The Dower House (16 page)

But close-to, after, say, half a minute's inspection, its subtlest of imperfections must reveal that a human hand had made it so. A perfect circle drawn with the aid of a compass has a dead sort of beauty; a perfect circle drawn by a Leonardo has the same beauty but is vibrant and passionate as well.

He laid the tools down again, took up his drawing board, and pinned a half-imperial sheet of conté paper to it – Barcham & Green's best quality, hand made. Then with charcoal, 6B pencil, and conté crayon he covered it with egg-shaped spheroids – eggs inside eggs . . . eggs overlapping eggs . . . eggs correcting eggs . . . and in this way he arrived at last at the perfect – no, the only
possible
or
permissible
shape for this particular block of marble. And with that he picked up his mallet and chisel once more and whacked off one of the square corners with some panache.Then the kitty corner.

Then the other two corners. And so he continued until, within the hour, he had the intimation toward which he had been groping ever since he began – the conviction that
his
egg, the one he was going to carve, had actually taken form already, just beneath the surface where his chisel was presently making its bites – so that he was not so much carving it as liberating it from an encrustation of stone.

By the time Faith returned that evening he had the upper half of the egg roughly formed. The ringing tap-tap of mallet and chisel told her he was working at last, so the sight of him standing there, carving away, came as no surprise. But as for the object itself . . . ‘Ah!' she cried. And then, ‘Oh!' And finally, ‘Well!'

‘I've changed my mind,' he said.

‘Meaning?'

‘I was going to carve it into a perfect egg-shape. If I cheated slightly and cut a flat surface at the very bottom – no more than a penny in size – I'm sure it would stand without props, if it was completely symmetrical all round. But then I got to thinking of Michelangelo . . .'

‘As one does.'

‘As anyone carving marble does, and I remembered his
Slave
. Do you know it?'

‘Only in photographs. God – we must start visiting in Europe again now they've lifted the ban. Florence! The Uffizi! Rome! Venice! This bloody socialist government with its five-quid limit! What about the
Slave?
It's the one he never finished, no?'

‘Yes – and no. He thought each one of his sculptures already existed inside the marble. All he did was liberate them – or half-liberate in the case of the Slave. I think I'll do that with this egg – only in a more advanced state of liberation. It will be a perfect egg except for this corner, at the bottom. I'll leave it so that that bit of the egg still must be liberated.'

‘Why?'

‘Because if I make the work complete, then it is just another work of art among thousands in the series – and probably inferior to most of them. And because it is repeated, again and again at the start of every chapter, it would soon begin to intrude. So instead it will take one step back from completion. It will say, “Over-to-you, Señor Picasso, Monsieur Derain, Herr Klee . . .” all the artists whose
finished
work will fill the pages around.'

She started to laugh.

‘What?' he asked.

‘Remember what I told you about the difference between artists and designers? You began this morning as an artist – but you end the day as a designer!'

He thought it prudent to let her think so. In fact, a cheap
unfinished
Felix Breit would have no
cachet
in Fogel's Hampstead circles. Not while the artist himself was alive and well and working in London.

Wednesday, 11 June 1947

Eric and Isabella Brandon's Morris Ten wove a careful path among the potholes along the drive. It drew up, dead centre, in front of the house. The engine died and the cooling exhaust pinged in the silence – or what would have been silence if Isabella had not said, ‘Didn't I ask you to get that spider out of the speedometer window?'

Her voice, fruity and penetrating, carried across the carriage sweep in front of the house to the welcoming delegation of Adam, Tony and Nicole, and Faith; it was Faith who had suggested to Eric that he and Isabella might like to join the Dower House community. She had run across him at several launch parties and other publishing haunts in Soho, for he was the author and illustrator of a string of successful children's books; his wife, Isabella, was . . . well, that remained to be discovered. ‘In the rag trade,' was all Eric had told her when she met the couple casually in the Hay Hill Bookshop in Curzon Street, near where they lived.

And now his flatter London tones proved quite as penetrating as his wife's. He wound down the window and stuck out his head. ‘How d'you call spiders – anyone? It's not “kitty-kitty”, is it?' He retreated inside the car again. ‘No, my pet, we are adrift in a sea of ignorance.'

She closed her eyes and said, ‘It's a simple question, darling. Did I ask you or didn't I? A yes or no will suffice.'

‘You undoubtedly did. A-a-and if you will tell me how to seduce spiders out from behind immovable glass, I shall evict him forthwith. Or her. Dead flies don't work, by the way. Nor worms.'

‘Worms?'

‘Well, they work with fish.'

To the waiting delegation their voices were clearer than their images, cowering in the dark tomb of the car and part-obscured by wipers that seemed to be stuck at half-quadrant. Isabella's face loomed forward until her nose almost touched the windscreen. ‘Oh, hello!' she cried, apparently seeing the welcome party for the first time; they were dwarfed by the Ionic pillars that flanked them. ‘I say! How grand!' She retreated back into the gloom and they heard her say, ‘Which one is Miss Manningham-Buller?'

‘It's Bullen-ffitch – and she hasn't changed much since we met her in Curzon Street.' Eric leaped from the car, shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie. ‘Good afternoon to you all.'

As he slammed the door the trafficator hoisted itself out of its pocket in the door pillar, almost hitting him in the neck. ‘Not tonight, Josephine!' he said, pushing it back into place.

‘Aren't you going to open
my
door?' his wife asked.

‘If I could achieve it from the driver's side,' he said as he strode around the car, ‘I would. But this –' he arrived on her side to open her door and assist her out – ‘is quite a bit easier.'

Like Aphrodite rising from her seashell, Isabella Brandon rose from the tiny car on a cloud of Chanel bouclé. As she smoothed her white lace gloves her eyes took in – in fact,
possessed
– the grandeur of the portico and the restrained elegance of the pale brick façade; almost as an afterthought she turned her attention once again to the quartet who waited to greet her. And to greet her husband, of course. She wobbled slightly on ultra-high heels as she negotiated the gravel between them. ‘Isabella Brandon,' she said, extending her right arm along a ballistic trajectory toward them; then, with a sidelong glance, she added, ‘. . . and my husband, Eric.'

‘What a splendid place,' he remarked when they had all introduced themselves. To Faith he added, ‘Your description didn't really do it justice.'

Faith was too engrossed in studying Mrs Brandon to reply that her parents' home in the Cotswolds was a good deal more grand than this.

‘Is that American person here?' Isabella asked.

‘Willard Johnson?' Faith was surprised. ‘You know him?'

‘He called on us last week,' she replied but did not elaborate.

‘Country air!' Eric said, inhaling deeply through his nose.

‘Well
there's
a surprise!' his wife exclaimed.

‘The place has seen better days,' Adam said. ‘Er . . . I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to slip out of your shoes. The pine floors in this part of the house are a hundred and sixty years old and . . . ah . . . haha . . . your heels, you know. I don't think I've ever seen heels so . . . sharp.'

She corrected him, ‘
Delicate
. They are next year's fashion so I sincerely hope
you
won't have seen any such thing as yet.' She looked daggers at Eric. ‘You never mentioned the floor. You can get my gumboots out of the car.'

As he walked back to it, he said, in a kind of sing-song, ‘So
many
things I forgot to ask before we came . . .' On his return, bearing a pair of lavender-coloured gumboots, he began to enumerate, ‘Are the interior walls of plaster or gesso? Are the pillars Doric or Ionic? Is the soil acid or alkaline? What is the prevailing wind? To tell the truth, I thought it more important to get the right directions.' Handing the boots to his wife, he said to the others, ‘Just try getting a map of
any part
of England nowadays. Stanford's offered me the entire Hindu Kush at six inches to the mile but Hertfordshire? Not a hope. The Ordnance Survey seems to think there's a war on.' Then, noticing how violently the lavender boots clashed with Chanel's pastel, he added, ‘How delightful, my darling! It's utterly you!'

Their bickering almost ceased and they were almost well behaved while the four residents showed them over the apartment that was on offer. ‘This entrance hall is communal,' Adam explained. ‘But yours would be these two rooms—'

Isabella interrupted him, ‘Why is it communal?'

‘Because this is the only access from the front of the house to the main staircase – which leads up to the Prentices' flat.'

‘And to our flat,' Tony added. ‘Unless you walk right round the back.'

‘You mean there's no back door to this entire house?'

‘The entrance is communal because we make it so,' Nicole said.

Adam resumed his usher's role: ‘Yours would be these two big rooms on either side. Each of them is actually big enough on its own to accommodate the average council house.'

He flung open a door and let them marvel.

‘The fireplace is by Barry,' Tony said.

Sally added, ‘And the plasterwork is Italian – by the same people who did the plastering in Sir John Soanes's house in Lincolns Inn Fields. It's very fine.'

‘The house was taken over by a Catholic boys' school evacuated from Jersey during the war,' Adam told them. ‘They put in lots of extra lavatories, which suits us perfectly, of course.
And
they treated the place pretty well.'

Isabella shot him a glance, taking this as a veiled comment on her heels. ‘Does the central heating work?' she asked, running a glove lightly over a painted cast-iron radiator of Edwardian vintage.

‘We were told it takes a ton of coke every twenty-four hours, so we haven't tried it. Most of us have paraffin heaters.'

‘Except that one in the attic,' Nicole insisted.

‘Now, now!' Tony warned her.

Faith saw that Isabella's eyes darted eagerly between Nicole and her Tony, eager for more.

‘Has anyone lit a fire here?' Eric was prodding a heap of twigs in the grate.

‘It's what fireplaces are
for
,' Isabella told him.

‘There's a crow's nest up there,' Tony admitted, ‘but we'll get some rods and fetch it down.'

‘This was the butler's pantry.' Adam moved them on toward the back of the apartment. ‘That's the door to the silver safe – which is big enough for a child's bedroom. Have you got any children?'

‘Isabella has a delicate throat,' Eric explained.

‘Oh, cork it!' she snapped. To the others she added, ‘It's the punchline of an extremely tasteless
joke
– so-called.'

Tony, remembering the joke from his army days, suddenly vanished into the silver safe. ‘Yes, quite big enough,' he managed to say without corpsing.

‘We shall be starting a family very soon now,' Isabella went on.

‘How interesting!' Eric said.

Nicole suddenly noticed that his shirt was buttoned up askew, leaving a bulge of cloth and an unused buttonhole at his throat, mostly hidden by his tie. Isabella had just noticed it, too; she drew breath to tick her husband off, thought better of it, and, saying loudly, ‘What's at the bottom here, then?' pushed him ahead of her down a short flight of stone steps. At the foot of it she thrust him round the corner, out of sight of the others.

Adam, still at the top, complained that they'd missed the room that could be turned into a kitchen, but Nicole tripped lightly down after them. Isabella was jerking and tugging at Eric's shirt and tie, getting each button in the right hole. But, most unexpectedly, the look in her eyes was one of pure love – angry, yes . . . exasperated, yes, but love for all that. ‘Do
you
have such trouble?' she asked Nicole.

‘Since the Garden of Eden, I think,' she replied.

‘Talking of which,' Eric said affably, ‘d'you know the first animal Adam took as a pet,
after
they were expelled from the Garden?'

Nicole shrugged.

‘The serpent.' He raised his voice and called out to Faith, ‘Does any room in this apartment have a north light? I need a north light for painting.'

‘Did you say
kitchen?
' Isabella asked suddenly. ‘Where?'

Adam took her back; most of the others followed. ‘It was the staff dining room when the school was here,' he said.

Isabella turned to her husband. ‘What colour curtains should we have, d'you think?'

‘Blue,' he said at once. ‘Flies can't abide blue. And chromium-plated taps.'

‘Why?'

‘Because they'll reflect the blue.'

She turned to Adam. ‘I'm sure you give more sensible answers to your wife than that!'

Adam smiled feebly and, avoiding Sally's eye, said, ‘North light, old chap?'

‘This way!' Tony was still at the foot of the steps. ‘Just follow me. You're now entering the ground floor of the original Tudor Hall. One room of it goes with this apartment. It's the only one with a north light.'