The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  Honeybath wondered whether Mr X might be suicidally inclined. He also wondered – and with rather more professional interest – whether he was of great age. Was he in his middle nineties, or only in his middle sixties? It seemed incredible that an expert in at least the tangible and visible surfaces of human life should be at sea about this. Honeybath had sometimes reflected that, if the worst came to the worst and commissions simply dried up altogether, he could make a very decent living as that sort of fairground character who guesses your age and returns your money plus a whiff of candy-floss if he gets it more than two years wrong. With Mr X he might be astray by more than twenty.

  This was beguiling in itself. It also almost persuaded him that, unlikely as it seemed, Arbuthnot’s biographical sketch of his relative had not been wholly a pack of lies. Dire experience of no common sort might produce just such an enigma. Mr X could have spent twenty years in a dungeon, dieted exclusively on potatoes, bread and lard – or an equal number of hours impaled on an anthill, or being otherwise disagreeably treated to a limit of human endurance. His pallor was extraordinary, was in itself a daunting challenge to the palette. He had brilliant dark-ringed eyes, a short sharp nose, a mean mouth, and a single lock of lank hair, still with trace of colour to it, depending over a domed forehead. Perhaps because he was of necessity precluded from all physical exercise, he was also a paunchy little man. And he sat with two fingers of his right hand thrust between the buttons of a crumpled waistcoat. There wasn’t the slightest difficulty in addressing him as Mon Empereur. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  Not that it was more than infrequently that Mr X demanded this. His sense of his exalted identity – or, for that matter, of any identity at all – was intermittent. Conceivably he was, although again intermittently, aware of this ultimate mystery about himself, and put in substantial spells brooding over it. At these times there was a questing look in his eyes, a yearning to plumb some abysm, to bridge some chasm, which it had come to Honeybath to know, almost at the first glance, as representing his own chance of glory. Get this on canvas successfully, and it would be with awe that future generations would murmur his name. Leonardo’s sphinx-like lady in the Louvre simply wouldn’t be in the competition.

  It was in this fond persuasion that Honeybath set to work.

  ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba,’ Mr X murmured. The thought appeared just to have struck him. ‘Or St Helena, for that matter, my dear Monsieur David.’ (Mr X frequently addressed Honeybath by this interesting name.) ‘It was a most damnable mistake ever to mount the deck of that confounded Bellerophon. The English sailors, by the way, called it the Billy Ruffian. Rather amusing that, eh?’ Mr X sometimes had a most charming smile.

  ‘I hope they made you comfortable?’ Quite early in the series of sittings, Honeybath had found himself chatting with Mr X easily enough. Once one has taken the plunge of humouring insanity it proves a surprisingly simple matter.

  ‘It was better than the Northumberland, which I made the final voyage on.’ Mr X was well clued up on his own phantasmal history; there was solid reading behind it. ‘But I didn’t at all take to that Captain Maitland. I addressed him as Captain Ruffian, as a matter of fact. He didn’t like it at all. A most undistinguished officer, I imagine, but prided himself on being quite the polished diplomat. Wilks, now, was all right. He knew that the beastly little island was at least my island. But they packed him off in no time, and introduced that intolerable Hudson Lowe.’

  Honeybath was about to say: ‘Who kept the job, didn’t he, till your death?’ But he refrained. When Mr X became agitated and incoherent Sister Agnes was apt to produce a hypodermic. Honeybath disliked that. Besides which, experiments on the mad are best left to the mad-doctors. They are barred to an amateur – or at least to an amateur with the instincts of a gentleman. Honeybath soothingly requested a slight turning of the head. A few minutes later he handed Mr X a pencil sketch. ‘I expect,’ he said, ‘you may like to see how we are getting on.’

  ‘Not up to your Distribution of the Eagles, Monsieur David.’ Mr X said this with imperial frankness. ‘Or to my favourite – the one in which I am pointing the way to Italy. However, it’s very well in its way. I am pleased to retain it for the archive.’ Mr X stuffed the drawing deftly beneath his behind. ‘With your permission, Monsieur,’ he added graciously.

  Honeybath silently bowed his gratification. He was quite getting into the spirit of the thing. And it was rather amusing to be taken for Jacques Louis David.

  He even came to accept with a good grace the curious routine of his day. All his meals were served to him in the solitude of his room, but Arbuthnot appeared from time to time and made conversation. Occasionally they went down in the lift together and into the open air. He saw little of the house on the way, and nothing of its other inhabitants. Perhaps, apart from the eminently respectable domestics, there weren’t any. Or perhaps all Mr X’s anxious and affectionate relations lived here, but were taking care to keep out of his way. It was written into the record, after all, that they were a pathologically secretive crowd. As for the breather en plein air, that took place in a walled garden, and so wasn’t informative. At times all this built up into a decidedly claustrophobic effect. If Honeybath hadn’t been absorbed in his portrait – so absorbed as really to be in an exceptional mental state – he wouldn’t have stood it as easily as he did.

  As it was, he became secretive in his own way. At times he had a strong impulse to furtive exploration. But the only territory he could explore was his own room. He poked about in drawers and climbed up to peer at the tops of cupboards. But all this yielded very little. If the room was normally in any sort of use, every sign of the fact had been effectively rubbed out before he was dumped in it.

  At length, however, he did come on something. Between the two windows, and against the wall, was a Hepplewhite tambour writing-table, with its drawers, big and little, as empty as if it were in a shop. But depressions in the carpet suggested that it had formerly stood a few feet farther out in the room, and Honeybath had the curiosity to restore it to this position. The result was to expose to view a single shallow drawer at the back. He opened this, and what he found was mildly perplexing. The drawer contained a couple of vulgarly erotic magazines, a map of Central London upon which somebody had here and there drawn small circles in red ink, a forbidding-looking textbook on what appeared to be obscure metallurgical processes, and a pair of remarkably high-grade binoculars.

  Honeybath had no impulse to edify himself with the reading-matter, whether heavy or light. He saw no interest in the map. But the binoculars were a tremendous find. This was because of the trains. If he wanted to know where he was – even remotely where he was – the trains passing to and fro just beyond the park seemed to be his only hope. The majority of them went flashing by, and about these nothing could be done. But just occasionally, as he had earlier remarked with interest, a train did stop, although very briefly, in full view. These binoculars could have the effect of bringing such a train within a few yards of him. He had only to be patient, and one of those informative yellow rectangles would yield its secret. He would know on just what main line – for a main line it certainly was – this nameless mansion lay.

  It is possible that Honeybath was a little taken aback by the excitement which his small discovery occasioned in him; by the thoroughly juvenile sense, as it seemed, of having gained a trick, possessed himself of a secret weapon. He found himself reflecting that he must be careful not to use the binoculars at a time when the young manservant might come into the room and discover him to be so employed. This was absurd – just as absurd as that he didn’t at times say things like ‘This afternoon I intend to go out and explore the countryside a little’. Why didn’t he, at least, test out his position by such means? The answer was, of course, that he was frightened. In part, he was frightened of something ruthless which he felt lurking pervasively in his mysterious environment. But he was now even more frightened, oddly enough, merely of
upsetting things. Because what was going forward on the canvas in his painting-room was more important than anything else whatever.

  He discovered that the possibility of being detected while peering through the binoculars simply didn’t arise. Strangely perhaps, he had failed to reflect that his bathroom window must command exactly the same view as his bedroom windows. The bathroom window was, quite absurdly, a frosted affair – as if modesty required that the naked human form should be screened from the regard even of the stars or the angels. This was perhaps why the simple fact of the matter hadn’t struck him at once. He had only to lock himself in, throw up the sash, and do as much spying as he pleased.

  He didn’t, so far as his immediate object went, have to do a great deal. Actually the first train to appear was so obliging as to draw to a halt with a couple of its carriages neatly centred in that convenient gap at the border of the park. On one of these carriages hung the yellow rectangle. And on the yellow rectangle, and to be read with no difficulty at all, was the single word Swansea.

  So that was it. Mr X’s residence – if it was indeed in any honest sense his – lay only a few hundred yards from the main line of what used to be called the Great Western Railway.

  Rightly or wrongly, this appeared to Honeybath to be a momentous discovery, the mere making of which reflected credit on his own enterprise and perspicacity. How many men would have thought to move a writing-table out from the wall, on the chance of discovering a neglected drawer and something significant hidden in it? It was positively what you might expect a professional detective to do!

  He worked particularly effectively at the sitting that afternoon. He made a small but significant discovery in the mastoid-temporal area of Mr X’s skull. He saw that the two fingers thrust into Mr X’s waistcoat (leaving six plus thumbs to be depicted gratis) were going to prove unexpectedly useful. On one occasion, when Mr X appeared to be emerging from his Napoleonic dream in some fresh direction, Honeybath rebuked Sister Agnes with authority when she seemed disposed to interfere. (But Mr X was frightened of Sister Agnes, and promptly shut up, all the same.) He gave Mr X two more sketches to play with, and when Mr X announced once more that the imperial archives would receive them, he repaid this courtesy by asking to be allowed to sign and date them on the spot. And this (before Mr X securely sat upon them) was done.

  At the end of this sitting Honeybath could hardly credit what he had put on his own canvas. It was exploratory quite beyond the normal twitch of his tether. His portrait of this strange old man, undertaken as it had been in circumstances of mere indignity, was going to put him among the swells. Not among the small swells of his own time and country. With them, after all, he was pretty well on equal terms already. But among the real swells. It was a breathtaking thought.

  He didn’t sleep well that night. An artist doesn’t, when verging on a manic condition. Even when he dozed, a brush was still in his hand, achieving incredible things. And the church clock – or was it stable clock? – was tiresome. He had never been able to understand what use to anybody was a contraption that went banging away like that all through the hours of darkness. The owls and bats, after all, didn’t presumably seek to be told the time. Perhaps the performance was for the benefit of poachers and burglars. It was nothing but a damned nuisance to honest men.

  He’d thought to relax by taking a bath not long after dinner, and in his bath he’d heard the thing strike nine. There was that flat effect on the last stroke. He heard it again in bed: at ten the penultimate stroke went wrong, and at eleven the antepenultimate. He told himself that this phenomenon reminded him of something, but he was quite unable to determine what it was. The point worried him unreasonably, and it was almost fretfully that he waited for midnight. Light, however, came to him before then. It came to him out of The Waste Land, the poem with which the obscurely apocalyptic voice of T S Eliot had so deliciously troubled Charles Honeybath’s generation when young. In The Waste Land one is told something about St Mary Woolnoth, which is in Lombard Street, London, among (it is to be supposed) the bankers. It is therefore known as one of Sir Christopher Wren’s City Churches, although it is in fact by Wren’s pupil, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is scarcely one of Hawksmoor’s successes, since it looks like a gaol upon the roof of which some inexplicable atomic catastrophe has landed an undistinguished classical temple. But it is not this that is commemorated in the celebrated poem. It is the fact that St Mary Woolnoth keeps the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. In an annotation the poet assures us that there can be no mistake, since the phenomenon is one which he has often noticed.

  Although in a drowsy and somewhat confused state, Honeybath didn’t fall for the error that he was actually in Eliot’s Unreal City, and flowing up the hill and down King William Street, now. He was deep in the country; there could be no doubt about that. It was simply that he was in contact with the effects of a similar mechanical deficiency to that commemorated in the poem. And not even precisely similar. Strictly read, The Waste Land asserted that only twice in the twenty-four hours – to wit when the striking of nine o’clock was in question – was the dead sound perceptible. ‘The final stroke of nine’ was quite unambiguous. Whereas here it was any ninth stroke that went wrong. There must be a missing tooth, or something of the kind, on some wheel or cog.

  Honeybath in his muzzy state was so proud of working out this nice discrimination that he failed for some moments to reflect on its irrelevance. But there was something, he presently saw, that was very relevant indeed. Not many clocks in the south of England could be relied upon to behave in this way eight times out of twenty-four.

  Set out from Paddington, plod along the line of the Great Western Railway, allow yourself (like Sir John Betjeman) to be sufficiently Summoned by Bells, and you would infallibly run to earth the residence of Mon Empereur, otherwise known as Mr X.

  6

  Several unremarkable days succeeded. Honeybath was now in a position to advance his painting in a number of regards without the presence of his sitter, and he achieved long hours of concentrated labour which once more left him without any very urgent impulse to quarrel with his situation. He had, in fact, fallen into a routine. The extent to which this was so became clear to him only when certain interruptions – not seemingly very significant interruptions – eventually came along.

  One morning Mr X was wheeled into the painting-room not by Sister Agnes but by Mr Peach. It was, it appeared, Sister Agnes’ day off, and Peach was standing in for her. Honeybath, of course, had never seen Peach outside his own studio, and he found himself not particularly pleased at seeing him again now. It wasn’t that he regarded him as excessively sinister. He regarded Sister Agnes, indeed, although he could hardly have said why, as a good deal the more sinister of the two. But he remembered Peach as an underbred and shifty little man who was entirely tedious. He disliked having to recall that he had even accepted banknotes planted before him by the fellow. He thought, no doubt unreasonably, that so affluent an outfit as he had become entangled with could readily have substituted for Sister Agnes another perhaps grim, but at least quiet and correct, trained nurse.

  Peach wasn’t quiet. He insisted on inspecting the portrait, and this Honeybath regarded as an impertinence. He ventured to make comments on it, which was less an impertinence than an outrage.

  ‘Very fine, Mr Honeybath – very fine, indeed, if the liberty to say so may be allowed me. Undoubted gusto, as I believe the critics say. And abundant chiaroscuro – almost lavish, in a manner of speaking. But perhaps the old gentleman’s complexion might be toned up a little? No more than a suggestion, Mr Honeybath. Just as it is, some might think it a shade on the unhealthy side. A liver condition, perhaps. Whereas he’s as hearty as can be, isn’t he?’ This last question was addressed not to Honeybath but to Mr X himself. It was as if Peach regarded it as a matter of good form to address only in the third person one who was unhappily of unsound mind. ‘He’s in as fine fettle as he has been for years, eh?’

 
; ‘Hold your tongue, my good man, and let Monsieur David get on with his work.’ This sharp retort by the victor of Marengo and Austerlitz was the first sign that today was not to be exactly like previous days. Sister Agnes, perhaps, had Mr X under her thumb in a way that Peach had not. Peach was uneasy with his charge. His enhanced vulgarity – he was back, you might say, to Lesson One – seemed an index of this.

  But Mr X himself was uneasy too. He kept shifting restlessly in his chair, so that Honeybath knew they were in for a difficult session. He wondered whether Sister Agnes’ absence had resulted in some tranquillizing pill or jab having got missed out. Of course, to have the opportunity of observing his subject in a changed mental state might well be interesting and valuable in itself. In psychological portraiture – and what other sort of portraiture was worth twopence in these days? – one had to work in depth. Ideally, layer upon layer, right down to the depths of the personality, ought all to be there. Sophisticated novels were like that in the present age. And Honeybath knew he had it in him to produce something quite as good as any sophisticated novel. It was going to be an edgy morning, all the same.

  And then the cars began to arrive.

  The painting-room faced north, as it ought to do. It had a single large window, from which there was quite a different view to that from Honeybath’s bedroom. It wasn’t at all an extensive or informative view, but Honeybath had got into the way of surveying it from time to time by way of relieving the strain of his work. There was simply a great gravel sweep, probably leading to the front door of the house, and beyond it one saw only the high wall of the garden in which he went for those tiresomely invigilated walks or toddles with Arbuthnot. There had never been the slightest sign of life or traffic on this sweep – but now first one car had arrived, and then another. Within half an hour there were almost a dozen cars parked side by side. They were rather grand cars, for the most part – quite as grand as the one in which Honeybath had himself been driven here. Executive-type cars, a car-salesman would have said.