Death of a Ghost
Page 25
Belle folded her hands over the little cretonne work-bag she carried, and for a moment she did not speak.
‘Her poor man,’ she said at last. ‘Poor Claire’s poor man! He’s just beginning to take a little interest in his work again. It’s actually a little better, I think; just a little, so that’s something for him. But oh, Albert, the wickedness – the dreadful wickedness and the waste!’
She turned away from the picture, but before they went out paused before another. The portrait of Lafcadio smiled down at them. ‘The Laughing Cavalier’s Big Brother’; again Campion was struck by the resemblance.
There was the same bravura, the same conscious magnificence, the same happy self-confidence.
A thought occurred to him, and he glanced down at Belle, to find her looking up at him.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she observed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m sure you don’t.’
‘I do.’ Belle was laughing. ‘You’re thinking of the seventh picture, the one the Easton Museum bought, aren’t you? None of the facts have been published and you’re wondering what I’m going to do.’
The young man looked startled. The thought had been in his mind.
Mrs Lafcadio opened her cretonne bag.
‘This is a secret,’ she said, and handed him a slip of paper. Campion glanced at it curiously.
It was a receipt for four thousand two hundred pounds, seventeen shillings and ninepence from a very famous artists’ charity. The date particularly interested him.
‘This is nearly two years old,’ he said, wonderingly. ‘Oh, Belle, you knew!’
Mrs Lafcadio hesitated.
‘I knew Johnnie hadn’t painted the crowd round the Cross,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see the picture until the party, as it happened, because I was in bed until the very morning, and then I was too busy to look at it closely. When I did see it properly it had already been sold, and everyone was chattering and praising it. I didn’t realize what had happened. It never occurred to me to doubt the Gallery.’
Mr Campion was still puzzled.
‘Whom did you doubt, then?’ he said, not unreasonably.
Mrs Lafcadio glanced up at the Sargent.
‘Johnnie,’ she said. ‘My bad old Johnnie. I thought it was a pupil’s effort. Johnnie would have laughed so – hoaxing them all like that – all the clever, pompous people.’
‘So you said nothing?’
‘No. I thought perhaps I wouldn’t. So I sent every penny I received to a charity, and I made a rule that in future I was to see the pictures before anyone else. Of course, the one this year was genuine, so I thought the last was one of Johnnie’s naughtinesses and I tried to forget it.’
‘How did you tell?’ enquired Campion curiously.
‘That the seventh picture was not genuine?’ Mrs Lafcadio’s brown eyes were bright like a bird’s.
‘Because of the child on the shoulder of the figure in the foreground. I never understood the technique of painting. I’m no expert. But Johnnie never painted a child on a grownup’s shoulder in his life. It was one of his private fetishes. He didn’t care even to see it. There’s a mention of it in one of his letters to Tanqueray, that dreadful book which everyone said was in such bad taste. He says somewhere: “Your disgusting habit of painting sentimental, elderly yokels supporting their bulbous and probably insanitary offspring on their shoulders repels me. Whenever I see a bloated child carried thus, its head exalted above its father’s I want to tear it down and dust that portion of its anatomy, which is always so adequately but unbeautifully covered in your pictures, with the sole of my boot”.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Campion. It seemed the only comment in the face of such irrefutable proof.
‘He wasn’t altogether a kindly person,’ Belle remarked.
‘Who? Tanqueray?’
‘No – noisy old Lafcadio,’ said the painter’s wife. ‘But he loved my little John. Poor little John.’
Campion had never heard her mention Linda’s father before, and now she did not dwell upon the subject.
‘Never tell about the seventh picture, will you?’ she said. ‘After all, what does it matter? Oh, dear life, what do all these pictures really matter?’
Mr Campion promised on his oath.
As they walked up the covered way to the house he looked down at her.
‘Well, is everything all right now?’ he asked.
She nodded and sighed.
‘Yes, my dear,’ she said. ‘Yes. And thank you. Come and see me sometimes. I shall be lonely without Linda.’
‘Linda?’
‘She and Matt were married at Southampton on Monday. I had a card yesterday,’ said Mrs Lafcadio placidly. ‘They found that separate cabins on the boat to Majorca would cost so much more than a special licence, and they’re set on painting down there, so they married. It seems very sensible.’
Mr Campion took his leave. Belle came to the door with him and stood on the steps, plump and smiling, her crisp bonnet flickering in the breeze.
When he turned at the corner to look back, she was still standing there, and she waved a little pocket handkerchief to him.
When he was out of sight she came in and closed the door.
She pulled the mat straight with the heel of her buckled shoe and trotted down the hall. At the kitchen door she paused and looked in.
‘Beatrice and Mr Potter are out tonight, so you and I will have something easy, Lisa,’ she said.
‘Sì, sì,’ said the old woman, without looking round from the stove. ‘Sì, sì.’
Belle closed the door softly, and went up to the drawing-room. The yellow evening sun was streaming in, mellowing the faded Persian rugs and caressing the upholstery of the Voltaire chair.
The old lady went over to the bureau and, taking a small key from a chain round her neck, unlocked a narrow drawer under the writing flap.
It slid open easily, and from its green-lined depths she lifted out a small unframed canvas. She seated herself and propped the little picture up on the desk.
It was a self-portrait of John Lafcadio, painted in the impressionist technique only appreciated in a much later day. It showed the same face which smiled so proudly from Sargent, but there was a great difference.
John Lafcadio’s famous beard was here only suggested, and the line of his chin, a little receding, was viciously drawn in. The lips were smiling, their sensuous fullness over-emphasized. The flowing locks were shown a little thin and the high cheekbones caricatured.
The eyes were laughing, or at least one of them laughed. The other was completely hidden in a grotesque wink.
It was cruel and revealing, the face of a man who was, if half genius, also half buffoon.
Belle turned it over. Written across the back in the painter’s enormous hand was a single phrase:
‘Your secret, Belle darling.’
The old lady returned to the portrait. She touched her lips with her forefinger and pressed it on the painted mouth.
‘Oh, Johnnie,’ she said sadly. ‘Such a lot of trouble, my dear. Such a lot of trouble.’
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Copyright © Margery Allingham 1934
Margery Allingham has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1934
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