Read Online Borrowed Time by Robert Goddard - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Goddard
Tags: Fiction
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have opened the window, in an attempt to blow away the memory as well as the mustiness. I walked in, hurrying to forestall any sense that what I was doing was better not done.
But there was nothing to see. A bare room, with white walls and no paintings. One wardrobe, its doors closed. A large double bed, stripped to the mattress, its pillows, sheets and blankets all gone. Absurdly feminine flower-patterned curtains stirring languidly. And a huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall facing the bed, smashed in one corner, cracks radiating to all sides, fracturing the reflection of the room into random triangles. When had it been smashed? I wondered. At what moment? Before? Or after? I shivered and looked at the bed. It was impossible to imagine, too awful to want to imagine. The breath straining, the wire tearing, the flesh yielding. So much agony. So much revulsion. Too much of everything. And now, as its antithesis, a vacuum, a space waiting to be filled. The room was drained, as the house was drained, exhausted by the violence that had briefly filled it. The night of July 17 wasn’t there any more. Even the impression it had left had been removed, on strips of tape and forensic slides, in sterile bags and sealed envelopes. In its place was an empty tomb.
By the time I returned to the sitting-room, Henley Bantock’s general amiability had refined itself into a drooling eagerness for Bella’s company: I knew the signs well enough. Forgetting his earlier determination to “sort things out” and apparently oblivious of my brief absence, he proposed we go out to lunch together. Bella not yet having ceased to find him amusing, we went. To the Harp at Old Radnor, a hilltop hamlet a few miles north-west of Kington, just off the road to Gladestry. It was a charmingly well-preserved old inn, with picnic benches set up on a bank outside, where a vast panorama of Radnor Forest was added gratis to the menu.
Henley had gone there with his uncle several times, apparently, during periodic visits with his wife, Muriel. She hadn’t been able to come this time and Henley was clearly enjoying being off the leash. They both worked as administrators for one of the London Boroughs. Havering, I think. Or Hounslow. Henley spoke so casually of Oscar that I couldn’t help suspecting the visits had been designed more to safeguard his inheritance than check on the old boy’s well-being. Muriel probably hadn’t considered it necessary to accompany him now Whistler’s Cot and an entire Expressionist
oeuvre
were in the bag. She might have changed her mind, of course, if she’d known her husband was going to spend half the day ogling my sister-in-law over a ploughman’s lunch.
I listened distractedly to his autobiographical insights into the character of Oscar Bantock, which grew less and less complimentary as the shandy flowed. “He might have looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Captain Bird’s Eye but there was a streak of cruelty in him. Call it an artistic temperament if you like, but I saw it differently. He lived with us most of the time I was growing up and coping with him as well as a sick husband was what took my mother to an early grave in my opinion.” While he waxed resentful, my eyes drifted north to the hills I’d crossed ten days before on the path from Knighton. If I’d accepted Louise Paxton’s offer of a lift that evening, we might have stopped here for a drink. Then, at the very least, she might have arrived at Whistler’s Cot a crucial hour later. Life, in Henley Bantock’s self-pitying account, wasn’t fair. But death, it seemed, had an artistic temperament.
“What little he made from painting he spent twice over. Not on us, of course. Not even on anything as useful as brushes and canvases. Most of it went on whisky. Only the finest malts would do for Uncle Oscar. And then there were his women. He had a better eye for the ladies than for art, I can’t deny. You’d certainly not have left Whistler’s
But there was nothing to see. A bare room, with white walls and no paintings. One wardrobe, its doors closed. A large double bed, stripped to the mattress, its pillows, sheets and blankets all gone. Absurdly feminine flower-patterned curtains stirring languidly. And a huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall facing the bed, smashed in one corner, cracks radiating to all sides, fracturing the reflection of the room into random triangles. When had it been smashed? I wondered. At what moment? Before? Or after? I shivered and looked at the bed. It was impossible to imagine, too awful to want to imagine. The breath straining, the wire tearing, the flesh yielding. So much agony. So much revulsion. Too much of everything. And now, as its antithesis, a vacuum, a space waiting to be filled. The room was drained, as the house was drained, exhausted by the violence that had briefly filled it. The night of July 17 wasn’t there any more. Even the impression it had left had been removed, on strips of tape and forensic slides, in sterile bags and sealed envelopes. In its place was an empty tomb.
By the time I returned to the sitting-room, Henley Bantock’s general amiability had refined itself into a drooling eagerness for Bella’s company: I knew the signs well enough. Forgetting his earlier determination to “sort things out” and apparently oblivious of my brief absence, he proposed we go out to lunch together. Bella not yet having ceased to find him amusing, we went. To the Harp at Old Radnor, a hilltop hamlet a few miles north-west of Kington, just off the road to Gladestry. It was a charmingly well-preserved old inn, with picnic benches set up on a bank outside, where a vast panorama of Radnor Forest was added gratis to the menu.
Henley had gone there with his uncle several times, apparently, during periodic visits with his wife, Muriel. She hadn’t been able to come this time and Henley was clearly enjoying being off the leash. They both worked as administrators for one of the London Boroughs. Havering, I think. Or Hounslow. Henley spoke so casually of Oscar that I couldn’t help suspecting the visits had been designed more to safeguard his inheritance than check on the old boy’s well-being. Muriel probably hadn’t considered it necessary to accompany him now Whistler’s Cot and an entire Expressionist
oeuvre
were in the bag. She might have changed her mind, of course, if she’d known her husband was going to spend half the day ogling my sister-in-law over a ploughman’s lunch.
I listened distractedly to his autobiographical insights into the character of Oscar Bantock, which grew less and less complimentary as the shandy flowed. “He might have looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Captain Bird’s Eye but there was a streak of cruelty in him. Call it an artistic temperament if you like, but I saw it differently. He lived with us most of the time I was growing up and coping with him as well as a sick husband was what took my mother to an early grave in my opinion.” While he waxed resentful, my eyes drifted north to the hills I’d crossed ten days before on the path from Knighton. If I’d accepted Louise Paxton’s offer of a lift that evening, we might have stopped here for a drink. Then, at the very least, she might have arrived at Whistler’s Cot a crucial hour later. Life, in Henley Bantock’s self-pitying account, wasn’t fair. But death, it seemed, had an artistic temperament.
“What little he made from painting he spent twice over. Not on us, of course. Not even on anything as useful as brushes and canvases. Most of it went on whisky. Only the finest malts would do for Uncle Oscar. And then there were his women. He had a better eye for the ladies than for art, I can’t deny. You’d certainly not have left Whistler’s
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