The Mysterious Commission (6 page)

But even before he glimpsed Mr X, his sense of personal peril had abated. It scarcely survived, indeed, the manservant – a younger and less impressive, but still admirably trained manservant – who had entered his room on the first morning, drawn back the curtains, raised the blinds, deferentially enunciated the time of day and the state of the weather, deposited morning tea and a copy of
The Times
at his bedside, inquired whether he should draw a bath, and withdrawn upon the information that breakfast too was served to Mr Arbuthnot’s guests in their rooms. Honeybath was a man sensitive to these minor graces of life commanded by the well-to-do. So now, when the China tea turned out to be of a quality to the achieving of which Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason in committee might be conceived as having given anxious thought, his confidence in the universe (and in that central feature of it known as Charles Honeybath) was in substantial measure restored to him.

This didn’t prevent him, as soon as the young man had departed, from jumping out of bed and making his way to a window. He was like a mariner who, while finding his desert island unexpectedly prolific in amenity, yet feels that there would be reassurance in even a distant sail. But there wasn’t a sail; there was just a park.

A park – a gentleman’s or nobleman’s park – is a comfortable thing. Find such a prospect outside one’s weekend window, and one’s innocent imagination at once identifies oneself with the ownership of it. Here, at last, are one’s own broad acres!

Not all parks, of course, constitute broad acres in themselves, although they may suggest an agricultural hinterland which may be so described. Honeybath, in his time, had looked out on parks which were in themselves very extensive indeed – for he had painted a duke or two now and then, and it is not to be expected of such grandees that they should clock in at a Chelsea studio. It was on the basis of this experience that he was able to tell himself at once that this park was a modest sort of park. Here was the kind of effect which, in the eighteenth century, country gentlemen whose taste (and pretensions) exceeded their rent-rolls contrived out of a stream, a duck-pond, and a coppice or two within which a few oaks and beeches usefully spread a lordly shade. It was all very pleasant, even august in a moderate way, but it didn’t exactly extend, vista by vista, far beyond a middle distance. At the moment, indeed, the vista was closed (as the landscape gardeners used to say) by a railway-train. And the railway- train, like the rest of the prospect, was in a static state.

It was also the only visible object to have been created other than directly by the deity. And here is a fact about parks. They needn’t be all that extensive in order to occlude the view of anything other than themselves. You may be able to spot a church tower appearing above one or another grassy swell amid the groves. But then again you may not. On this occasion, it was not. There were just trees, and some sheep, and this railway-train. And now the railway-train went away. It appeared to have been arrested at some rural halt well below its accustomed station in life; to have resented the fact; and now, upon its release by some invisible signal, to be eager to resume its own bright speed once more. As it accelerated, Honeybath was just able to remark, here and there upon its flashing sides, certain small yellow rectangles which he knew must carry the name of its destination. But even if the train had still been immobile it would have been quite impossible to decipher this with the naked eye. Nor, when the train had departed, was anything informative revealed. Behind the railway-line there were simply more trees. What the poet calls blessed seclusion from this jarring world appeared to be the eminent characteristic of Honeybath’s temporary and enforced residence.

The improvised studio provided for him was also secluded. It lay at a short remove from his own room, at the end of a corridor which appeared otherwise wholly unfrequented. Mr X came up in the lift. Or rather he was brought up in the lift, since his great age now confined him to an invalid chair. He had a female attendant who was introduced to Honeybath as Sister Agnes – which was a style which seemed somehow to suggest less a trained nurse than a devout person who has entered religion. Sister Agnes may have been devout. She was certainly grim, and had to be presumed devoted – this if only because she never let her patient out of her sight.

Honeybath wondered whether Mr X might be suicidally inclined. He also wondered – and with rather more professional interest – whether he
was
of great age. Was he in his middle nineties, or only in his middle sixties? It seemed incredible that an expert in at least the tangible and visible surfaces of human life should be at sea about this. Honeybath had sometimes reflected that, if the worst came to the worst and commissions simply dried up altogether, he could make a very decent living as that sort of fairground character who guesses your age and returns your money plus a whiff of candy-floss if he gets it more than two years wrong. With Mr X he might be astray by more than twenty.

This was beguiling in itself. It also almost persuaded him that, unlikely as it seemed, Arbuthnot’s biographical sketch of his relative had not been wholly a pack of lies. Dire experience of no common sort might produce just such an enigma. Mr X could have spent twenty years in a dungeon, dieted exclusively on potatoes, bread and lard – or an equal number of hours impaled on an anthill, or being otherwise disagreeably treated to a limit of human endurance. His pallor was extraordinary, was in itself a daunting challenge to the palette. He had brilliant dark-ringed eyes, a short sharp nose, a mean mouth, and a single lock of lank hair, still with trace of colour to it, depending over a domed forehead. Perhaps because he was of necessity precluded from all physical exercise, he was also a paunchy little man. And he sat with two fingers of his right hand thrust between the buttons of a crumpled waistcoat. There wasn’t the slightest difficulty in addressing him as
Mon Empereur
. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Not that it was more than infrequently that Mr X demanded this. His sense of his exalted identity – or, for that matter, of any identity at all – was intermittent. Conceivably he was, although again intermittently, aware of this ultimate mystery about himself, and put in substantial spells brooding over it. At these times there was a questing look in his eyes, a yearning to plumb some abysm, to bridge some chasm, which it had come to Honeybath to know, almost at the first glance, as representing his own chance of glory. Get
this
on canvas successfully, and it would be with awe that future generations would murmur his name. Leonardo’s sphinx-like lady in the Louvre simply wouldn’t be in the competition.

It was in this fond persuasion that Honeybath set to work.

‘Able was I ere I saw Elba,’ Mr X murmured. The thought appeared just to have struck him. ‘Or St Helena, for that matter, my dear Monsieur David.’ (Mr X frequently addressed Honeybath by this interesting name.) ‘It was a most damnable mistake ever to mount the deck of that confounded
Bellerophon
. The English sailors, by the way, called it the
Billy Ruffian
. Rather amusing that, eh?’ Mr X sometimes had a most charming smile.

‘I hope they made you comfortable?’ Quite early in the series of sittings, Honeybath had found himself chatting with Mr X easily enough. Once one has taken the plunge of humouring insanity it proves a surprisingly simple matter.

‘It was better than the
Northumberland
, which I made the final voyage on.’ Mr X was well clued up on his own phantasmal history; there was solid reading behind it. ‘But I didn’t at all take to that Captain Maitland. I addressed him as Captain Ruffian, as a matter of fact. He didn’t like it at all. A most undistinguished officer, I imagine, but prided himself on being quite the polished diplomat. Wilks, now, was all right. He knew that the beastly little island was at least
my
island. But they packed him off in no time, and introduced that intolerable Hudson Lowe.’

Honeybath was about to say: ‘Who kept the job, didn’t he, till your death?’ But he refrained. When Mr X became agitated and incoherent Sister Agnes was apt to produce a hypodermic. Honeybath disliked that. Besides which, experiments on the mad are best left to the mad-doctors. They are barred to an amateur – or at least to an amateur with the instincts of a gentleman. Honeybath soothingly requested a slight turning of the head. A few minutes later he handed Mr X a pencil sketch. ‘I expect,’ he said, ‘you may like to see how we are getting on.’

‘Not up to your Distribution of the Eagles, Monsieur David.’ Mr X said this with imperial frankness. ‘Or to my favourite – the one in which I am pointing the way to Italy. However, it’s very well in its way. I am pleased to retain it for the archive.’ Mr X stuffed the drawing deftly beneath his behind. ‘With your permission, Monsieur,’ he added graciously.

Honeybath silently bowed his gratification. He was quite getting into the spirit of the thing. And it was rather amusing to be taken for Jacques Louis David.

He even came to accept with a good grace the curious routine of his day. All his meals were served to him in the solitude of his room, but Arbuthnot appeared from time to time and made conversation. Occasionally they went down in the lift together and into the open air. He saw little of the house on the way, and nothing of its other inhabitants. Perhaps, apart from the eminently respectable domestics, there weren’t any. Or perhaps all Mr X’s anxious and affectionate relations lived here, but were taking care to keep out of his way. It was written into the record, after all, that they were a pathologically secretive crowd. As for the breather
en plein air
, that took place in a walled garden, and so wasn’t informative. At times all this built up into a decidedly claustrophobic effect. If Honeybath hadn’t been absorbed in his portrait – so absorbed as really to be in an exceptional mental state – he wouldn’t have stood it as easily as he did.

As it was, he became secretive in his own way. At times he had a strong impulse to furtive exploration. But the only territory he could explore was his own room. He poked about in drawers and climbed up to peer at the tops of cupboards. But all this yielded very little. If the room was normally in any sort of use, every sign of the fact had been effectively rubbed out before he was dumped in it.

At length, however, he did come on something. Between the two windows, and against the wall, was a Hepplewhite tambour writing-table, with its drawers, big and little, as empty as if it were in a shop. But depressions in the carpet suggested that it had formerly stood a few feet farther out in the room, and Honeybath had the curiosity to restore it to this position. The result was to expose to view a single shallow drawer at the back. He opened this, and what he found was mildly perplexing. The drawer contained a couple of vulgarly erotic magazines, a map of Central London upon which somebody had here and there drawn small circles in red ink, a forbidding-looking textbook on what appeared to be obscure metallurgical processes, and a pair of remarkably high-grade binoculars.

Honeybath had no impulse to edify himself with the reading-matter, whether heavy or light. He saw no interest in the map. But the binoculars were a tremendous find. This was because of the trains. If he wanted to know where he was – even remotely where he was – the trains passing to and fro just beyond the park seemed to be his only hope. The majority of them went flashing by, and about these nothing could be done. But just occasionally, as he had earlier remarked with interest, a train did stop, although very briefly, in full view. These binoculars could have the effect of bringing such a train within a few yards of him. He had only to be patient, and one of those informative yellow rectangles would yield its secret. He would know on just what main line – for a main line it certainly was – this nameless mansion lay.

It is possible that Honeybath was a little taken aback by the excitement which his small discovery occasioned in him; by the thoroughly juvenile sense, as it seemed, of having gained a trick, possessed himself of a secret weapon. He found himself reflecting that he must be careful not to use the binoculars at a time when the young manservant might come into the room and discover him to be so employed. This was absurd – just as absurd as that he didn’t at times say things like ‘This afternoon I intend to go out and explore the countryside a little’. Why didn’t he, at least, test out his position by such means? The answer was, of course, that he was frightened. In part, he was frightened of something ruthless which he felt lurking pervasively in his mysterious environment. But he was now even more frightened, oddly enough, merely of upsetting things. Because what was going forward on the canvas in his painting-room was more important than anything else whatever.

He discovered that the possibility of being detected while peering through the binoculars simply didn’t arise. Strangely perhaps, he had failed to reflect that his bathroom window must command exactly the same view as his bedroom windows. The bathroom window was, quite absurdly, a frosted affair – as if modesty required that the naked human form should be screened from the regard even of the stars or the angels. This was perhaps why the simple fact of the matter hadn’t struck him at once. He had only to lock himself in, throw up the sash, and do as much spying as he pleased.

He didn’t, so far as his immediate object went, have to do a great deal. Actually the first train to appear was so obliging as to draw to a halt with a couple of its carriages neatly centred in that convenient gap at the border of the park. On one of these carriages hung the yellow rectangle. And on the yellow rectangle, and to be read with no difficulty at all, was the single word
Swansea.

So that was it. Mr X’s residence – if it was indeed in any honest sense his – lay only a few hundred yards from the main line of what used to be called the Great Western Railway.

Rightly or wrongly, this appeared to Honeybath to be a momentous discovery, the mere making of which reflected credit on his own enterprise and perspicacity. How many men would have thought to move a writing-table out from the wall, on the chance of discovering a neglected drawer and something significant hidden in it? It was positively what you might expect a professional detective to do!