Parlour Four Page 7

  ‘Gibson here. Your synchronised watches, sir. They won’t wash.’

  ‘Won’t wash?’ Momentarily, Dr Cudbird was so at sea that he found himself reflecting that one doesn’t send watches, whether synchronised or not, to the laundry. ‘Just what do you mean, Inspector?’

  ‘I mean that those two Thimbles – and pretty rascals they are – have ceased to help us with our enquiries. They’ve gone home. In a taxi, so as not to attract notice. Only somebody split on us, and there were photographers waiting. Curse that damned Gas Board.’

  ‘Inspector Gibson, you forget yourself. But explain.’

  ‘They’ve come out with their report, after the very devil of a delay. They’ve had to dig deep, they say. Literally that. They’ve found a fractured main in a deep conduit. The stuff wandered about underground, and then chose to snug up in that accursed Number 36. And the whole thing, of course, utterly beyond young Harold Thimble’s contriving. You might as well accuse him of having sunk a bloody battleship.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘As for the start of it all, sir, you may feel it deserves thought.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Dr Cudbird paused, and found that no further words occurred to him. ‘Quite so,’ he repeated, and rang off.

  MELENCOLIA

  I

  Charles Bibury, although possessing rather more of general information than most prosperous and busy painters bother to pick up, had never heard of Ambrose Scurl. So when the woman sitting next to him evidently thought to clinch her proposal by saying quietly, ‘My father is Ambrose Scurl’, Bibury had to decide whether to look frankly and regretfully blank, or to pretend to knowledge he didn’t possess and hope for the best.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘Your very kind suggestion attracts me strongly, I need hardly say. But, just at present, there are rather formidable difficulties. In fact, insuperable ones, I’m sorry to have to confess.’

  In introducing him to the woman while marshalling her guests, his hostess had named her as Mrs Blond, and they’d hardly sat down before Mrs Blond explained that she was now a widow, and ‘kept house’ for her father, who was ‘wonderful for his years’. This was a shade more rapidly communicative in the personal way than Bibury regarded as appropriate in dinner-party chat. So he had decided that Mrs Blond was a bit of a bore, and through the soup and fish he talked for the most part with the woman on his other hand, a lively old soul he’d known for many years. But then Mrs Blond had come back at him to an even odder effect. Would he consider, she wanted to know, accepting a commission to paint her father’s portrait? Bibury was startled. With a young and almost unknown artist the abruptness of the thing would have been pardonable and probably agreeable. To come thus head-on at a person of his eminence (and eminent he was obliged to know that he was, whether deservedly or not) wasn’t at all in order. But he mustn’t, of course, snub a fellow guest, so what seemed to be needed was a rather elaborate courtesy. It was when he embarked on this that Mrs Blond interrupted with the information that her father was Ambrose Scurl.

  Bibury persevered with polite explanations. He didn’t say that he was accustomed to receive all such overtures through an agent, and still less that his London agent had confirmed with an opposite number in New York that a specified acreage of carefully applied pigment should be available for exhibition in six months’ time. But he did say roundly that over a long period ahead he had promised more than he feared he might be able to perform. Otherwise, of course . . .

  ‘And a replica,’ Mrs Blond said, disregarding. ‘There would have to be a replica. We have to think, you see, of the National Portrait Gallery.’

  ‘Gracious lady, I never paint replicas. No doubt there is respectable precedent for such things in the history of painting – and even of sculpture – since the cinquecento. But it seems to me unnatural and uncreative, and I’ve never gone in for it. Copies are another matter. The legal position about them is, I am told, obscure. But I’d never object to the taking of one. Indeed, I’ve found a reliable man, a copyist whom I use from time to time.’ Bibury paused on this. ‘Or a reliable lady,’ he added.

  ‘I will write to you,’ Mrs Blond said with surprising dignity. ‘Have you been to Glyndebourne lately?’

  On the following evening Bibury, a bachelor with old-fashioned habits, dined alone in his club. But afterwards he ran into a man called Micklethwaite, who was some sort of don at Oxford. They drank a glass of port together.

  ‘Micklethwaite,’ it occurred to Bibury to ask, ‘did you ever hear of somebody called Ambrose Scurl?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Micklethwaite, who owned the somewhat unpolished manners frequently to be remarked in the academic world, allowed himself to look surprised. ‘The philosopher, of course.’

  ‘And at the top of his tree?’ This was always a point of some importance with Charles Bibury.

  ‘’Quondam very much so, I’d say. But outmoded now. A very glum philosopher. Only on the foundations of unyielding despair can the temple of the human spirit henceforth . . .’

  ‘This Scurl talked like that?’

  ‘That I can’t say, never having heard him converse. But he certainly wrote in some such fashion.’

  ‘But is that kind of feel about things wholly outmoded? I’d have thought that with the general existentialist persuasion that we’ve been plonked down in a set-up that’s totally absurd . . .’

  ‘That’s rather different.’ Micklethwaite’s tone hinted indulgence, so that it occurred to Bibury that the man was probably a philosopher himself, and not a devotee of numismatics, papyrology, or what-have-you in the learned Oxford way. ‘I suppose you’re thinking of Sartre and his crowd,’ Micklethwaite went on. ‘One has to remember that they evolved their philosophy during the German occupation of France, when being passive just wasn’t on among decent chaps. So they made a good deal of the plain fact that every man can choose to act one way or the other. Whether or not Scurl came to pay any attention to them, I don’t know. He belongs essentially to an earlier time. Pretty well to Nietzsche, in fact, and the death of God.’

  ‘Ah, yes – the death of God.’ Bibury hastened to show that he was au fait with this interesting historical event. Then he produced what he judged to be a reasonably well-informed question. ‘Schopenhauer, now: would he come into this Scurl’s picture?’

  ‘I’d suppose so. At least they can both be called pessimists. Most philosophers are optimists, after a fashion.’

  Bibury now felt that this talk was in some danger of turning into what Micklethwaite would term a tutorial, and that he ought to shift to his own ground.

  ‘Optimism and pessimism are a bit off my beat,’ he said. ‘But it’s otherwise with success and failure – and I see irritatingly more of one than the other. Modern portraiture has become an adjunct of the success story. Some inane society woman is brought into my studio, and I have to make it apparent for all to see that she gave the most triumphant ball of the season. Or I try to cope with some red-faced, over-dieted fellow who would have it known on the canvas that he has just brought off a tremendous killing in the City. I believe “killing” is the word.’

  ‘I understand that it must be taxing. Yet think, Bibury, of those of your confrères who are perpetually painting horses. Having to impart an impression of conscious worth to a Derby winner must be yet more boring – and demeaning, if you like. I’ve sometimes suspected, incidentally, that losing horses are conscious of defeat while winning ones are unaware of having distinguished themselves. If that’s so, the painter is required positively to cheat, is he not? And it’s hard cheese on the horses.’ Micklethwaite paused, apparently to admire his involved whimsy. ‘Why are you curious about Scurl?’

  ‘It’s only a passing curiosity. I’ve been asked to take on painting his portrait, but it’s out of the question. I’m full up for a long way ahead.’

  ‘With red-faced and over-dieted tycoons? Scurl would be something of a change from that. If you have an itch to ditch success and go slumming after failure,
he might prove just your man.’

  Bibury didn’t judge this consideration to have been expressed with much amenity, and he took his leave of Micklethwaite as soon as he had finished his port. But as he retrieved his hat and coat from the chilly and marble-clad recesses of the club he had to acknowledge having received something to think about. He was successful, and thought of himself as by temperament well-equipped to enjoy success. Yet success lurkingly irked him through a feeling that he had come by it on the cheap; failure such as this fellow Scurl’s drew him because, at least by the ultimate standards, he was a failure himself. He hadn’t even (he concluded with an unaccustomed dip into morbidity) the honesty to look a failure. If he set up an affair of mirrors and went about a self-portrait what emerged on the canvas would be something red-faced and over-dieted.

  These thoughts absorbed him for some time, so that when he suddenly laughed aloud he was disconcerted to find that for this unseemly demonstration he had come to a halt in a public street, garish with neon lighting, smelly with petrol fumes. He walked on hastily, but his thoughts kept pace with him. Sometimes he still envisaged a miracle: the coming to him from some mysterious beyond of what the scribbling art historians called a third manner. It was the most idle of notions. A third manner comes only to a tiny minority even of those artists who have authentically achieved a first manner and then a second one, and in that whole league he simply didn’t play. In what might be called a high-class academic fashion, he was frankly a commercial artist. It was as simple as that, and he lived with it perfectly comfortably for most of the time. Yes, here he was, a busy little chap scurrying towards a London bus stop, dreaming of Donatello, of Michelangelo and terribilità! Pitiful, he told himself cheerfully, pitiful. And what had started off this useless reverie? A conjectural image of the unknown Ambrose Scurl, failed or outmoded philosopher, as having with dignity come to terms with his own condition, living in retirement, resolved at least to make himself no motley to the view. The real Scurl was probably quite different: embittered and fidgety; insisting he had been unfairly treated in Mind in 1940; intent on getting himself at life-size and half-length into their blessed National Portrait Gallery. His daughter’s assault tended to bear out at least this last assumption. A most insistent woman.

  The insistent woman’s letter was on his breakfast-table next morning. Bibury was rather struck by it. Without ceasing to be business-like it did briefly touch on a point of sentiment. Her father was in his eighty-first year; his tenure of life had to be thought about; she possessed a few mediocre photographs of him; and death-masks were—were they not?—happily outmoded. She then named a fee that doubled Bibury’s going rate even when extorted from livery companies or multinational conglomerates. Initially, Bibury discounted this last consideration. Mrs Blond would have second thoughts about her cheque as soon as she started inquiring around. But then it came to Bibury – just as a matter of curiosity – to consult reference books. The woman’s deceased husband turned out to have been a tax-haven type of the first order. His initial million had been in his pocket almost before his pockets were in long trousers, and he hadn’t looked back thereafter. It perhaps said something for his widow that with the world’s playfields presumably at her command she had fixed herself up housekeeping for her father, an obscure cough-in-ink philosopher. Mrs Blond concluded her letter with a touch of grandeur somewhat alien, however, to the mores of the professional classes. She named an hour in the day at which she was accustomed to be at home.

  Bibury succumbed – not with any intention of taking the job, since his timetable was not to be tinkered with for at least some months ahead. It was simply that he felt curious about Ambrose Scurl. He could take a look at the old boy, and even perhaps have some talk with him, during a call that could easily be represented as a necessary courtesy to his daughter. He’d enter a little more fully into the circumstances forbidding him to undertake what would have been a most interesting commission, and come away with a small accession to his knowledge of human nature in senescence.

  Such was at least his conscious view of his behaviour as a taxi took him up to Hampstead. The senescence to be inspected proved to harbour in a large but commonplace house with the Heath and its ponds conveniently at the back door. Bibury wondered whether the aged philosopher took a daily toddle there, observing the flying kites and the small boys angling for suppositious fish; perhaps, like the poet Swinburne at Putney, pausing to pat the heads of infants in their well-sprung perambulators. Swinburne had been provided with a fixed sum of money in order to recruit himself with a moderate draught of sherry for the return to his guardian at The Pines. Would Scurl, Bibury wondered, prove to have passed under a similar suzerainty at the hands of his devoted daughter? Would he, for instance, so much as have heard of any project for the painting of his portrait – let alone himself be whoring after so shadowy an immortality as might be conferred by that compendious receptacle off Trafalgar Square? It was an amusing question which must presently resolve itself.

  He rang a bell. The door was opened – as, just occasionally, doors were still opened for Bibury – by a manservant. His inquiry was received in silence but with an acquiescent bow; he was led through a shadowy hall; a further door was opened before him.

  ‘Sir Charles Bibury!’ the man announced – as loudly as if into the din of a large reception, but in some indescribable fashion rather mournfully as well.

  Bibury’s eyes ought to have been immediately upon his hostess, who had risen to greet him, but for perceptible moments they were on the walls of the room. The girl getting out of the bath was Renoir, the bridge spanning the water-lily pond was Monet’s bridge at Giverny, Mont St Victoire beneath an archway of pine boughs was Cézanne. There was a Seurat, a Gauguin, a Van Gogh. It might have been called rather a ‘safe’ collection, but such a prodigality of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in private hands surprised Bibury a good deal. He wondered whether the display had been brought together by the lady now before him or by her deceased husband the tycoon. Or was it conceivable that Ambrose Scurl himself was a man of taste, and had masterminded an operation which his daughter’s opulence made feasible? One obvious question presented itself at once. With all this interest in art around, why had it taken these people so long to get busy about a portrait of the philosophic Scurl? They could have had their pick of a succession of swells. They could have had the ageing John. They could have gone out on a limb a little and had Sutherland. They could have gone a good deal further out and had Kokoschka. Instead of which there was this belated proposal. So Bibury would have to stand in the middle of all these monstrously valuable canvases and reiterate that he himself had no time for daddy Ambrose. Altogether it was an awkward business. He wished he hadn’t come.

  ‘Sir Charles, how kind of you to call.’

  The woman was doing her stuff. Presently there would be a tinkle of teacups and a plate of macaroons. But would there be a philosopher? Perhaps Scurl was bedridden. At his age that would be fair enough. Conceivably it was envisaged that their chosen artist should get to work not on a sitter but a permanently supine person: Scurl in articulo mortis. Wasn’t there some poet or other who’d had himself painted in his shroud? Bibury had a brief vision of trying to cope with a dying man’s fingers as they plucked and plucked feebly at some sheet or coverlet. At least, he told himself, you can’t be expected to paint a death-rattle. They’d have to import some sort of electronic gadget if they wanted to commemorate that.

  This macabre line of thought was dispelled first by Mrs Blond’s devoting a few minutes to small talk and then by the predicted appearance of the tea things. ‘Tea equipage’ would perhaps have been the more fitting term, since what was paraded ran to a little blue flame, a good deal of silver, and what Bibury rather nervously took to be Sèvres. Mrs Blond, however, performed briskly rather than with any considered elegance before all this paraphernalia.

  ‘My father,’ she said, ‘will join us in a few minutes. It is his habit to take a glass of brandy a
nd soda at this hour. But he has a fancy for making rather a private business of it.’

  So here was another possible view of the situation. Dreary old Ambrose was a drunk of long standing. Ever so long ago, feeling his power to philosophise slipping away from him, he’d taken to sitting too often and too long over the decanters in some drab college common room. Now they’d succeeded in hauling the inebriate sage at least half on to the water wagon. He needed a tot or two before facing up to company, but it was judged that he was at last presentable even for the acid test of portraiture.

  ‘I much look forward to meeting the professor,’ Bibury said formally. (That Scurl was, or had been, a professor seemed a safe enough bet.) ‘But I’m terribly afraid that I’m taking up his and your time most unwarrantably. I’ve really only come to repeat that, most unhappily . . .’

  At this moment the door opened and Ambrose Scurl came into the room. He was above the middle height, and he was in a deep depression. These two disparate facts were simultaneously apparent. Scurl didn’t have to speak, he didn’t even have to give you a look, before his nervous condition revealed itself. Here was no philosopher a little daunted by the eternal silence of the heavens, or even by the discovery that we share our planet with eleven-foot submarine tube-worms endowed with the capacity to absorb nourishing bacteria through their skin. Here was simply something which, if unsheltered by wealth and position, would subsist in a bin huddled with others of its kind in a drug-conditioned muted misery. And what made this so instantly manifest was the man’s moving within an aura of isolation, of detachment, which one seemed, paradoxically, to hear as a kind of unnatural soundlessness which for the moment was more commanding than anything one clearly saw about him. That Mrs Blond, with such a parent on her hands, should nourish the project she did seemed to Charles Bibury an unbearable folly.