Honeybath's Haven (11 page)

It also occurred to him, more prosaically, that Edwin might be in the next room, a comfortable apartment to which it would be natural that he and his brother-in-law, perhaps accompanied by Dr Michaelis, had retired for a quiet chat. But this room was untenanted also. Honeybath lingered in it for a couple of minutes, marking the fact that here, too, a great many of Edwin's former possessions were on view. He must have moved in quite a lot of stuff in recent months – perhaps from that depository to which it had been consigned upon the break-up of the Royal Crescent
ménage
. This, in a limited way, seemed a good sign, suggesting that Edwin had come to feel moderately at home in his new environment.

Honeybath returned to the studio, and became aware of Ambrose Prout emerging from the third room in the suite, which was Edwin's bedroom.

‘Where is Edwin?' Honeybath asked. ‘He's not ill, I hope?' That Edwin was confined to bed seemed the only explanation of Prout's behaviour.

‘Oh, no. Edwin's quite all right. Or as right as we'd expect him to be.' Prout added the qualification with his customary gloom. ‘He must have missed you. I sent him to look for you in the garden. It struck me a spot of fresh air might do him good.'

Prout was detectably confused – as he might well be when thus discovered in one of his bouts of nosing around. But then Honeybath, too, had been doing something of the sort in the interest of estimating his friend's present nervous condition.

‘Have you seen Michaelis?' Honeybath asked.

‘Yes – but only briefly. I've arranged that the three of us should have a quiet talk later.'

‘Which three of us?'

‘You and I and Michaelis, of course. Have you had a look at that thing on the easel, Charles?'

‘Yes, I have. It's much the same as what we came on that day we had to have him hospitalized. It's sad.'

‘It is, indeed. I couldn't sell that affair to a wandering sheik for a five-pound note.'

‘I don't suppose they carry round anything as pitiful as five-pound notes. But you're probably right.'

‘It's damned puzzling, Charles. I can't get to the bottom of it.'

‘Just what is damned puzzling?' Honeybath was puzzled himself. ‘It seems all too clear to me, the decay of Edwin's talent.'

‘Oh, nothing, nothing. You're quite right. Absolute decay.' Prout glanced in a curiously furtive way at the door of the studio, as if fearing that its owner might return at an awkward moment. ‘I don't know that we should spend long here. There's really nothing to be done.'

‘We can at least support Edwin with a little familiar companionship. He can't make much of many of the people in this confounded place.'

‘Quite true, quite true. I say – do you think Edwin can be up to some deep game? He's always been as freakish as they come. Capable of anything. That about the burglar, and so on. Quite mad.'

It came to Honeybath that Prout was not merely puzzled. He was also in some abnormal state of excitement. Perhaps it was just something that could be put down to the general atmosphere of Hanwell Court.

‘Do you think we should get him away?' Honeybath asked. ‘It has been in my head. You remember how he once went off to Italy on his own, and it didn't work? It might be different if he were travelling with a friend. And I could manage to get away for a couple of months myself.'

‘It's something to consider – and very generous of you, of course. Something to think over. Perhaps we ought to get away and plan things. Not even bother about that talk with Michaelis.'

‘We needn't scurry off just like that.' This new attitude in Prout seemed to Honeybath uncommonly odd, and deserving to be got to the bottom of. It was almost as if something had
happened
. Not for the first time, he was conscious of a strong instinct to distrust Edwin's brother-in-law. ‘Ambrose,' he asked sternly, ‘are you being quite frank with me?'

‘Frank with you?' Alarm rather than reproach had sounded in Prout's voice, and he gave another covert glance at the door. ‘There's nothing not to be frank about. But I think, you know, we're meddling with something like a mare's nest. About this affair of the Munden woman. I did have a word with Michaelis about that. And it's blowing over. It seems Edwin has been treating other of the folk here in the same way. Sketching them from memory, that is, with that streak of caricature and in rather ludicrous situations. One or two of them have gone round, and it turns out that the subjects like it. Edwin's an RA, after all, and his attentions flatter them. I gather he's quite popular.'

‘I'm glad to hear it, Ambrose. But the main point…' Honeybath broke off. Edwin had entered the studio.

‘Charles, so here you are! Ambrose told me about your going to take a look at the orangery. I must have missed you.' Having uttered these words, Edwin Lightfoot embraced Honeybath, stood back, and rubbed his hands with what seemed to be genuine if somewhat febrile pleasure.

Honeybath was about to say, ‘I didn't even know there was an orangery.' But thus to expose Prout in prevarication might be to upset Edwin, who was (as forecast) in a jumpy state. It was clear that Prout had sent Edwin on a fool's errand – and that this had been to get him out of his living quarters while Prout did that poking around which now seemed habitual with him. What on earth had the man expected to find in Edwin's bedroom? Did he suspect that it harboured some Paphian girl or rural trollop? And what business of Prout's was it if it did?

Suddenly an extraordinary idea came to Honeybath. It was one of those away-out conjectures that can only visit a man of imaginative endowment. Prout's constant obsession nowadays was with those missing masterpieces of Lightfoot's early period, the existence of which he, and he alone, was obstinately convinced of. Mrs Gutermann-Seuss had proved unproductive –
but what about Lightfoot himself
? Was Edwin crazily hoarding pictures painted long ago – pictures which, if now given to the world through the world's sale-rooms, would vastly enlarge the artist's reputation overnight, to say nothing of vastly enlarging his agent's bank-balance as well? Frequenting Hanwell Court was constraining Honeybath to believe virtually all men mad. Was Ambrose Prout sufficiently mad to believe that Edwin Lightfoot's madness (which he was so constantly asserting) could take so bizarre a form as this? Or
was
it bizarre? With a suddenness equal to that of his first thought on the matter, Honeybath told himself that it was all perfectly possible. One sort of miser irrationally hides away his gold. Mightn't another sort hide away creations of his own far more precious than sovereigns and
louis-d'or
? And wasn't Edwin just the kind of perverse creature of whom such conduct might be predicated? Honeybath was surprised that he hadn't thought all this out before. He would challenge Edwin on it as soon as the two of them were alone together. And this, as it happened, came about almost at once.

‘My dear Charles,' Edwin said, ‘let me get you a drink. Ambrose, go away.'

‘Really, Edwin!' Not unnaturally, Prout was offended by this brisk injunction.

‘You and I have had our little chat. It's Charles' turn now. And too many people upset me. And too many people is just what you are. Get lost, old boy. Or try the orangery. Orangery, indeed!'

Producing this childish rudeness, and thus indicating his awareness that he had been imposed upon, seemed to put Edwin in good humour. He chuckled gaily (if also maliciously) as he watched Prout withdraw with what dignity he could.

‘Boring chap,' he said, as he rummaged among bottles on a side-table. ‘Worse than Melissa herself.' He poured gin liberally into glasses. ‘Do you know, I miss Melissa quite a lot. Nobody could imagine themselves missing Ambrose.' He chuckled again – this time on a higher note. ‘Impossible not to want to twist his bloody tail at times. And I've found the way to do it. But let's forget about him. I'll show you what I did this morning.'

‘To that painting?' As he asked this question, Honeybath glanced towards the easel, and felt embarrassed. He had a notion that Edwin was embarrassed too.

‘No, no – just another of those little jokes.' Edwin fished about on another table. ‘Have you met a chap here called Dacre?'

‘No, I've only heard about him.'

‘Very military – very military, indeed. Here he is. I've done him rather after Blake. It's called
The Spiritual Form of the Duke of Wellington surveying the Iberian Peninsula
. Pure nonsense.'

‘So it is.' Honeybath studied the latest of Edwin's small extravagances. ‘Are you going to show it to him?'

‘Oh, yes – Dacre will be rather pleased. Dotty, but a good sort, Dacre. And then I'm going to send it to some exhibition of contemporary drawings that one of those odd councils is proposing to trundle round the country.'

‘It strikes me as a little trivial for the purpose.' Honeybath sipped his gin, and resolved that the time had come to tackle Edwin. ‘Listen,' he said. ‘I want to ask you a straight question. Are you sitting on a number of things you did a long time ago – and that are a good deal more important than most of what you've done since?'

‘Now, that's a difficult one, Charles. A really hard question. Quite a philosophical conundrum. Have some more gin.'

‘I've barely begun this. And don't talk in riddles. Is it by hiding certain things away that you're contriving to twist Ambrose's bloody tail, as you express it?'

‘Ah, now – that's easier. Yes, in a way. But Ambrose isn't important. I'd even call him the quintessence of unimportance. The point is I'm not going to be a freak – not if I can help it. I'm mad, of course. Everybody says that. But not even a madman need be a freak. Keep a joke a joke, I say. All men have their honour. Even artists.' Edwin raised his glass. ‘To art, Charles.'

‘Edwin, do try…'

‘You heard what I said.'

‘Very well – to art.' Honeybath raised his own glass, and drank. ‘Edwin, am I being intrusive? I'd like us to get on well together. Really well, as we used to do. And – do you know? – I've had an idea. I'd terribly like to get back to Italy. You've heard that Piero's
Flagellation
has been returned to Urbino? The thieves seem to have abandoned it in the odd way they do. Shall we go and have a look? We could do Monterchi too. You remember our getting to the lady there when we hadn't so much as a bus fare? We could visit her again.'

‘And then to Borgo San Sepolcro for the really great thing.'

‘And to Arezzo for San Francesco. Put up in the
Chiavi d'Oro
, and dine in that place in a cellar.' Honeybath broke off in these bold proposals, suddenly aware that Edwin was weeping. It was like being back on square one.

Edwin's sobs died away into a constrained silence. Honeybath didn't know what to say. He had a sense that some essential factor in the situation was eluding him; even that Edwin had hidden it away in that last flood of quirky talk before his abrupt breakdown. Something terrible had happened to Edwin – or at least something bewildering and disorientating. And it was new, or fairly new. It had happened
after
that first occasion upon which he had wept. So it
wasn't
square one. In this seemingly so sheltered place, this funk-hole for the affluent aged and the affluent potty, something undermining had occurred. For Edwin Lightfoot, Hanwell Court was not the Great Good Place. It had turned out – utterly mysteriously – to be the GreatBad Place instead.

There was nothing for it – for the present there was nothing for it – but to play the whole situation down. And it was essential to see young Dr Michaelis at once, and to see him privately rather than in the company of Ambrose Prout as had been proposed. Nor was there any point in longer pretending that Edwin had graduated, as it were, to the position of a mere eccentric at Hanwell Court; to the category in which one could place the golf-ball man or Colonel Dacre or Mr Gaunt of the nasty daggers. Edwin was a man subject to some dreadful sickness of the mind. Or he was an
artist
subject to that. Something had happened to him in that character, and it was something distinct from his now long-established loss of what sports commentators might call his form. This was a very obscure conception, in the light (or darkness) of which it was difficult to see how to act. The simplest step was to secure for Edwin an almost immediate change of air. Honeybath resolved to cling to that Italian project.

Even more immediately, it would be a good idea to get Edwin briefly out of this studio, with its disheartening daub on the easel and its litter of futile little drawings of Hanwell Court worthies.

‘Let's take a turn in the garden,' Honeybath said, and got briskly to his feet. ‘We can plan the thing during a stroll there.'

‘Plan the thing?' It was quite blankly that Edwin repeated the words. But he too had got to his feet. He was, in his way, a very amenable, a suggestible, man.

‘We'll fly to Pisa, and hire a car there. It can be waiting for us, so we can spend our first night in Florence. Unless one is a rabid Byzantinist, it's the only place from which to start. We can be in the Carmine or the Pazzi, my boy, forty-eight hours from now.'

With chat like this, Honeybath got Edwin on the move. As they were going downstairs they met Ambrose Prout coming up. Prout passed them without a glance or a word. He was evidently very much offended still. It was a displeasing incident. Honeybath was so struck by it that it didn't occur to him to wonder where the confounded picture-pedlar was heading for.

 

 

 

It had been a good idea to get out into the open air. Edwin, although his attention strayed from time to time so that he walked on in a frowning and muttering abstraction, did talk rationally about Italy. He didn't fall in explicitly with Honeybath's plan, but did begin to make random remarks which seemed to indicate that his mind was moving in that direction. He was just recollecting (in the sanest fashion) that there is a thoroughly satisfactory hotel outside Gubbio when his train of thought was interrupted by the appearance of Honeybath's earliest Hanwell acquaintance, Mr Richard Gaunt. Gaunt was nursing what might have been taken from a distance to be a particularly villainous
Panzerbrecher
of gigantic size, but which proved to be merely a garden fork. The inmates of Hanwell Court, it was to be observed, were fond of providing themselves with small tasks in the gardens. Gaunt remembered Honeybath at once.