Money from Holme (2 page)

Anyway, it had all been unimportant, and there had been no occasion for a distinguished critic to take any cognizance of it. But now there was
this
. Mervyn Cheel continued to edge around through
this
with a mounting sense of annoyance and even indignation. He had to acknowledge a lurking and vexatious feeling of being a little out of it. Lord Crawford appeared to have forgotten him. He received rather a bleak nod from Sir Herbert Read. Kokoschka patted him in a kindly way on the arm as he went by, but plainly because he had mistaken him for some Central European émigré. When he made too sharp a turn and awkwardly jabbed in the stomach the Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Director, although taking this winding in good part, seemed indisposed to make it a basis of conversation.

Being thus put a shade out of countenance, Cheel decided to retreat from the ephemeral spectacle of mere humanity to the sempiternal world of art – or at least to that world to the extent that it was embodied in the work of Sebastian Holme. He began therefore to fight his way towards the pictures. The process wasn’t without beguilement in itself. Since the mere humanity assembled in the Da Vinci Gallery was preponderantly female, and since the jam had now reached something like rush-hour density on the Underground, the obstacles to be squeezed through in the quest of this aesthetic refreshment were constituted largely by
les tétons et les fesses
. A little ingenuity was thus enough to lend a curious interest to his progress. Only once, however, did he positively venture to
pinch
. This was when he felicitously found himself edging between a plump girl and the
Direttore
of the
Pinacoteca di Brera
in Milan. If the girl squeaked (he thought happily as his finger and thumb closed) the
Direttore
, being Italian, would get the blame.

Flushed from this exploit, Cheel found himself standing in front of one of the largest of Holme’s canvases. So far as quality went, he knew already, of course, approximately what he was going to see. All these grandees weren’t here for nothing, and Holme’s fame must already have gone abroad in a manner that he himself had somehow missed out on. All the same, he was unprepared for what hit him now.

He was looking at what might be called, perhaps, a jungle scene. It was full of horrible greens which had been made, somehow, to suggest intolerable heat. There were blue shadows, not receding harmlessly from the picture plane but menacingly reaching out at you. And in two tremendous places Holme had triumphantly modelled deep into mysteriously luminous tunnels through the fiercely proliferating vegetation which was his subject. There wasn’t much to be said in front of the thing except that England had decidedly never had an exotic painter of this stature before.

Mervyn Cheel was almost abashed. If he hadn’t taken a firm grip of himself his spirit might simply have been rebuked before the painting’s sheer power. And yet it wasn’t in the least a bravura piece. The underlying geometry was faultless, and there wasn’t a passage that hadn’t been calculated in millimetres. That was no doubt why Sir William Coldstream (whom Cheel now perceived to be his left-hand neighbour) was studying the picture with concentrated attention.

The sense of irritation which had been mounting steadily in Cheel was now reinforced by a strong feeling of injustice and deprivation. Largely endowed with intellect and sensibility though he was, his nature was perhaps a shade lacking in that final generosity which can only rejoice in the good fortune of others. Cheel too was an artist – even if an artist on the critical and analytical side. Who was Sebastian Holme (whose recollected features now rose vividly before him) that all this success should have come to
him
? The man had been (he now clearly remembered this too) an ignorant and undisciplined dauber – neither more nor less. And now
this
had happened. Holme was the sensation of the year; Cheel had to cadge meals and drinks.

He was not left long with this wholly sombre view of the matter. This was a
memorial
exhibition. Sebastian Holme was
dead
. Whoever was in the gravy as a result of this affair, it wasn’t that young oaf (he would still be quite a
young
oaf) Holme. He had once (Cheel now remembered) taken what you might call a smack at Holme. Indulging himself in a reminiscent grin at this, Cheel, for some reason, made a half turn towards his right. He thus became aware that he had a right-hand neighbour (rather a close neighbour) too. He took a glance at this neighbour, and the grin froze on his face.

There couldn’t be a doubt of it. The man next to him was Sebastian Holme.

As was not unnatural in such an exigency, Mervyn Cheel fell for some seconds into considerable confusion of mind. It is quite usual (he found himself reassuring himself) for artists to attend their own private views. Yes (he found himself replying), but dressed in their best clothes, standing before their best picture, and assuming whatever pitiful simulacrum of the manners of a gentleman they think may soften up the boobs and suckers who are being introduced to them. And
alive
. Not
dead
.

At this point a cold shiver ran down Cheel’s spine. He turned to his left, with the blind intention of making some desperate appeal to Sir William Coldstream. But Sir William had disappeared. So – he saw, glancing wildly round – had Lord Crawford, Sir Herbert Read, and the Directors of the Metropolitan and the Brera. Perhaps he had imagined all these distinguished persons. Perhaps he had imagined – He turned cautiously to his right again. Sebastian Holme was still there.

With a staggering gait, and all oblivious of the pleasures of letting a hand or thigh brush those so-enticingly-circumjacent female posteriors, Cheel made his way to one of the Da Vinci’s over-stuffed and moth-eaten plush settees, sank down on it, and endeavoured to collect his thoughts. He positively could not believe, he found, that he was in the grip of simple hallucination. The idea was too utterly repugnant to his just intellectual pride. Only stupid and besotted people
see
things
in that vulgar sense. He remembered having read a book called
Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death
, and in the light of this recollection he took a cautious glance across the room. But the figure before the jungle painting failed at all convincingly to suggest a Veridical Phantasm of the Dead. It suggested nothing at all except plain Sebastian Holme.

There remained only one explanation on this side of sanity: the very obvious one of mistaken identity. It was something that was constantly happening, after all. Why, only a few minutes ago the corpulent man had been taking him for somebody with whom he had once painted jolly old St Tropez red. So here was somebody
like
the late Sebastian Holme. The thing was as simple as that.

Unfortunately – and this seemed the really terrifying fact – the figure was
not
all that like Sebastian Holme. It couldn’t be, since it was heavily bearded, whereas he had never known Holme other than clean-shaven – or at least in some slovenly approximation to that state. What had happened was that, quite contrary to at least superficial appearance, he had received a convinced
impression
that this was Holme. And surely this wasn’t how simple mistakings of identity worked.

But there was something more. For this something more Cheel found that his mind had to grope. His first conviction had been powerfully confirmed, but he had already forgotten how. He was in contact – his high intelligence immediately helped him to realize – with some element within himself of psychological
trauma
. Something else had come under his observation, and it was something the recollection of which was painful to him.

That!
Suddenly be had remembered. But, even as he did so, he doubted as well. There was therefore nothing for it: a confirmatory examination must be made. Almost fearfully, he took a further glance around the room. His first observation was disturbing in itself. It was of the young woman at whose deliciously plump
derrière
he had so lately taken that carefree pinch. The young woman was looking angrily about her. It appeared likely that the Director of the Brera had got away unaspersed.

The bearded man had moved on. He was now standing before – and seemed to be rather furtively, or at least uneasily, examining –
a portrait of a bearded man!
Cheel, although he felt his head fairly swimming before this further
bizarrerie
, managed to get to his feet and wriggle once more through the crush. What he believed he had seen he must see again. Indeed, he must
touch
it. The concurrent testimony of two senses was something which it would surely be irrational not to accept.

The bearded man had again moved on. The picture he was now examining appeared to be of some sort of barbaric dance performed by luridly painted savages. It was another remarkable performance – so remarkable that Cheel, despite his extraordinary situation, found himself in some genuinely aesthetic engagement with it as he advanced. It wasn’t that this instantancity of whirling bodies and flailing limbs had been ingeniously frozen into a complex decorative arabesque, as in some amusing hunt or battle, say, by Uccello. It was rather that from this world of gesture, an irrefrangible
stasis
or solemn timelessness had been educed. Hulking Tom in the Tropics, Cheel thought – recalling, with his customary erudition, just what, in Italian,
Masaccio
means.

This release into professional musing lasted only for seconds. Then he was up against it – and up against the bearded man. The bearded man held a catalogue in his left hand. He wasn’t consulting it (why should he, since he was the painter?), but was holding it more or less in the position of a fig-leaf. His index finger, middle finger, and thumb were employed on the job, the catalogue being gripped between the first and second of these, and the third being inserted among the pages. Cheel took one glance at the area of the bearded man’s hand thus exposed (it lay, of course, at the triangular base of the index finger and thumb), and what he had already remembered returned to him in fresh, and painful, detail.

He remembered the party – although he couldn’t, naturally enough, remember who had given it. He remembered the girl whom (under the clever cover of withdrawing to relieve himself) he had ambushed in the alcove at the top of the stairs. He remembered the manner – embarrassing yet at the same time stimulating – in which the little trollop had decided to struggle and scream. He remembered the firm line he had consequently adopted (the excitement of a bogus rape was, of course, what she had been after) – and then be remembered the impertinent intrusion of the young dauber, Sebastian Holme. Fortunately there had been a bottle to hand; fortunately (or unfortunately) the vigour with which he had himself grasped and swung this had resulted in his shivering it against a banister. What had been left in his grasp (like the
tronchon
in the grasp of a medieval knight who has broken his spear) remained a weapon formidable enough. He had brought it down on Holme’s left hand. At least he had managed that, before Holme had laid him out.

And there, before him, was the scar. He could almost see it, as he looked, dripping the blood it had once dripped. If he’d only got the
right
hand – he found himself reflecting – and if, at the same time, he’d got the tendon, he might effectively have cooked the goose of Sebastian Holme’s genius.

‘Excuse me – but I wonder whether I might glance at your catalogue?’

Cheel couldn’t have told whether it was in a sepulchral croak or in the casual but well-modulated accents of a cultivated Englishman that he uttered these words. But he made no mistake about the accompanying action. Without waiting for a by-your-leave, he reached out as he spoke and took the catalogue from the bearded man’s hand. And he did so with a slight clumsiness that allowed a finger to brush lightly over the vital spot. Its report was unequivocal. There could be no question of mere visual hallucination. The small, hard cicatrice was palpable to the touch.

Since he lacked the resolution to venture a straight glance at Sebastian Holme, Cheel was unable to tell whether the man had taken alarm. He himself continued for the moment simply to be dead scared – although indeed there may already have been dawning in the recesses of his capacious mind the staggering realization that he was on to something in a big way. He managed to contrive some sort of appearance of consulting the catalogue for information on the painting before him, and then to hand it back with a muttered word. After that he moved away – as expeditiously as the crowd of gazers and gapers would permit. It was the characteristic of Holme’s right fist, he seemed to remember, that it came rather rapidly from below, and that its impact on your jaw had the effect of lifting you some inches off your feet before dropping you with a brutal absoluteness on your back.

But he mustn’t now let Holme out of his sight. This fact, coming to him with all the mysteriousness of a categorical imperative, had the effect upon him of that first quiver of the curtain which speaks of the imminent unfolding of some vast and exciting drama. Very definitely, his mind was beginning to work.

He had retreated – but to a strategic position from which he could command (as he brought his analytical faculties to bear on the situation) the only public exit from the Da Vinci Gallery. He had so retreated when – with a dastardly lack of all advertisement – he was struck a violent blow on the face. The pain was considerable, and filled his eyes with tears. The bewilderment (since Holme must be a dozen paces away) was extreme. And then he heard a voice. It was a woman’s voice, and what it said was, ‘Poisonous little man!’ His eyes cleared; for a moment he saw the plump young woman before him; her gloves were clasped in her right hand; he realized that what he had been subjected to was their application to his person with much the force of a whip.