Death of a Ghost (14 page)

‘I suppose you suggested that it was a contemporary picture?' persisted Belle.

‘I suggested nothing,' said Max. ‘He did all the talking. Isn't that so, Campion? He certainly said it was painted on canvas contemporary with Steen and I agreed with him. So it was. Your friend Van Pijper must have had a stock of old canvases. Very useful.'

Belle's muslin bonnet quivered in the warm air.

‘You're very clever, Max,' she said, ‘but you're not good.'

Max's reply to this summing up of his character was typical. He slipped on one knee at her side and burst into a torrent of words.

‘Let me explain, dear lady. You're judging me unheard. If you had seen the man, you'd have agreed with me. You would have been my ally. You'd have convinced him it was a Steen, sold it for three thousand pounds and spent the money on Hester van Pijper's descendants. And you'd have been right.'

He threw out his arm.

‘There was this man, an over-fed, self-important ignoramus with a ridiculous little glass – the sort of thing the detective in a farce might use – crawling about on my floor talking about the texture and the pigment as though he knew what the words meant. Why was he doing it?'

He sprang to his feet and strode down the room, working himself into' a passion of eloquence, his eyes blazing with righteous fire.

‘He was attempting to get an important picture cheap to present to the art gallery in a beastly town whose underfed millions he hopes to represent in Parliament. By this ostentatious gift he intends to impress the under-educated snobs on the local town council, while the shivering children of the poor, who subscribe to the rates and taxes, are not interested in pictures at all. They want food. Do you know what I intend to do with that fifteen hundred pounds, Belle? I shall buy a motor-car. This fellow's rival candidate owns a factory which employs hundreds and thousands of men. I shall buy one of his cars and the money which my idiot client should have spent on the poor children of his constituency will go back to them after all, with the picture thrown in.'

He finished his peroration, one hand spread out expressively.

The silence which followed this somewhat extraordinary argument was broken by a ladylike and ridiculous: ‘Hear, hear, Max!' from Donna Beatrice.

‘I agree with Max entirely,' she said. ‘Too many people imagine they know something about art.'

Belle raised her eyebrows. ‘It seems to me,' she said, ‘that two blacks make a white and there's a very expensive motor-car thrown in somewhere.'

Mr Campion alone was silent. He was assimilating the facts he had just heard, and comparing them with the interview he had witnessed in the Salmon Gallery. It seemed to him that he was on the verge of a very startling and important idea.

He and Max left together soon afterwards and walked through the Crescent to a taxi-rank on the railway bridge. It was raining and unusually dark for the time of year. Max appeared to be in high spirits. He strode along jauntily, his immense black hat set at an angle. Its brim was so wide that Campion, who towered above him, could not see his face beneath its shadow.

‘The memory of the old!' Max remarked. ‘The coincidence, too! Extraordinary, wasn't it? Quite an instructive afternoon.'

Campion was thinking furiously. The idea which had been nibbling at the back of his mind ever since he had turned out of the Salmon Gallery and walked down Bond Street suddenly became clear, and its significance sent an unaccustomed thrill down his spine.

What he had noticed subconsciously at the Salmon Gallery was an unmistakable family likeness between Max's story to the politician and his confession to Inspector Oates.

Apart from the obvious difference of emotional tone, the points of resemblance were striking: the apparent frankness, the flamboyancy, the wholehearted courage, the completeness of the job. The other side of the picture-selling episode he had heard and now a thought seized and bewildered him. What if there was another side to the confession? What if that, too, had been an essay in the second degree of subtlety?

He glanced down at the figure at his side, walking down the deserted London street, and experienced the odd physical phenomenon so aptly described as ‘the blood running cold'. The more he thought about it the more clear it became. Max's confession had been altogether too easily discounted by the Inspector. It was the confession of the hysterical and affected egotist Max appeared to be at first sight, and which the Inspector still supposed him.

Mr Campion now knew more than the Inspector. He knew that Max was not a negligible idiot; moreover, there seemed a reasonable chance that he was one of those strange, slightly crooked brains who not only take the courageous path but blind themselves to danger and truth alike. As Campion saw it now, Max's confession might very well have been a doubly ingenious lie, and if so the truth was terrifying.

He was aroused at this point in his reflections by a taxi pulling up beside them and Fustian's solicitous enquiry if he desired a lift.

Campion made his excuses, and Max entered the vehicle and was driven away. Mr Campion stood in the rain looking after the cab until it disappeared from sight, momentarily stricken by what he could only regard as a species of revelation.

In the taxi Max removed his hat and lay back and laughed a little.

For some time he remained content in the contemplation of his own cleverness, but after a while he frowned and his bright black eyes narrowed. He was thinking of Mrs Potter.

–

O
N THE
morning of the Thursday on which she died Mrs Potter rose a trifle earlier than was her wont, because there was so much to do.

She climbed out of the bed which was a divan by day and stood for a moment thinking. Her nightdress, copied from a figure on a Grecian plate, was surmounted by a pathetically warm and ugly bed jacket, comforting her throat and arms which the linen draperies neglected.

Her iron-grey hair was tousled, and her face very pale. She had slept badly.

Mr Potter had already risen and had retired to the lean-to shed behind the scullery in which he bit and printed his lithographs. He was safe for another hour at least.

His wife dressed mechanically, nervous lines wrinkling her forehead.

The studio was draughty and not very comfortable, so that its air of careful unconventionality was a little sad. The Chianti bottle and Roman shawl school of decoration now suggested less of the
vie de Bohême
than the set for an amateur production of
Trilby
, and the romantic makeshifts and picturesque squalor so brave in youth were in middle age merely disheartening.

Claire Potter hurried, arraying herself in a Russian overall for housework. It was William's day at Blakenham, the school in Chelmsford which was optimistic enough to employ him as a visiting art master. He had to be ‘got off' in time.

In her efforts to set aside the one vital and terrible thought which had haunted her nights and days for the past three weeks, Mrs Potter forced herself to consider the duties of the day. There were the tickets for the Roman Guild's water-colour show to be sent up to the committee for distribution. Then the efforts of the Gypsy Sketch Club had to be marked and a hurried criticism scribbled on the back of each; arch little criticisms they would be; ‘Tone values! careful!' or ‘That broken wash again! Avoid viridian.'

Claire Potter took them very seriously, which, since she was paid for them, was to her credit and very nearly constituted an excuse.

When the bed had been draped into its striped homespun blanket, and the pillows thrust into their daytime slips and piled into one corner to give a ‘touch of colour' to the room, Mrs Potter made her toilet at the scullery sink.

She had never identified herself with the unwashed movement and performed her ablutions carefully, finishing off her face with rice powder, which she packed herself and sometimes sold in pretty hand-painted boxes.

She moved deftly and methodically, the only way of doing anything in the face of so many domestic inconveniences, although on this particular morning much of her wonted brisk efficiency was absent.

She paused for a time, a wave of sudden heat sweeping up her backbone and over her head, leaving her scalp tingling and her eyes feeling sticky and uncomfortable. She had lived in a world of small things for so long that the intrusion of something really large hardly registered on her conscious mind, but had a curious, physical effect upon her.

She took her brushes out of the turpentine, cleaned them carefully before preparing breakfast, but she dropped the whole handful of them and upset the jar at the sound of a footstep outside the studio door.

She was angry when she remembered it was probably Lisa or Fred Rennie leaving the
Morning Post
, which came to the Lafcadio front door.

It was some time before she could bring herself to look at the paper. She was the last person in the world to indulge in premonitions, but the restless, terrified feeling which had been slowly increasing all through the week seemed to have become insupportable this morning. It was as though she felt the breath of disaster on her cheek.

She snatched up the paper at last, and scanned the news columns, an ever-growing sense of relief spreading over her as no familiar name caught her eye.

She turned back resolutely to the work of the day. There was so much to do and so little time. It was a terrible life. When one was really artistic it did seem a pity that one should have to spend one's whole time working.

She began to think of Italy, of a little village up in the hills behind San Remo, where one could prop up one's easel beside the church and sit in the shadow and enjoy the lighting. It was all so clean and clear and courageous; the colours straight out of the tube.

She repeated this to herself aloud as though she found a particular comfort in it. If it weren't for William, and their dreadful poverty, and the never-ending round of things to do, she would go back to that village.

Just for an instant, when she was spreading the peasant cloth over the old English gate-legged table, an impulse seized her to go, to go at once, to leave everything and fly precipitately. But this outcome of an instinct for self-preservation was unfortunately hastily put aside.

She would think about it, perhaps. If her nerve failed her she might try it in the autumn. As it was, she must see Fred Rennie about some paint. And there was Miss Cunninghame coming at half past three for her lesson. The day was going to be a rush.

There had been times when Mrs Potter had enjoyed Thursday. She liked being busy, she liked the air of importance which being secretary to the Roman Guild gave her, and she enjoyed pointing out to the refined and wealthy Miss Cunninghame exactly where that good lady's rather dated taste had let her down.

But today was different.

Mr Potter returned from the shed at the moment when the kippers were set on the table.

Mrs Potter looked at him as though she were seeing him for the first time as he came in at the doorway, and it occurred to her forcibly that he was of no possible help to her in her terrible situation. She had never had a great opinion of him and, looking at him now in this new cold light, she wondered how on earth they had ever come to marry. Surely it must have been obvious in those halcyon days thirty years ago at St Ives that the burden which that sad-faced youth had carried in his soul was not genius, but a gloomy conviction of his lack of it.

All this was particularly sad because Mr Potter was very happy. He was collarless, his old canvas trousers bagged at knee and seat, and his feet thrust into heelless Turkish slippers were bare. But he was joyful. The wretchedness had almost completely vanished from his face, and he waved a damp piece of jap paper at his wife in something akin to triumph.

‘A beauty,' he said. ‘A beauty. Claire, my dear, that last stone is a corker. I'm afraid I'm a little dirty. The ink, you know. But look at it! You couldn't get that feeling on ordinary stone. Sandstone's a new and important medium. I've always said so and this is going to prove it.'

He pushed the crockery out of the way and set the print down upon the tablecloth, leaving an inky thumb-smear upon the linen.

The sight of this blemish was the first blot on Mr Potter's morning, and he dropped his hand over it hastily, glancing at his wife out of the corners of his eyes.

Somewhat to his relief she was not looking at him but staring out of the window, an expression on her face that he did not remember having seen there before. She looked almost afraid, almost gentle.

For some reason which he did not understand, this phenomenon delighted him. He plucked at her sleeve.

‘Look,' he said. ‘It's good, isn't it? I was going to call it “A Bit of Old Bayswater”, but I think I might have something a bit more modern than that, since it's come off. There's the railway bridge, you see. It's come out beautifully, hasn't it? Those nice shadows there.'

She still did not speak, and he continued to gloat over the lithograph.

‘I thought I'd frame it and hang it over there, instead of the Medici print. After all, an original's better than a reproduction any day.'

‘Oh, William, don't be silly. Get on with your breakfast. I've got such a lot to do.'

Mrs Potter flicked the print on to the divan and put the food back in front of her husband.

‘Oh, be careful, my dear. It's not dry. Such a beautiful print. It's taken me all the morning.'

Despair was creeping back into Mr Potter's tone, and as he sat down meekly now and pecked at his kipper, which had grown cold and unappetizing, he looked old and neglected and rather dirty.

Mrs Potter ate her breakfast as though she would have disliked it had she thought about it. Once again the frightened expression which made her look gentle deceived her husband, and, after a sly glance to see that his print was all right, he leant forward.