‘You must excuse him, madame. My friend is a poet.’
She turned and smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve heard Bruno’s poems.’
Sitting himself down on the seat beside her was an extraordinarily good-looking boy with smiling eyes who introduced himself as Theo Benton; she had already noticed him mildly flirting with one of Viktor’s model girls – Liesl, Isobel thought she was called, blonde and beautiful, with a voluptuous body and no more brains than the sparrows who pecked the crumbs from her window sill each morning. He was an Englishman, an artist with paint under his nails and a smell of linseed on his clothes, staying here in Vienna for some unspecified time, actually here in the Francks’ attic, he told her, studying the new art which was sweeping across the Continent. Seeing her interest, he spoke about it at length. ‘But I’m a tyro compared with Viktor,’ he finished abruptly, seemingly embarrassed and surprised by his own enthusiasm. ‘Would you like to see some of his work? I have his permission to show you.’
He caught Viktor’s eye, who smiled thinly and adjusted his pince-nez. Isobel could feel his eyes on them as they walked to the building at the back of the courtyard and ducked under the low doorway. Igor got up and slunk after them, lithe as a panther.
It was the first time Isobel had been in the building which had intrigued her so much and she looked about her with interest. The rectangular space inside was lit by windows along the long wall facing the house and a door was set in the narrow end, presumably leading to the place where the printing press was housed. The other walls, roughly plastered and distempered, held canvases which glowed dimly from the shadows. Theo busied himself finding lamps as she tried to accustom her eyes to the dark.
‘Here they are!’ The light bloomed and she stared, mesmerised, at the outburst of gold thus revealed. Gold everywhere. A blur of deep, bright colours overlaid, enamelled and painted with gold, seeming to draw all the light from the lamps into themselves, leaving the rest in darkness. She could make nothing of them until somewhere among the writhing, whiplash forms, sinuous vegetation and clashing colours, the forms and faces of women began to emerge. Seductive, languorous women with snakelike hair, half hidden among all the sinister foliage, the same woman in every picture, or so it seemed. Gilded again, even her face and eyelids touched with gold, and her lips, her barely concealed breasts. Gold gleamed, too, on the snaky folds of her diaphanous robes, which were blown back as if she were breasting a high wind.
‘Well?’ asked Theo, as she went from one to the other of the paintings.
She shook her head, reluctant to give an opinion of these – to her – curiously repellent paintings. ‘These are really by Viktor?’ With their exuberance, their lack of restraint, the feeling of decadence they gave, it was difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile them with the cold, apparently unfeeling man who had painted them.
Theo looked disappointed, then he laughed. ‘I can see you don’t like them. Never mind, that’s the usual reaction to anything new. You’ll come to admire them, in time, you’ll see. I tell you, if I could paint like this…’ The laughter faded from his eyes and for a moment, such a look of passion and longing crossed the handsome face of this unassuming young Englishman that she was taken aback.
‘Like this?’
Her incredulity made him smile. ‘Oh, my own work is nothing of this sort – nor aspires to be. I meant, if I but had such mastery as his… Well, never mind that. And don’t worry about not liking Viktor’s work. I doubt he’ll ask for your opinion – but if he should by any chance do so, whatever you do, don’t compare him with Klimt. Nothing annoys him more – and Viktor is not a man to annoy.’
It would never have occurred to her to make the comparison to anyone, especially to Viktor, even had she not felt the coldness of dislike knife between them like an icicle whenever they spoke, even had she known anything about art. She had only heard of Gustav Klimt because Julian had bought some of his works. He was the man who was leading the artistic revolution here in Vienna and headed a group known as the Sezessionists, a dissident group of decorative artists and architects who were responsible for decorating all those new buildings with sinuous, waving, slightly disturbing forms. Like these painting of Viktor’s, they sometimes made her shiver.
‘If you’re going to be staying here, will you show me your own work sometime?’ she asked, endeavouring to change the subject.
His smile faded. ‘Perhaps. If and when I have something worth showing.’
She never saw a finished painting of Theo’s, all the time he was there.
He extinguished the lamp and they were just emerging from the studio when the little wicket gate that led into the courtyard was thrust back and, with a great noise, half a dozen police pushed their way in, led by a burly sergeant.
‘Where’s the Jew?’
‘Which Jew?’ demanded Viktor, stepping forward.
‘So you have more than one here?’
‘Is that a crime?’
‘It is if one of them is named Samuel Kohen. Out of the way, all of you. Hinder our search and you’ll be arrested, too.’
‘You searched last night and you found nothing.’
‘It’s not you we’re interested in this time, Franck. It’s Kohen we want.’
Kohen was a Marxist Jew with a reputation for stirring up trouble who, in spite of his beliefs, wore at all times a yarmulke on his lovelocks and a long kaftan. ‘Where is he, where’s the Jew?’ repeated the sergeant.
He got no further. With a terrifying leap Igor was there, throwing his whole weight onto the sergeant and sending him sprawling. The man fell backwards and lay with Igor straddling him, covering his face with drool. The rest of the men the sergeant had brought with him backed away and stood irresolutely at the gate, disinclined to attempt to rescue him.
The sergeant yelled to them to get the bloody animal off and two of the men found enough courage to step hesitantly forward again, one of them with a raised gun. Whether the reputedly soft-as-butter Igor had attacked at some signal from Bruno wasn’t clear, but before the soldiers could do anything, Bruno had yanked him back by the collar.
The police officer scrambled to his feet, brushing himself down and gathering what he could of his dignity. His men, now that the danger was averted, came forward and stood foursquare behind their sergeant, rifles at the ready.
Bruno said nonchalantly, ‘Carry on with your search, you’re welcome.’
They found nothing, of course. In all the furore, Kohen had somehow managed to slip away. ‘Lucky for him,’ Bruno remarked with a laugh when the police too, still uttering threats and blustering their way out of the situation as best they could, had left. ‘When the police get their hands on you, you’re…finished.’
Despite his swagger, Isobel was astonished to see how much the incident had shaken him – he could barely conceal his trembling now that the incident was over – though she knew, too, that this was not the time, especially if you were a Jew, a gypsy, an intellectual or anyone else considered undesirable, to fall foul of the law. There were desperate tales told of what happened to anyone taken into police custody, though until this moment she had dismissed them as of questionable authenticity.
There was another Englishman there that night, a quiet man who looked on and said little, an art-dealer called Martagon who had presumably come to look at Viktor’s work, but he and Isobel spoke only briefly when introduced. When she came out of Viktor’s studio he was gone.
PART THREE
England 1909
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nearly a week had passed since Janey Hutchins and her milkman had received such a grisly start to their morning by the sight of Theo’s Benton’s body impaled on the area railings, and Chief Inspector Philip Lamb was back in the studio in Adelaide Crescent. He wasn’t sure why Joseph Benton had requested a meeting here, upsetting as it was bound to be for him. As far as Lamb knew, he had never visited his son’s studio before; they had last met at Benton’s home when the news had been broken to him of
his son’s death.
Cogan was due here, too, but he himself had arrived early, in order to have a little time to himself in the place where Theo had died, to think about what he’d learnt only that morning. He looked forward, if that was the right expression, to seeing Cogan’s face when he communicated the unexpected results of the tests following the autopsy performed on Theo’s body, the report of which had arrived on his desk just before he left the station, and was now burning a hole in his pocket.
The findings were disturbing, but went a long way to justifying the unease he’d felt all along about the untimely death of the young man he’d once met and deemed so full of life, the inconsistencies he had balked at: Theo, a struggling artist, drunk on expensive brandy; the timing of his suicide, in the middle of an exhibition which must have meant a great deal to him; the absence of a suicide note. It had all been too vague and contradictory.
This last didn’t strike Cogan as anything out of the ordinary. ‘Nothing more than the morning after, if you ask me, sir, still too fuddled to think about saying goodbye.’
‘I daresay you’re right. Though one would have thought he would have slept it off by the next morning.’
Lamb had asked himself again if it were possible that Theo had wakened, hung over, in the early hours, and stumbled over to the window, thrown it open in an attempt to clear his head, leant too far forward and accidentally overbalanced. No. It still wouldn’t do. The window sill was at least three and a half feet from the floor, well above the waist height of even a tall man, and Theo had been only about average height.
And after associates and acquaintances had been traced and spoken to, the theory had held even less water. Without exception, all his friends had been incredulous, or downright disbelieving, of the idea of Theo being drunk at all, his unusual abstemiousness apparently being something of a joke among the bibulous artistic crowd with whom he hung around. Poor old Theo, alcohol didn’t agree with him at all. He would occasionally take a glass of wine to be sociable, which invariably made him tipsy. More than one and he would be practically incapable – and the sheer indignity of this had made him distinctly wary of alcohol in any form. He’d dined out the night before with two friends, at a café they frequented nearby: a fellow artist called Boynton, and a would-be novelist by the name of Tom McIver. The Pontifex exhibition having so far proved a modest success for Theo, in that he had actually sold a picture that day, he had been in a mood to celebrate, with wine bought for his friends. Theo himself had stuck to ginger beer, as usual, said McIver, grimacing. All the same, it had been a boisterous evening; when he was in good spirits there was no better company than Theo, a great chap, though they had to admit that lately he’d been unusually moody and occasionally depressed. They’d left about ten, Theo saying he wanted to get a good night’s sleep in order to start work early the next morning, and they’d parted on the corner of Adelaide Crescent. He and McIver, confessed Arthur Boynton, might not have been quite as steady as they might have been – it had been a convivial evening – but Theo was sober as a judge, as usual, and had talked seriously on the way home about his future prospects. They seemed genuinely shocked and upset that he could all the time have been contemplating his own death.
All of which had made suicide and the consumption of what was probably half a bottle of brandy shortly before his death even more inexplicable. Unless buying it and consuming it had indeed been a grand gesture, a deliberate act, to give him enough courage to climb onto the window sill and launch himself into space. In which case, what had happened, after he left his friends, to change his apparent good humour?
But all those questions had been posed before the experts had examined the body in greater detail, before it had been subjected to the further tests of doctors and pathologists.
Down below, the doorknocker sounded, followed presently by footsteps on the stairs, and then the knob was being turned, the door pushed open.
‘Cogan, there you are.’ Lamb slid a hand inside his breast pocket for the report.
However, the person who stood in the doorway was not Cogan, nor an early-arriving Joseph Benton, but a handsome, well-preserved, middle-aged man wearing a wide-brimmed black felt hat and a red-lined cloak, a loud check suit and a confident manner. Despite the theatrical get-up, there was an unmistakably distinguished air about him. He swept off his hat, revealing a head of thick wavy hair, which he smoothed back with a self-aware movement of his hand, bestowing a smile which held more than a hint of arrogance. Both gestures were what Lamb remembered most about Walter Sickert.
‘Ah,’ said the renowned artist, stepping into the room with outstretched hand. ‘Mr Lamb, I believe we’ve met before. I apologise if I’m intruding. I heard about Theo’s death and wondered what was being done about the work the poor fellow had left behind – whether any of it was for sale? The landlady told me there was a gentleman upstairs. I didn’t expect it to be you.’
The glance he swept around the room was bright with intelligence and conjecture. Lamb’s own glance was not without speculation. Was this really why the man was here? He couldn’t look at Sickert without being reminded of that by now notorious series of paintings, all done in unbelievably explicit, gory detail after the murder of the prostitute, Emily Dimmock. Whatever the intention of this had been – publicity, or realism, as Sickert himself had claimed, the thought still nauseated him. Did he expect to get something similar from the scene of Benton’s untimely demise? Clearly, the man was morbidly fascinated with the details of violent death, realism taken to its ultimate extreme. Lamb wondered sourly whether they could shortly expect to see a painting entitled The Adelaide Crescent Suicide.
‘What happens to his work will be up to Mr Benton, Theo’s father. But now that you’re here, Mr Sickert, perhaps you can be of assistance. I believe Theo was working for you?’
‘In a way. On occasions he acted as a pupil-assistant in my studio.’
‘Will you come over here, and see what you make of this?’
The painter followed Lamb as he crossed the room to stand by the easel. He threw back the cover and waited.
Sickert regarded the defaced painting through narrowed eyes. ‘Theo was never satisfied with what he could achieve,’ he said at last. ‘At one time, he painted over nearly everything he did.’ He paused. ‘But I’ve never known him to be savage.’
‘What was your opinion of him as a painter? Was he good?’
Sickert said carefully, ‘He knew the right techniques, but his ideas were half-formed. He was tormented by not being able to express what he felt – yet he was determined he would, one day. Stubborn, you see. Wouldn’t admit defeat.’
‘And he never did find it?’
The other didn’t answer. Having removed his gloves, flung back his cloak, he had turned away from the easel and begun to go through the stacked the canvases, one by one. There weren’t so many as on Lamb’s first visit: the man who was organising the showing at the Pontifex had asked permission of Theo’s father to take more for the exhibition when it reopened, on the premise, presumably, that the ghoulish appeal of his suicide would make him worth more dead than alive. Sickert quickly passed over, dismissing, with a faintly raised eyebrow, the drab interiors, the sleazy street corners – many of them his own preferred subjects – without comment. At the portrait of Tilly Tremayne (which the gallery had presumably declined to show) he gave a short bark of laughter. In front of others he paused critically, before shaking his head. At last he said, ‘My honest opinion? I admired him, for pressing on, in spite of everything.’
‘Why did he carry on’
‘Why? Like most of us, because he had to. And who knows? He might – all right, most probably would – have become a better painter than many of us, one day, if only he hadn’t succumbed.’ He left the pictures, looking disappointed. Lamb could have told him that the small, dim landscapes which had made such an impression on himself weren’t there any more.
‘What do you mean by succumbed?’ he asked.
Lamb, who was not familiar with Degas, Monet or any other French artist, either as a master or otherwise, but who had not missed the fact that Sickert had by implication included himself as one of the latter, merely nodded.
‘Storing it all up, one might say, until he felt the time was right for him to burst on the world with something different, something wholly original.’ Then he added unexpectedly, with a sharp glance at Lamb, ‘It was destroying him, you know.’
‘I understood he was having quite a success at the moment,’ said Lamb, deliberately misconstruing the words.
‘That’s just what I mean. There are those who are successful, and those who tell the truth.’
Lamb waited for him to explain. He was, as always, willing to listen, and hopefully to learn.
‘Do you understand what I mean? It’s easy enough to be popular. Take what’s being shown at the Pontifex, for instance. Mostly inferior imitations of what’s being achieved on the Continent, I have to say…yet British patrons are actually finding some of them thrillingly daring – and lionising the…perpetrators,’ answered Sickert, who knew himself what it was to be lionised, and how to roar to advantage. ‘There’s a lot yet to be learnt from France but—‘ he shrugged and smiled forgivingly – ‘I suppose we all have to eat.’
‘And I suppose that’s what Theo Benton had become – commercial?’
Sickert closed his eyes on the painful word. ‘We mustn’t blame him too much. His previous work was received – without enthusiasm, shall we say? What a waste, poor Theo. And such an agreeable chap. Everyone liked him.’
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