The Shell Seekers (5 page)

Nancy had never heard of Mrs. Leeper.

George did nothing to help. He simply appeared, sometime during all this commotion, ate his boiled egg, drank a cup of tea, and went. She heard the Rover going down the drive as she frantically stacked dishes on the draining board, ready for Mrs. Croftway to deal with at her own pleasure.

"Well, if you didn't have my geography book . . ."

Outside the door, the dogs howled. She let them in, and this reminded her of their dinners, so she filled their bowls with biscuits and opened a tin of Bonzo and, in her agitation, cut her thumb on the raw edge of the lid.

"Gosh, you're clumsy," Rupert told her.

Nancy turned her back on him and ran the cold tap over her thumb until it had stopped bleeding.

"If I don't have that twenty-five pence, Miss Rawlings is going to be furious. . . ."

She ran upstairs to put on her face. There was no time for gently blending rouge or outlining her eyebrows, and the finished result was far from satisfactory, but it couldn't be helped. There wasn't time. From her wardrobe she pulled her fur coat, the fur hat that matched it. She found gloves, her Mappin and Webb lizardskin handbag. Into this she emptied the contents of her everyday bag, and then, of course, it wouldn't close. No matter. It couldn't be helped. There wasn't time.

She rushed downstairs again, calling for the children. By some miracle, they appeared, gathering up their school-bags, Melanie jamming on her unbecoming hat. Out of the back-door and around to the garage they trooped, into the car—thank God the engine started first go—and they were off.

She drove the children to their separate schools, dumping them out at the gates with scarcely time to say goodbye before she was off again, speeding for Cheltenham. It was ten minutes past nine when she parked the car in the station car-park and twelve minutes past when she bought her cheap day return. At the bookstall, she jumped the queue with what she hoped was a charming smile, and bought herself a
Daily Telegraph
, and—wild extravagance—a copy of
Harpers and Queen
. After she had paid for it, she saw that it was out of date—last month's edition, in fact—but there was no time to point this out and get her money back. Besides, it didn't really matter being out of date; glossy and shiny, it would still be a marvellous treat. Telling herself this, she emerged onto the platform just as the London train drew in. She opened a door, any door, got in and found a seat. She was breathless, her heart fluttering. She closed her eyes. This, she told herself, must be how it feels when you have just escaped from fire.

After a bit, after a few deep breaths and a little reassuring chat to herself, she felt stronger. The train, mercifully, was very warm. She opened her eyes and loosened the fastenings of her fur. Arranging herself more comfortably, she looked out of the window at the iron-hard winter landscape that flew by, and allowed her frayed nerves to be lulled by the rhythm of the train. She enjoyed train journeys. The telephone could not ring, you could sit down, you didn't have to think.

The headache had gone. She took her compact from her handbag and inspected her face in its small mirror, dabbed some powder on her nose, worked her mouth to settle her lipstick. The new magazine lay on her lap, as full of delights as an unopened box of dark-coated, soft-centered chocolates. She began to turn the pages and saw advertisements for furs, for houses in the south of Spain, for time-sharing estates in the Scottish Highlands; for jewellery, and cosmetics that would not only make you look better but actually repair your skin; for cruise ships sailing to the sun; for ... Her desultory leafings were abruptly halted, her attention caught. A full-page spread, inserted by Boothby's, the Fine Art Dealers, announced a sale of Victorian art that was to take place in their Bond Street Galleries on Wednesday, the twenty-first of March. To illustrate this, there was reproduced a picture by Lawrence Stern, 1865-1946. The painting was entitled
The Water Carriers
(1904) and depicted a group of young women in various postures, bearing copper urns on shoulder or hip. Studying them, Nancy decided eventually, that they must be slaves, for their feet were bare and their faces unsmiling (poor things, no wonder, the urns looked dreadfully heavy) and their garments minimal, flimsy draperies of grape-blue and rust-red, with an almost unnecessary revealment of rounded breast and rosy nipple.

Neither George nor Nancy were interested in art, any more than they were interested in music or the theatre. The old Vicarage had, of course, its fair share of pictures, the sporting prints mandatory for any self-respecting country house, and some oils depicting dead stags or faithful hounds with pheasants in their mouths, which George had inherited from his father. Once, with an hour or two to spare in London, they had gone to the Tate Gallery and dutifully shuffled through an exhibition of Constables, but Nancy's only recollection of that occasion was a lot of woolly green trees and the fact that her feet had hurt.

But even Constable was preferable to this painting. She gazed at it, finding it hard to believe that any person should want such a horror hanging on the wall, let alone pay good money for it. If she had been lumbered with such an object, it would have ended its days either in some forgotten loft or on top of a bonfire.

But it was not for any aesthetic reason that Nancy's atten-tion had been caught by
The Water Carriers
. The reason that she gazed at it with so much interest was the fact that it was by Lawrence Stern. For he had been Penelope Reeling's father, and so, Nancy's grandfather.

The strange thing was that she was almost totally unfamiliar with his work. By the time that she was born, his fame—at its peak at the turn of the century—had dwindled and died, his output long sold, dispersed and forgotten. In her mother's house in Oakley Street there had hung only three pictures by Lawrence Stern, and two of these made up a pair of panels, unfinished, depicting a couple of allegorical nymphs scattering lilies onto slopes of daisy-dotted grass.

The third picture hung on the wall of the ground-floor hall, just below the staircase, the only space in the house that could accommodate its considerable size. An oil, and product of Stern's later years, it was called
The Shell Seekers
. It had a lot of white-capped sea, and a beach, and a sky full of blowing clouds. When Penelope moved from Oakley Street to Podmore's Thatch, these three precious possessions had moved with her, the panels to end up on the landing, and
The Shell Seekers
to dwarf the sitting room, with its low, beamed ceiling. Nancy now scarcely noticed them, so familiar were they, as much part of her mother's house as the sagging sofas and armchairs, the old-fashioned flower arrangements crammed into blue-and-white jugs, the delicious smell of cooking.

In truth, for years Nancy had not even thought of Lawrence Stem, but now, sitting in the train, in her furs and her boots, memory caught at her coat-tails and jerked her back into the past. Not that there was much to remember. She had been born at the end of 1940, in Cornwall, in the little cottage hospital in Porthkerris, and had spent the war years at Cam Cottage, beneath the shelter of Lawrence Stern's roof. But her babyhood recollections of the old man were misty—more the awareness of a presence rather than a person. Had he ever taken her on his knee, or for a walk, or read aloud to her? If he had, then she had forgotten. It seemed that no impression was made upon her childish mind until that final day, when, with the war safely over, she and her mother had left Porthkerris for all time and caught the train back to London. For some reason, this event touched Nancy's consciousness and stayed forever, clearly imprinted upon her memory.

He had come to the station to see them off. Very old, very tall, growing frail, leaning on a silver-handled stick, he had stood on the platform by the open window and kissed Penelope goodbye. His white hair had lain long on the tweed collar of his Inverness cape, and on his twisted, deformed hands he wore woollen mittens from which the useless fingers protruded, white and bloodless as bones.

At the very last moment, even as the train started to move, Penelope had snatched Nancy up into her arms, and the old man had reached out a hand and laid it against Nancy's rounded baby cheek. She remembered the cold of his hand, like marble against her skin. There was no time for more. The train gathered speed, the platform curved away, he stood, growing smaller, waving his great bfoad-brimmed black hat in a final farewell. And that was Nancy's first and last memory of him, for he died the following year.

Ancient history, she told herself. Nothing to get sentimental about. But extraordinary that any person, nowadays, should want to buy his work.
The Water Carriers
. She shook her head, uncomprehending, and then abandoned the conundrum and turned happily to the comforting unrealities of the Social Diary.

2

OLIVIA

The new photographer was called Lyle Medwin. He was a very young man with soft brown hair that looked as though it had been cut with the aid of a soup bowl, and a gentle, kind-eyed face. He had an unworldly air about him, like some dedicated novice, and Olivia found it hard to believe that he had successfully come so far along the rat race of his chosen profession without getting his throat cut.

They stood by the table at the window of her office, where he had laid out a selection of his past work for her inspection: two dozen or so large, glossy colour prints hopefully displayed for approval. Olivia had studied them minutely and decided that she liked them. In the first place, they were lucid. Fashion photographs, she always insisted, must show the clothes, the shape of them, the drape of a skirt, the texture of a sweater, and this came across with a punchy impact that would catch any eye. But as well, the pictures breathed with life, movement, enjoyment, even tenderness.

She picked one up. A man with the build of a full-back jogging through surf, blinding white track suit against a cobalt-blue sea. Tanned skin, sweat, the very smell of salty air and phys-ical well-being.

"Where did you take this?"

"Malibu. That was an ad I did for sports clothes."

"And this?" She took up another, an evening shot of a girl in blowing flame-coloured chiffon, her face turned towards the glow of the setting sun.

"That was Point Reays ... an editorial feature for Ameri-can Vogue."

She laid the prints down, turned to face him, leaning against the edge of the table. This brought her down to his height, and so their eyes were level.

"What's your professional experience?"

He shrugged. "Technical college. Then a bit of free-lancing, and then I joined Toby Stryber and worked with him for a couple of years as his assistant."

"It was Toby who told me about you."

"And then, when I left Toby, I went to Los Angeles. I've been living out there for the past three years."

"And doing well."

He smiled, deprecating. "Okay, I guess."

His clothes were pure Los Angeles. White sneakers, washed-out jeans, white shirt, a faded denim jacket. In deference to the bitter London weather, he had wound a coral-coloured cashmere muffler around his slender tanned neck. His appearance, though rumpled, was nevertheless deliciously clean, like fresh laundry, dried in the sunshine, but not yet ironed. She found him extremely attractive.

"Carla's told you the brief?" Carla was Olivia's Fashion Editor. "It's for the July issue, a last feature on holiday clothes before we go into tweeds for the moors."

"Sure . . . she mentioned location shots."

"Any suggestions where?"

"We talked about Ibiza ... I have contacts out there. . . ."

"Ibiza."

He was quick to accommodate her. "But if you'd rather someplace else, its okay by me. Morocco, maybe."

"No." She pushed herself away from the table and went back to her chair behind her desk. "We haven't used Ibiza for some time ... but I think not beach shots. Rural backgrounds would be a bit different, with goats and sheep and hardy peasants tilling fields. You could rope some of the locals in to add a bit of authenticity. They have wonderful faces and they love having their pictures taken. . . ."

"Great . . ."

"Talk to Carla about it then. . . ."

He hesitated. "So, I've got the job?"

"Of course you've got the job. Just do it well. . . ."

"Sure. Thanks . . ." He began to gather up his prints and stack them into a pile. The buzzer on Olivia's intercom rang, and she pressed the button and spoke to her secretary.

"Yes?"

"An outside call, Miss Keeling."

She looked at her watch. It was twelve-fifteen.

"Who is it? I'm just going out for lunch."

"A Mr. Henry Spotswood."

Henry Spotswood. Who the hell was Henry Spotswood? And then the name came back to her, and she remembered the man she had met two evenings before at the Ridgeways' cocktail party. Greying hair and as tall as she was. But he had called himself Hank.

"Put him through, Jane, would you?"

As she reached for the telephone, Lyle Medwin, the folder of photographs under his arm, made his soft-footed way across the room and opened the door.

" "Bye," he mouthed as he let himself out and she raised her hand and smiled, but he had already gone.

"Miss Keeling?"

"Yes."