The Means of Escape (3 page)

Just at the door of my own office, or rather of the
cubby-hole, for I have to pass through that, I turned, and saw at the end of the dim corridor what I had also expected, Singlebury, advancing towards me with his unmistakable shuffling step. My first reaction was a kind of bewilderment as to why he, who had been such an excellent timekeeper, so regular day by day, should become a creature of the night. He was wearing the blue suit. This I could make out by its familiar outline, but it was not till he came halfway down the corridor towards me, and reached the patch of light falling through the window from the street, that I saw that he was not himself – I mean that his head was nodding or rather swivelling irregularly from side to side. It crossed my mind that Singlebury was drunk. I had never known him drunk or indeed seen him take anything to drink, even at the office Christmas party, but one cannot estimate the effect that trouble will have upon a man. I began to think what steps I should take in this situation. I turned on the light in his cubby-hole as I went through and waited at the entrance of my own office. As he appeared in the outer doorway I saw that I had not been correct about the reason for the odd movement of the head. The throat was cut from ear to ear so that the head was nearly severed from the shoulders. It was this which had given the impression of nodding, or rather, lolling. As he walked into his cubby-hole Singlebury raised both hands and tried to steady the head as though conscious that something was wrong. The eyes were thickly filmed over, as one sees in the carcasses in a butcher’s shop.

I shut and locked my door, and not wishing to give way to nausea, or to lose all control of myself, I sat down at my desk. My work was waiting for me as I had left it – it was the file on the matter of the damp elimination – and, there not being anything else to do, I tried to look through it. On the other side of the door I could hear Singlebury sit down also, and then try the drawers of the table, evidently looking for the ‘things’ without which he could not start work. After the drawers had been tried, one after another, several times, there was almost total silence.

The present position is that I am locked in my own office and would not, no matter what you offered me, indeed I could not, go out through the cubby-hole and pass what is sitting at the desk. The early cleaners will not be here for seven hours and forty-five minutes. I have passed the time so far as best I could in writing this report. One consideration strikes me. If what I have next door is a visitant which should not be walking but buried in the earth, then its wound cannot bleed, and there will be no stream of blood moving slowly under the whole width of the communicating door. However I am sitting at the moment with my back to the door, so that, without turning round, I have no means of telling whether it has done so or not.

H
ackett, Holland, Parsons, Charrington and Dubois all studied in Paris, in the atelier of Vincent Bonvin. Dubois, although his name sounded French, wasn’t, and didn’t speak any either. None of them did except Hackett.

In the summer of 1882 they made up a party to go to Brittany. That was because they admired Bastien-Lepage, which old Bonvin certainly didn’t, and because they wanted somewhere cheap, somewhere with characteristic types, absolutely natural, busy with picturesque occupations, and above all, plein air. ‘Your work cannot be really good unless you have caught a cold doing it,’ said Hackett.

They were poor enough, but they took a certain quantity of luggage – only the necessities. Their canvases needed rigging like small craft putting out of harbour, and the artists themselves, for plein air work, had brought overcoats, knickerbockers, gaiters, boots, wide-awakes, broad straw hats for sunny days. They tried, to begin with, St Briac-sur-Mer, which had been recommended to them
in Paris, but it didn’t suit. On, then, to Palourde, on the coast near Cancale. All resented the time spent moving about. It wasn’t in the spirit of the thing, they were artists, not sightseers.

At Palourde, although it looked, and was, larger than St Briac, there was, if anything, less room. The Palourdais had never come across artists before, considered them as rich rather than poor, and wondered why they did not go to St Malo. Holland, Parsons, Charrington and Dubois, however, each found a room of sorts. What about their possessions? There were sail-lofts and potato-cellars in Palourde, but, it seemed, not an inch of room to spare. Their clothes, books and painting material had to go in some boats pulled up above the foreshore, awaiting repairs. They were covered with a piece of tarred sailcloth and roped down. Half the morning would have to be spent getting out what was wanted. Hackett, as interpreter, was obliged to ask whether there was any risk of their being stolen. The reply was that no one in Palourde wanted such things.

It was agreed that Hackett should take what appeared to be the only room in the constricted Hôtel du Port. ‘Right under the rafters,’ he wrote to his Intended, ‘a bed, a chair, a basin, a
broc
of cold water brought up once a day, no view from the window, but I shan’t of course paint in my room anyway. I have propped up the canvases I brought with me against the wall. That gives me the sensation of having done something. The food, so far, you wouldn’t approve of. Black porridge, later on pieces
of black porridge left over from the morning and fried, fish soup with onions, onion soup with fish. The thing is to understand these people well, try to share their devotion to onions, and above all to secure a good model –’ He decided not to add ‘who must be a young girl, otherwise I haven’t much chance of any of the London exhibitions.’

The Hôtel du Port was inconveniently placed at the top of the village. It had no restaurant, but Hackett was told that he could be served, if he wanted it, at half past six o’clock. The ground floor was taken up with the bar, so this service would be in a very small room at the back, opening off the kitchen.

After Hackett had sat for some time at a narrow table covered with rose-patterned oilcloth, the door opened sufficiently for a second person to edge into the room. It was a red-haired girl, built for hard use and hard wear, who without speaking put down a bowl of fish soup. She and the soup between them filled the room with a sharp, cloudy odour, not quite disagreeable, but it wasn’t possible for her to get in and out, concentrating always on not spilling anything, without knocking the back of the chair and the door itself, first with her elbows, then with her rump. The spoons and the saltbox on the table trembled as though in a railway carriage. Then the same manoeuvre again, this time bringing a loaf of dark bread and a carafe
of cider. No more need to worry after that, there was no more to come.

‘I think I’ve found rather a jolly-looking model already,’ Hackett told the others. They, too, had not done so badly. They had set up their easels on the quay, been asked, as far as they could make out, to move them further away from the moorings, done so ‘with a friendly smile,’ said Charrington – ‘we find that goes a long way.’ They hadn’t risked asking anyone to model for them, just started some sea-pieces between the handfuls of wind and rain. ‘We might come up to the hotel tonight and dine with you. There’s nothing but fish soup in our digs.’

Hackett discouraged them.

The hotelier’s wife, when he had made the right preliminary enquiries from her about the red-haired girl, had answered – as she did, however, on all subjects – largely with silences. He didn’t learn who her parents were, or even her family name. Her given name was Annik. She worked an all-day job at the Hôtel du Port, but she had one and a half hours free after her lunch and if she wanted to spend that being drawn or painted, well, there were no objections. Not in the hotel, however, where, as he could see, there was no room.

‘I paint en plein air,’ said Hackett.

‘You’ll find plenty of that.’

‘I shall pay her, of course.’

‘You must make your own arrangements.’

He spoke to the girl at dinner, during the few moments when she was conveniently trapped. When she had quite skilfully allowed the door to shut behind her and, soup-dish in hand, was recovering her balance, he said:

‘Anny, I want to ask you something.’

‘I’m called Annik,’ she said. It was the first time he had heard her speak.

‘All the girls are called that. I shall call you Anny. I’ve spoken about you to the patronne.’

‘Yes, she told me.’

Anny was a heavy breather, and the whole tiny room seemed to expand and deflate as she stood pondering.

‘I shall want you to come to the back door of the hotel, I mean the back steps down to the rue de Dol. Let us say tomorrow, at twelve forty-five.’

‘I don’t know about the forty-five,’ she said. ‘I can’t be sure about that.’

‘How do you usually know the time?’ She was silent. He thought it was probably a matter of pride and she did not want to agree to anything too easily. But possibly she couldn’t tell the time. She might be stupid to the degree of idiocy.

The Hôtel du Port had no courtyard. Like every other house in the street, it had a flight of stone steps to adapt to the change of level. After lunch the shops shut for an hour and the women of Palourde sat or stood, according
to their age, on the top step and knitted or did crochet. They didn’t wear costume any more, they wore white linen caps and jackets, long skirts, and, if they weren’t going far, carpet slippers.

Anny was punctual to the minute. ‘I shall want you to stand quite still on the top step, with your back to the door. I’ve asked them not to open it.’

Anny, also, was wearing carpet slippers. ‘I can’t just stand here doing nothing.’

He allowed her to fetch her crochet. Give a little, take a little. He was relieved, possibly a bit disappointed, to find how little interest they caused in the rue de Dol. He was used to being watched, quite openly, over his shoulder, as if he was giving a comic performance. Here even the children didn’t stop to look.

‘They don’t care about our picture,’ he said, trying to amuse her. He would have liked a somewhat gentler expression. Certainly she was not a beauty. She hadn’t the white skin of the dreamed-of red-haired girl, in fact her face and neck were covered with a faint but noticeable hairy down, as though proof against all weathers.

‘How long will it take?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. As God disposes! An hour will do for today.’

‘And then you’ll pay me?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I shan’t do that. I shall pay you when the whole thing’s finished. I shall keep a record of the time you’ve worked, and if you like you can keep one as well.’

As he was packing up his box of charcoals he added: ‘I shall want to make a few colour notes tomorrow, and I should like you to wear a red shawl.’ It seemed that she hadn’t one. ‘But you could borrow one, my dear. You could borrow one, since I ask you particularly.’

She looked at him as though he were an imbecile.

‘You shouldn’t have said “Since I ask you particularly”,’ Parsons told him that evening. ‘That will have turned her head.’

‘It can’t have done,’ said Hackett.

‘Did you call her “my dear”?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve noticed you say “particularly” with a peculiar intonation, which may well have become a matter of habit,’ said Parsons, nodding sagely.

This is driving me crazy, thought Hackett. He began to feel a division which he had never so much as dreamed of in Paris between himself and his fellow students. They had been working all day, having managed to rent a disused and indeed almost unusable shed on the quay. It had once been part of the market where the fishermen’s wives did the triage, sorting out the catch by size. Hackett, as before, had done the interpreting. He had plenty of time, since Anny could only be spared for such short intervals. But at least he had been true to his principles. Holland, Parsons, Charrington and Dubois weren’t working in the open air at all. Difficulties about models
forgotten, they were sketching each other in the shed. The background of Palourde’s not very picturesque jetty could be dashed in later.

Anny appeared promptly for the next three days to stand, with her crochet, on the back steps. Hackett didn’t mind her blank expression, having accepted from the first that she was never likely to smile. The red shawl, though – that hadn’t appeared. He could, perhaps, buy one in St Malo. He ached for the contrast between the copper-coloured hair and the scarlet shawl. But he felt it wrong to introduce something from outside Palourde.

‘Anny, I have to tell you that you’ve disappointed me.’

‘I told you I had no red shawl.’

‘You could have borrowed one.’

Charrington, who was supposed to understand women, and even to have had a great quarrel with Parsons about some woman or other, only said: ‘She can’t borrow what isn’t there. I’ve been trying ever since we came here to borrow a decent tin-opener. I’ve tried to make it clear that I’d give it back.’

Best to leave the subject alone. But the moment Anny turned up next day he found himself saying: ‘You could borrow one from a friend, that was what I meant.’

‘I haven’t any friends,’ said Anny.

Hackett paused in the business of lighting his pipe. ‘An empty life for you, then, Anny.’

‘You don’t know what I want,’ she said, very low.

‘Oh, everybody wants the same things. The only difference is what they will do to get them.’

‘You don’t know what I want, and you don’t know what I feel,’ she said, still in the same mutter. There was, however, a faint note of something more than the contradiction that came so naturally to her, and Hackett was a good-natured man.

‘I’m sorry I said you disappointed me, Anny. The truth is I find it rather a taxing business, standing here drawing in the street.’

‘I don’t know why you came here in the first place. There’s nothing here, nothing at all. If it’s oysters you want, they’re better at Cancale. There’s nothing here to tell one morning from another, except to see if it’s raining … Once they brought in three drowned bodies, two men and a boy, a whole boat’s crew, and laid them out on the tables in the fish market, and you could see blood and water running out of their mouths … You can spend your whole life here, wash, pray, do your work, and all the time you might just as well not have been born.’

She was still speaking so that she could scarcely be heard. The passers-by went un-noticing down Palourde’s badly paved street. Hackett felt disturbed. It had never occurred to him that she would speak, without prompting, at such length.

‘I’ve received a telegram from Paris,’ said Parsons, who was standing at the shed door. ‘It’s taken its time about getting here. They gave it me at the post office.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Hackett, feeling it was likely to be about money.

‘Well, that he’s coming – Bonvin, I mean. As is my custom every summer, I am touring the coasts – it’s a kind of informal inspection, you see. – Expect me, then, on the 27th for dinner at the Hôtel du Port.’

‘It’s impossible.’ Parsons suggested that, since Dubois had brought his banjo with him, they might get up some kind of impromptu entertainment. But he had to agree that one couldn’t associate old Bonvin with entertainment.

He couldn’t, surely, be expected from Paris before six. But when they arrived, all of them except Hackett carrying their portfolios, at the hotel’s front door, they recognized, from the moment it opened, the voice of Bonvin. Hackett looked round, and felt his head swim. The bar, dark, faded, pickled in its own long-standing odours, crowded with stools and barrels, with the air of being older than Palourde, as though Palourde had been built round it without daring to disturb it, was swept and emptied now except for a central table and chairs such as Hackett had never seen in the hotel. At the head of the table sat old Bonvin. ‘Sit down, gentlemen! I am your host!’ The everyday malicious dry voice, but a different Bonvin, in splendid seaside dress, a yellow waistcoat, a cravat. Palourde was indifferent to artists, but Bonvin had imposed himself as a professor.

‘They are used to me here. They keep a room for me which I think is not available to other guests and they are always ready to take a little trouble for me when I come.’