“You’re a liar, John. You’re a snivelling little liar. You always were.” Elizabeth’s anger had snapped, torn from its mooring by my presence. She would be hating herself for thus losing her temper in public, but she was quite unable to control it. My silence in the face of her attack only made her anger more fierce. “I know you’re lying, John. I have proof.”
I still kept silent. So did the rest of the family. I doubt if any of them had expected to see me at the funeral and, when they did, they had doubtless half feared and half relished that this skeleton from the family’s crowded bone cupboard would make its ghoulish appearance. Now it had, and none of them wanted to stop its display. Elizabeth, sensing their support and my discomfiture, attacked once more. “You’d better run away again, John, before the police discover you’re back.”
“You’re hysterical.” My anger was like a gnawing bitch in my belly, but I was determined not to show it; yet, try as I might, I could not keep its venom from my voice. “Why don’t you go and lie down, or take a pill?”
“Damn you.” She twitched her wrist and the sticky sherry splashed up on to my face and on to the cheap black suit I’d bought in honour of the occasion. “Damn you,” she said again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”
Sherry dripped from my chin on to my black tie. None of the relatives moved. They all agreed with Elizabeth. They thought I was the bastard who had made them poor. If it wasn’t for me then Stowey would still be in the family, the port would flow at Christmas, and there would be no importunate bank managers and no genteel shame of an old family driven into penury. I had not played their game, I wasn’t one of them, and so they all hated me.
So I didn’t stay for the funeral. I glanced at Georgina, but she was in a world of her own. Father Maltravers tried to detain me, but I brushed him aside and walked out, leaving the family in an embittered silence. I washed the sherry from my face in the hotel’s loo, collected my filthy oilskin jacket from its peg, then walked through the Devon rain to the village street. I dialled Charlie’s number on the public phone outside the Rossendale Arms, but there was no reply. I threw my sticky black tie into the gutter, then lit a pipe as I waited for the bus. The tooth suddenly began to ache again. I explored the pain with my tongue, wondering whether it truly was psychosomatic, but decided that no such sharp agony could be purely mental, not even if it was provoked by a lacerating homecoming.
Damn the family. I’d come home, and they did not want me. Above the thatched roofs of the village the green pastures curled up to the thick woods where, as a child, I’d learned the skills of stalking and killing. Charlie had taught me those skills. He’d grown up in one of my family’s tied cottages, but we had still become friends. We had become the best of friends. My mother, of course, had hated Charlie. She had called him a piece of village muck, a dirty little boy from an infamous family, but he had still become my best friend. He was still my closest friend; four years away had not changed that. I wanted to see him, but I wouldn’t wait for him. I wanted to be back at sea, riding the long winds in
And all because of a bloody painting.
It was a good painting, a very good painting. So good that it could have saved the family fortune.
My father’s death had been a financial disaster to the family, but my mother, with a single-minded fury, had fought to save Stowey and its estates. Her legal battles had been waged for ten years, and at the end she had won her campaign and the key to it was the painting.
The house had once been filled with fine pictures. The National Gallery in Washington DC has a slew of our Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, while a gallery in California has the pick of our Dutch interiors and the two good Constables that London’s National Gallery had been desperate to acquire, but too poor to pay for. One by one the walls of Stowey had been stripped to pay gambling debts or death duties, but on my father’s death there had been nothing of any value left.
Or hardly anything of value. There was a canvas which my mother swore was a Stubbs, but which Sothebys could not bring to auction as such. There was a Poussin, which probably wasn’t, but if it was then the old master had been having a bad day. There was a Constable drawing, which was undoubtedly genuine, but a Constable drawing doesn’t pay the revenue. The only recourse was to sell Stowey and its lands, but that was something my mother would not contemplate. Stowey had been in our family since the twelfth century.
But there was one undoubted treasure. An odd treasure for a house like Stowey, and a treasure which, strictly speaking, did not belong to the family, but rather to my mother. It was a Van Gogh.
The painting should have looked all wrong in the old house, as out of place as a drunken punk ensconced in a library, yet somehow it seemed perfect. It was a glorious, superb, demented canvas; one of the early sunflower paintings. It showed eight blossoms topping a half-glazed jar; an explosion of yellow paint touched by blue with poor Vincent’s childlike signature painted on the vase itself. On a summer’s day, when the sun blazoned Stowey’s mediaeval gardens with light, the painting seemed like a fragment of that brightness trapped and caught inside the house.
The painting had been brought to the family by my mother. She had been left it by her father. She had hung the Van Gogh on the linenfold panelling of her bedroom at Stowey. My mother refused to lend the picture to any exhibition, though once in a while an art historian or a reputable painter would seek permission to visit Stowey, and I remember the awe with which they gazed at the lovely canvas.
It was well protected. My mother’s bedroom had been in Stowey’s crenellated east tower, built for defence, and the mediaeval bastion had been supplemented with the most sophisticated alarms. No one had even tried to penetrate those defences, until the end.
That end came ten years after my father’s death. My mother had fought every month of those years. She had cursed and kicked and clawed at the taxmen. She had challenged their assessments and fobbed them off with small payments torn from the sale of our outlying pastures. She had fought a good fight, but then my brother had gone into the gun room and ripped her fight to shreds.
My brother’s suicide gave the taxmen a new carcass of juicy death duties to chew. My mother, recognising the inevitable, knew that either Stowey or the Van Gogh had to go. Stowey won. She agreed a price of four million pounds for the Van Gogh, but on the very day before it should have left the house, it was stolen. It transpired that my brother had let the insurance lapse one month before his death. The police were certain that only a person with intimate knowledge of the alarms could have penetrated to the gun room where the crated painting had been waiting for the security van. The police were also certain that I was that person.
I had put the painting in the gun room to await collection. I had the key to the room and to the alarm systems. Only I was supposed to know where the painting was. My fingerprints were on the door’s lockplates. On the day after the painting was stolen I sailed across the Channel in a friend’s boat, presumably carrying my loot away. The evidence was all circumstantial, and utterly damning. I was never charged, because my guilt could not be proved, but the whole family was nevertheless certain that I was guilty. I had done it, they said, to spite my mother and because I didn’t want to give the taxmen their ton of flesh. My relatives said I was a rogue, that I’d always been a rogue, and that now I’d broken the Rossendale family with my selfish greed.
The painting was never found. My mother’s fight, and four million pounds, was lost, yet the taxmen and the lawyers still had to be paid, and so Stowey was sold and now caters to well-heeled tourists who gape at a boot cupboard in the belief that a priest starved to death inside. My mother moved into an old rectory on the edge of the moor, and there she slowly died. The family had made me an outcast. And I had fled to sea.
In a yacht called
There wasn’t much I had to do in Salcombe because I didn’t plan on a full provisioning in England. I would fill up with fresh water, put diesel in the tanks and spare cans, and stock enough food to reach Vigo or Lisbon. I wanted an estimate for a new trysail, but even if I could afford it, I would not wait for delivery, but rather have Charlie send the sail to Tenerife. There were a slew of small problems. One of the winches had worn gearing, a bow fairlead needed replacing, and
