The Ghost Writer (22 page)

"I shall, my dear, for your sake. But I wish you would leave that room alone."

W
ALKING BACK WITH
H
ARRY FROM THE STATION ON
Saturday morning, Cordelia was quite overcome with shyness; he too seemed ill at ease, and she performed the introductions wishing she had never said a word about him. Though she could tell he was making a good impression upon her aunt and uncle (she had intimated to Harry that the subject of the pictures had best be left until later on), her discomfort grew worse in their presence, so much so that she was compelled, several times during lunch, to hide in the kitchen on the pretext of arranging dishes she had actually prepared beforehand.

Yet as soon as they entered the studio, their intimacy was restored as completely as if no time had passed since they left it four days ago. Harry seemed to understand, without her having to explain any further, exactly why she wanted to restore it, and to agree entirely with her intuition as to what ought to go where. And he did not try to prevent her from lifting things, but worked alongside her on equal terms. Getting covered in dust and grime while hauling furniture about also helped to disguise her renewed attraction to him; it was natural that her colour should be high, and that they should touch frequently; and as the afternoon went on, she felt increasingly certain that all of her feeling was returned. At one point she caught herself thinking that if they were to marry and live in London, the pictures would go with her. A few moments later, Harry had remarked, seemingly out of the blue, "of course if you were ever to move to London, the pictures would come with you; you could have a room like this, you know, your own private gallery, and invite people to see them. There's nothing in the trust to prevent it." He spoke with such warmth that she felt sure his thought was running beside hers.

By the end of the day, they had sorted through everything that had been stacked in the centre of the floor. The bed now stood beneath the windows; Cordelia had been amazed to discover that the bedding, despite thirty years in storage, had escaped the attentions of moths, silverfish, and damp, and was only a little musty. She had placed the table and two upright chairs between the bed and the door, and a small sofa against the wall to the right of the doorway. An empty easel stood in the middle of the room, with Henry St Clair's palette-tray attached to it. The tubes of colour had, of course, long since dried up, but she set them out anyway, along with his brushes and palette knives and other implements. Some of the unfinished or scraped-out pictures, along with pieces of board and canvas and framing were still stacked along the other two walls, so that it would look as much as possible like a real working studio.

They had made a preliminary selection of about twenty finished paintings for display, so that the pictures would no longer be jammed together. Cordelia had wanted to consign all of the exorcisms to the room next door, but Harry persuaded her that even the darkest aspects of his vision ought to be represented, and so several of the night scenes remained, along with "The Drowned Man", resting on its lectern in the corner opposite the door.

With everything swept and polished, and light filling the room, she felt that the malignant spirit of Ruthven de Vere had at last been banished for good. They had looked through every box and bundle and found nothing sinister; other than bedding and linen, the various boxes and bundles yielded only more painting materials, including a set of carpenters tools, presumably for fashioning frames. Aside from "The Drowned Man", the only object that Cordelia had felt slightly uneasy about retaining was a box—or rather a cube, since there seemed to be no way of opening it—made up of panels of dark polished wood, about fifteen inches square. It was not very heavy, and clearly hollow. The panels gave slightly when you pressed them, and if you rocked it to and fro, you could hear—at least Cordelia was half-persuaded she could hear—a very soft rustling noise. But it was so elegantly made that she decided to keep it in the corner nearest the sofa.

After she had bathed, and put on a dress of apricot silk which especially suited her colouring, she went downstairs to fetch her uncle and show him what they had done. Harry, now clad in a surprisingly elegant suit, had come down before her and was chatting to Uncle Theodore as if they were old acquaintances.

It was close on sunset, and in the fading light the transformation seemed even more remarkable; it really did feel as if they were stepping back thirty years. The illusion grew stronger still as Cordelia lit the candles she had already arranged. There was no electric light in the room; St Clair's belongings had been stored here long before the house was electrified, and Theodore had preferred not to disturb them. It occurred to her, as her uncle stood contemplating the results of their labours, to ask him if he recalled seeing electric lights in the restaurant in Soho on that dark winter afternoon.

"No, my dear, I don't think I did. In fact I'm sure there were none; I remember a gas-lamp on the wall. Electric light was still a luxury, you know; they would have been far too poor. And you're sure," he added, to Harry, "that the trustees would approve of this?"

"Entirely sure, sir. After all its our—that is to say, your—duty to ensure that everything is well cared for, and this could only be seen as an improvement."

Uncle Theodore asked several more questions along these lines, and seemed reassured by the replies, which encouraged Cordelia to make the request that had been shaping itself in her mind.

"Uncle ... would you mind terribly if we were to bring Imogen's portrait in here and put it on the easel? We could have another key made—I don't think Beatrice would care, she never looks at it—so you could come in and see it—I mean, any of the pictures" (remembering she had told Harry nothing of her uncle's love for Imogen de Vere) "whenever you like."

"You don't have to ask my permission, my dear; it's for you to decide. But why do you want to?"

"I shan't unless you approve, uncle. I'd like to because ... because then the room would look just as it did before."

"Before?" he prompted.

"Well, before everything went wrong," she floundered, realising this was delicate ground.

"I see ... You can't undo the past, you know."

"I know that, uncle. I just feel it would be the right thing to do."

"Well my dear, I shall trust your feeling, and accept your offer of a key."

She could tell that he was uneasy, but felt sure of persuading him once the portrait was back in its rightful place. One of Henry St Clair's luminous daylight visions could take its place on the landing.

At dinner that night, Harry insisted upon acting as her assistant, and between them they made a game of waiting upon her uncle and aunt. In Cordelia's private bestiary, her aunt had always been, in the nicest possible sense, bovine: large, placid, gentle, utterly without malice or guile. She could not walk very far, these days, because her legs tended to swell, and her heart was not strong. But tonight she wore her best dove-grey silk, and beamed upon Harry as if he and Cordelia were already engaged. Uncle Theodore brought out a couple of bottles of his best wine, and as the evening unfolded it seemed to Cordelia that everything in the room took on a deeper and richer glow. Harry and her uncle did most of the talking; she was perfectly content to sit and gaze at her beloved, bathed in a radiance so entrancing she felt she had never seen candlelight before.

G
IVEN THAT
H
ENRY
S
T
C
LAIR'S ENTIRE PROPERTY HAD
been seized without warning, they had expected to find papers, letters, perhaps even a diary. Harry—to his uncle's displeasure, as he cheerfully acknowledged—had spent much of the interval inquiring after the painter, without result: no one in any of the established galleries or salerooms had ever heard of a St Clair, let alone seen the man himself. Nor, thus far, was there indication that he might have continued working under another name. They began their search of his belongings with high hopes; but late on Sunday afternoon they were compelled to admit defeat. There were no books, no keepsakes, no photographs, no papers of any kind. The sole clue to his identity was his signature on the paintings.

"I don't understand," said Cordelia, when they had put away the last box and returned to the studio. "If they let him keep everything personal, why not his painting things?"

"I think," Harry replied, "that de Vere" (Cordelia had told him that she disowned her grandfather) "must have destroyed everything of that sort."

He was standing at the lectern, examining the face of the drowned man, as he had done several times that morning it seemed to hold a particular fascination for him. By leaving off the clasps that secured the last panel, he could display the final opening without having to lay out the rest of the work.

"But then why would he leave everything else?"

"Well ... madness aside, it does look as if he removed anything that might have given us a clue to St Clair's whereabouts. Which suggests to me that he wanted to make sure nobody
did
find St Clair. So perhaps there
was
something illegal in the way he got hold of the pictures...

"And suppose ... suppose you hadn't been interested, just left them locked up; then in due course the whole lot would have been burned by the trustees without anyone ever having seen them. De Vere really would have managed to erase all trace of St Clair's existence. 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'..."

He paused, still gazing at the drowned man's face.

"But even now, if we could only find him—and somehow I feel sure he's still alive—we could change that, and perhaps save his pictures as well For ever, that is."

"I see what you mean," said Cordelia. "But supposing we did find him, and it turned out that everything really did belong to him, the income would stop and my uncle would have to sell this house. I'm not saying we shouldn't try—we must do what's right—but it will make him terribly anxious. He loves Ashbourn—so do I—and I should hate to be the cause of his losing it."

It crossed her mind that her uncle and aunt would not always be here—and what would happen to Ashbourn after that?—but this was a train of thought she did not want to pursue.

"On my reading of the deed that wouldn't necessarily follow, not at all. Besides, St Clair would surely be happy to see his pictures here; he wouldn't want to do anything to harm you, of all people. And to recover possession of the pictures, he would have to bring an action against the trust, which could be very costly. No, my idea is that we would look after them for the life of the trust, but if we could establish St Clair's claim, then we ought to be able to persuade the trustees that the pictures couldn't be burned; if they went to the nation, nobody could be accused of profiting from the change."

It seemed to Cordelia that this chain of reasoning depended on a great many "ifs", but she was too delighted by "we would look after them" to care. Warm scents of blossom drifted in through the open window, where she was perched, in her usual fashion, on the sill with her feet upon the counterpane of the bed. The portrait of Imogen de Vere, serene and luminous as ever, rested upon the easel as if the artist had just laid down his brushes. Yes, she thought, we really have banished the last of the evil; the intended curse has turned out to be a blessing. Without the pictures I would never have met Harry; now this room will be our special place until we have a house of our own. Harry had accepted Uncle Theodore's invitation to join them again the following weekend, so eagerly that she really could not doubt it ... and perhaps, one day soon, they would find Henry St Clair and bring him here, and show him that his work had not, after all, been lost. If only Imogen were still alive, everything would be perfect. It was a pity, too, that Henry St Clair had not painted a self-portrait; but she could picture him so vividly, it scarcely mattered. He would have looked very like Harry ... who was once again absorbed in contemplating "The Drowned Man", moving his head in the way that caused the face to metamorphose from youth to age and back again.

"What is it that fascinates you so?" Cordelia asked.

For a second or two, when he looked up, he seemed not to know who she was.

"I don't know ... it draws me, that's all. The way it changes... it's like being reminded of something, and not being able to remember what it reminds you of..."

He folded away the panel and closed the cover, and seemed to come fully awake again.

"Shall we go for that walk now?" he asked. "There's still plenty of time before the evening train."

"Oh, yes," she said eagerly, and the uneasy moment was forgotten.

B
EATRICE CAME HOME THE NEXT DAY
. T
HOUGH
C
ORDELIA
strongly suspected Uncle Theodore of taking her aside and enjoining her to be on her best behaviour, Beatrice betrayed no awareness that anything out of the ordinary was afoot; she did not even ask what had become of Grandmama's portrait. Walking back from the station with Harry the following Saturday morning (now with her arm in his; the lane was obligingly slippery after several days of rain), Cordelia warned him that her sister was inclined to be cool and distant, so that he must not be hurt if she seemed aloof, or even hostile. But on this occasion, Beatrice behaved quite out of character; her normal self-possession vanished when she was introduced to Harry, and she became quite bashful and tongue-tied. At lunch, Cordelia noticed that her sister was very pale; she ate almost nothing, and spoke even less than usual, but followed the conversation intently, her eyes darting constantly between Harry and Cordelia. And then, as she helped clear the table, Beatrice surprised her sister still more by asking, quite humbly, whether she might be allowed to come up to the studio with them to see the pictures.

Not wanting to appear ungenerous in front of Harry, Cordelia agreed, hoping she would have seen all she wanted in fifteen minutes. But Beatrice stayed nearly two hours. She asked so many questions, and listened so attentively to the answers, that before she left she had elicited much of what Uncle Theodore had revealed two months before. Yet she did not seem to be making a set at Harry. Her behaviour throughout was that of a young girl grateful for the attention of an admired older sister and her accepted suitor. She praised Cordelia's arrangement of the studio, and admired the pictures one by one, displaying every appearance of genuine curiosity, until, despite her suspicions, Cordelia began to wonder if perhaps she did not know her sister nearly as well as she had imagined.