FOR THE ATTENTION OF DR BEN GOLDING
He read on, skipping the formalities:
The autopsy findings on Mr Leon Golding are as follows …
Automatically Ben held his breath.
Conclusion: suicide.
Conclusion: suicide … Ben read the two words again, the image of his brother’s body flickering behind his eyes. Leon hanged. Leon dead. Leon killing himself … Exhaling, he put down the fax, not bothering to read any more of the report. He already knew that the Spanish coroner would have backed up his findings with the bald facts – that Leon Golding had tried to commit suicide twice before. That he had been unstable. That his life had always been only an inch away from death.
Pouring a drink, Ben sat down with his legs stretched out in front of him, promising himself that he would get drunk. And then, remembering that he was operating later, he put down the glass. Idly, he riffled through his post, and found to his surprise that his hands were shaking and he was fighting tears. Embarrassed, he walked into the kitchen and began to make himself something to eat. His actions were automatic, unconsidered: the cutting of the bread, the buttering, the slicing of the tomato and some cheese. He made the sandwich because he needed to eat, not because he cared what it would taste like, filling the kettle and setting it to boil.
His mind kept replaying images, like scenes viewed through a train window, passing fast and unfocused. Leon, Gina, Abigail, Francis, the hospital … His eyes aching from exhaustion, he began to eat. Slowly he chewed the food, making little saliva, forcing himself because he hadn’t eaten for hours. When he had finished the sandwich, he would sleep. But it was unappetising and Ben could only eat a little. Turning, he was about to put the plate on the draining board and paused.
Something was different, he could sense it. Slowly, he looked around the kitchen – and then realised that the door of the washing machine was ajar. Bending down, he felt around inside the machine frantically, then dragged out his clothes, his hands rummaging, panicked, around the back of the empty steel drum.
The skull was gone.
BOOK THREE
… I should like to know if you are elegant, distinguished or dishevelled, if you have grown a beard, if you have all your own teeth, if your nose has grown, if you wear glasses, walk with a stoop, if you have gone grey anywhere and if time has gone by for you as quickly as it has for me …
LETTER FROM GOYA TO MARTIN ZAPATER
Spain, 1821
Shuffling across the dry stretch of grass outside the Quinta del Sordo, the old man paused beside the fountain, plunging his face under the fall of water. The coolness shimmered against his skin, pumping the aged blood into the pores, making his pulse thump to the liquid sensation of cold. His mind wandered from the hot day back to the court, to the past. When he had dabbled with colour and women, mocking the majas while he slept with them. Taking a salary from the king while the ruler slept and hunted his days away, and his Minister in Chief, Godoy, ruled over Spain and the bed of the Queen Maria Luisa. Godoy, a suspected murderer. The man rumoured to have had the Duchess of Alba killed.
Goya lifted his head out of the water, letting the heat dry the flutter of hair. Not bald, even past eighty, but deaf as a stone tomb. Inside his head the dull humming of blood beat in rhythm to the vibration of his footsteps as he made his way into the largest room of the house, on the left of the ground floor. Insects, plump with feeding, made trapeze movements over his head, alizard basking on the window ledge outside. Once, many years before, he had lain on a bed with the Duchess of Alba, both of them watching a lime green lizard making its showy way across the bedroom floor …
She had been poisoned, taken from him, the motive unclear. Jealousy, greed, her fortune up for the taking after her death. Or maybe she had been killed because she was, in truth, most frightening. Too wild, too reckless, her reputation tainted by rumours of her dabbling in the occult.
Soon it would be dark … Sighing, Goya picked up a paintbrush. The handle was worn, smeared with grease and an echo of old paint. No one was paying him for his work. There was no sponsor, no collector, to please. The house and the walls were his, to do with as he chose.
Like the bulls he had admired so often in the ring, Goya sighted his target and moved towards it. The wall fell to the onslaught of darkness, figures emerging half-completed, half human, winding in a mad procession. Mouths gaped, eyes extended, insanity in the turn of bodies, a demented congregation smearing their ghoulish progress across the wall.
‘… I have painted these pictures to occupy my imagination, which is tormented by all the ills that afflict me …’
He had sent the confession to a friend, but knew he could not risk confiding the whole truth in words. Anything written could be retained and used as a weapon against him.
The written word had held danger before. Earlier in his lifehe had scrawled captions under his works, the most damning reserved for The Disasters of War, the eighty aquatints which he had never published. Under the drawings he had made comments like a war correspondent writing from the front:
One cannot look at this.
This is bad.
This is how it happened.
I saw it.
And this too.
Why?
He had charted the war atrocities and recorded them, but kept them secret. The reason was obvious. A famed liberal, Goya could not risk retaliation from the vicious Ferdinand VII. He was too old and too weak for political grandstanding. Too frightened to rebel publicly.
Staring at his work, Goya moved up to the belly of the wall, his breath warm against the paint and plaster underneath. He knew the pictures wouldn’t survive in the Spanish climate. Oils mixed with white preparation of calcium sulphate, together with the adhesion of glue, would fade quickly in the heat and the damp from the nearby river. But that wasn’t important. He wasn’t creating the paintings to be admired, but to leave behind a testimony of what was happening to him.
His mind slipped backwards, losing its hold on the ratchet of memory. He was back in the summer of 1796, in Andalusia, at the country estate of the widowed Duchess of Alba. They were lovers, of course, and Goya ran the gauntlet of the Inquisition in return for her soft mouth and violence of nature. Resting his faceagainst the wall, the old man felt the wetness of the paint and remembered leaning his head against his lover’s moist thigh. So extraordinary had she been, the Duchess’s image had repeated itself constantly in his work. Chief sorceress, witch of the heart.
Witches in the Spanish court, witchcraft in the Spanish court. Satanism a sop against the grinding control of Catholicism and the Inquisition. Where there was ignorance there was superstition, and he had painted it … Pushing back from the wall, Goya turned, facing another mural, startled by his own vision.
Slowly the day began to shift, dusk at the windows and the open door. Lighting the oil lamps, he turned back to his work. Blisters on his palms made his actions intermittently clumsy, the straining of weak eyes made his head throb, and the swelling of worn muscles ached in the heat.
But still he carried on.
37
London
The first soft rains of April had given way to a truculent temper of wind and early dark afternoons, spring taking her time. The previous night Ben had slept intermittently, troubled by noises and the image of his dead brother. When he woke he remembered that the skull had been stolen and sat on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. Who had broken into his house? And, more importantly, how had they known the skull was there?