The Golden Fleece (5 page)

There were no other guests at the table. Adrian knew that the Jarndykes had two children, but there was no evidence of their presence in the house, and Adrian assumed that they must both be away at a fancy prep school, being groomed for Eton or Oundle. Because Angelica Jarndyke made little effort to fulfill her duties as a hostess conversion-wise, and Adrian was too shy to do anything but react to what was said to him, Jason Jarndyke had to guide the chatter and do most of the talking himself, but he was obviously used to that.

The industrialist talked and talked and talked, but he avoided being boring with practiced ease. He didn’t come across as too much of a boor, nor as overly arrogant, in spite of his cultivated bluntness and natural ebullience. He discussed current events and future possibilities—in a general sense rather than a specific one—with equal ease, and reminisced blithely without any crass braggadocio. The further the meal went, the more Adrian came to like his new employer, and the more comfortable he began to feel in his presence—until the coffee was served, and Jarndyke changed the subject without warning, as he was prone to do.

“Angie thinks you’re bullshitting me,” he said, suddenly. “Not about being a genius geneticist—she’s prepared to believe that you can deliver me a Golden Fleece, of sorts—but about the other stuff. I told her what you said about the Rothko chapel, but she thinks you’re bluffing, just like I thought she was. She doesn’t want to show you any of her paintings, because she thinks you’ll bullshit her too, the way half a dozen other so-called art experts have. She doesn’t want that. Claims to hate flattery, although I keeping telling her that when people say she’s beautiful, it’s not flattery because it’s the simple truth. So you might not get your treat, unless you can persuade her that it’s worth a go.”

Adrian made an effort to try to look Angelica Jarndyke in the eyes, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. She had blue eyes, but they were a darker shade than his. She had blonde hair, but it was a lighter shade than his. She and he couldn’t have passed for mother and son, even if she’d been old enough—which she wasn’t, quite.

Adrian considered going through the whole rigmarole that he’d spun for Jarndyke at the Savoy, but he knew that the old man would have repeated all of that to her, accurately enough to get the gist across. He thought it best to go the philosophical route, with a bit of allegory thrown in.

“The thing about the Emperor’s new clothes,” he said, “is that the crowd really might have been unable to see them, even if they were real. Not because the members of the crowd were stupid, or uncultured, but because they simply didn’t have the right neurophysiological equipment. Imagine the predicament of some poor fellow who, when the kid shouted out: ‘The Emperor’s got no clothes,’ wanted to shout out: ‘Yes he has, and they’re beautiful! The tailors are right, and they’re men of genius. That’s the finest suit that any emperor ever had to wear.’ What could he possibly say to convince the crowd, knowing that the majority was bound to be against him? How could he ever convince them that he really could see the suit, in all its glory, and wasn’t simply crazy or—as Mr. Jarndyke would say—bullshitting? He’d be like the sighted man in H. G. Wells’s ‘Country of the Blind,’ impotent to persuade his hosts that he was anything but a deluded fool, impending rockslide or no impending rockslide. And yet...perhaps the crowd should have been prepared to hear him out. They wouldn’t have needed to give him the benefit of the doubt—the
admission
of doubt would have been something, in itself.”

Angelica Jarndyke did condescend to look at him then, but not with any sympathy. “I’ve always thought that the child in the story was a disgrace to youth,” she said. “What he should have shouted was: ‘Who cares whether the old fool has any clothes on or not? He’s the emperor—roll out the guillotine, strike up the
Marseillaise
and full speed ahead for democracy.’”

Her husband laughed. Adrian didn’t, although he wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t a diplomatic error not to go along with the joke and let the whole issue of who could see what be swept under the carpet and forgotten. He hadn’t dared study Angelica Jarndyke as minutely as she’d studied him when they’d first been confronted with one another, and he didn’t dare to now, because he knew that staring at someone as beautiful as her was always a
faux pas,
but he tried now to take a better measure of her, covertly.

Then he pointed at one of the panels on the wall behind her head. “That one’s wrong, isn’t it?” he said. “The designer did a pretty good job with the rest, but that was a slip. Maybe he couldn’t find one to fit the scheme and improvised—or maybe he did it deliberately, knowing that ninety-nine people in a hundred would only see a sea of brown, and that most of the one per cent wouldn’t know exactly what was wrong, or why, but would just be subtly unsettled by it.”

Angelica Jarndyke turned her head. She didn’t have to ask him which panel he meant. “I’ve always thought that it was a deliberate mistake,” she said, biting her lip slightly, at the risk of disturbing the gloss. “Cocking a snook, so to speak.”

“I can sympathize with that,” Adrian said.

She thought about it for a minute, and then nodded her head. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.” Then she looked at her husband, who had obviously set up the challenge, perhaps as if to say:
You’d better be right...
or perhaps not.

Adrian could see that the two of them didn’t hate one another, even if they had had to agree to disagree more often than they would have liked. They probably wanted to love one another, he thought, but didn’t quite trust one another, or themselves, enough to believe that they weren’t being bullshitted by the other’s affectations of affection.

“That was good,” Jarndyke said, nodding toward the panel, when his wife had left the room. “Clever, too. I like you, Son—I really do.”

“Thanks,” said Adrian, not knowing what else to say. Spotting the anomalous panel had been child’s play, though. He knew that the acid test was coming up, and that even though Jarndyke liked him, and had been prepared to hire him on the basis of what his spies had told him, he wasn’t yet prepared to believe that Adrian had a superpower. On the other hand, Adrian could now see quite clearly—and cursed himself for not having seen it before—that Jarndyke’s peculiar strategy of interrogation at the Savoy had been guided by a hidden motive.

Angelica came back carrying an easel in her right hand and a cloth-swathed canvas tucked under her left arm. Moving with meticulous order, she set up the easel, and placed the canvas on it, still concealed. Then she removed the cloth.

Adrian had been expecting something akin to a Rothko, or maybe a Jackson Pollock: an exercise in abstract impressionism, playing deftly with the subtleties of color, perhaps even the utmost subtleties of color. He had not been expecting what he actually saw. He had been warned, but he had not been expecting witchcraft. He felt his jaw drop, and was uncomfortably aware that he was speechless. These, he knew, were untested waters.

He had seen a lot of paintings in his time, including a lot by people whose color discrimination was unusually subtle, but he had never seen a painting by anyone who used color discrimination in the way that Angelica Jarndyke did, to hide images from ordinary eyes that extraordinary eyes would be able to see, if not exactly clearly and distinctly, then at least in such a way as to make out what they were.

Angelica Jarndyke was no great draughtsman—her figures were a trifle cartoonish—but she knew what it was that she was trying to represent, and she had skill enough to carry off the representation. She was no genius, by any stretch of the imagination—no Monet, no Rossetti, no Jackson Pollock—but what she had tried to do was real, and ambitious, and, in Adrian’s experience, unique.

“Now that, to me,” said Jason Jarndyke, “is just a big splodge of red with a little dash of orange here and there. Maybe it’s a sunset seen in ultra-close-up, or the middle of a rose petal—and a Lancashire rose at that—but I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Do you?” The question was addressed to Adrian.

“Yes,” Adrian said, faintly. “I get it.”

“And what do you think of it?” Jarndyke persisted. “Honestly, what do you think of it?”

“It’s very strange,” Adrian said, unable to think, for the moment, of a better adjective. “Technically, perhaps not brilliant, but in terms of coloration, in its way, it’s magnificent. Magnificent, but....”

“But what?” It was still the husband doing the probing, but Angelica Jarndyke was looking at Adrian again, very intently indeed, search for the slightest sign of bullshit.

“...Unsettling,” Adrian admitted.

Jarndyke made a noise with his tongue, like a bullshit-detector going off. “Unsettling! It’s a big splodge of red, damn it!”

“It’s Dante’s
Inferno
,” Adrian said, weakly. “It’s a depiction of Hellfire—complete with the souls of the damned, in torment. Maybe I can’t fully appreciate the religious context, as an atheist, but you don’t need to believe in God to have a notion of Hell and retribution. The damned, I can believe in.”

While he was speaking, Angelica Jarndyke’s expression changed. In a trice, she lost all of her artificiality, all of her polish. Amazement broke through, and with it...Adrian couldn’t tell. Not delight, not gratitude...something more akin to outrage. Her gaze abruptly shifted to her husband, who met her stare with a bizarre expression of his own.

Adrian realized, a trifle belatedly, that Angelica Jarndyke thought he’d been tipped off. She thought that her husband had somehow found out what the painting represented, even though she’d probably never told him, and that he had formed some schoolboyish conspiracy with Adrian to give her a slap the eye. And ironically, Jason Jarndyke thought exactly the same thing. He thought that his wife had somehow formed a conspiracy with Adrian, so that he could come up with an interpretation of the picture that she would endorse, so that the two of them could give
him
a slap in the eye.

Mercifully, they knew one another well enough, and understood one another’s gaze well enough, to know, after five seconds of mutual staring, that they were both mistaken. Then they both turned to look at Adrian.

Adrian had thought, briefly, that if he passed the test that Jarndyke and his wife had faced him with, his employer would be delighted. He
had
passed, he knew: he had proved himself, and his uncanny sight. But his self-satisfaction was undermined by the consciousness that his boast to Jarndyke a few weeks before, though perfectly sincere, had been overstated. He wasn’t the only person Jason Jarndyke knew who had near-perfect color vision. He wasn’t even the best.

Not only could Angelica Jarndyke see better than he could, she could paint better than he could, albeit in an amateurish sort of way—and not, for the first time in his life, Adrian regretted bitterly that he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to wield a brush with as much efficacy as his sight demanded. Suddenly, being a reverse engineer of genus didn’t seem like such a perfect complement to his full-spectrum sight as it had seemed twenty minutes before. His ingenious argument about the emperor’s new clothes and the plight of the one man in the crowd who could see the beautiful suit had ceased to be a neat philosophical argument intended for intellectual persuasion, and had take on its full weight as a sketch of an actual, and potentially horrific, existential predicament: his own, and Angelica Jarndyke’s.

Angelica Jarndyke was a painter, perhaps not of genius but at the very least of unusual talent, but no one had ever been able to see the results of her particular talent, except very vaguely— until now...and that had shaped her decisions as to what to paint, in a fashion that seemed, to say the least, ominous.

In all his esthetic excursions, Adrian had never encountered her like. He had seen the work of a hundred painters who had real genius, and he had always thought himself better equipped to appreciate their genius than most people—better than anyone else, truth be told—but he had never seen anything painted by someone who had elected to exploit full-spectrum sensitivity in quite that way, and enough skill to complement it...and a subject-matter that somehow seemed altogether appropriate.

Adrian knew, now, that if he did manage to produce some kind of
authentic
Golden Fleece for Jason Jarndyke, that at least one person would be able to see it, consciously, in all its glory— but somehow, that idea didn’t immediately fill him with delight. In fact, it frightened him.

Even so, he forced himself to say: “I’d really like to see your other work some time, Mrs. Jarndyke,” because he knew that he couldn’t
not
say it, whether it eventually turned out to be a bad idea or not.

Jason Jarndyke was ready for that challenge, too, and showed every sign of wanting to watch. Angelica Jarndyke wasn’t, and showed every sign of wanting her husband to be a million miles away if ever she condescended to let Adrian into her barn.