Parlour Four Read online

  Thus perplexed and disturbed, he decided to turn to Graham. He had discovered that the chauffeur was of a good many years’ standing as an employee in the Hampstead household – which indeed one might have guessed from the extent to which the man had become low spirited himself. Contriving a private word with Graham wasn’t easy, but Bibury managed it one afternoon when Scurl dropped surprisingly into an uneasy and cough-tormented sleep.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to worry Mrs Blond about her father,’ Bibury began. ‘But the professor doesn’t seem to me to be at all well.’

  ‘You’re telling me. If it was curtains tomorrow, who’d say surprise, surprise?’

  ‘Quite so. There’s been a distinct deterioration even in the short time I’ve known him.’ Bibury hadn’t greatly cared for Graham’s manner of speaking, but at least the man seemed willing to talk. ‘And I fear it’s really a question of whether the portrait should go on. Do you by any chance know whether Mrs Blond appears to have any such thought in mind?’

  ‘A cow as couldn’t see a gate in front of it, that woman is.’

  Bibury of course found this remark extremely improper. But inwardly he had to agree that Mrs Blond was a strong-willed rather than a perceptive person. She had set her mind on the portrait, and it would take a lot to persuade her that it should be scrapped – or even finished, as would be perfectly proper, without the further attendance of its subject in the studio.

  ‘I suppose, Graham, that the professor has always had his ups and downs? On the nervous side, if you follow what I mean.’

  Graham didn’t fail to indicate with a sardonic glance his awareness that he might be supposed too thick to understand a perfectly lucid distinction. But again he spoke up readily enough.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No way, Sir Charles. It’s five years I’ve been with him, and never a cheery chirp has he come up with until almost the other day. It gets you down, does having a fair chronic around year in, year out.’

  ‘It hasn’t got his daughter down.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it doesn’t tell on her. I’ve known her pretty sharp.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Bibury told himself he was doing very wrong in encouraging Graham to talk thus freely about his employers. But his principal impulse was to make sure that he had understood the man. ‘Are you saying,’ he asked, ‘that in your experience the professor has been low spirited and depressed without interruption – until some change has come upon him in the last few weeks, and he has become – in wretched health though he be – capable of an almost buoyant tone?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘Have you any idea of what his daughter thinks about it?’

  ‘He’s pretty close with her still, the old chap is. But he talks to me.’ Graham paused to glance cautiously at Ambrose Scurl, still slumbering at the other end of the studio. ‘He makes plans for the two of us. First one plan and then another – and changing pretty rapidly. Just now it’s that we’re to be off to Monte Carlo in the Rolls together, and break the bank there. Because of what he calls his new theory of probability. A load of crap, I call that. There’s still plenty of the philosopher about him, mark you. But now cheerfulness keeps breaking in.’ Unconscious of thus quoting Dr Johnson’s friend Mr Edwards, Graham shook his head pityingly. ‘And only this morning, it was champagne and oysters at the Ritz.’

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘We are to say one day that we’re doing a double stint here with you – and go to the Ritz together for champagne and oysters. Quite why them, I don’t know. Nasty slimy things! The old fellow’s notion of what they call dissipation, it may be. It’s a dull life in Hampstead.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Bibury was now anxious to bring this unseemly conversation to a close. ‘I think I’d better wake him up – gently, of course – and finish up for the day.’

  ‘Any day now will finish him up, if you ask me. That cough! It’s like listening to the nails going into the coffin. It fair gets me down. And Jobbins too, for the matter of that.’ Jobbins was the butler. ‘And the old bastard’s got you down, all right. Haven’t I seen it. The two of you like a bloody see-saw these weeks past.’

  ‘Not like a see-saw.’ Bibury, although constrained to put up with bad language, couldn’t accept this undignified image. ‘But it’s true that he has been – as you put it – getting me down of late, and himself up after a fashion. And now we’ll say no more about it. I rather think I understand the state of the case.’

  And more understanding followed rather quickly. Ambrose Scurl woke up, and Graham beat a brisk retreat.

  ‘Dear me!’ Scurl said. ‘Have I been taking a nap? It’s the result of feeling relaxed, you know. Having—did I tell you, Bibury?—finished the book.’

  ‘You’ve been writing a book?’ There was an understandable surprise in Bibury’s tone.

  ‘Well, not writing it, exactly. But it’s all so clear in my head that it may be called as good as written. So time to take a holiday, eh? As you will do, my dear Bibury, when you’ve completed this admirable portrait.’

  Hitherto Scurl had always said ‘Sir Charles’. But now it was suddenly ‘Bibury’ in a cordial and entirely appropriate fashion. And Scurl, although coughing horribly and appearing to draw every breath with pain, managed to get to his feet and shamble round the studio.

  ‘A cruise,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll go for. See things I ought to have seen long ago. Ancient civilisations and other ways of living. All that.’

  ‘One of those Hellenic affairs?’ It seemed to Bibury that retired professors listening to other retired professors lecturing on the Minoans would be what Scurl had in mind in this painful fantasy.

  ‘Well, no. Rather dull, all that—eh? One of the whacking great liners—why not the biggest of the lot?—doing a round-the-world affair. Months of it.’

  ‘I see. But isn’t that sort of set-up . . .’ Bibury was about to say ‘a matter of atrociously vulgar gormandising and chucking money around’. But he checked himself in time. ‘Doesn’t it tend to be a bit rackety?’ he substituted.

  ‘No harm in a bit of fun, Bibury – no harm at all.’

  ‘Well, no—I suppose not. Will your daughter go with you?’

  ‘My dear chap! She’d be wholly out of her element, bless her. Think of Bali.’

  ‘Bali?’

  ‘A little commercialised these days, no doubt. But the girls are said to be still marvellous – absolutely marvellous. Mind you, it will be no more than a holiday – although an extended one. A bit of a spree, eh? When I get back, I’ll soon have a great deal of work on hand, a great deal of work. This book I’ve spoken of. No more than a parergon, Bibury, although a fairly weighty one. I have to face it, you know. The magnum opus has yet to come. Finis coronal opus—eh? The same thing’s ahead of you also, I’d say. You’ll have to get down to it, Bibury. Soul-destroying it must be, endlessly turning out tarted-up daubs of socialite nonentities. Where’s Graham? Where’s Graham, I say? We must be off, you know, we must be off.’

  Under this sudden and urgent persuasion, Ambrose Scurl turned round all too hastily in search of his chauffeur. His legs gave way beneath him and he fell, a crumpled heap, to the floor. And Bibury saw that his mouth was gushing blood.

  So there was occasion for an ambulance, after all. On the following afternoon Bibury rang up Mrs Blond and made the proper enquiries.

  ‘My father will come home from hospital on Friday or Saturday,’ Mrs Blond said. ‘It is all arranged. Nurses have been engaged, and Lord Pie has promised to look in everyday.’ Lord Pie was a very exalted physician indeed. ‘So there need be no call for alarm.’

  ‘That is excellent news.’ Bibury wondered how fatuous this sounded. ‘How is he bearing up? Is he in reasonably good spirits?’

  ‘He is very buoyant and confident, I am glad to say.’ Mrs Blond paused on this. ‘When he is conscious, that is.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Lord Pie says that we must be just ever so little cautious over that. It appears that when the
lungs are tainted – as I fear my father’s have been for some time – there is a tendency in the patient to euphoric feeling and behaviour. To being rather optimistic, in fact.’ Mrs Blond added this gloss as if mindful that an artist might well be unfamiliar with a learned word. ‘Lord Pie says that it can often be a most helpful circumstance. So much is within the power of the mind, is it not?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bibury didn’t very well know how to respond here. ‘Quite so. Your father has certainly struck me just lately as commanding quite a stock of useful optimism. He was speaking, incidentally, of perhaps taking rather a long holiday. Do you think he might be persuaded to go to Switzerland – to Davos-Platz, or somewhere like that?’

  ‘I think not.’ Mrs Blond sounded displeased. ‘Lord Pie assures me that sanatoria of the kind you probably have in mind are no longer considered en règle. But about the portrait, Sir Charles.’ This came from the lady with much the effect of recalling the cobbler to his last. ‘My father has mentioned it once or twice, saying it won’t be at all difficult to resume the sittings soon.’

  ‘But nothing of the kind will be in the least necessary.’ Bibury provided this assurance with almost indecent haste and emphasis. Scurl, he now clearly realised, had really succeeded in making him miserable, and he never wanted to see the man again. ‘There are things still to be done to it, of course. But they don’t in the least require the professor’s presence. Please tell him so.’

  ‘Very well, but I fear he will be disappointed. Only this morning, he remarked that you and he had been having some jolly chats. And just before dozing off – or lapsing, perhaps I should say – he said something about bally-somewhere. I failed to follow him. Might he have been thinking of some place in Ireland?’

  ‘I have no idea, Mrs Blond. No idea at all. And now I must not detain you longer. You must have much to do and think about. Do, please, give my good wishes to the professor – and perhaps you will ring me up later, and tell me how things go.’

  ‘In a week or ten days’ time, Sir Charles.’ This was again Mrs Blond putting a superior kind of hireling in his place – or so Bibury construed it. ‘For the present, goodbye.’

  It was, in fact, only after quite a long interval that Mrs Blond rang up. She did so early one morning.

  ‘Sir Charles?’ she said, ‘this is Muriel Blond. My father would very much like to see you. Please come.’

  ‘But of course.’ Bibury said this from an instant feeling that the woman was upset and ought to be deferred to. The words didn’t at all correspond to his inward feeling about Ambrose Scurl.

  ‘It’s about a frame.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘About a frame for the portrait. It seems to be worrying my father very much. About the sort of frame the National Portrait Gallery would approve of. He feels you ought to know.’

  ‘I see.’ What Bibury (whose nervous tone was still obstinately astray) thought he saw was a monstrous impertinence. That he should be hauled out to Hampstead to talk to a sick man about a picture-frame! If it wasn’t impertinent, it was certainly absurd. ‘I’m afraid that, just at present . . .’

  ‘My father is very upset, Sir Charles, and able to talk very little. But the frame does seem to worry him. I am worried myself, but needn’t say it’s not about that. When Lord Pie came in yesterday, he said that there must undeniably be some small occasion for anxiety. It’s something he has never said before. Such a confident man! And I must confess that your little journey may be in vain. My father sleeps a great deal. I have heard the nurses talking together about coma. They are only ignorant women, of course. But it was Lord Pie himself who recommended them.’

  ‘I see. Shall I come out straight away, or would it be better in the afternoon?’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Sir Charles, thank you! The mid-afternoon, I think. He is sometimes a little clearer then.’

  ‘Good! Say three o’clock. And I expect I can find a few bits and pieces—of frames, that is—that might interest your father. Goodbye.’

  Bibury hung up, and went into his studio. The portrait was there – finished and stacked with its face to the wall. He hadn’t looked at it since satisfied that there was nothing more to be done, and he didn’t much want to look at it now. He was no longer clear in his head about what he would find on the canvas if he turned it round. Had he simply painted the courteous depressive whom he had first encountered over Mrs Blond’s petits fours? Or had he caught Scurl as he began to pass into the final phase of what must have been a long-established wasting disease? Or had he, during the last stretch of his labours, evoked by certain deft strokes of the brush that dreadful state of roseate and fatuous day-dream which the Dark Angel ironically induces in this sort of sufferer when preparing to seize upon his prey? Or was it conceivable that Charles Bibury, R.A., had arrived at a third manner after all; had penetrated beneath the mere flux and mutability of things to whatever is unchanging and indestructible in an individual human spirit? Bibury put out his hand to the canvas. Then he thought better of this, ate an uneasy luncheon, and called a taxi.

  He rummaged out some meaningless bits and pieces of gilded wood, and put them in a bag. Then – surely grotesquely – he changed into a dark suit, and was ready for his painful mission. He would speak to Ambrose Scurl, without false cheerfulness but not sorrowfully either, and with what he could manage of sober attention to the hypothetical predilections of the National Portrait Gallery. He would talk for an appropriate length of time in this way, whether Scurl bore any appearance of hearing him or not.

  But it wasn’t to be. A short and well-kept drive led up to the Hampstead house: imposing and four-square, with two large windows on either side of a portico, five windows above these, and five identical windows above that again. Fourteen windows. And in every one of them a blind had been drawn down.

  ‘Stop!’ Bibury’s order to the taxi-driver was peremptory, and the man was so startled that he brought the cab to a halt with a jolt and a jerk. It was only very briefly that Bibury had then to hesitate. He was in no degree an intimate of the stricken household in front of him, and to turn his proposed professional visit into one of awkward and premature condolence would be of no help to Muriel Blond. ‘You can see what has happened,’ Bibury said. ‘Something on which I mustn’t intrude. Take me back.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ the man said. And he reversed down the drive.

  As soon as he got home, Bibury wrote the proper sort of letter. He posted it that evening. At dinner he uncorked a bottle of good claret, and drank half of it. But he failed to sleep at all well. He found himself worrying about that taxi-driver. Had the man felt – without knowing the first thing about the situation – that his fare had somehow behaved inadequately? It was an odd sort of discomfort to lie awake with. During many succeeding days Bibury felt increasingly out of sorts, and finally he had to acknowledge fully what he had been intermittently conscious of for some time: that he had caught from Scurl a bug having nothing to do with tuberculosis. He mightn’t have captured on canvas the philosopher’s melancholy condition, but in a formidable sense it had captured him. Eventually Bibury saw his doctor, and was given some pills. But Christmas had come and gone by the time he felt quite up to the mark again.

  TOM DICK AND HARRY

  ‘They must be told sooner or later,’ Arthur Patchett said to his wife. ‘And the sooner the better, I’d suppose. When it still won’t mean very much to them.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’ Muriel Patchett spoke as if this was a rather uncommon event. ‘Need they ever know? Even now, it might be upsetting. And when we are all getting along so well together.’

  ‘Certainly we’re doing that. There’s not a doubt about it.’ Arthur pronounced this with all the authority proper in a successful businessman. ‘But the time will come when the state of the case must be brought into the open. I understand there’s an age at which a young person acquires the legal right to see any relevant documents there may be. You and I think of Tom, Dick and Harry as still no mo
re than kids who wouldn’t make much even of a birth certificate shoved under their noses. But they’re growing older every day, aren’t they?’ Patchett paused on this, much as if it were a proposition which his wife might be moved to dispute. ‘And nowadays there are several quite trivial situations in which a young adult has to produce such a certificate. Or at an earlier age a boy may simply gather that such documents exist, and ask to see his own out of mere curiosity. If that were to happen with us, and it became obvious that we had been withholding information about our family set-up instead of being candid about it, the result might well be what you call upsetting.’

  The circumstances giving rise to this conversation were not at all complicated. Arthur and Muriel Patchett, having waited in vain through several years after their marriage for parenthood to come to them, had adopted a male infant upon whom they bestowed the name of Thomas. Hard upon their so doing, Muriel became pregnant – which was not, it appeared, an unusual sequel to an act of adoption. She was then delivered of male twins, and to these the parents somewhat unguardedly gave the names of Richard and Henry. It was thus that Tom, Dick and Harry Patchett came into the world. There were no further Patchett children.

  Dick and Harry were identical twins – ‘monozygotic’ the doctor had learnedly said – and it was, of course, regularly declared by all who came into contact with them that they were as like as two peas. And, oddly enough, Tom, who was senior to the twins by little more than a year, bore a marked physical resemblance to them, although there was no possibility of any blood-tie being in question. From time to time acquaintances even spoke of them as the Patchett triplets, and since Arthur and Muriel inclined to reticence in the matter, this further misconception went largely uncontradicted. Moreover, it had so happened that shortly after the birth of the twins Arthur Patchett moved his activities and abode from the south of England to the north. The society into which the Patchetts were thus brought took little interest in family relationships and what may be called lineage. The women talked mostly about the cost of clothes and comestibles, the men about motor cars and the threatening incomprehensibilities of a rapidly developing computerised world. Had the Patchetts contrived a multiple birth – six or seven at a go such as one occasionally sees on television – the progress of the litter would have been watched with some curiosity. But twins were of no particular interest, and triplets, although more of a rarity, were equally without much news value. All this was satisfactory to Arthur and Muriel as they continued to hesitate about coming clean to the three boys.