The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [71]
Her mouth froze. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d offered her a job, Alec’
‘You couldn’t have been listening. I said to you we need another artist because you’re not here all the time.’
‘And Piggott, I suppose, can’t be everywhere at once.’ She said it with a little laugh, making like she was following his thinking, how sensible he was, but she was grinding the words out between her teeth. ‘Pity Donald isn’t any good with a pencil’
‘Donald has other talents. And Stuart may not be here the whole season, if he marries Peggy in the autumn.’ Mr Keiller was losing interest in the conversation: his eyes kept slipping back to the men on the cricket pitch. ‘So give Miss Robinson what assistance you can, won’t you?’
There was factions at the Manor, I’d come to understand that already. Best to know who was in with who. I wasn’t sure I was as good at drawing as Mr Keiller believed, and I thought I’d better improve, quick, on my own, because I could tell Miss Chapman wasn’t going to be any help to me. So I’d gone to the museum to practise. Mr K was in London again, and Davey with him.
I’d brought a chair out of the back room, and perched on it to draw Charlie in his glass case. His skull, distorted and almost as big as an adult’s in spite of his tiny child bones, fascinated me. Miss Chapman’s speciality was facial reconstructions: she imagined what the dead had been in life, and painted them. I’d heard her tell visitors that the shape of the skull determined the shape of the fleshed face. What had Charlie looked like? I wanted to give him the soft gaze of a baby deer, but that swollen head brought to mind instead Charles Laughton’s froggy face and bulging eyes. That sent me off on another train of thought altogether: I’d seen Vessel of Wrath at the Palace cinema in Devizes with Davey, and somehow Laughton’s slack, drunk mouth in that film had become associated with Davey’s attempts to give me a kiss in the darkness.
Mam had been right. I was outgrowing Davey. It had all started to go wrong that day I’d seen him and Mr Keiller on the motorbike. He was a good-looking lad, but that was the problem: he seemed only a boy, compared to the others at the Manor. He kissed in a soft wet way that could sometimes make me queasy. In the cinema foyer there’d been a poster advertising Mutiny on the Bounty: Charles Laughton’s full-lipped face next to Clark Gable. No prizes for who he reminded me of. Davey was devoted to me, but there in’t anything about devotion makes the heart beat faster.
The overhead light reflected off the top of the glass case, making it hard to see Charlie clearly. I stood up to turn it off and found myself inches away from a shirtfront.
‘Mr Cromley! Didn’t know you’d come in!’ Didn’t even have to lift my eyes to his face because, up close, Mr Cromley had a smell all of his own, a pleasant, tangy, floral scent different from Mr Keiller’s spicy hair oil, and Stu Pig’s cabbagy old-socks stink. ‘Was you–were you watching me?’ Trying to mind my grammar like Mrs Sorel-Taylour told me.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Miss Robinson.’ Ever so respectful, unlike Mr K and Stu Pig, who’d taken to calling me Heartbreaker most of the time. Polite, but I still had a funny feeling he was laughing at me. ‘Alec’s right. You might not be trained, but your pencil captures the soul of what you draw.’
‘Have you been watching long?’
‘Only a minute or two.’
But I’d a feeling it’d been much longer. And my pencil had been idle, with me musing about Davey. Mr Cromley’s special gift seemed to be to catch me at those moments when my thoughts ran naked across my face. No comfort that my back had been to him–every last little frown and pout would’ve been reflected in Charlie’s glass coffin.
He picked up my sketchbook. ‘See? You’ve drawn a small boy, probably disabled, possibly hydrocephalic. If that’s not capturing a soul, I don’t know what is. Charlie’s tribe would have been terrified of your power.’
‘Oh.’ Didn’t know what to say to any of that. Didn’t seem to me I’d ever been thought