I swirled the Armagnac in my glass, inhaling its scent. ‘It’s a rather delicate matter, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘I’ll quite understand if you don’t want to talk about it.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Now you do have my attention. But in order to know whether I wish to talk about it or not, I need to know what it is.’
Now I was here, I felt nervous and embarrassed. I didn’t know how to explain my interest in Grace Fox to him other than as a prurient one, though I remained convinced it wasn’t that. There was nothing for it but to take the plunge. ‘It’s about Grace,’ I said. ‘Grace Fox.’
His expression didn’t change. In fact, he sat there frozen, drink halfway to his mouth, staring beyond me. I couldn’t read him. I didn’t know whether he was remembering the past or simply stunned by my audacity. I shifted nervously, sipped some more Armagnac. Too much; it made me cough.
After what seemed like hours, he turned back to me and said, ‘It was a very long time ago, but I don’t see any reason not to talk about Grace, so long as you are who you say you are.’ He paused. ‘You know, the day Grace died, a part of me died with her. It’s still difficult.’
‘But you’re still here, still painting, a success.’
‘A fluke. What was it Beckett wrote? “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Story of my life.’
‘Story of most of our lives, if truth be told,’ I said, thinking about Laura. There was something else Beckett had written that had always stuck in my memory, too, from my student days: ‘They give birth bestride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’. But, oh, I thought, that instant, and the things we do to fill it, the way we try to grasp who we are, why we are, the love we give and the cruelties we inflict. That instant is a lifetime. For some reason, I remembered the young jazz singer at Ronnie Scott’s the previous evening, how she brought ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ to life, how she made it new. If she had gone on singing for ever, I would have been listening for ever, and that would have been the instant between darkness and darkness. But life is made of many moments like that.
Sam grunted an end to the philosophy. ‘It’s an awful long way to come just to talk about a long-forgotten incident.’
‘I don’t quite see it like that,’ I said, ‘but I’m on my way to visit my brother in Angouleme, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of calling on you on my way.’
‘Well, would you at least satisfy an old man’s curiosity and tell me why you want to talk about it?’
I tried to explain to him as best I could about how I had been drawn into the whole Grace Fox business through moving into Kilnsgate House, how finding out about the murder and the hanging had stimulated my interest, along with the family portrait, my brother’s memory of the day of Grace’s execution, and my conversation with Wilf Pelham.
‘Wilf Pelham? Now there’s a name to conjure with. So he’s still alive, is he?’
‘Do you remember him?’
‘Of course I do. I may be old, but I’m not senile. Besides, it’s the short-term memory that goes first. I remember those days as if they were yesterday. We used to play together when we were kids during the war, then we lost touch for a few years, as you do. I spent most of my time up at the farm, and I don’t think we had a book in the house if it wasn’t to do with giving birth to calves. But Wilf’s parents were both teachers, educated, cultured people, and they lived on Frenchgate. Much more middle class, you know. But later, when we were fifteen or sixteen, Wilf was one of the few young town lads I could talk to. He knew about art and music and literature. You’ve no idea how rare that was. I liked him, and I think I actually learned quite a bit from him, even though he was younger than me. I was raw, unformed. Mostly up to that point I’d been sketching cows in a field or trying to capture an interesting landscape. Wilf wasn’t as stupid or as limited in his outlook as the rest. They were just… well, you know, sport, sheep and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Wilf had a good eye, but music was his real passion. He and I had the occasional pint together later. He even used to come and help out up on the farm at lambing and shearing times.’
‘Didn’t you go to art college?’
‘No. Never. Everything I learned, I learned from other artists.’
‘Where was the farm?’
‘Up Dalton way. I grew up there, but I went to school in Richmond. Farming wasn’t the life for me. I left when I was seventeen, went to live in town in a poky little flat over a hat shop on the market square, but I went back to help out occasionally.’ He sniffed. ‘That was one of the things the press held against me, what made it all so much worse. I was only a farmer’s boy, see. Sort of the equivalent to Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had it been readily available back then. Funny, isn’t it, but have you thought that the only people who seem to have made a decent movie out of Lady Chatterley are the French? It always seems such an English story.’
‘What about Ken Russell?’
‘I was never a fan. Women in Love? Maybe. Anyway, I digress. So it was Wilf who told you about me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how does he know where I live? We haven’t met in sixty years or more.’
‘He doesn’t. Once I knew you were still alive, I tracked you down myself through an art dealer colleague. It wasn’t difficult. You do have a public reputation, you know. A good one.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
‘So can you tell me anything?’
‘Oh, there’s plenty I can tell you. It’s a matter of knowing where to begin. I suppose I could start by telling you that Ernest Fox wasn’t a nice man.’
‘Wilf Pelham said as much.’
Sam nodded. ‘Fox was an arrogant, cold and cruel bastard.’
‘Why did Grace marry him, then?’
‘A man’s true face is not always apparent from the start. Besides, he was a friend of the family, Daddy’s ultimatum, a man of substance.’
‘It was arranged?’
‘ Advantageous. We English don’t do arranged marriages. You should know that.’
‘Did he abuse Grace?’
‘Depends on what you mean. He didn’t hit her, I’m certain of it. She wouldn’t have stood for that. But he did treat her like a chattel, and he was cold towards her. That was the cruellest thing you could do to someone like Grace. She needed… she… I’m sorry.’ He sipped some more Armagnac and cleared his throat. He wasn’t crying, but it was clear that he had been rather more overcome by emotion than he was used to. I began to feel guilty for putting him through it. And what if he had a heart attack or a stroke? ‘What I meant to say,’ he went on, ‘was that she needed nurturing, tenderness, kindness and passion. Romance. She was damaged. Ernest was insensitive and callous. He shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near another human being in pain.’
‘Grace was damaged? How?’
‘The war, I think. She never spoke about it, but it was there in her silences, her black moods. It seemed to come out most of all when she was confronted with great beauty. She always used to cry when she looked at a great painting, or when she heard a superb musical performance. She was a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, you know, and she was overseas a lot. Nobody says much about their heroism, but they went through much the same horrors as the fighting men.’
‘She never mentioned her wartime experiences?’
‘No. But people don’t, do they? They just want to forget, not dwell on it. It’s different when you’re just a kid, though.’
‘What sort of experience was it for you?’
‘Me?’ Sam laughed. ‘Well, in my case there’s nothing to talk about. Oh, it was all very exciting at the time, though we tended to be quite away from it all up on the farm. I mean, we didn’t get the bombing raids or anything. Mostly it was the usual stuff. Missing sheep, a foot-and-mouth scare, a bad harvest, dealing with ministry officials and government directives about how much to grow of what.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Lived in a world of make-believe. Pretended I was a soldier, or a spy. I had my fighter and bomber identification charts, my Mickey Mouse gas mask and my steel helmet. My father even put an Anderson shelter in the garden. We grew vegetables on top of it. We heard a doodlebug once, miles away, and sometimes the German bombers passed overhead on Teesside raids. Once a Messerschmitt crashed in a field near Willance’s Leap. That
