‘Miss Bray, may I introduce my nephew’s fiancée, Felicia Foster. Felicia, Miss Bray.’
We smiled at each other, made the usual murmurs. The ring on her engagement finger had diamonds and sapphires in an old-fashioned setting, quite small and modest. Her hands looked younger than the rest of her; rounded and childish, they had nails nibbled down to the quick. She and Mr Venn must have exchanged one of those little signals that well-run households have, because she left the room as soon as we’d been introduced and soon after that a gong sounded from the hallway. It was a tactful, unaggressive bong, in keeping with the atmosphere of this very civilised household.
* * *
Felicia was already waiting for us in the dining room, standing next to a good-looking man in his early thirties. Quite tall, dark brown hair, light tweed suit with a black mourning band round the right arm. Mr Venn introduced us.
‘My nephew, Adam Venn.’
He smiled and asked some conventional question about my journey. Quite how you tell, from the first contact, that a person is intelligent I’ve never known, but it’s unmistakable, like a little jolt of electricity. Adam Venn was intelligent. More than that, he was glinting me a look that said: Yes, I know this thing has its ridiculous side but let’s see it through, shall we?
I said yes, it had been a very good journey thank you. Then we sat down and Annie served lamb cutlets and green beans. The picture wasn’t mentioned over lunch. I suppose that would have counted as business. Most of the talk was of Philomena and her work in the suffrage movement, which her husband had supported with great enthusiasm. His admiration and love for her were clear in every look and word and more than once his bulging eyes filled with tears and his voice broke. When that happened, Adam and I would carry on talking about nothing in particular until he recovered. Felicia didn’t say much, but organised unobtrusively the clearing of plates and the arrival of plum compóte and cream, then coffee. Over the coffee cups, Mr Venn apologised for his show of emotion.
‘Philomena would have hated that, positively hated that. She even made me promise not to wear mourning for her.’
I glanced without meaning to at the broad band on his nephew’s arm. Adam Venn said, catching the glance, ‘It takes too much energy to defy all the small conventions. Don’t you think so, Miss Bray?’
‘But how do you decide which are the small ones?’ I said.
I’d have enjoyed a discussion with him, but Mr Venn was still talking about Philomena.
‘She said life would go on quite well without her. She was really quite angry when we decided to delay the wedding because she was taken ill. Young people shouldn’t be made to wait for an old woman, she said.’
Felicia was blushing, an attractive peach shade. Was she so much in the grip of the small conventions that it embarrassed her to have her matrimonial arrangements discussed in front of a stranger? To give her time to recover I turned the conversation to Adam.
‘Thoughtful of your aunt, not to want to delay your wedding.’
For a moment he looked alarmed. When he recovered, his eyebrows went up and the smile on his face told me I’d said something stupid. ‘Not my wedding, Miss Bray. Felicia is engaged to marry my younger brother, Daniel.’
I dare say I blushed, and not as attractively as Felicia. I was annoyed too, feeling that Mr Venn had let me fall into a social trap.
‘Adam’s wife Carol is away for a few days in London,’ he said. ‘As for Daniel, he’s hunting in Berkshire at the moment.’
‘Hunting!’
It wasn’t the season for it and anyway they didn’t seem like that sort of family.
‘In fact,’ Adam said, a little edge to his voice, ‘if all has gone according to plan – which it won’t have necessarily with Daniel – by now he’ll be in Faringdon workhouse.’
‘Workhouse?’
Mr Venn came anxiously to the rescue again.
‘Daniel has a great interest in collecting English folk-songs. He tells me that there are old men in some of the workhouses who know an astonishing number of songs that will be entirely lost to the world unless collectors can write them down in time. He’s been spending most of the summer doing field work in Wiltshire and Berkshire.’
That at least got us back on safe conversational ground. I had several friends who were interested in the folk-song and dance movement, going along as it did with many of the left-of-centre political causes. Neither morris dancing nor ‘here we come a-wassailing’ were great interests of mine, though I’d been coerced into the occasional session. So we talked about that until Mr Venn, at long last, suggested that I might care to come up to his study and see Philomena’s picture.
As I followed him up the beautiful curved staircase, something odd struck me. As fiancée of the missing Daniel, you might have expected Felicia to put in a word or two about him and his folk-song enthusiasms. She hadn’t. Not one.
* * *
The picture was facing us when he opened the door. Standing on the floor, it was propped against a chair. I admit my first reaction when I saw it was: Well, we couldn’t have hung that on the wall of the office. The woman in the picture was as naked as a baby, sprawled stomach down on a cushioned sofa, with one knee bent and the sole of her foot upturned. It rested on its own velvet cushion, offering a curve of little pink toes like sweets on a plate. Her rounded face, turned over her shoulder towards the artist, was part welcoming, part petulant as if she reserved the right to sulk but might be kissed out of it. Her flesh was as pink and puffy as cumulus cloud at sunset. You had the impression that if lawn tennis had existed in eighteenth-century Versailles it wouldn’t have been her game. I felt Oliver Venn’s eyes on me, sensed his anxiety.
‘The model was a young lady who, um, gained quite a reputation at the French court. There’s a more famous version, of course, La Blonde Odalisque at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Unmistakably the same model and much the same pose, but the angle of the head is different.’
He wanted me to like it. I did, in a way, only I’d expected something more in the line of swains and shepherdesses and didn’t know what to say.
‘She looks very, er, at ease with herself.’
He nodded several times, as if the comment had been sensible.
‘Philomena and I spent our honeymoon in Paris. I bought it as a surprise for her.’
Surprise for me too. It was hard to connect the veteran campaigner I’d met or the decent elderly man standing beside me with a young couple of nearly half a century ago who’d carried this back as their souvenir.
I said, ‘You’ll miss it.’
That aspect of Philomena’s bequest hadn’t struck me until then. A glaze of tears came over his eyes. Quickly I turned back to the picture.
‘She’ll be doing good work for us, I promise you. We really are most grateful to Mrs Venn, and to you.’
There was a clean linen tablecloth lying folded on a chair. He picked it up and began to wrap the picture, as if he didn’t trust himself to look at it any more. When I knelt to help him, I could feel his whole body shaking.
‘Cord, on that table there, if you’d be so kind.’
Soft cord, so as not to damage the frame, everything carefully prepared. I felt guilty depriving him of his treasure, and tried to console myself by thinking of all the campaigning she’d pay for. How much for a picture like this? A thousand? Five thousand? Once we’d got her decently covered and corded up we wrapped her in another layer of brown paper and the job was done. He suggested sending for Joseph – the groom, presumably – to carry her downstairs but I thought we could manage. He walked down backwards, none too steadily, while I tried to take most of the weight. It was a relief when we got it down to the hall and propped it against the umbrella stand.
‘I’ve asked them to have the gig ready. There’s a good train in just over an hour you should be in time to catch – unless you’d like another lemonade first?’
As I was thanking him and declining more lemonade, Adam came in at the front
door, looking annoyed.
‘Uncle, have you got the key to the schoolhouse? Some of Daniel’s confounded Scipians have arrived already and they want to get it aired.’
Mr Venn rummaged in his pockets.
I asked Adam, ‘Who are these Scipians?’
‘So the news hasn’t spread yet? They’re a breakaway group from the Fabians that my dear brother seems to have got himself involved with. He’s invited them to hold a summer camp on Uncle’s land.’
I knew that Oliver and Philomena Venn, as good middle-class socialists, had been among the founders of the Fabian movement and guessed that Adam was of the same persuasion.
‘Philomena would have wanted it,’ Oliver Venn said sadly, still failing to find the key. ‘She’d have liked to think of young people from the factories having a few days of sunshine and country air.’
Adam gave me another of his looks that implied he and I knew things weren’t as simple as that, but his tone with his uncle was patient.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to them. We must hope Daniel remembers they’re coming and gets home in time. Now, has somebody called the gig for Miss Bray?’
He said good afternoon to me and disappeared into the back of the house. Mr Venn came out to see me off and make sure the picture was safely stowed in the gig. As we turned into the road I looked back and there he was still standing there, like a fond parent watching his first-born going away to school.
* * *
I caught the train with ten minutes to spare and paid extra to go first class, so that the Odalisque could travel upright on two seats. For the first part of the journey my mind was on her and Philomena, but as we got nearer London I started worrying about the unexpected result of my trip. The news about the Fabians and the Scipians was not good because it meant more campaigning work when we all had more than enough. All right, I know reformist groups are always splitting like seed pods on a hot day. It’s one of life’s little unfairnesses that while alliances of the cynical and greedy seem to rub along quite happily for decades, put three idealists in the same room and you immediately get at least two different parties. To those outside it usually doesn’t matter one way or the other. But if – like the Suffragettes – you’re a group fighting for one particular issue, you have to pick up allies wherever you can, from moderate Liberal to anything this side of revolutionary anarchist. It had taken us a lot of time and work to get the ever-cautious Fabians to put votes for women high on their agenda. Since, for my sins, part of my job for the WSPU was to know what was happening in other political groups, I’d been aware that two factions within the Fabians were fighting each other – one more radical, the other less so. A split had been on the cards for some time, but now it had happened and I hadn’t known about it, which was careless. I’d have to spend some time finding out who’d ended up on which side of the split and whether the Scipians were worth cultivating from our point of view. This was where my mind was as we drew into Paddington and I realised I’d have to move fast if I intended to get the Odalisque into the safe hands of Christie’s before it closed.
* * *
I let a porter carry her to the cab queue for the sake of speed and managed to get to Christie’s as the doorman was just shutting up for the day. He wasn’t impressed with me or my package, but as luck would have it the beautiful young man was coming downstairs on his way out, soft felt hat in his hand.
‘Miss Bray, is that it?’ Far more enthusiasm in his voice than when we’d last met. ‘Since we spoke I’ve made some enquiries among my older colleagues. It seems Mr Venn may have bought some quite interesting pictures.’
I’d propped the brown paper parcel by the porter’s chair. His eyes went to it as eagerly as they might have done to the lady herself.
‘It’s a version of the Blonde Odalisque,’ I said. ‘Is she worth much?’
From the little shiver that went through him, I could tell the question was indelicate. ‘There’s never an easy answer to that,’ he said. ‘I shall have to see the picture, check its condition and provenance.’
From the hungry look in his eyes I expected him to start tearing at her wrappings there and then, but I’d misjudged him. He wanted to be alone with her when he did it. The long-suffering doorman, annoyed at being kept late, was sent to find a porter. The porter carried the parcel upstairs with the young man watching every step. When they were out of sight at last he remembered I was there.
‘I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow, Miss Bray. Where may I find you?’
I’d given him the address already but I gave it to him again – 4 Clement’s Inn – and left. As the door closed behind me I could hear his feet practically running back upstairs.
* * *
When Emmeline asked about it next morning I was able to tell her that Christie’s seemed quite excited about our picture. The Fabian split was not such good news and I had the feeling – not for the first time in our acquaintanceship – that Emmeline blamed me for it. ‘You’d better go down to this camp, Nell. Find out who the leaders are and bring them in line.’
‘Must I?’
The fact was, I’d already survived one Fabian summer school that year. It took place on the Welsh coast, involved debates and lectures on things like housing and poor law from morning to night, an hour of Swedish drill before breakfast and sea bathing along with George Bernard Shaw in any spare moment. I’d enjoyed it, up to a point, but wasn’t eager to repeat the experience so soon.
‘Somebody has to and it might as well be you.’
I didn’t argue, as it’s always a waste of time with Emmeline, but decided privately that I’d find things that would keep me in London. I spent the morning doing various odd jobs, mostly concerned with organising meetings, waiting all the time for the message from Christie’s. It came around two o’clock in the afternoon, by special messenger. The elegant young man would be very grateful if Miss Bray would come and see him as soon as convenient. I put my hat on and walked at a good hiking pace along the Strand, across Trafalgar Square, past the gentlemen’s clubs and gentlemanly little shops of Pall Mall, weaving in and out of the crowds strolling in the late summer sun. All the time I was looking forward to bearing the good news back to them all at Clement’s Inn. The face and voice of the young man the evening before had suggested that Philomena’s windfall might be a lot bigger than any of us had guessed.
* * *
When one of the porters showed me into his office, the first thing I saw was our Odalisque propped on an easel. I felt proud of her and the lazy pink curves that would translate into so much useful activity for us. A hundred and fifty years ago she’d laid herself down on soft cushions, never dreaming that her flesh would be translated into leaflets, marches, speeches at factory gates. I smiled at the thought of it and looked up, expecting to see an answering smile on the young man’s face. No smile. Instead the expression – half pity for you, half pride at his own knowledge – of a specialist about to give bad news.
‘Have … have I hurt her?’ I was filled with sudden guilt about the gig, the train ride. She’d deserved to be treated more respectfully.
‘No, Miss Bray. The picture’s in very good condition.’
‘What’s wrong. Isn’t it by Boucher after all?’
He gave a long sigh and walked out from behind his desk like a man coming to lay a wreath.
‘May I ask, when the picture was left to your organisation, was there any mention made in the will of its being a copy?’
‘Copy?’ I stared at the Odalisque. She stared back, unconcerned.
‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. I was certain as soon as I unwrapped it, but I asked several colleagues to look at it this morning. I’m afraid there is no doubt at all.’
‘Poor Philomena. I’m glad she never knew.’
It was the first thing that struck me. I was disappointed for all our sakes, of course, but money comes and goes. The young man was looking at me as if I’d said something stupid.
‘You think she didn
’t?’
‘I’m sure not. Her husband bought it for her on honeymoon in Paris. They must have lived with it all those years, thinking it was genuine.’
‘All those years?’
‘Forty at least, I’d say. They’d been married for a long time.’
‘Your understanding is that Oliver Venn bought this picture in Paris around forty years ago?’
‘Of course. He said so.’
He walked three slow steps to his desk, picked something up and paced back to the picture on the easel.
‘May I show you something?’
The thing he’d picked up was a magnifying glass. He held it over the bottom right hand corner of the picture and beckoned me to look.
‘What do you see?’
‘Initials, very small ones. It looks like JVD in a monogram.’
‘John Valentine Dent.’
‘Is he a well-known faker?’
‘He’s not a faker at all. John Dent is a very expert copyist of pictures. He’s quite a young man – no older than his late twenties, I’d say.’
‘But…’
‘And he’s only been doing work of this quality for the past two or three years.’
‘But that means they … he…’
I stared at him, hoping that he’d say something that made sense of this – or at least some different sense from what was in my mind.
‘Had it copied within the past two or three years? Yes. It’s not uncommon, especially if people are worried about art theft. They commission a good copy and store the original somewhere safe.’
‘He must have known.’
‘Mistakes can occur, especially if a household is in some confusion.’
Oliver Venn’s household had been one of the most orderly I’d seen in a long time.
‘Of course, it’s not my place to advise you on this, but if the will made no mention of a copy I’d suggest that you get in touch with the executors and let them know that a mistake has occurred. Naturally if you receive the original, we should be more than pleased to handle the sale on your organisation’s behalf.’
Blood on the Wood Page 2