Love Song Page 34

  ‘Easy, really. And nothing to do with X-ray eyes, alas! You see …’ Crawford paused for a second. ‘You see, art discovery is only research, but occasionally when you think you have researched a provenance accurately, for some reason or another you find that you have actually got it wrong. At other times, as with this, you more or less know you’ve got it right.’

  He paused once more, and ordered them both a pudding and some sweet wine to accompany it before continuing.

  ‘I actually knew about this painting by chance, which is really the best way. I was told all about it by one of my aunts, of all people. You see, she was a great friend of the former owner of Mountfort – the house where you were today. This friend, Zelda Francks, had inherited the painting from her father, a banker. The father was a man of great character. Not only did he love art as much as he loved to live, love, eat and drink, he loved this country. But not our tax system. So, although he remained domiciled in England, he went to great trouble to hide some of his wealth. He hid it all over the place. Switzerland, Austria, America – wherever. But not his precious paintings. He simply could not part with those. Consequently when this country faced the threat of a Nazi invasion he had many of his greatest paintings over-painted.’

  Claire nodded. Of course. Hide a great painting behind a lesser fake.

  ‘Quite. A good idea, don’t you think? And of course, being a very rich man, he had them very well faked. No problem. Well. Happily we were not invaded as had been forecast, but unhappily he died very soon after the war, and Zelda, his heiress and only child, naturally set about selling the hidden treasures or restoring them to their former glory. And very skilfully too, I may say. Except, halfway through this process of restoration she remarried and went to live in Italy. As it happened, at that time – I’m not boring you, am I?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘As it happened, at that time my unmarried aunt, Penny, was Zelda Francks’s closest friend, as well as her personal assistant, so she knew all about this, and she always swore that there were still at least two paintings at Mountfort that had either not been restored, or were still labelled with their wrong attributions.’

  ‘So, there is another?’

  ‘Yes, I just don’t happen to know which that is! As a matter of fact I was only interested in this one – and if I am right, it will do fine.’

  ‘Who do you think it is?’

  Crawford leaned forward and lowered his voice and Claire leaned towards him, dying to hear Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet – what?

  ‘Cozens.’

  Claire straightened up and smiled politely, experiencing a feeling of searing disappointment. Unable to lie, she shook her head and confessed, ‘I’m dreadfully afraid that I don’t know him.’

  Crawford smiled warmly. ‘Not many people do. He was actually better than Constable, so Constable thought, but he died too young to leave enough behind him to ensure his popularity. But a true genius, someone that undoubtedly deserves to live for ever. But there. Genius does die young. And when you think, so many of us so ordinary people just go on and on and on. Which all goes to show something!’

  ‘What will you do, if you are wrong?’

  ‘Laugh!’

  At which they both did, and then he asked her just what instinct had made her take the train home rather than coming back in the hire car?

  ‘It was probably stupid, I know. But I just felt safer. And I had one of those funny feelings as if there was someone behind me pushing me to take the train, on my own. As if, should I take the car back with that man, he might rob me, and then dump me. It was just a feeling, but not one I could ignore, although I expect you thought I had gone bonkers, didn’t you?’

  ‘Not at all! I like people who listen to their inner voices. That’s what I’ve spent my life doing, if you can imagine? I think you did the right thing, coming home by train. Of course, we’ll never know if the driver was just bidding you up out of devilment – acting out the Jack the lad – or if he was working for someone else, or if he really fancied buying the painting, and had the money! But still, you did very well to assume the worst.’ It was his turn to stop. ‘It very often is,’ he finished, and he suddenly threw back his pudding wine in an uncharacteristic gesture of defiance, before signalling to a waiter to bring them two more.

  Claire stared. She did not want to say to her new employer What about the breathalyser? but – what about the breathalyser?

  He smiled, apparently reading her anxious thoughts immediately. ‘It’s all right, I’ve booked us both in here tonight!’

  This statement cast a cloud as big as the planet over Claire’s side of the table, but she smiled nevertheless while allowing her anxious thoughts to take a new and wholly different turn. He must have sensed sudden anxiety.

  ‘Don’t worry if you’ve come unprepared. The management will have laid on everything – toothbrushes, soap, whatever – and they keep dressing gowns and slippers and all that in every suite.’

  After that, her confusion being so evident and herself so suddenly anxious, she refused more wine, inwardly turning over and over in her mind, as she listened to Crawford talking about one of his earlier, justifiably famous finds, just what she was going to do – if?

  Over and over the potential embarrassment of the moment presented itself, over and over she mentally rehearsed the inevitable words I like you very much but …

  And as she did so, her heart sank, thinking that it would cost her every bit of her wonderful opportunity, until she remembered her newfound courage, the one that she had accidentally discovered at the Mountfort Sale, and she finished by thinking, almost triumphantly, I will do as I must always do, I will say what I think and feel, and that is an end to it. All my life I must follow my own desires, never let go of my integrity, never let anyone force me to compromise on what is right or wrong, make up my own mind.

  The evening having come to an obvious conclusion Claire followed Crawford to the reception desk, her mind so firmly made up, and her little speech so carefully prepared, that she really did not care if he had booked a honeymoon suite, but before Crawford could ask for their keys – or key – a voice spoke from behind them.

  To Claire it was a very familiar voice. It belonged to the man that Crawford had so kindly helped her to avoid earlier in the evening, someone Claire had hoped would have left the hotel by now, and be well on his way back to London.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She turned slowly, unsurprised, but nevertheless appalled, because the one thing she had hoped, prayed, for all evening was that, since she had been to such trouble to avoid him, her father would have the decency to ignore her.

  ‘What are you doing here, Clair-oil?’

  That had always been his insulting name for her when he was cross.

  Claire looked very directly at Crawford, and once she found his eyes her own begged him not to say anything. She would handle this.

  ‘Same as you …’ She was about to say ‘Dads’ when she hesitated. ‘Alexander.’

  She had not thought the use of his name would be such a bucket of cold water over him, but she saw at once that it was. It did not matter, because in her eyes he deserved to be hurt.

  Muffin Hateful was standing so near her she could hear her intake of breath at the intentional rudeness, and although she could see the momentary pain in her father’s eyes Claire really did not care. Alexander had left them all for this elegant woman in her Armani dark red suede and silk evening suit and her expensive patent leather slippers, and that was his business, his life. But he could not expect to do what he wanted and everything stay the same, he could not take his daughters with him into his new life, not with their mother still lying, all those miles away in that hospital, neither dead nor alive.

  ‘Are you staying here?’

  Another anxious glance towards Crawford, and suddenly he did seem to be Crawford and not Mr Haye, and she nodded. ‘Yes, I am staying here, with Crawford. Are you?’

  A glance at Mu
ffin and then, ‘No.’

  Of course! Claire remembered. How stupid of her to ask. Muffin had yet another house just nearby somewhere. She remembered it now, but she remembered it in such a way that it was as if she was waking from an anaesthetic, as if for the previous minute she had been put to sleep.

  ‘Well, goodnight.’

  Claire nodded.

  Crawford had taken charge of two room keys. Claire saw this immediately with a strange mixture of relief and disappointment, but not Alexander. He was too busy frowning down in disapproval at his daughter, still making a feeble attempt at trying to frighten her, but with her newfound courage Claire just stared right back up at him, hoping, hoping – hope against hope – that seeing her apparently about to stay the night in an hotel with a man as old as himself he might experience just some of the hurt that she had felt when they discovered just how much he had deceived them.

  No-one said anything more after that. What was there to say? Alexander turned away, pushing Muffin ahead of him, obviously itching to say something to Crawford, but not able to think of what it could be, or even perhaps what it should be, given the circumstances.

  Claire walked ahead of Crawford clutching her key, and without a backward glance made her way up the old staircase to bed, followed, some paces behind, by a puzzled Crawford, who realized that he had just witnessed something but was not at all sure what it was.

  And so it was that at the top of the stairs, when they had turned safely out of sight, he turned to Claire and asked, ‘Who on earth was that?’

  Claire was silent for a second. She paused.

  ‘Just someone I used to know.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Still there was nothing. Still the page was a blank. Yes, there were plenty of words there, words all over the place – and notes too. Clusters of notes, crotchets, quavers, minims and semi-breves – and the whole thing didn’t add up to as much as a teaspoon of beans.

  Jack sighed and shredded yet another manuscript. It just would not arrive, this feeling that he so much wanted to express, and, it seemed, the more he wanted to express it, the less it arrived. It had happened many times before. After his wife deserted him, leaving him with the kids to bring up. After his father died, when Jack had seemed quite unable to settle to anything, not for weeks, but for months. After his second American tour when he had been too exhausted to know his own name. At all sorts of times and in all sorts of places, his creativity had deserted him, and he had wanted to lie down and forget the urge to express himself musically for ever.

  But then he thought of Hope, lying there all alone, perhaps listening for him to arrive, for someone to arrive, but locked into that state of consciousness which tells the outside world I am not here while all the time being there, all the time knowing about everything and everyone and not being able to speak to them.

  Pause on the stairs, he said to himself. When you’re trying to say something important, musically, always pause on the stairs.

  He sat with his head resting on the top of his piano. He was exhausted. He did not think that he had ever felt so tired, or so useless. Nevertheless the sounds of the house came to him, softly creeping up his own state of semi-consciousness. The wind rattling the doors of the house, the water going through the millrace outside, the sound of the sheep that were grazing somewhere up the fields.

  He paused on his own particular imagined stairs and, his eyes still closed, he found himself falling asleep while at the same time imagining his emotions, colouring them until they took a shape that was more than real, it was surreal.

  After a while the sound came towards him, but this time it had a musical shape, and he no longer felt tired, he felt exhilarated, and he knew exactly what his song had to do. He knew precisely what he wanted of this song, at last he had the sound, he had found the sound.

  But while Jack had finally found his sound, Rose Merriott had lost hers.

  ‘I have passed into drama school, I have done what I wanted to do, I thought I would be over the moon, that I would be walking on air,’ she confessed to Charles, ‘and all I have is this feeling that in going to drama school, I am doing completely the wrong thing.’

  ‘It’s only to be expected. Particularly after you thought you did so badly, which obviously you didn’t. But auditions are very cold experiences, I’m told by friends who’ve been through that particular mill.’

  They were sitting drinking wine, and Rose kept ploughing her hands through her hair, and, unforgivably, chewing at one of her fingers. Every now and then Charles found himself hitting her lightly on the knuckle.

  ‘I thought that audition I gave was a perfect pill, but no, they thought it was great, so it seemed, and now I find that because they thought it was so good I am accepted – and I don’t want to go! I have lost respect for them. If they think that was good, then I don’t want to know. How pathetic can you get?’

  ‘What do you think has particularly changed you? There must be something.’

  Rose fell silent, and then she cleared her throat, and looked at the professor, her dear professor.

  ‘You!’

  Crawford hated anything dull, and for many reasons his life, after Claire left in the evenings, had become dull. The painting was being slowly restored, about two inches of the old paint had been removed, enough to see a fraction of what was underneath. That was all very satisfactory. What was not satisfactory was how lonely he now found himself in the hours he was bereft of the company of Claire, the long, long hours before she arrived back for work the following morning.

  He was miserably lonely when she was not at Cheshire Street running up and down the stairs, making his coffee all wrong so that, without her seeing, he had to nip downstairs and make it all over again. It was not that he was in love with her, it was nothing like that at all, he kept reassuring himself. Love was not a possibility. It was that in this, the late afternoon of his life, she was his Indian summer. She was also his fawn.

  He loved to watch her running about the place, which she always did, never doing anything at half speed. He loved to hear her laugh, to watch her from an upstairs window as she swung down the street to fetch his suit from the cleaners or on her way to the delicatessen for something for their lunch. He liked everything about her. He had always had Marjorie to look after him, but perversely now, of all times, he found that he wanted to be with this one person for the rest of his life. That he lived for the sound of her knocking at his door, that he spent most of the day trying to think of good reasons why she should stay behind for a drink – friends coming in, someone to hand round the eats, anything.

  Even his paintings had become just so much paint on canvas, and while he knew they were beautiful, since she had arrived in his life he did not feel they were beautiful any more. He had never anticipated this. He had not anticipated looking forward to seeing another human being with such a passionate intensity.

  Crawford Haye is not like this, he reminded himself, in the middle of the night, early in the morning, when he showered, when he ate breakfast, over a late night whisky, at a concert. He is simply not like this. Not at all. It was as if he was his own best friend and that this dear, close friend had turned out to be quite the reverse of what he had thought him to be, as if he had been betrayed by this person called Crawford Haye.

  Of course the restoration of the painting was fascinating, would be fascinating, and would add a great deal to an already glittering reputation in the art world, but since – well, since lately – this painting, this perhaps Cozen, had become just another work of art to hang eventually in some great gallery for a scattering of tourists to pass it at carefully timed intervals, and say, ‘Oh, yes, I read about that being discovered.’

  While the girl with the laughing eyes who stuck her spectacles on top of her head whenever she was in a hurry, the girl with hair that seemed always having to be scraped back from her forehead by her tortoiseshell hair band, the girl with the navy-blue clothes and the eternally white shirt – she was what
art only imitated. She was the real thing. She made him feel more alive than the discovery of a thousand Cozens would ever make him feel.

  But besides the company of Claire there was one other thing for which he found himself pining – his beloved Bryndor.

  Josh was back from India, but he had not come back alone.

  Jack did not want to say to him, amid the chaos of Letty and James, Actually, old son, I’ve just finished the song which I have been waiting for months to be able to write, and I really haven’t got time for you!

  Because there was something so affecting about children when they were grown-up but still needed you, he found himself setting about looking after both his son and his unwanted guest – a bug he had picked up in India – rather than going off to stay with his old friend Rusty Naylor in Wales where she now lived in darkest seclusion, willing someone, somewhere, to drag her on and make her sing their next hit.

  ‘You’d better keep away from the littles,’ Jack advised him, but saw by the look on Josh’s face that it would have been better not to have advised this, so he stopped and began again. ‘Look, Josh, I know it’s difficult for you – you know, with Letty and James here where you and the others once were, but – and this is a big but – you know you three will always come first with me, don’t you?’

  Josh nodded, pale-faced and disbelieving. He had lost a ton of weight in India, and was quite rightly feeling very sorry for himself.

  ‘It’s your life, Dad,’ he said miserably.

  Jack started to say, ‘Yes, it is, old son,’ and then stopped. Josh did not need that. Neither of them needed to say those things to each other, those half things which were really just little fencing statements made to mark time and defend your own point of view. What they all needed was to grow up and get on with things.

  ‘OK, so here’s how it is.’ He smiled. ‘You are going to be moved up to my old games room and into the guest suite in the wing. Those can be yours, from now on, and that will leave Nanny and the littles to get on with their routine, here, with me, in the main house, while you get better. That’ll be your space from now on. So. Independence. Your own thing, no-one around, just you.’