Money from Holme (17 page)

There was an easel in the middle of the room – and on it, of course, was a Sebastian Holme in the making.
Unmistakably
a Sebastian Holme. Cheel shut the door abruptly behind him. There was a risk (which hadn’t before occurred to him) in the mere fact that, in the person of Binchy, an artist of sorts lived down below. Other people with some knowledge of painting presumably frequented his society. Might not any of them wander up here when the door was open – and be in possession of sufficient relevant knowledge to find such a picture as this astonishing? Cheel sat down on the couch. An uncomfortably chilly sensation had run down his spine. Holme, he realized, must be given much stricter instructions under the head of what had to be called security. He’d speak pretty stiffly to him as soon as he returned.

But
would
he return? What if he had bolted for good – perhaps having lost his nerve, or perhaps having fled the country in some fit of nostalgia for those exotic parts in which, after all, his authentic inspiration lay?

Cheel looked about him. He might get a clue as to whether or not Holme had departed for good by seeing whether he had taken his belongings with him. But then he virtually didn’t have belongings. He had been seeming to make do very happily with the clothes he stood up in, a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush. Certainly there seemed to be nothing missing from the untidy room. On the other hand – Cheel stiffened – there were several things that hadn’t been there upon the occasion of his last visit. There were two large, flat cardboard boxes. There was a crumple of tissue paper and paper bags. Cheel crossed to a cupboard and flung it open. Holme’s clothes were hung in it: the only clothes he had hitherto possessed.

With mounting misgivings Cheel inspected the bags and boxes. They all came from a respectable men’s outfitter in Regent Street. The larger box had almost certainly contained a ready-made suit. The other might have held shirts, socks, ties and the like. Moreover, under the litter of paper, there turned out to be an empty shoe-box as well. It was only too clear what had become of that £50.

It was a crisis – but a crisis to which Cheel’s intelligence responded with the vigour that might be expected of it. If Holme had decided simply to cut and run, and had naively provided himself with only such a very moderate sum with which to do so, he certainly wouldn’t have spent it on merely togging himself up. The man had the temperament of a feckless Bohemian, but he wasn’t a half-wit. He had acted on some impulse that might well be totally irresponsible. But – again – his temperament must have been involved. What, in terms of this, could suddenly have persuaded him to rush out and dress himself up?

Considering this problem, Cheel stumbled on a thought before which he paled and abruptly sat down again. What if Holme had gone off and reconciled himself with his wife? It was true that his regular epithet for Hedda Holme was ‘awful’, and that occasionally he even used expressions much less printable. Nevertheless his attitude to her was ambivalent. There was, he seemed lurkingly to acknowledge, something to be said for Hedda. Cheel had no difficulty whatever in imagining just what this was.

Cheel contemplated for some minutes the sombre situation at which he had thus arrived. If Holme had suddenly decided that it was time he went out and found himself a woman, he certainly wouldn’t have considered it necessary to pay an expensive visit to Regent Street first. But before the thought of Hedda something of the sort seemed possible. Hedda clearly set some emphasis on appearances – and would be doing so more than ever, now that she was so grossly in the lolly. Her prodigal husband might well calculate that she would be more acceptive of him if he didn’t turn up smelling of a studio.

Here was a dangerous – indeed dire – state of affairs. Confronting it, Mervyn Cheel would have been more than human if he hadn’t, for a brief space, contemplated bolting in his turn. He hadn’t of course (he again reassured himself) perpetrated any crime. But crime – or at least fraud – was something on which the law could demonstrably take very unreasonable views. So perhaps he ought to call it a day. Apart from that trifling £50, he had cleared the whole profit on his private sale of the first two Holmes. None of his present splendours had involved the putting down of much spot cash. He found himself thinking about the hour at which his bank opened in the morning, and about a quick run out to London Airport thereafter.

But it was now – need the reader be surprised? – that the essential quality of the man appeared. All was
not
lost, even although the day appeared to have been so. His worst fears might be groundless. Even if they were not, was he not possessed of that quite exceptional degree of intellectual endowment and dexterity of address that is bound to triumph over even the most adverse circumstances? He would stay. He would stay and fight upon the field.

Having arrived at this resolution (and the strong word is here a wholly apt one) Cheel looked at his watch. It was far past midnight; the smallest of the small hours lay ahead. He supposed that he ought to go back to his flat, and return here in the morning. But this, he quickly saw, wouldn’t do. To stay and fight meant
literally
to stay. Once he left, he mightn’t bring himself to come back again. He couldn’t imagine himself climbing all those stairs after breakfast with the knowledge that what he might find at the top would be a couple of detectives from Scotland Yard. No – he must simply sit down and wait, if Holme failed to return within the next few hours he would have to think again.

He walked over to the easel and examined the current recreating of a lost Sebastian Holme. It was called, he remembered, ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’. The convolvulus was there, and the primal scene was there too. The latter seemed to be notably outlasting the poet’s ‘poor benefit of a bewildering minute’, since the proliferating tendrils of the flower had wreathed themselves around the bronze and ebony of the lovers’ limbs. It might be called, Cheel supposed, an erotic painting; indeed, he wasn’t confident that some aged magistrate mightn’t be sharked up to disapprove of it. Having nothing with which to occupy himself and thereby distract his mind from its present weight of care, Cheel tried taking ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’ in this direct and simple sense – substituting it, so to speak, for that spell of bed-time reading which he had missed out on earlier that night.

It didn’t work. High sexual excitement – for all he knew to the contrary – had gone into the making of the picture. But all that issued from it was a stern command to sacred awe. Uneasy already, Cheel grew still more uneasy before this thing. He even pretended to himself that he had inspected it only to make sure that it had been worked on within the last few hours. For what the point was worth, it had. Holme’s flight – if it was flight – had only just begun.

Time wore on. Cheel felt thirsty, but there was nothing to drink in the place except some nauseous coffee powder. He even felt hungry – and the little larder proved to contain two kippers. Two o’clock sounded, and then three. It grew cold. Sometimes Cheel wrapped a rug around himself. Sometimes he got up and stamped about the room. On the canvas the two lovers remained immobile in their long ecstasy.

Cheel jerked awake from an abominable dream. They had lashed him tightly to the naked body of Hedda Holme with the cord-like tendrils of some hideous bindweed – a bindweed that at the same time smotheringly extruded a mass of blossoms with a nauseous smell. To struggle was unthinkable, and when he tried to scream his mouth was instantly filled with fleshy petals. Then they cut him free, but only to lead him away to some further torment. And he was still bound: this time in manacles that clanked as he moved. The manacles still clanked when he woke up. But they had become the bottles and metal baskets on a milk-float making its noisy matutinal progress down the street outside.

He struggled out of the chair in which he had dropped asleep, and went over to the big north window. London under its smoky dome was facing another day. Below, there was as yet no life except the milkman’s and that of a couple of cats. Opposite, the windows still showed drawn curtains and blinds; only at one of them an old man stood under a naked light, shaving himself with a cut-throat razor. It was a world in
grisaille
, without a note of colour in sight. Here, Cheel thought, was a reality as dreary as his late nightmare had been terrifying. England (it came to him) was getting him down. He could take no more than a few further months of it. He must make his pile, and go.

‘Well, I’m blessed – fancy finding you around at this hour!’

Cheel swung round as he was addressed. The truant Holme had entered the room. He was in new clothes that had gone a little untidy, and he was carrying a bottle of milk and an array of paper bags.

‘Had breakfast yet? I suppose not. Plenty for two.’ Holme grinned amiably. ‘Just light that stove affair, and put on the kettle and the frying-pan. I’m dropping into the bog.’ Holme put down his provisions and vanished.

Cheel did as he had been told. He was feeling a little dazed. Holme’s manner had been totally unexpected. For a moment he had thought the man must be tight. But it wasn’t that. It was – but Cheel didn’t need to tell himself what it was. He had sensed it in a flash.

‘Now, that’s fine.’ Holme was back in the room, and looking lazily round it. He walked to the window, glanced out, yawned, stretched, and turned back to Cheel. ‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I thought I would. And I did.’

‘Did what?’

‘Had her, my dear man. The data given, the senses even. But not
all
the senses. I dropped off to sleep in the course of the proceedings – it’s a nice thing to do, don’t you think? – and when I woke up I was damned hungry. I could have eaten her. But, of course, that would have been wasteful. So we’re going to eat now.’ Holme strode over to the stove. The movement took him past ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’, and he paused to gaze at it. ‘Yes, by God!’ he said. ‘And – do you know? – I’d almost forgotten it.’

Cheel felt rage rising within him. It was rising from somewhere very deep indeed. He was aware that it might irrationally and disastrously master him. And as yet he hadn’t at all got the measure of this crisis. It mightn’t
be
all that of a crisis, for that matter. But he must, he simply must, keep cool.

‘Mind the eggs,’ he said. Holme had dumped down one of his paper bags so carelessly that there had been an ominous crack.

‘Fidgety Cheel, fretful Cheel – one can’t, you know, make an omelette without breaking them.’ Holme proceeded to enforce this by opening another packet, dropping a blob of butter into the frying-pan, and rapidly breaking and stirring in something like a dozen eggs. ‘Make some of that coffee-stuff, will you? Give you something to do. Luckily I brought half-a-dozen rolls.’

Could it – Cheel asked himself –
could it possibly
have been Hedda? Mercifully, he felt free to doubt it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the young brute perfectly capable of speaking in that unbearably coarse way of sleeping with his own wife. It certainly wasn’t that he judged the Holmes’ cordial mutual detestation any bar to their tumbling into bed together if they felt the itch for it. It was rather a conviction that, if Holme had managed to lay his wife again, she wouldn’t have thereafter let him go all that quickly.

No – there was nothing in question but some low, casual adventure. It wouldn’t, of course, do. He couldn’t let Holme cut out of his work like this to go off wenching. It was a waste of time, for one thing. For another, it probably diverted into useless channels physical energies that ought to be bent on extracting sensations only from pigment. Above all, it was dangerous. Any little tart, professional or amateur, about London might prove to be Sebastian Holme’s Delilah. Until his task was finished, until every lost picture in the Wamba catalogue was in being again, nothing more of this sort must occur. Even so, it would be prudent to discover something a little more specific about last night’s adventure. With this in view, Cheel gave a few minutes to making coffee in as relaxed a manner as he could. He even looked at the rolls and made some cordial remark about them. Indeed, after his chilly vigil he would be glad enough to get his teeth into a couple of them. And the omelette – which was in fact an enormous dish of scrambled eggs – was beginning to look uncommonly palatable.

‘Who was it?’ he presently asked, with an air of friendly conspiracy.

‘Who was who?’

‘This girl you’ve had a night out with.’

‘Ah, that would be telling.’ Holme again produced his cheerful grin. It was almost – Cheel reflected with distaste – as if this cursory copulation had effected some quite disproportionate release of tension in the young man; had produced, indeed, something very close to a change of personality. Even Holme’s body seemed to have taken on, for the time, a new ease and a new poise. This was the Sebastian Holme, Cheel had to suppose, who had to so agreeable an end locked up Professor Ushirombo in a privy.

‘And it would be telling,’ Holme went on, ‘to no purpose. Not your line, Cheel. All you need is a rubber woman, with a five-year guarantee against pinching. They can be had in Port Said. I’ll get you a whopper one day.’ He clattered a couple of plates down on the table. ‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘Eat up, and then explain yourself.’

Cheel had no ability to eat up. His rage was such that his lower jaw appeared to be conducting a private epileptic fit of its own. What was unbearable was that Holme didn’t appear to feel that he had been insulting; he had the air of simply having made genial reference to established fact. But, once more, Cheel presently achieved control. He even got down some of the scrambled eggs and took a big bite at a roll. His jaw proved to come more or less all right when thus given plenty to do. And meanwhile he considered in silence just how this young man was to be told where he got off. The expression was a vulgar one, such as would not normally have been admitted by Cheel’s fastidious linguistic sense. But it was quite inadequate to the strength of his feelings now.