SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (30 page)

Are you sorry for that? That let you hang on to your professorship, did it?' He looked genuinely startled.

'I never wrote a letter to Flyte. He wrote one to me.'

'I saw the letter, Tom. Don't lie.'

'You can't have seen the letter, because
I
never wrote one.' She stopped and thought back. Actually, she hadn't seen any letter, had she? Hamish had only let her catch a glimpse of the letter
-
head, then he had ordered her out of his room, after giving her a version of what he said were its contents. Tom was rustling through one of his drawers. He pulled out a sheet of paper.

'This was the only communication that passed between us.' He handed her the sheet. It was from Hamish to Tom. She read:

Dear Dr Helsey,

I
am aware of the recent goings-on
in
this building
involving
yourself and a member of the staff here.

I
have heard through the grapevine
that you are up for a professor
ship. There has also been some gossip about your behaviour with a number of your female undergraduates.

I
f it were to come to the attention of the authorities that you deliberately set about getting a member of my staff drunk, then bringing her back to these premises to have
sex:
with her,
I
don't think your prospects would look
very
good.

I
would be obliged if you did not return to the Signum for some time.
I
also think it would be wise of you not to attempt to contact Sylvie Ashton again.

Should you
do
so,
I
might feel
obliged to take further action.

Yours sincerely,

HAMISH FLYTE

Director of Studies, The Signum Institute

Sylvie read it twice. 'I want a copy.'

'That's the only reason
I
didn't answer your calls.'

'I want a copy.'

'What are you going to do with it?'

'Never you mind, Tom.
I
want a copy. Photocopy it for me.'

He did as she said. He went to the end of the corridor, and photocopied the document.

'Do you want me to do some copying for you, Professor Helsey?' the secretary called from her office. Nothing out in the corridor ever escaped her notice.

'No thank you, jean. It's just the one sheet.'

Then he walked back to his room and handed it over. 'Looks like it's goodbye, then. I'm leaving the Signum.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Oh do stop saying you're sorry, for God's sake. Let's find something positive to say to one another; since we'll probably never be speaking again. '

'It was a beautiful evening,' he said, with evident sincerity, and held out his hand.

'Yes, I didn't think you were a bad fuck either, Tom.' With that she kissed him on the cheek, very
gentl
y
, and left.

Rising Waters

Bernard
Trasker MBE was back in the gallery, minus his wife. He was looking at the Nolan
Rimbaud
with intense interest. Finally, he emerged from his own reverie, stared at his watch and then shook it. It had stopped. He looked around him from wall to wall. Henry watched him from his seat behind the desk, and smiled. He spoke now, but only to himself.

Ah, I see you've finally noticed the clock,
Bernard
. Or rather its absence. There are no clocks in casinos; no calendars in hell. This isn't a casino, of course, and it certainly isn't hell
- it's Shropshire, and really rather pleasant, but time still bends here all the same. If you ever go to Ramsgate you can still see the clock down by the harbour giving the local hour, permanently at variance with Greenwich Mean Time. I'm told in all French stations before the Great War each clock would give
l'heure de la gare,
five minutes slower than the time in Paris, and in those days to cross the US, you had to keep adjusting your watch every time you crossed the line. Here too in the Riverside Gallery the clock hands turn to a tempo of their own devising. Which is to say that they don't turn. Henry wouldn't have clocks in the gallery, and had no watch of his own. This, he felt, disadvantaged him not at all.

Time though. You certainly couldn't escape it by exiling the faces of clocks. He had been making a few mental notes while looking at a new book on the
Vollard Suite:
Rembrandt in Picasso's portrayal had become a mountain of fleshly curlicues, the ludicrous meanderings of elderly troubles and senescence.

Thus did Picasso anticipate his own decline. Thus did he point out in visual terms that time only gains its contours by passing you through its valley of shadows. The more decrepit Rembrandt becomes in the etchings the more firm-limbed an
d perfectly-
contoured are the young women he gazes upon. Rembrandt is now a confusion of lines; old age a scrollwork of over-fussed confusion. Youth is clean, clear and fecund, but is that only in the eye of the artist? Is it a reality, this cleanliness, this clearness, or a creative achievement? Is it ever possible to make the distinction in any case? Henry had no idea.

'I'm going to buy it.'

'Quite sure, Bernard?'

'Quite sure.'

'I'll wrap it in brown paper before delivering it to your home.'

'I want to take it with me now. I've got the car outside.' Bernard made out his cheque,
for a substantial amount, but
Henry found it hard to believe it wouldn't be honoured. In any case he knew where the man lived. And they took it out together. Put it on the back seat.

'A glass of wine, Bernard?'

'I won't actually.'

So Henry was left alone in his gallery, with a gap on the wall he'd have to think about filling. The payment meant he didn't have to worry about a number of things he probably wouldn't have worried about very systematically anyway. But the knowledge that he wasn't worrying about them would have worried him. In one sense he was sad to see the Nolan go. It was such a dry, scorched, arid painting. Rimbaud having the sockets of his heart and mind burnt out. It had seemed to him like a talisman against floods and drowning. Something so dry even the Severn could never come near it. He could not understand why he had become so obsessed by the notion that the things he most loved would be taken away in the waters. He knew it wasn't logical, but
then how much of life ever was?

Henry opened one of his better bottles to celebrate. He stood at the edge of the gallery's garden and stared at the Severn.

'Why, do I know you are going to take something away from me? You or one of your sisters?'

*

He woke at three that morning, shouting, choking, fighting away the sheets that were sheets of water, coughing the sludge out of his lungs.

'It's all right, love. All your minotaurs are safe and so are you.' Mane's arms were around him, gently caressing.

'I'm going to move them all to the top floor tomorrow,' he said. 'Or I'll never get another decent night's sleep.'

The Shipwreck of the Singular

Summer turned to autumn and then winter. The chronicle of events, as ever, unfolded. The revelation of Lady Pneuma's eating habits, and some of her other habits too, sexual and financial, destroyed the Delta Foundation. She didn't go to prison, all the same, even though some like Patrick Gregory felt that she certainly should have done. The last he heard of her she was starting up a public relations company in Wisconsin under another name, and he had a queasy feeling it would be a great success. She had re-married, apparently. Her new husband was very old, and very rich.

Deva
appeared finally, with no cuts, at ten 0' clock in the evening on BBC 4. It was acclaimed. It was finally given two prizes, one for the script and one for the direction. John Tamworth and Owen Treadle were reconciled, if they'd ever in truth been unreconciled. And they had a new production on their hands,
Claparède
's Drawing Pin.
'Ground-breaking' it was being called. Owen now lived in a flat in the same block as John, having agreed with Sylvie what proceeds should come to him from her house, which had been sold for a substantial price. Henry Allardyce had moved all his Picassos up to the top room of the Riverside Gallery, where he sat every evening, staring at them and then down at the river. He was glad of the space he had placed between the minotaurs and the water. He had also met all of Marie' s children, and had almost brought himself to be civil to her elder son, whose self-important financial wizardry represented everything he most detested in life.

At least the bumptious young fellow wouldn't be needing to borrow money from them.

And as for Sylvie, she had sold up for more than she expected, settled matters with Owen, and moved to Whitstable, where she now had a four-storey Edwardian house looking out over the sea. It was within twenty minutes drive of the university. There the students seemed to like her, and she liked them, so far. If there was a Hamish about, she had not yet encountered him. Hamish had already left the Institute, but not before Sylvie had phoned him a number of times.

'I have an interesting document here, my friend. It's a letter from you to Dr Tom Helsey, who I gather is now Professor Helsey.' She then read him the text of the letter. There was a silence she greatly enjoyed. 'I gather you have been pensioned off with all sorts of enhancements, Hamish. I can't help thinking that if this piece of paper comes to light, your pension might get
de
-
enhanced
.' She'd kept the line alive long enough to hear his deep breathing, then she'd rung off. She'd performed variations on this routine for several weeks, until she'd grown bored. Let the bastard crawl off into a corner and die.

Ex-Detective-Inspector Patrick Gregory had watched
Deva
more times than he could recall, despite the pain it undoubtedly caused him. He could never see the rape scene without feeling momentarily nauseous, without foreseeing his daughter's death in a ramshackle hut on the west coast of Scotland.

'I only hope you realise how good you were, my love. That takes acting beyond acting. They've even given you a posthumous award, but that's not going to bring you back.'

*

As the autumn term finished, Sylvie decided that she needed a break, a serious break. There was money in the bank, the divorce proceedings were almost complete, and for the first time she could remember she felt easy about her work and her life. She thought of Owen and Chester and the Signum Institute, and it all seemed like another life, an alien life she'd been redeemed from. A labyrinth she'd finally escaped.