The Death of William Posters (14 page)

The lane turned sharply, snow not too deep, so that a foot of it seemed like normal walking. ‘If you want your bus fare,' Frank said, ‘I'll lend it you. It can't be much to Leicester.'

‘What the hell would I do in Leicester? Shoot roof rabbits?'

Back from the next bend stood a large three-storeyed plain-fronted brick cottage. ‘There's the happy homestead,' Albert said. ‘Fifteen shillings a week is what I shell out for it, and that's all it's worth, believe me. There are four buckets under the attic roof for when it rains, so thank God it's snowing. We're dreading the thaw. In winter it's an igloo; in summer a cullender upside down.'

Within fences was a large garden: coal sheds and chicken coops next to the house: bike shelter, rabbit-hutches and wooden porch. It seemed a bargain to him. Two sacks served as doormats, iced waterbutts on either side. Some kids had scrawled in chalk: ‘Sticky bombs for sale.' They kicked snow off before getting out of the deadly wind that Albert had been too busy talking about to notice what part of him it was getting at.

The hallway was bare except for a framed portrait of the Queen on one wall, and one of Albert's larger pictures on the other. There were no mats or carpets on the wooden stairway, and it wasn't much warmer in than out. A sea-like clatter of spoons and pots sounded from somewhere.

‘The family's having something to eat. Let me show you this painting.' Frank stood too close, stepped a few paces back, until he bumped into the Queen's head on the wall facing. ‘Turn it round if it bothers you,' Albert said. ‘I just keep her there because it looks good if somebody comes to see my paintings. They never used to buy any before I put that up. Then they thought I was a fine chap who should be helped. One of my best brainwaves.'

Frank got a good view, and nothing else bothered him. It was an epic combination of browns, greens, mauves and purple-blues, a massive background landscape as if meaning to depict the whole breadth of Lincolnshire. Against this was the vague grain of a brown cross, almost merging into it, and on the cross was the shadow of a man, his head not, as usual, hung in the hello death position, but somehow upheld and looking inland, over a violent shift of darkly coloured and merging symbols in the foreground. His outspread arms were drawn back over the wood and tied there. Hanging beneath the crosstrees was a row of small dead animals that looked in no way out of place. ‘They're rabbits,' Albert explained. ‘I call this picture “Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher”.'

Frank was transfixed. The totality of it reached a long way into his heart, touched a dark and not disagreeable world familiar to his senses and memory. It wasn't so much the dramatic content, startling and effective though it was, as the colours and juxtapositions of shapes that weren't relevant to the main theme, showing with terrible perfection a clash of personality punished by crucifixion. They were the colours he felt hidden between his everworking heart and disjointed soul, a coagulate of visual mechanism located somewhere behind the eyes. He had studied Gray's
Anatomy
in Pat's library over many weeks, but his idea of the body and its components retained the primitive impressionism of childhood. The plates, as clear and marvellous as coloured diagrams of the four-stroke engine, stood no chance against the eternal fixtures of his earthed imagination.

‘Someone from Grantham offered me forty pounds for it last week, but I asked fifty – what with the time it took, and materials I had to find. I think he'll be back. Not that I'm worried. I could use the money, but I wouldn't like to see it go either. I like it myself, and that means it might be good.'

‘It's really got something,' Frank said. ‘I can understand it, you know, but I can't say much about it.'

‘Ah, well, that's saying a lot in itself. I take small ones to Skegness in the summer, sell 'em for a few pounds on the front, but it's hard. Every month or two I raffle one in the village, send my kids out with books of tickets at a shilling a throw. I clear twenty quid on a system like that. Then the odd few people come and buy one now and again. They must be scattered all over the county by now. I used to think it a funny thing, me being a painter, but I got over that long ago. I don't know what sort you'd call me, a sort of primitive surrealistic realist I suppose – which means keck-all, but sounds like something. I just go on painting though, because I can't do much else. I started during the war, saw some reproductions of modern stuff in a big book, bought an ordinary box of water-paints and some cartridge paper. An officer saw me one day and encouraged me, got me books, oils, canvas. Went out to Burma and got killed. He said I had talent, but also I'd got idleness, and that made it better.'

They went up to Albert's studio, opened the beer. ‘I didn't know there was somebody like you in the village.'

‘I keep low,' Albert said. ‘I'm busy and harassed most of the time, and can't be bothered with people.' The room was bitterly cold, the floor carpeted with newspapers which Frank felt like kneeling down to read, as if one might contain the message of his life. He'd never been in an artist's studio, looked at the vast square table scattered with utensils and bric-à-brac, all kinds of pictures leaning against it and the four walls. Some canvases were primed, others finished, but most were still raw wounds of thought split and laid open among odours of turps and damp dust. ‘I haven't been in for a couple of days, that's why it's so cold. I might get back to it tomorrow, but I'm like a bloody motor car – can't start in such weather. Maybe the wife's got a bit of dinner, so bring the bottles.'

They walked along the corridor and down by the shaking banister. Two children, pinch-faced and happy, lay on the bare floor playing Monopoly. ‘It's time you went to school,' Albert said. ‘Don't think you can stay away just because of a bit of snow. The vicar told me you played truant from Bible class last Sunday. If you don't keep it up we won't get another parcel at Christmas. See that you go.'

Via a bare parlour they entered a kitchen. A fire burned at the range, and down the middle of the room was a table flanked by wooden forms. Under the window was a huge pram, in which a baby played with blocks and rattles. A twelve-year-old girl with short straight hair and a face like her father's was reading a book at the table, and an eighteen-year-old sister was washing up at the sink. Frank fixed his eyes on her. She was fair-haired with a sulky, thin face that didn't altogether match her fine bust and mature hips well held by shirt and skirt. Her feet in carpet slippers, legs without stockings, she glanced at him with large blue eyes, a slight sneer on her lips.

Albert's wife sat at the table, a white-skinned, large-boned middle-aged blonde. ‘Hello, Ina,' he said, ‘this is Frank. He's the man staying at Nurse Shipley's.' The girl by the sink, and the mother, looked again. ‘I brought him up for something to eat.'

A wireless-eye glowed green from the top of a low-lying pot-cupboard, one of its connections faulty. It kept coming on, staying for half a minute, then cracking out softly again in the middle of some B B C parlour game that would have sounded like the apotheosis of boredom had anyone been listening to it. ‘There's something left,' she said, ‘if you'll wait while it warms. It's rabbit stew as usual.'

‘There wasn't any post,' Albert informed her. ‘I would have got through. He's a bit soft, the postman we've got now. In the last big freeze-up the postman made a sledge. Never missed a day – till he died of pneumonia. Still, they say it'll be in either late tonight, or in the morning. Mandy can go down at six.'

The girl by the sink said: ‘She can't. She does enough for this house as it is.'

‘We can't exist without letters,' her mother said, ‘you know that. We haven't paid the grocer yet for that wine. Nor have we settled the newsagent.'

‘I didn't drink the wine,' Mandy said. ‘You two did. I didn't read the papers either. You light the fire with them before I get up.'

‘You should get up before midday then,' her mother said mildly.

‘Tell me what for, and I will.'

‘They'll have to wait for their money,' Albert said. ‘They won't get blood out of a stone. Anyway, I'll write a few more letters after I've eaten. Mandy can hand them in when she goes down.'

‘I'm not going down,' Mandy said, coming to the table and looking at Frank as if seeing him for the first time. ‘I told you already.'

‘I'll knock you about one of these days,' Albert said.

‘Drop dead. Take an overdose.'

‘You rotten little sybarite,' he called. ‘Get out of my way.'

‘You're not saying much,' she said to Frank, ignoring her father.

‘I'm thinking though,' he answered.

‘I suppose he's one of your pub mates,' she sneered. ‘That wireless is driving me potty' – and went out of the room. Ina laid dishes: ‘Mrs Warlingham came today for that painting you promised, of her house and orchard she said. I told her you were still working on it.'

‘She'll be lucky if she sees that,' Albert said.

‘She paid you for it.'

‘Half. I'll do it when it thaws. Otherwise I might just as well give her a piece of white board.' He reached for the bread. ‘That's not a bad idea. As long as I frame it. It's been done before.'

Frank opened the beer. ‘Got any glasses?' Ina brought three – one for herself. ‘Are you any good at writing letters?' Albert asked.

‘Only love letters,' Frank said. ‘Why?'

‘Well, I'm a great writer of begging letters, a born begging-letter writer. To edge-up my income (such as it is) I turn out a few every week. You'd be surprised at the results. With an old typewriter, a copy of
Who's Who
, a few stamps and a bit of imagination, quite a bit trickles in. Where's that rough draft I knocked off this morning, Ina?' She passed him a sheet of paper from the shelf: ‘It needs polishing yet.'

‘Listen to this, though, it'll make your blood run cold. “Dear Sir, As you know from my last communication I have seven children on the point of starvation, and so far you have done nothing to help me alleviate their condition. At least, I myself had the goodness to write to you and describe their plight. I have had many vicissitudes in my life. Once a successful coal merchant, I went bankrupt when rationing stopped, had to leave the semi-demi mock-tudor pebble-dash detached I was buying on a mortgage and come to this rural slum. My car is rotting at the end of the lane, and I haven't had a smoke for a week. Apart from that, as aforesaid, my seven children are undergoing hardship in spite of the socialist benefits from this left-wing conservative government.” A remark like that usually puts on an extra five pounds. You've no idea what pig-rats they are.'

‘One day he'll come to see you,' Ina said.

‘No he won't. They never do. They hate poverty even more than they like money.'

‘But we aren't desperately poor.'

‘Not much. The longer I live the more I know I'm poor. If he told me to get a job I'd throw a fit.' He turned to Frank: ‘I'm a full-time painter and a part-time epileptic. But I'm so good at begging letters that I posted one to myself once by mistake. It broke my heart, spoilt my day, and I was putting a ten bob note in an envelope before I realized my mistake. My eldest son's going into the Church. I can't think of a better trade for a lad of mine. He's at university already, thanks to a scholarship he was bright enough to get. He's glad to be away from home because he doesn't like my begging letters. I can't think why: he never gets one. He calls them “charitable appeals”, the craven bloody hypocrite. Goes white as death when I talk about “begging letters” in front of his friends. They don't get them, either, though I've toyed with the idea more than once, and he knows it as well. What can you do when you're a painter? You can't go out to work. Work is a killer, occupational disease number one for a bloke like me. If I do a stroke it puts me on national assistance for a year.' He smoothed at his moustache, giving the same impression of sulkiness that had been on Mandy's face, indicating dangerous temper in such a grown man.

Frank stood: ‘I've got to empty some beer. Where is it?'

‘You'd better use the one upstairs,' Albert said. ‘You'd sink without trace in the one outside. The door next to my studio. Show him up, Ina.'

‘Don't bother, I can't get lost.'

He went through the hall – children still playing – and up the stairs. How could anyone live in a house so bleak? Snow beaded the windows, worried the chimneys with discordant yappings as the lifting wind hit them. It was a larger house than it looked, emphasizing the power of its protection as he reached the first floor.

He opened a door by Albert's studio, presumably the wrong one. When his eyes focused he saw a bald-headed thin-lipped man, illuminated by a table lamp in a room of drawn blinds, sitting at a transmitter-receiver with earphones on and fingers ac a morse-key. The man, wearing a good suit, was sweating, shivering as if in the first stages of malaria. He turned a panic-stricken look on Frank's intrusion, then swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand. ‘Get out!' he screamed. ‘Get out!' – an unforgettable picture.

Frank slammed the door, went in the next before giving himself time to parry the surprise of his first incursion. It was a whitewashed room, open to milky daylight of the outside snow. Nearly the whole space was taken by a low table, over which was spread a vast taped-together ordnance survey map. Two youths were leaning across from opposite sides, moving different coloured symbols across the co-ordinates. One, wearing a black leather jacket and a ban-the-bomb badge, looked up and said: ‘I'm Adam. This is my brother, Richard. Do you want a game? We're practising civil war on England's green and pleasant land.'