Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

I supposed that he was right and didn’t push the point.

I slept soundly and nightmare free yet again that night and woke soon after dawn to another quite glorious summer morning. Through the bedroom window I could see the sun rising over the bay. It was the kind of morning which defied you to be anything other than happy and optimistic. One of these days, I thought, I will build a life of my own, like Mariette, I really will.

Carl, almost always an early riser, was already up and about, and I could smell that he had made fresh coffee. I tripped down the stairs, my head buzzing with all my ideas.

‘You look like you’re in a good mood,’ he remarked with a grin.

‘I am,’ I said, and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

‘Right then,’ he responded. ‘It’s a glorious day. Shall we drive out of town a bit and take a walk along the coastal path? It’s still very early, shouldn’t be too many grockles about yet.’

I nodded enthusiastically, gulped down a cup of coffee, nibbled at a slice of bread and honey, then followed Carl out of the door.

His old red van was parked just around the corner on the brow of the hill. It was pretty battered but, even so, as we approached it we noticed that there were fresh scratches right down the side nearest to us.

‘Goddamn it,’ exclaimed Carl, reaching out to touch the damage. ‘I thought they only did this to Mercs and Beamers.’

I smiled. I was still in a good mood. Neither Carl nor I were exactly car proud. We couldn’t afford anything much to be proud of, for a start.

Then Carl stood back and studied the scratches more carefully.

‘It’s some kind of graffiti, isn’t it?’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘Some kind of writing, I think, but very difficult to read.’

He narrowed his eyes and half squinted at the marks.

‘“Know, Know, Know... something.” I’m not sure. What do you make of it, Suzanne?’

‘“Know the truth”,’ I read aloud, suddenly seeing most of the badly formed letters on the van quite clearly.

I glanced at Carl.

He was frowning by then. Concentrating hard.

‘“I know the truth”,’ he said quietly.

Then he turned to look at me. We stared at each other for a few seconds. It felt like a very long time.

‘Kids,’ he said eventually. ‘Damned stupid kids.’

‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘Must be kids. What else?’

We climbed into the van, drove out a few miles on the road heading south towards Land’s End, parked in a lay-by just outside Zennor and found our way on to a part of the famous coastal path which runs all the way from Minehead on the north coast of Devon, right down around the bottom end of Cornwall and up the south coast to Portland Bill in Dorset.

The sun was still shining brightly. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sea was that kind of aquamarine blue that is so rarely seen off the British Isles.

And yet somehow the day was not quite as glorious for Carl and I as it had been such a short time ago.

We only walked for an hour of so. Our hearts were not in it. As soon as we returned to the cottage Carl went into his studio – then just a makeshift lean-to in the backyard but with plenty of good natural light – and began to paint. Not one of the wonderful abstracts which were his pride and joy, but a cosy seaside scene of the kind that were our bread and butter.

I sat quietly on a stool and watched him as I so often did, even though my mind kept wandering. I had somehow lost the desire to go off job-hunting.

Carl could paint the chocolate box pictures, as we called them, blindfold. Sometimes he used pastels and watercolour, but more often he worked in oils because oil paintings fetched the best prices. Carl was a highly accomplished oil painter, very skilled in all the technicalities of producing just the right colour and texture, but that morning his progress was slow. His brush did not sweep across the canvas with anything like its usual assured flourish.

The light was almost too bright. The studio, which had a glass roof, caught rather too much morning sun on a day like this, and it could be blinding for an artist. I knew that Carl preferred the pure light of a more wintry day. He was sweating, too. Every possible window was open but it was hot in the small conservatory-like building. In the winter it was extremely cold, of course, but Carl never seemed to notice.

He worked on a tall easel and stood with one leg bent and balanced on a footstool so that he could lean his palette on his knee. His big wooden paintbox was on the table to one side, every tube and jar meticulously laid out. Carl was a very ordered painter. The studio was never untidy, not at all the way I had always imagined an artist’s studio would be. Carl said he couldn’t work in a mess. Occasionally he took a break from layering on the paint to step back and study the all too familiar scene taking form on his canvas – a fishing smack in the foreground of St Ives bay, a vividly setting sun behind.

The painting was as technically excellent as ever, but I knew how much the subject bored him.

‘Do you know how many sunsets over St Ives I’ve painted since we came to live here, Suzanne?’ he asked, as he paused to drink a mug of coffee I had made for him.

I shook my head.

‘Neither do I.’ He grinned. ‘If I counted them I think I really would go mad.’

He gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to work. About an hour or so later, as he squeezed some crimson paint on to his palette the tube split open and dollops of the bright-red goo spurted on to the canvas.

Carl rarely swore. ‘Bugger it!’ he said, dabbing at the canvas with an oily cloth. Then he put down his palette, stepped away from his easel and turned to face me. ‘This is silly,’ he said, ‘I can’t concentrate. Come on, we’re going out.’

He led me into the town, stopping in Fore Street at Warren’s pasty shop for what we reckoned were the best oggies in town and then at an off-licence for a bottle of wine, before marching me up the hill. I knew where he was taking me. We both loved the Barbara Hepworth museum, set in the white-painted cottage in the little narrow street leading up from the harbour, which had been the famous sculptor’s home. It wasn’t like the Tate Gallery down the road, all antiseptic and don’t touch and blaring out that awful ever-so-British establishment message that most of us aren’t really good enough to appreciate art.

In Barbara Hepworth’s place you can sit on a bench eating your lunch while children crawl through the convoluted holes of her huge garden sculptures and her workshop remains exactly as it was the very last time she had used it, even down to the discarded smock and the half-finished carvings.

The garden was bathed in warm sunshine that morning. It’s not a big garden, but mature trees and shrubs give plenty of shade and variety, and provide a wonderful backdrop for the Hepworth sculptures. We sat on our favourite south-facing bench in its sheltered spot backing on to the garden wall alongside the white-painted hut where Barbara used to sleep sometimes on balmy summer nights. Her bed is still there.

The wine was a chilled bottle of Sancerre – a real extravagance by our standards. Usually we only drank wine on our rare nights out at a local restaurant. Carl opened the bottle carefully, keeping it in its brown paper bag and turning his back to the garden. Drinking in public places, apart from licensed premises, is not allowed in St Ives any more, a legacy of too many afternoon boozers, particularly during the holiday season, spilling out on to the streets outside pubs like the Sloop and causing drunken mayhem. However, with a little discretion quiet drinkers like Carl and me could still wash down a summer picnic with something more interesting than lemonade.