The Tap Dancer by Andrew Barrow

Author:Andrew Barrow [Barrow, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-06-09T12:00:00+00:00

24

The relationship between Mr Blunt and Pauline the model had not worked out.

‘Your friend,’ she soon screamed hysterically at me down the telephone, ‘has stolen a hundred pounds from me!’

This call was followed by a much calmer one from the Chelsea police. ‘Have you any idea,’ asked a detective, ‘how we could get in touch with Mr Blunt?’

I did not offer any suggestions, and in fact I never saw Blunt again. ‘I should imagine he’s pretty adept at disappearing without trace,’ said Crispin Gray when I informed him of this latest development in the aftermath of Ben’s death.

Meanwhile, my peaceful domestic life had been partly disrupted by Tim’s return from New York. From the floor below I would hear his footsteps as he hurried to answer the telephone, which rang continuously now he was home. In the evenings these footsteps would merge with the tread of other feet and often the tip-tap of high heels.

Several times a day, Tim would descend to the flat and make himself a snack, a cup of coffee, munch an apple or express mild irritation with the sounds that came from my room.

‘Is it necessary to make such a noise with your typewriter? Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!’

I would often return to the flat to find Tim rustling about, humming a little tune, sneezing or running himself a bath. In the morning I would hear his joints creaking as he made his breakfast, the clunk of his bowl on the work surface, the rustle of a cereal packet and the scrape of a saucepan on the hob. Sometimes he would enter the room and give me a plate containing half a scrambled egg.

Tim’s main interest beside painting was social life. He was attracted to and fitted effortlessly into the mainstream. Though acquainted with some of his more fashionable contemporaries, such as the tailor living downstairs, he preferred a more sedate and respectable life and one night that summer spoke in disparaging terms of a ‘wife-swapping party’ he had found himself at in Hampstead. Tim’s circle and the rackety, colourful gang that had engulfed Ben hardly overlapped, and I sometimes got the impression that Tim regarded Ben’s demise as an inevitable consequence of straying too far outside the ordered world.

He did not share my exalted opinion of Ben’s talents as an artist – and he had not adapted his opinion because of the tragedy. Tim had an instinctive sense of who was really significant – and this did not include many of the practitioners or collectors of Modern Art. My friends did not interest him – and he even expressed relief that Peter Cooper had left England again. ‘I had virtually no time at all for him’, he said. ‘I think he was a boring little man.’ Tim’s heroes were the semi-philistine owners of stately homes: he was extremely popular among them and their offspring. Now in his early thirties but still unmarried, he was a beloved figure in these circles, where few artists roamed, and within

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