The Kings of Eternity (2 page)

She picked her way up the steps in her dusty plimsolls and smiled at him again.

He moved into the kitchen, retrieved two bottles of beer from his old fridge, and returned to the patio. Caroline was sitting on the very edge of the sofa, knees together, beautiful hands clasped on her lap.

On the table before the sofa she had placed the package she had been carrying: something rectangular and flat, in gift wrapping.

He sat beside her, maintaining a respectable distance, and poured the beer.

“I began work shortly after you left,” she said, “and was hard at it for the next few hours. I don’t know if you ever find that. Sometimes your work just carries you away and you lose all track of time.”

So she must be aware that he was a writer. He smiled and murmured some affirmative reply. He wondered if she was another journalist, and the whole artist thing was a clever charade to catch him off guard and win him over. The trouble with attempting to maintain one’s privacy was not only the danger of paranoia, he thought, but the pitfall of solipsism.

“How long have you been painting?” he asked, watching her left hand as she reached out and picked up the glass. The nail of her little finger was long and oval and breathtakingly perfect, like an opal.

“Oh, ever since I was this high,” she said, holding her right hand two feet off the ground. “My mother was an amateur artist and encouraged me. It was always something I did.”

“Because you needed to, or because you could do it?”

She regarded him; she had expressive lips, which she screwed now into a crushed rosebud of intense thought. “Good question. I honestly think because I needed to do it. I mean, there were weeks when I couldn’t paint or draw - when I was thirteen I fell off my bike and broke my left arm. The next few weeks were absolute torture! Painting... I don’t know, it’s elemental. It expresses something I think or feel that no other endeavour can quite achieve. Your writing must be the same?”

She took a sip of beer, looking away, and Langham felt something open in the pit of his stomach; he experienced an abyssal disappointment that her visit, her friendliness, was nothing but a pretence for an interview.

He smiled. “I find it hard to talk about my work,” he said.

He took heart from the fact that she nodded, seemingly not at all put out by his reply. “Oh, I nearly forgot. This is for you. In thanks. And please don’t refuse it - it’s just something I did in a spare hour the other day.”

She passed him the gift-wrapped package and he opened it on his lap. “This is exciting, like Christmas come early.”

He pulled out the painting, perhaps eighteen inches by ten, and held it to the light.

It was a simple still life, a bowl of oranges, but the fruit seemed to glow with radiance, as if throwing back to the viewer all the sunlight the real things had soaked up in the process of growing.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” he said, and his reaction was genuine. “It really is. It generates life, vitality. It’s hard to believe it’s just oils, and not the real thing.”

She laughed. “Well, it’s acrylic, but I won’t split hairs. I’m delighted you like it.”

He laughed. “Oils, acrylic... Some art critic I’d make!”

He propped it on the coffee table, against the railings, the better to admire it. Perhaps, he thought, she was not a journalist after all, but a genuine artist with a genuine, friendly interest in her creative neighbour.

“Have you had many exhibitions?” he asked, which he supposed was a diplomatic way of enquiring as to whether she made a living from her art.

“Dozens back home,” she said. “A small gallery in London sells my work. I got the big breakthrough about ten years ago. Before then it was always small shows and local galleries in the north. I scraped a living. But once London became interested...”

“You’re from... let me guess. The accent...”

“I have an accent?” she laughed.

“Beneath the Queen’s English I detect an undercurrent of Yorkshire, am I right? Maybe even Lancashire?” He smiled. “I suppose that covers most of the north of England.”

“Right first time. Yorkshire. I was born and lived in Harrogate for twenty years, then moved into a village not far from Leeds when I married.”

“What does your husband do?” He wondered, later, if he were fishing.

“Did. He was a landscape gardener. We divorced ten years ago.”

“Just when your career took off? You saw the bright lights of London and decided to ditch your poor gardener?”

She picked up on the playfulness in his voice, and laughed. “How dare you! Not at all! In fact, I realised I’d made a mistake. A big mistake. He was domineering and small-minded. A woman’s place, etc. It was a miracle I painted at all, what with looking after him and the boys.”

“How old are they?”

“Twenty and eighteen, and both at university. Anyway, I ditched my gardener, as you say, and suddenly the work improved. I began to get commissions, and then the London gallery took interest.”

“And it’s been plain sailing ever since?”

Her smile faltered. “Something like that.”

And there it was again, that undercurrent of sadness and melancholy he’d noticed that morning. It was almost a shadow in her eyes, a secret she was harbouring and could not divulge. He told himself that it was the novelist in him that was interested, and no more.

She brightened. “And talking about exhibitions, I have one on the island next week. You will come?”

He never went out on an evening while working on a novel; but now, inexplicably, he found himself nodding. “Yes, why not? I’d like that. But don’t expect any insightful critical comment.”

“I won’t. As long a you have a good time.”

A private showing, he thought. People, crowds of people, all murmuring platitudes that failed to say what they were really thinking. A kind of polite gentility that would stick in his craw. He would hate it.

“And what brought you to Greece?” he asked.

“Always loved the place. It’s a cliché, I know, but the quality of the light is quite miraculous. There’s something about the sunlight around mid-afternoon. It’s an ambition of mine to capture it before...”

“Before?”

She smiled. “Before my talents run out, or I become old and grey and blind.”

“You’ve a way to go yet,” he said.

“Why, thank you, Mr Langham.”

He raised his glass, uneasy with the course of the badinage. He was well out of practice in the art of talking to attractive women.

“What brought you to Kallithéa, Daniel?”

There it was again, the not so subtle shift away from herself as the topic of conversation, to him.

He shrugged. “Hate publicity, the modern world. The West, or rather the trappings of the West. I know this is the West, and becoming increasingly more so, but it’s easy to close yourself off from all the commerce and advertisement.” It was more than he’d meant to say, and came out in a spurt, but it was no more than he was on record as saying in the past. It was no scoop.

But she didn’t pursue the matter, which heartened him. He drained his glass and picked up the painting. “I think I know just the place for this,” he said, moving from the sofa.

He stepped into the villa and Caroline followed. She looked around the small lounge, examining the pictures on the walls: pen and ink sketches of Tangier, street scenes, Moorish buildings and local characters.

He crossed to where an old wood-burning stove stood in a recessed hearth. He placed the painting against the raw brickwork. “There? What do you think?”

“Down a little. Perfect. I think it’ll look lovely there.”

“Certainly brighten up the room.”

She was looking at a photograph on the mantelshelf. “Do you mind?” She indicated the picture.

He gestured, and she took the photograph from where it had stood for years. It was black and white, and dusty, and showed three men standing on the steps of a big, old country house. They were wrapped in overcoats and caps, giving the impression that the picture was taken in the middle of winter.

“The man on the right. Your father?”

He took the picture and stared at the three figures. It was a long time since he’d examined the photograph. The man on the right was of medium height, smiling, fair-haired and rather boyish looking.

“My grandfather, Jonathon Langham. Oddly enough, he was a writer, too.”

“That’s obviously who you inherited it from. You do look very much alike.” She glanced at the carriage clock on a nearby bookshelf and exclaimed. “Heavens! Nearly eleven! I didn’t realise it was that late.”

He saw her out to the patio. “Thank you for the painting. It’s wonderful.”

She smiled up at him. “Thank you for a lovely evening. You’ll have to stop by sometime, and I’ll return the favour. Oh, and I’ll drop an invite around for the private show next week.”

He lifted a hand in farewell and watched her pick her way down the steps of the patio and around the side of the villa.

He returned to the lounge and took the photograph from its place on the mantelshelf. He wondered if it had been last night’s dream which had made him so edgy today. Whatever, he should not have kept the photograph in so prominent a position. He was becoming complacent.

He moved to his study. He unlocked the top drawer of his big oak desk and slipped the picture inside. He saw the pile of yellowing, hand-written papers within the drawer, then hesitated before lifting them out.

He carried the manuscript out to the patio, switched on the light and sat down on the sofa. He stared up at the mass of stars above the sea for a long time, his thoughts far away.

Then he began reading.

Chapter Two

London, February, 1935

It never ceases to amaze me how I have managed to accommodate myself to the fantastic series of events which transpired during the freezing winter of 1935, just one year ago as I write this. More amazing still, perhaps, is that I have come to accept the personal, I might even say psychological, changes that the series of events brought about in me. We are adaptable creatures; we quickly learn to accept changing conditions, however unexpected those changes might be.

It was the February of ‘35, that drear month at the very heart of winter, with the festivities of Christmas and New Year a fading memory and the delights of spring a distant promise. An arctic chill held the country in its grip; London was spared the worst of the inclemency - but not the penetrating, bone-aching cold. It was weather appropriate to my frame of mind.

I was thirty-five - as old as the century - a struggling writer with three published, but unsuccessful, novels behind me. My father, with whom I had a close and cordial relationship, that month informed me that he was ill and would not recover. At the same time, as if this were not enough, I was involved in a love affair which, if the woman or the circumstances had been different, might have brought me some measure of relief, but which did nothing of the kind. It was one of those doomed liaisons between two mismatched souls who have been together longer than is healthy for either party. I was at that self-deluding stage of telling myself that I loved the woman, with the hope that, one day, I might actually, magically, experience that desired state. Carla, for her part, treated our affair with an informal and casual off-handedness which infuriated me, and often caused me severe emotional grief. I should have been stronger much earlier in our relationship, and put an end to it there and then - but the fear of loneliness, and the hope that some day Carla might return my affection, had stayed my hand. The fact was that Carla DeFries was my very first lover, and I was immature and uncertain in the treacherous matters of the heart.

The passing year has done nothing to dull my memory of that fateful month. There occurred, on the very first day of February, three significant incidents. My father issued a summons to visit him; I had a less than satisfactory outing with Carla; and at midnight I received the phone call from the editor Jasper Carnegie which was to change my life for ever.

On the proceeds of an advance from my publisher for my third novel, I had taken a year’s lease on a roomy flat in Battersea: it was a short walk from where Carla lived in more fashionable Belgravia, and overlooked the park where I was in the habit of taking an extended morning stroll.

My mornings always began with good intentions: I would rise at seven, breakfast, attend to any post that might have arrived, and then take a turn around the park. I told myself, and friends, that my morning constitutional was a necessary part of the creative process.

That morning, as I tramped through frosted grass towards the stand of ghostly oak which marked the mid-point of my walk, I could not concentrate on the novel I was plotting. Instead my head was full of Carla, as ever. At the weekend we had dined at a restaurant in Belgravia which might have been within the means of a successful actress - which Carla was - but put severe strains on my meagre author’s pocket. Fortunately, Carla always insisted on paying her share of the bill.

At one point she had slipped a theatre ticket from her purse and slid it across the table, face down, like a blackjack dealer.

She was appearing in a stage version of James Hilton’s novel
Lost Horizons
, due to open that week at the Curzon on Shaftesbury Avenue. The complementary ticket was for the opening night and she wanted me to attend.

We had argued. I told her that the last thing I wanted to do when I was mid-way through a tricky chapter was to sit through some tawdry adaptation of a bad novel. My selfishness was prompted, I might add, though this is no defence at all, by Carla’s behaviour on the last occasion we had met: she had ignored me throughout a dinner party given by mutual friends, and then decided - contrary to what we had agreed - to return to her flat rather than come back to mine.

That morning, as I strolled through the freezing fog, I decided to ring Carla and apologise, tell her that I’d love to go to the play.

Resolve hastening my pace, I hurried back to the flat and put a call through to Carla. To my disappointment, she was out.

I moved to my desk, stared at the page of notes I had scrawled the night before, and tried to inspire myself to write. Minutes later a knock sounded at the door.