of a concert. ‘Please don’t let me detain you, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, and the request in his voice is unmistakable.
‘I’m not exactly rushed off my feet.’
Mr Morton’s lower lip presses outward and he tilts back his head. ‘To tell you the truth, if you could spare me a couple of minutes, there are a few things I’d like to ask you.’
‘By all means,’ he says, pulling a chair closer.
Mr Morton bends his head right back and turns to left and right, as if taking the measure of the space around him. ‘We’re in the room with the paintings, yes?’
‘We are. The Randall Room.’
‘The Randall Room. The greenhouse,’ Mr Morton remarks, with a nod of amusement. ‘The friend who made the booking for me, he saw a picture of it on a website,’ he explains. ‘He said it made him think of a mad millionaire’s greenhouse.’
‘Yes, yes. I suppose it could be.’
‘The ceiling feels high.’
‘It is. Twenty feet.’
‘And there’s a chandelier? A large chandelier? Behind us?’
‘There is.’
‘OK,’ says Mr Morton, and the skin round his eyes tightens.
‘You knew there was a chandelier?’
‘I had an idea. When you walk underneath it, you can tell there’s something hanging above you. And the breeze is making something scrape up there.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Listen,’ says Mr Morton, lifting a forefinger like a conductor preparing to give a musician his cue.’
He listens, and hears nothing but the leaves shuffling in the wind.
‘There, you heard that?’
‘I heard something,’ he equivocates, and Mr Morton lowers his hand, gratified.
‘Now, this room,’ Mr Morton goes on. ‘A ballroom, would that be right?’
‘It was the Assembly Room, when the hotel opened.’
‘Which was?’
‘At the end of the eighteenth century. It was called the Angel, originally. Concerts were held here, and dances. Then, when the Angel became the Oak –’
‘Which was?’
‘1870. Then the new owner, Walter Davenport Croombe, he converted the Assembly Room into a winter garden and commissioned the paintings.’
‘From Randall.’
‘From Randall, precisely. William Joshua Forster Randall of Devizes.’
‘Not a name I know.’
‘I don’t think his fame ever extended much beyond the county.’
‘And what about the paintings? What do they depict?’
‘There’s a wedding in the country on one wall, and workers in the fields on the other side, sowing seed and tending livestock. The third wall is a landscape, with herds of cows and a lake, and distant mountains above the door.’
‘And the style? How do the people look?’
‘Modern folk in medieval costume. Ladies in conical headdresses, men in colourful stockings, with Victorian whiskers. The peasants are all impossibly healthy looking. We had an art teacher staying here, a couple of years ago. She said that Randall’s work was just an anthology of Pre-Raphaelite quotations. A bit of Millais, a bit of Rossetti, a bit of Burne-Jones.’
‘I don’t have a very clear idea of what that might mean, I’m afraid.’
‘No, of course. I’m sorry.’
‘No need. For all you know, I might once have been an aficionado of Burne-Jones. Do you like Mr Randall’s work?’
‘It’s not great art, I know that much, but I like what it does for the room. Gives it a certain gaiety.’
‘OK.’
‘And I like it because it has a story.’
‘Excellent,’ says Mr Morton, laying his hands on the arms of the chair to denote attentiveness.
‘Quite a long story.’
‘All the better,’ Mr Morton laughs, smacking the wicker arms. ‘I have an insatiable appetite for stories. So please, take as long as you like.’
‘OK. Well, our Mr Randall was something of a ladies’ man in his youth, until well into his forties, it appears. Then, finally, he was enticed to the altar by Elizabeth Drummond, the sole offspring of a local magistrate. Croombe commissioned these paintings seven or eight years later. Though then in his fifties, Randall was still a handsome man, slim and with a roguish glint to his eye. His self-portrait is in the wedding procession. He appears as a friar, walking next to a somewhat muscular nun.’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Precisely. Now, when Randall was here, a rumour began to spread that he had become involved with a local farmer’s daughter, a girl by the name of Lily Corbin, who was around twenty at the time. Tongues started wagging when Randall included a portrait of Lily in his painting: she’s a serving girl at the banquet table. Not only that. The friar – Randall – is holding a book in his left hand, and if you continue a line from the index finger of that hand it leads you straight to Lily. For some people this was a clear sign that something was going on. Elizabeth certainly thought something was going on, because one afternoon she stormed in here, accused her husband of being a heartless adulterer and a corrupter of young women, and proceeded to stab him with a knife she’d taken from the kitchen. It’s said that as Randall staggered back some blood from his hand got onto the wet plaster, and that he later disguised the stains by painting a bank of poppies around them. There was something of a scandal, and Randall’s wife never let him out of her sight after that. Every day she followed him to the winter garden, and sat in the middle of the room all day long. As for Lily, she protested that nothing improper had occurred between herself and Mr Randall. She always insisted on their innocence, but the taint of sin remained with her, and she never married.
‘Now, our night porter, Mr Naylor, his father was a grocer down in the town, and Jack, Mr Naylor, used to go with him when he made deliveries to the outlying villages. This was after the war. One of their customers was an old lady who lived in a cottage on what had once been her parents’ farm. And of course this old lady was Miss Corbin. Some Sundays, Jack and his mother would cycle out to visit her. Jack would play outside while the women chatted in the kitchen. By this time Lily lived almost entirely on the ground floor of her cottage. She had her bed in the parlour, and her bathroom was downstairs. But one day there was a rainstorm and water started dripping through the ceiling of the landing. It was Jack who noticed the water coming through, and he took a bucket from the outhouse and went up the stairs to put it under the leak. Being just eight or nine years old, an inquisitive age, he couldn’t resist having a look around.
