baffling. I could have believed she was trying to provoke me into disclosing something, but for the fact that there was nothing to disclose. “I never knew Oscar Bantock.”

“No. But you knew his foremost patroness, didn’t you?”

I frowned. My bemusement must by now have been apparent to her. Along with my growing irritation. “You mean Louise Paxton?”

“Who else?”

“You’ve lost me. I met Lady Paxton for a few minutes on the day she died. That’s all. We didn’t discuss Oscar Bantock’s painting career.”

“Then what made you contact the revolting Henley? It’s
you
who’ve lost
me
.”

We stared at each other, incomprehension battling with incredulity. I sensed it would be foolish—perhaps dangerous—to try to explain how I’d met Henley. But why I couldn’t have said. Sophie Marsden seemed not just to know something I didn’t, but to know it
about me
. I couldn’t decide which might be worse. To find out what it was. Or never to.

“Are you two all right?” asked Sarah, surprising both of us, even though her approach along the gravel path can hardly have been stealthy.

“Fine,” replied Sophie. “Just chatting.”

“Yes,” I said. “But as a matter of fact—” I glanced ostentatiously at my watch. “I think I ought to be starting back now. I’ve . . . er . . . a long drive ahead of me.”

“Of course,” said Sarah, smiling warmly. “It’s wonderful you were able to share the day with us, Robin. Rowena really appreciated it, I know.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I responded, leading them out through the gate and moving round to the driver’s door of my car. “Well, I . . .”

“Goodbye,” said Sarah, stepping forward to kiss me. “Lovely to see you.”

“You too,” I murmured. Then I turned to shake Sophie’s hand. “Goodbye, Mrs. Marsden,” I said, hoping my grin wouldn’t look too stiff.

“Please call me Sophie,” she replied, fixing my eyes with hers as she added: “After all, I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

C  H  A  P  T  E  R
NINE

T
imariot & Small’s financial circumstances didn’t improve as 1992 faded towards 1993. There were, to be honest, no grounds for expecting them to. Jennifer spent nearly as much time in Melbourne as Petersfield, but the more she learned about Dyson’s management of Viburna Sportswear, the worse the outlook seemed to grow. While Adrian’s attempts to negotiate an exemption for us from Bushranger’s agreement with Danziger’s came predictably to nothing. The road back to profit and self-respect was going to be long and hard.

But we had no obvious choice other than to tread it. For my part, I took some comfort from being the least blameworthy member of the board and concentrated on running the Frenchman’s Road operation as efficiently as possible. The workforce knew about the Viburna disaster, of course. How couldn’t they? It led to some cynicism about the calibre of the directors, but no more than I’d have expected. Less, in some ways, than was justified. Don Banks had been making cricket bats of consistently high quality for as long as I could remember. It had taken him fifteen years just to learn how. His standards were as demanding as ever. And he was no moaner. A stern reticent deferential man was Don. But I saw the look on his face as Adrian and I stood talking in the workshop one day. And I knew what the look meant. We’d let him and his fellow craftsmen down. We’d failed to live up to
their
standards.

I think it was people like Don who made me determined to see it through. I could have scuttled back to Brussels and index-linked security any time I liked. I often thought of doing so, I can’t deny. The Maastricht Treaty was bulldozing its way through the parliaments of Europe and lots of juicy new posts were sure to follow in its wake. One of them might have my name on it. Nobody could blame me for grabbing a ripe plum from the laden bough. Except Don Banks and the rest, of course. Except all their predecessors and successors for whom Timariot & Small had meant and might yet mean something more satisfying than an adequate living. Except, in the final analysis, me.

So I stuck to the task, over-compensating for the board’s strategic deficiencies by working excessive hours and paring back my life until it comprised little more than the short-term worries and long-term problems of the family firm. Hugh’s example should have deterred me from becoming a workaholic. But during an evening of home truths and brotherly bonding in the Old Drum, Simon assured me that was just what I was turning into. And he was right, however reluctant I might be to admit it. I had few friends and no leisure pursuits besides country walking. Since the break with Ann, I’d deliberately avoided intimacy with another human being. Not just sexual intimacy, but any kind of lowering of the psychological defences. I found the limitations of my existence strangely comforting in an ascetic sort of way. More and more, I was coming to see how safe—how undemanding—the solitary life really was. And I was beginning to think I’d probably settle for it.

Thanks largely to Bella, I stayed in distant touch with the Paxtons. She invited me to a Boxing Day lunch at The Hurdles, which Paul and Rowena also attended, along with Sarah and a humourless young lawyer called Rodney who was clearly more taken with her than she was with him. That and a few similar occasions apart, however, our worlds no longer overlapped. Sir Keith had given his daughters the use of The Old Parsonage as a weekend retreat within easy reach of Bristol, while he and Bella divided their time between Biarritz and Hindhead. The lives of Louise Paxton’s husband and children were back on an even keel. Sir Keith was settling into marriage and retirement. Sarah was looking ahead to her career as a solicitor. And Rowena was probably only waiting to finish her degree course before starting a family. Equilibrium had been restored. As for Louise and her stubborn but elusive memory, those who couldn’t forget her didn’t speak of her. Those, like me, who couldn’t stop wondering, knew better than to wonder aloud.

In March 1993, however, the Kington killings’ slide into a discarded past came abruptly to a halt. That month saw the publication of
Fakes and Ale: the Double Life of Oscar Bantock
, by Henley Bantock and Barnaby Maitland. I remember clearly the moment when I came across a review of the book and learned of its existence for the first time. It was an unremarkable Thursday afternoon. I was eating a snack lunch at my desk, waiting for our timber agent to return a call and leafing idly through the newspaper. Then the headline caught my eye.
NEGLECTED EXPRESSIONIST
’
S LAST LAUGH AT ART WORLD
. What had apparently already been made much of in the specialist art press was summarized in the column below.

This entertaining if sometimes uneven biography of Oscar Bantock, the eccentric English Expressionist who was murdered three years ago, is a collaborative venture between Bantock’s nephew Henley and the unorthodox art historian Barnaby Maitland. It reveals that Bantock, written off in his lifetime as a prickly drink-sodden recluse determined to plough a lonely and deeply uncommercial Expressionist furrow, was actually a womanizer of considerable charm, a popular and sociable pub-goer and a gifted forger of several different artists and styles. His scorn of naturalistic and sentimental work emerged in subtle pastiches of its most popular examples from which he made far more money than he ever did painting in his own name. Maitland’s researches are based on journals inherited from Bantock by his nephew and meticulous cross-checking with the records of dealers named in them, often to those dealers’ vigorous displeasure. They reveal the curmudgeonly idealist’s double life as the most mercenary of forgers. He seems to have stuck at first to middle-rank recently dead artists, notably a clutch of Edwardian specialists in drawing-room or garden scenes of children and pets, greetings card material in reasonable demand but not famous or pricey enough to attract expert attention. In the last few years of his life, however, he became more ambitious, mining his own Expressionist vein to produce several brilliant fake Rouaults and Soutines. Henley Bantock’s insight into his uncle’s drift towards cynicism supports Maitland’s contention that this change was triggered by the artist’s acceptance that he could not hope for recognition in his own right and that material reward represented his only prospect of satisfaction. If they are correct, which many irate dealers, auctioneers and owners will say they are not, Bantock and one of the few tireless fans of his own work, the late Lady Paxton, paid a heavy price for his revenge against the artistic establishment. The authors’ most startling conclusion is that the murders of Bantock and Lady Paxton in July 1990 may have had more to do with his output of fake art than any of the motives imputed to the man convicted of the crimes. If this sad and fascinating tale of frustration and forgery turns, as it well might, into a cause célèbre of miscarried justice, then the authors will have exposed a legal as well as an artistic scandal. But that, as they say, is another story.

I was dumbstruck. What had Henley been thinking of? His uncle a forger. Well, that was between him, his conscience and his customers. I didn’t care one way or the other. But I did care about Louise Paxton. And it was being suggested according to the reviewer—on what evidence he didn’t bother to mention—that there was more to her murder than met the eye. More, by implication, than could be laid at Shaun Naylor’s door.

I telephoned Sarah that evening. Before I could explain why I’d called, she guessed.

“You’ve read
Fakes and Ale
?”

“No. Just a review.”

“Then you might be making more of it than you should. Henley Bantock sent me an advance copy. Crowed about his theory in a covering letter. Said I’d be bound to find it persuasive. Well, I don’t. He hasn’t produced a shred of evidence to support it.”

“But what
is
his theory?”

“That Oscar was murdered because several dealers he’d sold fakes to were afraid he meant to go public with the story of how he’d duped them. And that Mummy had the bad luck to be there when it happened. But he can’t back it up. The forgery business seems to be true. But obviously that wasn’t sensational enough for the publisher. So, Henley’s gilded the lily with this wild idea that just happens to tally with Naylor’s defence.”

“But surely, if there’s no evidence—”

“It’ll come to nothing. Exactly. That’s why I didn’t bother to tell you about it. But look, I have to go out and . . .” She seemed to be whispering to somebody in the background. “Why don’t I send you the book, Robin? It’ll be quicker than you ordering a copy. Then you’ll see what I mean.”

It arrived two days later. The cover illustration was one of Oscar Bantock’s own paintings, a blurred but eye-catching self-portrait depicting the artist standing in a luridly decorated bar drinking from a tankard shaped in the likeness of a death’s head. There was a queasily prophetic quality to it that made me think Sarah might have been glad to get it off her hands.

According to the blurb on the dust jacket, Henley Bantock was a
former
local government officer. Presumably, he and Muriel had already earnt enough from Uncle Oscar’s art to quit the bureaucratic life. Now they were aiming to cash in on his scandalous secrets while enjoying the luxury of condemning them. With Barnaby Maitland to lend the whole thing some scholarly gloss. Maitland had books on two other twentieth-century forgers—the notorious “Sexton Blaker” Tom Keating and the Vermeer specialist, Hans van Meegeren—to his credit. He must have seemed an obvious choice as co-author. Just as the journals Henley had discovered at Whistler’s Cot must have been too succulent an opportunity for Maitland to resist.

I read the book in one long sitting, enduring Henley’s self-serving hatchet job on his uncle’s character for the sake of Maitland’s convincingly detailed account of how and why he’d taken to forgery. And even that was only a necessary preamble to what really concerned me. We came to it slowly, via Maitland’s meticulous verification of the output of forgeries recorded in the journals. Oscar had wanted the truth to come out after his death, of course. That was the point of them. To show what fools the experts were to denigrate his work. To prove they couldn’t tell good from bad, true from false, real from fake. And he’d proved his point. Perhaps too well. The Rouaults and Soutines were his fatal mistake, in Maitland’s opinion. They fetched high prices despite doubts about their authenticity. Such high prices that the truth about them threatened the reputations and livelihoods of influential dealers and powerful middle-men. The authors reckoned Oscar let it be known he meant to publish the facts. It would have been his glorious V-sign to the self-appointed arbiters of taste who’d done him down. It would have fulfilled his true motive for turning out fakes, which was never really money in their opinion so much as distorted pride.

Sarah was right. They hadn’t uncovered any evidence to support their theory. It was a shallow invention designed to boost sales. But to the ill-informed it might sound plausible. A contract killing that claimed Louise Paxton as an extra victim because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where did that leave Naylor? The authors didn’t know. But Maitland doubted he was the sort to be employed as a hit-man. So, in the end, their implication was clear. But unstated. That was the worst of it. They never came out and said what many readers would infer. That Naylor was innocent.

I felt so angry after finishing the book that I wrote to Henley Bantock care of his publisher, accusing him of a gratuitous attack on a fine woman’s memory. It was a stupid thing to do, since it merely elicited a sarcastic reply that deliberately missed the point I’d made. “
You were not above deceiving me about your connection with Lady Paxton
,” Bantock wrote, “
so your high moral tone is scarcely justified. Our conclusions about the Kington killings represent a reasonable extrapolation of the known facts. I am sorry if they offend you, but I wonder if that is not really because you resent us seeing matters in a clearer light than you
.” I didn’t pursue the correspondence. Nor did I comply with his closing request. “
Please pass on my best wishes to your sister
.”

According to Sarah, the only sensible course of action was to ignore the book. “Treat it with the contempt it deserves, Robin,” she said in a telephone conversation shortly after I’d finished it. “Chuck it on the fire if you like.
I
don’t want it back.”

I didn’t destroy it, of course. I slid it into a bookcase out of sight, spine turned to the wall, and did my best to forget all about it. Oscar Bantock’s career as a forger would no doubt run and run as a story in the art world. But I didn’t move in the art world. As for its supposed relevance to Naylor’s conviction as a rapist and double murderer, that was surely a kite that wouldn’t fly. With or without
Fakes and Ale
, Shaun Naylor was staying where he belonged: in prison. And the truth was staying where
it
belonged. The Kington killings weren’t going to come back to haunt us. Not so long after the event. Not in the face of so much certainty. They couldn’t. Could they?

I had lunch with Bella and Sir Keith over Easter. They took the same line as Sarah. Dignified silence was the only way to respond to Henley Bantock’s money-grubbing. “I’m glad Louise never knew old Oscar was into forgery,” said Sir Keith. “She thought he was a neglected genius—and an idealist to boot. The real irony is that this will actually increase the value of genuine Bantocks. Like the ones Louise bought for next to nothing.
And
Sophie Marsden. She should be pleased. But Henley’s the big winner, isn’t he? Royalties from his nasty little book. And God knows what per cent whacked onto his stockpile of Bantock originals. With all that to look forward to, you’d think he could have had the decency to leave the murders out of it. But people never are
moderately
greedy, are they? They always want more.”

I enquired tentatively about Rowena’s reaction to the book. But as far as Sir Keith knew, she was unaware of its existence. “Too busy trying to combine being a student and a housewife to comb through reviews. Paul hasn’t drawn it to her attention and, frankly, I think he’s wise not to. We don’t want any repetition of those problems she had before the trial, do we? In fact, I’d be grateful if you took care not to mention it next time you meet her. With any luck, it’ll pass her by completely. Leave her free to concentrate on making me a grandfather as soon as possible.”