Honeybath's Haven (12 page)

‘My dear sir,' he said, ‘I am delighted to see you. Lightfoot, how are you, my dear fellow? I believe I observed you, Mr Honeybath, in conversation with our friend Brown.'

‘Yes, indeed. I'd just met him.' Chatting up Edwin being hard going, Honeybath welcomed this brief diversion. ‘I was rather curious about him.'

‘Not quite from the usual stable, eh? Our mystery man, I sometimes call him. Retiring fellow. Impossible to get anything out of him.'

‘He seemed to take a certain interest in crime.'

‘Very true. Precisely so. And – do you know? – Luxmoore has told me he got the most valuable advice from Brown about rendering the place burglarproof. Brown concerned himself with the job vigorously. Lightfoot, you recall that?'

This was an unfortunate subject, and Honeybath was rather alarmed by his friend's reaction to it. Edwin, in fact, was tiptoeing round his two companions in a grotesque manner undoubtedly occasioned by revived memories of Flannel Foot. But Mr Gaunt appeared unperturbed by this, being presumably accustomed to Edwin's little ways. He continued to be informative.

‘I have myself entertained the conjecture,' he said, ‘that Brown was at one time connected with the police. He may even have begun as a bobby on the beat. The highest positions in the constabulary are now, as you know, frequently filled by men coming up from the ranks. There is here an explanation, conceivably, of Brown's somewhat unpolished speech. And now, here is another curious fact about our friend. Lightfoot, I wonder whether you have remarked it? Brown very seldom leaves Hanwell, or even ventures beyond the grounds. But when he does occasionally go away it is for a week or a few nights at a time. And he is collected, and brought back, by a personable young woman driving a discreet but powerful car. It is a vehicle that itself for some reason suggests the police to me.'

‘Most interesting,' Honeybath said. Hanwell Court, he reflected, must be a place where a great deal of this close observing of other people's business went on. It wasn't an activity that Edwin would take kindly to having directed upon him.

‘But there is something further, my dear Mr Honeybath. It is a circumstance of which I have become aware as a consequence of reading my daily paper with some attention. Those absences of our friend Brown almost invariably coincide with the perpetration, somewhere around the country, of some large-scale robbery of the highly organized sort.'

‘Good heavens!' Honeybath, although he had other things to think about than the mysterious Brown, was startled by this striking piece of intelligence. ‘You mean you have reason to suppose the man a criminal? Haven't you told the police?'

‘Nothing of the kind, my dear sir. Such an idea is obviously absurd. But it has struck me that Brown, before his retirement, was a highly qualified police authority on that sort of thing. Safe-breaking, and so on. A thoroughly scientific business, including the controlled use of high explosives – which brings it almost within the field of my own interest, as you will remember. I take it that when these sensational robberies occur Brown is recalled from retirement in an advisory capacity. But this is mere conjecture, needless to say.'

Honeybath agreed privately that it didn't need saying. Probably everybody at Hanwell Court had some mildly crazy notion about everybody else. This was almost certainly not true of Gubbio. The sooner he got Edwin to Gubbio the better.

But his first task – he reminded himself as he and Edwin took their leave of Gaunt and walked on – was to have that talk with Michaelis and see if any light could be thrown into the darker corners of Edwin's condition. As for Prout, the problem of getting rid of him resolved itself, a little disconcertingly, by Prout's own initiative. Prout had left a scrawled note in the studio, couched in highly offended terms. Edwin had addressed him in such a way that it would be better if they did not again meet for some time. He had no thought of a permanent breach, but an interval for reflection and apology there must be. He proposed to walk to the railway station and catch the next train.

This communication from his brother-in-law failed in turn to offend Edwin; on the contrary, it induced in him one of those rapid changes of mood in which Honeybath understood that neurotic subjects are prone to indulge. He even capered round the studio before momentarily settling down to sketch Brown from memory. Honeybath didn't doubt that Brown's feet would be represented as swathed in flannel. And this harmless absorption on Edwin's part made it feasible to go off and seek out Dr Michaelis at once.

The Medical Superintendent occupied a curious crypt-like room in the bowels of the building. At some time presumably in the earlier nineteenth century its
décor
and appointments had been pervasively Gothicized by some owner of the house who had grown tired of the Palladian decorum around him. Since a varied paraphernalia of medical science was now disposed around the room the total effect was of a slightly necromantic or even alchemical order. Here, one felt, Paracelsus might have laboured.

But there was nothing of this suggestion about Dr Michaelis himself, or about his more personal goods and chattels. These latter seemed designed to suggest that he was in the full enjoyment of the general affluence diffused throughout Hanwell Court. There were good eighteenth-century watercolours on the walls, Chinese pottery of a plainly authentic sort on a shelf, Hepplewhite chairs that had been sat upon in George Hepplewhite's day. Honeybath, sensitive to these appearances severally, was also capable of a sense that they didn't quite compose or cohere. They reflected nothing in Dr Michaelis himself. He didn't suggest aesthetic feeling; and if he had a concern it was to appear entirely up-to-date.

But he also displayed the same easy manner, correctly short of familiarity, that Honeybath had approved on his previous visit. It was possible to wonder why so capable and alert a young man had relegated himself, so comparatively early in his career, to the medical backwater that caring for the inmates of Hanwell Court must presumably be. Perhaps the pay was particularly good. Or perhaps Michaelis, whom Honeybath recalled as having been rather uncomfortably interested in the psychopathological side of things, himself suffered from some mild disorder in that region. Gerontophilia, it was probably called. The condition of doting upon the aged.

‘I didn't regard the business of Lady Munden's portrait as in the least sinister in itself,' Michaelis said. ‘A mere foible on your friend Lightfoot's part. We must admit, of course, that he is a man of foibles.'

‘No doubt.' Honeybath felt this to be quite a temperate judgement.

‘And working in that way must be normal enough with you artists. Easier than simply imagining people.'

‘I'd say not.' Honeybath was less satisfied with this last remark, which he even judged rather silly. ‘One's first impression of a sitter is much conditioned by types or
schemata
pre-existing in one's own head. The labour comes in peeling away that layer of facile generalization, and arriving at the unique visual phenomenon that is in fact before one.'

‘Ah, yes.' Michaelis didn't seem particularly interested in this; indeed, he might almost have not been listening. ‘And he has been doing other sketches of the same sort. One or two have been seen by some of his fellow guests, and have gone down quite well. But the activity
might
cause embarrassment. I shall try to persuade Lightfoot to take up something else.'

Although Honeybath judged this to be a good idea in itself, he wasn't too pleased with the notion of Michaelis proposing to boss Edwin around in his vocation.

‘Have you noticed,' he asked, ‘anything in the quality of my friend's work? The larger things in oils, I mean. I gather he has been painting a good deal.'

‘Indeed, he has. I have encouraged it very strongly. Such things absorb Lightfoot most usefully over long periods of time. When not so engaged he can be – well, a shade tiresome all round. In fact there have been some episodes of real difficulty. But the painting is splendid. I feel he couldn't be doing better. Therapeutically regarded, it is a first-rate occupational resource.'

‘I am delighted to hear it.' Honeybath, of course, was nothing of the sort, and he had uttered these words with a severe irony. He was conscious of something undesirably equivocal in the cocksure Medical Superintendent's role. But this no doubt proceeded from the fact that the place discreetly played down its function as in part at least a receptacle for mildly loopy persons. ‘What I was curious to know,' Honeybath went on (easing off only a little on the irony), ‘is whether you have examined any of the individual paintings with any attention. Would you say they were good, or bad?'

‘Oh, good. Decidedly good, many of them. Most interesting. Tell me, Mr Honeybath – did Lightfoot lose his mother in infancy; and, if so, was she almost at once succeeded by a stepmother?'

‘My dear sir, I have no idea whatever. And I cannot imagine…'

‘There has been one very interesting landscape painting. It is dominated by a large tree; one may say a sheltering and sustaining tree. Only it is impossible quite to tell whether it is
one
tree. It might almost be
two
trees, with their several trunks at once distinct and confused. A really beautiful picture. I made some careful notes on it. Tell me, do you know whether in infancy Lightfoot ever had an alarming experience with a cat?'

‘Again I have no idea.' Honeybath's astonishment and indignation mounted. ‘Nor, I imagine, has he.'

‘Indeed not. It would be entirely a matter of repressed memory. But there it was – in one of the pictures. Ostensibly the shadow cast by a man haymaking. But in fact the perfect silhouette of a cat.'

‘Most enlightening.' Honeybath had a dim memory of nonsense of this sort being rendered persuasive by the formidable creative endowment of Sigmund Freud. Michaelis, on the other hand, was no artist. Carousing cardinals in red, or darling puppies in a basket, would be very much the same thing to him as
Las Meninas
or
The Burial of Count Orgaz
. He'd search them all indifferently for evidence of the traumata of childhood.

‘And at first,' Michaelis was saying, ‘it wasn't easy to get Lightfoot going. He seemed to have taken against painting. And he'd wander around the place in an agitated way, often pretending to be somebody else.'

‘Ah, yes. It's a kind of game he plays. He associates it with charades.'

‘Charades. Thank you.' Michaelis turned to his desk and made a rapid note. ‘As I was saying, I had difficulty in getting Lightfoot to settle down with his materials. It was the same for a time with the elder Miss Pinchon and her basketwork. But, of course, we have our techniques. There are the resources of science.'

‘Good heavens!' Honeybath was outraged. ‘Do you mean that you drugged or doped Lightfoot into labouring at work he no longer had any spontaneous prompting to?'

‘Nothing of the sort, Mr Honeybath.' Michaelis appeared shocked in his turn. ‘Apart from a few reliable psychotropic drugs, I view all chemicotherapy as undesirably hazardous. Irreversible side effects may always turn up. Not that related hazards may not attend other techniques. I had to break off with Lightfoot, as a matter of fact. Happily, the habit had been substantially restored. He has continued to paint, one may say, pretty well by rote.'

‘And uncommonly badly. Dr Michaelis, I am constrained to say that I don't care for the sound of all this at all.' Honeybath felt that the time had come to stand up and be counted on his friend's behalf. ‘And I may add that I have been discussing future plans with Lightfoot. We intend to visit Italy together very shortly. There will be details to settle about his possible later return to Hanwell, and so on. But that can readily be arranged, and I shall take it upon myself to discuss the matter with Brigadier Luxmoore.' Honeybath recalled with some satisfaction that Dr Michaelis was no more than a second-in-command at Hanwell Court. ‘And I am sure,' he added with grim formality, ‘that Lightfoot will always be grateful to you for the interest you have shown in his work. May I ask whether you told him about your remarkable discovery of the cat?'

‘We had a number of instructive discussions, of course.' Michaelis was entirely unruffled and urbane. ‘I hope you intend to lunch with us?'

‘Lightfoot and I are going to take a short walk on the downs.' Honeybath thus announced as a fact what had only just come into his head. ‘We shall pick up a sandwich at an inn. And I shall make our travel arrangements the moment I get back to town.' For the moment, at least, Honeybath was feeling strongly anti-Hanwell. Like the dreadless Angel in Milton's poem, he was all for turning his back on those proud towers, and could almost have wished them to swift destruction doomed. He had done wrong ever to dump Edwin in the place.

‘I envy you your foreign trip,' Michaelis said amiably. ‘Italy is a wonderful country. A veritable cradle of the arts.'

‘Quite so. And of the sciences, too, for that matter.'

Honeybath added this with the notion, equally amiable, of patching up some sort of
concordat
with this tiresome mad doctor. ‘But I have taken up too much of your valuable time.'

‘Not at all. I am always at your disposal, my dear sir.' On this note of decent amenity the interview ended.

 

 

 

One would scarcely expect Mrs Gutermann-Seuss to re-enter the story. She had appeared to be a write-off so far as Ambrose Prout's devoted quest for early Lightfoots was concerned. The wretched woman, although the widow of one formerly eminent in Prout's own trade, had not known the difference between a genuine Lightfoot of that golden lustre and a forgery of the most pitiful sort. Or so it had appeared. And so Honeybath had thought until, on reaching Rome in Edwin Lightfoot's company, he had found a letter from Prout awaiting him at his hotel.