Appleby chuckled to himself in the dusk. Oh, matter and impertinency mixed, he said to himself. And Packford, he knew, loved linking a sober discovery to some extravagant hypothesis. When he was able to prove that Burbage was really a very fat man, all this would come out. Meanwhile, Packford relished keeping a discovery up his sleeve for a time. He had his regular technique for surprising the world. First the foolproof case, painfully elaborated and checked and polished in deep secrecy. Then the leak – so that one interested scholar heard uneasily from another that there was some reason to suppose Lewis Packford was at it again, was nursing this or that monstrously upsetting discovery. Then the swift unmasking of his design – in a long letter to The Times Literary Supplement, or in a small book attractively got up with telling illustrations, instantly commanding the attention of the fashionable metropolitan reviewers. Before the learned journals could lumber into reasoned appraisal, the whole thing had been accepted as gospel by the common reader and become established as a plain fact of literary history.
And almost certainly Packford was up to something of the sort now – although Appleby didn’t really believe that it had much to do with the corpulence or otherwise of Richard Burbage. All this talk was a determined if light-hearted smokescreen put up by Packford to obscure some actual design. And Appleby thought he could take a dim guess at it.
This eminent literary detective wasn’t in Italy for his health. Even if his own gross corpulence made it medically probable that he should drop down dead at any moment, such a calculation wouldn’t make the slightest impact on Packford’s sanguine personality. No – this wasn’t a rest cure. Nor, for all his delight in his situation and his fluent chattering in Italian with his retainers, was it matter of a lover’s retreat into communion with the soil and culture of his passion. Packford’s wanderings, when they happened, were invariably strategic in conception. This villa was a cunningly chosen lurking place. And Packford, as he had virtually admitted, had been very far from advertising it. Mere chance had put Appleby in possession of his whereabouts. And perhaps – despite the cordiality of his welcome – he wasn’t too pleased at being found out.
Not that Appleby felt in the least an intruder. If he now tumbled to some secret of Packford’s, that would be all in the game, and Packford would acknowledge it as such. And indeed Appleby was determined – quite idly, indeed, since the whole matter was without seriousness of any sort – to discover what he could. Detective work of his own wasn’t commonly his notion of a holiday. But detection that is all amid innocence and merely learned guile, that can’t end in anybody being hanged or imprisoned or disgraced: well that, after all, was about as complete a change as he could run to. So he decided to have a go.
The little breeze had faded away, and when Giuseppina brought out candles they burned without a flicker in the warm, faintly lemon-scented air. It was an evening for dining al fresco – and, sure enough, the meal was presently brought out to them where they sat. It wasn’t, after all, in the least elaborate: only a mess of deadly-looking but delicious fungi, followed by a chicken displaying a higher proportion of flesh to bone than is at all common south of the Alps. They drank Chianti. And Appleby tapped the flask. ‘It’s like the vermouth,’ he said. ‘Sit down with it in a dark room, and it would be undistinguished stuff. But here – well, it’s another matter.’
‘My dear man, Portia knew that. Nothing is good, I see, without respect. You remember?’
Appleby nodded. ‘How many things by season season’d are – isn’t that it? – to their right praise and true perfection! I suppose it’s true everywhere. But what about Shakespeare’s having had it borne in upon him in Italy?’
Packford set down his glass with caution. ‘Now just what,’ he asked with great casualness, ‘puts that in your head?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know. Would it be your Giuseppina’s candles? Certainly they reminded me of Portia coming home to Belmont. The light we see is burning in my hall; how far that little candle throws his beams. And look over there.’ Appleby pointed across the darkness of the lake. ‘Those tiny lights on the farther shore. You could reach out your hand to them. I’d say there really is Italian air in that last act of The Merchant of Venice.’
‘And therefore Shakespeare must actually have travelled across Europe and taken a sniff at it?’ Packford leant back and laughed with great decision. ‘Cobweb, my dear Appleby – mere cobweb! There’s a great deal of English poetry that is stuffing with Greek air, if it comes to that. But how many great English poets have ever set eyes on Greece? Two, precisely.’
‘So you think Shakespeare didn’t come to Italy?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Ah.’
Packford looked suspiciously at his guest. ‘I can see,’ he said genially, ‘that you’ve been reading some rubbish or other. There’s enough of it, the Lord knows.’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I don’t read much in that sort of learned way. But didn’t somebody lately find an old map of Verona, and decide that it fitted Shakespeare’s Verona exactly?’
‘There’s no end to what people find it possible to decide – no end at all. He must have been to Venice, since he knew that business was transacted on the Rialto. It’s all like that, the talk of Shakespeare in Italy. Crackpot stuff, like saying he must really have been Lord Tomnoddy, since otherwise he couldn’t have made all those references to hunting and hawking and heraldry.’ Packford reached comfortably for the Chianti flask. ‘And, after all, does it much matter whether he travelled in Italy or not? The plays remain just as wonderful either way.’
‘Oh, quite so.’ Coming from Packford, it seemed to Appleby, this austere critical doctrine verged on the disingenuous. ‘But I’ve known you pursue rather similar curiosities from time to time.’
Packford waved this aside. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘there would be real critical interest in a related question. Did he know Italian? Could he read it? One would give something to be able to answer that.’
‘I seem to remember being told that Othello is important there. Isn’t it true that its only source was in Italian?’
‘Ah, yes – Cintio’s Ecatommiti.’ Packford paused, as if his mind were wandering. ‘But Cintio’s yarn may have got translated into English, you know, without the translation’s having survived. Or a translation into French may have come his way. There’s an English ballad on the story. Unfortunately it’s one of John Payne Collier’s forgeries.’ He chuckled. ‘Now, there’s a fascinating subject: the history of the great Shakespearian forgers! What a pity that it can’t happen any more.’
Appleby was interested. ‘But can’t it? Why not?’
‘Too many experts. Too much science.’
‘Perhaps so. But expert knowledge, and the command of scientific techniques, can work both ways. In some fields I’m familiar with, the forger who commands them can put up quite an alarming show. It’s rather as with warfare. Sometimes science puts the attack on top, and sometimes the defence. Of course I agree that nowadays there are certain directions in which the forger’s liberty has been drastically curtailed. Think of Van Meegeren’s spurious Vermeers and De Hooghs. There wasn’t a chance for them once the chemists came along and spotted a resin of the phenolformaldehyde group, unknown until the last years of the nineteenth century. And it was the same with the most noted of the recent literary forgers, T J Wise.’
Packford shook his head. ‘Not quite. Wise pretty well confined himself to the forging of nineteenth-century printed material. If he’d known enough on the scientific side, and taken enough trouble, he might have produced things that were indetectable. Or take inks. You or I could quite readily manufacture ink according to one or another of the methods current at, say, the beginning of the seventeenth century. And if we then used it cleverly and sparingly on paper preserved from that period – which isn’t hard to come by in small quantity – the result would quite soon baffle the back-room boys in their labs. Conceivably in five years, certainly in twenty, the che
mical situation would be tricky enough to produce divided opinions.’
‘Always provided that materials from organic sources weren’t much involved. It’s no longer possible to tell fibs by the century, so to speak, where the new carbon tests can be brought in. Think how they’ve vindicated the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls.’ Appleby paused. There was a new delicious smell on the terrace. It was evident that Giuseppina knew how to make coffee. ‘But hasn’t it always been possible,’ he asked, ‘to tell simply by the smell? If, I mean, you really knew your stuff. Amateurs of literature all over Europe fell for Macpherson’s Ossian, but it didn’t take in a professional like Dr Johnson. Chatterton was a marvellous boy, and his Rowley poems impressed the respectable antiquaries of Bristol. But he was sunk as soon as they were put into the hands of a poet and scholar like Gray. Ireland could turn out anything of Shakespeare’s, from a signature to a whole play. All sorts of persons of rank and consequence believed in them, but a high-powered authority like Edmund Malone at once knew them to be ridiculous.’
Packford was producing a box of cigars. ‘There’s something in all that,’ he said. ‘But it’s not always so. Van Meegeren’s things took in tremendous pundits.’
‘But largely, I think, because it was war-time. A competent expertise in a field like that is a matter of very delicate intellectual and aesthetic judgements. If you had to be smuggled past a lot of Nazi guards in order to look at a painting, your responses to it might be affected in queer ways… No brandy, thank you. I’ve quite a bit of driving in front of me still.’
‘No doubt you’re wise – although it’s a good road.’ Rather reluctantly, Packford pushed away the bottle he had been offering. ‘We’ve hit, you know, on a complex subject. The moral issues are sometimes far from clear. Take Chatterton. His fakes were scarcely fakes to him. He lived in a medieval dream-world of his own contriving, and the poems and so forth came out of it. Make-believe was a condition of the functioning of his genius – and it was a very real genious. It’s arguable that it was the duty of society to sustain him in his delusions.’
‘As it is, his story’s unbearable.’ Appleby was silent for a moment. Packford, he was reflecting, had turned quite serious. At the same time, he was discernibly distrait – as if, despite the genuineness of his hospitable impulse, some insistent preoccupation was tugging at his mind. Appleby resolved to get away fairly soon. ‘Yes,’ he presently went on, ‘it’s a complex subject, as you say. And it certainly sometimes puzzles the law. One doesn’t commit a crime in teaching oneself to paint precisely like Richard Wilson in the morning, and precisely like Renoir in the afternoon. But it would be an unlikely routine to adopt in the disinterested pursuit of an artistic education. I’d turn a bit suspicious, prowling round a studio which showed a set-up like that.’
Packford laughed. ‘Suspicion’s your job, Appleby. And it’s a good part of my job too. They say I’m credulous, you know. But it’s not true. I’ll admit to having run a notion or two of my own pretty hard, and to squeezing my evidence as if I were a barrister out for a verdict. From time to time I may even have put across a pretty tall story. But I’m not aware that I’ve ever been taken in. I’ve never, as they say, been had.’ And again Packford laughed – confidently, infectiously. ‘Good luck to the chap who tries!’
Giuseppina had come to clear away the meal. The two men rose and strolled up and down the terrace. ‘But it’s not the technique of forgery that’s really fascinating,’ Packford said. ‘It’s the psychology.’
‘I’d say there are a dozen psychologies.’
‘Exactly! And there’s what you might call a gradus, too. I mean that there are degrees of the impulse. At one end there’s no more than what might be called a bit of historical sense and curiosity – the prompting, say, to try out the way some earlier painter has applied his glazes or managed his edges. Further along, you come on chaps with whom the thing has gone obsessive and passionate. Think of the Venus of Milo, Appleby! A masterpiece of the fifth century before Christ – a masterpiece, that’s to say, of the great age of that sort of thing. Only it happens to be nothing of the kind. It was created some four hundred years later. Why? It was a vision of the goddess that can’t have cut any ice with that later age. Her vital statistic would have appeared all wrong.’
‘Not, perhaps, to a patron of antiquarian mind. The statue may have been commissioned by some first-century gentleman who thought modern art terribly vulgar.’
‘No, no – nothing of the kind.’ Packford could be brusquely dismissive without being in the least offensive. ‘The Venus of Milo mayn’t be all that our grandparents cracked her up to be. But she’s far too good to be a piece of historical pastiche done to order with an eye on a rich man’s cheque-book. It’s a case of an artist’s passionate identification with the vision of another age.’
‘Or perhaps it’s a joke.’ Appleby couldn’t resist the impulse to receive Packford’s large vague enthusiasms sceptically. ‘For there, I think, you often find the master motive behind fakes and forgeries. It can be the underlying motive, even when the superficial motive is predatory, practical and financial. I mean the impulse to extract fun out of laughing up one’s sleeve.’
‘Laughing up one’s sleeve?’ Packford repeated the words as if they were entirely obscure to him. And then, disconcertingly, he gave one of his shouts of laughter. ‘Yes, of course – it would be enormous fun! But, do you know, I never thought of it?’
‘There seems to be a particular attraction in the idea of fooling people who are inclined to patronize you. Something of the sort certainly operated in Wise’s case. He was a prosperous man, and he had collected a library of great value and interest, which scholars were eager to consult. He was therefore surrounded by learned people paying court to him – and at the same time unconsciously treating him rather de haut en bas, since he was only an eccentric commercial person, after all, unprovided with the unspeakable blessings of a classical education. Well, he fooled them to the top of their bent. And how he must have enjoyed it!’
Once more Packford laughed – this time so loudly that even Giuseppina, who must have been well accustomed to these explosions, turned round and stared. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I can see that. And he must have felt like Chaucer’s Manciple. You remember?’ And striding down his terrace, Packford began to chant:
‘Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace,
That switch a lewed mannes wit shal pace
The wisdom of an heep of lerned men?’
Giuseppina gestured expressively to the heavens. She had a high regard for her employer, but this clearly didn’t preclude her regarding him as a little touched. Pazzo would be the word. And perhaps – Appleby thought – there really was an element of some strangeness in Packford. If, one day, something very surprising turned up about him, you wouldn’t – so to speak – be very surprised. And yet this circumstance – that you wouldn’t be surprised by a surprise – was surprising in itself. It couldn’t quite be accounted for, that was to say, in the light of what seemed the normal large transparency of Packford: the simplicity of his vanities and enthusiasms which blended so naturally, somehow, with the keenness and vigour of his mind.
Did he, perhaps, have a secret life? Briefly, as they paused at the far end of the terrace to gaze again at the faint lights across the lake, Appleby tried to equip him with something of the sort. But the exercise came to nothing. There was no glimpse, for instance, of anything out of the way in this small temporary household established in so pleasant a place.
Perhaps Packford’s only oddity consisted in his being something of a survivor from a past age. There weren’t many of his sort about. There were of course dilettantes, wealthy or merely prosperous, in plenty. English, American, Australian, you found them scattered over Italy and the south of France. But nowadays that sort of person’s fancy seemed to lie nearly always in the fine arts or in music. Corresponding amateurs of literature – at least of an ability and pertinacity sufficient to gain them ser
ious scholarly consideration – were much harder to find. It wasn’t a field that Appleby knew particularly well, or had much occasion for interest in. But at least he couldn’t think of a single other person in precisely Packford’s situation. He had money, but he travelled light. He was presumably unmarried, and Appleby had never heard him mention even a distant relation. He could entirely please himself. And what was pleasing him now – if Appleby hadn’t guessed entirely wrong – was the persuasion that he was going to prove William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to have been at one time a traveller in Italy. Milan, Mantua, Verona, Padua, Venice: they all had their Shakespearian associations – and to one of Packford’s temperament and reputation the possibility of unearthing and displaying to the world an actual biographical link would be irresistibly appealing. To present himself before the learned with what he had called mere cobweb triumphantly transmuted to perdurable steel; to flourish before their noses, it might be, the dramatist’s very hotel-bill on the Grand Canal: that would be precisely Packford’s cup of tea.
And the ambition was at least blessedly innocent. It wasn’t even frivolous – or not if you took the scholar’s view of the dignity inherent in adding to any and every sort of knowledge. It didn’t make you a nuisance or a blight to others, and it didn’t land you in any trouble. And there was much – Appleby thought – to be said for any activity which was quite unlikely to add to the burdens of the police.
As he made this prosaic professional reflection Appleby became aware that his host was again looking at his watch. This time, it could scarcely be in expectation of a meal; and the plain inference was either that he had an appointment or that he wanted to get back to work. Whatever the nature of that pile of books and documents down in his summer-house, he would be quite glad to get back to them. ‘I must be getting on my way,’ Appleby said. ‘I go round by Peschiera, I suppose, and that makes it quite a step.’
The Long Farewell Page 2