The Wise Friend, page 1
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Wise Friend
FLAME TREE PRESS
London & New York
For Don D’Auria –
champion of horror, champion editor
Chapter One
The Journal
I could never have believed I would wish my son loved books less, let alone dread the consequences. That August afternoon he’d been in my apartment less than half an hour before he ended up in the room with shelves on every wall. He was sprawled in a leather armchair several times his age, and leafing through an exhibition catalogue, when his phone gave its vintage ring. A glance at the screen let him say “It’s mum.”
“Shall I leave you to talk?”
Roy’s features – the long sharp-nosed face and thin lips he’d inherited from me – twitched in a fleeting grimace. Just the deep brown eyes were his mother’s, but their habitual preoccupation was all his. “You can hear,” he said.
Just the same, I turned to the window. Double glazing fended off much of the noise from New Brighton Station down below, but I was being told a train was late. On the far side of the railway, beyond a cluster of chain restaurants at the bottom of the hill, the sea led to a crowd of windmills spinning like cogs of the sky. A microscopic oil rig and the distant filament of Blackpool Tower might have been components as well, helping maintain the pellucid blue. None of this distracted me from hearing Julia say “Are you at your father’s now, Roy?”
“Have been for hours. Do you want to talk to him?”
“I will when I’ve spoken to you. Are you settling in all right?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
I could tell this meant yes in a fifteen-year-old’s parlance besides protesting at the question, but Julia persisted “Will you be comfortable there while I’m away?”
“Mum, dad can hear.”
“Then I’m sure he understands.”
“I’m good.” As I hoped this wasn’t dutifully aimed at me Roy added “I’m reading in his book room.”
“No need to bring any of those home. That’s what your tablet’s for.”
“The modern librarian,” I murmured and felt sly at once.
“I didn’t hear that,” Julia said, which generally meant she had. “What’s your reading, Roy?”
“A book of dad’s aunt’s paintings.”
“Just don’t let them tempt you to imitate her. You make sure he doesn’t, Patrick.”
“I haven’t done paintings since I was little,” Roy said.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” Julia retorted forcefully enough to be rebuking both of us. “All the things she was mixed up with obviously harmed her mind, or she wouldn’t have done what she did to herself.”
“It was never proved she meant to,” I said.
“I’m not having this argument again,” Julia said, a response familiar from the last years of our marriage. “Please keep an eye on what Roy reads and what he does while he’s your responsibility. I’ll be home once the conference is over.”
As our son took refuge in the book, which didn’t save his face from growing mottled with embarrassment, I said “I think we’re both responsible for him.”
Someone unfamiliar with Julia might have thought she’d grown briefly deaf, since she said only “Call me whenever you need to, Roy. And make sure you two don’t get into any mischief.”
“Yes, miss,” I said but heard no sign that she’d taken it as a joke.
When a further silence made it plain that she’d gone, Roy slipped the phone into one of the several pockets of his elongated shorts. As he reopened the catalogue at Thelma’s best-known painting – the red London bus perched on the highest Himalayan peak – he said “What was your aunt like?”
“She’d have encouraged you to look further than people ordinarily do. That’s what she did to me when I used to stay with her, though I can’t say my parents were altogether in favour.”
“That’s how all the books with her pictures on them used to make me feel. Have you still got them?”
“They’re over in the corner where the sun can’t get at them. All the books with anything to do with her are, just in case they fade.”
Roy was making to replace the catalogue when he peered into the corner I’d devoted to my aunt. “What’s back here?”
Reaching into the gap the catalogue had left, he coaxed out an item. He might have been extracting a slice of darkness, a concentrated essence of the shadows in the corner, but just the covers of the exercise book were black. I had no idea when I might have trapped it behind the other volumes, and it touched off memories I hadn’t visited for years. “That was Thelma’s,” I said.
Roy perched on the edge of my desk while he leafed through the book. “What’s it meant to be?”
“I was never really sure. Maybe they’re notes for some of her work. I thought the names were places she based paintings on.”
“It’s more like a diary at the start, but it doesn’t end up much of one.”
As he passed me the journal it emitted a faint earthy smell, presumably of age. My aunt had made an entry on the inside of the front cover, which suggested she’d written it later than she’d begun the journal. 21st March, first year, the elaborately cursive writing said. Met A on walk. I glanced at a few of the place names she’d annotated with obscure quotations – Monks Cross, Slatevale, Goodmanswood – and then let Roy have the journal, since it intrigued him. “Why did she give you her book?” he said.
“She didn’t, but I think she’d have liked me to have it. She tried to inspire me whenever I stayed at her house. She thought her sister, that’s my mother, didn’t bring my mind out enough.” With a twinge of guilt I said “Maybe I should have passed it on to her biographer.”
“Do you think they’d have understood it?”
“If anybody could.” As the railway station’s voice turned female, warning listeners to be aware of suspicious items, I said “I was hoping it would help me understand what happened to my aunt, but that’s one more thing I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”
Roy blinked at the journal and laid it on my desk with a thump as muted as the voice below. “We could go and see some of these places,” he said, and now I wish we’d never found the book.
Chapter Two
Absences
“Mummy, what did grandma say about dad’s auntie?”
“Roy, you’ve been really good all day.” Julia’s delicate but determined face barely hinted at a frown. “Don’t spoil it now,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t interrupt while grown-ups are talking.”
“But I only nearly heard what she said.” His quirk of language earned him an indulgent smile from an art critic. “She said something was a pity,” Roy insisted.
“She wasn’t talking to little boys. Would you like to play in the back garden? Just don’t go out of the gate.”
“I don’t like playing there by myself. Someone kept looking at me over the fence.”
“Now, nobody could do that, could they?” My mother lowered her round face, which routinely resembled a badge of concern, towards him. “It’s taller than you and your daddy put together,” she said and told the rest of the family “Someone looking over it, that’s the kind of thing my sister would have made up, and our parents would have encouraged her.”
“No need to squash his imagination, Astrid.” While my father’s face looked weighted by generous jowls, his slowness denoted thought. “I expect they were up a tree, were they?” he told Roy, adding an unhurried smile. “That’ll be what you saw, son.”
“They were in a tree, but—”
“That’s settled, then,” Julia said. “If you don’t want to play out, why don’t you see if anybody wants a sandwich? You were so good taking them around before.”
“You needn’t send him away, Julia,” my mother said. “He’s not too young to know what I was saying, and the sooner the better. Roy, sweetheart, don’t you ever get up to the kind of thing my sister did.”
“But mum and dad like me to paint.”
“Not painting, lovely. Don’t go in buildings nobody lives in, and never go up too high. We don’t want you falling over, do we?”
“Didn’t dad’s auntie mean to fall?”
“I’m sure she didn’t, son,” my father said. “She just didn’t take enough care.”
“That’s right, Jonathan,” my mother retorted, though not as if it wholly was. “Cared too much about her art and not enough about how we’d feel for losing her.”
“I shouldn’t think that crossed her mind, dear.”
“Too much didn’t that should have.” My mother appeared to recall Roy was listening. “Your family’s the most important thing in your life,” she told him. “Your mummy and daddy care for you and each other, and I know they always will.”
“I know too,” Roy said with a seriousness that seemed concentrated by his size and youth. “Dad’s auntie’s paintings are important, aren’t they? Lots of people said they were in church.”
“They’re very important,” Julia said, “to people who like them.”
“Don’t you, mummy?”
“I prefer art to be more like real life, I’m afraid.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt provoked to respond. “As the lady from the Tate was saying, Roy, my aunt made people look again and further.”
“I don’t need to be told how to look,” Julia said.
“Don’t we all take things for granted sometimes?”
“Oh yes, Patrick,” Julia said. “You’ve been known to do that.”
“Now, children,” my mother intervened. “Shall we just talk about Thelma? That’s why we’re here, after all.”
Roy gazed around the room full of my aunt’s friends and colleagues, more of whom were audible in the kitchen and the hall. Beside the redundant red-brick hearth, above which hung a Leonora Carrington print apparently depicting a witch and her familiar, Thelma’s one-time husband Neville was arguing with an art critic. “Shall I tell everyone they have to talk about her?” Roy said.
“I’m sure they are already,” my mother said, only to look as if she’d missed the chance to send him away on a mission. Neville had finished disagreeing and was making for us.
His wide not quite shaven face with its greying hair and equally shaggy eyebrows looked unkempt with suppressed grief. “I hope nobody thought the worse of me for not speaking at the funeral,” he said. “I wouldn’t have trusted myself.”
“Neville,” my mother said like her handclasp shaped into a word. “I’m certain everyone understood.”
“And sorry if you thought I should have lined up with you outside the church.”
Since my mother had relinquished my uncle’s hand, my father dealt it a manly squeeze. “You could have if you’d liked, old chap.”
“I didn’t want to presume.” Having hesitated while he glanced at Roy, Neville said “No, the truth is I didn’t know if you’d have someone else with you.”
“This little fellow’s mother took him for a walk, but even if he’d been there—”
“Not your grandson. My replacement. Thelma’s man.”
“I don’t see how you could have thought that,” my mother objected. “We wouldn’t have wanted him.”
“We had quite a few words with her about him,” my father said.
“Well, thank you,” Neville said, though the reason for his gratitude wasn’t clear. “Was he here today? You might know better than I would. I don’t even recall what he looked like, not that I’ve any wish to.”
“I don’t myself too well,” my father said. “Can you improve on us, Astrid?”
“I don’t think I’d know him if he walked into the room, and I shouldn’t think Patrick would either.”
“I only saw him once like you,” I said and immediately wondered if I was mistaken. As we’d entered the chapel I’d noticed someone among the trees on the far side of the graveyard. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman, but I’d thought the loiterer was watching us. “And I heard him one night while I was staying here,” I said. “I don’t think I was meant to.”
“He was good at skulking all right. Made for it, he was so thin.” Neville stared around the room, presumably in search of him. “I kept hoping Thelma just wanted a break from me,” he said. “I know I wasn’t the easiest person to live with.”
“None of us are,” I said.
As Julia gave me a look more meaningful than I entirely welcomed, Neville finished surveying the room. “I’ve never seen the house so tidy,” he admitted. “I know some of that was my fault.”
“That was Astrid and me,” my father said. “We cleared up for the wake.”
“Did you throw much out?” Neville was anxious to learn.
“We’ve tried to keep everything that might mean anything to someone,” my mother said. “Some things we don’t think would. There’s a kind of diary Thelma started, but it might as well be blank for all the sense it makes.”
A memory prompted me to blurt “Where is it?”
“Where we found it. In her studio.”
Neville was focusing on Roy as if he’d just noticed him. “You look like a grand chap,” he said, delivering a large loose handshake. “My grandnephew, will you be?”
“He’s our little helper, aren’t you, Roy?” my mother said.
All this felt like my excuse to be elsewhere. “Back in a few minutes,” I said and sidled through the crowd.
Outside the room a man appeared to be miming a bird, his arms held behind his back while he cocked his head at a framed painting. Three guests seated on consecutive stairs reminded me of plaster poultry mounted on a wall. In the bathroom a woman I didn’t think I’d ever seen before was restoring her makeup in front of a mirror. The bedroom I used to stay in looked diminished, stripped of memories, awaiting some visitor other than me. My aunt’s studio faced it across the landing. As I stepped into the large room scattered with paintings and the makings of them a woman said “Can I help?”
She might have been addressing a potential customer at her gallery, which had been the first to support my aunt’s career. In the church she’d spoken at length about Thelma’s achievement – how the intense lyricism of her early landscapes had grown hallucinatory before advancing into a highly personal form of surrealism, where enigmatic elements recalled the magical suggestions of Leonora Carrington, Thelma’s favourite painter. Towards the end Thelma Turnbill seemed to grow dissatisfied with her success, perhaps feeling too much of her fame depended on her early painting of a bus up Everest, used by London Transport for their Taking You Everywhere poster. In the pulpit Barbare had sounded close to proprietary, but I wasn’t going to let her treat me like an intruder in the studio. “Just looking for an item,” I said as firmly as I could.
Barbare thinned her eyes, lowering her multicoloured eyebrows. They and her cropped rainbow hair might have been designed to contrast with her severely funereal suit and polo-neck. “May I ask what?” she said.
I didn’t answer until I located Thelma’s attempt at a journal, lying on the sill of the broad high window that overlooked the woods behind the house. Leaves rusty with autumn massed into the distance, where their tints were diluted by mist. My son’s complaint about a watcher made me peer into the forest, but I’d seen nothing except trees when Barbare said “Excuse me, could you leave that? It was Thelma’s.”
I picked up the book I’d laid my hand on. “I’m her nephew.”
Barbare narrowed her eyes further before letting them relax. “I do know you. I haven’t seen you for years, or much.”
“Thank you for everything you said today. I’m sure everyone would want me to say so. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
I was giving her permission to explore the studio, but she said “I wish you wouldn’t take that. Do remind me of your name.”
“It’s still Patrick.”
“I should have remembered. One of the few men in her life.”
Remembering the discussion downstairs made me ask “How well did you know the last one?”
“Her inspiration, you mean.”
“That’s what you think he was.”
“That’s what Thelma said he was, and her work did take a new direction.”
“You sound as if you weren’t so happy with it.”
“It sold. It must have spoken to people, even if they weren’t sure what they were being told.” Barbare left her mouth ajar as a preamble to adding “It felt as if she’d started hiding details in her work she didn’t want the rest of us to understand.”
“And you’re blaming her partner.”
“If that’s what he was. I don’t know what else he could have been. She did say she wouldn’t have visited quite a few of the places she painted without him.”
“What did you make of him yourself?”
“Do you know, I thought of mentioning him in the church, but I couldn’t find a single thing to say about him. I’m sure I met him several times and yet it feels as if I hardly did.”
I had a disconcerting sense that the imprecision of her memory had infected mine, and I turned to my aunt’s last canvas, a version of the woods beyond the window. Every season of the year was represented by foliage or its absence. Just one detail looked incomplete, a figure beneath a distant tree that was skeletal with winter despite bearing blossoms on some of its branches, not to mention leaves in every state a year would bring. The figure had been left without a face, and even its gender was unclear. “What do you think she was trying to do there?” I said.
“I’m afraid we’ll never know, even if we think she finished it. I’m not sure she meant to fill in whoever’s in the background.”
