Bohemian Girl, The (24 page)

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Because she put the note there? She probably put it there so she wouldn’t forget it.’

‘But she did forget it.’ Or did she? Perhaps Heseltine’s theory was not so entirely wrong. ‘How many other people worked in the shop when Mary Thomason was here?’

‘Only one.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘A woman.’ Geddys put his hands behind his back, stared out at the empty arcade. ‘An older woman. She and Mary got along, neither friends nor enemies - you know. But the Wesselons was out here in the shop; Alice had no reason to come out here and handle it.’

‘But you did.’

‘Well, of course I did! I
owned
it!’ He turned his head towards Denton but didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Please leave. I’ve nothing more to say.’

‘Who was going to buy the painting? Somebody was going to buy it and then didn’t want it.’

‘The Wesselons? I can’t tell you that.’

‘I think you’d better.’

‘I have a responsibility to my clients.’

‘Do you want to tell the police about that?’

Geddys whirled on him, his face reddening, his head tilted on the neck, then strode to the back and came out with a large ledger. He opened it on one hand, turned pages with the other, read until he found what he wanted. ‘Francis Wenzli put down a guinea on it. He never came for it. I wrote to remind him that the painting was here, and he sent back my note with a scribble on it to the effect that he was no longer interested.’ He slammed the book. ‘Rude of him.’

‘Who’s Francis Wenzli?’

Geddys looked at him as if he were simple. ‘The painter.’

‘You didn’t give him back his deposit?’

‘He didn’t ask for it.’ Geddys shrugged. ‘I’d lost the sale, after all.’

Denton went over some of it again, but Geddys wanted him gone. The story didn’t change. A couple of hard detectives might get more - Denton thought there might be more to ask about the relationship with Mary Thomason - but he wasn’t going to get it today. He could come back another time. Or put Guillam on him, ho-ho.

He had missed lunch. The rain was steady now, the wind slacked off; Piccadilly seemed dispirited - the tops of the buses empty, the horses plodding with their heads down, black umbrellas everywhere. He realized he was hungry. His watch told him it would be the low period at the Café Royal, but he could at least find something to eat there, and he might, too, find somebody who could tell him who Francis Wenzli was. Not Frank Harris: Harris was one of the nighttime habitués. Oddly, he thought of Gwen John, and not without interest. He set off for the Café Royal.

Inside the door of the Domino Room, shaking the rain off his ponderous overcoat, he looked for a familiar face. The room was all but empty, waiters leaning against the backs of chairs, arms folded. A single pair of long legs stuck out from a banquette half-hidden by a gold-and-green pillar - somebody either asleep or telling the world with his posture to go to hell.

It was the latter. Denton saw a big, dark hat, the glitter of a gold earring.

‘Hullo, sheriff. What the hell are you doing here at this hour?’ It was Augustus John, Gwen’s brother, astonishingly cheeky for a near-boy of twenty-three. Denton slid into the banquette and said, ‘I might ask you the same thing. I like your hat.’

‘Bought it off an Aussie I saw in the street.’

‘I thought you were in Liverpool.’

‘I was. I couldn’t stand any more of it, so I took a few days off.’ John was sitting low on his spine, arms folded, the wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. His costume - an almost threadbare velvet jacket in olive green, once apparently belonging to a game-keeper, corduroy trousers much bagged from the rain, thick boots - proclaimed the artist. So did the earring, the almost black beard.

‘Liverpool isn’t London?’ Denton said.

‘The Liverpudlians believe that only Greece, Rome and dead people in fancy clothes can be proper subjects for art. They’re astonished and censorious that I could think the gypsies in the fields or the workers at the docks could interest me. They display the very best taste of the eighteen-fifties.’ He sighed heavily and looked over at Denton, who was beginning a negotiation with a waiter about the choucroute garni. John said, ‘My sister said she’d seen you. Gwen was rather taken with you. She likes older men.’

‘I’m certainly one of those.’

‘She said you were looking for a girl.’

‘Not what you think.’ Denton passed over the leather envelope that held the drawing and told the waiter he’d have the chicken pie.

John took the drawing out and looked at it. His head came back as if his eyes were too close to it. ‘Right piece of shit, isn’t it,’ he said.

‘Gwen said Burlington House.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You don’t recognize her? She was in her first year at the Slade.’

‘Might. I used to drop into the drawing classes, might have seen her. Dreadful piece of work, this.’ He put his head forward and brought the drawing up almost to the brim of his hat. ‘The remarques are more interesting.’

‘The little drawings in the corners?’

‘Not awfully well done, but they’re Slade work, which is something. ’

‘Different hands did the head and the little things?’

‘Oh, of course. The girl might have done the remarques, in fact - they look about right for first-year work. But she didn’t do the head - that’s Academy stuff, somebody immensely pompous and outdated. Bit odd, putting remarques on somebody else’s drawing, more so when the drawing’s of you. Little mementoes.’

‘Of what?’

‘Who the hell knows? One’s a doorway; means nothing to me. The other—’ John laughed. ‘Christ on a crust, it’s Himple!’ He laughed again. ‘Sir Erasmus Himple, RA - one of the great old turds of Burlington House. The drawing is his Lazarus. It’s obvious. I have a friend who insists that it looks like a man preparing to let out a colossal fart. That look of intense stupidity - the open mouth, the rolling eyes - old Himple said it shows Lazarus at the moment of realizing he’s alive again. I suppose one could wake with a fart, eh?’

‘“His Lazarus”?’

‘Himple put a painting of the raising of Lazarus into the last exhibition. Huge thing - took up most of a wall. He described it as his “chef-d’oeuvre” and made much of the fact that his Lazarus is young and his Jesus is a Jew. And indeed, the Christ has a nose like Shylock in a burlesque, but everybody else in the painting is as English as Boadicea, so it looks as if the Jew of Malta has wandered into a palace garden party. Himple is unmatchable - a genus unto himself.’

Denton was turning over the name - Himple. Somebody else had mentioned Himple. Who was it? He was eating chicken pie, bending to look over John’s shoulder at the drawing. ‘I thought maybe the man in the drawing was screaming.’

‘Well, he could be. One’s never quite sure with Himple. You know, on closer inspection, I think that Lazarus looks a bit like the woman in the big drawing? And I wonder if she was perhaps the model for Lazarus’s sister, who’s shown in the painting as tripping over the ground as if she’s weightless, one hand extended like a hostess introducing the dustman to the Prince of Wales.’

‘I should have a look at the painting.’

‘It’s worth the trip, if only for the comic effect.’

‘But why would Lazarus look like a woman?’

‘The girl in the drawing was a model?’

‘Now and then, they say.’

‘There you are.’

‘For Lazarus
and
the sister?’

‘Well, it’s like old Himple to want to show a family resemblance. He likes to be authentic, you know - brothers and sisters always look alike, right?’ He laughed. ‘Like Gwen and me.’

Denton looked more closely at the little drawing. ‘And Lazarus is what she’d look like as a man?’ He was thinking of the brother who had picked up Mary Thomason’s trunk from her lodging house.

John stirred. He found a pencil in a pocket, searched through others until he found a folded piece of cartridge paper, on one side a list of some sort. He smoothed it out on the table and began to draw with quick, sure strokes. To Denton, it was like theatrical magic: one moment, blank paper, the next a face very like Mary Thomason’s but male.

‘I’ve cut his hair for him. Or we could have him with a beard, like Lazarus.’ He made another sketch just as quickly, and the same young face appeared with a short beard, even the slight scantiness of the youthful hair shown. The economy of line was remarkable, and all at once Denton understood ‘the Slade look’. He told John as much, praised his ability.

‘I’ve thought of doing portraits in Trafalgar Square - sixpence a head. I’d make a fortune.’

‘Can I keep those?’

John slid the paper over the tablecloth. ‘You can tell your grand-children you own an original Augustus John.’ He took the paper back and dashed off a signature, shoved it over again.

‘You’re not lacking in confidence, anyway.’

John laughed. ‘Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’ He sighed. ‘I mean to get very drunk and possibly find myself a woman. That sound like a programme that would interest you?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘I think Gwen wondered if you were attached to anybody just now.’

‘I am, actually.’

‘Oh.’ John slid down on the banquette again. ‘It’s just as well. Gwen’s really interested only in her art. Everything else is “secondary”, as she puts it. I wish I had her concentration. You heard I was married?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Hard on the concentration. Gwen’s quite right, actually. She’ll wind up a nun of art. I’ll wind up a bigamist. Or a trigamist. I can’t live without women. Half a dozen of them, if I could afford them. Oddly, having only one is surely more distracting than two or three - they could entertain each other. Isn’t that so?’

Denton had ordered coffee. He sipped. ‘I was married once. It was distracting, yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘She killed herself.’

John seemed to ponder this. He put his eyebrows up, then cocked his head, frowned. He said, ‘I came to London to cheer myself up, and I’m not being cheered. It’s time to get drunk.’ He wandered away.

Denton remembered that he had meant to ask about Wenzli, the man who had put down the deposit on the ‘little Wesselons’. He also remembered who had first mentioned Himple - Henry James, at the dismal party at his publishers. Something about Himple’s having gone away.

Maybe he had come back.

‘Mary Thomason as a young man, with and without beard.’ He spread the piece of paper on his desk. Janet Striker, his dressing gown held closed at her throat, bent to look at it. It was Atkins’s evening off.

‘We should look at the painting,’ she said.

He put his hand on her buttock. She flinched.

‘I’m taking liberties,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I’ll get used to it.’

‘I hope not.’ He tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t.

It was the same skittishness. He wondered when she would end it.

 

 

 

The Raising of Lazarus
was indeed an enormous painting, the figures life-sized, the landscape so expansive that it was impossible to take in the whole thing at once. A printed note said that the actual site of the Apostle John’s account was shown, sketches for it made in the Holy Land by the artist himself. The clothes, mostly cloaks and shifts, were ‘archaeologically authentic’, but the faces were, as Augustus John had said, as English as Spotted Dick. Despite the seriousness of the subject - a man raised from the dead, after all, a miracle by the Messiah - there was something terrifically lightweight about it.

‘Like Handel played on the tin whistle,’ she murmured.

He actually knew who Handel was. ‘They’re all play-acting,’ he said.

‘Oh, that
is
it, isn’t it. He’s posed them all. As if it’s a studio photograph that went on too long. It is frightful, isn’t it.’

He went closer and studied Lazarus. There was no mistaking that face now. With the memory of the drawing and John’s sketches in his head, he thought of Lazarus as ‘Mary’s brother’. He said, ‘Himple used her for the sister and her brother for Lazarus.’

‘If they really look so much alike, he could have used either to model both.’

A lot of handsome young men filled the crowd that followed Jesus. Denton said, ‘Either Jesus or the artist favours the good-looking ones.’

‘Mmm, boys. Yes, I suppose. That might cast another light on the brother.’

‘What are you saying - Himple liked young men but used Mary as a model? Or her brother? I told you that James said that Himple had “decamped”. I wonder if we can find him to ask some questions. ’

She turned back before they left the gallery. ‘It’s so huge. Can you imagine having that on your wall?’

‘It would cover a lot of cracked plaster.’

Denton wrote to Erasmus Himple, RA, but had no answer as yet. On her own initiative, Janet Striker went to the Reading Room and brought back what there was in the obvious sources about Francis Wenzli, the artist who had put down a deposit on the Wesselons. Wenzli was apparently a few years younger than Denton, the latest in a line of minor, originally Austrian painters who had emigrated to England to escape Napoleon. The current incarnation, according to an article on ‘Our Contemporary Artists’ in
Pearson’s
, was a society portraitist and landscape painter who specialized in country houses.

‘It appears he can put both your wife and your country place on the wall for you,’ Denton said to Atkins. ‘And you, yourself, if you’ve a mind.’

‘Maybe he gives discounts for quantity, like the insurance men - “Family Rates Our Speciality”.’

Denton was getting ready to go out, his work day over. His brain felt blurry. He thought that if he didn’t finish the damned novel soon, he was going to take a rest. However, he didn’t say this to Atkins; Atkins liked his employer to be busy making money. Denton said, ‘How’s the moving-picture business?’