‘Awkward,’ I agreed.
‘So now it’s burnt, and I dare say you’ll think it serves me right, because the nine thousand’s gone up in smoke and I won’t see a penny of it back.’
She finished the gin and I bought her another.
‘I know it’s not my business, Maisie, but how did you happen to have nine thousand handy in Australia? Aren’t there rules about exporting that much cash?’
She giggled. ‘You don’t know much about the world, do you, dear? But anyway, this time it was all hunky dory. I just toddled along with Archie’s sister to a jewellers and sold him a brooch I had, a nasty sort of toad, dear, with a socking big diamond in the middle of its forehead, something to do with Shakespeare, I think, though I never got it clear, anyway I never wore it, it was so ugly, but of course I’d taken it with me because of it being worth so much, and I sold it for nine thousand five, though in Australian dollars of course, so there was no problem, was there?’
Maisie took it for granted I would be eating with her, so we drifted in to dinner. Her appetite seemed healthy, but her spirits were damp.
‘You won’t tell anyone, will you, dear, about the picture?’
‘Of course not, Maisie.’
‘I could get into such trouble, dear.’
‘I know.’
‘A fine, of course,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that might be the least of it. People can be so beastly about a perfectly innocent little bit of smuggling.’
‘No one will find out, if you keep quiet.’ A thought struck me. ‘Unless, that is, you’ve told anyone already that you’d bought it?’
‘No, dear, I didn’t, because of thinking I’d better pretend I’d had it for years, and of course I hadn’t even hung it on the wall yet because one of the rings was loose in the frame and I thought it might fall down and be damaged, and I couldn’t decide who to ask to fix it.’ She paused for a mouthful of prawn cocktail. ‘I expect you’ll think me silly, dear, but I suppose I was feeling a bit scared of being found out, not guilty exactly because I really don’t see why we should pay that irritating tax but anyway I didn’t not only not hang it up, I hid it.
‘You hid it? Still wrapped up?’
‘Well, yes, dear, more or less wrapped up. Of course I’d opened it when I got home, and that’s when I found the ring coming loose with the cord through it, so I wrapped it up again until I’d decided what to do.’
I was fascinated. ‘Where did you hide it?’
She laughed. ‘Nowhere very much, dear. I mean, I was only keeping it out of sight to stop people asking about it, of course, so I slipped it behind one of the radiators in the lounge, and don’t look so horrified dear, the central heating was turned off.’
I painted at the house all the next day, but neither D.J. nor anyone else turned up.
In between stints at the easel I poked around a good deal on my own account, searching for Maisie’s treasures. I found a good many recognisable remains, durables like bed-frames, kitchen machines and radiators, all of them twisted and buckled not merely by heat but by the weight of the whole edifice from roof downwards having collapsed inwards. Occasional remains of heavy rafters lay blackly in the thick ash, but apart from these, everything combustible had totally, as one might say, combusted.
Of all the things Maisie had described, and of all the dozens she hadn’t, I found only the wrought iron gate from Lady Tythe’s old home, which had divided the hall from the sittingroom. Lady Tythe would never have recognised it.
No copper warming pans, which after all had been designed to withstand red-hot coals. No metal fire screen. No marble table. No antique spears.
Naturally, no Munnings.
When I took my paint-stained fingers back to the Beach at five o’clock I found Maisie waiting for me in the hall. Not the kindly, basically cheerful Maisie I had come to know, but a belligerent woman in a full-blown state of rage.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said, fixing me with a furious eye.
I couldn’t think how I could have offended her.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘The bar’s shut,’ she said. ‘So come upstairs to my room. Bring all your stuff with you.’ She gestured to the suitcase. ‘I’m so mad I think I’ll absolutely burst.’
She did indeed, in the lift, look in danger of it. Her cheeks were bright red with hard outlines of colour against the pale surrounding skin. Her blonde-rinsed hair, normally lacquered into sophistication, stuck out in wispy spikes, and for the first time since I’d met her her mouth was not glistening with lipstick.
She threw open the door of her room and stalked in. I followed, closing it after me.
‘You’ll never believe it,’ she said forcefully, turning to face me and letting go with all guns blazing. ‘I’ve had the police here half the day, and those insurance men here the other half, and do you know what they’re saying?’
‘Oh Maisie.’ I sighed inwardly. It had been inevitable.
‘What do you think I am, I asked them,’ she said. ‘I was so mad. There they were, having the nerve to suggest I’d sold all my treasures and over-insured my house, and was trying to take the insurance people for a ride. I told them, I told them over and over, that everything was in its place when I went to Betty’s and if it was over-insured it was to allow for inflation and anyway the brokers had advised me to put up the amount pretty high, and I’m glad I took their advice, but that Mr Lagland says they won’t be paying out until they have investigated further and he was proper sniffy about it, and no sympathy at all for me having lost everything. They were absolutely beastly, and I hate them all.’
She paused to regather momentum, vibrating visibly with the strength of her feelings. ‘They made me feel so dirty, and maybe I was screaming at them a bit, I was so mad, but they’d no call to be so rude, and making out I was some sort of criminal, and just what right have they to tell me to pull myself together when it is because of them and their bullying that I am yelling at them at the top of my voice?’
It must, I reflected, have been quite an encounter. I wondered in what state the police and D.J. had retired from the field.
‘They say it was definitely arson and I said why did they think so now when they hadn’t thought so at first, and it turns out that it was because that Lagland couldn’t find any of my treasures in the ashes or any trace of them at all, and they said even if I hadn’t sold the things first I had arranged for them to be stolen and the house burnt to cinders while I was away at Betty’s, and they kept on and on asking me who I’d paid to do it, and I got more and more furious and if I’d had anything handy I would have hit them, I really would.’
‘What you need is a stiff gin,’ I said.
‘I told them they ought to be out looking for whoever had done it instead of hounding helpless women like me, and the more I thought of someone walking into my house and stealing my treasures and then callously setting fire to everything the madder I got, and somehow that made me even madder with those stupid men who couldn’t see any further than their stupid noses.’
It struck me after a good deal more of similar diatribe that genuine though Maisie’s anger undoubtedly was, she was stoking herself up again every time her temper looked in danger of relapsing to normal. For some reason, she seemed to need to be in the position of the righteous wronged.
I wondered why; and in a breath-catching gap in the flow of hot lava, I said, ‘I don’t suppose you told them about the Munnings.’
The red spots on her cheeks burned suddenly brighter.
‘I’m not crazy’ she said bitingly. ‘If they found out about that, there would have been a fat chance of convincing them I’m telling the truth about the rest.’
‘I’ve heard,’ I said tentatively, ‘That nothing infuriates a crook more than being had up for the one job he didn’t do.’
It looked for a moment as if I’d just elected myself as the new target for hatred, but suddenly as she glared at me in rage her sense of humour reared
its battered head and nudged her in the ribs. The stiffness round her mouth relaxed, her eyes softened and glimmered, and after a second or two, she ruefully smiled.
‘I dare say you’re right, dear, when I come to think of it.’ The smile slowly grew into a giggle. ‘How about that gin?’
Little eruptions continued all evening through drinks and dinner, but the red-centred volcano had subsided to manageable heat.
‘You didn’t seem surprised, dear, when I told you what the police thought I’d done.’ She looked sideways at me over her coffee cup, eyes sharp and enquiring.
‘No.’ I paused. ‘You see, something very much the same has just happened to my cousin. Too much the same, in too many ways. I think, if you will come, and he agrees, that I’d hike to take you to meet him.’
‘But why, dear?’
I told her why. The anger she felt for herself burned up again fiercely for Donald.
‘How dreadful. How selfish you must think me, after all that that poor man has suffered.’
‘I don’t think you’re selfish at all. In fact, Maisie, I think you’re a proper trouper.’
She looked pleased and almost kittenish, and I had a vivid impression of what she had been like with Archie.
‘There’s one thing, though, dear,’ she said awkwardly. ‘After today, and all that’s been said, I don’t think I want that picture you’re doing. I don’t any more want to remember the house as it is now, only like it used to be. So if I give you just the fifty pounds, do you mind?’
5
We went to Shropshire in Maisie’s Jaguar, sharing the driving.
Donald on the telephone had sounded unenthusiastic at my suggested return, but also too lethargic to raise objections. When he opened his front door to us, I was shocked.
It was two weeks since I’d left him to go to Yorkshire. In that time he had shed at least fourteen pounds and aged ten years. His skin was tinged with blue-ish shadows, the bones in his face showed starkly, and even his hair seemed speckled with grey.
The ghost of the old Donald put an obvious effort into receiving us with good manners.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m in the diningroom now. I expect you’d like a drink.’
‘That would be very nice, dear,’ Maisie said.
He looked at her with dull eyes, seeing, as I saw, a large good-natured lady with glossy hair and expensive clothes, her smart appearance walking a tightrope between vulgarity and elegance and just making it to the safer side.
He waved to me to pour the drinks, as if it would be too much for him, and invited Maisie to sit down. The diningroom had been roughly refurnished, containing now a large rug, all the sunroom armchairs, and a couple of small tables from the bedrooms. We sat in a fairly close group round one of the tables, because I had come to ask questions, and I wanted to write down the answers. My cousin watched the production of notebook and ballpoint with no show of interest.
‘Don,’ I said, ‘I want you to listen to a story.’
‘All right.’
Maisie, for once, kept it short. When she came to the bit about buying a Munnings in Australia, Donald’s head lifted a couple of inches and he looked from her to me with the first stirring of attention. When she stopped, there was a small silence.
‘So,’ I said finally, ‘you both went to Australia, you both bought a Munnings, and soon after your return you both had your houses burgled.’
‘Extraordinary coincidence,’ Donald said: but he meant simply that, nothing more. ‘Did you come all this way just to tell me that?’
‘I wanted to see how you were.’
‘Oh. I’m all right. Kind of you, Charles, but I’m all right.’
Even Maisie, who hadn’t known him before, could see that he wasn’t.
‘Where did you buy your picture, Don? Where exactly, I mean.’
‘I suppose… Melbourne. In the Hilton Hotel. Opposite the cricket ground.’
I looked doubtful. Although hotels quite often sold pictures by local artists, they seldom sold Munnings.
‘Fellow met us there,’ Don added. ‘Brought it up to our room. From the gallery where we saw it first.’
‘Which gallery?’
He made a slight attempt to remember. ‘Might have been something like Fine Arts.’
‘Would you have it on a cheque stub, or anything?’
He shook his head. ‘The wine firm I was dealing with paid for it for me, and I sent a cheque to their British office when I got back.’
‘Which wine firm?’
‘Monga Vineyards Proprietary Limited of Adelaide and Melbourne.’
I wrote it all down.
‘And what was the picture like? I mean, could you describe it?’
Donald looked tired. ‘One of those “Going Down to the Start” things. Typical Munnings.’
‘So was mine,’ said Maisie, surprised. ‘A nice long row of jockeys in their colours against a darker sort of sky.’
‘Mine had only three horses,’ Donald said.
‘The biggest, I suppose you might say the nearest jockey in my picture had a purple shirt and green cap,’ Maisie said, ‘and I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it, because when Archie and I were thinking what fun it would be to buy a horse and go to the races as owners, we decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one else already had that, of course.’
‘Don?’ I said.
‘Mm? Oh… three bay horses cantering… in profile… one in front, two slightly overlapping behind. Bright colours on the jockeys. I don’t remember exactly. White racetrack rails and a lot of sunny sky.’
‘What size?’
He frowned slightly. ‘Not very big. About twenty-four inches by eighteen, inside the frame.’
‘And yours, Maisie?’
‘A bit smaller, dear, I should think.’
‘Look,’ Donald said. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Trying to make sure that there are no more coincidences.’
He stared, but without any particular feeling.
‘On the way up here,’ I said, ‘Maisie told me everything’ (but everything) ‘of the way she came to buy her picture. So could you possibly tell us how you came to buy yours. Did you, for example, deliberately go looking for a Munnings?’
Donald passed a weary hand over his face, obviously not wanting the bother of answering.
‘Please, Don,’ I said.
‘Oh…’ A long sigh. ‘No. I wasn’t especially wanting to buy anything at all. We just went into the Melbourne Art Gallery for a stroll round. We came to the Munnings they have there… and while we were looking at it we just drifted into conversation with a woman near us, as one does in art galleries. She said there was another Munnings, not far away, for sale in a small commercial gallery, and it was worth seeing even if one didn’t intend to buy it. We had time to spare, so we went.’
Maisie’s mouth had fallen open. ‘But, dear,’ she said, recovering, ‘that was just the same as us, my sister-in-law and me, though it was Sydney Art Gallery, not Melbourne. They have this marvellous picture there, “The Coming Storm”, and we were admiring it when this man sort of drifted up to us and joined in…’
Donald suddenly looked a great deal more exhausted, like a sick person overdone by healthy visitors.
‘Look… Charles… you aren’t going to the police with all this? Because I… I don’t think… I could stand… a whole new lot… of questions.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said.
‘Then what… does it matter?’
Maisie finished her gin and tonic and smiled a little too brightly.
‘Which way to the little girls’ room, dear?’ she asked, and disappeared to the cloakroom.
Donald said faintly, ‘I can’t concentrate… I’m sorry, Charles, but I can’t seem to do anything… while they still have Regina… unburied… just stored…’
Time, far from dulling the agony, seemed to have preserved it, as if the keeping
of Regina in a refrigerated drawer had stopped dead the natural progression of mourning. I had been told that the bodies of murdered people could be held in that way for six months or more in unsolved cases. I doubted whether Donald would last that long.
He stood suddenly and walked away out of the door to the hall. I followed. He crossed the hall, opened the door of the sittingroom, and went in.
Hesitantly, I went after him.
The sittingroom still contained only the chintz-covered sofas and chairs, now ranged over-tidily round the walls. The floor where Regina had lain was clean and polished. The air was cold.
Donald stood in front of the empty fireplace looking at my picture of Regina, which was propped on the mantelpiece.
‘I stay in here with her, most of the time,’ he said. ‘It’s the only place I can bear to be.’
He walked to one of the armchairs and sat down, directly facing the portrait.
‘You wouldn’t mind seeing yourselves out, would you, Charles?’ he said. ‘I’m really awfully tired.’
‘Take care of yourself.’ Useless advice. One could see he wouldn’t.
‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Quite all right. Don’t you worry.’
I looked back from the door. He was sitting immobile, looking at Regina. I didn’t know whether it would have been better or worse if I hadn’t painted her.
Maisie was quiet for the whole of the first hour of the return journey, a record in itself.
From Donald’s house we had driven first to one of the neighbours who had originally offered refuge, because he clearly needed help more now than ever.
Mrs. Neighbour had listened with sympathy, but had shaken her head.
‘Yes, I know he should have company and get away from the house, but he won’t. I’ve tried several times. Called. So have lots of people round here. He just tells us he’s all right. He won’t let anyone help him.’