Money from Holme (6 page)

‘My good woman, masterpieces have changed hands before now for no more than the price of–’ Cheel was about to add ‘a square meal’ but changed this, on second thoughts, to ‘a packet of cigarettes.’ ‘And such a deal,’ he went on, ‘would be perfectly valid, if freely entered into. Even if some of your husband’s paintings turned up after having simply disappeared, you wouldn’t find it easy to break in on any subsequent transaction and establish a claim to them. Ask your lawyer – your attorney, I should say.’

‘I don’t believe it. It wouldn’t be just.’

‘Well, the situation simply isn’t going to arise, so we shall never know, If you had any sense, you’d be content with what you’ve got. If you own all that stuff over the road – and I suppose you do – then you’re damned lucky. Your husband might have made a will, leaving it all elsewhere. He might have divorced you, which would have been pretty rational.’ Cheel thought of adding: ‘Or he might have drowned you in your bath, which would have been more rational still.’ Fear of a further vulgar physical assault, however, restrained him. ‘Perhaps just a morsel of Stilton,’ he said instead. ‘And a drop of brandy with the coffee.’

The meal wore pleasantly to its close. What Cheel asked for, that is to say, was set before him. He ceased much to bother his head about Mrs Holme. Temporarily, at least – and he hoped for good – her bolt was shot. It had been a bolt sufficiently blindly directed in the first place, and she was obviously a person of low intelligence. It was true that there remained a certain element of the enigmatic about her. The terms in which she addressed him had been almost uniformly offensive – and this had, of course, displeased one of Cheel’s breeding and sensibilities very much. On the other hand, she had come clean with this entirely satisfactory repast. No doubt there had been some notion of simple bribery in her head. Having formed – more or less at the drop of a handkerchief – the fantastic idea that he was in league with Braunkopf, she had capped it by supposing that he could be detached from a lucrative swindle by a mingling of opprobrious speech with cakes and ale. This mis-estimate of his quality, if comical, was annoying. Nevertheless Cheel now found himself in a mood of considerable post-prandial contentment. He had lunched without spending a penny after all. And meanwhile – what was far more important – his vision had come to him. He thought of the poet Keats, on tiptoe to explore the vastness of his first long poem. He thought of Mrs Holme’s compatriot Henry James at the moment of its dawning on him that
The Golden Bowl
, say, was to be a work of some complexity. Yes, he felt rather like that.

So now he must get away and think. He watched with satisfaction as Hedda Holme paid quite a large bill. She wasn’t, in a sense, getting any change out of it, either. She was gathering up her bag and those damned gloves. Cheel glanced round the little restaurant. It was better appointed than one would expect, simply glancing in from the bar which had represented his first interest in the place. You had to go through the bar to reach the exit – and then, of course, immediately opposite, was the Da Vinci Gallery. He was still interested in the bar. If he were to succeed in contacting Sebastian Holme again (and this was now imperative) he would have to put into execution the plan he had already formed. He would have to put in time in a chair by a window, with his eye on the entrance to Braunkopf’s establishment.

Mervyn Cheel had just reminded himself of this when he suddenly became aware that events had, so to speak, got ahead of him. In the bar, so far as he could command it from his present position, there was no longer any sort of lunch-hour crush. In fact there were only three customers to be seen. Two of them, confabulating together while perched on stools and drinking gin-and-tonics, might be motor-salesmen, or persons of that rank of life. This, indeed, was only a conjecture. But the identity of the third man, who was sitting hard by the door, admitted no doubt whatever. He was – once more, beard and all – the late Sebastian Holme.

Strictly speaking, there ought not to have been anything unexpected in this turn of events. It was as natural (or unnatural) that the late Holme should hover in the vicinity of his pictures as that the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father should perambulate the battlements of Elsinore. And as the Da Vinci must be a place of hazard to one in Holme’s peculiar position it was equally natural that, before essaying a further foray there, he should pause to fortify himself in this conveniently located hostelry.

Cheel was taken unawares, all the same. It is therefore to his credit that he saw at once the need for decisive action. Whether Sebastian Holme had spotted his wife in the Da Vinci earlier that morning was something Cheel couldn’t be sure of. It seemed probable that he had, since he must certainly have reckoned on her being present there. Presuming that he was anxious to continue unrecognised, as surely he must, then his turning up at all on such an occasion seemed to argue a rashness in temperament that Cheel felt it might be useful to register. However all this might be, it did seem certain that Hedda Holme hadn’t, in her turn, spotted her husband. Perhaps her glance hadn’t fallen upon him at all. Perhaps it had, and she had taken him for her brother-in-law Gregory Holme, whom for some reason she had chosen to ignore. Perhaps the bearded figure had conveyed nothing at all to her. It would be odd, of course, if she had failed to penetrate a disguise which had been instantly patent to Cheel. But then she was a singularly stupid woman – whereas he, Cheel, was a quite exceptionally intelligent man.

It was intelligence that was needed now. If Mrs Holme had stared unregardingly at Mr Holme once, this didn’t at all mean that she would do so a second time. And there was no question of her not even noticing the man. In order to reach the street she would have to pass within a couple of feet of him. And Cheel, although still so much in the dark as to the inwardness of the situation he had stumbled upon, was very sure that his scope for profitable manoeuvre in the face of it would be sadly straitened should the painter forthwith be restored – whether willingly or unwillingly – to the embrace of his not particularly sorrowful widow. He had to prevent the risk of an encounter. And he had seconds in which to manage it.

For Hedda Holme was on her feet. As he scrambled out of his own chair (for his problem had made him a little tardy in the exercise of his accustomed good manners), she turned away from him and began to thread her way among the tables towards the bar. She couldn’t herself, at the moment, either see Sebastian Holme or be seen by him. But the breathing-space thus afforded was only fractional – and Cheel was doing no better than follow helplessly in Hedda’s wake. Then something came to his aid. It was no more than a start of memory: one occasioned by their relative postures as they moved.
There it was
: swaying, tightly skirted, delightfully challenging in its own right. Cheel put out his hand and pinched.

This time, he pinched so hard that Hedda gave a loud yell. It was a sound that came like music to his ear, and he managed to stand his ground with a very tolerable stoicism as she whirled round on him. But the strength of her punch to his jaw surprised him, so that he quite genuinely staggered and toppled, and had little difficulty in making a thoroughly verisimilar business of upsetting a whole laden table as he fell.

Not unnaturally, pandemonium broke loose. The little disturbance in the Da Vinci had been no more than a mere murmuring in the comparison. The majority of the remaining lunchers rose hastily, knocking over their chairs, spilling their coffee, and retreating with precipitation to the sides of the room. Hedda, unfortunately, was not retreating; with a resourcefulness he could only admire, she had equipped herself with an ugly looking weapon probably designed for the dissection of cold ham and was again advancing upon him rapidly. Hell, he reflected us he dodged, hath no fury like a woman pinched quite as hard as that. Hedda was also shouting. She was accusing him (he gathered as he dodged round a potted palm) not of sadism or indecency but of base ingratitude. It was true that she did have some small reason to be surprised. And so would anyone (he had grasped this crucial fact) who heard her plaint. What had just happened, although in certain situations (in a tube train, for instance, or even in a crowded picture gallery) it entertainingly does happen, precisely does
not
happen as a gentleman follows a lady with whom he has been quietly lunching in a respectable restaurant. Poor Hedda was plainly off her rocker.

The shindy must, of course, abundantly have reached the little bar between the restaurant and the street. Both Sebastian Holme and the motor-salesmen would have been moved to take a peep in at it – and by this time Holme, having spotted Hedda, would certainly have made himself scarce. The crisis was over. Or it would be over as soon as he had successfully terminated the little fracas he was now involved with. For one of a sedentary habit Cheel was fortunately possessed of a very creditable degree of mobility. Evasive action afforded him no difficulty. At this moment, for instance, a couple of agile side-steps sufficed to interpose between Hedda and himself the person of an elderly and apparently infirm woman who could only hobble with the aid of a stick.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Cheel murmured as he dodged her. ‘My wife is liable to these delusional states. But nobody is in any danger except myself.’ He gave the infirm woman a dexterous shove further into Hedda’s path, and was thereby enabled to gain the more secure shelter of an able-bodied waiter. ‘Get it away from her,’ he said.

The waiter – perhaps surprisingly – did just as he was told; he stepped up to the panting Hedda and took the carving-knife from her hand. He was joined by a woman who looked as if she might preside over a cloak-room, and who appeared to have a professional line in soothing noises for occasions like this. Near the door, another waiter was restraining a junior colleague, who had rashly thought to rush outside and shout for the police. Several guests were calling frigidly for their bills. And a flabby man, who was certainly the manager, was approaching Cheel with a forbidding but at the same time wary expression. Cheel took the initiative at once.

‘Sorry about this,’ he said, politely but with a touch of
hauteur
. ‘Fact is, it’s weeks since my wife had one of these turns, and I thought lunch out might buck her up. But it hasn’t answered, as you see. Have them call a cab, please. My car’s not due back for half an hour. Send me a bill, of course, for any damage. Lord Basset. Two esses, one tee. Send it to me at the House of Lords.’

The manager gave a nod to the waiter near the door, and Cheel was heartened to hear a taxi being whistled up. At the same time he became aware that one of the guests – clearly a motor-salesman superior in the hierarchy to the two who had been drinking at the bar – had thrust himself forward in grossly vulgar curiosity. Cheel turned to him.

‘See you’re a physician,’ he murmured. ‘Professional interest, eh? Distressing thing. Sporadic delusions, you know.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Fantasies of petty sexual assault, and so on. Her time of life, you know.’ He turned to Hedda – who, he was delighted to see, was now reduced to weeping quietly. ‘That’s right, Ianthe?’ he said more loudly. ‘Your time of life, eh? Cheer up, old girl. No harm done.’

He moved confidently towards the door. The first waiter and the cloak-room woman continued to flank Hedda, urging and assisting her forward. The manager, hovering in front, spoke for the first time.

‘We are most extremely sorry,’ he said in a loud voice, and plainly for the benefit of any of his patrons who cared to listen. ‘Extremely sorry, my lord, that her ladyship has been taken ill.’ He made Cheel a low bow, and at the same time gave him a glance of extreme malevolence. It was obvious that he had no more belief in this disastrous guest as Lord Basset (with however many tees and esses) than he had in him as the Grand Cham of Tartary. ‘Get out,’ he hissed in Cheel’s ear. ‘Try that once again and I’ll have you put where you belong. Inside, see?’ He made another low bow.
‘Good
afternoon, my lady. A happier occasion, I hope. Old and valued clients. Most distressed.’ He waved imperiously to a waiter to open the door.

They were on the pavement. Cheel’s satisfaction in his conduct of the episode was only slightly marred by the realization that (as so frequently happened) his moral character had been shockingly aspersed. It was the manager’s notion that the affair had been no more than a low put-up job, contrived between this revolting woman and himself in the interest of getting away with a free meal. Cheel glanced with distaste at Hedda – and it struck him that there was no time to lose. At any moment she might recover her accustomed nervous tone and take another swipe at him. Hastily he assisted in shoving her through the open door of the taxi – and then closed it on her with a bang.

‘Where to, sir?’ The driver, seeing that there was to be only one passenger, was leaning inquiringly out of his little glass compartment.

‘Holloway Gaol,’ Cheel hissed in his ear. ‘Main entrance.’ He pressed a pound note into the man’s hand and stood back. Watching the taxi drive off, he handed the waiter and the cloakroom woman a half-crown apiece. His lunch had cost him something, after all. He was well satisfied, all the same. He glanced at his watch, and was surprised at the time. But then – as was remarked by a Shakespearean character whom he greatly admired – pleasure and action make the hours seem short.

The afternoon was fine, and he decided to take a turn in the mild London sunshine. His living quarters, as it happened, were not at the present time commodious, and spaciousness was in consequence a sensation that he had to seek
en plein air
. On this occasion he decided for St James’s Park. It had frequently – he remembered – proved particularly propitious for the smooth functioning of his intellectual faculties. He was inclined, indeed, to indulge the fancy that, at either end, its vistas closed at precisely the distance most congenial to what might be called the range of his own mind. Moreover the route thither was not without sundry associative and nostalgic charms. He would pass a club from which, through a misunderstanding, he had been obliged to resign some years before, but for which he preserved nevertheless (such was the refinement of his spirit) a benign and wholly unresentful regard. He would pass another club which – again because of a stupid misunderstanding – had a couple of years later simply refused to let him in. The incident saved him a certain amount of money that he hadn’t possessed. Finally he would cross the Mall. There, of course, Royalty might drive by – and Royalty so utterly royal that it would be proper to halt and turn respectfully roadwards as one swept off one’s hat. Mervyn Cheel, who was eminently well-affected to the Crown, could rely upon an encounter like this to make his day.