Snatched (23 page)

‘These things take on a kind of grand inevitability,' Clode assured her.

‘One deduces you are not at all in favour of this recognition for Flounce, Penny,' Vaux went on. ‘I'm unclear as to why not. But presumably you feel that the old creep is already too much of a posthumous presence, infringing on your own time and space. What was that German thing meaning they had to eat up Czechoslovakia and Poland and France?
Lebensraum –
room to spread themselves and develop? You feel that? I'm not unsympathetic, believe me. I walk into the Hulliborn and the memories of Flounce hit me immediately – not just the poisoned
vol-au-vents
and subsequent choral vomiting, but his whole egomaniac, vicious, foully indomitable, enragingly jolly persona. The point is, though, Penny, as I see it at least, busts are always of very deads, so allowing this to proceed – even boosting it – is simply an affirmation that he has become a memory only.'

‘It has to be the case,' Clode said. ‘Think of that stone image of Marx in the London cemetery. OK, his work can still cause havoc and boredom, but not him personally.'

Vaux said: ‘I imagine you might retort, Penny, there's nothing
only
about the memory of Butler-Minton. But, after all, they're going to do the thing in some scorched and shagged-out stone from a volcano, aren't they? Could any material have less of life about it? There'll be a plaque, too, and it will say very clearly when he died. We can insist on this, if you wish. I mean, much bigger figures than his birth date. The whole project will declare Flounce well and truly gone. In every sense, the bust is a plus.'

‘I'm against it, Minister,' Lady Butler-Minton answered. ‘Let's leave him as ashes.'

‘But as I hear it, this is not at all how you behave personally, Penelope,' Vaux said. ‘Would you deny feeling he is near you sometimes now?'

‘I sort of talk to him,' she said. ‘I can control that. I initiate these sessions, and I close them. Well, obviously. They are just an occasional lapse, a tic. I call him “Lip” not “Flounce”, in tribute to his brutal mouthings. I don't want the bust. I've moved on, Perhaps we all should.'

Vaux sat back on the sofa looking ratty. He'd be approaching fifty, plumpish, mid-height, dark slightly receding hair, a small chin beard also dark, heavy horn-rimmed glasses, a suit of very good material and cut, but not cut for him, or not recently enough, though not as bad as those Dominican Republic suits Flounce used to wear in order to insult people. Behind the glasses, Vaux's eyes looked unforgiving and clever. A snub nose did its best to give him a cheeky-chappie charm, but Lepage was not a great believer in noses as character tests.

‘Well, I'm distressed you feel like that, Penny, I really am,' Vaux said. ‘We would have much preferred things went ahead with your approval, or, better still, encouragement. However, it must go through, either way. Once we can demonstrably establish a really sound Hulliborn–Tokyo rapport – agreement for the bust and then the medical exhibition – this museum is certain to be placed in the government's premier category, with all that implies for prestige funding. Absolutely certain, you see. I'll have a word with H. de T. Timberlake – Board of Museums chairman – and everything will assume its proper place. Timberlake – known familiarly as Gadarene, of course – can be utterly reasonable if you catch him right. He writes a kind of poetry and at present is into composing something rather longer than
The Faerie Queen
about rust, so he won't be looking for distracting aggro with me and the Cabinet. The Board's intended grading audit of the Hulliborn would be a formality, or even waived – as so much of the procedure for the medical exhibition might be. I'm sure, Penny, that Dr Lepage and the rest of the Conclave would be only too happy with that outcome, and one does hope you can see things from the Hulliborn's point of view. We must all adapt to conditions – the new, tough but bracing conditions of viability. Hulliborn cannot be an exception, nor any other institutions, however worthy.'

The newspaper photographer arrived accompanied by a reporter, and Vaux posed with the Monet. The others watched. Vaux gave some quotes about the general worthwhileness of art.

Lepage heard a woman's footsteps approaching behind him and, feeling alarmed, quickly turned: sometimes Kate would surprise him from the back and, putting her hand up between his legs, give his balls a breathtaking cosset, not greatly worried about people nearby. But it was not Kate. For a few moments, Lepage failed to recognize this young woman properly, though he knew he had seen her around the Hulliborn.

‘Ah,' Penny said, ‘yes, dear, I'm ready to go now.' She stood.

The woman carried a canvas holdall, something like the one lying with the suitcase against the gallery wall, and had a large shoulder bag, its wide strap across her chest.

‘We're arranging a trip, and agreed to meet here first,' Lady Butler-Minton explained. ‘It seemed especially appropriate somehow. We're going to spend time together in Ethiopia, starting at Jimma. In fact, we might not return.' At the word ‘together' she leaned across and gripped the arm of the younger woman, who put her hand over Penny's for a moment.

‘Jimma is one of Flounce's old stamping grounds, surely,' Vaux said. The photographer and reporter left.

‘In the south-west. But we'll do a trek north as well and get up into the Ethiopian Highlands. Often, I need mountains,' Penny said.

‘Oh, how one knows that yearning,' Vaux cried. ‘At times, I long for a topography that can make me seem small, dwarf me, remind me of my mean stature in the wide scheme of Nature.'

Clode said: ‘Minister, I have heard you more than once utter a kind of plea – “Ben Nevis, Cader Idris, heights of Lammermuir, let me but appreciate your scale, cower under your grandeur!”'

‘I do see myself as rather Wordsworthian,' Vaux replied, ‘an insignificant, reverential figure against the majesty of landscape. I hope that to regard one's self as akin to the poet is not arrogant.'

‘Arrogant?' Clode disbelievingly repeated. ‘It is the very reverse. It is a resemblance based only on humility and self-effacement.'

‘But have we met?' Vaux asked the young woman.

‘This is Trudy Dingham,' Penny Butler-Minton said.

Now Lepage remembered. Of course, she was Butler-Minton's former research assistant, the girl whose family members had come to the Hulliborn incompetently seeking sex vengeance on Flounce, and whose bush had turned tern in the Birds cupboard.

Penny Butler-Minton said: ‘Trudy and I are cooperating on a biog of Eric. I've been shooting her all the dirt. But totally bloody all! We'll publish in due course. That's what I mean about the bust – why I'm opposed. It will be mad to set up a monument after what we're going to say, like reverencing a carbuncle.'

‘But this must not be,' Vaux cried.

‘No way,' Clode shouted.

In the tortured circumstances, Lepage felt glad the journalists had gone, and that there was only one other person about the Raybould now – a woman, probably out of earshot at the far end of the gallery, apparently fascinated by one of the big old Italian things that hung there.

‘We intend to be very frank, but also just,' Lady Butler-Minton said. ‘I've told Trudy everything I know, good and bad. And there are some tapes that Eric kept under lock and key at home. I've looked those out. Haven't listened to them yet, but they're certain to provide disclosures. These might be favourable, might not.'

‘The Japanese will not like uncertainty – the prospect of a possibly scurrilous book coming out, endorsed by Flounce's widow,' Vaux said.

‘There could be ramifications,' Clode said.

‘From things Eric let slip I have the idea that the tapes cover his time in East Germany – the Wall, Mrs Cray, the haversack straps and so on. This material might be very positive – might show Eric in an excellent light,' Penny said.

‘And if not?' Vaux asked.

‘Would you still publish?' Close said.

‘We aim for a complete portrait of Eric, don't we, Trudy?' Penelope said.

‘Research does not merit the name “research” if it suppresses or falsifies,' Trudy said.

‘We're going to work on the first draft in Jimma, drinking that extraordinary tea they have there. Volume length. It will be a kind of exorcism,' Penny said. ‘Friends in the town will lend us something to play the tapes on. We'll get the draft finished, take a break in the Highlands, and then come back to Jimma and polish up our work, ready for submission to a publisher.'

‘But why are you doing this to Flounce?' Vaux asked.

‘How, how, can you behave like this, Lady Butler-Minton?' Clode said.

‘My mind is settled,' she answered. ‘I've given up those talks with the spirit of Eric. A foolishness. A weakness. Obviously, I'll listen to Lip on the tapes once or twice, and then this will be at an end, too. Our book will close that book.'

The Minister said: ‘I'm afraid there is only one word for what you propose, Lady Butler-Minton. It is “betrayal”.'

‘No other term will suffice,' Clode confirmed, with a hint in his voice that he had mentally tried a cohort of others.

‘We all need to be free of Eric now,' Penny replied.

‘But how can you be joint with Trudy?' Vaux said. ‘Didn't I hear Flounce was banging her at one stage, or more than one?'

‘A posse of your relatives hunting him, Trudy?' Clode said. ‘That's the report as I remember it.'

‘There was an episode,' Trudy said, ‘it being the
kind
of episode that, in changed circumstances – changed ideas about love – can bring two women together, having at a previous time being, as it were, linked via one man.' She put her hand on Penny's again.

‘Yes, changes have come,' Penny said. ‘I, too, have had recent interludes.'

‘Youde? Pirie?' Vaux said.

‘Spreading it rather,' Clode said.

‘Closed now,' she replied. ‘Especially Pirie. He was so much in favour of a memorial to Flounce – reproaching the Hulliborn for tardiness. Yet he knew I was against. It seemed a sort of perversity considering how things were.'

‘Ah,' Vaux said.

‘Oh,' Clode said.

Vaux stared at the luggage beneath
L'Isolement
. ‘The tapes are in one of these bags, are they?' he asked.

‘And are staying there,' Penny said.

‘Get up, Lionel,' Vaux snarled abruptly at Clode. ‘Don't just sit there like part of the fucking Royal Academy judging panel. Find those tapes. We don't know what damage they might do. The risk of the dubious is too great. Turn out her gear. Secure them. It's our only way to hit back.'

‘Of course, of course,' Clode said. He got up from the sofa and moved resolutely towards the luggage.

Lepage said: ‘Minister, I don't think I can allow this kind of behaviour on Hulliborn premises. Lady Butler-Minton is entitled to—'

‘“Entitled”, pox,' Vaux said.

‘Absolute pox as for “entitled”,' Clode remarked. But he had paused when Lepage spoke.

‘This is the health and future of your bloody museum we're talking about, Lepage,' Vaux said, ‘plus the whole panoply of British culture, plus, more to the point, the integrity of Anglo-Japanese relations in a commercial jungle. Don't you grasp this, dickhead?'

Clode moved forward again. Over his shoulder he shouted: ‘It's your well-being and the all-round well-being of Britain in a ruthless world that concerns us, Lepage, you jerk.'

‘Wait!' Lepage yelled after him. ‘I forbid this.'

‘It's OK, George,' Penny said. ‘I'll deal with that string of wind.' She took a few short, swift steps and, just as Clode bent over to unzip the holdall, got a grip on him by the seat of his fine trousers and the back of his superior dark suit jacket and, swinging him off the ground, rammed his head hard against the wall just to the right and below
L'Isolement
, then repeated this twice. It seemed to Lepage like an extended version of how she had handled Neville Falldew on the balcony. Clode's thin arms and legs trailed the ground like loose guy-ropes on a breeze-blown tent. The Raybould wall shook and, although the Monet held firm on its hook, above it, to the left, an N. Sotheby Pitcher wartime seascape,
Convoy Assembling Under Barrage Balloons, 1941
,
shifted slightly, hung askew for a moment, then dropped.

Clode lay face down, very long and still, nestling into the right-angle between wall and floor, possibly conscious but making no sound. Once it had come loose, the picture of battered looking but beautiful merchant ships, with their individual single balloons, fell very straight down the wall so that the bottom horizontal of the frame struck Clode across the back of the neck, like a guillotine, or the humanitarian chop for dispatching rabbits.

Lying there, Lionel Clode took on a kind of dignity – that touching dignity of the mutely suffering, or of one who has fought the good fight, although gravely out of his class, and is unlikely to demand a return. The seascape finished face up on his back, and it occurred to Lepage that members of the public coming into the Raybould might assume the picture and Clode littering the ground like that comprised one of those significant modernistic collages, saying something new and didactic about the war at sea, or the relationship of Art to Humanity. It would be pushing it a fair deal to have Lionel represent Humanity, but his clothes were magnificent. Fortunately, though, there were not many people in the museum today, and at present the Minister's group had the Raybould to themselves but for the woman at the far end, still apparently preoccupied by one of the larger Italian daubs. She seemed so set on loitering that Lepage peered hard, wondering if it were Kate, untypically showing some tact. But this woman was too old and too garishly dressed.