at art school. We were both nineteen. After a few months of it, we counted our money, borrowed what we could, and told our lecturers that we thought school was the last place for an artist to practise; fornication, politics, and drugs, yes, but not art. Three agreed with us; one asked if he could come along when he learned our plans, and two said we were stark raving mad to give up the chance of freeloading for a few years. No one thought we should stay. We had to disappoint the volunteer—I’m not in the least liberal-minded when it comes to Sally—and we left to the cautious good wishes of everyone.
We had already found the place where we were to try to earn a crust. It was a stone barn built around 1710, and derelict. I saw that it would easily adapt for a crafts workshop and saleroom, and that we could knock up a partition or two to make a bedroom and kitchen area. The farmer who owned it drove a hard bargain.
It was February when we moved in, and by March the place was habitable. That was when the first Peak District tourists took to their cars and sallied forth to buy expensive junk in the small towns of the High Peak. In the Middle Ages, robber-barons used to levy a toll on travellers who used the passes over the Backbone of England: now, it’s the gift-shops. I didn’t feel any compunction about joining them. If people want to buy plaster casts of gnomes at twice Woolworth’s prices, why shouldn’t they buy mine? We sold candles, too, garish objects in purple and yellow.
They went well at first. I also picked up bits of interesting junk from the industrial towns nearby—I had a regular arrangement with a couple of scrap-merchants. Anything that would go on my shelves they set aside for me. Chamber pots were highly prized.
We both did some painting. I went in for landscapes, Sal for rather moody pictures of horses. She was much better than me, and she had more ideas about stocking the shop.
When the craze for chalk-on-velvet came, she could sketch in purple volcanoes and green-eyed Eurasian girls with the best of them; we made some money that way, but when he saw how well we were doing, the farmer upped the rent.
We had little time for our own painting; I found I was wrong in thinking we could do more of our own thing in Derbyshire than at the school. We were busy from morning till night painting gnomes, producing instant antiques from the junk we sorted, and knocking off cheap watercolours of things like “Mist over Mam Tor”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining about the amount of work we did; in a way, it was very satisfying. We didn’t charge the tourists too much, and if we saw that a customer really felt something about one of our bits of paintings and hadn’t much money, we’d knock it down to half the asking price.
What we were looking for was a way to get a few thousand together quickly so that we could negotiate a proper lease on the barn, or find somewhere else where we wouldn’t be subject to our landlord’s gloomy rack-renting; so far we’d backed losers. I had invested good money in the velvet boom, but I had caught it at its tail end. Now, I had hundreds of assorted lengths of velvet that no one wanted: that was one of Sal’s ideas. After that, came the potting-wheel.
Sal bought it in a sale. She’d forgotten that we didn’t pot. It stood in a corner of the saleroom—it looked good, I must say, but it wasn’t going to bring us any money; and no one wanted to buy it. Likewise our several hundreds of decorative candles. I don’t understand the tourist. One week she—rarer he—will buy anything. The next they become choosy. Candles were in during the winter—everyone wanted candles, red and green, purple and yellow, pink and blue—we had them all; I had sweated for hours over the greasy pots. Now, candles were out.
So, when Sally burst in to say that we were rich, I treated it with some suspicion. Not that I showed it, of course. I hadn’t got her pregnant yet, and I wanted to make sure of her before I put on the dominant male image.
“Make us rich,” I told her. “We’ll buy the farm and throw Judson out.” He was our landlord.
“Mock, scorn me, revile me—I’ve made some mistakes, Andy, but this is the real thing. Catch!”
The thing brought bad luck at once. She had rolled it up in a tube of cardboard. In the badly lit salesroom I didn’t see the damned thing until too late. It caught me squarely across the eyes, then it went on to knock over a shelf of plaster gnomes.
Sal laughed like a drain for five minutes. She had an excellent laugh—medium-pitch, sustained, none of your yelping gulps, but a full-throated belly laugh. I began to see the joke when I had got over the sharp pain. We lost a customer just then, someone who popped a head around the door and retreated when he saw Sal doubled over the remains of a dozen gnomes; he mumbled something and ran for his car.
“For Christ’s sake!” I got out when I recovered. “What is it, Sal?”
“Your face—the gnomes—that funny man in the raincoat—”
“They’re all hilarious, early Charlie Chaplin, great jokes, but what’s this you’ve found?”
“Open it! Oh, your face!”
It isn’t a bad face. A bit on the thin side, but pleasant enough. Sometimes I think I have an Italian face—something Florentine. Maybe not. At least it was an innocent face in that Derbyshire spring.
I pulled the paper out of the tube.
“Brass rubbing?” I asked. I had seen only a corner.
“Of course! It’s fantastic! We’ll make a bomb, Andy! It’s lucky I had some paper and a crayon in the van! Can’t you see it—we can do a couple every morning before we open the shop—if we only sell one a week, we can live like in the Hilton!”
Her enthusiasm was infectious. I unrolled the rubbing and began to look at it closely.
As I’ve said, the place is badly lit. We have two neon tubes high in the roof of the barn. The windows are high and don’t amount to much, and anyway it was a miserable day. The hills were covered in mist, and the roof leaked in the two usual places. I shifted the large rectangle of stiff paper so that the rain wouldn’t drip on it; there was more light on what served as a counter.
I saw the disfigured face of the woman first. I thought Sal had been a bit slapdash, but I didn’t say so. There were two main figures, a man and a woman. Overall, the rubbing measured about five feet in width by about four feet. The figures occupied most of the space; there was the usual band of inscriptions set into the fancy border, but it wasn’t this that I looked at. It was the woman. Her face, or rather the lack of it. It was missing.
Someone had scored out the lines of the engraving where there should have been features. What was left was a mass of gouged marking; yet even though the face had been almost obliterated, there were signs of beauty in the long-dead woman’s neck and shoulders. The artist had had an eye for proportion; he had caught the graceful contours of her body with extraordinary skill.
“That’s Sybil,” said Sally. “He’s Humph. Humphrey to the customers. Humphrey, Lord of Stymead. Sybil and Humph, come to make us rich.”
Did I sense the power of the dead? It’s possible, though I think it might have been a certain exasperation as well as foreboding that made me say:
“It’s no good to us, love. Sybil’s incomplete. We couldn’t get away with a faceless wonder, not even with the Yanks. Stupid they may be, but they know about faces. Now, Humphrey’s handsome enough—we could do a line in Humphs.”
He wasn’t handsome at all. The artist had tried, but Humph’s portly, short body just wouldn’t do. Where Sybil was tall and willowy, Humph was plain fat. In his
