'Goodnight then,' he said to her, 'sleep well.'
'I will,' she said. 'You do the same.' Then she was gone, leaving him to the last three or four pages of Simeon's life. There was little of any consequence in the remaining paragraphs. Dwyer's researchers ran out of steam two months or so before Simeon's passing.
'He died on or about July eighteenth, 1730,' she wrote, 'having reportedly swallowed enough of his own paints to poison himself. This, at least, is what is widely assumed to be the truth. There are in fact contradictory voices in this matter. An anonymous obituary in The Review, for instance, published four months after Simeon's death, hints darkly that "the artist had fewer reasons to die than others did to silence him."And Dolores Cruikshank, writing to Galloway at about the same time remarks that: "I have been trying to locate the physician who examined Thomas's corpse, because I heard a rumour that he'd found curious and subtle dislocations in the body, as though it had been subjected to an assault before death. I thought of the 'invisibles' you told me he had been so fearful of when you'd taken him from Rukenau's place. Had they perhaps mounted an attack upon him? But the physician, a Doctor Shaw, has disappeared apparently. Nobody knows where, or why. "
'There was one final oddity. Though John Galloway had made arrangements for his agents to collect the body and have it removed to Cambridge, where he'd arranged for it to be buried with due honours, when they came to do so the remains had already been spirited away. Thomas Simeon's last resting place is therefore unknown, but this writer believes his body was probably taken by land and sea to the Hebrides, where Rukenau had chosen to retreat. It is unlikely, given Rukenau's iconoclastic beliefs, that Simeon was buried in hallowed ground. It's more likely he lies in some anonymous spot. It is only to be hoped that he rests well there, the travails of his life ended before he had truly made any mark upon the art of his time.
'John Galloway was killed in 1734, accidentally shot during a military exercise on Dartmoor; Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, who assisted Galloway in the abduction of Simeon from Rukenau's house, both died young: Varty perished of consumption and Maupertius, arrested for smuggling opium in Paris, died of a heart attack in police custody. Only Dolores Cruikshank lived out her biblical span, and more, dying at the age of ninety-one. Much of the correspondence quoted here was in the possession of her heirs.
'As for Gerard Rukenau, despite four years of attempts by this author to uncover the truth behind his legendary existence, little beyond the information contained within these pages could be found. There is no trace of the house in Ludlow from which Galloway supposedly abducted him, nor are there extant any letters, pamphlets, wills or other legal documents bearing his name.
'In a sense, none of this matters. Simeon's legacy...'
Will's concentration drifted here, as Dwyer again tried to fit Simeon's work into an aesthetic context. Simeon the prophetic surrealist, Simeon the metaphysical symbolist, Simeon the nature painter. Then the text just petered out, as though she could not find a personal sentiment that suited her, and had simply let the text come to a halt.
He put the book down, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one. He didn't feel particularly tired, despite all that the day had brought. He wandered downstairs, and went to search the fridge for something to eat. Finding a bowl of rice-pudding, which had been one of Adele's coups as a cook, he retired to the living-room with bowl and spoon to indulge himself. Her recipe hadn't changed in the intervening years: the pudding was as rich and creamy as he remembered it. Patrick would go crazy for this, he thought, and so thinking picked up the phone and called him. It wasn't Patrick who answered, but Jack.
'Hey, Will,' he said, 'how ya doin'?'
'I'm okay.'
'You called at the right time. We've got a little meetin' goin' on here.' 'About what?'
'Oh you know ... stuff. Adrianna's here. Do you want to talk to her?' He got off the line with curious haste, and put Adrianna on. She sounded less than her best.
'Are you okay?' he said.
'Sure. We're just having some serious conversations here. How are you doing? Have you made peace with your Dad?'
'Nope. And it's not going to happen. He told me point-blank he doesn'~ want me visiting him any more.'
'So are you going to come home?'
'Not yet. I'll give you plenty of notice, don't worry, so you can lay or a big Welcome Home party.'
'I think you've partied enough,' she said.
'Uh-oh. Who have you been talking to?'
'Guess.'
'Drew.'
'Yep.'
'What's he saying?'
'He thinks you're crazy.'
'You defended me, of course.'
'You can do that for yourself. Do you want to speak to Pat?'
'Yeah. Is he around?'
'He is, but he's not ... doing too well right now.'
'Sick?'
'No, just a little emotional. We've been having a heavy conversation, and he's not in great shape. I mean, I'll get him for you if it's urgent.'
'No, no. I'll call back tomorrow. Just send him my love, will you?'
'Do I get some too?'
'Always.'
'We miss you.'
'Good.'
'See you soon.'
When he put the phone down, he felt a pang of separation, so sharp it caught his breath. He imagined them now - Patrick and Adrianna, Jack and Rafael, even Drew - going about their business while the fog crept over the hill, and ships boomed in the Bay. It would be so easy to pack up and creep away; leaving Hugo to heal and Adele to dote. In a day he'd be back amongst his clan, where he was loved.
But there would be no safety there. He might forget the hurt of this place for a few days; he might party himself into a stupor, and put the memories out of his head. But how long could that forgetfulness last? A week? A month? And then he'd be taking a shower or looking at a moth on the window, and the story he had left unfinished would come back to haunt him. He was in thrall to it: that was the unpalatable truth. His intellect and emotions were too thoroughly engaged in this mystery for him to leave. Perhaps at the beginning he'd been merely a conduit, as Jacob had dubbed him, an unwitting sensitive through which Steep's memories had flowed. But he had made himself more than that over the years. He'd become Simeon's echo: a maker of pictures that showed the spoiler's hand at work. There was no escaping that role; no pretending he was just a common man. He had laid claim to vision, and with it came responsibility. If so, so. He would watch, as he had always watched, until the story's end. If he survived, he would bear witness as no one had ever done before: he would tell a tale of near-extinction from the survivor's side. If not - if he was dispatched into an unnatural grave by the very hand that had made him the witness he was - then he would at least go knowing the nature of his dispatcher, and lie, perhaps, more quietly for the knowledge.
CHAPTER VIII
The pain-killers Hugo had been administered denied him easy slumber. He lay as though upon a catafalque in the dimly lit room, while memories came to pay their respects. Some were vague; no more than murmurs and fiutterings. But most were crystalline; more real to his heavy-lidded eyes than the idiot nurses who now and then came to check on his state. Happy visitations, most of them: memories of the halcyon years after the war, when his star had been in the ascendant. There had been a period of three or four years following the publication of his first book, The Fallacy of Thought, in 1949, when he had been the idol of every iconoclast in English philosophical circles. At the tender age of twenty-four, he had published a book that not only challenged the tenets of logical positivism (all metaphysical investigation is invalid, because it can never be verified), but also existentialism (the chief imperatives of philosophical study are being and freedom). He was later to repudiate much that he'd written in that first book, but that didn't matter now. He forgot his doubts, and remembered only the fine, high times. Debating at the Sorbonne with Sartre (he'd met Eleanor there that spring); making mincemeat of Ayer at a party in Oxford; being told by one of his sometime tutors that he was destined for greatness; that if he kept to his purpose he would change the course of European thought. All perfect nonsense, but he indulged it readily tonight, enjoying the gilded phantoms who glided to his bedside to pay him court. (Sartre was amongst them, as batrachian as ever; with Simone in tow.) Some of these tribute-payers simply smiled and nodded at him, one or two were too drunk to say a word; but many chatted to him in a casual fashion; unimportant opinions, every one. But he listened indulgently, knowing they only sought to impress.