The Language of Bees (18 page)

The centre of the image was a confusion of colours and shapes: a hand outstretched, a leg and foot dangling above the grass, and most troubling, a piece of a man’s face with a staring, dead-looking eye. With a shock, I realised that I was looking at a strip, as it were, of a larger image, showing a man hanging from a tree—but if the eye was dead, that tensely extended hand was definitely not.

In a lesser craftsman, I would have thought he had painted the eye badly; in a lesser mind, I might have assumed the artist did not know how a dead hand would hang. But this was Damian Adler, so I looked at the card on which the title had been typed:

Woden in the World Tree

If I remembered my Norse mythology, the god Woden—or Odin-had hanged himself for nine days in the tree that supported the world, so as to gain knowledge. Woden was blind in one eye.

I nodded in appreciation, and moved to the next painting, that of a hand shaking itself in a mirror—clever, but nothing more. The one after that appeared to be a solid wall of leaves, meticulously detailed, until one noticed that the twin points of gleam to one side were eyes: The hidden image gradually resolved into the ancient pagan figure of the Green Man.

Next time I walked through the woods, the back of my neck was going to crawl.

The room’s far wall at first glance seemed to have a window in it, but did not.

What it had was a
trompe-l’oeil
painting, with shadows falling naturally both on the inner sill and on the scene “outside.” It showed an alleyway, such as might indeed be on the other side of the wall: an expanse of dirty red bricks topped by a slice of sky. At the upper edge of the canvas was a crescent moon, translucent in the bright daylight. A man strode towards the right-hand edge of the canvas, his hat tipped back on his head, his right hand swinging forward, grasping some object that was cut off by the edge of the canvas—although something about his posture made one think he was perhaps being pulled along by whatever was in his hand.

The painting reminded me of something: I walked forward to see if I could figure out what.

Up close, everything changed. The bricks began to glisten and take on the texture of living matter, as if skin had been flayed from a muscle wall. Closer still, the cracks and mortar grew alive with tiny creatures, squirming and baring sharp, minuscule teeth; the pale shape in the upper corner suggested less a daylit moon than it did a mouth, poised to open. Taking a step back felt like a natural response.

I was not surprised to see the signature in the corner:
The Addler
. Suddenly, I saw why it looked familiar: If the brick walls had been sandbags and the businessman replaced by three soldiers, I would be looking at his 1915 drawing of the trench under fire.

“Mesmerising, is it not?” came a French accent from behind me.

“Disturbing,” I said.

“Great art often is.”

I thought about that. Was it possible that time would declare Holmes’ son great? That the peculiarity of Damian’s work was less the sign of a troubled mind than the fearless exploration of an artistic vision? Many had thought Holmes himself unbalanced. “Great or not, I don’t know that I’d want it in my sitting room.”

It was the wrong thing to say: When I turned, the woman had
raised a polite and condescending face. “Surrealism expresses thought without reason, pure artistic impulse with no hindrance from rationality or aesthetics. Perhaps you should take a closer look at the other room. Vanessa Bell has just sent me a very nice portrait that would look good on a sitting room wall.”

I hastened to get back into the woman’s better graces. “Oh no, I like Damian’s work enormously. I like him, for that matter. It’s just that some of his paintings are, what? A little too compelling for comfort?”

The small woman tipped her perfect head at me, considering. She herself was an artifice—at any rate, a flawless appearance and a sympathy for Bohemian artists did not go hand-in-hand. In the end, she decided that I, too, was not what I appeared.

“You have met Mr Adler?”

“I’ve known him for years,” I said, which was the literal, if not the complete, truth. “He came to dinner the other night. When I heard you were displaying his work, I thought I’d stop in. This is another of his, isn’t it?”

The other painting, on the room’s back wall, bore his characteristic hand: painful, nightmare images painted with such loving realism, one was tempted to reach out and touch the surface, just to reassure one’s self that it was two dimensional.

The moon, again. Only this time, it was a pair of moons, two bright eyes in the night-time sky, staring down at the eerie blue-tinged outlines below. The shapes of the landscape were difficult to determine. At first I thought it was a group of bulky figures walking along an unlit street. Moving closer, I noticed that the shapes were nearly square: tall buildings in a modern city during an electrical outage? The painting occupied the room’s darkest corner, which did not help any. But when I was nearly on top of it, the details became clear.

The painting showed a prehistoric site, a grouping of massive stones both upright and fallen, forming a rough circle on a moonlit hillside. The grass around them was composed of a million delicate black and blue-black brushstrokes, the texture of a cat’s fur.

I lifted my gaze to the dual moons, and saw that the craters and
patterns on their near-white surfaces had been re-arranged to suggest a retina and iris: Two great pale eyes gazed down from a sable sky.

Had I seen this painting earlier, I should never have fallen asleep on the moonlit terrace.

“The Addler is known for his moons,” the Frenchwoman said.

“Lunacy,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Lunacy. From Luna, the moon. There’s a long belief that madness is linked to the phases of the moon.”

“Most interesting,” she replied in a chill voice, “but The Addler is not mad.”

“Isn’t he?”

“No more than any artist,” she protested, then gave an uncomfortable laugh, as if to acknowledge that we were both indulging in clever badinage.

“The madder the better, when it comes to art,” I agreed. “Have you met his wife?”

“But of course. And the child, such a winsome thing.”

I thought about that word: Either the woman didn’t like children, or she didn’t approve of this particular child.

While we spoke, I had been studying the two-moon painting, the shapes of the stones, the texture of the black-on-black hillside. The man had skill, no denying that, although producing an endless string of works that made the viewer uneasy might not guarantee commercial success.

I started to turn away, then stopped as a shape redefined itself in the corner of my eye.

What I had taken for a flat stone in the centre of the circle was not an even rectangle; under scrutiny, the faint reflections of moonlight off the myriad leaves of grass made the shape appear to have extremities. I removed my glasses; with lack of focus, it became clearer. The stone had the outline of a human, arms outstretched, as if bathing in the moonlight.

With my glasses on again, the suggestion of humanity faded, until I could not be certain it was there at all.

“How much is this one?” I asked.

She arched an eyebrow at my two-year-old skirt and unpolished shoes, and named a price approximately three times what I anticipated. Then she added, “I might be able to come down a little, since you are a friend of the artist.”

“I’ll take it. And I’ll think about the others.”

She frankly gaped at me, but I knew Holmes would like the piece—although I might ask him to hang it in one of the rooms I did not spend much time in.

I made the arrangements for shipping it to Sussex, and left, meditating on the idea of painting
thought without reason
and
pure artistic impulse
. If Damian had searched long and hard for a way to set himself in opposition to his rationalistic father, he could not have found a better style than that of Surrealism.

I rode the Piccadilly line down to South Kensington and walked towards Burton Place. After the prices the Frenchwoman had quoted me, Damian’s home address became more understandable.

Bohemia was torn between a scorn for money and a basic human appreciation for comfort. Too much success in art was seen as a dubious achievement, if not outright treason to The Cause, proof that one had strayed onto the side of the bourgeois and middle-class. Money (be it earned or inherited) could be justified by sharing it with less fortunate members of the Bohemian fraternity, but from the image of Yolanda that I had begun to form, I rather doubted Damian’s wife would be enthusiastic about hangers-on.

Number seven, Burton Place, proved to be on a quiet cul-de-sac, one street over from a park, in an area composed of similar neat, narrow, two-and three-storey houses. Indeed, as I strolled up and down the adjoining streets, I began to feel I was walking the human equivalent of honeycomb, identical compartments broken only by the occasional queen cell. Not the sort of neighbourhood one might expect to shelter a bearded painter of staring moons and bizarre city-scapes—
Chelsea was for the well-heeled, unlike the more working-class Fitzrovia where the true artists nobly starved.

There was no sign of life within the Adler house, but much coming and going from those nearby: Any break-in at this time of day would not go unnoticed.

So I did what any investigator would do on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and went to talk to the neighbours.

Reward (1):
Mere weeks after he has been transformed
,
the new-born man learns that this most ephemeral of
apprenticeships has preserved the mortal life of the Guide
from flames and the turmoil of an angry earth: a reward
.
Testimony, II:2

T
HE REACTIONS AT TWO HOUSES SUGGESTED, and the third confirmed, that I was not convincing for my rôle. A maid at the first and a man with a newspaper at the second both got as far as my first dozen words—“Good evening, I’m a friend of the Adlers at number seven and”—before their gaze strayed to my nondescript shirtwaist and unremarkable skirt and their faces shifted to polite disbelief.

The third time it happened, at number eleven, the person whose suspicions I raised was a child of perhaps eight or nine. She opened to my knock, and although I expected a parent to appear any moment, the child faced me with all the aplomb of a householder. So I told her who I was and what I wanted. She put her head to one side.

“You don’t look like one.”

“One what?” I asked. How did one talk to a child, anyway? I hadn’t much experience with it.

“Like a friend of the Adlers.”

“Why, what do they look like?”

“Not like you,” she said helpfully.

I looked down at my skirt, and pulled a face. “I know. I had to visit my parents today and this is how they like to see me.”

“You’re too old to have to dress for your parents.”

“One never grows too old for that.”

Her shiny head tipped to the other side as she considered. “They give you an allowance, and you have to keep them happy?”

“Something like that.” My parents had been dead nearly a decade, but that did not mean I had not, at times, changed my appearance to satisfy other figures in authority.

“That’s dreadful,” she stated, making it clear that I had just scotched her entire expectations for life as a free adult.

“True, but its merely on the surface. May I ask you—”

But our discussion on the merits of Bohemia was interrupted by the child’s own figure of authority, as fingers wrapped around the door eighteen inches above hers and pulled it open. At last: the mother.

The girl craned her head upwards and said, “Mama, this lady is looking for ’Stella.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m looking for Estelle’s parents.”

“Why, what did they do?”

An interesting assumption. “Nothing, as far as I know. I’m a friend of Damian’s, in Town unexpectedly, and I was hoping he and Yolanda would be here. But no-one answers, and I wonder if you have any idea where they might have gone?”