Within a very few minutes all residual thought of Frek and her lily-white flesh had vanished from his mind.
3. Wolf head, angel face
Sam stood at the open end of the smithy and removed her Ray-Bans to let her eyes adjust to the change of light.
The scene before her was like an old painting, all heavy shadow and lurid glow. Winander was shoveling coals on to a forge. The air was heavy with the pungent smell of fire and hot metal.
There you are, said Winander. Just as well that wanked-out priest got a lift. He looked fit to collapse.
He dropped the shovel with a clatter that made Sam start. She tried to conceal the movement but he grinned to let her know hed noticed, then went to a cool-box on a trestle at the back of the smithy and took out a can of beer.
Need to keep your liquor level up in here, he said. Catch.
He tossed her the can which she caught with one-handed ease. It was ice cold and the label boasted it was the strongest Australian lager you could buy.
You trying to stereotype me, Mr. Winander? she said.
No. Im not that subtle. The stuff was on offer last time I got into a supermarket. Never pass up on a bargain, Miss Flood.
He raised his eyebrows comically as he spoke. His eyes had a distinctly flirtatious twinkle. How did he get it there? she asked herself. With an eyedropper?
Bit hard on Mr. Madero, arent you? Calling him a wanked-out priest? she said.
Did I say wanked-out? I meant dropped-out, he said. Decided there were better ways of spending his life than wearing a skirt and pretending he never got horny. Perhaps I did mean wanked-out.
He ripped the ring-pull off a can, raised it high and let the beer arc into his mouth. Some of it ran down his cheeks and jaw on to his body. He was sucking his belly in, she noticed. Did he really think he was impressing her?
As if sensing a challenge, he set down his can and moved back to the forge where he put his right foot on a set of foot-bellows and began to pump the dull red coals to a white-hot heat.
It was a pretty effective performance, she had to admit. His skin was almost as brown as her own, his torso still slab muscled despite the waistline sag. His plentiful body hair was rejuvenated from gray to ruddy gold by the reflected fire. With each bend of the knee she could see the contours of his huge thigh muscle outlined against his trousers before he drove his foot down in a rhythmic movement which a susceptible woman might find erotically mesmeric.
And where, she wondered, sucking at her lager, did these mesmerized women pay the price of their susceptibilities? Did he take them here in the heat of the forge, creating Thor-like thunder by beating his hammer against the huge anvil as he grappled them close, then mocking their ecstatic cries as he entered by plunging a length of glowing metal into the cooling trough? Or did the great god carry them up to his god-size bed?
Or was he past all that and just enjoying talking the talk even though he could no longer walk the walk? Geriatric sexuality wasnt an area she had much experience of. Unlike Martie, she hadnt had to fight the dirty old dons off. Sometimes basilisk eyes came in useful.
She yawned widely, then said, Is that good for your heart with the extra weight youre carrying? Id really like to hear what you can tell me about my namesake before you drop dead.
He stopped straightaway. To do him justice he didnt seem out of breath. Also he smiled as if acknowledging a telling stroke and let his belly bulge over his waistband.
Lets get to it then, he said. You look ready for a refill.
He tossed her another can. Rather to her surprise she realized he was right and the first one was empty. He led her out of a door at the back of the smithy into a cobbled courtyard. Here she could see the rear of the main house and alongside it what had probably been a barn but which now had wide plate-glass windows to admit light into what looked like an artists workshop.
The yard itself was scattered with the materials of his trade, or rather his trades. Lumps of wood, chunks of rock, a tubful of seashells, another of polished stones, some wrought-iron garden tables and chairs, and a small menagerie of delicate and detailed wildlife in various metals. But the thing which caught the eye was a tree stump standing upright on the cobbles and leaning back against the smithy wall.
The barkless and sun-bleached surface of the bole curved and twisted with a kind of monumental muscularity, as if some huge beast were trying to escape from the confining wood, an impression confirmed by the topmost section which was in the process of being carved into a gaping-jawed wolfs head. It was both repellent and compulsively attractive.
Sam went close and ran her hands over the sinuous undulations, feeling the grain against her skin.
Irresistible, isnt it? Not a gender thing either. Men and women both the same, said Winander close behind her.
Its the Wolf-Head Cross, isnt it? The other one I read about in Peter K.s Guide.
Now why should you think that?
She peered at the residual branches which formed an irregular stubby crossbar.
The nail holes are a bit of a giveaway, she said. Did you put them there?
Nail holes? What an imagination you have! A few beetle holes perhaps. Its exactly as it was when we dragged it out of the Moss, except a bit drier.
The Moss? Mecklin Moss, would that be?
Youre remarkably well informed for a stranger, said Winander. If you stay another couple of days, well have to elect you queen. Yes, it was Mecklin. I was helping a neighbor haul out a beast of his that had got bogged down when we chanced upon this. Something in that bit of bog must have preserved it, I dont know how. I hauled it out, cleaned it up and left it standing here till it told me what it wanted to be.
And it told you, wolf?
Not really. In fact it was Frek Woollass who came up with that idea. She saw something lupine in the twist of the grain. She offered to commission me. I said I didnt want her money just her body so we shook hands on that. As many hours modeling for me as I took on the wolf head.
So youve been dragging your feet, suggested Sam.
Perish the unprofessional thought! said Winander, twinkling. Ive had to prepare a site too. She wants her grandfather to have a view of it from his window. Gerry, her dad, isnt keen on having a view of it from anywhere. Too pagan for his taste. But like most young women of my acquaintance, its Frek who calls the tune. So it will be in place as promised before she goes back to Cambridge which is this coming weekend.
Cambridge? You mean the university?
Thats the one. Our Frek is a real-life don. Eddas and sagas and Nordic mythologys her thing, hence maybe her fancy for the wolf. You dont seem impressed?
Seems a waste of good money teaching that stuff at university, she said.
An opinion Id keep to yourself if Freks around, he said. Anyway, this is promised, but if anything else takes your fancy, well see if we can work out a deal.
Another twinkle. He was irrepressible, she thought, as he flung open the double barn door and led her into the workshop. This was relatively tidy after the yard. Bang in the middle, lit by the rectangle of light falling in through the open door was a wide-eyed marble angel brooding over a headstone. Sam stood before it, struck by a sense of familiarity stopping short of recognition. She lowered her gaze to read the inscription:
BILLY KNIPP
taken in his 17th year
sadly missed by his grieving mother
Think what a present thou to God hast sent
This the boy they buried yesterday? she said.
Yes. Almost done. Ill be setting it up later.
Nice inscription, she said.
Milton. If you knew Billy, you might think it a touch ironical.
He gave her a twinkle as if expecting curiosity about the boy.
Instead she asked, So what are you, Mr. Winander international artist or village jobbing craftsman, like your ancestors, according to Peter K.?
He was hard to put down.
From the stuff I see winning the Turner Prize year after year, the latter is the nobler designation. I am proud of the fact that once upon a time round here the Winanders did everything that needed to be done with hammer and chisel and saw and adze. First Winander son was the blacksmith, second the mason, third the carpenter.
What did they do with daughters? Stake them out on a hillside?
Youve definitely been reading up on us, he laughed.
So what number son are you?
I was unique, he said. So I had to do it all.
Including the wild pranks I read about in the Guide?
Especially the pranks. Seen enough?
I reckon.
As she turned from the memorial she noticed something on the floor concealed by a piece of sacking. She pulled it aside and found herself looking at a reclining nude, half life-size, in some kind of creamy, almost white wood. It was a piece full of energy with the violent chisel marks clearly visible and nothing classical in the pose. It was blatantly sexual, legs splayed, vulva boldly gouged. Yet it had the same pensive features as the marble angel. And suddenly she knew whose they were.
Miss Woollass certainly keeps her side of a bargain, she said.
If she hoped to surprise him, she failed.
Yes, you know where you are with Frek, he said.
You can even see where youve been, she said ironically. To her surprise her response made him roar with far more laughter than it deserved.
He led her from the workshop now into the house.
Find yourself a seat in there if you can, he said. Wont be a second.
Chaos resumed in the room he left her in. The only chair with space enough to sit on looked as if it had been cleared by natural slippage and her feet rested on a slew of books. The floor was littered with artifacts ranging from a Valkyrie bust in sandstone to a giant wrought-iron corkscrew twisted into a granite cork. The main ceiling beam was covered with hooks from which depended a row of grotesque and sexually explicit corn-dollies which dangled there like Execution Dock on a bad day.
The only conventional piece on show was a portrait enjoying sole occupancy of the broad chimney breast. Its subject was a smiling young man with tousled blond hair standing beside an apple tree just beginning to blossom. He was leaning forward with his outstretched hands cupping a nest in which half a dozen chicks had just broken out of sky-blue eggs. Around his feet were primroses, cowslips, wood anemones, all the flowers of spring, while the hills behind were bright with the yellow of gorse. Yet nothing in this exuberance of vernal color reduced the brightness radiating from the youth. On the contrary, he seemed its center if not its source.