Money from Holme (19 page)

English painters with the Christian name of Sebastian and a history of domicile in Africa couldn’t be very thick on the ground. Any informed person hearing of such a painter would say ‘That must be Sebastian Holme’ – and then, presumably, add ‘But how odd, since Holme’s dead’. This was alarming in itself. But the real mischief, of course, was the fact of Debby’s acquaintance with Wuggles. It had the appearance of a fairly close acquaintance. At least Wuggles and Duffy were cronies, and Debby (when not escaping to visit her old governess) was more or less constrained to tag on. Moreover Wuggles himself was already in some way a danger-point. Cheel was convinced of this.

But there was one substantial saving fact. Debby’s relationship with Holme was of the most casual order, so far. Moreover it was a disreputably clandestine one. Debby might be excited about her newly acquired artistic bedfellow. But she would hardly be likely to go running off to tell either her husband or her husband’s familiar friend about him. At least Cheel supposed not.

Yet, it was true that, with thoroughly depraved people, you never knew. Shocking as it seemed, Cheel had heard of married couples who communicated to each other and to their friends whatever promiscuous encounters came their way. He couldn’t be sure that Duffy, Debby and Wuggles didn’t belong to a coterie in which such horrors obtained. If this were so, prospects were very bleak indeed. Wutherspoon at least, with his acrid tags from the poets, seemed not altogether a fool. If Debby chattered about her new conquest in his hearing there was no assurance that he wouldn’t put two and two together.

But there was one effective hope. The affair might be so ephemeral that nobody would ever think to mention it again to anybody. Cheel felt that he must sound out this possibility with Holme at once.

‘Well,’ he said, with a forlorn attempt at an indifferent manner, ‘I don’t suppose you intend to see more of her.’

‘That would hardly be possible, old boy.’

‘Keep your indecent quips for somebody else!’ Cheel’s sense of moral decorum was really outraged. ‘You don’t, I take it, propose another meeting with the woman?’

‘Don’t I? Let me see. I wouldn’t say, mind you, that custom would be incapable of staling her infinite variety. Debby’s not exactly a Cleopatra. But, well–’ Holme was silent for a moment. He had the air of a man doing sums. ‘I’d say there will be six or seven more nights to her, at a guess.’

Although obscurely aware that in this particular speech he was being merely baited, Cheel found it too much for him.

‘Abomination!’ he cried in a loud voice, and left the room.

A third day dawned – one destined to be quite as crowded as either of those during which the fortunes of Mervyn Cheel have been exhibited so far. But Cheel himself, knowing nothing of this, lay in bed rather late. The woman who came in to do the cleaning in the morning had now been trained to bring him a little pot of China tea. This was an agreeable start to the day. So was the circumstance that – the lady being plump, good-natured, and not really very far past fifty – a little horse-play could be added to the proceedings from time to time.

But this morning Cheel was in a meditative mood. He was disposed, in fact, to sum up the position to date. Taken all in all, it was satisfactory. Certainly, fortune had taken none of the dire turns that had appeared to threaten from time to time. Sebastian Holme had become, once more, at least moderately well-behaved. He had another working fit on him, and in a day or two there would be a further picture to take to the Da Vinci Gallery. Braunkopf had already disposed of three canvases. ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ was the only one at present remaining with him; it was a particularly fine Holme, and he was determined to get a particularly high price for it.

All this was excellent. And none of the people whom it was prudent to keep a wary look-out for had shown any sign of sinister behaviour. If Holme was persisting in his improper relations with Debby the fact was one which Cheel, of course, must deplore. But there had been no ill consequence so far. Debby must be keeping her mouth shut about the glamorous painter, Sebastian from Africa. She’d be a fool if she didn’t. Then there was the unspeakable Rumbelow. He, in a sense, was potentially a double threat. On the occasion of his outrageous visit to Cheel’s former quarters he had appeared to be on the verge of recalling Holme’s identity. And his behaviour at Burlington House – when he had responded with such insane violence to a sophisticated and exquisitely witty joke – had suggested that he might launch himself in implacable vendetta against his adversary. But nothing had happened. Cheel, naturally was keeping his own present whereabouts dark. And perhaps Rumbelow had left town. He possessed – Cheel had discovered – a hovel and a barn-like studio in some God-forsaken corner of Kent. Presumably he manufactured his full-size absurdities there.

This left only Wutherspoon as a focus of real anxiety. The more Cheel looked back on the whole course of events since his first astounded discovery of the living Sebastian Holme, the more (curiously enough) did he sense Wutherspoon’s odd explosion at the dinner-table as containing some hidden threat to his whole grand design. Yet this persuasion was almost irrational, and there hadn’t been the flicker of an occasion upon which it had in any degree been substantiated.

There was every reason, in fact, for a modest confidence that fortune was behaving as it should, and smiling upon his deserts. Holme, it was true, had been adamant about his £500. But even that sum was already insignificant compared with what had come in. If nothing came unstuck within, say, the next three months Cheel would be in possession of what could only be called a competence. He was already making discreet inquiries from the agents of Swiss banks into the technique of opening a numbered account. He had filled a whole drawer with the proposals of estate-agents anxious to market desirable villas on the Spanish or North African coasts.

It was comfortably enough, then, that Cheel got out of bed eventually and turned on a bath. As he waited for it to fill, his eye fell on an evening paper which he had bought, but scarcely looked at, the night before. There was a minor headline that seemed of interest:

TERRORISTS SCATTERED

WAMBA GOVERNMENT’S SUCCESS

The paragraph following this was very short. JUMBO, it appeared, directed by the atrocious ‘Emperor’ Mkaka, had again been rearing its ugly head in the paradise of democratic Wamba. But the MADS had the situation well in hand; Professor Ushirombo had held a press conference; it was even believed in informed circles in Wamba-Wamba that Mkaka had been executed by his enraged and disappointed followers; there was likely to be a Royal Visit to Wamba in the spring, when the new Palace of Industry – symbol of the country’s now advanced and awakened state – was due to be opened.

Cheel read all this complacently and with a legitimate proprietary interest. He had settled down to a late and substantial breakfast when the telephone-bell rang.

‘Here Braunkopf, here Braunkopf – yes?’

Cheel heard this opening with satisfaction. It seemed likely that the owner of the Da Vinci Gallery was about to report that a fat cheque for ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ was in the bag.

‘Here Cheel,’ he replied humorously. ‘How are you, my dear fellow?’

‘You Cheel come here damn-quick.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Cheel was much offended by the words.

‘
Und schnell… Verstanden? Unverzuglich! Schreckliche Umstände–’

‘Would you mind–’

‘
Sofort – verstehen Sie? Dieses eine Wort sage ich dir noch. Beeilen Sie sich!
’

There was a click and the telephone went dead. Cheel was perturbed. That Braunkopf possessed anything that could be called a native language at all was something that had never entered his head. This tumble of expressive if indifferent German seemed to suggest a sinister degree of psychical trauma. In fact, it sounded very much as if something
had
come unstuck. And Cheel had long ago resolved what he would do when
that
happened. He would collect his current resources, cut his losses, and take the first available flight abroad. And so strong was his instinct that the moment for this had come now that he actually went back to his bedroom to pack a bag. Then he hesitated. Ever since the eleventh century (he recalled) Cheels had been celebrated for the obstinate valour with which they contested the field. Besides, there was still a
very
large sum of money to be made.

And Braunkopf, after all, was an absurd person. It was very conceivable that he was simply putting on a turn over some entirely trivial matter. Even if he had got wind of the truth – to wit, that Sebastian Holme was not dead but alive – he was now so far involved in prevarication about his wares that he was hardly in a position to turn nasty. In selling three Holmes he had three times explained the preservation of a number of the Wamba pictures by repeating Cheel’s story to the effect that they had been purchased by a certain ill-fated Mr Kabongo, later liquidated by the Wamba State Ballet. Moreover he had never again asked Cheel for the fictitious receipt which Cheel had so rashly averred to be mysteriously in his possession. This had been just as well, since Holme, when tackled, had bluntly refused to fudge up anything of the sort. It was another point adding to what might be called Braunkopf’s complicity. There, indeed, lay the beauty of the whole thing. Braunkopf, as much as Holme himself, was now a helpless accomplice. There could be no real danger in going to see what he was fussing about.

Thus did Cheel, whether through courage or calculation, defy that inner prompting which urged him to immediate flight. He dressed with unusual care and then brought out his magnificent hired car. He still got a great kick out of the Rolls. He felt pretty sure that Braunkopf, despite his unmannerly telephone call, would again be out on the pavement when it was reported as drawing up.

As he slipped into gear he became aware (as once on a previous occasion) of a newspaper poster balanced against a lamp-post. It said:

WAMBA CRISIS

– and then, in smaller type that he didn’t quite manage to read, it said something ending either in FLEES or in PEACE. Or was it TREES? Perhaps Ushirombo had established peace, or perhaps JUMBO was in flight – or for that matter had bolted upwards into the branches like the near-monkeys they no doubt were. Cheel chuckled and drove on. He was one not for long daunted, and confidence was returning to him.

And, sure enough, Braunkopf was standing outside the Da Vinci Gallery as he drew up and got out But so, he then immediately saw, was another man – whom he was unable to persuade himself he liked the look of. There was something unpleasantly stony about the set of his features. Cheel, curiously enough, had never to his knowledge met a plain-clothes detective, and he wondered whether this was what a member of that disagreeable branch of the police looked like. It was perhaps with some idea of flight even at this eleventh hour that he now looked swiftly about him. The result of this survey was only an awareness of two further posters. The first merely read:

‘PROFESSOR’

USHIROMBO

SACKED

but the second was more informative:

WAMBA

LIBERATED

DR MKAKA FORMS

GOVERNMENT

‘But they can’t!’ Cheel exclaimed wildly, and as if the matter were of the utmost moment to him. ‘They can’t have JUMBO, you know. They’re mere–’

‘Why can’t they?’ The stony-faced stranger asked this. ‘It’s a most respectable party. The Joint United Methodist and Baptist Organization, it seems. And the whole country had united against the butcher Ushirombo. Good luck to them.’

‘But these are not our concernments, no? We have other fish to fly, yes?’ Braunkopf was looking balefully at Cheel as he asked these merely rhetorical questions. Then he waved a commanding hand towards the door of the Da Vinci. ‘Vot privileges!’ he said with rude irony as Cheel entered. ‘Oh, vot happiness!’

Cheel had been much too agitated to notice, in the window of the Da Vinci, whatever might there be exhibited as the authentic Braunkopf sculpture of the week. But he was at once aware of the inside of the place as having undergone another of its transformations. The
trecento
and
quattrocento
had vanished. The walls had been hung with a faintly damasked paper of pale lavender. The collection on view appeared to be made up entirely of contemporary English watercolours. And most of these were evidently by a single hand.

Cheel took a look at the hand. It was a hand meticulous in a manner that would appear, superficially, to run counter to the medium. The effects achieved, nevertheless, were very pleasing. This, however, was not what struck Cheel. What struck him was that he could
read
the hand. His professional expertness enabled him to do this at once. And it was the hand – exercising itself, indeed, in a fashion totally new – of Albert Rumbelow.

For a moment Cheel had no other thought than that he had been led into a ghastly trap. He looked desperately around him, in the immediate expectation that Rumbelow was about to leap from behind a settee, brandishing a cane or even a rapier. So strong was this persuasion, that he even turned and began a bolt to the door. But he found that – whether by accident or design – the stony-faced man was in his way. So he thought better of it, and walked on. Flight would now be no good, in any case. They would all be after him in a flash.

Moreover the thing might merely be a coincidence. If Rumbelow had watercolours to exhibit, the Da Vinci was quite a reasonable place in which to display them. Even so, it was unfortunate. Artists have a knack of haunting their own shows. (It was Sebastian Holme’s having done so that had drawn Cheel through the first shallows towards those deep waters which – he feared – now threatened to engulf him.) So Rumbelow – even without being apprised of Cheel’s visit – might turn up at any minute. It was with relief that Cheel reached the comparative security of Braunkopf’s inner sanctum.