Money from Holme

by Michael Innes

  At this point Cheel remembered that he had certain supplies to deliver to Holme. For their original arrangement had been maintained. Cheel had done all the purchasing of artists’ materials, and had delivered them at his own former lodging. Holme oughtn’t to be given any excuse for idleness on the pretext of not having received this or that on time. Cheel would go along with these various commodities now. The hour, indeed, was late. But it would do no harm to show Holme that there was no time of the day or night at which he mightn’t expect to be kept an eye on.

  It is melancholy to have to remark that in all this there might have been detected at play an element of mere and useless fantasy. It was the fantasy of Cheel as Master and Holme as Thrall. If it had come to birth on any specific occasion, that occasion may well have been the moment of Holme’s turning from the abstract pointillist creations of his fellow-conspirator with the dispassionate remark that they were pretty average rubbish. At that moment, of course, Cheel would have liked to have possessed some means of taking the young man’s hide off his back. And this feeling had conceivably remained with him. Had he, at this present juncture, had mental recourse to his favourite play, he might have reflected that one who proposes to thrive by making his fool his purse (which was precisely his design upon Sebastian Holme) must not, indeed, dull device by coldness and delay – but must have an equal care to go to work tenderly. Cheel didn’t go to work tenderly now. He was annoyed. And at this late hour he tumbled out of his flat again, resolved a little to twist the tail of Sebastian Holme.

  21

  The attic apartment from which Cheel had lately withdrawn, and in which Sebastian Holme now led his industrious and reclusive life, had at one time accommodated the three or four female servants deemed requisite in the London establishment of a solid although not notably prosperous citizen. The citizen had long since departed; the tall house – never other than unbeautiful – had a shabby and disgraced air; its staircase was now the common means of entrance to a warren of unassuming but by no means inexpensive flats.

  Cheel parked his car round the corner (for some reason he hesitated to advertise his new splendour in this old haunt) and collected in his arms the various supplies that Holme’s present activities required – including a large canvas which was quite soon (Cheel reflected) going to be worth several pounds sterling per square inch. He moved round to the front of the house and observed that its upper parts were in complete darkness. Holme must have gone to bed. This might be regarded as satisfactory, since it no doubt conduced to his working efficiency that he should keep regular and early hours. If he was asleep by eleven there was no reason why he should not be standing before his easel by eight the next morning. And if he was asleep now Cheel would have the satisfaction of waking him up without ceremony.

  The windows on the second floor were lit up, however, and there were sounds suggesting that someone was giving a party. Cheel had never held much commerce with his former neighbours, and he did not expect to meet any of them now. But in this he was mistaken. Just as he climbed the stairs the party began to break up, and several people gave him a perfunctory greeting as they passed. The tenant on the second floor, who went by the name of Binchy, was a sub-artistic character understood to scramble up a living out of scratching designs on glass. Binchy was standing in his doorway, speeding his parting guests. He hailed Cheel now.

  ‘Evening to you,’ he said. ‘Another whacking canvas, eh? That’s the second I’ve seen you scurrying home with. Quite stepping up your ambitions, aren’t you? It will take you the hell of a time to cover a surface like that with all those damned silly little spots.’

  This highly offensive manner of referring to the art of abstract pointillism not unnaturally gave marked offence to Cheel, who responded only with a stiff inclination of the head. At the same time it struck him as reassuring that even a close neighbour like Binchy was unaware of the change of tenancy that had occurred. Holme’s very existence, it seemed, must be totally unsuspected. It might be a good idea, even at some sacrifice of dignity, to encourage Binchy in his ignorance. Cheel therefore turned round and assumed an affable manner.

  ‘It’s certainly not my old style of thing,’ he said, tapping the stretcher of the canvas. ‘I’m busy at something quite different, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Aha!’ Despite himself, Cheel gave a cackle of laughter. ‘As to that, my dear fellow, I’m not sure that I ought to tell you. I’m not sure, indeed, that anybody will ever quite precisely know.’ Cheel was about to turn away when he remembered how very rude this nasty man had just been. ‘And how are the jolly old lavatory windows and tooth-mugs?’ he asked. ‘So long.’ He gave a triumphant nod, and climbed the next flight of stairs.

  The top landing was in darkness. He had to set down his burden and fumble for the light-switch. When he found it, a flick at it produced no result. Somebody – presumably Holme – had failed to replace a burnt-out bulb. Moreover the door of the attic was locked, so that he had to fumble further for a key which he had sensibly retained. These awkward movements put him in an ill humour again. He unlocked the door and flung it open. He found and turned on the light.

  ‘Wakeup!’ he said, loudly and peremptorily.

  But his words had no effect – for the good reason that the attic was empty.

  There could be no doubt of it. The place consisted only of the one large room. Cheel himself had rigged up a screen which to some extent demarcated his sleeping from his waking life. But this, at the start, Holme had torn down and tossed aside. A glance was enough to confirm the disconcerting fact that Sebastian Holme had vanished.

  For a moment Cheel felt something like hideous panic. He had, after all, experienced a very trying day, and it is understandable that, for a brief space, his nerve should desert him. What if Holme – as once in St James’s Park – had toyed (this time fatally) with the impulse to contact the police? Almost for the first time, it crossed Cheel’s mind that if Holme was in his power, so, equally, was he in Holme’s. If the unaccountable young man (and he was, distinguishably, that) chose to have a fit of conscience – or merely elected some rash throwing-over of the traces – things might turn very awkward indeed.

  There was an easel in the middle of the room – and on it, of course, was a Sebastian Holme in the making. Unmistakably a Sebastian Holme. Cheel shut the door abruptly behind him. There was a risk (which hadn’t before occurred to him) in the mere fact that, in the person of Binchy, an artist of sorts lived down below. Other people with some knowledge of painting presumably frequented his society. Might not any of them wander up here when the door was open – and be in possession of sufficient relevant knowledge to find such a picture as this astonishing? Cheel sat down on the couch. An uncomfortably chilly sensation had run down his spine. Holme, he realized, must be given much stricter instructions under the head of what had to be called security. He’d speak pretty stiffly to him as soon as he returned.

  But would he return? What if he had bolted for good – perhaps having lost his nerve, or perhaps having fled the country in some fit of nostalgia for those exotic parts in which, after all, his authentic inspiration lay?

  Cheel looked about him. He might get a clue as to whether or not Holme had departed for good by seeing whether he had taken his belongings with him. But then he virtually didn’t have belongings. He had been seeming to make do very happily with the clothes he stood up in, a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush. Certainly there seemed to be nothing missing from the untidy room. On the other hand – Cheel stiffened – there were several things that hadn’t been there upon the occasion of his last visit. There were two large, flat cardboard boxes. There was a crumple of tissue paper and paper bags. Cheel crossed to a cupboard and flung it open. Holme’s clothes were hung in it: the only clothes he had hitherto possessed.

  With mounting misgivings Cheel inspected the bags and boxes. They all came from a respectable men’s outfitter in Regent Street. The larger box had almost certainl
y contained a ready-made suit. The other might have held shirts, socks, ties and the like. Moreover, under the litter of paper, there turned out to be an empty shoe-box as well. It was only too clear what had become of that £50.

  It was a crisis – but a crisis to which Cheel’s intelligence responded with the vigour that might be expected of it. If Holme had decided simply to cut and run, and had naively provided himself with only such a very moderate sum with which to do so, he certainly wouldn’t have spent it on merely togging himself up. The man had the temperament of a feckless Bohemian, but he wasn’t a half-wit. He had acted on some impulse that might well be totally irresponsible. But – again – his temperament must have been involved. What, in terms of this, could suddenly have persuaded him to rush out and dress himself up?

  Considering this problem, Cheel stumbled on a thought before which he paled and abruptly sat down again. What if Holme had gone off and reconciled himself with his wife? It was true that his regular epithet for Hedda Holme was ‘awful’, and that occasionally he even used expressions much less printable. Nevertheless his attitude to her was ambivalent. There was, he seemed lurkingly to acknowledge, something to be said for Hedda. Cheel had no difficulty whatever in imagining just what this was.

  Cheel contemplated for some minutes the sombre situation at which he had thus arrived. If Holme had suddenly decided that it was time he went out and found himself a woman, he certainly wouldn’t have considered it necessary to pay an expensive visit to Regent Street first. But before the thought of Hedda something of the sort seemed possible. Hedda clearly set some emphasis on appearances – and would be doing so more than ever, now that she was so grossly in the lolly. Her prodigal husband might well calculate that she would be more acceptive of him if he didn’t turn up smelling of a studio.

  Here was a dangerous – indeed dire – state of affairs. Confronting it, Mervyn Cheel would have been more than human if he hadn’t, for a brief space, contemplated bolting in his turn. He hadn’t of course (he again reassured himself) perpetrated any crime. But crime – or at least fraud – was something on which the law could demonstrably take very unreasonable views. So perhaps he ought to call it a day. Apart from that trifling £50, he had cleared the whole profit on his private sale of the first two Holmes. None of his present splendours had involved the putting down of much spot cash. He found himself thinking about the hour at which his bank opened in the morning, and about a quick run out to London Airport thereafter.

  But it was now – need the reader be surprised? – that the essential quality of the man appeared. All was not lost, even although the day appeared to have been so. His worst fears might be groundless. Even if they were not, was he not possessed of that quite exceptional degree of intellectual endowment and dexterity of address that is bound to triumph over even the most adverse circumstances? He would stay. He would stay and fight upon the field.

  Having arrived at this resolution (and the strong word is here a wholly apt one) Cheel looked at his watch. It was far past midnight; the smallest of the small hours lay ahead. He supposed that he ought to go back to his flat, and return here in the morning. But this, he quickly saw, wouldn’t do. To stay and fight meant literally to stay. Once he left, he mightn’t bring himself to come back again. He couldn’t imagine himself climbing all those stairs after breakfast with the knowledge that what he might find at the top would be a couple of detectives from Scotland Yard. No – he must simply sit down and wait, if Holme failed to return within the next few hours he would have to think again.

  He walked over to the easel and examined the current recreating of a lost Sebastian Holme. It was called, he remembered, ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’. The convolvulus was there, and the primal scene was there too. The latter seemed to be notably outlasting the poet’s ‘poor benefit of a bewildering minute’, since the proliferating tendrils of the flower had wreathed themselves around the bronze and ebony of the lovers’ limbs. It might be called, Cheel supposed, an erotic painting; indeed, he wasn’t confident that some aged magistrate mightn’t be sharked up to disapprove of it. Having nothing with which to occupy himself and thereby distract his mind from its present weight of care, Cheel tried taking ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’ in this direct and simple sense – substituting it, so to speak, for that spell of bed-time reading which he had missed out on earlier that night.

  It didn’t work. High sexual excitement – for all he knew to the contrary – had gone into the making of the picture. But all that issued from it was a stern command to sacred awe. Uneasy already, Cheel grew still more uneasy before this thing. He even pretended to himself that he had inspected it only to make sure that it had been worked on within the last few hours. For what the point was worth, it had. Holme’s flight – if it was flight – had only just begun.

  Time wore on. Cheel felt thirsty, but there was nothing to drink in the place except some nauseous coffee powder. He even felt hungry – and the little larder proved to contain two kippers. Two o’clock sounded, and then three. It grew cold. Sometimes Cheel wrapped a rug around himself. Sometimes he got up and stamped about the room. On the canvas the two lovers remained immobile in their long ecstasy.

  22

  Cheel jerked awake from an abominable dream. They had lashed him tightly to the naked body of Hedda Holme with the cord-like tendrils of some hideous bindweed – a bindweed that at the same time smotheringly extruded a mass of blossoms with a nauseous smell. To struggle was unthinkable, and when he tried to scream his mouth was instantly filled with fleshy petals. Then they cut him free, but only to lead him away to some further torment. And he was still bound: this time in manacles that clanked as he moved. The manacles still clanked when he woke up. But they had become the bottles and metal baskets on a milk-float making its noisy matutinal progress down the street outside.

  He struggled out of the chair in which he had dropped asleep, and went over to the big north window. London under its smoky dome was facing another day. Below, there was as yet no life except the milkman’s and that of a couple of cats. Opposite, the windows still showed drawn curtains and blinds; only at one of them an old man stood under a naked light, shaving himself with a cut-throat razor. It was a world in grisaille, without a note of colour in sight. Here, Cheel thought, was a reality as dreary as his late nightmare had been terrifying. England (it came to him) was getting him down. He could take no more than a few further months of it. He must make his pile, and go.

  ‘Well, I’m blessed – fancy finding you around at this hour!’

  Cheel swung round as he was addressed. The truant Holme had entered the room. He was in new clothes that had gone a little untidy, and he was carrying a bottle of milk and an array of paper bags.

  ‘Had breakfast yet? I suppose not. Plenty for two.’ Holme grinned amiably. ‘Just light that stove affair, and put on the kettle and the frying-pan. I’m dropping into the bog.’ Holme put down his provisions and vanished.

  Cheel did as he had been told. He was feeling a little dazed. Holme’s manner had been totally unexpected. For a moment he had thought the man must be tight. But it wasn’t that. It was – but Cheel didn’t need to tell himself what it was. He had sensed it in a flash.

  ‘Now, that’s fine.’ Holme was back in the room, and looking lazily round it. He walked to the window, glanced out, yawned, stretched, and turned back to Cheel. ‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I thought I would. And I did.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Had her, my dear man. The data given, the senses even. But not all the senses. I dropped off to sleep in the course of the proceedings – it’s a nice thing to do, don’t you think? – and when I woke up I was damned hungry. I could have eaten her. But, of course, that would have been wasteful. So we’re going to eat now.’ Holme strode over to the stove. The movement took him past ‘Primal Scene with Convolvulus’, and he paused to gaze at it. ‘Yes, by God!’ he said. ‘And – do you know? – I’d almost forgotten it.’

  Cheel felt rage rising
within him. It was rising from somewhere very deep indeed. He was aware that it might irrationally and disastrously master him. And as yet he hadn’t at all got the measure of this crisis. It mightn’t be all that of a crisis, for that matter. But he must, he simply must, keep cool.

  ‘Mind the eggs,’ he said. Holme had dumped down one of his paper bags so carelessly that there had been an ominous crack.

  ‘Fidgety Cheel, fretful Cheel – one can’t, you know, make an omelette without breaking them.’ Holme proceeded to enforce this by opening another packet, dropping a blob of butter into the frying-pan, and rapidly breaking and stirring in something like a dozen eggs. ‘Make some of that coffee-stuff, will you? Give you something to do. Luckily I brought half-a-dozen rolls.’

  Could it – Cheel asked himself – could it possibly have been Hedda? Mercifully, he felt free to doubt it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the young brute perfectly capable of speaking in that unbearably coarse way of sleeping with his own wife. It certainly wasn’t that he judged the Holmes’ cordial mutual detestation any bar to their tumbling into bed together if they felt the itch for it. It was rather a conviction that, if Holme had managed to lay his wife again, she wouldn’t have thereafter let him go all that quickly.

  No – there was nothing in question but some low, casual adventure. It wouldn’t, of course, do. He couldn’t let Holme cut out of his work like this to go off wenching. It was a waste of time, for one thing. For another, it probably diverted into useless channels physical energies that ought to be bent on extracting sensations only from pigment. Above all, it was dangerous. Any little tart, professional or amateur, about London might prove to be Sebastian Holme’s Delilah. Until his task was finished, until every lost picture in the Wamba catalogue was in being again, nothing more of this sort must occur. Even so, it would be prudent to discover something a little more specific about last night’s adventure. With this in view, Cheel gave a few minutes to making coffee in as relaxed a manner as he could. He even looked at the rolls and made some cordial remark about them. Indeed, after his chilly vigil he would be glad enough to get his teeth into a couple of them. And the omelette – which was in fact an enormous dish of scrambled eggs – was beginning to look uncommonly palatable.