Gently With the Painters (10 page)

Gently shrugged. How did he, if it came to that?

‘You might have made a judge, or a priest or something. But not a detective – it’s a sheer waste of human material. Just look at that mouth, and the set of the brows! A doctor, even … but not a policeman.’

The topic was making Gently feel uneasy, so that he was
glad when Withers interrupted them with the sherry. About Mallows there was a fearless and unceasing
penetration
; both his brain and his pencil had a scalpel-like sharpness.

‘You like a dry sherry, do you?’

‘Yes … I prefer it dry.’

‘Good, because I don’t carry much of the other. But this is a Vino del Pasto, Domecq, ’16 – that was the best year for sherry since … oh, ’82.’

Unquestionably they were drinking a fine and delicate sherry. Gently leant against the bench and sniffed and sipped it with appreciation. Mallows, squatting on a window sill, watched him over considered mouthfuls, and every now and then an elvish twinkle came into his eye.

‘So you’ve come back to me, then!’ He was forcing Gently to meet his eye. ‘You’ve taken a sniff at Mr Johnson, and you think that hewon’t do. Personally speaking, I think you’re right … as you may know, I’ve done business with him. He, too, has a mouth with a story … then there’s his nose: that isn’t quite a failure. Yes … I think you’re quite right … you mustn’t let Johnson bias your viewpoint.’

‘Why do you say: “So you’ve come back to me”?’

‘My dear fellow!’ Mallows lofted a shaggy eyebrow at him. ‘In the first place the Palette Group enjoys level pegging with Johnson, and in the second, I was the last person to see Shirley alive. Have a little more sherry – the second glass is often the best.’

Gently grunted but permitted his glass to be taken. It was a sherry he would have drunk with the devil himself. Again the two of them sat silently drinking, Gently by the bench and Mallows in the window.

‘Let me guess, if I can, a few of the things you want to ask me. From the beginning I’ve tried to look at this affair as you would …’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I asked them?’

‘Don’t spoil the fun, you moron! Let’s reverse the roles for the moment –
I’m
the detective, and
you’re
the suspect.’

‘All right … if it amuses you.’

‘Drink your sherry and listen to me.

‘To begin with, have you ever been to bed with Shirley Johnson?’

‘What does the suspect reply?’

‘Remember! You’re being me.’

‘Very well. I think I may have been, but I’d better be quiet about it.’

‘That’s good – very good. It’s what I expected all along. Now, your wanting to be quiet about it opens up some possibilities. If I think that she’s been your mistress, then I think I can see a motive. She’s been threatening you, hasn’t she – threatening to shop you to her husband?’

‘I wouldn’t go as far—’

‘Wait a moment – here’s something better!

‘Suppose – just only suppose – that you were infatuated with Shirley Johnson. Now it’s not enough to go to bed with her – she must be solely, wholly your own. She has become a symbol to you, the fiery cross of a desperate faith: she will, you think, transform your existence, she will give a substance to your dreams—’

‘Now you’re laying it on too thick!’

‘Drink your sherry – I say, just suppose. We can suppose a thousand things to see if they fit the given facts. Of course, I’m not going to claim that Shirley could inspire Olympian
passions – she wasn’t a beauty, by any means, or brilliant either, or even good. No, she was drearily psychopathic and trying to sublimate her repressions, which, as you no doubt know, is a lot of claptrap and fundamentally impossible.

‘Never mind! Take Shirley for what she was, and no more. In this particular equation it doesn’t matter in the slightest. On the other side we’ll set another unbalanced personality, a man who has never advanced beyond a certain point of adolescence. X – we’ll call him X – probably had an unfortunate childhood, enough to set him dreaming compensatory dreams of greatness; it happens all the time, I know – it’s the standard pattern of adolescence; but now and then one finds a psyche that never gets beyond that phase.

‘He grows up – his body does, and he acquires a surface shell of maturity. There is an annoying world of reality to which, with reluctance, he has to conform. But
underneath
there remains the fever, the fear-triggered belief in his greatness: he is a statesman, a general, manqué – a poet, perhaps – perhaps a painter!

‘One sees him, absorbed, quiet, perhaps
friendly-seeming
, but behind his shy smile lies a perpetual frost. His best friend, if he can find one, is a representative of his dream-calling, such a one as he feels may understand his smothered genius. And it may be, that as an amateur, he pursues that calling, at the same time imagining the signs of greatness he is exhibiting. He is modest, of course – that is the mask that hides the dream! – but prouder than a peacock if you scratch him unawares.

‘So there’s my man, this X, becoming infatuated with Shirley. In her he sees a conductor between his dream and
its realization. She is the symbol and the path; through her, he can rise to his full stature. First with her the dream becomes fact, but after her, with all the world. Oh, I know it’s a common psychological pattern – but here we are dealing with a critical intensity.

‘Now to go back to the other side of the equation, to Shirley Johnson and her peculiar repressions.
She
wasn’t obsessed by any delusions of grandeur – hers all belonged to quite a different category. She was homosexual, of that I’m certain, but she didn’t happen to possess the courage of her secretions; instead she compelled herself to associate with men – not to bed with them, necessarily, but to dominate and tantalize them.

‘She liked to be the queen in a circle of men. She liked to rule their roost, to have favourites, to settle disputes. She plotted and intrigued between the two jealous factions, while remaining herself securely perched upon the fence.

‘Could our X have possibly chosen a less amenable subject? My dear fellow, our equation was dynamite from the beginning! We may suppose that to start with she smiled upon his advances – flattered them, teased them, brought his dreams to a pitch of madness. Then he began – isn’t it probable? – to propose taking his dreams in earnest. He might want to throw up his job and to have our Shirley run away with him. You can guess her reaction – she would have slapped him down with a bang; she would have used that scathing tongue of hers, scattered his dream house to the winds …

‘Isn’t it an amusing supposition to indulge in over some sherry? By and large it fits the facts – at least, while I’m playing the Superintendent!’

He drank, and Gently drank; it had the air of an unexpressed toast. Mallows turned his glass by the stem to display its exquisite spiral filaments.

‘Lace twist … these are a pair. I’m rather fond of a bit of glass. I picked these up in that shop in Lynton – you know the place? He stung me a fiver.’

‘Am I still playing at being the suspect?’

‘Yes, of course. Until we’ve finished our drink.’

‘There’s a question you forgot to ask me.’

‘Don’t tell me! Is Stephen Aymas our X?’

Gently nodded, at the same time reaching for the sketching block. He was rather surprised, then, to find what Mallows had been making of him. Other people had sketched Gently at one time or other, but, allowing for different techniques, they had shown a unanimity in their portrayals. Mallows had found something different,
something
the others had missed. He had shown Gently looking younger and with a wondering expression in his eyes. Yet it wasn’t youthfulness either, but some sort of inner illumination; he had done it by lightening all the tones, by smudging and thumbing away the charcoal.

‘So what is your answer going to be to that one?’

‘I don’t quite know. I don’t think it would be Aymas.’

‘Too much of an extrovert – yes, I agree. An ambitious soul, mind you, but quite a healthy little monad. He would tell the world his wrongs rather than simmer them over in private.’

‘You have your own suspicions, of course?’

‘If I have, I don’t tell my suspects. Don’t forget one important point – you were the last person to see Shirley alive.’

‘Yes.’ Gently laid the sketch down on the bench, undecided whether or not he found it flattering. Twice, now, Mallows had recurred to that point … why did he feel the need to emphasize it so much?

‘If you like I’ll go on with my interrogation – this is a game that ought to be popular at parties! Now consider this carefully: you’ve been cagey about the meeting. There was more going on there than you admitted to, wasn’t there?’

‘A good deal more … there was a row between Aymas and Mrs Johnson. To be frank, it got to the stage where he was calling her a liar. There was such a row down there that it interfered with a darts match in the bar – and it went on for about an hour. It should have been quite a memorable set-to.’

‘You are right, quite right – it should have been indeed.’ Mallows showed no surprise at the extent of Gently’s information.

‘On that basis, perhaps, you could make some
suggestions
?’

‘Don’t hurry me, man! I’m on the point of putting some to you. Let me see …’ He did a miming of intense concentration. ‘You admitted, I remember, that the Palette Group had suffered a split. On the one side stood the traditionalists (of whom you yourself are a prominent member), and on the other the modernists, and all that sort of flim-flam.

‘Shirley Johnson, you tell me, had a foot in either camp, and by her pictures you couldn’t discover if she were biased in a particular direction. Both sides had a claim to her and supplied her with favourites.

‘Now, I put it to you that you can tell me what happened that evening.’

Gently slowly nodded. ‘I could hazard a guess, I think! It seems to fit that she dropped her neutrality and committed herself, that evening …’

‘Which is exactly what I suspected: she committed herself to the modernists. It was done in a fit of temper, you can bet your last sou on that. Something had happened to upset Shirley before she ever arrived at that meeting, so she picked a quarrel with Aymas, and after him, with the rest of the tribe.’

‘She picked it with him because, being her favourite …’

‘Just so. He was the one she could hurt the most. It was never a question of artistic conviction, just a wicked talent for finding the rawest spot.’

‘And what would you make of her breaking out like that?’

‘Ah! The first time, too, after she’d ridden the fence for years. But you mustn’t try to quiz a Superintendent, you know – you must leave him alone to add his two and two together. By the bye … do you think you could use me at Scotland Yard?’

It may have been the result of the sherry, but they both suddenly found themselves laughing – Mallows, indeed, doubled up with mirth, and had to wipe the tears out of his eyes.

‘I’ve told you everything – everything – haven’t I? Everything you were going to ask me! That’s the silliest interrogation – and the best – you’ve ever done!’

‘There were one or two other points …’

‘You devil, Gently! But not before lunch, I shan’t permit it. We’ve had quite enough of cops and suspects – damn it, man, I haven’t shown you a single picture.’

There was no calling Mallows to order even if Gently
had wanted to, but the academician had already given him more to chew on than he had expected. What was more, and this was rare with Gently, he felt an affinity with the man; Mallows had charm and more than charm – one felt at home with him in a moment.

‘These are things I’ve done for myself, all the ones you see stored in the racks, and there are one or two early canvases which I didn’t sell at the time. One day, I’m going to build a gallery. I want to see them all set out. Some artists can’t stand their own pictures –
avec raison
, you’ll say, of some contemporaries.’

‘Wouldn’t you find it a bit … overpowering?’

‘Not a whit. I’ve got the devil’s own ego. Then it’s nice to be able to see the subjects that you’ve got rid of – you won’t have to paint
that
again, or these, or those. You can’t guess what a satisfactory feeling it gives you.’

‘Don’t you enjoy painting, then?’

‘It’s a bed of thorns, my dear fellow. An artist is the most tormented devil alive. He loathes the sight of a blank canvas and yet he’s always standing in front of one – he sees a vision which gets on his nerves, and somehow then he has to get rid of it. Until that’s done, he can’t live with himself. He’s like a prophet with a gag in his mouth. You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: either you paint
for
someone, or else you’re not an artist; and that goes for every other art under the sun.’

While he spoke he was pulling out one canvas after another, bewildering Gently by the succession of subjects. Unlike most of his contemporaries Mallows scorned to specialize, and his astonishing talents seemed to embrace the entire cosmos. Landscape, seascape, portraiture, still
life, each one had come to be conquered by that luminous, rich brush; crowd scenes, architecture, horses, snowscapes, even historical reconstructions; there seemed nothing that he hadn’t attempted.

‘Do you see what it is I’m trying to do? Good lord, what a period this is for an artist! For years I’ve been telling people where they stand with art, and might as well have shouted it up a chimney. We’ve changed our whole footing, that’s the point of departure. Without noticing it, we’ve crashed through a spiritual sound barrier. There’s a curtain pulled, Gently, across the centuries preceding us, and it’s cut off the old sun to leave us blinded by the new.

‘Do you know what engendered art, and society, and everything else? It was fear, plain fear, nothing bigger or nobler than that. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of all the great Unknown: it drove men to get together, to search for a meaning, to increase their stature.

‘Just as it did our old friend, X! This was his tragedy, historically foreshadowed. A race of X’s were driven together, to glorify themselves and to tame their universe. They insisted that it should be significant and they set up gods who understood it; and then, by pomp and rank and circumstance, they added divinity to man.