To the Hilt (16 page)

“How much?” I asked, resigned, and negotiated a minor king’s ransom.

“Always at your service, Mr. Kinloch.”

 

 

It rained all the way up the muddy track to the bothy. Once there, I sat in the comparative comfort of the Land-Rover outside my locked front door and made inroads into the battery power of Jed’s portable phone. Poor reception, but possible.

It was still office hours in Reading. I tried Tobias Tollright first with trepidation, but he was reasonably reassuring.

“Mrs. Morden wants to talk to you. She held the meeting of creditors. They did at least attend.”

“And that’s good?”

“Encouraging.”

I said, “Tobe ...”

“What is it?”

“Young and Uttley.”

Tobias laughed. “He’s a genius. Wait and see. I wouldn’t recommend him to everyone, or everyone to him, but you’re two of a kind. You both think sideways. You’ll get on well together. Give him a chance.”

“Did he tell you that I engaged him?”

“Er ...” The guilt in his voice raised horrible doubts in my mind.

“He surely didn’t tell you what I asked him to do?” I said.

“Er...”

“So much for discretion.”

Tobias said again, lightheartedly, “Give him a chance, Al.”

It was too late by then, I thought ruefully, to do anything else.

I phoned Margaret Morden and listened to her crisp voice.

“I laid out all the figures. The creditors all needed smelling salts. Norman Quorn took off with every last available cent, a really remarkable job. But I’ve persuaded the bank and the Inland Revenue to try to come up with solutions, and we are meeting again on Wednesday, when they’ve had a chance to consult their head offices. The best that one can say is that the brewery is basically still trading at a profit, and while it still has the services of Desmond Finch and the present brewmaster, it should go on doing so.”

“Did you ... did you ask the creditors about the race?”

“They see your point. They’ll discuss it on Wednesday.”

“There’s hope, then?”

“But they want Sir Ivan back in charge.”

I said fervently, “So do I.”

“Meanwhile you may still sign for him. He is adamant it should be you and no one else.”

“Not his daughter?”

“I asked him myself. He agreed to speak to me. Alexander, he said. No one else.”

“Then I’ll do anything you need, and... Margaret ...”

“Yes?”

“What are you wearing, today?”

She gasped, and then laughed. “Coffee and cream.”

“Soft and pretty?”

“It gets subliminal results. Wednesday—a gentle practical dark blue, touches of white. Businesslike but not threatening.”

“Appearances help.”

“Indeed they do ...” Her voice tailed off hesitantly. “There’s something odd, though.”

“Odd about what?”

“About the appearances of the brewery’s accounts.” Alarmed, I said, “What exactly is odd?”

“I don’t know. I can’t identify it. You know when you can smell something but you don’t know what it is? It’s like that.”

“You worry me,” I said.

“It’s probably nothing.”

“I trust your instincts.”

She sighed. “Tobias Tollright drew up the accounts. He’s very reliable. If there were anything incongruous, he would have noticed.”

“Don’t alarm the creditors,” I pleaded. “They are interested only in the future. In getting their money. What I feel—a whisper of disquiet—is in the past. I’ll sleep on it. Solutions often come in the night.”

I wished her useful dreams, and sat on my Scottish mountainside in the rain-spattered Land-Rover realizing how little I knew, and how much I relied on Tobe and Margaret and Young (or Uttley) for answers to questions I hadn’t the knowledge to ask.

I wanted to paint.

I could feel the compulsion, the fusing of mental vision with the physical longing to feel the paint in my hands that came always before I did any picture worth looking at: the mysterious impetus that one had to call creation, whether the results were worth the process or not.

Inside the bothy there was an old familiar easel and new painting supplies from London, and I had to instruct myself severely that two more phone calls had to be made before I could light a lamp (new from the camping shop) and prepare a canvas ready for morning.

Tack cotton duck onto a stretched frame. Prime three times with gesso to produce a good surface, let it dry. Lay on the Payne’s gray mixed with titanium white. Make working drawings. Plan. Sleep. Dream.

I phoned my mother.

Ivan was no worse, no better. He had agreed to talk to some woman or other about saving the brewery, but he still wanted me to act for him, as he couldn’t yet summon the strength.

“OK,” I said.

“The real trouble at present,” my mother said, “is Surtees.”

“What about him?”

“He is
paranoid.
Patsy is furious with him. Patsy is furious about
everything.
I do wish you would come back, Alexander, you’re the only person she can’t bully.”

“Is she bullying Ivan?”

“She bullies him terribly, but he can’t see it. He told Oliver Grantchester he wants to write a codicil to his will, and it seems Oliver mentioned it to Patsy, and now Patsy is demanding to know what Ivan wants a codicil for, and for once Ivan won’t tell her, and oh
dear,
it’s so bad for Ivan. And she’s practically
living
here, she’s at his elbow every minute.”

“And Surtees? Why is he paranoid?”

“He says he’s being followed everywhere by a skinhead.”

I said weakly,
“What?”

“I know. It’s stupid. No one else has seen this skinhead. Surtees says the skinhead disappears whenever he, Surtees, is with other people. Patsy’s livid with him. I do wish they wouldn’t crowd in here all the time. Ivan needs rest and quiet. Come back, Alexander ... please.”

The overt uncharacteristic plea was almost too much. Too many people wanted too much. I could see that they needed someone to decide things—Ivan, my mother, Tobias, Margaret, even my uncle Robert—but I didn’t feel strong enough myself to give them all strength.

I wanted to
paint.

To my mother I said, “I’ll come back soon.”

“When?”

Dear heaven, I thought, and said helplessly, “Wednesday night.”

We said goodbye and, finally, I phoned Jed.

He said, “All hell has broken loose at the castle.”

“What sort of hell?”

“Andrew—Himself’s young grandson—has run off with the King Alfred Gold Cup.”

I laughed. “Well,” Jed said, “I suppose it’s quite funny.”

“What exactly happened?”

It seemed that soon after Himself and his guests returned to the castle for a good Scots afternoon tea of hot scones and fortified cups, Dr. Zoë Lang had made an unheralded return visit, bringing with her an expert in precious and semiprecious stones. She couldn’t rest, she said, while her evaluation of the King Alfred Cup was incomplete.

Himself, Dr. Lang, the jeweler and the fishing guests had all accordingly gone into the dining room in the quest for truth.

The cardboard box had been retrieved from the sideboard and the copies of Dickens removed. The black leather cube had been lifted out and the gold clasp undone, and in the white satin nest ... nothing.

My cousin James, who had returned from seeing his family onto the air shuttle from Glasgow to London, had instantly said he would tan the hide off his elder son, who had been fascinated by the Cup, but the Spacewatch good guy could not at that moment be reached for questioning, as he was by then somewhere on the road back to boarding school with his mother, who had no phone in her car.

Jed said, “I called in to see Himself about estate business, and I found this old lady rather rudely telling him he shouldn’t be trusted to keep the Kinloch Hilt safe from robbers if he couldn’t guard things from his own grandson, and Himself just stood there benevolently agreeing with her, which seemed to make her even crosser. Anyway, after she’d gone, he asked me to ask you if you thought he ought to worry about Andrew, so do you?”

“No.”

Jed’s sigh was half a chuckle.

“I told Himself you had carried out of the castle one of those big old game bags from the gun room, and he beamed. But what’s it all about? They were saying that that cup is a racing challenge trophy, that’s all. Is it really worth a lot?”

“It depends where you stand,” I said. “It’s gold. If you’re rich, it’s just an expensive bauble. If you’re a thief, it’s worth murder. In between—you balance the greed against the risks.”

“And to you? To Himself? To Sir Ivan?”

When I didn’t reply at once, he said, “Al, are you still there?”

“Yes ... I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to find out.”

 

 

On Tuesday morning a cold front swept the sky dramatically, clearing away the gray rain and leaving a high washed pale blue cosmos with a northern yellowish tint of sunlight. The bothy faced west, which often gave me long mornings of near-perfect painting light, followed by warm afternoon glows that I’d at first subconsciously translated into mellowing glazes and then, when I found out those pictures sold most quickly, into a commercial technique. I did paint for a living: I also earned money so that I could paint to please only myself, when I wanted to.

On that Tuesday, on the gray-white underpainting, I lightly drew in pencil the head of a still-young woman, with a face already strongly defined by character, a face of good bone structure, of intelligence, of purpose. I drew her not looking straight ahead but as though she saw something to her right, and I drew her not smiling, not disapproving, not arrogant, not self-conscious, but simply
being.

When the proportions and the expression were near to what I intended, I painted the whole head in light and dark intensities of ultramarine blue, mostly transparent, mixed with water. I painted dark blue shadows round the edges of the canvas, leaving light areas round the head itself, and worked dark shadows round the eyes and under the chin until I had a fairly complete monochrome portrait in blue on light gray.

She looked as I thought Dr. Lang might have looked forty years earlier.

I had learned my trade from four different painters, one in Scotland, one in England, one in Rome and one in California, and had watched and assimilated and practiced until I knew what paint would do, and what it wouldn’t. Unable to afford art school, with a father dead and a mother newly married and rebuilding her own life, I had offered my services as cook, cleaner, gofer and dogsbody to the four accomplished painters in turn, asking only for payment in food, a patch of floor to sleep on and scraps of paper and paint.

After three years of such profitable drudgery I’d received a surprise inquiry from my uncle: What, he wanted to know, would I like for a twenty-first coming-of-age birthday present? I’d asked for the use of a tumbledown shed on the mountainous part of his estate and a pass to give me an occasional game on the local golf course (which he owned).

He’d given me the use of the hut (once an overnight shelter for shepherds at lambing time), full membership of the golf club and some money for paints. Two years later he’d sent me to Lambourn to make portraits of the horses he had in training with Emily Jane Cox.

After I’d run from Lambourn he’d moved me from the hut to the sturdier but ruined bothy and had paid for it to be made habitable; and a year after that he’d asked me to take care of the Honor of the Kinlochs.

I couldn’t have refused him, even if I’d wanted to, which I hadn’t.

I had all my younger life been in awe of him. It was only during the past five years that I’d grown old enough for a more adult understanding. He had of course taken the place of the father I’d lost, but much more than that he had become friend, partner and ally: and never would I trade on that privilege, either with him or within the family.

Brooding over my blue woman, I ate a cheese and chutney sandwich and in the afternoon overpainted the background with browns and crimsons, glazing and rubbing together the colors in the method called scumbling until I had a deep rich background that wasn’t identifiably blue or brown or red but which receded from the eye, leaving the face itself startlingly near and clear.

Tuesday night I slept again on the floor in the sleeping bag and dreamed of colors, and early on Wednesday, as soon as it was light, began overpainting flesh onto the blue bones, working from light areas to dark, giving her strength and brain but not a peach-skin luminous beauty. By afternoon she was a woman who would both excel in an academic world and comfort a strong man in bed ... or so, in my mind, I saw her.

At about the time when every day Jed could be found in the estate office writing notes on current affairs, I phoned him.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Any news of Andrew and the Cup?”

“The poor little bugger swore he didn’t take it. Himself says he believes him. Anyway, the damned thing seems to have vanished.”

“Are you alone in the office?” I asked.

“You guessed right. I’m not.”

“Well, listen. I’m going back to London tonight from Dalwhinnie station. Can you meet me there, and if so, when? And could you bring with you an old bedsheet?”

“Er...”

“A bedsheet,” I repeated. “People I see in London will know I am not in the bothy. While I’m in London, the bothy is as secure as one blow from a sledgehammer on that nice new lock.”

“
Al
.”

“I’ve been painting a picture that I really do
not
want stolen or ruined. Please could you bring a sheet to wrap it in? Please will you keep it safe for me?”

“Yes, of course,” he said hesitantly, “but what about ... anything else?”