In the Frame

3

For two days Donald lay in bed, and I grew to understand what was meant by prostration.

Whether he liked it or not, this time he was heavily sedated, his doctor calling morning and evening with pills and injections. No matter that I was a hopeless nurse and a worse cook, I was appointed, for lack of anyone else, to look after him.

‘I want Charles,’ Donald in fact told the doctor. ‘He doesn’t fuss.’

I sat with him a good deal when he was awake, seeing him struggle dazedly to face and come to terms with the horrors in his mind. He lost weight visibly, the rounded muscles of his face slackening and the contours changing to the drawn shape of illness. The grey shadows round his eyes darkened to a permanent charcoal, and all normal strength seemed to have vanished from arms and legs.

I fed us both from tins and frozen packets, reading the instructions and doing what they said. Donald thanked me punctiliously and ate what he could, but I doubt if he tasted a thing.

In between times, while he slept, I made progress with both the paintings. The sad landscape was no longer sad but merely Octoberish, with three horses standing around in a field, one of them eating grass. Pictures of this sort, easy to live with and passably expert, were my bread and butter. They sold quite well, and I normally churned one off the production line every ten days or so, knowing that they were all technique and no soul.

The portrait of Regina, though, was the best work I’d done for months. She laughed out of the canvas, alive and glowing, and to me at least seemed vividly herself. Pictures often changed as one worked on them, and day by day the emphasis in my mind had shifted, so that the kitchen background was growing darker and less distinct and Regina herself more luminous. One could still see she was cooking, but it was the girl who was important, not the act. In the end I had painted the kitchen, which was still there, as an impression, and the girl, who was not, as the reality.

I hid that picture in my suitcase whenever I wasn’t working on it. I didn’t want Donald to come face to face with it unawares.

Early Wednesday evening he came shakily down to the kitchen in his dressing-gown, trying to smile and pick up the pieces. He sat at the table, drinking the Scotch I had that day imported, and watching while I cleaned my brushes and tidied the palette.

‘You’re always so neat,’ he said.

‘Paint’s expensive.’

He waved a limp hand at the horse picture which stood drying on the easel. ‘How much does it cost, to paint that?’

‘In raw materials, about ten quid. In heat, light, rates, rent, food, Scotch and general wear and tear on the nervous system, about the amount I’d earn in a week if I chucked it in and went back to selling houses.’

‘Quite a lot, then,’ he said seriously.

I grinned. ‘I don’t regret it.’

‘No. I see that.’

I finished the brushes by washing them in soap and water under the tap, pinching them into shape, and standing them upright in ajar to dry. Good brushes were at least as costly as paint.

‘After the digging into the company accounts,’ Donald said abruptly, ‘they took me along to the police station and tried to prove that I had actually killed her myself.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘They’d worked out that I could have got home at lunch time and done it. They said there was time.’

I picked up the Scotch from the table and poured a decent sized shot into a tumbler. Added ice.

‘They must be crazy,’ I said.

‘There was another man, besides Frost. A Superintendent. I think his name was Wall. A thin man, with fierce eyes. He never seemed to blink. Just stared and said over and over that I’d killed her because she’d come back and found me supervising the burglary.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I said disgustedly. ‘And anyway, she didn’t leave the flower shop until half past two.’

‘The girl in the flower shop now says she doesn’t know to the minute when Regina left. Only that it was soon after lunch. And I didn’t get back from the pub until nearly three. I went to lunch late. I was hung up with a client all morning...’ He stopped, gripping his tumbler as if it were a support to hold on to. ‘I can’t tell you... how awful it was.’

The mild understatement seemed somehow to make things worse.

‘They said,’ he added, ‘that eighty per cent of murdered married women are killed by their husbands.’

That statement had Frost stamped all over it.

‘They let me come home, in the end, but I don’t think...’ His voice shook. He swallowed, visibly trying to keep tight control on his hard-won calm. ‘I don’t think they’ve finished.’

It was five days since he’d walked in and found Regina dead. When I thought of the mental hammerings he’d taken on top, the punishing assault on his emotional reserves, where common humanity would have suggested kindness and consoling help, it seemed marvellous that he had remained as sane as he had.

‘Have they got anywhere with catching the thieves?’ I said.

He smiled wanly. ‘I don’t even know if they’re trying.’

‘They must be.’

‘I suppose so. They haven’t said.’ He drank some whisky slowly. ‘It’s ironic, you know. I’ve always had a regard for the police. I didn’t know they could be... the way they are.’

A quandary, I thought. Either they leaned on a suspect in the hope of breaking him down, or they asked a few polite questions and got nowhere: and under the only effective system the innocent suffered more than the guilty.

‘I see no end to it.’ Donald said. ‘No end at all.’

By mid-day Friday the police had called twice more at the house, but for my cousin the escalation of agony seemed to have slowed. He was still exhausted, apathetic, and as grey as smoke, but it was as if he were saturated with suffering and could absorb little more. Whatever Frost and his companion said to him, it rolled off without destroying him further.

‘You’re supposed to be painting someone’s horse, aren’t you?’ he said suddenly, as we shaped up to lunch.

‘I told them I’d come later.’

He shook his head. ‘I remember you saying, when I asked you to stay, that it would fit in fine before your next commission.’ He thought a bit. ‘Tuesday. You should have gone to Yorkshire on Tuesday.’

‘I telephoned and explained.’

‘All the same, you’d better go.’

He said he would be all right alone, now, and thanks for everything. He insisted I look up the times of trains, order a taxi, and alert the people at the other end. I could see in the end that the time had indeed come for him to be by himself, so I packed up my things to depart.

‘I suppose,’ he said diffidently, as we waited for the taxi to fetch me, ‘that you never paint portraits? People, that is, not horses.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘I just wondered... Gould you, one day... I mean, I’ve got quite a good photograph of Regina...’

I looked searchingly at his face. As far as I could see, it could do no harm. I unclipped the suitcase and took out the picture with its back towards him.

‘It’s still wet,’ I warned. ‘And not framed, and I can’t varnish it for at least six months. But you can have it, if you like.’

‘Let me see.’

I turned the canvas round. He stared and stared, but said nothing at all. The taxi drove up to the front door.

‘See you,’ I said, propping Regina against a wall.

He nodded and punched my arm, opened the door for me, and sketched a farewell wave. Speechlessly, because his eyes were full of tears.

I spent nearly a week in Yorkshire doing my best to immortalise a patient old steeplechaser, and then went home to my noisy flat near Heathrow airport, taking the picture with me to finish.

Saturday I downed tools and went to the races, fed up with too much nose-to-the-grindstone.

Jump racing at Plumpton, and the familiar swelling of excitement at the liquid movement of racehorses. Paintings could never do justice to them: never. The moment caught on canvas was always second best.

I would love to have ridden in races, but hadn’t had enough practice or skill; nor, I dare say, nerve. Like Donald, my childhood’s background was of middle-sized private enterprise, with my father an auctioneer in business on his own account in Sussex. I had spent countless hours in my growing years watching the horses train on the Downs round Findon, and had drawn and painted them from about the age of six. Riding itself had been mostly a matter of begging the wherewithal for an hour’s joy from indulgent aunts, never of a pony of my own. Art school later had been fine, but at twenty-two, alone in the world with both parents newly dead, I’d had to face the need to eat. It had been a short meant-to-be-temporary step to the estate agents across the street, but I’d liked it well enough to stay.

Half the horse painters in England seemed to have turned up at Plumpton, which was not surprising, as the latest Grand National winner was due to make his first appearance of the new season. It was a commercial fact that a picture called for instance ‘Nijinsky on Newmarket Heath’ stood a much better chance of being sold than one labelled ‘A horse on Newmarket Heath’, and ‘The Grand National winner at the start’ won hands down over ‘A runner at Plumpton before the Off’. The economic facts of life had brought many a would-be Rembrandt down to market research.

‘Todd!’ said a voice in my ear. ‘You owe me fifteen smackers.’

‘I bloody don’t,’ I said.

‘You said Seesaw was a certainty for Ascot.’

‘Never take sweets from a stranger.’

Billy Pyle laughed extravagantly and patted me heavily on the shoulder. Billy Pyle was one of those people you met on racecourses who greeted you as a bosom pal, plied you with drinks and bonhomie, and bored you to death. On and off I’d met Billy Pyle at the races for umpteen years, and had never yet worked out how to duck him without positive rudeness. Ordinary evasions rolled off his thick skin like mercury off glass, and I found it less wearing on the whole to get the drink over quickly than dodge him all afternoon.

I waited for him to say ‘how about a beverage’, as he always did.

‘How about a beverage?’ he said.

‘Er... sure,’ I agreed, resignedly.

‘Your father would never forgive me if I neglected you.’ He always said that, too. They had been business acquaintances, I knew, but I suspected the reported friendship was posthumous.

‘Come along, laddie.’

I knew the irritating routine by heart. He would meet his Auntie Sal in the bar, as if by accident, and in my turn I would buy them both a drink. A double brandy and ginger for Auntie Sal.

‘Why, there’s Auntie Sal,’ Billy said, pushing through the door. Surprise, surprise.

Auntie Sal was a compulsive racegoer in her seventies with a perpetual cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and one finger permanently inserted in her form book, keeping her place.

‘Know anything for the two-thirty?’ she demanded.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘What? Oh, I see. Hello. How are you? Know anything for the two-thirty?’

‘ ’Fraid not.’

‘Huh.’

She peered into the form book. ‘Treetops is well in at the weights, but can you trust his leg?’ She looked up suddenly and with her free hand prodded her nephew, who was trying to attract service from the bar. ‘Billy, get a drink for Mrs. Matthews.’

‘Mrs. Who?’

‘Matthews. What do you want, Maisie?’

She turned to a large middle-aged woman who had been standing in the shadows behind her.

‘Oh... gin and tonic, thanks.’

‘Got that, Billy? Double brandy and ginger for me, gin and tonic for Mrs. Matthews.’

Maisie Matthews’ clothes were noticeably new and expensive, and from laquered hair via crocodile handbag to gold-trimmed shoes she shouted money without saying a word. The hand which accepted the drink carried the weight of a huge opal set in diamonds. The expression on her expertly painted face showed no joy at all.

‘How do you do?’ I said politely.

‘Eh?’ said Auntie Sal. ‘Oh yes, Maisie, this is Charles Todd. What do you think of Treetops?’

‘Moderate,’ I said.

Auntie Sal peered worriedly into the form book and Billy handed round the drinks.

‘Cheers,’ Maisie Matthews said, looking cheerless.

‘Down the hatch,’ said Billy, raising his glass.

‘Maisie’s had a bit of bad luck,’ Auntie Sal said.

Billy grinned. ‘Backed a loser, then, Mrs. Matthews?’

‘Her house burned down.’

As a light conversation-stopper, it was a daisy.

‘Oh... I say...’ said Billy uncomfortably. ‘Hard luck.’

‘Lost everything, didn’t you, Maisie?’

‘All but what I stand up in,’ she agreed gloomily.

‘Have another gin,’ I suggested.

‘Thanks, dear.’

When I returned with the refills she was in full descriptive flood.

‘... I wasn’t there, of course, I was staying with my sister Betty up in Birmingham, and there was this policeman on the doorstep telling me what a job they’d had finding me. But by that time it was all over, of course. When I got back to Worthing there was just a heap of cinders with the chimney-breast sticking up in the middle. Well, I had a real job finding out what happened, but anyway they finally said it was a flash fire, whatever that is, but they didn’t know what started it, because there’d been no one in the house of course for two days.’

She accepted the gin, gave me a brief unseeing smile, and returned to her story.

‘Well, I was spitting mad, I’ll tell you, over losing everything like that, and I said why hadn’t they used sea water, what with the sea being only the other side of the tamarisk and down the shingle, because of course they said they hadn’t been able to save a thing because they hadn’t enough water, and this fireman, the one I was complaining to, he said they couldn’t use sea water because for one thing it corroded everything and for another the pumps sucked up sea-weed and shells and things, and in any case the tide was out.’

I smothered an unseemly desire to laugh. She sensed it, however.

‘Well, dear, it may seem funny to you, of course, but then you haven’t lost all your treasures that you’d been collecting since heaven knows when.’

‘I’m really sorry, Mrs. Matthews. I don’t think it’s funny. It was just...’

‘Yes, well, dear. I suppose you can see the funny side of it, all that water and not a drop to put a fire out with, but I was that mad, I can tell you.’

1 think I’ll have a bit on Treetops,’ Auntie Sal said thoughtfully.

Maisie Matthews looked at her uncertainly and Billy Pyle, who had heard enough of disaster, broke gratefully into geniality, clapped me again on the shoulder, and said yes, it was time to see the next contest.

Duty done, I thought with a sigh, and took myself off to watch the race from the top of the stands, out of sight and earshot.

Treetops broke down and finished last, limping. Too bad for its owner, trainer, and Auntie Sal. I wandered down to the parade ring to see the Grand National winner walk round before his race, but without any thought of drawing him. I reckoned he was just about played out as a subject, and there would shortly be a glut.

The afternoon went quickly, as usual. I won a little, lost a little, and filled my eyes with something better than money. On the stands for the last race, I found myself approached by Maisie Matthews. No mistaking the bright red coat, the air of gloss, and the big, kind-looking, worldly face. She drew to a halt on the step below me, looking up. Entirely self-confident, though registering doubt.

‘Aren’t you,’ she said, ‘the young man I had a drink with, with Sal and Billy?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I wasn’t sure,’ she said, the doubt disappearing. ‘You look older out here.’

‘Different light,’ I said, agreeing. She too looked older, by about ten years. Fifty-something, I thought. Bar-light always flattered.

‘They said you were an artist.’ Their mild disapproval coloured the way she spoke.

‘Mm,’ I said, watching the runners canter past on the way to the post.

‘Not very well paid, is it, dear?’

I grinned at her, liking her directness. ‘It depends who you are. Picasso didn’t grumble.’

‘How much would you charge to paint a picture for me?’

‘What sort of picture?’

‘Well, dear, you may say it sounds morbid and I dare say it is, but I was just thinking this morning when I went over there, and really it makes me that mad every time I see it, well, I was thinking actually that it makes a crazy picture, that burnt ruin with the chimney sticking up, and the burnt hedge behind and all that sea, and I was thinking of getting the local photographer who does all the weddings and things to come along and take a colour picture, because when it’s all cleared away and rebuilt, no one will believe how awful it was, and I want to hang it in the new house, just to show them.’

‘But...’

‘So how much would you charge? Because I dare say you can see I am not short of the next quid but if it would be hundreds I might as well get the photographer of course.’

‘Of course,’ I agreed gravely. ‘How about if I came to see the house, or what’s left of it, and gave you an estimate?’

She saw nothing odd in that. ‘All right, dear. That sounds very businesslike. Of course, it will have to be soon, though, because once the insurance people have been I am having the rubble cleared up.’

‘How soon?’

‘Well, dear, as you’re half-way there, could you come today?’

We discussed it. She said she would drive me in her Jaguar as I hadn’t a car, and I could go home by train just as easily from Worthing as from Plumpton.

So I agreed.

One takes the most momentous steps unawares.

The ruin was definitely paintagenic, if there is such a word. On the way there, more or less non-stop, she had talked about her late husband, Archie, who had looked after her very well, dear.

‘Well, that’s to say, I looked after him, too, dear, because of course I was a nurse. Private, of course. I nursed his first wife all through her illness, cancer it was, dear, of course, and then I stayed on for a bit to look after him, and, well, he asked me to stay on for life, dear, and I did. Of course he was much older, he’s been gone more than ten years now. He looked after me very well, Archie did.’

She glanced fondly at the huge opal. Many a man would have liked to have been remembered as kindly.

‘Since he went, and left me so well off, dear, it seemed a shame not to get some fun out of it, so I carried on with what we were doing when we were together those few years, which was going round to auction sales in big houses, dear, because you pick up such nice things there, quite cheap sometimes, and of course it’s ever so much more interesting when the things have belonged to someone well known or famous.’ She changed gear with a jerk and aggressively passed an inoffensive little van. ‘And now all those things are burnt to cinders, of course, and all the memories of Archie and the places we went together, and I’ll tell you, dear, it makes me mad.’

‘It’s really horrid for you.’

‘Yes, dear, it is.’

I reflected that it was the second time in a fortnight that I’d been cast in the role of comforter; and I felt as inadequate for her as I had for Donald.

She stamped on the brakes outside the remains of her house and rocked us to a standstill. From the opulence of the minor mansions on either side, her property had been far from a slum; but all that was left was an extensive sprawling black heap, with jagged pieces of outside wall defining its former shape, and the thick brick chimney, as she’d said, pointing sturdily skywards from the centre. Ironic, I thought fleetingly, that the fireplace alone had survived the flames.

‘There you are, dear,’ Maisie said. ‘What do you think?’

‘A very hot fire.’

She raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘But yes, dear, all fires are hot, aren’t they? And of course there was a lot of wood. So many of these old seaside houses were built with a lot of wood.’

Even before we climbed out of her big pale blue car, I could smell the ash.

‘How long ago...?’ I asked.

‘Last week-end, dear. Sunday.’

While we surveyed the mess for a moment in silence a man walked slowly into view from behind the chimney. He was looking down, concentrating, taking a step at a time and then bending to poke into the rubble.

Maisie, for all her scarlet-coated bulk, was nimble on her feet.

‘Hey,’ she called, hopping out of the car and advancing purposefully. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

The man straightened up, looking startled. About forty, I judged, with a raincoat, a crisp-looking trilby and a down-turning moustache.

He raised his hat politely. ‘Insurance, madam.’

‘I thought you were coming on Monday.’

‘I happened to be in the district. No time like the present, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I suppose not,’ Maisie said. ‘And I hope there isn’t going to be any shilly-shallying over you paying up, though of course nothing is going to get my treasures back and I’d rather have them than any amount of money, as I’ve got plenty of that in any case.’

The man was unused to Maisie’s brand of chat.

‘Er...’ he said. ‘Oh yes. I see.’

‘Have you found out what started it?’ Maisie demanded.

‘No, madam.’

‘Found anything at all?’

‘No, madam.’

‘Well, how soon can I get all this cleared away?’

‘Any time you like, madam.’

He stepped carefully towards us, picking his way round clumps of blackened debris. He had steady greyish eyes, a strong chin, and an overall air of intelligence.

‘What’s your name?’ Maisie asked.

‘Greene, madam.’ He paused slightly, and added ‘With an ‘e”.

‘Well, Mr. Greene with an ‘e’,’ Maisie said good-humouredly. ‘I’ll be glad to have all that in writing.’

He inclined his head. ‘As soon as I report back.’

Maisie said ‘Good,’ and Greene, lifting his hat again, wished her good afternoon and walked along to a white Ford parked a short way along the road.

‘That’s all right, then,’ Maisie said with satisfaction, watching him go. ‘Now, how much for that picture?’

‘Two hundred plus two nights’ expenses in a local hotel.’

‘That’s a bit steep, dear. One hundred, and two nights, and I’ve got to like die results, or I don’t pay.’

‘No foal, no fee?’

The generous red mouth smiled widely. ‘That’s it, dear.’

We settled on one-fifty if she liked the picture, and fifty if she didn’t, and I was to start on Monday unless it was raining.