Honeybath's Haven Page 3

  On the whole it had seemed satisfactory enough, and Honeybath wasn’t altogether clear why he had suddenly decided to take another look at the place. It wasn’t merely because of his tumble, and reflection suggested to him that the Lightfoots had something to do with it. Here were two very old friends, or at least a very old friend and his wife, approaching with a painful obviousness the end of a road. Perhaps they could be regarded as a special case – being both, as they were, more than a little dotty. But in old age who wasn’t liable to turn that way? Perhaps Honeybath himself was, without noticing it, teetering on the verge. Didn’t he ceaselessly talk aloud as he drove through the countryside in the solitude of his car? Didn’t he sometimes make grotesque faces at himself in his shaving-mirror for no reason at all? Didn’t he hunch himself up in bed in an infantile and indeed foetal position when it would really be more comfortable, as well as dignified, to lie stretched out like a statue on a tomb? Nothing of all this seemed directly connected with Edwin and Melissa; yet there was no doubt that the spectacle of life getting out of hand with them was distressing and shaking him very much. And this was so even although he had seen neither of them again. His misadventure on the kerb had prevented his making any speedy return to the flat in Royal Crescent, and in addition to this he felt there might be something intrusive in seeming to elevate into a crisis that business of Melissa’s declaring she was clearing out. Perhaps it was a threat she made every week, and what he had blown in on was no more than a recurrent tiff such as married couples commonly indulge in harmlessly enough.

  The domestic relations of the Lightfoots nagged at him, all the same. He even felt that if – what he didn’t at all intend – he made his retreat into Hanwell Court at once, he might come to feel that he had withdrawn from a fray in which his friends were still honourably engaged: by the ‘fray’ being meant simply carrying on with one’s habitual manner of life even when it turned sticky in one way or another.

  When he did return to Royal Crescent it was in a mid-afternoon, and again unheralded. He went in a cab, since he had provided himself with a rather large bouquet – the sort of thing small girls or boys hand to the Queen – and he had felt this might mildly embarrass him on a bus. He had remembered Melissa’s neglected flowers, and vaguely felt that a good dollop of fresh-cut ones might cheer her up.

  There proved, however, to be no Melissa to hearten – and no Edwin either. There was nothing but a furniture van, and a number of burly men huddling the Lightfoots’ possessions into it. Alarmed and seeking information, Honeybath squeezed past these sweating persons and penetrated to the flat. The directing intelligence of the operation proved to be a man even more burly than the others, and enjoying as a consequence the character of a foreman. He regarded Honeybath with suspicion (quite massively and elaborately, since he had nothing else to do), and professed entire ignorance of anything except the immediate job in hand. It was his business to see the flat cleared of everything that could be removed or wrenched from its place, and then dumped in something he called the depository. One or two of the other men looked at Honeybath rather hopefully. There being no proprietors of the flat in evidence, he represented their only chance of any additional remuneration for their day’s labour. Nothing of the kind came into Honeybath’s head, and he was about to withdraw from this melancholy and disconcerting scene when a fresh arrival a little changed the situation. This was none other than a certain Mrs Plover, whom Honeybath dimly remembered from long ago as a lady occasionally obliging the Lightfoots in a cleaning and polishing way. As things now were, she appeared to enjoy the status of an old retainer, and it looked as if she had accepted the task of a final tidy up when the removal men had done their worst. Honeybath, although he was extremely perturbed by the whole affair (and hurt in his mind as well), at once greeted her with firm cordiality.

  ‘My dear Mrs Plover,’ he said, ‘this is very strange. I had no idea of it. I’ve been a little out of touch with the Lightfoots of late. Where have they moved to?’

  ‘I don’t know as to ’er’. Mrs Plover spoke darkly. ‘But Mr Ell, ’e gone orf to Italy.’

  ‘Dear me! Well, it’s a nice time of year for it.’ Honeybath felt that a certain cover-up of his dismay was prudent.

  ‘I never did ’old with Italians, Mr Haich. There was one next door to us when I was a kid. A mangy little monkey ’e went in for, wot sat on his ’urdy-gurdy. A narsty flea-bag, it was.’ Mrs Plover’s speech might have been described as vigorously demotic.

  ‘Ah, yes – I remember that sort of thing. The monkey would be taught to hold a cap and collect pennies. But there have been some quite notable Italians in times past, Mrs Plover. Masaccio and Michelangelo, for example. And Piero della Francesca.’ This pointless informativeness showed that Honeybath was in great confusion. ‘Has Mr Lightfoot left a forwarding address?’

  ‘Ten quid down to clear up the mess, and never a bloody ’int of his whereabouts.’ Mrs Plover produced a soiled apron from a string bag. ‘Not that Mr Ell mayn’t be keeping on the studio, it seems. A dirty mucky place that I’m glad I never put ’and to. But a separate dwelling in the eye of the law.’

  ‘No doubt. Well, I mustn’t detain you from your work, Mrs Plover.’ Honeybath’s only thought at the moment was to get away from the distressing chaos around him, and think things out. ‘But if you should hear from Mrs Lightfoot meanwhile…’

  ‘I won’t hear nuffink from ’er’. Mrs Plover was emphatic. ‘But one thing I do know – and not to ’er credit. I was unsurprised. She said it would remind ’er of the charms of Mr Ell’s conwersation.’

  ‘Whatever was that, Mrs Plover?’

  ‘What she gone and bought, of course. A bloody great parrot.’

  Honeybath turned away and prepared to leave the flat. He disapproved of Melissa’s parrot, Melissa’s joke about it, and Mrs Plover’s language. Halfway to the door he discovered that he was still carrying a large bunch of red and white carnations dolled up with fluffy fern and swathed in tissue paper and silver foil. He could hardly drop this ridiculous burden on the floor, and to hand it to one of the burly men might be an action carrying the most sinister implications. So he came back and handed it to Mrs Plover instead.

  ‘I wonder if you would care to have these?’ he asked. ‘I should like you to have them. It’s possible we mayn’t meet again.’

  ‘I’ll be ’appy, Mr Haich,’ Mrs Plover said. And she looked, oddly enough, quite as gratified as surprised.

  On this note of amenity Honeybath got out of the flat – which it appeared likely that he was saying goodbye to too. On the landing he paused, conscious of a sudden strong curiosity about the state of the big studio on the top floor. It was, of course, very familiar to him, and now there came into his mind one immediately relevant fact. As a precaution against inconvenience arising from his own absent-mindedness, Edwin never brought away the key when he locked the place up behind him. He simply shoved it under the terminal few inches of the stair-carpet. So far as Honeybath knew, there had never been any ill-consequence of this guileless notion of security (of which the authentic Flannel Foot would certainly have thought poorly). But it did make it quite probable that Honeybath could pay a quiet visit to the studio before leaving the building. As he saw it, there would be nothing improper in this. He and Edwin had been on terms that amply licensed anything of the sort, and there was no reason to maintain that they were not on the same terms still.

  He mounted the final flight of stairs doubtfully, all the same. The burly men were clustered round Melissa’s grand piano on a lower landing, and their language cast the mild impropriety of Mrs Plover’s in the shade. It would be awkward, however, if one of them looked up and shouted at him. Fortunately this didn’t happen, and the key was in its familiar hiding-place. Honeybath unlocked the door of the studio and went in.

  It was a single very large room under the roof – into which there had been inset a large skylight. Off it there opened two small and low-hutched dens which appeared long ago to have
served as rudimentary kitchen and yet more rudimentary bathroom. (Perhaps the late burglarious Mr Vickers, if he had indeed lived here, had let it out to some confrère less eminent in the profession.) These ancillary accommodations no doubt made it possible to envisage living in the place as well as painting in it. And this seemed indeed to be in theabsent Edwin Lightfoot’s mind. The sole marked change in the studio since Honeybath had seen it last was the introduction of a brand-new single bed. It hadn’t occurred to Lightfoot, planning some alteration in his manner of life, to introduce an unobtrusive object of similar utility called a ‘studio couch’ or something of the sort. Or, if it had, he had nevertheless decided upon this more bleakly assertive measure. Married life – the narrow bed declared – had packed up on him. And in this Bohemian fashion he was going to set up his abode when he returned from Italy.

  Honeybath approved of Italy; it was a distressed painter’s obvious resource. He didn’t approve of the proposal to pig in the studio. It would be all right for a young man. And there were, perhaps, older men for whom it would be all right too. But it just wasn’t Edwin. Honeybath was wholly clear about this. It was part of the atrophy (as it must brutally be called) of his friend’s genius that he had turned rather self-indulgent in the most commonplace ways. And Melissa, who had more than a streak of domestic competence when she was feeling like it, had always done him fairly well – or had done so until the recent phase of strained relations. Edwin’s ability to do for himself would have been minimal at the best of times, since he simply wasn’t a practical man. In the plan he appeared to have formed there was no future whatever.

  But the studio, when Honeybath walked round it, bore at least the superficial appearance of being in full working order. And the smell, too, was right; it was like that of a good sauce of the more complex sort, the diverse ingredients of which are still at play upon one another and have not yet faded into an inert continuum. There waseven token of a work in progress, since a fairly large canvas was disposed on the easel, covered with a light cloth. Honeybath respected its reclusion, since he was a punctilious man, but otherwise poked freely about. A good many completed paintings were in evidence, unframed, and stacked up one against another, face to the wall. It was a state of affairs reminding him of the earliest phase of his own career; these works were in a kind of queue, he supposed, awaiting exposure in discreet numbers in some dealer’s gallery – probably Ambrose Prout’s. Honeybath examined a few at random, and didn’t greatly care for what he found. They were landscapes of undoubted technical mastery, but repetitive and almost formulaic, as if the artist had long ago compounded for a limited number of schemata which were more and more peeping through the varied compositions based upon them. It was sad, but true, that there was very little fire to Edwin Lightfoot nowadays. What that failed painter and prolific writer William Hazlitt had been fond of calling gusto had evaporated from his work.

  Everything, Honeybath noticed, was conscientiously dated as well as signed. This even applied to a number of minor efforts, all recent, of quite a different sort: rapidly executed portrait-sketches in pencil on wet paper, some of women but for the most part of men. About these there was sometimes something tentative and alert, as if Edwin had been waking up to the necessity of breaking new ground. It was, in a sense, Honeybath’s own ground. When an Oxford or Cambridge college, or a City livery company wrote to Honeybath stating that they had it in mind to ‘procure a likeness’ of this worthy or that there was something very satisfactory in the slightly archaic expression. Honeybath liked trying to produce a likeness, and he was rather touched to find Edwin engaged in tentative essays at the same thing. He was even glad to acknowledge that these deft scribbles and smudges held something of the true Lightfoot – the true Lightfoot being (according to Honeybath’s own loyal definition) one who had a little something that Honeybath hadn’t got. Here and there, for example, there were evident bold accentuations partaking of the nature of caricatura, so that the ‘likeness’ was at once of the man anybody could see and of the same man’s ideal form as it might exist laid up in heaven. But many of these sketches, even when plainly felicitous, had been crumpled up or torn in two. This was the only evidence of a disturbed, as distinct from an exhausted, Edwin Lightfoot visible in the studio.

  In the end Honeybath left the abandoned room, and made his way downstairs past the empty flat, himself a little more disturbed than when he had arrived. It was up to him, he again felt, to mount some sort of rescue operation on Edwin’s behalf. He recalled with grave distaste the nonsense of his friend’s recent ‘charade’. Hadn’t there been something perverse or wanton in it rather than truly mad? And didn’t these sketches suggest an Edwin who was struggling to regain contact with folk in all their stimulating diversity, and who realized that he had been living in an injudicious near-solitude, with little company except Melissa and the ghost of a burglar?

  These thoughts were still in Honeybath’s head on the following morning, when he boarded a train at Paddington with the object of taking that second look at Hanwell Court which was to clarify, he hoped, the vexed problem of his own later course of life.

  4

  He had become – Honeybath told himself – something of a creature of habit: a state of affairs which the approach of old age doubtless regularly promotes. Why else had he bought himself a first-class ticket? Since few people now travelled by British Rail except at other people’s expense, one very commonly found the Firsts more crowded than the Seconds. One was apt, in fact, to find oneself seated between two business men (or ‘businessm’n’, as the BBC now liked to call them) and with three persons in a similar walk of life facing one. When neither asleep nor shamelessly perusing girlie magazines, they were usually annotating sheafs of repellent-looking typescript, or doing endless sums on miniature calculating machines, or drooling unceasingly into pocket tape-recorders. On this occasion, however, it looked as if he was to have a compartment to himself – a portent, perhaps, of the near-paralysis which he understood to be invading the industrial and commercial life of the country. He settled himself comfortably in a corner; placed on the seat beside him his hat, his gloves, and the handsomely illustrated brochure uttered by the proprietors of Hanwell Court to their prospective clients (or inmates). He then opened a copy of the Burlington Magazine.

  Just before the train drew out of the station, however, the door giving on the corridor was drawn back, and an elderly man cast an appraising glance over the available accommodation. Satisfied with the Lebensraum on offer, he made an entry somewhat impeded by the necessity of manipulating through the door a substantial and seemingly over-weighted suitcase. Honeybath put down his magazine and made courteous gestures indicative of his willingness to assist. Between them they dumped the suitcase on a seat, since it was much too heavy to hoist to the luggage-rack overhead. Its proprietor expressed his thanks with a well-bred absence of effusion. Honeybath withdrew into his magazine. The train’s first stop was to be at Didcot. So he could enjoy a long comfortable read of matter well calculated to elevate his mind above the personal concerns motivating his journey.

  He didn’t look up until the train was hurtling through Ealing Broadway. What he then saw startled him considerably. His fellow-traveller had opened the suitcase, which could be glimpsed as containing a variety of gleaming metallic objects not immediately to be identified. But from among these had evidently come something that the elderly man was now gripping firmly in his mouth. It was a slender dagger of the most sinister appearance. And the muscular effort required for this unnerving performance had the effect of contorting his features into a ferocious rictus the impact of which was momentarily enhanced by a glance that could be described only as wild and glaring.

  Honeybath wasn’t the less alarmed through his having seen something of the sort before. There are Japanese actor prints in which ferocious persons thus exhibit themselves as literally armed to the teeth. But this didn’t at all explain the appearance of a similar phenomenon in an English railway-carriage.<
br />
  ‘I do beg your pardon.’ The elderly man, who had necessarily unmouthed the dagger to achieve this articulateness, smiled disarmingly. ‘And I wonder whether you are interested, sir, in this kind of thing? Yesterday, I am delighted to say, I made a most successful raid on Sotheby’s.’

  ‘A raid?’ It was with a natural alarm that Honeybath repeated the word.

  ‘One of my regular forays, my dear sir. Once or twice I may have bid a shade injudiciously. But I was well satisfied in the end.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it. Did your purchases include that – um – poniard?’

  ‘Panzerbrecher – if you will forgive the correction. But indeed yes. I have been looking out for one for a long time. Its use, as you know, was to penetrate the joints of the armour of an unhorsed opponent. It thus belongs co the general category of the misérecorde, the name by which is denominated any weapon designed to administer the coup de grâce – or, alternatively, to thrust sufficiently far and painfully into an adversary’s person to educe a plea for mercy. But my chief prize yesterday was a more complex weapon of the same sort, at one time much in use by the emissaries of the Fehmic Courts – or the Vehmgerichte, which you will recall as the uncorrupted term. And here it is.’ The elderly man rummaged in his suitcase and produced another small dagger. ‘It had, of course, the same function. Only here is a spring one may release with the thumb. Pray watch the blade.’