Gillespie and I (64 page)

That is the end of Clinch; I have seen her off.

Frustratingly, I must now start all over again with yet another firm. Every single one of the supposedly ‘first-rate' registries has turned out to be nothing of the sort and, in recent years, I am reduced to Clinch and her ilk. Extremely tiresome and inconvenient, but it must be done. I have eaten nothing since yesterday, except a stale Oval Osbourne, and yet, although I have not cooked any meals, the place is beginning to smell a bit whiffy, and all the ashtrays are full, and these flies are becoming a blasted nuisance. I cannot understand where they creep in, for I have closed all the windows. There are flies, everywhere, I now realise, everywhere I look, those lazy flies that swirl and dart beneath the lampshade in the centre of the room, and also, droning in and out, big buzzers, bumping against the windowpane. They make my skin crawl.

Dr Derrett telephoned, this morning, rather cross, wanting to know why I had failed to attend hospital for my X-ray. He insists on booking another appointment, but that will have to wait, for I have quite enough to do, in finishing my manuscript. As well as revising everything that I have done so far, I have yet to describe what happened, following the trial. The final part—the aftermath—is still completely unwritten. Indeed, I have not even planned what to include in that section. I suppose that I should say something about what happened to me: the initial return to London, and so on, and the discovery that, even here, the penny press would make my life a misery. In the days that followed the trial, I lived in constant fear of reprisals, and after a few nervous weeks here in London, I had had enough. My stepfather was still suffering from ill-health, and unable to leave Switzerland and, thinking that I might find some sanctuary there, with him, I sent a telegram, proposing that I travel out to join him. However, the reply that I received was from his factor. It informed me that all visitors were being discouraged for the foreseeable future, and suggested that I write again, in a few months, when, perhaps, the situation might have changed.

Thereafter, on something of an impulse, I booked my passage to New York. One afternoon, a few days before my departure, I found myself on Piccadilly with a few hours to spare. I ended up wandering through the park, and by the time that I had reached the other side, I had resolved to continue westwards, and bid farewell to Eaton Square, to my childhood home. Ramsay kept the house closed up, and it was opened only on the rare occasions when he visited London, but I had no notion of going inside: I simply wanted to look at the old place.

Dusk was falling as I turned off the King's Road and approached the terrace, which seemed much taller than I had remembered. I walked down the narrow pavement along the edge of the gardens. Up ahead, across the road, I could see the house, halfway down the terrace, the ribbed columns of the portico, and, on the first floor, the shallow balcony spanning the drawing-room windows. There was an empty Victoria sitting beneath one of the plane trees; the horse, a stallion, had been tied to a railing and the driver was leaning against the fence, smoking his pipe. I paused to stroke the animal's nose, while I gazed across the road, at the windows of our house, particularly those on the third floor, where the nursery used to be. To my surprise, while I was watching, a few lights went on, here and there: in the hallway, the front sitting room, and a few rooms upstairs. It occurred to me that, perhaps, Ramsay had loaned or rented the place to someone—although that seemed unlikely.

I was still standing there, wondering about the lights, when a Hackney drew up in front of the portico. Imagine my astonishment when I saw Ramsay descending from the cab. He paid the driver and then walked briskly up the steps, and entered the house. A few minutes later, he appeared in the window of the front sitting room, closing the shutters.

I believe that I may have stood there for several minutes. The next thing I knew was that the driver of the Victoria was at my side, speaking to me.

‘Is something wrong, madam? You look ever so strange.'

‘What? No—no.'

‘Only I thought you was going to faint, you gone so pale.'

‘No, I'm fine… Do you work here, in one of these residences?'

‘Yes, ma'am.' He indicated the house beside my stepfather's. ‘There.'

‘Does—does anybody live in that house, next door?' I asked him. ‘Who was the man who went in there, just now?'

‘Oh, that's Mr Dalrymple. Usually, he's up in Scotland, but he's been here now, several weeks.'

‘… How many weeks?'

The man rubbed his chin. ‘At least a month, I'd say. It was a while before St David's, he arrived, I reckon. But we've hardly seen him—he hasn't been out in daylight since he got here.'

I could well imagine. Doubtless, he had no wish to advertise his presence in the country, since both the Scottish authorities, and myself, had been under the impression that he was on his deathbed, in Switzerland. He could have spoken in my defence, and yet he had chosen to dissociate himself from me, to feign illness. Of all the slights and hurts and rejections that I had suffered at his hands, this was surely the worst. And yet, the strange thing was, I felt very little—very little at all.

A few days later, I sailed for New York. There is not much to say about my time there. Apart from one minor misunderstanding—so minor that it never even came to court—I was able to exist in relative obscurity in America.

More importantly than myself, of course, I must decide and plan out what I am to write about all the Gillespies and what became of them.

I gather that Mabel and Peden had intended to return to Tangier soon after the trial, but were obliged to remain in Glasgow when it became clear that the Wool and Hosiery was about to fold. Ned, who was nominally in charge, was not in any state to run things, and he had been unable to keep the shop in profit. As the proceeds now constituted the family's major source of income, Mabel and Peden took over, and attempted to save the business. Peden evicted his tenants, and he and Mabel moved back into his old house, in Victoria Crescent Road. In an effort to create more income, Elspeth was obliged to take in lodgers at number 14, which gave her a few extra pounds. However, the role of landlady did not sit well with her, and she was never entirely content with these new arrangements.

As for Sibyl, her dramatic appearance as a witness seemed to have been her undoing: it had tipped her over the edge. There is no clear account of what happened immediately after the trial but what I do know is that she was readmitted to the Glasgow Asylum later that week. Apparently, Ned made several attempts to bring her home over the months that followed, but his efforts were to no avail, because, this time, Sibyl really was beyond help, and the decision to release her now lay outwith her father's control. Ultimately, she became catatonic, and refused to acknowledge anyone she knew, including both of her parents.

Shut out by Sibyl, Annie resumed the peripatetic way of life that she had adopted whilst searching for Rose and began, once more, to tramp the roads around the city of Glasgow, becoming a common sight to those who recognised her. As time went by, she began to travel further afield, until eventually she stopped returning home altogether, and became a sort of vagabond. She did not go mad, exactly, but she developed an aversion to being indoors. At some point—alas—the relationship between her and Ned came to an end. I was not there to see it; by that time, I was settled in America, but I did hear rumours that they were no longer husband and wife. Eventually, Annie disappeared from notice, and I have been unable to find any record of what happened to her, nothing in the papers, no obituary, no gravestone. Perhaps she is still out there, tramping the highways and byways of Scotland: for some reason, I picture her as an old crone, in ragged, blackened garments, with dirty grey locks, and down-at-heel shoes.

As for Ned's mother, she died of apparently natural causes, in the winter of 1891. In fact, by a strange coincidence, at around about that time, I had a dream in which Elspeth choked to death on a bacon rind, but later, I learned that the post-mortem ruling was that she had suffered a massive heart attack.

Following his mother's death, Ned went further into decline. Before the trial, he had resumed painting, but it is my understanding that he stopped again, after Sibyl returned to the asylum. The door of his studio was locked; he never entered there again. In order to live, he was obliged to resume work as an assistant in the Wool and Hosiery, although I gather that Mabel and Peden kept him on more as an act of charity, since he was not much use as a salesman. As far as I know, he never painted again. Having been on the verge of making a name for himself, at the time of the Exhibition, he drifted into obscurity. Nowadays, one hears talk of ‘the Glasgow Boys', Lavery et al., but Gillespie's name is never associated with that loose alliance of painters. I believe that Walter Peden did encourage Ned to go back to painting, and even persuaded Mr Whistler to write him a letter, full of compliments, urging Ned to resume his work, but all was to no avail. Meanwhile, Peden's own sentimental animal portraits became infernally popular.

Instead of painting, Ned became obsessed with reclaiming all of his work, even pictures that had no meaning for him, such as the portraits that he had done, on commission. I believe that he invented non-existent exhibitions, and ‘borrowed back' canvases, which he then never returned. His aim, in recouping these pictures, was unclear, at the time. He never exhibited them, but kept them stored in an old mews workshop at the back of Peden's house.

In the spring of 1892, Ned moved into the workshop, while continuing to try and reclaim his paintings from their owners. I personally never heard from him, although he must surely have remembered that I was in possession of his picture of
Stanley Street
, which hangs in my bedroom. As already mentioned, when Euphemia Urquart refused to lend him her portrait, he attempted to burgle her home, only to be thwarted by her butler. It is my understanding, from someone who was acquainted with one of the Urquarts' maids, that Detective Sub-Inspector Stirling was called to Woodside Terrace and asked to investigate the attempted burglary. The contents of the pockets of Ned's jacket, left behind in his escape, revealed his identity. However, Stirling was sympathetic to the artist; perhaps he felt guilty at having failed, for so long, to solve the mystery of what had happened to Rose. At any rate, he persuaded the Urquarts not to press charges, and the matter was forgotten.

After the rumours about the Urquart painting had subsided, I heard very little more about Ned, until late in 1892. In October, on the third anniversary of the date that Sibyl had first entered the asylum, it is my understanding that Ned made a huge pile of all—or, should I say, almost all—of his canvases, inside the workshop in Victoria Crescent Lane, and then set them alight. The building soon became an inferno. It was thought, at first, that Ned had become trapped, by accident. There was only one exit from the workshop, on the ground floor, but any person imprisoned inside could have escaped, either through there, or by climbing out of an upstairs window, for it was only a mews, and the first storey was not very high. However, investigators found that the door had been bolted from the inside, and Ned had not made any attempt to escape from the building, by either route.

By the time that I heard of Ned's death, his funeral was long over. My grieving had to be done in private, as was the case with my stepfather, who also died in my absence, in 1895, when his latest gadget, an imported shower-bath, exploded with him inside. Ramsay's funeral was carried out so swiftly that there was no time for me to return to England. I never saw him buried, and the next time that I set foot on these shores was in 1913. By then, the trial of Hans and Belle Schlutterhose and my part in it were forgotten. My father had bequeathed his land and properties to Glasgow City Council, but, with my small income, and the sale of my aunt's house, I was able to settle here, in Bloomsbury, in some approximation of tranquillity. That is, until the publication of a certain provocative little pamphlet.

For ever and a day, this murky, ambiguous ‘not proven' has hung above my head. Alas, ‘the Scottish verdict' is unclear, saying neither one thing, nor the other. In fact, I believe that when a Scottish jury return a verdict of ‘not proven' what they mean is not so much: ‘We don't think you did it', but more: ‘We think you probably did do it—but, luckily for you, the prosecution didnae prove it well enough.'

They might as well have found me guilty.

Kemp's theory is that I escaped conviction only by foul means and one of the main contentions of his pamphlet is that I managed to bribe Christina Smith and prevent her from appearing at the trial. His supposition is that I contacted her, from prison, and persuaded her to disappear from court on the day that she was due to give evidence. Of course, I barely knew Christina Smith. I doubt that I even knew where she resided, at the time. Even had I known her, and wanted to communicate with her, it would have been almost impossible, for all my mail was inspected and read before it was posted. Kemp fails to realise how very difficult it is to smuggle letters in and out of gaol, a feat possible only if one has friends in high places within the prison hierarchy, and if one is willing to bribe and cheat and lie. One would have to be very clever indeed to dream up a way of secretly carrying on illicit correspondence with someone in the outside world.

Tuesday, 19th September. Yet more evidence to uphold my theory that I am purging myself of all the badness and anxiety engendered by that girl. This involves a somewhat indelicate revelation. Lately, I am called to stool in the middle of the night. This happens, several times a week, and wakes me from sleep, at about four o'clock in the morning. Today, it was half past three o'clock when I awoke, and stumbled down the hallway to the WC. I had turned on the light and, as I pulled the chain after using the lavatory, I happened to glance back, and was alarmed to notice that my elimination, instead of the usual colour, was as black as tar. Upon reflection, I expect that this is a sign that I am expelling the last of all the horridness and vexation that I have been feeling over the past few weeks. However, momentarily, I was quite disturbed.