Read Online The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori by Robert Barnard - Free Book Online Page A

it was—apart from Declan, of course. Here’s you, my dear, still queening it at the head of the table, nursing the consciousness that you are the wife, soon to be the widow, of one of Britain’s great artists, and trying to forgive me for refusing that knighthood that would have given you the ladyship you’ve been in training for all your life.”
    Melanie smiled pityingly.
    â€œDear me, Ranulph, do we have to celebrate your return by going over all those old canards? For the thousandth time, I merely thought you should accept the honor that you richly deserved, that’s all.”
    â€œ More than richly deserved. Overdeserved!” said Byatt, his eyes flashing. “If it had been a peerage, as it should have been, I would have accepted.”
    A shadow briefly passed over Melanie’s face, disturbing for a moment her queenly placidity. Declan decided that the emotion that prompted it must have been regret.
    â€œYou will have to be content with posterity’s verdict on you as my muse, my inspiration, my sheet anchor to the world,” continued Byatt. “Posterity, as a rule, can be relied on to get it wrong, but in that they would be right. You have been my inspiration, and so much more . . . . And then there’s dear Martha—still the same, still devoted, still a martyr to duty. Where do you get that from? I wonder. Duty is a thing I’ve always tried to bypass, to forget about entirely, and I’ve found that very easy to do. Duty hasn’t loomed at all large either in my dear wife’s scheme of things—her moral universe, as you might say, though with the rider that a universe has never been smaller thanmy wife’s moral one. I suppose we shall have to blame the grandparents as usual. My father was a dreary little man, the sort of person who worries if he’s five minutes late at the office, and works five minutes over to make it up.”
    Declan, who was cutting up the steak, which was the main course for his employer, flushed. He was used to family rows, but cruelty in the O’Hearn household was direct, brutal. This cruelty nestled under a civilized, urbane exterior. It was, he sensed, the more deadly for that.
    â€œBut at least there’s something now in your life since I was last in this room, isn’t there? The husband hunt! And that really is something new and important, because it can go on for the rest of your life. It will give you an interest until senility breaks out, and you may be on your deathbed and you will still not have got anywhere with it.”
    Martha Mates looked down at her plate, flushing, and began to cut determinedly at her meat.
    â€œYou’re cruel,” said Stephen Mates.
    â€œYes,” said Byatt. Declan thought he was going to leave it at that—as well he might, in Declan’s view—but he added: “To be realistic is to be cruel.”
    â€œYou can be realistic but simply make the judgment in your own mind,” said Stephen.
    â€œBut that would be to dodge the issue, wouldn’t it? Silence assumes consent, assumes complicity with lies and fantasies. Such as that you, Colonel, will ever be a painter.”
    â€œThere is no such fantasy on my part, I assure you,” said Colonel Chesney in clipped yet somehow heartfelt tones. “Pure dabbling, I realize only too well.”
    â€œYes, you are to painting what Florence Foster-Jenkins was to singing and William McGonagall was to poetry,”said Byatt, his meal pushed aside, sitting in a pensive and somehow doubly dangerous pose. “Or Stephen is to any intellectual endeavor.”
    Stephen sat still. He had, his body language suggested, been waiting for this, and now his burning eyes showed only an eagerness to get it over.
    â€œStephen’s delusion is rare,” said his grandfather, with the magisterial wisdom of old age and long experience. “It’s common enough to come across people who are