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“Is Vitruvious successful?”
Tom paused. Away from the floodlights, Charlie could see a half moon caught between drifting clouds. He looked down. Dead leaves edged the path, smelling of damp earth, all colour turned to shades of grey. He realised that in the last few minutes he’d stopped wanting answers to his policeman’s questions, and begun wanting to hear about Tom’s world.
“V is noticed. Mainly because he does the angry lefty artist so well. Maybe it’s the name too. Pontificates at the drop of a hat about the role of class society in the history of art. He has an agent whose job is to get him on TV as often as he can. The thing is that he’s an extremely good painter. He has been painting seascapes and portraits of refugees for a few years now. I’ll show you. He can’t just be dismissed as a posturing fool, tempting though it is.”
Tom turned and headed back the way they had come, until they reached a door set into the college wall. “Back of the library,” Tom said. The lock was operated by an electronic fob and opened with a beep, and they stepped into what looked like a storeroom. Charlie looked round. Stacking chairs and folding tables took up most of the space, together with cardboard boxes. Tom waved at them.
“This may be the computer age,” he said, “but we still send out mountains of paper. Look, this is what I wanted you to see.” Charlie saw that one side of the room had pictures leaning against it, some turned to face the wall, others covered with hessian sheets. Tom lifted a hessian sheet and moved the painting to lean against the cardboard boxes.
It was about four or five feet square, dominating the space. Charlie had an impression of a mass of blues and greens, appearing to move in some kind of rhythm. Blobs of other colours appeared woven amongst them. Tom took Charlie’s arm and pulled him as far away from the canvas as they could get, and the image resolved itself. Human bodies being washed around in a wild sea. Limbs and heads appearing above the waves, or showing as shadows under the restless water. There was no shore, and no horizon. Just the ocean, and the bodies. In the corner, two letters, IV.
“Wow,” Charlie said, “not something I’d want in my living room.”
“Indeed. Not many people do. Paintings on this scale don’t sell, and so far no one’s offering him an exhibition space that he thinks is worthy of them. He can be his own worst enemy. Anyway. I wanted you to see some of his work, before you dismiss him as the idiot he undoubtedly is.”
They left the storeroom and retraced their steps.
“Do you see both sides of everything?” Charlie asked. They had come to a standstill in the half light. Young trees moved against their stakes in a light breeze, and Charlie could taste woodsmoke in the air.
Tom shrugged. “I wasn’t aware that I did.”
“Take it from me. Are you successful? Yes or no.”
“Yes or no?”
“No caveats, no context, yes or no.”
“Then, yes.”
The faint rustling from the trees stopped and the moon disappeared behind a cloud. Charlie smelled Old Spice and wool and held his breath. The air between them crackled.
Then the library door opened with a splash of light and a burst of conversation, and the moment passed.
The narrow windows of the halls of residence spilled different coloured lights.
“Can I ask why you were in New York?” Charlie asked. He wanted to know, but he also wanted to keep Tom talking. Was he flirting? He didn’t think so. Tom was simply interesting. He heard the smile in Tom’s voice as he answered.
“New York was me being successful. I got a major grant from an arts foundation to stay there for six months and produce any work I liked. The foundation provided me with a flat, and a generous stipend, and when I got back, whatever I made would have sold for good money. Success. Except I had to come back and pretend to run the college. Which might look like success. At least in New York I knew what I was doing.”
“What do you paint?”
“Paint! I don’t paint. I’m a printmaker. Dear God, paint?”
Charlie had only the vaguest notion of what a printmaker made. Prints, obviously. Etchings? He would find out.
Students in twos and threes were making their way from the library towards the main entrance to the residence building. Tom looked at his watch.
“The library is closing. Library staff will be around for half an hour or so, and this area is well-lit. We should have a look around the back.” He led the way past the door to the library and into the darkness beyond. The paths had the dim bollard lights, but all the windows in the main building were dark. Charlie could see the expanse of mostly empty car park to the left, and to the right, a cluster of sheds, containers and portacabins looming out of the darkness, barely visible against the night sky.
“Storage, and places to make things too big or messy for the studios in the main building.” Tom said. “The ceramics people build fires and dig holes …” Charlie found out about the holes by falling into one of them. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Charlie felt Tom’s arms holding him upright, and this time he didn’t mind so much. He minded the scrapes on his hands, but he felt fine being close to Tom. Except this was exactly what he needed to avoid. Llanfair was already struggling to recover from the corrupt collusion between college and police. They needed to co-operate, for the sake of Tom’s students and Charlie and his colleagues’ jobs, but there was a line. It was bright red, Charlie knew where it was, and he wasn’t going to cross it. So he stepped out of Tom’s embrace and said thank you for picking him up.
“But I can’t believe there’s anyone lurking amongst this lot,” he said. “Our flasher might be hiding here, but if any student was working late, we’d see the lights. Get the warning out tomorrow, but I think we’ve done enough for tonight.”
“You’re the expert,” Tom said, not sounding entirely convinced. “Where are you staying?”
“With Eddy’s Aunty Dilys,” Charlie said without thinking. He’d forgotten the name of the house, or the street; the guest house had become Aunty Dilys’s in his mind.
“I’ll walk you back,” Tom said. “I’m going to assume there aren’t two guest houses run by someone called Dilys. That’s where we put our visitors. We get a few raised eyebrows, but her beds are comfortable, it’s spotless and the breakfasts are a feast. Dilys loves her work, and it shows.”
