The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (13 page)

The conversation at Jenny Birdsell's was typical of many that took place in Ashworth as September set well in, and the first traces of brown appeared in the fields and the trees around the little community. The excitement that Jenny and Arnold expressed was no more than was felt by everyone there, and in all of them it was mingled with a strong sense of anticipation. A new golden age was approaching. Only Stephen was exempt from the excitement, and he was particularly contemptuous of the anticipation.

“They're getting so worked up it's positively orgasmic,” he said with a sneer to Declan one day, poking his head out from under the old car in the stables, on which he was working, and looking up at Declan, who was standing beside the car, wishing he would ask him to help. “If the excitement gets through to the old man he'll have a heart attack, and where will the masterpieces be then?”

“Your grandfather is excited already,” said Declan quietly. He always spoke respectfully of old people. “He knows he's doing good work again.”

“Know a lot about painting, do you?” asked Stephen, and slid back under the ancient Volkswagen Golf.

“Nothing at all,” said Declan. “I know a little bit about cars.”

“Well, if I find I need the help of someone who knows a little bit about cars, I'll know who to call on,” came Stephen's muffled voice.

Walking away Declan registered the waves of hostility that their brief conversation had revealed. When he analyzed the words, it would seem that the hostility was personally directed at himself. But when he looked at the situation, the
feeling
of the encounter, he felt that Stephen's frustration and aggression were directed first at his own little world of Ashworth, the family and the acolytes, and then at the world as a whole. He was a young man who had never found a place in either, and was beginning to fear he never would. That was how Declan saw the situation.

Over the succeeding week the canvas was brought toward completion with the addition of small touches and changes which Ranulph Byatt said no one would notice, but which represented the last stages in the struggle toward the ideal painting he had had from the beginning in his mind's eye. It was a bold, dramatic, forbidding work, imbued with an energy that none of them, only a month or two before, would have imagined possible. The dominant colors were grays and near blacks, in spite of the fact that the greens of the cliff top and the white of the foam also had prominent parts to play. Declan loved the picture. He felt he knew the weather, knew the sort of landscape depicted. There was an element of egotism in
his love too: he felt this was a picture in which he had played a part.

His “part” was put before him in a less flattering light one day when Stephen emerged from an unused bedroom that served him as a darkroom. Stephen was a dabbler in photography, but an energetic and persevering one. Of the few specimens that Declan had seen, he had found the landscapes unremarkable—Stephen failed, as every amateur snap-taker failed, to take in the grim immensity of the moorlands surrounding Haworth—but one or two pictures of people, taken when they were unawares, had intrigued and amused him: a view of Jenny Birdsell's backside when she bent over weeding in her scrap of garden: a zoom lens view of his mother's face—anxious, pleading, middle-aged yet somehow unformed. Such pictures seemed to him in a way unfair, taking advantage as they did of their subjects, yet giving a more truthful view than a photograph taken when they were conscious of being snapped could have done.

“If I was on better terms with the old man,” Stephen said, comparatively friendly, “I'd ask him if I could make a series of studies of him. As it is, this will have to do for posterity.”

He handed Declan a photograph taken at the door to the studio. The definition was not sharp, but there was a vivid sense of situation: the photograph showed the back of Ranulph Byatt, leaning forward and vigorously attacking the foaming sea of his picture, the energy of the pose contradicting the decrepitude of the body. Declan was standing facing him, eyes down at the palette, looking for all the world like the dumbwaiter he sometimes imagined
himself to be—the perfectly respectful, selfless, presence-less servant.

“Couldn't use a flash,” said Stephen, a smile playing on his face as he watched Declan's reactions. “The old bugger would have registered it.”

“Why did you take it?” asked Declan, handing it back and feeling somehow diminished. Stephen shrugged.

“Might come in useful. Someone's going to write a biography of him someday. Might as well make a penny or two out of him if I can.” He grinned evilly. “Who knows? I might write the biography myself.”

As he slipped the print back into the folder, Declan registered that there were other photographs, including one of his grandfather asleep in bed. He said nothing, but Stephen, as he turned down the stairs, said, “I might take some photographs at this viewing Melanie is planning. No one could object to that, could they?”

That was the first Declan had heard of the viewing. If he had been more sophisticated it might have struck him as a trifle absurd: a private viewing of an
exhibition
, in advance of the public, was one thing. But of a single picture? On the other hand Ranulph Byatt was very old, had had a long fallow period, and in the nature of things could not be expected to produce many more pictures of quality. And the people of Ashworth were all devotees. Weren't they?

The evening of the viewing was a Tuesday. Ranulph was given a meal of shepherd's pie and rhubarb crumble at six o'clock, and as expected it perked him up. His eyes—those terrible eyes—began to sparkle. Declan set him to rights, then walked him slowly along to the studio. It was quarter to seven, and the guests were expected at
seven. Already Ranulph was showing that he intended to savor the occasion.

“I wonder what they'll make of it,” he said, chuckling, as Declan eased him into his usual chair, the one he used for painting. “Not that any of them are capable of any appreciation worth a ha'pence. Even the child molester's opinion is something I wouldn't have given tuppence for twenty years ago.”

“What about Mrs. Byatt's opinion?” Declan asked. He never called her Melanie to her husband.

“Oh, Melanie's my best critic,” said Ranulph wholeheartedly. “Sounds a cliché, but it's true. If Melanie hadn't thought it good, we wouldn't be having this jamboree.” He thought for a moment, then out of the blue added the only statement about himself that Declan could remember. “Melanie has been everything to me. Since I met her in 1947 I've never wanted another woman. I've
had
one or two who offered, but the wanting was all on their side. Without her none of the great pictures would have been painted. I'm well aware I'm considered an egotist. I don't deny it. And Melanie has been an egotist
for me
. Everything else in my life has been an irrelevance.”

He stopped. Declan felt that anything he could say would seem an impertinence, or ridiculously weak.

Ranulph's chair had been moved away from the picture, and he flung the landscape a glance, just to assure himself it was there, and in a good light. Then he settled down to await the arrivals. “They'll all exclaim over it, like parrots!” he muttered, but it was clear he was looking forward to the occasion by the set of his body.

The animals went in two by two, but the Ashworth community arrived in ones and ones. Apart from Jenny
Birdsell and her daughter (and Mary Ann was certainly not likely to attend such a gathering) they were all solitaries, and proclaimed their solitude almost as if it were a proud gift. Melanie and Martha set out the finger buffet that Mrs. Max had prepared, then stood around in a hostessy manner, but apart. Stephen was standing near the easel with a camera slung over his shoulder, as if to say this was the only reason he was there at all, but he was finally persuaded to man the front door. (“I need Declan here with me,” said Ranulph emphatically.)

Jenny was first, and exclaim over the picture she certainly did, and like a parrot too, just as Ranulph had predicted. Then there was Charmayne, then Arnold Mellors, then Colonel Chesney, and last—proclaiming by that gesture, and much to his sister's suppressed rage, that he had seen the painting and had no cause for eagerness—came Ivor Aston, both rakish and pathetic as usual. He gazed around him in a manner both triumphant and condescending: “You see, I told you it was good,” the manner seemed to say. “Not that any of you is capable of real appreciation.”

“Marvelous!” one of them would say after a period of awed inspection that varied from person to person, but was never less than a minute. “Wonderful!” came from another. “So vital, so powerful,” said a third—Colonel Chesney, to be precise. “It's like a punch in the guts,” said Charmayne daringly.

“After the sort of pictures you've been painting recently” was an addendum implied in what they all said, but it was never spoken. They were acolytes: they had not said it while the feebler pictures were being painted, so
they would not say it now that those were being so magnificently transcended.

“It seems like a new beginning,” said Arnold Mellors.
Snap
! went Stephen's camera, catching his expression as he looked toward Ranulph, a look of admiration, but with something supplicating about it, almost cringing.

“It is,” harrumphed Ranulph, his voice rich with relish. “Have to get a new man to handle things.”

Mellors behaved admirably, Declan thought. He was prepared for this. Physically, he did little more than swallow. A stiffening of the shoulders and back, however, told the watcher that the man had suffered a rebuff he had half expected.

“Then you expect . . .
more
?” he said, the voice very close to normal, the expression, snapped by Stephen, being that of a man who has just received a massive punch to the head. “You expect this new phase to last?”

“I do,” said Ranulph, his voice loud with triumph. “To last, to develop, to mature.” He turned his sunken face, like an old walnut, in Declan's direction and bared his teeth. “Thanks to this young man.”

How much every person in the room, perhaps not even excepting Stephen, would have liked that to be said about them! It was an occasion for accepting blows as best they could.

“You owe him a lot,” said Colonel Chesney.

“I do. And expect to owe him still more.”

Declan wished he had Arnold Mellors's control over himself. When he saw the stained teeth bared once again, felt the sharp, glinting eyes fixed on his, he shivered uncontrollably, and hid his reaction by going over to
Byatt's chair and rearranging his overlarge cardigan around his withered frame. When he had put his employer to rights he moved away from the chair and stood silent. He was not allowed to remain in the shadows. Melanie came over to him, and Martha came nearer, listening.

“He's fond of you,” Melanie said. Declan did not let his doubts show.

“I'm glad. It makes it easier—for him and for me.”

“And it's so good for Martha and me to have a rest. Of course we both realize it can't last forever. A young man like you will stick it for only so long. It can't be what you want, being in the middle of nowhere as we are, and being so tied down to Ranulph and his needs. But when we take up our duties again, we'll be mightily refreshed.”

“But of course not
yet
,” said Jenny Birdsell, overhearing—or, rather, listening in. “Declan has a role to play in this wonderful renaissance.”

Melanie's face tightened with displeasure, and as it did so Stephen's camera went
snap
again.

“Certainly Declan has a role to play in what your daughter unkindly calls Ranulph's
resurrection
,” Melanie said in a cold voice. “Aren't religious people thoughtless?”

“I'm sorry Arnold told you that, Melanie,” purred Jenny. “And you're certainly right about religious people. But I'm sure Declan is not thoughtless, and I'm sure he will want to do all he can to help Ranulph in this new, wonderful phase in his art.”

“All I
can
,” said Declan, trying to make his voice bland. But Melanie seemed to pick up at least part of his meaning.

“Do you mean your powers to help are limited?” she asked.

“I mean I can't force myself. . . . I mean, like I've said, there are things I wouldn't do.”

“Ranulph lives by his own rules and codes,” Melanie continued.

“That's fine, so long as he doesn't expect others to live by them too.”

“I think you took me up rather too hastily when we talked before,” Melanie swept on. Martha was watching and listening closely. “Of course we wouldn't want you to do anything seriously wrong. No question of that. But Ranulph has always been . . .” She paused, then let the rest of the sentence rush out, “excited by violence.”

Declan left a pause, then nodded.

“I could guess that, from some of his pictures.”

“Violence is everywhere these days, isn't it? Ranulph isn't alone—it's thrown into our living room all the time from the newspapers and the television screens, so lots of people must get their kicks from it.”

Declan suddenly realized that, though the room had not gone silent, everyone in it had their eyes surreptitiously on him, and everyone was aware of the conversation that was going on. He said nothing. Melanie, who had seemed to be leading up to something, seemed also to become aware of that, and backtracked.

“That's all I meant. I wanted you to understand Ranulph's nature.”

“I suppose I was bound to do that, in time.”

“You're not quite the peasant boy we've all taken you for, are you, Declan?” said Melanie with malice in her voice. But then she softened it. “And I hope you will be able to . . . go along with him, so far as you can.”