Mystery in Moon Lane Read online

  We reached a narrow landing and he opened a door. Beyond it was a dusty attic, cluttered with old furniture. In a corner, stood an easel with a cloth covering what was obviously a canvas positioned on it.

  “Now, here’s a rough diary kept by Costigan,” George Fennister said, opening a drawer in a scarred wooden table. The booklet he handed me was tattered, stained, and dog-eared. I grasped it eagerly, hardly able to credit my good luck. I had placed an advertisement in an art magazine saying I was researching a book on Costigan and sought contact with anyone who might have helpful material. George Fennister was the only person to reply, and I never imagined that, on this visit to his gallery, I would encounter a treasure trove.

  “This is wonderful,” I said as I leafed quickly through the book, finding page after stained page of penciled handwriting, frequently soiled by what I felt might be the end of the Western Front. “Something on Costigan’s life in his own hand is stunning.”

  “It might well help in remedying the false impressions which McArdle perpetrated,” said George Fennister. “One of them being something you said only a few minutes ago: that Costigan destroyed the painting of Katherine after he fell out with her. Well, the truth is, he didn’t. He had wished to make the painting his masterpiece—as you’ll see from his notes. He really wanted to capture her beauty and put it before all the world. After he rowed with her and after a heavy drinking session, he soured on the girl and on his own ability. He felt he had not done justice to her beauty and, anyway, he believed he hated her—but that was only a passing notion, fired by his drunken stupidity. He did not wholly destroy the painting, however. He loaded a brush with black paint and what he did was—this.…”

  He moved quickly over the dusty floor of the attic to the covered painting on its easel. He took a corner of the covering, whipped it off the canvas, and I gasped at what was revealed.

  It was a full-length nude, a young woman, painted with such sensitivity that I felt I was looking on living flesh. She had her back to the viewer and her head was turned so that she was looking over her shoulder out of the picture—at least she would have been looking if she had a face.

  All her facial features had been obliterated by a series of thick lines of black paint, crisscrossed on the canvas as if it had been attacked by a frenzied vandal. There was absolutely no trace of the facial beauty that must surely have matched the vibrant, young womanly body the artist had depicted.

  “You mean, this is it?” I gasped. “This is the very picture which Costigan painted—the one McArdle claimed was destroyed? But, yes, it must be. I recognize his style, his brushwork.”

  “It’s the very one,” George Fennister confirmed. “He slashed paint all over her face, then regretted it. He stored the canvas with his other belongings when he went off to the war. As you’ll see from his diary, he hoped to return, make it up with Katherine, and repair the damage by really doing justice to her beauty. It was a dream which kept him going through all those wretched months in the trenches.”

  The old man paused, shook his head and sighed. “But it wasn’t to be. Soon after he enlisted, Katherine simply disappeared. His diary records show he searched for her on his few brief leaves, all to no avail. In the end, the war swallowed him up. He left the painting to my father with his other mementos, and my father hung on to them. He concentrated on building up his gallery and dealership after the war, and never entered into the controversies of the art world, although he could have corrected much of the misinformation put about by McArdle through his ill-informed book. Anyway, perhaps you can do it all these years on, Mr. Jevons. I’m selling up, but I’ve kept this painting out of my stock-in-trade. You may have it with all the other Costigan items.”

  I was astounded by his generosity. “But, defaced though it is, it’s surely valuable just because it’s a Costigan.”

  George Fennister shrugged. “No matter. I’m not exactly struggling for money and the painting might assist you in your work. It might help you towards a balanced view of Costigan, and I know my father would have appreciated it. For all his wildness, Costigan was his good friend and a reliable comrade in the horrors of the Western Front. The diary does give one some understanding of the real Costigan. Under his pose as a drunken Bohemian, he was remarkably straitlaced. There was the matter of his row with Katherine, for instance. It was brought on by his stuffy attitude.”

  “I thought the cause was unknown. McArdle says they quarrelled for some unknown reason,” 1 said.

  Fennister chuckled. “That was McArdle all over. He cobbled together the so-called life of Costigan without any real facts. Well, the diary will show you that they rowed over a tattoo.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “Yes. It seems Katherine tried to be as unconventional as Costigan made himself out to be, and she had herself tattooed, something a young woman hardly ever did in those days. She had his name, ‘Fred’, tattooed on her shoulder, and it caused Costigan to hit the ceiling. His essential fastidiousness came into play. He liked a woman to be totally feminine and he claimed Katherine was defiling herself with the tattoo. He said only rough characters like sailors and navvies went in for tattoos. Furthermore, he’d always despised the name Fred and he was annoyed at her marking herself for life with it. Tattoos couldn’t be removed in those days, remember.”

  I left Fennister’s premises elated and enlightened, with the precious diary in my pocket and the defaced picture of the beauty which Costigan had wanted to put before the world under my arm still covered by its cloth. The art dealer had not only exploded my belief in McArdle’s work, hitherto regarded as the most reliable outline of the young life of Fred Costigan, he had presented me with material that was absolutely invaluable.

  My car was parked in front of the gallery and as I was carefully slanting the large canvas across the rear seat, a corner of the covering slipped, revealing the back of the painting and I saw something penciled on the bottom of the wooden stretcher. I read:

  ‘F. Costigan. Readly’s School of Fine Art, London, WC1, February 1914.’

  So, I mused, could it be that Costigan had tackled his attempt at his masterpiece at the very school of which both of us were graduates and where we both eked out our painting careers with part-time tutorships? I had imagined that he worked on it in his studio near Mornington Crescent but perhaps, like myself, he managed to put in some personal work while engaged with students in the very life rooms in which I was employed.

  Readly’s dated from the 1870s and its layout had hardly changed over the many decades. I knew that the life rooms had been used in that capacity since the creation of the school and, like myself, Costigan had tutored in advanced painting from life in them. I looked at the penciled date again: ‘February 1914’. I remembered that the First Great War broke out in the August of that year and that Costigan had enlisted very early as one of the great rush of young men eager to take up arms. Probably, this attempt to catch the beauty of an obscure girl who would totally disappear from ken was the very last significant work of a young man who was also destined to be obliterated.

  The poignancy of it was brought home to me as, back in my flat, I read Costigan’s diary far into the night. From faded words, penciled on grubby pages, perhaps written when huddled against the sandbags of a trench or when snatching some respite in a rest station on in an estaminet, in some cruelly battered French village, I absorbed Fred Costigan’s remorse and hopes. He cursed himself for a fool for parting so bitterly from the only woman who really meant anything to him.

  The more I read, the more I formed a new picture of Costigan. I saw how the received view of him, based almost wholly on McArdle’s book, was wrong. He was far more than a rowdy young drunkard, who nevertheless had a rare artistic gift that the brutality of war blotted out. It was as if I was hearing his voice from the cauldron of the dreadful conflict that engulfed the world early in the Twentieth Century.

  It spoke of one who was so obviously the true Fred Costigan, a sensitive man who longed to be
free of the lunacy of wholesale slaughter to find his lost love and place her beauty before the world through the art his brain and fingers longed to practice. Years before, 1 became fascinated by this young man because of the slender body of work he left behind. As a working artist myself, I found an affinity with him which 1 could not fully understand. I determined to attempt a new biography of him to update the out-of-print one of McArdle.

  Now, thanks to the dog-eared diary, the task had become imperative. I felt owed a debt to this man who had perished on a battlefield of long ago.

  From that tattered record, I learned how, on his few meager leaves in London, he tried without success to find his missing love, and nostalgic yearnings for the days that used to be leapt off the pages.

  “We had a respite last week and rested in a small café. I fell in with some of the South Lancashires who shared the line with us. One had an old gramophone and a solitary record, which he played over and over again. It was that silly ragtime item to which Katherine and I danced many times and which we sang together with abandon:

  “I’ll make you my own

  In our own little home.

  My madtime, gladtime,

  Ragtime girl.”

  “The words were banal and ridiculous, but they brought back those nights before the war. I could not rid my mind of the memory of Katherine for days. I longed to be with her again and enjoy the silly moments of singing that song with her. And mingled with it all was my regret at rowing with her and spoiling the picture of her which I had so much wanted to make my masterpiece.”

  Costigan’s diary ended on a date in 1917 with a terse entry:

  “Going up the line tomorrow. Rumors of a big push.”

  The remainder of the little book contained only blank pages, which told their own ominous tale.

  During a long night of reading interspersed with sessions of studying the canvas I had propped against a wall, considering Costigan’s spoiled masterpiece, I formed distinctly sympathetic feelings for him. Artistic London in the days before the Great War knew him as a roaring Bohemian. But I had encountered a sensitive man, a man in love who regretted that his impetuous temper led to his mauling the highly accomplished attempt to put his lost love’s beauty before the world. I stared at the brutal black lines he had slashed across the face of the girl, and I longed to see the beauty that had been so deliberately obliterated.

  Next morning, I set off for the school with Costigan and the lost Katherine haunting me. We were in the midst of the summer school sessions, and I was mixing my regular work with four days a week instructing in advanced life painting, all easy enough because the summer school attracted competent students, many of whom were professionals seeking added experience of working from models.

  Because such students required only a modicum of advice now and again, I had hardly any teaching to do and could devote some time to personal projects. I usually did so from a model of my own choice rather than the one posed in the center of the life room, and I worked in a curtained-off area to one side of the major studio.

  Looking back on events of the days following my evening with Costigan’s diary, they seem to be shrouded in a kind of haze, as if they occurred when I was in a dream-state. I went into the school that morning knowing that my class had been comfortably set up over the previous few days, working under its own steam from one of our regular pool of models. At that stage, I could begin some work of my own and, though I had a good-sized canvas already primed, I had not selected a model. I had a vague idea of doing a female nude study and it now seems that the notion was prompted from outside of myself while I was in the hazy condition that I believe overcame me the moment I entered the school.

  Looking in at the office on the ground floor, I asked Margaret, the general factotum, if I might have a model.

  “June has already gone up to your studio as usual,” she said, meaning the regular model from whom my class was working.

  “I don’t mean June. I mean a model for some work of my own.”

  “Sorry, I’m afraid there isn’t a spare model. You know how things are at summer school time,” Margaret replied. “If a girl comes in, I’ll send her up.”

  Disgruntled, I went upstairs. The corridor off which the life studios were situated was empty save for a solitary woman walking ahead of me. She was tall, slender, dark-haired, and wearing a dressing gown. She was bare-legged and barefoot, presenting an appearance which in any art school indicates a life model. She turned a sharp corner ahead of me but when I turned it, she had disappeared with what seemed remarkable rapidity.

  Puzzled and experiencing that strange haziness, I entered the studio where my class was established. June, the model, was already in her agreed pose and the class, eager in its early start, as ever with summer school classes, was keenly at work.

  “Good morning. Everyone happy with what they are doing?” I asked, attempting some morning breeziness. A chorus of satisfied “Good mornings” came from behind the easels and nobody demanded my time.

  In my curtained-off area. I found a tall, dark-haired girl unclothed and standing still on the small podium as if in a prearranged pose.

  Her back was to the prepared canvas I had placed on my easel the previous day. In the mental fogginess that imparted a feeling of unreality, I walked to the easel and the girl looked over her shoulder, smiled at me and said: “Good morning Mr. Jevons. I think this is how you want me posed, isn’t it?”

  I nodded and noted the dressing gown lying on a chair and, in that same fogged way, realized that she was the girl who had walked ahead of me in the corridor, yet I could not understand how she came to be in my portion of the studio. The whole time factor made it impossible for her to be one of the regular rota of models who had reported at the office and whom Margaret had sent upstairs. Then there was the strange matter of her taking up a pose of her own accord and my unquestioning acceptance of it. Curiously, I had little desire to question her though I made a half-hearted attempt.

  “I haven’t seen you about before, have I?”

  “Oh, I’ve been around for some time,” she said, smiling over her shoulder, where upon my questioning ceased, for I saw she was stunningly beautiful with huge, dark, and liquid eyes and a slender, entrancingly formed body. I knew only an overwhelming desire to capture her on canvas, so I hastily put on my smock and set about preparing a palette.

  How best can I describe my actions for the bulk of that day except by saying I painted? I painted as I had never painted before, all the time enveloped in that peculiar mental fog and scarcely conscious of my surroundings. Looking back, I have only a vague recollection of preparing the preliminary sketch of the girl who stood motionless on the podium, a perfect model in her pose and her ability to remain totally still. Then I plunged into the work of painting with a vigor alien to my usual painstaking approach.

  There was no conversation between us. None seemed necessary and I had no indication to make lighthearted chat as a means of easing the strain of her task. I worked with a positive passion, oblivious to everything but the driven desire to portray the girl with her classic beauty and her half-saucy, half-innocent smile as she looked over her shoulder at me.

  I have recollections of now and again suggesting she rested while I ventured out of my nook and made what was really a token circuit of the students working from the model in the larger studio, giving a suggestion here and there, answering an occasional query and ensuring that June, their model, had her proper rest breaks. When I returned to my own curtained-off corner, my model was always there, standing on the podium, posed correctly and needing no repositioning.

  Then I would hurl myself once more into what had now almost become the be-all and end-all of my existence: the striving for perfection in placing of this girl’s image on canvas. It went on all that day and I was scarcely aware of anything but the work in hand. Absorbed in the task, I was unaware of my surroundings though, now and again, from the street outside, I heard the clatter of horses’ hooves, the tr
undling of iron-rimmed cartwheels, the occasional honking of a motor-horn and once, the hoarse voice of a newsboy shouting the afternoon edition:

  “Evening News! Evening News! Mr. Asquith’s important speech in the House! Important statement by the Prime Minister…!”

  Late in the afternoon, the bell marking the close of lessons clanged through the corridors and I emerged from what I suppose must have been a frenzy of painting, gasping like a swimmer coming up for air. I moved to one side to begin cleaning my brushes and, all at once, realized that the girl was no longer there. Nor was her robe. Somehow, without my seeing or hearing her move, she had simply disappeared.

  For a moment, I stood as if paralyzed, gazing at the vacant podium, then I gathered my wits and stepped out of my curtained-off corner. In the main body of the studio, my students were gathering their gear, most preparing to go down to the evening lecture, a regular feature of the summer school.

  “Did anyone see my model go out of here a moment or two ago?” I asked, to be met with blank stares all round.

  “A tall girl, slim, with dark hair,” I persisted.

  “I didn’t realize you had a model in there, Ted,” responded one. “I thought you were doing some private work without a model.”

  “Well, I looked in quickly to ask your advice, Mr. Jevons,” said another, a middle-aged woman who seemed in awe of me and always addressed me formally. “But I didn’t bother when I saw the way you were and I didn’t notice any model.”

  “What do you mean by the way I was?”

  She shuffled her feet awkwardly. “Well, you were concentrating very deeply on your painting and—sort of—well, grunting and muttering as you worked. I didn’t think it was right to disturb you. I’m certain I didn’t see a model, though.”

  I watched the students file out of the door aware of one or two shooting me a dubious parting glance then, with the studio cleared, I made a half-hearted tour of the room, thinking I might come across the girl, hiding as some sort of silly joke. Deep down. however, I knew I was not going to find her. She had gone as quickly and mysteriously as she had earlier appeared in front of me in the corridor.