to his wife, who hated the house only a little less than she hated the English climate. Before departing for Antibes she willed the whole place to a niece, Sarah, already married to a gentleman-farmer, Oliver Langdale. But the money which accompanied the estate was not, in days of inflation, enough; and although Oliver made full use of its many acres for farming, lumber and horse-breeding, most of the house lay empty and useless. Also Sarah grew bored, after bearing three children.
‘Farmers’ wives,’ said her husband, a handsome block of good old county oak, ‘usually do garden produce and eggs, that sort of thing.’ Sarah had different ideas. Long ago, in her mid-twenties, she’d realized that her own artistic talent was an illusion (a few paintings survived to prove how right she’d been), but she still longed for the company of artists. Livestock and bloodstock were not, to her, limitless subjects of conversation.
After a certain amount of careful conversion, paid for out of her aunt’s money, she was presently able to insert a discreet advertisement in one or two of the right publications. Original apartments and studios were, it seemed, now available in and around a remote country house on the Wiltshire-Dorset borders and would be let only to ‘artists of recognized stature’. Peace was assured; rents would not be low but were negotiable; the main line station was nine miles away—Waterloo 1 hr. 40 mins. Oliver Langdale maintained that his wife was around the bend; he presumably foresaw a group of freaky, unwashed, stoned youngsters who would foul up the house and get in the way of his tractors, his horses and their grooms. Sarah told him not to be silly; hadn’t she specified ‘artists of recognized stature’? And why, he asked, would that kind of artist want to live in a commune?
‘It isn’t a commune,’ said Sarah, ‘it’s a community. And they’ll want to live here because creative people fundamentally need security. They’ll come, you see if they don’t.’
And come they did.
Johnny Ash, the well-known ‘East End’ painter, had been the first to settle in, and might well have left almost immediately (like many Londoners he didn’t like the country and was indeed afraid of it); but then he’d met young Rosamund Turner, and since his foremost wish was to keep her away from London, for excellent reasons, he had changed his mind and stayed. His studio was in the tower at the north end of the Victorian Wing, and thus commanded the best light, as well as staggering views to north and east—which was yet another reason for the jealousy of his neighbour, another painter, Ben Elliston. Between these two and the old house lived Lisa MacDonnell, the sculptress. Whether or not this beautiful and recently divorced young woman needed the security of Crestcote, she’d have had to go a long way to find a better studio than her ex-coach-house in the stable-yard: also ideal for the delivery of stone or marble.
The stables themselves were huge: so large that not even Oliver Langdale minded sacrificing a chunk of them to make two more dwellings, one occupied by Laurence Otterey, the writer, and the other by Vicky Lind whose wild-life paintings, much reproduced, were known worldwide. The Lodge was rented by Edvard Kusnik, composer: well removed from the main house so that his pianos, synthesizers and massive stereo-system disturbed nobody. The same went for Harold Newson who worked in iron, producing a din which was every bit as loud but (some of his colleagues claimed) a lot more musical than Edvard’s compositions. He had chosen his own workshop, an abandoned cottage on the far side of the walled kitchen garden. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, giving him the height he often needed. It had never been Sarah Langdale’s intention that anyone should inhabit this shack, but when Harold moved his single suitcase and his sleeping-bag into what remained of the upper floor, she hastened to make it passably habitable: not that rain and wind seemed to worry the ironworker in the very least.
Of course the Lord of the Manor’s fears regarding these, to his mind, odd customers were quite unfounded. Indeed, he had to admit that his wife’s ‘community’ not only made use of the place and brought it to life, not only paid well, thus taking care of many estate expenses, but also gave Crestcote an interesting cachet in county circles. Most of the county had heard of Johnny Ash and Lisa MacDonnell, and all of them knew the lovely work of that clever Vicky Lind: those lifelike badgers and hedgehogs, foxes and owls, not to mention the minutely realistic flora among which her fauna reposed.
Needless to say, none of the other artists considered Vicky Lind to be an artist at all, pairing her with Johnny Ash’s Rosamund; but whereas Rosamund admitted that she was only ‘an arts and crafts kind of person’, Madame Lind affected airs and was thought by all to be a stuck-up bitch.
A certain confusion surrounded the exact standing of Harold Newson. Could an iron-worker properly be called an ‘artist’? Harold himself, tall and sinewy with a long Scandinavian face and almost white fair hair, didn’t care what he was called. He kept himself to himself, living in flurries of fire, black-faced, like some mythic figure from a Norse folk-tale. Newson—Cnutson. Harold, son of Canute: and he looked it!
When it became known that he’d been commissioned to design and make a pair of gates for Westminster Abbey the doubts about his artistic status faded away, and he was accepted as a fully paid-up member of the creative (and self-evidently snobbish) community: though Oliver Langdale persisted in calling him ‘the farrier’, but not to his face.
As will become all too apparent, there were quite a number of such mockeries, rivalries, and even hatreds, festering beneath the calm of Crackpot Castle: a nickname invented by some village wit in Crestcote St Michael and gleefully adopted by the inmates themselves.
On this brisk sunny autumn morning the denizens of Crestcote House were going, industriously or sluggishly, about their everyday occupations, naturally unaware of the fact that even these were soon to undergo peculiar changes, as if some malicious fairy had touched them with her wand, and that the beautiful day would soon become emotionally overcast.
In the tower-studio, Rosamund Turner—fair, blue-eyed, with a fresh young beauty only slightly smudged by the assaults of life—was sitting upright on the bed, naked, stitching deftly at a sampler: Honoria Temple 1832. Johnny Ash, who always collapsed after sex, turned his head and watched her; he would presently do some preliminary sketches for yet another portrait, he never tired of painting her. He was thirty-five, not tall, but dark, wiry, good-looking in a gipsyish way. He was also inclined to be jealous, but had been forced by life with Rosamund to see what a selfish and self-defeating emotion it was.
She herself was so popular with everyone at Crestcote that it would have taken an excessively churlish man, which he was not, to complain on that account. Indeed, he now felt quite proud of the fact that even Ben Elliston, who would barely speak to him, was always overjoyed to talk to her; and she was surely the only resident of the place who could rely on a warm welcome at Harold Newson’s forge.
Gently mocking, he said, ‘Honoria Temple 1832, my arse! Who’s going to believe that?’
‘You’d be surprised.’ This was another of the reasons he loved her: she was a bit of a con.
The sampler had been commissioned by an ‘antique’ dealer in London. When it was finished, she’d bleach it a very little to fade the colours, put it in one of her large collection of old frames and take it, with three others already finished, to his shop in Marylebone. Not looking up she asked, ‘What happened in Bristol yesterday?’
‘They’d like to do a show all right.’
‘But?’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t too impressed. Who needs a half-cock provincial show?’
‘You were awfully late back.’
‘Yes. I got boozing. I hoped I hadn’t woken you.’
‘You didn’t, not really.’
