Tied Up In Tinsel

‘But was there a ready supply?’

‘I had to wait for them, as it were, to fall in. For some time I lived very simply with only Cuthbert and Kittiwee, in four rooms of the east wing. But gradually the supply built up: The Vale was not the only source. The Scrubs and, in Nigel’s case, Broadmoor were also productive. In passing,’ Hilary had then pointed out, ‘I remind you that there is nothing original in my arrangements. The idea was canvassed in Victorian times by no less a person than Charles Dickens and considerably later, on a farcical level, by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. I have merely adopted it and carried it to its logical conclusion.’

‘I think,’ Troy had said, ‘it’s remotely possible that Rory, my husband, you know, may have been responsible for the arrest of one or even more, of your staff. Would they –?’

‘You need have no qualms. For one thing they don’t know of the relationship and for another they wouldn’t mind if they did. They bear no grudge as far as I can discern against the police. With the possible exception of Mervyn, the ex-signwriter, you recollect. He feels that since his booby-trap was directed against a class that the police are concerned to suppress, it was rather hard that he should suffer so grievous a penalty for removing one of them. But even he has taken against Counsel for the Prosecution and the jury rather than against the officers who arrested him.’

‘Big of him, I suppose,’ said Troy.

These conversations had taken place during the early sittings. Now, on the fifth day of her residence, Hilary and Troy had settled down to an oddly companionable relationship. The portrait prospered. She was working with unusual rapidity, and few misgivings. All was well.

‘I’m so glad,’ Hilary said, ‘that it suits you to stay for Christmas. I do wish your husband could have joined us. He might have found my arrangements of some interest.’

‘He’s on an extradition case in Australia.’

‘Your temporary loss,’ said Hilary neatly, ‘is my lasting gain. How shall we spend the afternoon? Another sitting? I am all yours.’

‘That would be grand. About an hour while the light lasts and then I’ll be under my own steam for a bit, I think.’

Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?

She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.

‘Look here,’ Troy said abruptly, ‘you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I assure you. No.’

‘OK,’ said Troy. ‘I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.’

‘But of course. I am enjoying myself,’ Hilary said, ‘inordinately.’

Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.

And as she thought of him he came in; wary-looking and dark about the jaw.

‘Excuse me,’ Mervyn said, and added ‘madam’ as if he’d just remembered to do so. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Thank you very much,’ Troy said. ‘Nothing. It’s all marvellous,’ and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.

‘I thought,’ Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, ‘you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.’

‘Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.’

‘Like you was cramped. Sort of.’

‘Well – not now.’

He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close behind her.

But he was only waiting with her smock which he held as if it were a valuable top-coat and he a trained manservant. She felt no touch of his hands as he helped her into it.

‘Thank you very much,’ Troy repeated and hoped she sounded definitive without being disagreeable.

‘Thank you, madam,’ Mervyn responded and as always when this sort of exchange cropped up, she repressed an impulse to ask: ‘For what?’

(For treating him like a manservant when I know he’s a booby-setting manslaughterer? thought Troy).

Mervyn withdrew, delicately closing the door after him.

Soon after that, Hilary came in and for an hour Troy worked on his portrait. By then the light had begun to fail. Her host having remarked that he expected a long-distance call from London, she said she would go for a walk. They had, she felt, seen enough of each other for the time being.

III

A roughish path crossed the waste that was to become something Hilary, no doubt, would think of as a pleasance. It led past the ruined conservatory to the ploughed field she had seen from her bedroom window.

Here was the scarecrow, a straw-stuffed antic groggily anchored in a hole it had enlarged with its own gyrations, lurching extravagantly in the north wind. It was clad in the wreckage of an Edwardian frockcoat and a pair of black trousers. Its billycock hat had been pulled down over the stuffed bag which formed its head. It was extended in the classic cruciform gesture and a pair of clownish gloves, tied to the ends of the crosspiece, flapped lamentably, as did the wild remnants of something that might once have been an opera cloak. Troy felt that Hilary himself had had a hand in its creation.

He had explained in detail to what lengths, and at what enormous expense of time and money, he had gone in the accurate restoration of Halberds. Portraits had been hunted down and repurchased, walls rehung in silk, panelling unveiled and ceilings restored by laborious stripping. Perhaps in some collection of foxed watercolours he had found a Victorian sketch of this steep field with a gesticulating scarecrow in the middle distance.

She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.

She was now high above Halberds and looking down at it saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library; remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the western façade with the hideous wreckage of a conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a ‘Hilary’s Folly’ no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.

And no doubt, Troy thought, it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between “Here it still is” and “This is how it was” and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap-markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.

She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.

It was as if a slide had clicked over in a projector and an entirely dissociated subject thrown on the screen. Troy now looked down into The Vale, as it was locally called, and her first thought was of the hopeless incongruity of this gentle word, for it stood not only for the valley but for the prison whose dry moats, barriers, watch-towers, yards, barracks and chimney-stacks were set out down below like a scale model of themselves for her to shudder at. Her husband sometimes referred to The Vale as ‘Heartbreak House’.

The wind was now fitfully laced with sleet and this steel-engraving of a view was shot across with slantwise drifts that were blown out as fast as they appeared.

Facing Troy was a road sign.

STEEP DESCENT

DANGEROUS CORNERS

ICE

CHANGE DOWN

As if to illustrate the warning, a covered van laboured up the road from Halberds, stopped beside her, clanked into bottom gear and ground its way down into The Vale. It disappeared round the first bend and was replaced by a man in a heavy macintosh and tweed hat, climbing towards her. He looked up and she saw a reddened face, a white moustache and blue eyes.

She had already decided to turn back but an obscure notion that it would be awkward to do so at once, made her pause. The man came up with her, raised his hat, gave her a conventional ‘Good evening’ and then hesitated. ‘Coming up rough,’ he said. He had a pleasant voice.