The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (14 page)

So when the gallery officially closed at five, Sally once more found herself alone. After the bustle of the day, everything had now fallen silent. Sally went round the gallery doing her usual checks. It was then that something very disturbing happened.

She was in the far gallery turning off the mechanism which sprang the Cora Crippen Jack-in-the-box when she distinctly heard a female voice in the main room say:

‘That bloody tiger! Ken loved it, but I always hated it.’

Sally ran into the next room but no-one was there. For the first time she felt fear. Being naturally strong-willed and brave she hated herself for being afraid so she deliberately took her time to leave the gallery. Having locked the door behind her and walked down to the first landing she stopped to listen for a long time. Nothing. Then, as soon as she had put her foot on the next step down, the whispering started, just as she had heard it before, coming from her gallery. Sally ran down the stairs and did not stop running until she was out in New Bond Street with the dear sweet traffic.

That evening Sally met her sister and some friends and went out to dinner. When she got back to her flat she went straight to bed and fell asleep. Three hours later, at four in the morning, she woke up suddenly. She was not particularly alarmed, but she knew she had woken up because she had thought of something. A connection had been made in her brain during the hours of sleep which she must now recall. It had to do with that odd remark she had overheard: ‘Her head was staring at me out of the fire.’ Then suddenly she remembered.

When Tina was constructing the installation, she had told Sally all kinds of stories about the murderers whose relics she was placing in little trails across the gallery floor. One story concerning the trunk murderer Patrick Mahon was particularly memorable. When Mahon finally confessed after being sentenced to death, he recalled how he had dismembered his mistress to put her in the trunk. He did this in the living room of a small seaside bungalow. When he cut off the head he threw it on the fire to see if it would burn. The heat of the fire caused the eyes of the corpse to open and it seemed to him that they had looked straight at him. That was the story. Sally did not sleep again that night. Towards morning her turning, troubled mind did find some tranquillity out of sheer exhaustion, but not for long. At eight o’clock the telephone rang and it was the police.

The office below Sally’s gallery employed overnight cleaners. At about four in the morning one of these had heard a sudden commotion from the floor above. He can’t have been very courageous because it was some time before he and a fellow cleaner had ventured upstairs to see what had happened. They found that the door of the gallery had been broken open. They entered and looked round. It was some time before they realised (or were willing to realise) that the figure sprawled across the bloodstained sofa in the main installation was not a sculpture but the real corpse of a man.

Who was it? The police said that they didn’t know, but the body had been removed to the police mortuary and would she try to identify it and make a statement? A car would be calling for her shortly. She asked how had the man died. The police said enigmatically that there were no obvious signs of a violent death.

Sally did not recognise the body at first, the features were so distorted; it was the signet ring that did it. One of Jake’s affectations—and he had had many—was that he was the scion of an ancient and immensely aristocratic Polish family. The family crest, an eagle devouring a hare, was engraved on a gold ring which he wore on the little finger of the left hand. Once she had recognised the ring Sally was able to identify the face as Jake’s. The mouth was agape and the eyes stared: it was like a statue of Fear personified. After explaining who he was Sally asked again how had he died? The police would go no further than to say that it appeared to be some kind of heart seizure and that ‘foul play was not suspected’. Sally had difficulty in preventing herself from laughing hysterically: the words ‘foul play’ seemed so hideously inappropriate.

Later that morning Sally gave the news to Tina who broke down and wept convulsively. Whether it was grief or remorse, the reaction was terrible. Apparently, that very morning Tina had been told in confidence that she had won the Turner Prize. How she wished Jake could have been there to share it with her, she wailed. Sally took advantage of this moment to say that in view of all the circumstances she would like to close the exhibition early, in fact as soon as possible, in fact that very day. Most of the art objects for sale had, after all, been bought. Tina impulsively agreed.

Sally had the exhibition dismantled the same afternoon. When she had seen to the despatch of the artefacts to their various buyers, she closed the gallery and went to stay with her godmother in the Dordogne.

The celebrations surrounding the award of the Turner Prize that year were rendered even more unpleasant than they usually are by a group of Animal Rights protesters who claimed that Tina’s variations on
Tiger in the Snow
were ‘speciesist’, an ugly word. By this, presumably, they meant that her work was insulting to tigers. One commentator observed that, after all, no tigers had protested and anyway it was not the tiger which had been insulted but the intelligence of the art-loving public. Generally, however, Tina’s award was reckoned to be well deserved, and everyone was touched by the moving tribute she made in the acceptance speech to her ‘late partner’, Jake Pomorski.

**

Roger Banbury no longer paints wildlife, but his income is not diminished. His talents are now concentrated on the representation of Spitfires and steam engines, and he never relinquishes his copyrights.

Tina Lukas’s work now consists entirely of copies of
Tiger in the Snow
, often with bizarre variations. Sometimes the tiger is shown wearing Wellington boots, or a rakish Trilby hat; sometimes he holds in his mouth a coat hanger on which is a bloodstained cardigan; sometimes the face of the tiger carries the lugubrious features of the Prince of Wales. Many critics are fascinated by the turn Tina’s art has taken; they say that her work is an ironic commentary on . . . well, opinions differ, but irony always comes into it somewhere.

There are others, of course, who simply say that Tina is mad. But in the Art World today what is sane and what is mad? Indeed, are such antiquated categories relevant at all to the modern cultural scene? Sally Cochrane has decided that these questions are not worth asking, let alone answering, and now runs a highly successful craft shop in Nuneaton.

GARDEN GODS

Julian and Antonia (Jules and Tonia) Paige were a notoriously successful London couple. They were tall and attractive and in their late thirties; they had highly paid jobs as financial analysts in merchant banks; they had two daughters of eight and ten, both, like their parents, gifted and bright. They also had a wide and admiring circle of friends to whom it came as a shock when they decided to give up their jobs and live permanently in the country. A cottage in the Cotswolds, or even Suffolk, for weekends was acceptable, but ‘going the whole hog’ was looked at askance. Reactions ranged from anxious warnings and downright disapproval to grudging envy.

The decision Jules and Tonia had made was not an impulsive one. It had been contemplated over several years while they saved large sums from their salaries; and they knew what they were going to do with their rustication. They would buy a substantial property and create a garden of great beauty from which visitors could buy plants. Workshops and residential courses on horticultural matters would be run from the house. The Paiges flattered themselves on having green fingers: Tonia was the plantswoman and Jules the designer.

At weekends they would set off in search of their ideal property which was to be an old house, spacious and stylish but not grandiose, set in several acres of well drained soil. Jules and Tonia had the reputation among their friends of being lucky, a reputation which appeared to be well deserved when, sooner even than they expected, they came across exactly the right place for a surprisingly modest price.

Wyvern Manor, not far from Westhill in the heart of the Cotswolds, was an eighteenth-century house of compact elegance set in seventeen acres of ground on the crest of a gentle slope. Its natural advantages were enhanced for the Paiges by the fact that it already possessed a horticultural reputation, albeit a faded one.

In the 1920s it had come into the hands of the Honourable Adrian Clavering, the younger son of Lord Swinbrook. Adrian Clavering had the misfortune to have been born the one artistic member of a very conventional aristocratic family. After Eton and Oxford he had shunned a traditional Clavering career in the army or the diplomatic service in favour of the arts. Which one of them he could never quite decide, for his gifts, though various, were thinly spread.

He scraped an acquaintance with the Sitwells and contributed a couple of pale poems (‘Harlequin in Montmartre’ and ‘Pan on the Saxophone’) to their journal
Wheels.
He painted for a while in the Cubist manner, and was nearly commissioned to design a ballet for Diaghilev. He played the piano prettily enough and might, with more application, have become a distinguished professional interpreter of Ravel and Debussy. But nothing quite stuck—he had the sensitivity but not the steel of the true artist—and so he drifted, living the life of a mildly impoverished but socially acceptable bachelor-about-town.

When a favourite aunt died leaving him Wyvern Manor and a substantial sum of money, Clavering found his vocation. He emptied the house of its Victorian accretions and filled it with good Georgian furniture and well-chosen modern paintings. He completely redesigned the garden, turning it into a place of delicate neo-classical fantasy, full of lichened statues, fountains and eccentric topiary. At the end of a long yew walk he built a folly in the form of a classical temple to the god Pan. He gathered strange botanical specimens from all corners of the globe and planted them with taste. His garden became famous to many (open to the public on the first Sunday of the month from May to October) and his hospitality was enjoyed by a select few.

In 1931 he published his first book,
Green Thoughts
(‘Decorated by Rex Whistler’), about the making of the Wyvern garden. The elegant if mannered prose together with its combination of wit, recondite horticultural scholarship and practical advice made the book a distinct though minor success.
In a Green Shade,
the sequel, and other works of a similar nature followed. The golden years for Adrian Clavering were the early 1930s when he was esteemed, fulfilled and still young. They were marred only by an unsatisfactory private life whose main theme was a febrile, at times self-destructive quest for the perfect partner. A number of young men came and went, some taking with them substantial amounts of his money when they left.

The war years were lean ones in which Clavering was forced to give over some of his acres to the growing of potatoes and other unattractive but useful vegetation. After the war Clavering re-made his garden, but he was older, less energetic, and yet no wiser in his choice of companions. Visitors still came from far and wide to see the Wyvern garden; Clavering still wrote occasional articles in
Country Life
, but everyone who knew agreed that it was ‘not what it was’.

Adrian Clavering was found dead in his Temple of Pan one bitter January morning in 1971. There were mysterious circumstances surrounding his death which the police never cleared up. The property was inherited by a great nephew who, being a normal philistine Clavering, sold the Georgian furniture with the modern paintings, and neglected the garden. When he left his wife, she was allowed to live at Wyvern rent-free as part of the divorce settlement, and there she drank herself into an early grave. By an odd coincidence she too was found dead one morning in the Temple of Pan. It was on her death that Wyvern was sold to Jules and Tonia Paige.

After essential repairs to the fabric had been made the Paige family arrived with their removal van one bright, cool morning in April. The yellow Cotswold stone of Wyvern Manor shone almost like gold. Its beauty struck all of them, but to Jules it did not seem an altogether friendly kind of beauty. Tonia walked up to the house and tore down some of the ivy which was masking its architectural beauties. Their two daughters, Emilia and Tamsyn, began to run about in a great state of excitement.

‘Millie, Tam, don’t go too far away. We’ve got a lot to do,’ said Jules, who was seized by an irrational fear that they would lose themselves in the overgrown garden. The family cat, Hermes, lolloped cautiously out of the car, walked a few paces towards the house and then sat down on the gravel drive to stare at the building. His gaze was the still, intense one he usually reserved for potential prey.

The hall was empty except for a large thin rectangular package wrapped in brown paper leaning against a pillar. Jules smiled at his wife.

‘Tonia, darling,’ he said. ‘I think it’s for you.’

‘What?’

‘A house-warming present from me to you. Open it.’

‘Oh how sweet! Thank you, darling.’

Tonia began to unwrap the package with slight feelings of irritation. Jules had on what she secretly called his ‘Clever Me’ expression, a little schoolboyish smirk. He often wore it when he was giving her something which he really wanted for himself.

It was a picture, the head and shoulders of a man in his mid twenties set against a black background, superbly painted.

‘It’s a Glyn Philpott,’ said Jules, half reading his wife’s thoughts.

‘Yes, I can see. He
was
good, wasn’t he?’ said Tonia, a little grudgingly. ‘But who’s it of?’

‘Can’t you guess? Adrian Clavering, of course. I thought we had to have him with us, so to speak, if we were going to restore his garden. To inspire us.’

‘Oh, brilliant! Thank you, darling. How did you get hold of it?’

As the removal men brought in their furniture and effects Jules told his family the story. He had known the picture existed from a reproduction he had seen in a book. When he found out that the Clavering great nephew from whom they bought Wyvern owned the painting, Jules had persuaded him to part with it for only three thousand pounds. Of course, the great nephew had not known who Glyn Philpott was and so Jules was able to get it for less than he should have paid, but that, Jules implied, was the great nephew’s fault for being a philistine. Tonia was troubled by her husband’s story: it was not that she felt any qualms about the great nephew, but she did not like Jules glorying in his smart deal. They were, after all, supposed to be leaving all that sort of thing behind.

The picture had the rich, old-masterish glamour which Philpott managed to impart to his best work. Superficially it was just a society portrait, but it had depth. Clavering in half profile was staring out of the picture to his right. An orchid in his buttonhole suggested an earlier, more dandified age than the 1930s. The head was narrow, the hair black and sleek, the eyes large, dark brown, long lashed. Elegantly almost-handsome was the first impression; the second impression was less easy to define.

There was something about the tilt of the head, the half smile, the nervous intensity of the glance that suggested unease. Poise was aimed at but not wholly achieved. He seemed to be hungry for something which he could not quite grasp or define. That was Tonia’s impression, and she hoped that his picture would not be put in too prominent a position because its presence might become unsettling.

The Paiges’ first few weeks at Wyvern were spent on the house, redecorating and generally, as Tonia put it, ‘making it our own’. Though he never said so Jules began to feel that they would never make Wyvern entirely their own; nor did he want them to. The legacy of the past should continue to weave its spell. Nevertheless, this settling in period was an exciting time despite all the hard work.

There were, inevitably, one or two elements in their situation which made for unease. The first of them, trivial but disturbing nonetheless, were the empty bottles. There were hundreds of them: some were wine bottles, but they were mostly gin and vodka bottles, and the Paige family found them in every conceivable space not immediately visible to the eye. They were the only traces to be found of Wyvern’s previous occupant, the divorced, alcoholic Mrs Clavering. Hardly a day went by without a new cache being found. ‘I honestly think they breed,’ said Tonia who, with Jules, strenuously tried to make a joke of it in front of the children. Alone, when Millie and Tam were in bed, they confessed to finding these discoveries depressing.

‘Poor wretched woman,’ said Tonia. ‘What a bastard that husband of hers must be.’

‘It makes me gladder than ever that I did him over the Glyn Philpott,’ said Jules.

Tonia grimaced and turned her head away from him. ‘But why on earth didn’t she just put them in the dustbin?’ she asked. ‘Why keep the damn things?’

‘Her way of making a mark. We all have to leave a mark.’

‘But this isn’t an unhappy house. Is it?’

‘Oh no. It’s going to be a very happy house indeed.’

**

Tonia got the girls into a good nearby primary school and set about making herself part of the community. She made use of what local shops there were, even though the supermarkets at Evesham were far cheaper, and for purely social purposes she went to church. Everyone was perfectly pleasant, though she was irritated by the fact that whenever she mentioned that she and Jules were remaking the Wyvern garden, the reply was always: ‘Oh. Good luck!’ spoken in such a way as to imply that it was an impossible task, but they were welcome to try.

They found that, after London, society in that part of Gloucestershire seemed a little restricted. Of course, they missed their metropolitan friends, but it was more than that. There were in the main only two social classes: the commercial and agricultural workers and those loosely described as ‘landed gentry’. Though Jules and Tonia considered themselves and were considered to be in the latter group, they did not find many sympathetic spirits among them. In London, social categories tended to be less rigid and had more to do with interest and occupation than lineage and wealth. The gentry still held fast to feudal beliefs and pursuits which revolved around horses and hunting. Gardening was looked on as a secondary activity; music and literature, Jules and Tonia’s other passions, were barely thought of at all. The Sunday morning drinks parties, common forms of entertainment in that part of the world, had an extraordinary sameness about them: the same white wine—or Pimms in Summer—the same canapés made and served by the same catering firm, the same Snaffles and Munnings prints on the walls (or originals in the case of the ‘seriously’ rich), the same chintz covers, the same people. Jules and Tonia, however, were not too worried about this lack of social diversity, as they were too busy creating their own world at Wyvern.

By the end of May the house had been fitted up more or less to their satisfaction and they were ready to devote all their efforts to the garden. A first serious inspection revealed that they had a huge task ahead of them. Large areas of the grounds had become impassable thickets of bramble and nettles; in the walled garden every glass pane of the Victorian greenhouses was smashed; all the ponds and water features, of which there had been many, were dried up or choked with mud and reeds. Only the Temple of Pan remained undamaged, though its bronze doors absolutely refused to open. Irritated by this they began to refer to the Temple as ‘The Folly’, and it became to them a symbol of the difficult and possibly foolhardy task which they had undertaken. If, as was their plan, they were going to open to the public the following June, Jules and Tonia would need assistance.