‘But excusings!’ Braunkopf had suddenly remembered something. ‘The formal introduction, yes? Mr Mervyn Cheel, the eminent critic. Dr Quinn, the eminent chemist.’
Dr Quinn inclined his head gravely. It was rather clear that he didn’t terribly like Cheel. And Cheel certainly didn’t like him. He was very well aware of one branch of chemistry in connexion with which the name of Quinn was apt to turn up.
‘The violet,’ Braunkopf went on, with a disagreeable softness. ‘The peautiful modest violet, no? Of course it is there in the shadow cast by anythink yellow, yes? And here’ – he pointed to what must now be called Wutherspoon’s Holme – ‘it is so.’ He turned to the second picture. ‘And here, so. And your eye is goot, my goot Cheel. This violet shadow is not that violet shadow. That is the aestheticals. But I too have the goot eye – and the sciences as well. All my life I make the expertises. And I look at this violet in “Clouded Leopards Playing” – in your “Clouded Leopards Playing”, Cheel–’
‘Mine?’ There had been something that Cheel didn’t at all like in Braunkopf’s tone.
‘Kabongo’s, then.’ Braunkopf again tapped the frame of the relevant picture. ‘And what do I say? I say “My valued freunt Dr Quinn must have one tiny flake this violet pigment”.’
There was another of the horrid silences. And then Dr Quinn himself seemed to feel that things might advantageously be speeded up.
‘In a word,’ he said, ‘I have conducted a micro-analysis of a fragment of paint taken from this picture. And I find that this particular violet comes from a substance first synthesized less than a year ago. It has been available in the colourmen’s shops for three months at the most. Sebastian Holme could not possibly have used it during his lifetime. This painting is therefore a forgery. An amazing forgery, but a forgery beyond any shadow of doubt.’
Cheel managed a laugh that sounded uncomfortably shrill to his own ear.
‘You’ve neglected one obvious possibility,’ he said. ‘And it happens to be the true explanation. When the picture came to me – through confidential channels, I must insist – it proved to be a little damaged. I had to touch it up myself. And I used this paint you are speaking of.’
‘Mr Cheel, that is rubbish.’ Dr Quinn’s face was more granite like than ever. ‘I have also employed radiography, and Mr Braunkopf is now in possession of macrographs of the relevant areas. There has been no damage, and no touching up whatever. Moreover there are the strongest indications that the whole painting has been executed very recently indeed.’
Big men have to be capable of big decisions. Mervyn Cheel was very conscious of this now. What confronted him was, in vulgar parlance, a fair cop. And he had better face up to it at once. Braunkopf, despite his nauseous airs of injured virtue, was already in up to the neck. As for this detestable Quinn, he was clearly a scientist existing on a pittance of a salary, and he was bound, therefore, to have his price.
‘Very well,’ Cheel said. ‘Let us be frank. As you’ve no doubt guessed, Sebastian Holme is still, in fact–’
But Braunkopf had raised a prohibitory hand – and with such authority that the image of Lord Duveen might have been said positively to shine through him.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘we come to the confidentials. Dr Quinn, my goot freund, it will be correck that you overdraw.’
‘Withdraw,’ Quinn said unemotionally, and got to his feet, ‘I am very content to leave Mr Cheel and yourself to confer.’ He paused, gave Cheel a particularly bleak last look (he must be one of those, after all, in whose mind the Nicolaes de Staël affair lingered), and walked out of the room.
Cheel drew a long breath.
‘Will he keep his mouth shut?’ he asked urgently. ‘Can we square him?’
‘Mouth shut? Square him?’ Braunkopf-Duveen repeated these distasteful expressions while turning upon Cheel the coldest of eyes. ‘But you were about to make a communicating, yes?’
‘You can call it that, if you like. But you know very well what I have to say. Sebastian Holme is still alive. He’s alive, and in London, and painting, now.’
‘You make the jokings, Cheel. Always you make the jokings. It is ha-ha-ha, no?’ Braunkopf was, in fact, austerely remote from hilarity. ‘But this is the tall story, my poor Cheel. It will not take you far.’
‘What the devil do you mean?’
‘You are a goot forger, Cheel. Perhaps there has never been so goot a forger before. But a goot liar? No.’
26
Very naturally Cheel was as much offended as he was alarmed by this judgement. He was far from flattered by the suggestion that he was a superb forger. In his character as an artist, his high sense of dedication to the practice of abstract pointillism made intolerable to him the mere thought of working in any other painter’s manner. Conversely, to be denied the highest skill in the craft of prevarication was extremely mortifying to his own just sense of his powers in that direction. What he chiefly felt at the moment, however, was contempt for the gross intellectual incapacity of Braunkopf, whose fixed ideas about the situation were proving invulnerable to the facts of the case. That Sebastian Holme was indeed alive must now be as plain as a pikestaff to any rational intelligence. But here was Braunkopf obstinately pursuing the idiotic notion that Cheel himself could paint, and had been painting, bogus Holmes detectable only through a technical slip.
It was too silly for words. Still, it was evident that the whole grand design must now be reorganized on a drastically different basis. Cheel was about to tell the obtuse proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery that he was able and willing to produce Holme, active and in the flesh, at half an hour’s notice, when he was prevented by a buzzer sounding on Braunkopf’s table. Braunkopf picked up a telephone.
‘But, yes,’ he said, ‘But if there was an appointment he must be shown in.’ He put down the receiver and turned to Cheel apologetically. ‘A client,’ he explained. ‘A misimportant client. But it would be discourtesies to be longer engaged. You excuse?’
Cheel didn’t excuse. He judged it highly improper and inexpedient that a delicate phase in negotiation should be interrupted in this way. But, before he could protest, the door had opened and Braunkopf’s visitor entered the room. It was Cheel’s former neighbour, the miserable glass-scratcher Binchy.
Once more, coincidence was conceivable. Binchy might be ambitious to follow Rumbelow as an exhibitor in the Da Vinci Gallery. But Cheel doubted it. It wasn’t long before he found his dubiety justified.
‘Dear me,’ Binchy said. ‘If it isn’t friend Cheel.’ He turned to Braunkopf. ‘Cheel and I pig together, more or less. He’s the attic varlet.’
‘But this is interestings.’ Braunkopf adopted the air of one indulging in small-talk. ‘And you have the artistic communions, yes?’
‘Well, we pass the time of day on the stairs. Quite often, I’d say – eh, Cheel ? Only the other day, for instance. Yes, only the other day. How is your new activity going, Cheel, old boy?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no new activity. And you know very well that it isn’t I who lodges above you any longer.’ Cheel’s mouth had gone disagreeably dry. He had a sense of what was coming at him. It was conspiracy. ‘Everybody in the building must know that.’
‘Must they? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. What a funny chap you are! And turning secretive, one might say.’
‘Secretive?’ Braunkopf repeated softly. ‘This too has the interestingness, no?’
‘When Cheel hasn’t been scribbling rubbish in any rag that would print it, you know, he’s been covering perfectly nice little bits of paper and board with spots. Effect rather like the measles. Don’t ask me what he does with them afterwards. The Seurat of the sewers, we’ve always called him. Haven’t we, Cheel ?’
Cheel was not aware that he had heard this vulgar witticism before. He managed to preserve a dignified silence.
‘But lately he’s been scurrying round with large canvases. And he says that what he’s doing with them is so
mething that nobody will ever precisely know. I think those were his words to me quite some time ago. He’s a deep one, is Cheel.’
‘The goot Cheel has a puttikler prestidigious subtle mind.’ Braunkopf produced this with an irony that was highly offensive. ‘And we give it damn-plenty employment now.’
‘But I must be off myself. My little business with you will keep until you’re less occupied, my dear Braunkopf.’ Binchy had stood up and was nodding cheerfully. ‘Particularly as there’s a lady waiting. I’ll send her in. And now I’ll get back to my lavatory windows and tooth-mugs, Cheel. So long.’
With this parting shot, Binchy walked from the room. There was a moment’s murmur of talk outside it, presumably with the waiting lady. And then the waiting lady entered. It was Hedda Holme.
‘My goot Mrs Holme, please take place!’
Braunkopf had risen to receive his new visitor, and was bowing in a most Duveen-like way over her hand. His manner, in fact, carried all the respectful deference proper towards one who might still be described with approximate accuracy as a recently bereaved widow.
‘I think,’ Braunkopf went on, ‘you know the man Cheel?’
‘Sure. I know Mr Cheel.’ Hedda was making her way to a chair while preserving an elaborate care to present only the front part of her person to Braunkopf’s other visitor. This semi-public allusion to an entirely private and intimate matter struck Cheel as in very bad taste.
‘The man Cheel,’ Braunkopf pursued, ‘is suffering from a delusion. That, at least, is the charitables. He claims that your sadly departed husband is alive.’
‘Sebastian’s dead,’ Hedda said.
‘Exackly. Sebastian Holme is dead. Pinched in the bud. Dumped to rest in foreign soil that is forever Englant, no? But Cheel believes otherwise. It seems a case for medical persistence.’
‘Isn’t it time,’ Cheel asked, ‘that we dropped this nonsense? If we’re all going to get our cut – and I take it that is what this foolery is about – it’s high time we had a little straight talk.’
But at this Braunkopf and Hedda only looked at each other sadly.
‘Locoed – huh?’ Hedda said.
‘Either he is mad, Mrs Holme, or he is a knave. And if he is a knave, he has met his Paddington, yes?’
Oddly enough, it was this last fantastic abuse of the Queen’s English that finally triggered off righteous anger in the breast of Mervyn Cheel.
‘Now, look,’ he said. ‘if anybody is meeting his Waterloo in this affair, it’s you two. I’ve done nothing – nothing, do you hear? – except place on the market as paintings by Sebastian Holme paintings that are in fact by Sebastian Holme. Whereas what shady tricks you’ve been up to the police will pretty quickly find out.’ He turned to Hedda. ‘Didn’t you put up a damned lie to the effect that you believed Braunkopf and myself to have all those Wamba pictures stowed away? It was Braunkopf and yourself, all the time. The beastly things were never destroyed, despite your idiotic husband’s swearing they were. That ghastly Wutherspoon has one or two of them – but you two have all the rest. And you’ve been making a fool of me.’
Cheel paused, panting. Braunkopf and Hedda again did no more than exchange commiserating glances. And Cheel pulled himself up. Whatever the true facts of the case, he had to acknowledge that in his last remarks he had been threshing about wildly. It was almost certain that, of the Wamba pictures, only Wutherspoon’s couple had really been rescued.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ve got Sebastian Holme. What’s more, I’ve got him under my thumb.’ Cheel made a vicious gesture on the table in front of him. ‘Sebastian emptied his dead brother Gregory’s –
‘His dead brother Gregory! Vot ravings, no?’ Braunkopf gave an expressive wave of his hands.
‘He emptied his dead brother Gregory’s bank account on the strength of forged cheques. I can have your blasted Sebastian put inside for a long term tomorrow’
‘Sebastian is dead,’ Hedda Holme said.
‘Dead,’ Braunkopf echoed. ‘And dead men is not punishable.’ He recollected himself. ‘Exceptings,’ he added piously, ‘by Divine Improvidence.’
‘Have some sense!’ Cheel’s irritation before the obstinate stupidity of these people mounted within him. ‘I know very well that you don’t want him alive. I know that his survival is highly inconvenient to you. It reopens the whole question of what was sold in the Da Vinci here as coming from Mrs Holme’s estate as her husband’s legatee. But we can fix that. We have a pretty tough hold on him: something like five years in gaol.’
‘Sebastian Holme is dead,’ Braunkopf said.
‘Dead.’ This time the echo came from Hedda.
And it pulled Cheel up. He saw – all too belatedly – that he had to take a fresh measure of the situation. Actually, these people knew as well as he did that Sebastian Holme was alive. For what the point was worth, they probably knew too that Gregory Holme was dead.
‘The forging of cheques and the forging of paintings,’ Braunkopf said, ‘is all von, Cheel. And you have forged the paintings of this prestidigious great dead artist Holme. There is the evidences of Dr Quinn. There is the evidences of the goot Binchy. Who goes to gaol?’
‘In a sense, we’ll keep him dead.’ Cheel was urgent again. ‘There’s no difficulty about that. As soon as he shows signs of wanting to come publicly alive, we simply put the screw on him. But there’s plenty more painting in him yet. Not Wamba paintings. That’s finished. We couldn’t market supposed replicas of the whole lot, if you two had only been straight with me’ – Cheel ventured on a note of robust reproach – ‘we needn’t have got into that jam. But why not new paintings? In moderation, you know. It would be unwise to flood the market. Paintings that will simply turn up here and there during the next few years. The provenance may be a bit tricky. But between us we can manage it.’
Again Braunkopf and Hedda glanced at each other. Was it possible, Cheel asked himself, that a flicker of doubt, of cupidity, was already flickering in their eyes? He hoped so.
‘So there you are,’ he said. ‘It will all be plain sailing, believe me.’
‘Supposings, my goot Cheel, this misfortunate dead painter were not so.’ Braunkopf spoke with the air of one idly interested in beguiling tedium with intellectual speculation. ‘Supposings you could take his sorrowing viddow to a blissful reunitings now. And supposings this puttikler authentink genius produced more voonderble contributings the great vorlt of art.’ For a moment Braunkopf appeared tempted to linger on this elevated and familiar note. Instead, he descended to a more practical viewpoint. ‘It cannot go on for perpetuities. How you arrange the pay-off, yes?’
It was possibly the brutality, the gangsterdom, lurking in this expression that struck a long suppressed chord in the civilized breast of Mervyn Cheel. For the moment, at least, a new voice spoke in him. And it was the voice of one who hated Sebastian Holme the superb painter, who hated Sebastian Holme the successful lover, very much.
‘How?’ he repeated with a sudden snarl. ‘Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake. Poison him with ratsbane. Chuck him into a canal. We’ll take our choice.’
There was a shocked silence. Cheel himself, although not so weak as to be shocked on his own behalf, did wonder whether his tone had been wholly judicious. After all, they were only small-time crooks – Braunkopf and Hedda Holme. They were incapable of bringing anything like his own boldness and breadth of view to the ultimate facts of the situation. Not that he had himself quite seen the truth until this moment. The time would come when Sebastian Holme would have to go.
‘Mrs Holme,’ Braunkopf murmured, ‘vot happiness that your husband was a perisher at the hand of heffalumps, crocodiles, savages, and not left to the mercifuls this eminent critic Cheel!’
The perverse folly of this remark was so evident that Cheel wondered whether to waste time denouncing it. He was still wondering, when an unexpected diversion occurred. The door of Braunkopf’s sanctum opened, and the detestable Wutherspoon entered the room.
‘Darling!’ Wutherspoon cried – and folded Hedda Holme in a tender embrace. ‘They told me you were here, my angel. So I hurried to you with feet as fleet as my desire. One of the poets.’
‘Wuggie, you honey!’ Hedda Holme said.
27
From Wutherspoon, transformed into a lover, it could scarcely be said – with another poet – that the loathsome mask had fallen. His figure hadn’t exactly filled out. Indeed, it occurred to Cheel that he ought to be carrying not a neatly rolled umbrella but a scythe and hour-glass. His complexion was as yellow as ever. His features retained the atrabilious cast so congruous with the misogynistic apophthegms which had formerly been current on his lips. But Cheel, thinking back to Burlington House, remembered a detectable disposition on the part of the female called Debby to make eyes at Wutherspoon – and this even (as Cheel now knew) when Debby’s thoughts must have been much engaged with somebody else. It must be supposed, then, that Wutherspoon – or Wuggles or (now) Wuggie – was not without power of sexual attraction, revolting as this thought was. And what had happened recently seemed clear enough. Not content with substantially mitigating his penury by the sale of ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ and whatever was the other Sebastian Holme he had dishonestly smuggled out of Wamba, Wutherspoon was proposing to cash in on Holme in a big way. He had, in fact, made successful addresses to Holme’s supposed widow – on whose behalf Braunkopf had sold a couple of dozen Holmes only a few months ago. Here, in Braunkopf’s office, the happy couple were shamelessly engaging in amorous transport now.
‘Hedda, darling!’ Wutherspoon was saying. ‘The party’s off. So we can have a lovely lunch together – just you and me.’
‘Oh, Wuggie!’ Hedda received this news with rapture. ‘Isn’t that just swell? But why is the party off?’
Money from Holme Page 16