A Winter's Child (20 page)

‘When are we to see the masterpiece?' enquired Nola who, despite her scorn, would nevertheless have been more than ready to arrange the unveiling herself, in the presence of well-prompted Crozier bank accounts and suitably prepared gentlemen of the press.

‘Leave him alone,' said Claire.

‘He won't answer the door,' the landlord's agent grumbled, having three times called to collect the rent. ‘I don't like it. Mr Crozier won't like it. It's queer.'

She put a ten-shilling note and two half-crowns into his hand. ‘Please leave him alone.'

‘You heard what the lady said,' advised Kit Hardie, looking at her from behind the rent-collector's shoulder in a way – knowingly, wryly – which made her blush.

And then it was over.

Kit Hardie came upon him one morning sitting at the kitchen table pouring the dregs of a whisky bottle into his tea, a large canvas propped behind him, its face to the wall.

‘It's finished then?'

‘It's finished.' And, far from triumphant, he looked chalk-white, fine-drawn, tight-stretched, breakable, disposable by the faintest breeze, his voice weighted and slurring with fatigue.

‘Mind if I have a look?'

It was the face of a young man, yet not exactly a face. Not Euan himself, although very like him, a young gentleman, very blond, very pure, a clean soul somehow in his eyes so that looking at them – recognizing their blue – Kit, who was not much given to analysis, swallowed uncomfortably and felt that he ought to look away. A private face and behind it, around it, the open faces of minute flowers, the texture of cloud and sand and good ploughed earth; eggshells in deep, soft nests, cosseted by the tips of bird-feathers; the contentedly breathing flanks of a dog; swift striding horses; a smiling landscape of young manhood, half-lost and half-rejected, but still beckoning. Still there.

‘I don't know …' said Kit who was rarely troubled, rarely at a loss for words.

‘What don't you know?' The weary voice all too clearly did not care.

‘I didn't have that kind of boyhood, Euan.'

‘What boyhood? It's a chocolate box picture of Sir Galahad in cricket flannels, looking at flowers.'

Kit didn't think so, A lost paradise. A doomed paradise, its invitation, its soft beckoning a cruel illusion, hair-line cracks in the eggshells warning of dead chicks in those deep, cosy nests; a foam of madness, no bigger than a snowflake, on the mouth of the dog; blight on the dainty under-petals of a flower; disease in the horse's hoof, the seeds of paralysis in the bird; mounds of earth that could serve as graves as well as furrows; a film of poison on the land. Paradise destroyed, decaying from within, rotting before the candid eyes, beneath the unsuspecting nostrils of the fine, fair young pilgrim, the Believer, the pure-hearted.

And although this had never been Kit's paradise and he had never believed in anything beyond his own drive and determination he shuddered slightly, needing more than ever to look away.

‘It's good, Euan,' he said roughly.

‘Christ.' Weariness had hollowed Euan's voice now to a kind of hoarse whisper. ‘It's a story-book illustration – for children.' Kit shook his head and smiled grimly. No. He had had no place in that sunlit, ailing world, no innocence to be destroyed, no boyhood, as such, to be taken from him and trampled into the Flanders mud. He had never had to learn the casual, everyday brutality of man to man. He had always understood it, dealt with it, from the feckless unconcern of his own father – whoever he might be – to the last elderly, alcoholic colonel who had sent the last schoolboy conscript off to be killed in France. He had always known the world of Euan's young pilgrim to be false. Yet now he found himself growing angry with a strange need to defend it – or at least this heart-rending, sinister, exquisite portrayal.

‘It's good.'

Euan looked too exhausted to shake his head. And in any case, what was the point of a denial. It
was
good. He knew that. It was what he had set out to do, to force out of himself, drop by agonizing drop. And so, measured by that yardstick, one could call it a success. Weakly, almost fretfully, he began to laugh.

‘So you've come out of hibernation have you?' A broad bright voice spoke suddenly from the doorway and the dancing teacher came into the room, looking more like an athlete with her wide shoulders and short muscular legs – a tightrope walker – than a ballerina, her sharp eyes, on the lookout for drugs and debauchery, fastening themselves at once on the canvas.

‘Oh I say – that's awfully pretty.'

‘Yes,' said Euan smiling. ‘Isn't it.'

‘And what a good-looking young chap. Anyone you know?'

‘An old acquaintance.' And Euan's eyes which had been dull and void began to fill again with their malicious sweetness.

‘Well – well – fancy that. And here was I thinking you were – well – well!'

‘Taking cocaine,' he supplied amiably, ‘and painting nude women.'

She blushed very slightly and then, having lived in cheap lodgings far too long to be bashful, gave a loud, unmelodious laugh.

‘All right. I'm big enough to admit it. An old friend eh? I wouldn't mind having him on my wall, I can tell you.'

‘Take him.' And even Kit, for a moment, thought he was joking.

He was not.

‘Now look here,' she said considerably startled, ‘I didn't mean… It's very nice I'm sure, but as to what it's worth …'

‘Nothing,' he said, his fallen angel's smile breaking out of him like the poisoned sunshine dappling the face of his young pilgrim, ‘It's a gift – from me to you, my darling – because you're beautiful and I'm generous. Just take it away. Something to remember me by when I'm gone.'

Eventually, after ten flustered minutes, she took it, half-convinced, as she carried it through the door, that it might suddenly explode or squirt jets of water at her or give off a bad smell; that there was something odd about it at any rate. Yet, since it was free and large and might come in handy someday, especially if he ever made a name for himself – although she doubted
that
– she took it, leaving the two men in a silence that lived and almost moved with Kit's strangled pity and exasperation, an urge he recognized as crazy to defend that blasted painting – and Euan – coupled with another urge – less crazy he thought – to take Euan by the scruff of his neck and shake him.

‘You bloody fool,' he said.

‘Very likely.'

‘You sweated blood over that picture.'

Euan's listless shoulders sketched a shrug, the only substance in him, the only source of energy, his angelic smile and the innocent malice of his eyes.

‘Oh – pretty thin blood,' he said carelessly, ‘blue, of course, but past its best.'

‘And that silly bitch didn't even want it. I suppose you know that.' Kit was becoming very angry.

‘I know. I didn't want it either.'

‘Christ, Euan – you could have done something better with it than that.'

He got up, whistling a ribald soldier's tune, his pilgrimage, his time of innocence, very far behind him now, his search abandoned, cast off, the cauterized stumps of his past unhealed. It had all been for nothing. Never mind. He believed now that he had expected it.

‘All right, Kit,' he said, his blue gaze seraphic, ‘what
did
you want me to do with it? Give it to Claire?'

She came into the kitchen a few moments later, just as Euan had gone off, still whistling, across the back yard, her face saddened but not, Kit thought, surprised.

‘I've just seen the ballet teacher,' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘Did Euan show you the picture?'

‘He did. It was … I don't think I'll forget it.'

She sighed. ‘Oh well –' And it was a relief, a
pleasure
to go off into the solid world of curtain fabrics and floor coverings with Kit, the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood creature comforts of hotel bedrooms which, he decided over smoked salmon sandwiches and a glasss of
Chablis
that afternoon, were to be given identity by their colour. Blue fittings for the Blue Room, pink for the Rose Room, muted orange for the Tangerine Suite, pale green and lemon, lilac and cream to be dealt with in equally meticulous fashion. An attractive notion which absorbed her time and her energy and wore blisters on her heels all over again when he further decided that tangerine towels must be matched by soap of a toning tangerine, that even ashtrays in the Blue Room must be blue, in the Rose Room pink – she would never have believed pink ashtrays so hard to find – that the heart-shaped Victorian pin-cushions set out on the various toilet tables should not only contain needles
threaded
with suitable cottons but should fit exactly into the colour scheme to which they belonged.

‘You're absolutely right,' she told him, kicking off her shoes again a week later. ‘Little things
do
make all the difference. Your little pink ashtrays are making a lot of difference to me.'

‘Then let me pay you for your trouble.'

‘Nonsense.'

Nor would she accept anything more substantial than flowers, chocolates, wine, for finding, beneath a tattered shawl and a layer of dust in a Harrogate antique shop, the beautiful inlaid piano which stood now on a platform in the dining room, to be played each evening by a performer – and Kit had not yet made his selection – who would be expected not only to make sweet music but to look well-groomed and, if possible, attractive, the Major's own sensibilities having been seriously offended by the dandruff-speckled evening suits of the Feathers' Teashop string quartet.

Another piano of a similar type had been ordered for the smaller restaurant and, as a final innovation, to which by no means the whole of Faxby had taken kindly, there was to be dancing in a room which, being partly below ground level, could be reached clandestinely and thus rather excitingly, by a separate entrance at the back of the hotel. A public bar? Most hotels had them. But Polly Swanfield had heard, and reported half swooning with delight to Claire, that this was to be a real cocktail bar, the first of its kind in Faxby, with those fascinating new drinks from America all mixed up in silver shakers which her mother had warned her never to drink because they had gin in them and everybody knows that ladies are not supposed to drink gin. Was it true? And a jazz band, they were saying, not from America she supposed because that would be far too good to be true, but certainly not from Faxby either. A proper nightclub, in fact, like London, especially thrilling since no one ever seemed to be quite certain whether they were legal or not. What absolute bliss! And if it turned out not to be legal and one ended up getting arrested – what a lark. Benedict, of course, would get her out pretty quickly and hush it all up, but just the same …!

So? Was it true? She had just had her scissors out again and sliced inches off all her evening skirts and
slashed
the necklines positively to the waist.

‘You're just so lucky, Claire,' she moaned. ‘Why can't I practically live at the Crown, like you? And to think it's just Hardie, who used to look down his nose at me for leaving my tennis shoes in the hall and who'd never ever give me more than one glass of wine at dinner. Just Hardie. And my friend, Mary-Ellen Stephens, saw him in Town Hall Square the other day and says he's positively devastatingly
attractive?
‘

Kit Hardie's office on the first floor of the hotel was light and sunny, his manner unhurried, quietly assured no matter what crisis might be on hand. A haven, Claire frequently found it. The easiest place, the most
breathable
place she knew.

‘I want you to come and work for me,' he told her.

‘Yes.'

‘Is that an acceptance? Or just an acknowledgment of the fact?'

‘I think it means – let's wait and see.'

‘Must we really? I can't go on asking favours, you know – can I?'

But, nevertheless, when his secretary developed a sick headache that afternoon, brought on, it seemed, by his insistence that in no circumstances would a semi-colon do the same job as a comma, Claire, who had patience to compensate for lack of skill, tapped out with two fingers and a perfect understanding of punctuation, his letters, his bills, his sample menus.

‘The Croziers are bringing somebody over this morning to take photographs and those flowers in the hall look positively mean. Is there another florist in Faxby, Claire, that one could trust?'

And Claire, who had been taught about flowers by Dorothy, did the arrangements herself and worried about them until the Croziers had emptied a final glass of
Dom Perignon,
climbed into their Rolls and driven away.

And, quite soon, she began to wake up, more often than not, with a feeling – half uneasy, half excited, by no means unpleasant – that Kit Hardie would be expecting her, that there were things she had not exactly promised but somehow seemed committed to do, and that if she failed to appear he – and she – would feel that she had let him down.

What things? Of what real use was she? A cool head. A keen eye. Peacemaker, since the Major, beneath his urbanity, was always exacting, sometimes by no means gentle.

‘Smile – damn you!' she heard him bellow one morning after the sullenly retreating figure of a new young chambermaid who, instead of dimpling instantly with the smiles Kit considered to be a first essential to the chambermaid's trade, burst into tears, muttering some tragedy of a sick headache or a sick mother in which he expressed no greater interest than a curt ‘Talk to her, Claire.'

And Claire, accustomed to hysteria in all its conditions, had explained quietly, sweetly, the Major's insistence that the staff of the hotel must control their own emotions like actors on a stage, that ‘the show must go on', that ‘the guest must always be right', that ‘Punchinello and even a little chambermaid called Mary-Anne must keep on smiling, no matter how sick the headache or how broken the heart'.