‘Isn’t your name Cheel?’ the young woman asked. She made the name sound as if it were an objectively displeasing one.
‘I am Mervyn Cheel,’ Cheel managed to say. Commonly he would have contrived to lend these words the effect of a modest but firm claim, so that the further words ‘the distinguished critic and painter’ would be present in a species of invisible parenthesis. On this occasion, however, he was conscious that his tone carried only the suggestion of a small-time crook making a dispirited admission to a policeman. It was not merely that his first exchange (if it could be called that) with this person had been such as to put him at a certain permanent disadvantage with her; it was also that there was something inherently alarming in the woman. This was hard to explain, but Cheel felt it acutely. ‘Mervyn Cheel,’ he heard himself repeating – feebly and to no purpose.
‘What do you know!’
This rejoinder, which Cheel understood to be an idiom expressive of admiring surprise, was clearly being ironically used on the present occasion. It conveyed, too, the further displeasing inference that this nasty person must be of transatlantic origin. You were never really safe, Cheel reflected, with an American woman – particularly after you had pinched her bottom. He must extricate himself from this outrageously impertinent intrusion upon his privacy at once.
‘Madam,’ he said, taking a kind of bold scramble in the direction of dignity, ‘I hardly think our acquaintance–’
‘Cut it out, Cheel.’ The woman was gently swinging her gloves in front of what might, in other circumstances, have been pleasing contours on the upper part of her person. ‘I’ve figured this out – see? I’ve heard about you. And right now I’ve seen you muttering with that smart cookie Braunkopf. And don’t I know there’s been something phoney about the whole thing? Hell I do, Mr Mervyn Cheel.’
‘I’m afraid I quite fail to understand you.’ Cheel’s alarm and distaste were suddenly tinctured with a dawning curiosity. The woman appeared to cherish the extraordinary notion that he was involved in some sort of conspiracy with the proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery. Her delusion was perhaps worth investigating. ‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘who
you
are?’
‘Sure,’ the woman said. ‘Sure you may – if you want to kid me Braunkopf hasn’t told you. I’m Hedda Holme.’ Her gloves swept upwards, so that Cheel sidestepped smartly. But the woman had intended only a gesture at the line of paintings behind her. ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Widow. That’s me.’
She could only have been called Hedda – it occurred to Cheel – after the violently displeasing person in Ibsen’s rotten old play. This might be held to testify to remarkable prescience on the part of her parents. It further suggested that these same parents had owned some shadow of literacy. Hedda’s mother had perhaps been the daughter of a genuine Ibsen-vintage New Woman – something like that. How Sebastian Holme – who presumably owned such limited rationality as painters ever possess – could have come to marry the creature was wholly unclear. Or rather – Cheel suddenly saw – it wasn’t. For not only was Hedda Holme, regarded
a tergo
, remarkably pinchable; she was also (although this made a less lively impression upon him personally) undeniably attractive when viewed the other way on.
He had noticed (now he came to think of it) a portrait here in the exhibition in which Holme had done justice to this female’s features. Her claim to be Mrs Holme must therefore be accepted as genuine. Cheel began to wonder just when husband and wife had become – as the imbecile Braunkopf expressed it – deranged. And he began to wonder what the woman was up to now. Did she know that her husband was alive? Did she know that he had been virtually rubbing shoulders with her not half an hour ago? A somewhat oppressive sense of the obscurity of the situation with which he had become implicated momentarily discouraged Cheel. But he recovered quickly. For he had an increasingly strong sense – it might have been called intuitive, or even mystical –
that there was something in this for him
.
Meanwhile, there was the fact that Mrs Holme had introduced herself. He resented this, since he deplored any irregularity of approach between strangers. It would be best to signalize the fact at once.
‘How do you do,’ he said austerely.
Hedda Holme laughed shortly. At the same time her right hand, which was now resting rather inelegantly on her right hip, moved down the curve of her right buttock. It was clear that she still had it in for him as the perpetrator of that innocent little
jeu d’esprit
.
‘We’re going to talk,’ she said. ‘But not here.’ She had been glancing round the Da Vinci, in which there were comparatively few people left. Now she looked appraisingly at Cheel. ‘In fact I’ll do you a square meal,’ she added unexpectedly. With a peremptory jerk of her head, she moved away.
Cheel couldn’t very well pretend to be gratified. Some such additional words as ‘you hungry-looking bastard’ or even ‘you mangy cur’ might safely have been used at this point by any imaginative writer concerned to give a little more fullness to Mrs Holme’s speech. Nevertheless there was an undeniable immediate convenience in the woman’s proposal. There was both that and the obscurer but equally beguiling prospect of somehow getting in on the velvet in a large way. Cheel found that he was following along. As he did so he spoke with easy dignity in the direction of the nape of Hedda Holme’s neck.
‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘You might care for the Caprice. Or a cab would take us to Pipistrello’s in no time. Or perhaps–’
‘Across the street.’ The brutal woman spoke without turning round. ‘There’s a joint with a buffet set-up at the back. They’ll fix you as much as you can eat, I guess. Tank yourself up as well, if you want to. So long as you talk, that is. And talk you will. Get, Cheel?’
For the moment, Cheel said no more. It was perhaps this form of address that chiefly offended him, and he judged silence to be the best rebuke. At the same time he remembered that his earlier reconnaissance had determined the establishment over the way as reputable and indeed promising. It ought to be possible to begin with some tolerable smoked salmon. When Mrs Holme quickened her pace, he quickened his too.
‘And first,’ she said, ‘don’t think that I don’t
know
.’ Occasionally sipping from a large and nauseous draught of orange juice, and alternately poking round in the dismal sort of salad that has nothing whatever to eat in it, Hedda Holme had been watching sardonically as he did civilized justice to a very tolerable
homard thermidor
. ‘About the Nicolaes de Staël, that is. Most everybody does know, I guess.’
Cheel frowned. Everybody didn’t know, and he wondered just how Sebastian Holme’s widow did. In matters of artistic concern she must be not without an ear to the ground. The de Staël affair had been unfortunate, although of course nothing more was involved than a small chronological blunder. He wasn’t too good, he had to admit, on what you might call the Lives – and Deaths – of the Painters. His vagueness about Holme was an instance. And certainly he had claimed with some confidence to have conversed with de Staël about, and in the presence of, a picture by de Staël quite a few years after de Staël turned out to have died. As this venially inaccurate recollection had been advanced in the course of making a professional
expertise
, and as the resulting attribution to de Staël had happened to bring him in a reasonable fee, a certain unpleasantness had naturally succeeded upon the discovery of the truth of the matter. But it wasn’t true that
everybody
knew. If they did, his present position would be even mote unjustly depressed than it was. Not even the wretched provincial rag might be employing him.
‘Ah, that,’ he said whimsically. ‘There has been a certain amount of uninformed gossip about it. The true facts are rather amusing and quite innocent. Unfortunately I’m not at liberty to divulge them at present.’
‘You’re a crook, Cheel, and you know it. In the picture-broking racket you’ve brought off some very pretty swindles in your time. So has that rogue Braunkopf. And there were the two of you, muttering to each other in the middle of the bastard’s paintings–’
‘The bastard?’ For the moment Cheel was simply unable to decide at what point of the woman’s raving he was most flabbergasted.
‘Sure, Cheel. The low hound I married. And there you and Braunkopf were, conspiring together. I mean to get to the bottom of it.’
The woman must be in some advanced stage of paranoia. Cheel felt extremely annoyed. He resented the suggestion that he was in the habit of bringing off successful swindles in the picture-broking world. It was something that he had just never got in on. The melancholy de Staël affair was an instance of his total failure, to date, in anything of the sort. He didn’t even believe that Braunkopf was really in any notable degree a rogue. Hedda Holme was one hundred per cent crazy.
‘Forty per cent,’ Hedda Holme said – so that Cheel positively jumped. ‘Shall I tell you how Braunkopf tricked me into agreeing to a commission like that? Swearing the slob’s daubs were the next thing to junk, and that it would cost the earth to start a legend about him.’
‘A legend?’
‘All that hocum about Wamba-Wamba. A cover story, if ever there was one.’
‘You mean that all that never happened? You mean that your husband’s still alive?’ This last question escaped Cheel’s lips simply because he was by now thoroughly dazed. As it turned out, he could scarcely have asked a better one.
‘Alive? You’re crazy. Sebastian’s dead, all right. That’s the one bright spot in the affair. Why–’
‘Yes, of course.’ Cheel interrupted. For Sebastian Holme’s supposed widow had spoken with spontaneous and complete conviction. Whatever her suspicions were, he, Cheel, was one ahead of her in a crucial piece of knowledge. ‘But what do you mean,’ he demanded, ‘by hocum at Wamba-Wamba?’
‘That’s what
you
know. You and your fellow-crook Braunkopf. So where are all those paintings? That’s what I want to discover.’
‘You mean the paintings destroyed by the mob, or whatever it was, in this outlandish Wamba place? Dust and ashes, I suppose, blowing through the jungle.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Mrs Holme put her heaviest irony into this question. ‘Braunkopf has them. And you’re in on it.’
‘Don’t I damned well wish I was.’ Cheel was about to add ‘you silly bitch’ (or perhaps merely ‘you stupid cow’) to this avowal. But he desisted, perhaps feeling that he had produced sufficient candour for one mouthful. Instead, he decided to try sounding a rational note. ‘Have some sense,’ he said. ‘Braunkopf may have shot you a line about the cost of building up the Wamba affair. But he couldn’t have intended it, you know – whether to grab a lot of pictures, as you seem to suggest, or simply to create a legend. Mind you, he
has
created a legend. The success of this exhibition has a silly side which is certainly bound up with that. By the way, I suppose you realize that, legend or no legend, your husband – your
late
husband – could paint?’
‘Of course he could paint. Somebody must have taught him, I suppose. He produced acres of the stuff.’
‘You imbecile bitch! Sebastian Holme could
paint
.’ Cheel was heartily glad that he had saved up his imprecation for this point. For the first time, Hedda Holme seemed a trifle shaken. ‘Do you know what that means? Of course you don’t. But what you do know is that you’re sitting bloody pretty on this whole business. Even at sixty per cent, it means tens of thousands for you. So lay off your crackpot suspicions. All that stuff in the catalogue – their stupid revolution, and the burning of some rotten hotel – must be on the record, you know. The notion that this little Braunkopf creature somehow rigged it in order to steal the pictures of a painter who still wasn’t worth twopence just won’t wash. my girl. It’s as potty as your notion that I was in on it too. How’s your salad? Useful for keeping down the
embonpoint
, I suppose. They’re not too bad with lobsters here. They can bring me my
tournedos
now.’ Cheel raised his wineglass amiably and chinked it against the tumbler containing his hostess’ orange juice. He remembered the corpulent man in the Da Vinci. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
Mrs Holme quite failed to respond to this civility.
‘I’ve been swindled,’ she said. ‘And I’ve a hunch you’re in on it.’ She looked at Cheel balefully but (he thought) a shade uncertainly. Perhaps she was coming to some glimmering perception of her own fatuity. ‘Braunkopf and you have gotten all those African paintings – the ones there’s this phoney story about – and you’re going to unload them quietly and slowly on the market.’
‘I see,’ Cheel said. He found himself speaking almost respectfully. It was a nice thought, after all – so nice that he couldn’t do other than mourn its baselessness. ‘You think the show the catalogue speaks about in this Wamba Palace Hotel never took place at all?’
‘It took place, all right. There was a printed catalogue of that one too. I possess a copy of it.’
‘Well then – there you are.’ This time, Cheel spoke almost absently. For, with Hedda Holme’s last remark, something had started up in his mind like a creation. As yet, like all great imaginative constructions at their moment of birth, the thing was unformed and shadowy.
But it
was there
. Cheel took a long draught of claret. ‘And so what?’ he asked.
‘I don’t believe for a moment that they were destroyed.’ Mrs Holme bit viciously into the plainly nauseous fluff of a starch reduced roll. ‘Certainly not all of them. Probably not any of them. Somebody just walked off with them in the confusion. Or perhaps bought them up at a dollar a piece.’
‘It’s an interesting notion.’ Cheel found that he wanted to laugh rudely. He did so. ‘Has it occurred to you that if they
were
saved, and
were
bought up at a dollar a piece, you yourself wouldn’t preserve the slightest title or interest in them?’
‘A sale like that would be a fraud, a racket.’