From London Far

by Michael Innes

  ‘But it’s quite plain’, said Meredith, ‘that you do collect art big. Just look at all that.’ And he pointed to the panelled walls which were flowing smoothly past them on either side. As far as the eye could see these were hung with etchings: Rembrandt’s etchings to the number of several hundred. ‘No wonder your friend Mr Gipson keeps leading round to pictures in a way you don’t like.’

  ‘But we must put something on the walls; it wouldn’t be natural not. Suspicious.’

  What Properjohn – thought Meredith – would call fishlike. ‘But it is suspicious,’ he said aloud, ‘–hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Rembrandt hanging along a corridor.’

  ‘It strikes you that way?’ And Mr Neff looked fleetingly and with a queer distrustfulness at these ranked masterpieces. ‘Flosdorf arranges all that: the pictures we give away and the pictures we hang about the place for folks to see. Clever at it, I’ve always thought. Quiet and in good taste. Nothing to catch the eye, but the quality right. Same as if you had a custom-made suit with a neat pin stripe – nothing loud or dressy.’

  ‘I see.’ And Meredith looked again at the labours of Rembrandt thus likened to the products of a discreet tailor. ‘No doubt they are quiet in one sense. On the other hand, a good many of them are highly dramatic – perhaps a little too much so.’

  ‘For instance,’ said Jean, ‘look at that one – the Blinding of Samson.’

  Mr Neff cast a rapid glance up the corridor to where the rest of the party were just disappearing on a turntable. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘look at it.’ And grabbing the arms of his two companions he jerked them off the conveyor belt in front of the etching. ‘Look at it,’ he repeated – and proceeded to do so himself, squarely and with no apparent disposition to speech. Samson in his agony confronted the three of them.

  But presently Mr Neff did speak. ‘Take Goya,’ he said. ‘Goya did a whole heap of things much like this – people maiming and torturing each other in some war way back in history. I got the whole lot of his stuff in a folio upstairs. It’s not what you could put on a wall; not if you are a man of peace same as I am. But the point is that you’re wrong about Rembrandt and his having too much drama. Goya’s got that, but this hasn’t.’ Mr Neff made this pronouncement quite without absoluteness; indeed he frowned over it like an anxiously open-minded professor. ‘Or so it’s always seemed to me, Mrs Pantelli, after looking a good many times at both. And why? It just seems that this Rembrandt got more art all the time. It’s the way the lines go across the paper.’ Mr Neff offered this accurate if unsurprising information much as if it were his own unassuming contribution to aesthetic theory. ‘That and how the light come here’ – he made a curiously subtle gesture – ‘and here. And I’ll tell you another thing. Hang this upside down so you’d think it couldn’t make sense, and you’d find it still looked somehow as if it had been put together on purpose. Now that doesn’t work with the Goyas – or not with many of them – because I’ve tried with them often enough. And why is this Rembrandt still most the same van Rinjn even if you hang him topside down? just because he got more art all the time. Step back folks, or we’ll be late for the soup.’

  They resumed their progress. Meredith was as persuaded of the essential soundness of the observations just offered as he was surprised at Mr Neff’s making them. ‘About Rembrandt again,’ he said curiously, ‘would you say he had more art all the time than even Alma-Tadema?’

  For a moment Mr Neff stared; then he burst out into large laughter. ‘Art’s tiring,’ he said. ‘Art’s the darn’dest tiring thing I know. Ever felt that?’

  ‘Well, I think I know what you mean.’

  ‘And there’s nothing like that Tadema if you want a break. I bought dozens of him just to have a bit of a joke now and then. Dirt cheap, too.’ And Mr Neff laughed again. ‘Not that I let Flosdorf in on that. Mean nothing to him. Clever man, of course. But he doesn’t understand art.’ Mr Neff lowered his voice. ‘Doesn’t even really know that art is beautiful. Kind of queer, isn’t it?’

  Meredith considered. ‘I suppose it to be not uncommon.’

  Mr Neff shook his head. ‘It’s wonderful’, he murmured, ‘how art is beautiful. Keeps on surprising me every time.’ He looked from Meredith to Jean with the largest innocence. ‘But about having only quiet things showing, so as not to have too much talk. You’ll find it the same in the dining-room here. Just cartoons by Leonardo and Raphael, and things in soft chalks by Dürer. Nothing striking. All plain, nothing coloured.’ Again he lowered his voice. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘I’ll do for you folks what I don’t often. I’ll show you the coloured ones tonight.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Meredith looked with increasing wonder at his host. ‘I suppose a good many experts and connoisseurs come here?’

  Mr Neff nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said – and his more assertive self abruptly returned to him. ‘Only to see what’s on show, of course. It’s modest and not striking, as I say; still it’s brought big museum men and critics to the Cottage more than once.’

  ‘With your fondness for these matters, you must find conversation with them very interesting.’

  ‘And they do too.’ Mr Neff was now frankly assertive. ‘It’s a remarkable thing. We talk art and understand each other.’ His voice rose in sudden, surprising triumph. ‘We understand each other all the time.’

  VI

  Mr Neff, then, was a Dragon after all – a Dragon with pronounced if untutored aesthetic sensibilities and no morals whatever. He knew that art was beautiful. And he helped himself.

  Nor was he altogether a solitary Dragon, crouched unyieldingly upon his hoard. For although that part of it which was two pence coloured was securely hidden away, over the penny plain residue he was in the habit of conversing with authorities, and of finding satisfaction in the exercise. Indeed, it had become clear that in this was the man’s peculiar pride. And Meredith, as the tedious banquet to which he was set moved elaborately forward, considered the implications of this.

  Mr Neff had come up the hard way, which meant that he had battled towards affluence with no pause for anything that could be called cultivation, with no glimmering intimation of what does in fact really constitute the good life, without access to that traditional body of philosophy, literature, art which a little serves to unsensualize the mind. And yet Mr Neff had never belonged quite sheerly to his type, had never been wholly and simply the Acquisitive Man. The queer streak of restless inventiveness which had evoked his home, his dove, his swimming pool, his conveyor belts would have, been creativeness in a more genial environment. Almost, in fact, Mr Neff was an artist. Almost – but not quite.

  And then Mr Neff had been got at to collect. Don Perez, Properjohn, Flosdorf: these or others (and the story was common enough) had for their own advantage set him to buying art. But Mr Neff (in this unlike most magnates who are induced to walk into the dealer’s parlour) had not merely bought art. He had discovered it.

  And at once some ever-present sense of inferiority was relieved. He was no longer merely a Merchant – the wealthiest of whose order all human testimony massively declares to be inferior to the poorest Scholar, the most meagre Artist. For his understanding of this new world of values was intuitive and immediate, and by this understanding his life was raised to a higher plane. He knew that art is beautiful – and this was more than his purveyor of pictures, Flosdorf really did. When people who lived unchallenged upon this peak of culture came to look at the Leonardo and Raphael cartoons, the Dürer drawings, and the Rembrandt etchings, they had the same understanding as himself – in essence the same and no more – of what turned upon the way the light fell and the lines went across the paper. The outré Neff, assertive and uneasy, abundantly aware of the absurdity of his Cottage with its dove and sharks and octopodes and moving platforms, discovered that Nature, after all, had endowed him with the purest and most exact aesthetic taste. And to this discrimination,
therefore, he had hitched the most powerful impulses of his abundant ego. His self-esteem, although it feigned to be, as of old, wholly implicated in the Big-Business game, was actually packed in this new, single basket. He knew that art is beautiful; and so he could not have enough of it. Honestly or dishonestly, he bought it up. And somewhere in this fantastic building, then, was the Dragon’s hoard. Meredith and Jean were to be led to it that night.

  Arrived thus far, and obliviously eating caviare for the first time in years, Meredith came back to the problem from which he had set out. Why Higbed? Why was that ill-treated but assuaged psychiatrist now kept lurking on the outskirts of Dove Cottage, like an ambulance or a fire-engine on the fringes of an aerodrome? What could the explanation be?

  Across Mr Neff’s elaborately laden board Meredith caught Jean’s eye, and discerned in it a glint of provisional triumph. Certainly the stocks of Pygmalionism and iconolagnia had fallen low, for the nature of their host’s interest in the plastic arts was evidently as irreproachable as Ruskin’s had ever been, and a good deal more relevant. Indeed (thought Meredith, going into a learned reverie) there might be rather more reason for suspecting that Ruskin had made love-objects of pictures than there was for supposing that Mr Neff did so. It was, of course, not inconceivable that Mr Neff in all this led a sort of double life; that his secret collection sometimes satisfied his sheer artistic sense and at other times ministered to delusions or obsessions. It was not necessary to suppose that he would fain bite collops from the Horton Venus, or that he struggled with a temptation to invite his acquaintances to inspect her through a keyhole. Some less specific confusion might easily be dangerous to the employees who had criminally brought the collection together. Art was something new to Mr Neff; if his mental balance was naturally poor might it not have become a focus of attention so compelling as intermittently to usurp reality? Moving in a necessary secrecy and solitude amid a hundred resplendent evocations of the Renaissance, his eye constantly conversing with the glowing pastorals of Palma and the resplendent palaces of Veronese, travelling down the Venetian vistas of Canaletto and Guardi –

  Meredith became aware of the grossly alliterative nature of this speculation and looked suspiciously at the wine-glass beside him. The stuff, whatever it was, had nothing of the qualities of Don Perez’s noble claret; it was far from clearing the brain; it favoured the silent composition of bad prose. But the point was this: might not Mr Neff, endlessly communing in his silent and secret gallery with all those potent memorials of another age, come imperceptibly to step in among them – or let them step from their frames like the deceased baronets in Ruddigore? And might not this be a likely road to sporadic delusions of grandeur to the control of which a Higbed might appositely be called – his patient one who had persuaded himself that he was a pope or a doge, a Borgia or a Medici or a Montefeltro? And Meredith, much taken with this new idea, looked up the table at his host. He looked up the table and sighed. For Mr Neff, somehow, did not look like even the most intermittent Borgia or Sforza or Gonzaga. He had the appearance of being altogether unintermittently Otis K Neff. It was evident that others besides Jean and Meredith had wind of the hoard, and that one of these was Mr Gipson. He was a dwarf of a man – it is dwarfs, after all, Meredith thought, who traditionally search out the hoards of dragons – but of those present at Mr Neff’s table tonight it was he who seemed to approach nearest to the status of a colleague rather than a client. Mr Neff was disposed to talk business, with occasional explanatory asides to Jean on the magnitude of the interests involved and the infinite guile required in the handling of them. But the mind of Mr Gipson was running on art. Almost certainly he had no notion that art was beautiful. But he was plainly confident that there must be something to it – probably money – if it was being covertly trafficked in by his astute friend. Mr Gipson therefore, without at all knowing what the attempt would reveal, was doing his best to look through the keyhole. And Mr Neff was opposing him. In fact, the Dragon – in this wholly unlike the man with half a dozen mistresses hidden about a town – had no disposition to let anyone glimpse his riches. If the Pantellis were to be let in, this was no doubt in order to impress them with the singularly little consequence in which the owner of so extensive a collection would regard a mere two or three dubious Giorgiones.

  ‘Neff,’ said Mr Gipson, ‘I wonder you don’t think to brighten this place up. A bit sombre, to my mind.’

  ‘That so? Take a drink.’ And Mr Neff turned back to Jean. ‘Yes,’ he said heavily, ‘nowadays it’s Time Factor all through. When I started it was Business Efficiency, which meant buying more comptometers and having your files so that only the Business Efficiency folk could handle them. But now it’s Time Factor that’s the secret. You saw me on the long-distance before we sat down? That was Jo’burg. And what they said means I leave for the Coast six tomorrow morning. Drummey’s out there on the lake tuning up now.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Jean was impressed. For there must be a genuine complexity about operations in which a message from Johannesburg sends a man shooting off to the shores of the Pacific. ‘And shall you be there long?’

  ‘Mightn’t even get there. A radio might come when we were an hour out meaning it might be best to turn round and meet a man for dinner in London.’

  ‘I see.’ Transport was evidently a very different thing for Mr Neff to what it was for his clandestine friends of the International Society. No furniture vans, no Flying Foxes, no interminable crawling obsolete submarines. Just up in the air with Mr Drummey and to all intents and purposes you were on your own magic carpet. ‘Do you often–’

  But now Mr Gipson got going in earnest. ‘Take that drab picture,’ he said; ‘the one with the two women and the two kids fooling in a rockery.’

  ‘That’s a Leonardo,’ said Mr Neff quickly.

  ‘No doubt it is. I don’t say it’s not high-class. But I do say it’s drab.’

  Jean twisted round. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the infant St John the Baptist (for it was these that Mr Gipson had described) were indeed posed before a vast grotto. There could, Jean supposed, be few more precious objects in the world than this unknown conflation of the Virgin of the Rocks and the Royal Academy cartoon. But the charcoal on brown paper, sparely heightened with white, was no doubt on the drab side.

  ‘Nice enough for a corner of your billiard-room,’ said Mr Gipson.

  Mr Neff flushed and for a moment looked Renaissance enough – for the temper of some orgulous despot glinted in his eye. ‘Nice enough, hey?’ he said. ‘If you’d care to know, that cartoon is the one mentioned by Lomazzo as having been in the possession of a guy called Aurelio Luini. And now it’s mine. I bought it fair and square from a bankrupt Graf in Hungary a bit before the war.’

  ‘I don’t care whether you bought it from a giraffe or not.’ And Mr Gipson, as he produced this childish witticism, guffawed loudly. ‘I don’t care whether you bought it from a dromedary. It’s drab.’

  ‘Very well; it’s drab.’ And Mr Neff turned away to another of his guests. ‘About what I was telling you,’ he said. ‘Time Factor again. I locked that option in my safe just sixteen minutes before the news broke.’

  ‘And it’s not only drab. It’s odd.’

  Had Mr Neff, it occurred to Meredith, exercised a little control over what he received in return for large cheques to his wine merchant, Mr Gipson might not have been so absolute. Or was he, perhaps, like a skilled picador enraging his bull?

  ‘It may be by Leon Ardo or Tom Ardo or Dick Ardo,’ pursued Mr Gipson. ‘But it’s odd, all the same. And I suppose you paid a tidy sum for it?’

  ‘I paid’, said Mr Neff breathing heavily, ‘a lot more than you could ever put your hand in your pocket for Jeff Gipson.’

  ‘I don’t say you didn’t. I’ve known folk interested in cattle would give any amount of money for a two-headed calf. And that’s just what that picture is.’


  ‘Jeff Gipson–’

  ‘Don’t you get mad. Just look and you’ll see it’s that. It’s not two women at all. It’s one woman with two necks and two heads.’

  This was an acute observation on Mr Gipson’s part, and it set his host momentarily at a stand. But Mr Neff now looked so exceedingly angry that Jean though she would attempt a little pacification. ‘But that’, she said, ‘is because Leonardo when he was a child didn’t know whether he had one mother or two. That’s why the Virgin and St Anne are sort of fused together. Also when he was an infant he had an adventure with a bird, and so he keeps on putting the silhouettes of birds into his pictures without ever being aware of it.’

  But this scientific information, with which Dr Higbed himself could not have been more ready, was not well received by Mr Neff. ‘Mothers?’ he said. ‘Stuff and nonsense! When those great painters are at their easels they aren’t thinking of Mother, same as we might be with the second Sunday in May coming along. Not even with the underside of their minds, they aren’t.’ And Mr Neff pointed a confident finger at the cartoon. ‘It’s the mass’, he continued, ‘and the planes and the edges. And getting the draperies monumental and to look like some great mystery. A mystery that kind of draws you right into itself.’ Mr Neff checked himself abruptly. ‘And so much for your two-headed calf, Jeff Gipson.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Gipson. ‘If you don’t know a whole heap! And all I say is, bring out a coloured one and brighten the place up. Looks like you might be a mortician with all that dingy stuff around.’