Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

“Are you busy?” I asked when he opened the door. “Can you give me ten minutes?”

“Is it a medical visit or a social one?”

“Social.”

He stepped back. “Come in, but you’ll have to watch while I eat my lunch. There’s only enough for one, I’m afraid, but I can rustle up a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.”

I followed him across the hall. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“When did you last eat?”

The question caught me off-balance. “This morning?” I suggested.

He eyed me thoughtfully before pulling out a chair. As always in my company, he was careful to give me space, stepping away before inviting me to sit down. “Take a pew.”

“Thank you.”

He resumed his place at the other side of the table. Lunch was a microwaved pasta meal, still in its plastic container. “I use a plate when I know people are coming,” he said, picking up his fork. “Anyone who rings the bell on spec doesn’t count. Has Jess been bringing you food from the farm?”

I nodded.

“Do you eat it?”

I nodded again.

He didn’t believe me, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “So what can I tell you about Jess? Which particular part of that extraordinarily irritating personality do you want me to explain?”

I smiled. “How do you know it’s Jess I’m interested in?”

He filled his fork. “I was two hundred yards behind you when you turned in through her gate. Did you find her at home?”

“I watched her grease her baler, then she took me inside and showed me around. Presumably you’ve been in the house?”

“Too often to count.”

“So you’ve seen the corridor of family photos?”

“Yes.”

“The big room with the screens?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

He didn’t answer until he’d dealt with the last of his food and pushed the container aside. “I change my mind from time to time but, on the whole, I think it’s a good thing Jess never finished art school. She was at the end of her first year when the accident happened, and she had to jack it in to take on the farm. She still regrets it…but she’d have wasted three years if she’d stayed.”

I was unreasonably disappointed. If anyone could see she had talent it was surely Peter, because he seemed to have more empathy with her than anyone else. “You don’t think she’s any good?”

“I didn’t say that,” he corrected mildly. “I said if she’d stayed at art school she’d have been wasting her time. Either she’d have conformed and lost all her individuality…or she’d have been at permanent war with her tutors and done her own thing anyway. If you’re lucky, she might show you her paintings one day. As far as I know she hasn’t touched a brush since the accident, but the work she did before was exceptional.”

“Did she sell any of it?”

He shook his head. “Never tried. It’s sitting in a studio at the back of the house. I doubt she’d accept money for it, anyway. She’s of the painting-for-profit-is-bad school…thinks any artist who panders to what the buyer wants is a mediocre hack.”

“What sort of subjects did she paint?”

“Landscapes. Seascapes. She has a very individual style-more impressionist than representational-creates movement in the sky and the water with minimal paint and sweeping brushstrokes. It didn’t go down too well with her teachers, which is why she’s so intolerant of other people’s opinions. They told her she was looking back towards Turner instead of embracing the idea of conceptual art, where a piece is created in the mind before it becomes concrete. The sort of artist they liked was Madeleine’s husband.”

My disbelief must have been obvious, because Peter laughed.

“He used to be a lot more interesting than those canvases on Lily’s walls. He conceptualized irrationality in physical form…quite different from the abstracts he’s doing now.”

I tried to look intelligent. “Jess said you have one of his early paintings. Can I see it?”

There was a small hestitation. “Why not? It’s hanging in my office…second door on the right. You shouldn’t have any trouble identifying it. It’s the only painting in there.”

This picture was detailed and busy, like Hieronymus Bosch, with the same nightmarish visions of a world gone mad. Living houses thrust out massive roots with gnarled lianas burrowing through the brickwork. The painting had a high sheen, as if layer upon painstaking layer of paint had been applied to produce it, and the style bore no resemblance to the looser work at Barton House. There was a whirling madness at its heart. None of the houses stood true, but leaned drunkenly in all directions as if gripped by a hurricane. Hundreds of tiny people, quite out of scale with the buildings, populated the rooms behind the windows, and each face was a meticulous replica of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Outside, similarly tiny animals foraged among leaf matter, with no distinction in size made between species, all with the pale, tapered, human faces of the Munch.

I was prepared to accept that it was conceptualized irrationality (whatever that meant-it sounded like an oxymoron to me) but, without a title, I hadn’t a clue if a particular piece of unreason was being expressed or if it was unreason in general. Why living houses? Why so many people trapped inside them? Why animals with human faces? Was it man’s fear of nature? Or was it closer to Hieronymus Bosch-a vision of hell? I had an uncomfortable feeling that if Jess were there she’d say my opinion was subjective, and therefore irrelevant. It didn’t matter how disturbed and powerful I found the vision, the meaning belonged to the artist.

Peter was standing in front of the kettle when I returned to the kitchen. “I hope you like your coffee black,” he said, pouring water into two mugs. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of milk.”

“I do, thank you.” I took the one he offered me, successfully manoeuvring my fingers to avoid his. “Does the painting have a title?”

“It won’t help you. Ochre. What did you make of it?”

“Honestly? Or will you bite my head off like Jess? I felt her breathing down my neck in there, telling me not to be so pretentious.”

Peter looked amused. “Except she hates the thought police more than you do. She calls it the emperor’s-clothes syndrome. If someone like Saatchi’s prepared to pay a fortune for an unmade bed, then it must be good…and it’s only idiots who don’t get it. Try honesty,” he encouraged.

“OK, well, it’s a damn sight better than anything at Barton House, although I haven’t a clue what it’s supposed to represent. It has a surrealist feel to it. What I really can’t get my head around is how Madeleine lives with the artist who painted it. I mean, she’s so middle-class and conformist…and Nathaniel appears to be hovering off the planet somewhere. How does that work exactly?”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Nathaniel painted it before he married her. The stuff he does now is very tame. Jess describes it as marshmallow buildings with window-boxes. Which is about right. He hardly sells at all these days.”

“How much did you pay for yours?”

Peter pulled a face. “Five thousand quid eleven years ago, and it’s worth hardly anything now. I had it valued for the divorce. In terms of investment, it was a disaster…but, as a canvas, it still fascinates me. When I bought it, Nathaniel told me that the clue to what it represents is the repetitive Edvard Munch face-the angst-filled scream.”

I waited. “OK,” I said after a moment. “I recognized it in the faces…but it doesn’t help me much. Is it hell?”

“In a way.” He paused. “I thought you might recognize the emotions. It depicts a panic attack. Munch suffered anxiety most of his life and The Scream is usually described as an expression of intense anguish or fear.”