Restless - Boyd William - Страница 47

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With the flashlight she picked her way down to the wreck. One headlight was still on and the hood had buckled and sprung open. There was a smell of petrol leaking and the car had canted over forty-five degrees on the passenger side. She was able to wrench open the driver's door and put the gear lever into fourth. Luis de Baca had fallen forward in the descent and smashed his forehead on the dashboard. A small trickle of blood was now running from his eye to his moustache. The moustache filled and began to drip blood on to his shirt. She hauled him over to the driver's side noticing that one of his legs looked broken, skewed at an odd angle. Good, she thought.

She took the map out of her bag and carefully tore a large corner off it, leaving 'LUFTVERK' and the lines for San Antonio and Miami. She put the rest of the map in her bag, then, taking out a pen and spreading the torn corner on the bonnet, wrote notes on it in German: 'Wo befinden sich die Olreserven fur den transatlantischen Verkehr?' and 'Der dritte Gau scheint zu gross zu sein.' In the margin she wrote a small sum adding up some figures: 150,000 plus 35,000 = 185,000 then some meaningless letters and numbers – LBF/3, XPD 77. She smeared the torn corner against de Baca's bloodstained shirt and crumpled it up, then she slipped it under the shoe of his unbroken leg. She put the 3,000 dollars in the glove compartment in the dashboard under a road map and an instruction manual. Then with her handkerchief she wiped down the surfaces and the steering wheel, taking particular care with the gear lever. Finally she heaved de Baca up and propped him against the steering wheel so she could see his face. She knew that what she had to do next would be the hardest but she was so involved in the construction of the accident that she was operating almost automatically, with conscious efficiency. She scattered some windscreen glass over him and snapped off a bent windscreen wiper, tearing away the rubber blade.

She reached for the pencil in his eye and drew it out. It came easily, as if oiled, and with it blood welled up and flowed over the lids. She jammed the end of the windscreen wiper into the wound and stepped backwards. She left the door open and made a final check with the flashlight. Then she picked up her bag, scrambled up the gulley side and walked back along the road towards Highway 80. After about half a mile she left the road and buried the remains of the map, the flashlight and the pencil under a rock. She could see the lights of cars on the highway and the glow of lights from Berdino's main street. She headed off again. She knew what she had to do next: call the police and anonymously report a crashed car in a gulley between the highway and Leopold. A taxi would take her back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She would pay her bill and drive through the night to Albuquerque. She had done everything she could but she could not stop thinking as she walked into a Texaco gas station on the outskirts of Berdino – the truth had to be faced: someone, somehow, had betrayed her.

I STOOD IN FRONT of David Bomberg's portrait of Lucas Romer for a good twenty minutes, searching for clues, I suppose, and also trying to identify the man my mother had met in 1939 in order to distinguish him from the man I was about to meet in 1976.

The portrait was virtually life-size – a head and shoulders on a canvas of about 12 inches by 18. The simple broad black wooden frame made the small painting look more imposing but it was still, none the less, stuck away in a corridor on an upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery. The artist in this case was more important than the sitter: the notes on the wall were all about David Bomberg – the sitter was identified simply as 'Lucas Romer, a friend' – and its date was given as '1936(?)' – three years before Romer had met Eva Delectorskaya.

The picture was clearly a sketch, notable for its fluent impasto surface – perhaps a study that might have been worked up later to something more polished had there been more sittings. It seemed to me a good painting – a good portrait – the sitter's character emerged from it powerfully, though I had no idea if it were a good likeness. Lucas Romer stared out of the canvas at the viewer – making emphatic eye contact – his eyes a pale grey-blue, and his mouth was set, not relaxed, almost slightly pushed to one side, betokening reluctance, impatience at the posing procedure, the time spent being still. His hair was thinning at the front, as my mother had described, and he was wearing a white shirt, a blue jacket almost the same colour as his eyes and what looked like a nondescript greenish-beige tie. Only the knot of the tie was in the frame.

Bomberg had outlined the head with a thick band of black that had the effect of concentrating your eye on the painted surface within that boundary. The style was bold: blue, verdigris, chartreuse, raw pinks, browns and charcoal combined to render the flesh tones and the incipient heavy beard. The brush strokes were broad, impetuous, confident, loaded with pigment. I had an instant sense of a personality – a strong one, perhaps an arrogant one – and I didn't think I was bringing any privileged knowledge to that assessment. Big hooded eyes, a conspicuous nose – perhaps the only sign of weakness was in the mouth: full, rather slack lips, pursed in their temporary tolerance. A bully? An over-confident intellectual? A complex neurotic artist? Perhaps you needed all these qualities to be a spymaster and run your own team of spies.

I wandered down to the gallery lobby and decided to walk to Brydges'. But first I went to the ladies' lavatory and considered myself in the mirror. What did this portrait say of the sitter? My hair was down, thick and long and freshly washed, I was wearing a pale pink lipstick and my usual dark eyeshadow. I had on a newish black trouser suit with ostentatious white stitching on the seams and the patch pockets – and I had my platforms on under the trousers. I was tall – I wanted to be tall today – and I thought I looked pretty damn good. The worn leather briefcase I was carrying added a nice incongruous touch to the picture, I felt.

I walked across Trafalgar Square towards Pall Mall and then cut up through St James's Square to the network of small streets between the square and Jermyn Street, where I would find Brydges'. The door was discreet, glossy black – no nameplate, just a number – with a fanlight with elaborate tracery, all curlicues and ogees. I rang the brass doorbell and was admitted suspiciously by a porter in a navy-blue frock coat with red lapels. I said I had an appointment with Lord Mansfield and he retreated into a kind of glass phone box to consult a ledger.

'Ruth Gilmartin,' I said. 'Six o'clock.'

'This way, Miss.'

I followed the man up a wide swerving staircase, already aware that the modest entrance concealed a building of capacious and elegant Georgian proportions. On the first floor we passed a reading-room – deep sofas, dark portraits, a few old men reading periodicals and newspapers – then a bar – a few old men drinking – then a dining-room being set up for dinner by young girls in black skirts and crisp white blouses. I sensed it was very unusual ever to have a female in this building who wasn't a servant of some kind. We then turned another corner to go down a corridor past a cloakroom and a gentleman's toilet (a smell of disinfectant mingled with hair oil, the sound of urinals discreetly flushing) from which an old man with a walking-stick emerged and, on seeing me, gave a start of almost cartoon-like incredulity.

'Evening,' I said to him, becoming at once both calmer and angrier. Angry because I knew what was obviously, crassly, going on here; calmer because I knew that Romer could have no idea that it would not only not work, but that it would be counter-productive as well. We turned another corner and arrived at a door that had written on it: 'Ladies' Drawing Room'.

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