Silence Observed (4 page)

“Is this Jimmy Heffer sound at his job? Will he make a good curator of pictures and so forth?”

“Dear me, yes. Jimmy has taste, which is quite useful, and a first-class visual memory, which is the really vital thing. He’ll do very well.”

“Private means, I suppose?” Involuntarily, Appleby found himself asking the routine questions. “Picture galleries and museums, I imagine, scarcely offer royal roads to fortune.”

“Indeed they don’t. And Jimmy has something. Not much – but enough to get him about the world, and let him buy his own books and photographs. Commercial background. Family in tea, I seem to remember. No learned or academic tradition. No artistic one either. But young Jimmy is quite reasonably presentable. Winchester and New College. Or was it Eton and King’s? I forget. But that sort of thing.”

“I see. And was this girl with the Rembrandt Winchester and New College too?”

“Well, yes – if you want to put it that way. Perfect young gentlewoman, and all that. But let me get back to telling you the story in an orderly fashion. On Friday morning this picture was brought in to Heffer. Wrapped in brown paper, and on its stretcher, although without its frame. Jimmy took one look at it – or it may have been two – and tumbled across the corridor into my room. Didn’t so much as knock at the door.”

“Natural, even for a Wykehamist. In the exciting circumstances, that’s to say.”

“Quite so. Well, I went back to his room with him. And there was this thing. This utterly monumental thing.”

“A
good
Rembrandt.”

“Just that. Jimmy had propped it up on his table, opposite the window. For a moment I thought it was the St Paul from the Widener Collection in Philadelphia. I believe I turned on Jimmy almost indignantly, and demanded how the devil he’d got hold of
that
. Then I realized it was a portrait I’d never seen – nor ever seen reproduced. But still, of course, it never occurred to me that it could simply have been trundled in on us in the way it was – straight off the street, as you might say.”

“But you were instantly certain” – Appleby glanced curiously at his companion – “that it was an authentic portrait by Rembrandt?”

“Lord, yes. Not a doubt of it.”

“I ask because there’s a devilish lot of high-class forgery and faking about. I ran into something of the kind in this very club only a few hours ago.”

“Is that so?” Gulliver didn’t seem interested. “Well, there was no doubt about this. A layman might suppose we’d have to make refined scientific tests before we could exclude the possibility of forgery. But that’s all my eye. Or
sometimes
it’s all my eye. And this was one of the times. All the photographic and chemical jiggery-pokery was ready to lay on next door, of course. And Jimmy Heffer himself was competent to do some of the latest things. But there was just no need for them. We
knew
.”

“Most impressive,” Appleby said. “But I wonder why? Might it conceivably be because this good Rembrandt was a
very
good Rembrandt?”

Gulliver laughed rather shortly. It was as if he was suddenly impatient with the whimsical tone he had imported into his own narrative.

“Yes, yes. And there we were, the two of us, staring at the thing. And Jimmy telling me that he understood it had been brought in by a woman, and asking me if I would please take charge. Do you know, I had positively to wrench my attention back to the youth? The junk I live among is pretty comprehensively of the highest class, I think you’ll agree. I oughtn’t to have been all that staggered by the appearance of just one more pebble on the vast shore of the world’s art. And yet I was goggling at the fatness of that impasto as if it were an absolutely new revelation to me. It was the unexpectedness of the incident, no doubt, that made the experience so vivid. Would you care for another glass of that Madeira? I don’t consider it positively bad.”

Appleby pushed away his glass.

“I think not, thank you. And then you had in the young gentlewoman?”

“We had her in – as soon as I’d taken breath and given the situation a little thought. You see, it didn’t lack its tricky side.”

“Connected with the fact that the picture was worth a lot of money?”

“Certainly. The picture market is a crackpot affair, as you know. And never more so than of late, with ignoramuses pouring out meaningless money for Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and what-have-you. But even poor old Rembrandt hasn’t quite had his day. This thing – propped up before us by Jimmy Heffer’s bowler hat – would fetch almost as much under the hammer as anything that hung on the walls of the building we were gorping and gaping in.”

“I can’t imagine you doing anything so inelegant,” Appleby said.

“I assure you I was doing exactly that. And it’s all very well, you know, telling any casual caller that their picture’s really very pretty, and undoubtedly painted by hand. You can even be quite light-hearted about saying it looks as if they’ve got hold of an Etty or a Maclise. But when it comes to a woman strolling in with a shattering Old Master, a little circumspection is probably wise. Before I gave a formal opinion, for example, the routine sort of tests ought to be made, even although I knew they were superfluous. And I ought to know something about the thing’s provenance.”

“That would be wise, even in quite minor affairs.” Appleby was thinking of poor Charles Gribble’s discomfiture over Manallace.

“Exactly. And I ought to satisfy myself that this enquiry about the Rembrandt was being made by, or with the sanction of, the legal owner. All this was fairly elementary, but it took me a moment or two to get it clear in my head before I told Jimmy to ring his bell and have the lady in.”

Gulliver paused, and Appleby glanced round the smoking room. His friend’s voice was silvery and resonant, so that anybody might be having the benefit of this odd story. But in fact they were quite alone.

“It must have been an interesting moment,” Appleby said. “The entrance of the proprietor of this rather tremendous object.”

“Well, yes. But – do you know? – I was still so absorbed in the tremendous object itself that it was seconds before I looked round when the door opened. And, even then, it wasn’t the woman I found myself looking at. It was Jimmy. And the way
he
was looking made the moment not so much interesting as laughable. He had gorped and gaped, as I said, at the Old Man, just as I had. But he was in a very ecstasy of gorping and gaping now. I remarked – didn’t I? – that the lad had taste. Well, it was getting at him. Rembrandt had been knocked clean out of his head. And you might say that Botticelli had taken his place.”

“Botticelli?”

“Yes, indeed. The girl, you see, was quite astounding. One looked at once for dancing waves and a great scallop shell under her feet. One found something positively improbable in the fact that she had clothes on.”

“Dear me!”

“But you mustn’t suppose me to mean that there was anything lascivious about her. It was just that she had that sort of beauty.
Precisely
that sort of beauty. She had stepped from the walls of the Ufizzi, you might say, and slipped into a well-made coat and skirt.”

Appleby vindicated the philistinism which Gulliver had earlier attributed to him by finding this funny. In fact he threw back his head and laughed.

“Quite so, quite so.” Gulliver laughed too. “But there it was. The birth of Venus.”

Appleby shook his head more soberly.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Botticelli’s lady is undoubtedly pleasing as a bit of paint. But she’s not remotely human. She’s as weightless as a space traveller. And, if there’s ballet on Mount Olympus, hers is a ballerina mask.”

“No doubt. I’m talking at random, I don’t deny. An old fellow, you know, rather whips up feelings about those things – a girl’s face, and so on – when he knows he’s a bit beyond them.”

Appleby said nothing to this, and the consequence was a moment’s pause. There was something frustrated or baffled, he was thinking, beneath Gulliver’s urbanity. He was a man not reconciled to the direction in which life had taken him. And perhaps a woman had started the trouble long ago.

“And indeed,” Gulliver went on, “I’m testifying to something against my own convictions. I don’t believe that there is anything that can be called feminine beauty in an absolute sense. It’s only some informing – and perhaps evanescent – sensibility which makes any lass worth looking at twice. So let us pass on. Here was a really striking girl, we’ll say. And here was my young athlete struck all of a heap by her. Naturally it fell to me to do the talking. And that was just as well. Jimmy Heffer, I’m convinced, couldn’t have uttered a word.”

“This didn’t work the other way round as well? The young person wasn’t struck all of a heap by the athlete?”

“Well, as I think I said, I had a feeling that they were surprising each other. I’d say she found Jimmy more unexpected than she found me. Her notion of the sort of person who looks after pictures would be quite conventional. But remember that I wasn’t in on their first glance at each other. I was still looking at the picture.”

“Yes, I see.” Appleby thought for a moment. “What sort of girl was she – apart from this Aphrodite aspect?”

“A well-bred girl, but far from sophisticated. Indeed she was shy and rather awkward.”

“An awkward Aphrodite? That’s rather disappointing, I’m bound to say.”

“She was in a novel situation. And, when she spoke, she was composed enough. She apologized for bothering us, and hoped it wasn’t entirely out of order. That sort of thing. I asked her to sit down, and thanked her for bringing the picture along. I said it interested me very much, and I asked her whether she herself had any idea of who might have painted it. She seemed to hesitate. And then she said no, but it did seem to her that it might be very old. At that young Heffer chipped in – rather abruptly and dogmatically for him. He said the picture was very probably within a month or two of its three hundredth birthday.”

“And how did the young lady take that?”

“She looked at Jimmy almost as if she were scared of him. I suppose she regarded such precision as a sort of black magic. Then I asked her a question which seemed perfectly legitimate in itself, but which certainly scared her a good deal more.”

“Whether she owned the thing?”

“I didn’t put it exactly that way. I asked her whether it had been in her family a long time. She looked at me with all the grave candour of that Botticelli face – but I had a strong impression that she didn’t, for a moment, know what to reply. Then she said: ‘Oh, yes – we haven’t just bought it, or anything like that.’”

Sir Gabriel Gulliver had paused in his narrative, and Appleby took a moment before asking a question.

“There was a point, it seems, at which you became uneasy about the whole business. Was this it?”

“I think it was. And I think that Jimmy Heffer was uneasy too. He was refraining from looking at the girl, as if he didn’t want to give the appearance of challenging her. For my own part, and in spite of her charms, I felt we’d better get rid of her, and think a little. So I said the picture might well be by Rembrandt–”

“Did that register? She’d heard of him?”

“Oh, yes. She was a simple girl, no doubt, but not to the extent of being utterly without ordinary information. I said that we didn’t, however, care to make a positive statement at once, and that she had better leave the canvas for thorough examination. Then I explained our procedure in such cases. We take a photograph straight away, and have a print within ten minutes. On the back of the print there’s a form of receipt, with the conditions upon which we accept works of art for preliminary gratuitous expertise. Our trustees’ legal advisers insist on that.”

Appleby nodded approvingly.

“Businesslike,” he said. “You certainly have it streamlined, as you said.”

“It was too businesslike, it seems, for our young person. Aphrodite looked thoroughly alarmed. But that was only for a moment. Then she recovered her self-possession – something which, in fact, she abundantly rejoiced in. She thanked us, said that she required no more formal opinion, walked over to the Old Man, and quite coolly wrapped him up again in his brown paper. Then she simply gave us her grave smile – with an extra tilt of the chin, I felt, for Jimmy – and walked out, picture and all. Of course, I hadn’t the slightest title to prevent her.”

There was another pause. Gulliver had sat back with elegantly folded hands. It appeared that the main part of his narrative was over, and that Appleby was now expected to offer appropriate comment.

“Interesting,” Appleby said. “And tantalizing, no doubt. How old was this girl?”

“A mere child. Twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“Town or country?”

“A rural Venus, I was inclined to suppose. Schooling which was mostly ponies and a home which was mostly spaniels. Parents who had returned from some modest imperial station to some equally modest hereditary plot. Some small upper-middle class ambience of that sort, with nothing remarkable to it except those almost preternaturally good looks of the girl herself. That was my guess – and I remember offering it to Heffer there and then. He said that I was very probably right, but that we could at least begin from a basis of established fact. And he rang his bell and had in the visitors’ book. I’d clean forgotten it. But of course the girl had written her name in it. Astarte Oakes.”

Appleby raised his eyebrows.

“Do people of the pony and spaniel order go in for that sort of fancy Christian name?”

Gulliver nodded confidently.

“Dear me, yes. All sorts of mad names. I’ve often remarked it.”

“Even if their surname is Oakes?”

“Certainly. Oakes or Nokes or Stokes – it makes no matter.”

“And there was an address?”

“Yes – and, although it wasn’t very informative, it seemed to support the rural Venus theory. It was a hotel in Bloomsbury. One of those largish unassuming places one’s never been in. Full, I imagine, of bed-and-breakfasting families from Wigan and Glasgow.”

“That doesn’t seem quite to fit, after all.”

“No more it
did
fit, as you’ll presently hear. I said I was worried, didn’t I? Well, the worrying began almost straight away. There was surely something odd about a girl drifting round with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of art under her arm – to say nothing of its being an infernally good picture. I tried to think what such a state of affairs could all be about. I imagined some condition of pretty severe poverty.”