‘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. He pushed at a door, and what he found was a dusty, cobwebbed room that had nothing in it – nothing, that is, except pictures. Dozens and dozens of pictures. Leaning against the wall there were paintings that had gone baggy in their frames. Albums full of drawings were heaped on the floorboards, with loose sheets of paper strewn all over the place.
‘That night Jack told his mother what he’d seen. It was through Jack’s mother that we learned more about Randall’s last years. It was known that Randall had returned to the Oak towards the end of his life, in 1895, after Croombe had installed electric lights in the hotel. The new lighting caused a sensation, but it didn’t flatter the paintings, Croombe thought. On the contrary; the colours looked wan and flat. He made enquiries, and discovered that Randall was still alive, living in Bristol, still painting, but Elizabeth had died a decade before and he was alone now. He was almost penniless, and in poor health, so when Croombe invited him to the Oak to retouch the murals, it was like a gift from heaven. He came back, spent a month as Croombe’s guest, worked on his paintings, and then returned to Bristol.’
Mr Morton has eased himself lower in the chair. His eyes have been closed for some time, but from small movements of his lips it had been clear for a while that he was attending to every phrase. Now, however, there is no sign that he is listening. He may even be asleep.
He leans gradually towards the blind man, who now sits up and faces him, frowning. ‘Is that the end?’ asks Mr Morton.
‘Not quite,’ he replies, backing off, like a shoplifter accosted on the point of pocketing something.
‘I thought not. Go on,’ Mr Morton commands, reclining again.
‘Well, that was the story that everyone knew: that Randall did the job, went home to Bristol and died there,’ he continues. ‘In fact, Randall took a detour on his way home. He went in search of Lily Corbin, and found her living at the farm where she had been living when he first came to the Oak, though now she was in the cottage that used to be occupied by the herdsman. As Lily told it, she answered a knock on her door late one afternoon, and there was her younger brother, Alfred, standing in the drizzle beside a bedraggled old man, whom he shoved towards her as if he were some vagrant he’d found thieving from the henhouse. Alfred said the old man’s name was Mr Barlow, but she’d recognised him straight away. She wasn’t going to say anything, however, not with her brother there, because her family had always blamed her for the affair with the painter. It was because of the affair that nobody had ever wanted to marry her. And when she got him inside, out of the rain, she didn’t have a chance to say anything, because before she could get a word in Randall launched into a great speech about his love for her, how her face and voice had haunted him every morning and every night for these past twenty years and more, how he had reproached himself for his cowardice in not leaving his wife. He was a beggar now, he said, not merely in appearance but in his heart as well. He knelt at her feet on the cold stone floor of her kitchen, pouring out his heart while rainwater dripped from his straggly hair. He looked ridiculous, she thought, and he was talking nonsense. Perhaps he had indeed fallen in love with her in the course of that summer month, when they had walked along the river together. Certainly she had fallen in love with him. It was the one time in her life, that month, that she had been as happy as she had been as a child, but it was too many years ago. Her heart had withered. He told her that he had been back to the room where he had painted her portrait, that he had repainted the face of one of the shepherdesses, to make her the twin of the beautiful serving girl. He had painted a lily by her feet, in honour of her, as a sign of his love. She was no longer the beautiful serving girl, she pointed out, but he told her that she was wrong, and started quoting poetry at her. She looked at William as he knelt in a little puddle on the floor of her freezing kitchen, and what she saw was not the man she had loved when she was twenty, but a man she did not know, a lonely and fearful old man, and she felt pity for him.
‘Randall came to his senses, and learned to content himself with pity. He vacated his home in Bristol and went to live on the upper floor of Lily Corbin’s cottage, while she lived below. When Randall fell ill with pneumonia, nearly two years after he’d moved into the cottage, she nursed him until he died. In his will he left her everything, though there wasn’t much to leave, except the pictures he’d painted in her house. She stored them in the room in which Randall had worked and slept, and rarely looked at them, she said.
‘By the time that Jack and his mother were visiting Lily, the hotel had fallen into disrepair and was boarded up. During the war it was used as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen, having gone out of business in the 1920s. Randall’s paintings were whitewashed over and this room became a ward. In 1945 the Oak was boarded up again, so when Jack came up here, to take a look at the pictures he’d heard Lily talk about, the garden was wild and had started to invade the building. Vines were creeping across the walls and there was grass coming up through the floor. Armed with a torch, Jack would slip in here and try to find the portraits of Lily. Some faces could be seen through the veil of whitewash, but not many, and the whole room had grown a coat of fungus and moss. It was like a magic grotto, with the sun shining through the cracks between the boards, and the painted people lurking underneath the greenery and mould. He’d shine his torch across the walls, trying to find Lily, but he never saw any shepherdess and the only serving girl he could see looked nothing like the old lady at the farm. He described