Silence Observed (3 page)

“Disgusting,” Gulliver said. “To think that, if I’d been born an Italian, I might be living in the Vatican, looking after a few old walls and ceilings and things for the Pope.”

Appleby shook his head.

“My dear Gulliver,” he replied, “you might have the Brera, and be compelled to exist in Milan. Or be living out your life in Urbino. They’ve a nice little gallery, but I don’t think you’d care for their winters.”

“No, no – it would have to be Rome. Have you ever wintered in Rome?” Gulliver was leading the way over stretches of obscure mosaic in the direction of the smoking room. “I never have. And that’s positively absurd. I might be a damned civil servant.”

“But haven’t you spent years in Italy?”

“Of course I have.” Gulliver was whimsically impatient. “How do you think I learned my job? But I tell you I’ve never spent a winter in Rome.”

“You’d find it overrated, I don’t doubt. Better just to read about it in a nostalgic way in Edwardian novels. The reality would be disenchanting. I understand there’s a great deal of snow, and that the natives have never studied to accommodate their lives to it. Moreover in winter Rome is full of Romans, just as in spring London is full of Londoners. And you know how tiresome that is. No capital city is tolerable except when voided of its inhabitants.”

Sir Gabriel Gulliver received this with appropriate amusement. Entering the smoking-room, he dived into a corner to ring a bell, and then returned to Appleby, still mildly laughing.

“Nice of you,” he said, “to talk to an old buffer in what you conceive of as his own antique conversational mode. A good many of you youngsters, you know, have no conversation at all… Turned fifty yet?”

“I’m fifty-three.”

“Precisely. A youngster in my regard, you may well believe.”

The arrival of a servant relieved Appleby for a moment from the necessity of keeping up this badinage. Gulliver was making some rather particular enquiries about Madeira. It was possible that the great gallery over which he presided had no retiring age for its Director, and he might well be on the farther side of sixty-five. His pose as an old dodderer, however, was merely an amiable affectation. He was in the prime at least of his intellectual powers, and there were wide stretches of art history in which he was still far ahead of any up-and-coming younger men. Appleby didn’t know him very well, despite Judith’s obscure cousinship with him. But he had always found him entertaining. Perhaps it was only to entertain him that Gulliver had yanked him out of the reading-room now.

“And you?” Gulliver demanded, when the man had gone away. “Wouldn’t
you
have been born an Italian?”

“To be Chief of Police in your blessed Rome, and spend my days investigating – or being told I was failing to investigate – monstrous orgies in high life? No, no, Gulliver. Give me London – with all its traffic problems, and with every acre of its stupid crime and squalid vice.”

For a moment Gulliver was silent. He was quick to catch a tone. And when the Madeira arrived, he made an easy change of subject.

“I hope Judith is well? She hasn’t been in the Gallery lately. Or she hasn’t, at least, looked in on me. When she does, it’s a habit I take kindly in her. I like reminiscing about dear old Luke and Everard.”

“She’s very well, thank you.” It was a point in Gulliver’s favour with Appleby that he had been on terms of some intimacy with Judith’s variously gifted if crazy family. “Only she’s modelling something rather intricate. Spends her days knocking up maquettes and shoving them about like a kid with toy soldiers.”

“Ah, you always take that philistine tone about the poor girl’s stuff. Actually, it disguises your vast admiration.”

Appleby was amused.

“Well, yes,” he said. “It does.”

“And quite right, too. She’s getting better and better. We must have a dinner, or something, and launch a move to have the Arts Council make a pet of her. Don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.” Appleby didn’t resent this airy nonsense. “But you’d better make your kind suggestion to her.”

“Of course, Judith is a shade on the traditional side. All those stones with holes through. Erosion, I’m told, has definitely gone out.
Fuori
, as our Italian friends express it. And corrosion is correspondingly in.
Dentro
. Do you know, there’s a Lapp who’s discovered a rapid process for corroding and encrusting barbed wire? He’s done a perfectly superb Madonna in it. You can see it somewhere off Bond Street, any day, by paying no more than a mere half-crown.”

“I saw it last week. And we had the Lapp to dinner. Judith made me read an article on something called Anti-Art, in order that we might have a topic for rational conversation. But the Lapp, for all his rebarbative barbed wire, hadn’t heard of Anti-Art. In fact he confessed an interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. Not what you might call an informed interest. But still – there it was. I don’t find artists less perplexing as I grow old.”

“Nor should I – doubtless – if I ever met any. But, of course, since I got away from that damned hole on the river, I converse only with the dead. Do you know, my dear Appleby, I believe I shall end up with the same creed as Bernard Shaw’s preposterous painter, in that play about doctors? I forget his name. Something like Tit for Tat.”

“Dubedat.”

“Precisely. And he dies on the stage, you remember, after announcing that he believes in Michaelangelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt. And I’m blessed if I don’t agree with him.”

Sir Gabriel Gulliver paused, and took a considering sip of his Madeira.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s about Rembrandt that I want to talk to you.”

Appleby felt familiar with this kind of approach. Almost, he’d thought he was being subjected to it only that afternoon by Charles Gribble. There are levels of English society in which nearly all professional advice is picked up free. Cabinet ministers murmur their symptoms negligently into the ear of distinguished consultant physicians when the ladies have withdrawn from the dinner table. Leading Queen’s Counsel know precisely what lies ahead of them when they find themselves on the right hand of brilliant and frequently dis-married hostesses. Top-ranking architects, summoned to indigestible feasts in ancient colleges, commonly take the precaution of bringing a junior staff with them and lodging them in an adjacent hotel.

But for all this sort of seeking after knowledge there is at least a substantial pool of authorities to draw on. Only one man runs London’s police. He has, it is true, a large number of competent assistants. But these are not, somehow, persons largely current in society. The Archbishop of Canterbury – Appleby sometimes felt – had distinctly the advantage of him. He had all those bishops – to say nothing of his brother of York.

“Rembrandt?” It was with well-practised civil interest that Appleby repeated the name. And he picked up his glass of Madeira, wondering just what it was going to work out at in terms of expenditure of time.

“Well, yes – Rembrandt, more or less. It’s a rather delicate position, as a matter of fact. Not an affair which, at the moment, I’d like to have bruited abroad.”

Silence is observed.

“Do tell me,” Appleby said. It couldn’t be maintained that this little talk wasn’t running true to form.

“People keep on bringing pictures,” Sir Gabriel Gulliver pursued. “One can’t very well have them simply turned away. So we run what is in fact a free-advice bureau. You read about it in the papers at times. And I’ve got it pretty well taped nowadays. One or another of my young men is available right through working hours. It doesn’t teach them all that much about painting, but it does help them to a little knowledge about human nature. And my sort of young man needs anything of that kind that he can pick up, the Lord knows.”

“Remote aesthetes, are they?” Appleby asked. “What Kipling calls long-haired things with velvet collar-rolls?”

“There you go on your philistine note again. But it’s true that some of them could do with a little common humanity. Well, old ladies come in with Arundel prints, or with shiny oleographic reproductions of the
Laughing Cavalier
or the
Night Watch
, manufactured in Leipzig in the 1880s. And my lads have to explain that the blessed thing is delightful to possess, but that the market isn’t precisely buoyant just at the moment. It’s a point of honour that the old ladies should go away feeling rather pleased, despite their dreams of sudden wealth being unrealized.”

Appleby nodded.

“Rather,” he said, “like being in Complaints in a big store. The customer takes the article away again, feeling he’s had a thoroughly square deal after all.”

“Just so. The analogy’s rather a commercial one, but fair enough. Except that we do always have the chance of a real find. All the young men believe that one day Great-grandfather’s Dobbin will actually prove to be by Stubbs.”

“Or Great-grandfather himself be by Lawrence or Hoppner.”

“Well, even Hoppner would be something. Only it doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen at all.”

“Never?” Appleby was mildly surprised.

“Next to never, anyway. It’s an odd thing, but there it is. Of course finds are made, even in England, from time to time. But not from among the treasuries of the simpler classes – who are naturally the people who do most of the walking up our steps. When your impoverished country gentleman starts hopefully turning out his attics, he usually begins by sending photographs of anything likely looking to the big saleroom chaps. And if he elicits a cautious expression of interest from them, he forks out for a regular expertise. So our little public service, as I’ve said, isn’t precisely a prolific field of art-world drama. In fact, we’ve never made the headlines yet. But are we going to, tomorrow or the next day? That’s my headache at the moment. As you can see, I’m a worried man.”

Appleby found that he wasn’t disposed to question this. Gulliver, although talking with a great air of urbanity and leisure, did somehow suggest an underlying uneasiness of mind.

“You can’t be worried, surely, simply because a real find has turned up at last?”

Gulliver shook his head.

“Not because it has turned up. Because it has disappeared again.”

“A Rembrandt?”

“Yes. It sounds incredible. But there it is. A girl walked in with the thing last Friday.”

“An unknown Rembrandt?”

“An unknown Rembrandt. And an unknown girl.”

“Well, I can see that it could have been pretty startling. But there must be a great many Rembrandts in the world. Didn’t he live to a respectable old age, and go on painting like mad?” Appleby paused, and received an abstracted nod from Gulliver. “This was a
good
Rembrandt?”

“Most Rembrandts aren’t at all bad.” Gulliver was momentarily acrid. “And of course I’m not a critic. Nor is my young man, Jimmy Heffer. We’re just humble art historians. But we knew we were looking at an important Rembrandt, if that’s any use to you. Perhaps you know the Old Man in the Pitti? 1658, I seem to remember. Well, this was another Old Man, and very close to that one. Not such a large canvas, mind you, but almost the same amount of paint got on to it.”

Appleby smiled.

“That’s a virtue?”

“It’s one of the old boy’s very great virtues. Painters adore him for it. And this girl walked in with a transcendent instance of it tucked under her arm.”

“I see. But just what girl?”

“We don’t know. We don’t know at all. By the way, I think I’ll change my mind. I think I’ll commit myself to the statement that this was
quite
a good Rembrandt – as good as you’ll find in London, Edinburgh or Glasgow. Yes, I’d go as far as that. And this unknown girl walked in and out with it. But perhaps I’m boring you, my dear chap?”

Appleby shook his head. He wasn’t exactly breathless. But he had been stirred to mild curiosity.

“Tell me the whole thing,” he said.

“The trouble precisely is that there’s uncommonly little to tell.”

Sir Gabriel Gulliver glanced into his empty glass as if considering its replenishment. Then he appeared to think better of this, and went on talking.

“But I can begin by explaining the drill. When a person turns up with a picture in this way, the first thing they have to do is to write their name and address in a book. Then they’re asked to hand over the picture, and told that the expert will see them and give an opinion as soon as he’s completed his examination. Sometimes they’re unwilling to let their treasure out of their hands. But the word ‘expert’ usually fixes that. Have you noticed how the newspapers have made it a term of awe? There’s an expert in every damned thing nowadays, and it’s our duty to take what he tells us as gospel.”

Appleby nodded.

“Very true. But why this business of handing over the picture or whatever?”

“Largely because people are so talkative, my dear fellow. They want to tell you that Grannie remembered the picture as a girl, so that it must be very old and therefore very valuable. That sort of thing. And we naturally don’t want all that. What we want is two or three minutes with the canvas undisturbed. After that, we know just what to say when the owner is shown in on us. If the time of my young men – and my own time occasionally – is not to be consumed by this rather futile activity, the technique has to be streamlined in that way. And that was how it happened last Friday.”

“First the Rembrandt and then the girl?”

“Just that. Or, more precisely, first Jimmy Heffer, then the Rembrandt, then myself, and then the girl. I don’t suppose you’ve met Heffer?”

Appleby reflected.

“His name seems familiar.”

“That’s because he’s an athlete. Some sort of champion at running the four hundred metres. Or is it the four thousand? Anyway, it’s something out of the ordinary in my sort of young man. Not a long-haired thing.” Gulliver paused, as if something had suddenly struck him. “Do you know, I believe the girl felt that about Jimmy? Not what she’d expected.”

“Fell for him, you mean?”

“I’m not sure that she didn’t. I had a kind of feeling they were surprising each other.”