The Dancing Druids

Chapter Ten

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‘ Heaven have mercy upon us! 0 if our poor mother knew how we are used!’

Ibid. (Hansel and Grettel)

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The woman at Newcombe Soulbury had been correct, Mrs. Bradley was willing to admit, in describing Cuchester as not a very large town, but it was large enough to render unacceptable the notion of going from door to door enquiring for David Battle.

Mrs. Bradley parked her car, therefore, near the cattle market, and walked into the post office to make some enquiries. She obtained nothing there, however, which was of the smallest use to her, except a dozen twopenny-halfpenny stamps, which she put into her handbag before going northwards towards the main road.

She walked until she discovered a shop which had pictures for sale. She went in and asked whether they had any paintings by local artists. She was taken to the first floor of the shop and invited to inspect the canvasses.

It appeared that there were quite a number of local artists. Bold and obscure pictures confronted Mrs. Bradley on every hand. Bright, hard modern greens muscled stubbornly in on both dim and imperial purples; kaleidoscopic variations of sunsets, still, windy, cloudy, clear, were streaked against hills, reflected in water, splashed over levels and indiscreetly displayed behind buildings of historic interest. Water-meadows in the style of the Cromes, and moorland in the style of the Cornish school attempted to distract attention from ladies with flowers in their months and horses with ribbons in their forelocks. Here was a touch of Matisse and there a pale shade of Stephen Spurrier. On the left was a still-life displaying a rose and a beer-bottle; to the right a bold attempt at a battle of stags. Cubism was represented by a bull seen on three sides at once, and surrealism by a harp suspended over a pat of butter and a toadstool. In a dark corner hung a canvas which Mrs. Bradley thought at first was a genuine Old Crome.

‘I am looking,’ said she, ‘for a Battle.’

The picture-dealer looked at her with a certain degree of defensiveness, and begged her pardon.

‘Battle—a local artist,’ Mrs. Bradley explained, waving a yellow claw. ‘Among so many examples, you must surely possess a Battle. I came especially to get one.’

The man continued to look dubiously at her.

‘We have nothing in stock,’ he said, ‘but… may I ask whether you are acquainted with Mr. Battle?’

‘Friends of mine are interested in him,’ said Mrs. Bradley vaguely, ‘and I should have liked to make them a present of one of his pictures. I wonder whether there is anyone else in Cuchester…’

‘I don’t stock his pictures,’ said the dealer suddenly, ‘because I don’t think they would sell. Not in this place, anyhow. They might sell in London. I don’t know. I’ve only got one of his things—an early work and of no great interest except that, if I were a dishonest man, I could easily pass it off as an Old Crome. I saw you looking at it just now. I took it in payment of a debt.’

‘And you don’t want to sell it?’

‘I couldn’t sell it. It isn’t a copy of an Old Crome, you see. It’s a fake. Old Crome never painted that subject, so far as we know. I believe Battle painted it for a bet, but he tried to pass it off as genuine. His later work is, shall I say, French?’

‘You shall say French by all means,’ Mrs. Bradley cordially replied. ‘Chacun à son gout, no doubt. And as I happen to recognize that the subject of the picture under discussion is part of the Isle of Wight— ’

‘San fairy Ann,’ said the dealer, entering into the spirit of the discussion, and suddenly grinning. ‘But Battle is certainly a bit too hot for Cuchester.’

‘That being the case,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘if you will oblige me by writing down Mr. Battle’s address…’ she produced notebook and pencil in a flash… ‘I shall attempt to assuage the natural disappointment of my friends with…’ She looked around her. ‘Ah, yes! With…’ She picked out a very large canvas priced modestly (considering the amount of paint on it) at twenty-two pounds ten ‘… with this!’ The picture-dealer, looking at her for a moment with a degree of incredulity which, but for the practice she had had in the art of converting unbelievers, she would have found disconcerting, said, on a high note of pleasure:

‘But I congratulate you! You have selected a masterpiece. That, madam, is the only Toro in my establishment.’

Mrs. Bradley was more interested in this information than the art dealer could possibly know, but she did not betray her feelings. It might well be the only Toro, if he hoped to sell pictures, she thought.

The painting was wrapped up for her and taken to the ground floor of the shop. Armed with the address for which she had sought, she went in search of David Battle. A single enquiry was enough to set her upon the right road, and she found him on the second floor of an old and dilapidated house. He was a tall, myopic, rather handsome young man. Three minutes’ conversation and the sight of two dilapidated but genuine seventeenth-century picture-frames each containing a boldly-splashed and obviously freshly-painted picture, led Mrs. Bradley to decide to tell him frankly why she had come. She felt that only by taking him into her confidence could she obtain from him any assistance.

He listened carefully, and without attempting to speak, until she had reached the end of her story. Then he said, blinking through his spectacles:

‘I can’t do anything to help you, you know, and if I could I wouldn’t. I hated my father. I have no intention of trying to find out why he disappeared, or what happened to him after he left me. I believe he might have been murdered. I’ve thought so for the past ten years, and, if he was murdered, rather than attempt to track down the murderer and get him punished, I’d like to shake him by the hand. He is the best friend, except my mother, I ever had.’

‘I see,’ said Mrs. Bradley, slowly nodding her head. ‘Your mother died, I imagine, before your father disappeared?’

‘Yes, she did. While she was alive she protected me. She held the purse-strings, you see. After she died my life was hell. I was half-starved and ill-treated. Then, when I was twelve, my father went out one night and never came back. I waited up all night, but he did not come.

‘For a week I lived in dread of his reappearance. After that I lived go-as-you-please for a couple of months. Then I got into trouble for poaching. I had to keep myself alive, and I had no money except a pound or two which I found in one of the drawers of the dressing-table in my father’s bedroom. The magistrates made some enquiries, but nothing came of them. Some of the villagers thought that my father had deserted me, and was living with a woman in London.

‘My uncle heard of all this before I could be sent to an Approved School as being in need of care and protection, and he made a good many enquiries, but nothing came of them, so he took me to live with him, and, later on, sent me to school. He was good to me; so was my aunt—my mother’s sister—but they wanted me to go into business and, of course, I wanted to paint.

‘I painted. That’s all there was to it. And if you suppose I am going to move an inch to find out what happened to my father, you are, I’m afraid, mistaken. I’m sorry, but there it is. I’ve simply no need of my father, dead or alive.’

‘I am not, primarily, concerned with your needs,’ Mrs. Bradley pointed out, ‘and I sympathize with your feelings; but will you tell me just one thing before I go?’

‘I expect so.’ The young man smiled. His face, when he was not brooding upon his wrongs, was pleasant enough. ‘What is it?’

‘Are you aware of any connection between your father and the people who now live in what used to be your house at Newcombe Soulbury?’

‘I don’t know the people at Newcombe Soulbury at all. I’ve never seen them. My uncle sold the cottage and invested the money for me when I came of age, for it seemed unlikely by that time that my father would ever come back. It was my mother’s property, in any case, not his.’

‘Then you don’t know so much as the name of the people who bought it?’

‘I’ve got their name somewhere, yes. Wait a minute. I think I can remember… A peculiar name. Reminded me of melons… What was it, now? Ah, Cantelope. That’s it. John Alexander Cantelope. But I don’t know the man himself from Adam.’

‘And now,’ said Mrs. Bradley, ‘do you know anybody called Allwright, who painted his pictures under the name of Toro?’

‘I knew of him, of course. I never met him. A very fine painter. Would have made a name for himself if he had lived. Went to London, so I’ve heard, and was killed in the blitz in 1940.’

‘No, I don’t think that was it,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘It seems more likely that he disappeared some time in 1939.’

‘Really? I never heard of that! I knew that his relations wanted news of him, but that, I happen to know, was in 1940. I remember it because I’d just been seconded for a camouflage job, and was at home on a few days’ leave, and an uncle and aunt of his called to see me.’

‘Why did they come to you? You say you didn’t know Mr. Allwright personally?’

‘I don’t know, exactly, how it was, but I think they had found my name among his papers.’

‘Had you ever corresponded with him, then?’

‘No, I had not. My father may have done so. His name was the same as mine, you see, David Battle.’

Mrs. Bradley thought it unwise to press him further; therefore, armed with the information which she had contrived to obtain, she went back to the picture-dealer’s shop, claimed her canvas, and returned to Slepe Rock.

Whilst she was dressing for dinner she turned over in her mind some yeasty thoughts to which the Cuchester pilgrimage had given rise. There was also the fascinating connection between the cottage at Newcombe Soulbury and the appearance at Slepe Rock of the sinister and urbane Mr. Cassius now that she had identified him as the guardian—or, more probably, the father—of the boy who had thrown stones at Laura.

Laura, meanwhile, had come back from bathing, had received Mrs. Bradley’s note, and had crossed the road from the hotel to the refreshment shack. It was much like all other such temporary structures, and was inside the open yard of the pull-in. It was patronized chiefly by drivers of lorries and coaches. Opposite to it was a garage.

Laura went back to the beach and conversed with the oldest boatman. A friendly atmosphere having been maintained for some quarter of an hour, she mentioned the shack and the pull-in.

‘Been here the last ten years. Built just before the war,’ she was told. ‘Been a bungalow or something afore that, and before that again a cottage. The bungalow people was drownded out in the bay. Sailed their own dinghy. Reckless. ’Andled ’er well enough, too. But there’s a nasty lift on the bay when the wind blows contrary to the tide. Pity. They was a nice young couple. ’Ad the cottage left ’em in somebody’s will, and pulled it down and ’ad the bungalow built. Never lived there ’ardly six months. Then these motor-lorry folks took over, and pulled down the bungalow and put up the garridge and that shack. ’Course, it be better for Slepe in a way, but in my opinion it brings the wrong people to the place.’

‘And both of those who lived in the bungalow were drowned?’

‘Ay, like I told ee.’

‘Were—were the bodies recovered?’

‘No, they wasn’t, although they was looked for. But the boat was found. Gybed they ’ad, us reckoned, beyond the point out there, and overturned. No, there was never no sign of the neither of ’em. They went out, but they never come back.’

‘Were you surprised the bodies weren’t found?’

‘Not a lot. The tides be very funny round ’ere when the wind’s across ’em. That’s what us said at the time.’

‘But the bodies would come ashore somewhere along the coast, surely?’

‘That I couldn’t very well say.’

‘What sort of a man was that one who left them the cottage?’

‘I don’t recollect much of he. Bit of a poet, they do say.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Blowed if I know. ’Twere all of thirty year ago.’

‘Twenty-seven since he died,’ thought Laura; but she did not say this aloud.

‘I did ’ear as it was the poet chap as left the cottage to them as was drownded and built the bungalow,’ the old man went on. ‘The young ’ooman was a niece of his or sommat. I don’t recollect how it went, but I believe it was family property. Howsomever, it must ha’ been sold to these garage folks, seemingly by the lawyers. Of course, it brings trade to the village. No doubt as to that, but we done very nice, all the same, wi’out all the likes of them trippers.’

The conversation continued along these lines until Laura went back to the hotel. Brooding upon the conversation, it seemed to Laura that the first use to which the information it had produced could be put was to find out the name of the lawyers who had sold the bungalow and discover from them whether the dead poet or the drowned couple had been named Bulstrode. She discovered the name of the lawyers by asking at the hotel.

‘The lawyers were Thorn, Thorn and Butterthorn, of Burehampton,’ she told Mrs. Bradley next day. ‘I got it from the landlord here this morning. We talked about lawyers in general, and it came out almost at once. The trouble is,’ she added, ‘that the police will have explored that particular avenue long ago, and it can’t lead anywhere, or they would have found out more than they did. Is it worth our while to follow up those deaths by drowning?’

‘Oh, yes, child, of course it’s worth while. Anything which adds to our knowledge will be valuable, because we shall soon be following a different line from that so far taken by the police.’

Following, Laura gathered, this different line, she returned to Cuchester on the next afternoon and went again to see David Battle.

‘Did a man named Bulstrode have anything to do with your father?’ she demanded.

‘Bulstrode?’ said David, who seemed very much on the defensive and whose smile was not once in evidence. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard the name before. Why? What about him?’

‘He disappeared,’ said Mrs. Bradley, waving a yellow claw. ‘Nine years before your father. A poet, I understand. I thought you might know something about his work.’

‘Not a thing. Sorry. I say, I wish you’d sit for me some time.’

‘Not if you are going to give me an odd number of eyes and noses. I sat for a Cubist once, in my younger days, and the result was not at all gratifying.’

‘You wouldn’t have to buy it if you didn’t like it, you know, although, if you’re rich, I wish you would.’

‘Are you as badly-off as that?’

‘I’m pretty well down to bedrock. But I didn’t mean that. At least, well, yes, I suppose I did. But I think you would like it, you know.’ His manner changed. In a persuasive voice he added, ‘You’ve got lovely bones. It wouldn’t be difficult to flatter you.’

‘You had better paint my secretary,’ said Mrs. Bradley decisively. ‘She has time to spare, and I haven’t. Besides, her young man would like to have a flattering portrait of her, no doubt. Oh, you needn’t look distressed. Laura is well worth painting. I’ll send her round. Mind you’re polite. She is quite capable of felling you to the ground if she finds you irritating. I thought, by the way, that your mother left you some money?’

‘She did, but that brute got through most of it. There was only the house when he went, blast his ugly soul!’

Mrs. Bradley looked searchingly at him.

‘Did you, by any chance, murder your father?’ she asked. To her great interest, Battle looked amused.

‘When I was a little tiny boy?’ he asked mockingly. ‘What do you take me for?’

‘More of a villain than you look!’ said Mrs. Bradley decisively. ‘And more of a liar than you think I do,’ she added in her sardonic, secret thoughts. She did not like the young man.