Honeybath's Haven by Michael Innes Page A

assertions came from Lightfoot punctuated by distressing snivels. It was useless to blink the fact that he was in a most abject state.
    â€˜Come over here, Edwin.’ Honeybath had remained beside the table, on which he was now securing with drawing-pins a large sheet of cartridge-paper. ‘Giotto’s circle,’ he said, as Lightfoot shambled up. ‘You remember, Edwin? I could beat you sometimes, but not often. Here goes.’ He picked up a crayon, and with a single sweep of his wrist (the uninjured wrist) contrived a very tolerable approximation to a circle some ten inches in diameter. ‘Next boy,’ he said.
    Lightfoot produced one large sniff, took the crayon, and obediently drew his circle. It was a perfect circle. A pair of compasses couldn’t have faulted it.
    â€˜You win,’ Honeybath said. ‘So you can draw, can’t you?’
    â€˜So I can.’ Lightfoot sounded surprised but entirely convinced. He appeared so satisfied for the moment, indeed, that Honeybath was taken aback. The little demonstration just concluded hadn’t really all that to do with ‘drawing’ as an artist understands the term. But he remembered that Edwin had always been a curiously suggestible type. He would believe what he was confidently told about himself, although the belief didn’t always stick. Even when he was kidding himself he was Flannel Foot or Zeuxis something of the same disposition must be at work. Honeybath was not sanguine enough to suppose that his primitive stroke of therapy had effected much. But at least Edwin now sat down, and didn’t again fall to weeping. And when Prout returned with a bottle of milk and a packet of tea he watched the production of a beverage from these simple constituents with a kind of quiescent puzzled respect.
    Honeybath had to wash some cups. There was no denying that the studio was in a most disgusting mess. Edwin had obviously persuaded himself – or been injudiciously persuaded by others – that he couldn’t do a damn thing in a domestic way, and not a damn thing was he going to do. But it was clear that the chaos around him gave him no emotional satisfaction even of the most perverse sort. He was perfectly miserable before the spectacle of the squalor he had himself created. So here was an absolute datum – and one Honeybath had really acknowledged already. There was no future for Edwin in this confounded place.
    Prout didn’t contribute to any achieving of an atmosphere of repose. Having made the tea, he was prowling restlessly here and there, stirring up the dust and making disgusted noises when he trammelled his fingers in cobweb. He even opened the deep cupboards that ran under the eaves and peered inside, possibly in his obsessive pursuit of vanished Lightfoot masterpieces. This behaviour presently unsettled Lightfoot in a new way. He got to his feet again and began himself to wander round. It wasn’t aimlessly, although he was in fact making efforts that it should appear so. Honeybath, puzzled at first, became aware that there were half a dozen objects in the studio – a door-knob, a mackintosh hanging on a peg, an empty biscuit tin and the like – which Edwin was under some constraint to touch in a set order. He was trying now to achieve this without detection, and the furtive effect thus produced was at once pathetic and embarrassing. Edwin might have been a pickpocket, edging his way warily towards a prospect. Honeybath would rather have had him wholeheartedly a burglar again. But it was clear that Flannel Foot had vanished below Edwin’s imaginative horizon, probably for keeps.
    These two compulsive individuals together were a bit much. Honeybath saw that it would take more than jokes about Giotto’s circle to haul Edwin back into a normal frame of mind, and that the next step must be to call in medical assistance. He was wondering how best to set about this when the door opened without