In the Frame

  ‘I will, sir.’ He switched his gaze sharply to my face and studied my lack of expression. ‘What do you know?’

  I said calmly, ‘Only that the police have suspicious minds.’

  He disregarded that. ‘Is Mr Stuart worried about his business?’

  ‘He’s never said so.’

  ‘A great many middle-sized private companies are going bankrupt these days.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Because of cash flow problems,’ he added.

  ‘I can’t help you. You’ll have to look at his company’s books.’

  ‘We will, sir.’

  ‘And even if the firm turns out to be bust, it doesn’t follow that Donald would fake a robbery.’

  ‘It’s been done before,’ Frost said dryly.

  ‘If he needed money he could simply have sold the stuff,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Maybe he had. Some of it. Most of it, maybe.’

  I took a slow breath and said nothing.

  ‘That wine, sir. As you said yourself, it would have taken a long time to move.’

  ‘The firm is a limited company,’ I said. ‘If it went bankrupt, Donald’s own house and private money would be unaffected.’

  ‘You know a good deal about it, don’t you?’

  I said neutrally, ‘I live in the world.’

  ‘I thought artists were supposed to be unworldly.’

  ‘Some are.’

  He peered at me with narrowed eyes as if he were trying to work out a possible way in which I too might have conspired to arrange the theft.

  I said mildly, ‘My cousin Donald is an honourable man.’

  ‘That’s an out of date word.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot of it about.’

  He looked wholly disbelieving. He saw far too much in the way of corruption, day in, day out, all his working life.

  Donald came hesitantly down the stairs and Frost took him off immediately to another private session in the kitchen. I thought that if Frost’s questions were to be as barbed as those he’d asked me, poor Don was in for a rough time. While they talked I wandered aimlessly round the house, looking into storage spaces, opening cupboards, seeing the inside details of my cousin’s life.

  Either he or Regina had been a hoarder of empty boxes. I came across dozens of them, all shapes and sizes, shoved into odd corners of shelves or drawers: brown cardboard, bright gift-wrap, beribboned chocolate boxes, all too potentially useful or too pretty to be thrown away. The burglars had opened a lot but had thrown more unopened on the floor. They must, I thought, have had a most frustrating time.

  They had largely ignored the big sunroom, which held few antiques and no paintings, and I ended up there sitting on a bamboo armchair among sprawling potted plants looking out into the windy garden. Dead leaves blew in scattered showers from the drying trees and a few late roses clung hardily to thorny stems.

  I hated autumn. The time of melancholy, the time of death. My spirits fell each year with the soggy leaves and revived only with crisp winter frost. Psychiatric statistics proved that the highest suicide rate occurred in the spring, the time for rebirth and growth and stretching in the sun. I could never understand it. If ever I jumped over a cliff, it would be in the depressing months of decay.

  The sunroom was grey and cold. No sun, that Sunday.

  I went upstairs, fetched my suitcase, and brought it down. Over years of wandering journeys I had reversed the painter’s traditional luggage: my suitcase now contained the tools of my trade, and my satchel, clothes. The large toughened suitcase, its interior adapted and fitted by me, was in fact a sort of portable studio, containing besides paints and brushes a light collapsible metal easel, unbreakable containers of linseed oil and turpentine, and a rack which would hold four wet paintings safely apart. There were also a dust sheet, a large box of tissues, and generous amounts of white spirit, all designed for preventing mess and keeping things clean. The organisation of the suitcase had saved and made the price of many a sandwich.

  I untelescoped the easel and set out my palette, and on a middling-sized canvas laid in the beginnings of a melancholy landscape, a mixture of Donald’s garden as I saw it, against a sweep of bare fields and gloomy woods. Not my usual sort of picture, and not, to be honest, the sort to make headline news a century hence; but it gave me at least something to do. I worked steadily, growing ever colder, until the chillier Frost chose to depart; and he went without seeing me again, the front door closing decisively on his purposeful footsteps.

  Donald, in the warm kitchen, looked torn to rags. When I went in he was sitting with his arms folded on the table and his head on his arms, a picture of absolute despair. When he heard me he sat up slowly and wearily, and showed a face suddenly aged and deeply lined.

  ‘Do you know what he thinks?’ he said.

  ‘More or less.’

  He stared at me sombrely. ‘I couldn’t convince him. He kept on and on. Kept asking the same questions, over and over. Why doesn’t he believe me?’

  ‘A lot of people lie to the police. I think they grow to expect it.’

  ‘He wants me to meet him in my office tomorrow. He says he’ll be bringing colleagues. He says they’ll want to see the books.’,

  I nodded. ‘Better be grateful he didn’t drag you down there today.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  I said awkwardly, ‘Don, I’m sorry. I told him the wine was missing. It made him suspicious… It was a good deal my fault that he was so bloody to you.’

  He shook his head tiredly. ‘I would have told him myself. I wouldn’t have thought of not telling him.’

  ‘But… I even pointed out that it must have taken a fair time to move so many bottles.’

  ‘Mm. Well, he would have worked that out for himself.’

  ‘How long, in fact, do you think it would have taken?’

  ‘Depends how many people were doing it,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his face and squeezing his tired eyes. ‘They would have to have had proper wine boxes in any case. That means they had to know in advance that the wine was there, and didn’t just chance on it. And that means… Frost says… that I sold it myself some time ago and am now saying it is stolen so I can claim fraudulent insurance, or, if it was stolen last Friday, that I told the thieves they’d need proper boxes, which means that I set up the whole frightful mess myself.’

  We thought it over in depressed silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Who did know you had the wine there? And who knew the house was always empty on Fridays? And was the prime target the wine, the antiques, or the paintings?’

  ‘God, Charles, you sound like Frost.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Every business nowadays,’ he said defensively, ‘is going through a cash crisis. Look at the nationalised industries, losing money by the million. Look at the wage rises and the taxes and the inflation… How can any small business make the profit it used to? Of course we have a cash flow problem. Whoever hasn’t?’

  ‘How bad is yours?’ I said.

  ‘Not critical. Bad enough. But not within sight of liquidation. It’s illegal for a limited company to carry on trading if it can’t cover its costs.’

  ‘But it could… if you could raise more capital to prop it up?’

  He surveyed me with the ghost of a smile. ‘It surprises me still that you chose to paint for a living.’

  ‘It gives me a good excuse to go racing whenever I like.’

  ‘Lazy sod.’ He sounded for a second like the old Donald, but the lightness passed. ‘The absolutely last thing I would do would be to use my own personal assets to prop up a dying business. If my firm was that rocky, I’d wind it up. It would be mad not to.’

  I sucked my teeth. ‘I suppose Frost asked if the stolen things were insured for more than their worth?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Several times.’

  ‘Not likely you’d tell him, even if they were.’

  ‘They weren’t, though.’

  ‘No.’

&nbs
p; ‘Under-insured, if anything.’ He sighed. ‘God knows if they’ll pay up for the Munnings. I’d only arranged the insurance by telephone. I hadn’t actually sent the premium.’

  ‘It should be all right, if you can give them proof of purchase, and so on.’

  He shook his head listlessly. ‘All the papers to do with it were in the desk in the hall. The receipt from the gallery where I bought it, the letter of provenance, and the customs and excise receipt. All gone.’

  ‘Frost won’t like that.’

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Well… I hope you pointed out that you would hardly be buying expensive pictures and going on world trips if you were down to your last farthing.’

  ‘He said it might be because of buying expensive pictures and going on world trips that I might be down to my last farthing.’

  Frost had built a brick wall of suspicion for Donald to batter his head against. My cousin needed hauling away before he was punch drunk.

  ‘Have some spaghetti,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s about all I can cook.’

  ‘Oh…’ He focused unclearly on the kitchen clock. It was half past four and long past feeding time according to my stomach.

  ‘If you like,’ he said.

  The police sent a car the following morning to fetch him to his ordeal in the office. He went lifelessly, having more or less made it clear over coffee that he wouldn’t defend himself.

  ‘Don, you must,’ I said. ‘The only way to deal with the situation is to be firm and reasonable, and decisive, and accurate. In fact, just your own self.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘You’d better go instead of me. I haven’t the energy. And what does it matter?’ His smile broke suddenly and the ravaging misery showed deeply like black water under cracked ice. ‘Without Regina… there’s no point making money.’

  ‘We’re not talking about making money, we’re talking about suspicion. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll assume you can’t.’

  ‘I’m too tired. I can’t be bothered. They can think what they like.’

  ‘Don,’ I said seriously, ‘They’ll think what you let them.’

  ‘I don’t really care,’ he said dully: and that was the trouble. He really didn’t.

  He was gone all day. I spent it painting.

  Not the sad landscape. The sunroom seemed even greyer and colder that morning, and I had no mind any more to sink into melancholy. I left the half-finished canvas on the table there and removed myself and trappings to the source of warmth. Maybe the light wasn’t so good in the kitchen, but it was the only room in the house with the pulse of life.

  I painted Regina standing beside her cooker, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. I painted the way she held her head back to smile, and I painted the smile, shiny-eyed and guileless and unmistakably happy. I painted the kitchen behind her as I literally saw it in front of my eyes, and I painted Regina herself from the clearest of inner visions. So easily did I see her that I looked up once or twice from her face on the canvas to say something to her, and was disconcerted to find only empty space. An extraordinary feeling of the real and unreal disturbingly tangled.

  I seldom ever worked for more than four hours at a stretch because for one thing the actual muscular control required was tiring, and for another the concentration always made me cold and hungry; so I knocked off at around lunch-time and dug out a tin of corned beef to eat with pickles on toast, and after that went for a walk, dodging the front-gate watchers by taking to the apple trees and wriggling through the hedge.

  I tramped aimlessly for a while round the scattered shapeless village, thinking about the picture and working off the burst of physical energy I often felt after the constraint of painting. More burnt umber in the folds of the kitchen curtains, I thought; and a purplish shadow on the saucepan. Regina’s cream shirt needed yellow ochre under the collar, and probably a touch of green. The cooking stove needed a lot more attention, and I had broken my general rule of working the picture as a whole, background and subject pace by pace.

  This time, Regina’s face stood out clearly, finished except for a gloss on the lips and a line of light along inside the lower eyelids, which one couldn’t do until the under paint was dry. I had been afraid of seeing her less clearly if I took too long, but because of it the picture was now out of balance and I’d have to be very careful to get the kitchen into the same key, so that the whole thing looked harmonious and natural and as if it couldn’t have been any other way.

  The wind was rawly cold, the sky a hurrying jumbled mass of darkening clouds. I huddled my hands inside my anorak pockets and slid back through the hedge with the first drops of rain.

  The afternoon session was much shorter because of the light, and I frustratingly could not catch the right mix of colours for the tops of the kitchen fitments. Even after years of experience, what looked right on the palette looked wrong on the painting. I got it wrong three times and decided to stop.

  I was cleaning the brushes when Donald came back. I heard the scrunch of the car, the slam of the doors, and, to my surprise, the ring of the front door bell. Donald had taken his keys.

  I went through and opened the door. A uniformed policeman stood there, holding Don’s arm. Behind, a row of watching faces gazed on hungrily. My cousin, who had looked pale before, now seemed bloodlessly white. The eyes were as lifeless as death.

  ‘Don!’ I said, and no doubt looked as appalled as I felt.

  He didn’t speak. The policeman leant forward, said, ‘There we are, sir,’ and transferred the support of my cousin from himself to me: and it seemed to me that the action was symbolic as much as practical, because he turned immediately on his heel and methodically drove off in his waiting car.

  I helped Donald inside and shut the door. I had never seen anyone in such a frightening state of disintegration.

  ‘I asked,’ he said, ‘about the funeral.’

  His face was stony, and his voice came out in gasps.

  ‘They said…’ He stopped, dragged in air, tried again.

  ‘They said… no funeral.’

  ‘Donald…’

  ‘They said… she couldn’t be buried until they had finished their enquiries. They said… it might be months. They said… they will keep her… refrigerated…’

  The distress was fearful.

  ‘They said…’ He swayed slightly. ‘They said… the body of a murdered person belongs to the State.’

  I couldn’t hold him. He collapsed at my feet in a deep and total faint.

  3

  For two days Donald lay in bed, and I grew to understand what was meant by prostration.

  Whether he liked it or not, this time he was heavily sedated, his doctor calling morning and evening with pills and injections. No matter that I was a hopeless nurse and a worse cook, I was appointed, for lack of anyone else, to look after him.

  ‘I want Charles,’ Donald in fact told the doctor. ‘He doesn’t fuss.’

  I sat with him a good deal when he was awake, seeing him struggle dazedly to face and come to terms with the horrors in his mind. He lost weight visibly, the rounded muscles of his face slackening and the contours changing to the drawn shape of illness. The grey shadows round his eyes darkened to a permanent charcoal, and all normal strength seemed to have vanished from arms and legs.

  I fed us both from tins and frozen packets, reading the instructions and doing what they said. Donald thanked me punctiliously and ate what he could, but I doubt if he tasted a thing.

  In between times, while he slept, I made progress with both the paintings. The sad landscape was no longer sad but merely Octoberish, with three horses standing around in a field, one of them eating grass. Pictures of this sort, easy to live with and passably expert, were my bread and butter. They sold quite well, and I normally churned one off the production line every ten days or so, knowing that they were all technique and no soul.

  The portrait of Regina, though,
was the best work I’d done for months. She laughed out of the canvas, alive and glowing, and to me at least seemed vividly herself. Pictures often changed as one worked on them, and day by day the emphasis in my mind had shifted, so that the kitchen background was growing darker and less distinct and Regina herself more luminous. One could still see she was cooking, but it was the girl who was important, not the act. In the end I had painted the kitchen, which was still there, as an impression, and the girl, who was not, as the reality.

  I hid that picture in my suitcase whenever I wasn’t working on it. I didn’t want Donald to come face to face with it unawares.

  Early Wednesday evening he came shakily down to the kitchen in his dressing-gown, trying to smile and pick up the pieces. He sat at the table, drinking the Scotch I had that day imported, and watching while I cleaned my brushes and tidied the palette.

  ‘You’re always so neat,’ he said.

  ‘Paint’s expensive.’

  He waved a limp hand at the horse picture which stood drying on the easel. ‘How much does it cost, to paint that?’

  ‘In raw materials, about ten quid. In heat, light, rates, rent, food, Scotch and general wear and tear on the nervous system, about the amount I’d earn in a week if I chucked it in and went back to selling houses.’

  ‘Quite a lot, then,’ he said seriously.

  I grinned. ‘I don’t regret it.’

  ‘No. I see that.’

  I finished the brushes by washing them in soap and water under the tap, pinching them into shape, and standing them upright in ajar to dry. Good brushes were at least as costly as paint.

  ‘After the digging into the company accounts,’ Donald said abruptly, ‘they took me along to the police station and tried to prove that I had actually killed her myself.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘They’d worked out that I could have got home at lunch time and done it. They said there was time.’

  I picked up the Scotch from the table and poured a decent sized shot into a tumbler. Added ice.

  ‘They must be crazy,’ I said.

  ‘There was another man, besides Frost. A Superintendent. I think his name was Wall. A thin man, with fierce eyes. He never seemed to blink. Just stared and said over and over that I’d killed her because she’d come back and found me supervising the burglary.’