Free Honeybath's Haven by Michael Innes

ease himself out of a false situation by temporizing means.
    â€˜I’m grateful to you for explaining things,’ he therefore said. ‘And I’ll come to no final decision in a hurry.’
    â€˜That is everything we could hope for, Mr Honeybath.’ Dr Michaelis was now composed – even smooth – again. ‘And, meanwhile, I wonder whether we might now go and hunt for that room with a good northern light? Even if you don’t want it yourself, you might have a fellow-artist to whom you would wish to recommend it. And I’d like you to be assured of the sincerity with which I speak when I say how much I’d like to see Hanwell being useful to a few distinguished artists, or writers, or the like, in their later years. Not that the distinction is all that important. It’s the lifetime’s dedication to the hard labour of art that counts with me.’
    Honeybath listened, and again felt himself to have rather a liking for Michaelis. The man had made an honest and not ignoble little speech. So he allowed himself to be guided through the splendid building once more, and presently the appropriate quarters were found: a great high room with perfect lighting, and with attached to it a small and secluded sitting-room having a glorious view over the park and a distant line of downs – this and a bedroom and bathroom all firmly behind the occupant’s own front door. A more nearly perfect disposition of things for a solitary artist of advancing years it would have been hard to conceive. It failed to shake Honeybath, but at least it enabled him to be abundant in civil expressions. He ended by lunching in Hanwell Court along with those of the inmates opting for public refection at this time of day. People sat at their own small tables at a well-calculated remove each from the other. You could converse with a neighbour without shouting, or without unsociability you could treat yourself as being in solitude. The fare was excellent, and there was the unobtrusive adjuvant of a capital hock.
    After this, Honeybath sought out Michaelis again, took a politely non-committal farewell, and got away. The notion that he might commend the place to somebody else didn’t again enter his head. But it was to do so fatefully – indeed, fatally – in the not distant future.

 
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7
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    Edwin Lightfoot was back in England. He had been back in England – and in Royal Crescent, Holland Park – for some weeks before Honeybath heard of it. The news came to him, once more, through the agency of Lightfoot’s brother-in-law, Ambrose Prout. And Prout, as on a previous occasion, was extremely worried. He entered Honeybath’s studio one morning – he virtually broke in – with the plain object of spreading despondency and alarm. At first Honeybath simply resented the irruption. He had no sitter with him, it was true, but he was engaged on the tricky if not wholly unfamiliar task of transferring to a canvas the Robes and Star of the Order of the Garter as these august habiliments were disposed in front of him, draped upon a kind of tailor’s dummy adapted for the purpose. The Star was proving particularly awkward; he had set it at an oblique angle to the picture-plane, and it was refusing to look like the resplendent gewgaw it was.
    â€˜Melissa’s attitude worries me,’ Prout said. ‘I feel she isn’t behaving well. She ought to go back to him – and see that he gets on with his work.’
    â€˜What has happened to the flat?’
    â€˜The lease has gone to a car-salesman, I believe.’
    â€˜Well, Ambrose, one can’t expect Melissa to live in that attic studio. She’d feel it to be a come-down.’
    â€˜Or a go-up.’ Prout seemed not to find his own witticism encouraging. ‘And the point is that Edwin can’t live there either. Not what could be called living. It’s chaotic. He hasn’t a clue.’
    â€˜I