The Long Farewell (3 page)

Packford shook his head. ‘Not quite. Wise pretty well confined himself to the forging of nineteenth-century printed material. If he’d known enough on the scientific side, and taken enough trouble, he might have produced things that were indetectable. Or take inks. You or I could quite readily manufacture ink according to one or another of the methods current at, say, the beginning of the seventeenth century. And if we then used it cleverly and sparingly on paper preserved from that period – which isn’t hard to come by in small quantity – the result would quite soon baffle the back-room boys in their labs. Conceivably in five years, certainly in twenty, the chemical situation would be tricky enough to produce divided opinions.’

‘Always provided that materials from organic sources weren’t much involved. It’s no longer possible to tell fibs by the century, so to speak, where the new carbon tests can be brought in. Think how they’ve vindicated the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls.’ Appleby paused. There was a new delicious smell on the terrace. It was evident that Giuseppina knew how to make coffee. ‘But hasn’t it always been possible,’ he asked, ‘to tell simply by the smell? If, I mean, you really knew your stuff. Amateurs of literature all over Europe fell for Macpherson’s Ossian, but it didn’t take in a professional like Dr Johnson. Chatterton was a marvellous boy, and his Rowley poems impressed the respectable antiquaries of Bristol. But he was sunk as soon as they were put into the hands of a poet and scholar like Gray. Ireland could turn out anything of Shakespeare’s, from a signature to a whole play. All sorts of persons of rank and consequence believed in them, but a high-powered authority like Edmund Malone at once knew them to be ridiculous.’

Packford was producing a box of cigars. ‘There’s something in all that,’ he said. ‘But it’s not always so. Van Meegeren’s things took in tremendous pundits.’

‘But largely, I think, because it was war-time. A competent
expertise
in a field like that is a matter of very delicate intellectual and aesthetic judgements. If you had to be smuggled past a lot of Nazi guards in order to look at a painting, your responses to it might be affected in queer ways… No brandy, thank you. I’ve quite a bit of driving in front of me still.’

‘No doubt you’re wise – although it’s a good road.’ Rather reluctantly, Packford pushed away the bottle he had been offering. ‘We’ve hit, you know, on a complex subject. The moral issues are sometimes far from clear. Take Chatterton. His fakes were scarcely fakes to him. He lived in a medieval dream-world of his own contriving, and the poems and so forth came out of it. Make-believe was a condition of the functioning of his genius – and it was a very real genious. It’s arguable that it was the duty of society to sustain him in his delusions.’

‘As it is, his story’s unbearable.’ Appleby was silent for a moment. Packford, he was reflecting, had turned quite serious. At the same time, he was discernibly distrait – as if, despite the genuineness of his hospitable impulse, some insistent preoccupation was tugging at his mind. Appleby resolved to get away fairly soon. ‘Yes,’ he presently went on, ‘it’s a complex subject, as you say. And it certainly sometimes puzzles the law. One doesn’t commit a crime in teaching oneself to paint precisely like Richard Wilson in the morning, and precisely like Renoir in the afternoon. But it would be an unlikely routine to adopt in the disinterested pursuit of an artistic education. I’d turn a bit suspicious, prowling round a studio which showed a set-up like that.’

Packford laughed. ‘Suspicion’s your job, Appleby. And it’s a good part of my job too. They say I’m credulous, you know. But it’s not true. I’ll admit to having run a notion or two of my own pretty hard, and to squeezing my evidence as if I were a barrister out for a verdict. From time to time I may even have put across a pretty tall story. But I’m not aware that I’ve ever been taken in. I’ve never, as they say, been had.’ And again Packford laughed – confidently, infectiously. ‘Good luck to the chap who tries!’

Giuseppina had come to clear away the meal. The two men rose and strolled up and down the terrace. ‘But it’s not the technique of forgery that’s really fascinating,’ Packford said. ‘It’s the psychology.’

‘I’d say there are a dozen psychologies.’

‘Exactly! And there’s what you might call a
gradus
, too. I mean that there are degrees of the impulse. At one end there’s no more than what might be called a bit of historical sense and curiosity – the prompting, say, to try out the way some earlier painter has applied his glazes or managed his edges. Further along, you come on chaps with whom the thing has gone obsessive and passionate. Think of the Venus of Milo, Appleby! A masterpiece of the fifth century before Christ – a masterpiece, that’s to say, of the great age of that sort of thing. Only it happens to be nothing of the kind. It was created some four hundred years later. Why? It was a vision of the goddess that can’t have cut any ice with that later age. Her vital statistic would have appeared all wrong.’

‘Not, perhaps, to a patron of antiquarian mind. The statue may have been commissioned by some first-century gentleman who thought modern art terribly vulgar.’

‘No, no – nothing of the kind.’ Packford could be brusquely dismissive without being in the least offensive. ‘The Venus of Milo mayn’t be all that our grandparents cracked her up to be. But she’s far too good to be a piece of historical pastiche done to order with an eye on a rich man’s cheque-book. It’s a case of an artist’s passionate identification with the vision of another age.’

‘Or perhaps it’s a joke.’ Appleby couldn’t resist the impulse to receive Packford’s large vague enthusiasms sceptically. ‘For there, I think, you often find the master motive behind fakes and forgeries. It can be the underlying motive, even when the superficial motive is predatory, practical and financial. I mean the impulse to extract fun out of laughing up one’s sleeve.’

‘Laughing up one’s sleeve?’ Packford repeated the words as if they were entirely obscure to him. And then, disconcertingly, he gave one of his shouts of laughter. ‘Yes, of course – it would be enormous fun! But, do you know, I never thought of it?’

‘There seems to be a particular attraction in the idea of fooling people who are inclined to patronize you. Something of the sort certainly operated in Wise’s case. He was a prosperous man, and he had collected a library of great value and interest, which scholars were eager to consult. He was therefore surrounded by learned people paying court to him – and at the same time unconsciously treating him rather
de haut en bas
, since he was only an eccentric commercial person, after all, unprovided with the unspeakable blessings of a classical education. Well, he fooled them to the top of their bent. And how he must have enjoyed it!’

Once more Packford laughed – this time so loudly that even Giuseppina, who must have been well accustomed to these explosions, turned round and stared. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I can see that. And he must have felt like Chaucer’s Manciple. You remember?’ And striding down his terrace, Packford began to chant:

‘Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace,

That switch a lewed mannes wit shal pace

The wisdom of an heep of lerned men?’

Giuseppina gestured expressively to the heavens. She had a high regard for her employer, but this clearly didn’t preclude her regarding him as a little touched.
Pazzo
would be the word. And perhaps – Appleby thought – there really was an element of some strangeness in Packford. If, one day, something very surprising turned up about him, you wouldn’t – so to speak – be very surprised. And yet this circumstance – that you wouldn’t be surprised by a surprise – was surprising in itself. It couldn’t quite be accounted for, that was to say, in the light of what seemed the normal large transparency of Packford: the simplicity of his vanities and enthusiasms which blended so naturally, somehow, with the keenness and vigour of his mind.

Did he, perhaps, have a secret life? Briefly, as they paused at the far end of the terrace to gaze again at the faint lights across the lake, Appleby tried to equip him with something of the sort. But the exercise came to nothing. There was no glimpse, for instance, of anything out of the way in this small temporary household established in so pleasant a place.

Perhaps Packford’s only oddity consisted in his being something of a survivor from a past age. There weren’t many of his sort about. There were of course dilettantes, wealthy or merely prosperous, in plenty. English, American, Australian, you found them scattered over Italy and the south of France. But nowadays that sort of person’s fancy seemed to lie nearly always in the fine arts or in music. Corresponding amateurs of literature – at least of an ability and pertinacity sufficient to gain them serious scholarly consideration – were much harder to find. It wasn’t a field that Appleby knew particularly well, or had much occasion for interest in. But at least he couldn’t think of a single other person in precisely Packford’s situation. He had money, but he travelled light. He was presumably unmarried, and Appleby had never heard him mention even a distant relation. He could entirely please himself. And what was pleasing him now – if Appleby hadn’t guessed entirely wrong – was the persuasion that he was going to prove William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to have been at one time a traveller in Italy. Milan, Mantua, Verona, Padua, Venice: they all had their Shakespearian associations – and to one of Packford’s temperament and reputation the possibility of unearthing and displaying to the world an actual biographical link would be irresistibly appealing. To present himself before the learned with what he had called mere cobweb triumphantly transmuted to perdurable steel; to flourish before their noses, it might be, the dramatist’s very hotel-bill on the Grand Canal: that would be precisely Packford’s cup of tea.

And the ambition was at least blessedly innocent. It wasn’t even frivolous – or not if you took the scholar’s view of the dignity inherent in adding to any and every sort of knowledge. It didn’t make you a nuisance or a blight to others, and it didn’t land you in any trouble. And there was much – Appleby thought – to be said for any activity which was quite unlikely to add to the burdens of the police.

As he made this prosaic professional reflection Appleby became aware that his host was again looking at his watch. This time, it could scarcely be in expectation of a meal; and the plain inference was either that he had an appointment or that he wanted to get back to work. Whatever the nature of that pile of books and documents down in his summer-house, he would be quite glad to get back to them. ‘I must be getting on my way,’ Appleby said. ‘I go round by Peschiera, I suppose, and that makes it quite a step.’

‘You must really be moving on?’ Packford asked. He now seemed genuinely reluctant to lose his guest. ‘Well, it was uncommonly kind of you to look me up in this solitude. And we’ve had a good talk.’ He laughed. ‘And talk taking an odd turn, as good talk should. What about our going into partnership, Appleby, eh? Shall we set up together?’

‘Detecting forgeries?’

‘No, no. That would be too easy, my dear chap – too easy altogether. Let’s set up, you and I, at presenting the world with some handsome ones. We’d be a tiptop combination, you know. How shall we begin?’

Packford’s freakish humour was coming on top again. He had asked his question with a great appearance of gravity. ‘It must depend,’ Appleby said, ‘on the state of the market. I shan’t be one of those disinterested forgers, taking out all his dividend in a quiet laugh. Indeed, I think I’ll concentrate on sales.’ He paused, rather flogging his brain for a way in which to keep up for a further civil minute or two this laboured facetiousness from which his host seemed to obtain such harmless pleasure. ‘But is there really much of a market to tap – I mean, for purely literary forgery? Is there anything like the big money that the high-powered artistic variety can command? I’d hardly have thought so.’

‘Tons of it, my dear chap.’ Packford in this mood, Appleby reflected, probably spoke largely at random. ‘America, you know. Public institutions with vast resources would positively compete for anything right at the top. Private collectors, too. Of course, there aren’t so many of them as go in for pictures and furniture and porcelain and so forth. Still, they’re there. Some quite sane, and some a bit round the bend. But then, my sort’s a bit mad, too, wouldn’t you say? Why do I mole away after obscure events of no large human interest – of no genuine intellectual interest at all – back in the seventeenth century?’

Packford had paused, almost as if puzzled at hearing himself turn serious again. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘the plain man’s answer: that I’ve found a tolerably harmless way of keeping myself out of the pub. Of the pub and – well – other things in that general area. But the devil of it is, you know, that it may let a chap down. A chap may feel he’s been missing things.’ Packford shook his head; he seemed suddenly depressed. ‘And get into a scrape, eh? Rebound, as they say.’

‘No doubt.’ Appleby was puzzled before this somewhat incoherent vein.

‘And, of course, it’s simply chance that takes one in the first place into one manner of life rather than another. And one looks back, and imagines one might have chosen better – whereas, really and truly, choice didn’t enter into the matter. What do you think?’

Appleby thought only that the hour was too advanced to enter upon a discussion of the mildly perplexing problem of necessity and free will. ‘What sort of career,’ he asked rather at random, ‘would you now fancy entering upon, supposing you were thirty years younger?’

‘Busting atoms, probably. Or perhaps being a professional amorist. You remember the name of Edward Dowden? Not a bad Shakespeare critic, in an old-fashioned way. Well, after a long life of blameless scholarship, he confessed that what he would really have liked to be was the lover of many women. A bit frightening, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Possibly so. And if he’d put in that long lifetime simply pursuing wenches, he’d no doubt have looked back and said his only true ambition had been to be a great scholar.’