‘It’s a notion of your wife’s. She thinks they were saved and somehow collared by Braunkopf. She thinks Braunkopf’s holding on to them until your reputation’s at its peak. Then he’ll unload them quietly for the benefit of his own pocket.’
‘What ghastly tripe.’
‘No doubt. Your wife does strike me as a suspecting sort.’
‘She’s an awful woman. You might get on with her rather well. She might even come to tolerate your dirty little tricks. It’s an idea. Horrible Hedda and her heel Cheel.’
A man unequipped with Mervyn Cheel’s natural magnanimity might have resented this. It did, indeed, produce a moment’s silence. But Cheel could afford not to feel offended. He was pretty sure that he had as good as got Sebastian Holme where he wanted him. Of course there was much that still had to be found out before a master-plan could evolve itself. But the essence of the situation was now clear.
In one regard, however, Cheel recognized (with his usual penetration) that he had some little way to go. Holme’s last remark might be said to emphasize this. If the situation now unfolding satisfactorily were to be successfully exploited (not that ‘ exploited’ would be the word to employ) then something of an honest and wholesome relation of confidence must be built up with this obviously kittle and difficult young man. Holme must not simply follow along; he must eat out of the hand. Cheel must be not merely manager and impresario; he must be guardian angel as well. Holme must come – and that quickly – to bless the hour at which he had sat down on this particular bench in St James’s Park. It could hardly be denied that, before this could be achieved, there was a certain amount of existing prejudice to overcome. Holme, unfortunately, carried one occasion of this prejudice about with him under his thumb. Literally that. The problem of getting him – this time metaphorically – under
Cheel
’s thumb was a little complicated by the fact.
‘There’s an impersonal side to this,’ Cheel said. ‘And it’s what chiefly makes me want to help. Mind you, I want to do that simply as a matter of man to man. You must know very well what it is to be liked, because you’re a very likeable person. Although it can’t be said that you’ve been exactly cordial this afternoon, I do myself happen to like you simply as a chap.’
‘I didn’t have any lunch,’ Holme said. ‘Otherwise, this is where I’d vomit.’
‘But it’s something else I’m talking about.’ Cheel pursued his way determinedly. ‘What I’ve called the impersonal side. The business, I mean, of getting you back to your painting. Or perhaps you
are
back at it? If so, I’m talking to no purpose.’
‘Cut it out. Look at me, Cheel. Look at me sitting in this rotten place and putting in time talking to a blackguard. Of course I’m not back to painting.’
‘So I’d have supposed.’ Although Holme’s remarks were still a little lacking in expression of regard, Cheel felt satisfied with the turn the talk was taking. It was bringing into Holme’s eye a glint he wanted to see there. ‘And my point is, you know, that it’s a plain duty to get you back into a studio. You’re a youngster still, if you’ll forgive my mentioning the fact, and moreover quite a bit of your mature production went west in that stupid hotel.
There just must be more Sebastian Holmes
. Put it that I feel the thing professionally. As it happens, I’ve painted a little myself.’ Cheel was disingenuously modest. ‘I still do from time to time, although I’ve no illusions about the extent of my talent.’
‘Illustrations for smutty books – or just designs for chocolate boxes?’
‘Small pointillist abstracts.’ Cheel now hardly noticed Holme’s continued offensiveness. His instinct told him that the moment of crisis had come. ‘In the main, of course, I’m just a critic – a sterile intellectual. But the fact that I
do
a little myself–’
‘Yes, of course.’ Holme’s impatience was suddenly of a new sort. ‘Get on, can’t you?’
‘A man with your gift owes a duty to it. That’s the plain fact of the matter, Holme. It’s your business to paint. So why aren’t you painting?’
There was a silence. Holme – and it was for the first time – seemed to have decided that Cheel had advanced something worth thinking about.
‘That’s interesting,’ Holme said. ‘It’s interesting because there’s no creditable answer. No honest answer I wouldn’t be a bit ashamed to give. And yet I haven’t quite seen it that way. Thanks.’
‘You’ve got some money, I suppose?’
‘Damned little. But I’ve got some.’
‘You could hire an attic, buy a canvas or two, and get down to work? And you don’t feel you’ve exhausted your inspiration?’
‘Inspiration my foot. I’m a painter and that’s that.’ Holme was now looking bewildered. ‘It’s true I could do these things. And true that I don’t seem to want to. It must be connected with this change of identity.
I was
the painter – not Gregory.’
‘I think you’re on to something there.’ Cheel nodded approvingly, as at an apt pupil’s first steps to comprehension. ‘You have to get back to free artistic expression in your own essential character.’ Cheel had made this sound quite impressive, and for a moment he paused on it weightily. ‘Or at least,’ he added as an afterthought,
‘almost
free artistic expression.’
‘You think something can be done?’ Holme’s voice had become frankly appealing. At the same time he looked round apprehensively. ‘It was damned silly of me to take off the beard. Anybody might come along.’
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
‘Or Hedda might. She’s a perfectly awful woman, you know. She might do absolutely anything. She might call a policeman.’
‘We certainly don’t want anything like that.’ Holme, Cheel saw, was a reformed character. At least he was that for the moment – for he seemed to be a young man subject to somewhat rapid changes of mood. Doubtless he might turn sulky again – and in consequence thoroughly rude – at any moment. It would be prudent in Cheel to press hard upon the initiative he now held. ‘And we need privacy in any case. There’s much to get clear. I must have the full facts, you know. That’s only fair.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Holme sounded reluctant. ‘But it’s such a horrid story. There are parts of it I just don’t like remembering at all.’
‘You must get it off your chest.’ Cheel said this in a manly and encouraging way, like a schoolmaster keeping eventual disciplinary intentions out of sight. ‘We’ll go to my rooms. It’s about time for a cup of tea. Come along, my dear chap.’
‘I’m not your–’ Quite pathetically, Sebastian Holme checked himself. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’
‘Of course these aren’t my regular quarters,’ Cheel said twenty minutes later. ‘The fact is my flat’s being decorated, and I’ve moved in here to be out of the mess.’
‘What rot!’ Holme, who was prowling round the room, spoke contemptuously. He appeared to have gone into opposition again. ‘It’s clear enough that you’re in pretty low water. A sleazy character in seedy circumstances. That’s you. You needn’t be ashamed of it. At any rate, not of the circumstances.’ He moved to the window and inspected it. ‘You’ve got a damned good north light. A man could paint ten hours a day here, if he wanted to. I don’t expect you last out as long as that. But let me see some of the pointillist things you were talking about.’
‘It’s the application of the technique to abstractions that I’ve been finding interesting.’ Surprised and gratified, Cheel produced some of his recent labours. ‘One can’t just be a critic all the time.’
‘Can’t one?’ For some minutes Holme studied with care the small paintings shown to him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see. You’re rather a clever person, Cheel.’ He turned away, suddenly indifferent. ‘Which doesn’t mean these things aren’t pretty average rubbish. They are.’
‘Thank you very much.’ For the first time in the course of his exchanges with the disagreeable Sebastian Holme, Cheel was really offended. Indeed, he was deeply mortified. He managed, however, to say no more than: ‘If that’s settled, perhaps we can get back to business.’
‘Exactly. You’re broke, or the next thing to it. And honest work isn’t your line. So you’ve decided that you can somehow cash in on having discovered me.’ A quick grin came over the young man’s face. ‘Money from Holme. That’s your notion.’
‘Money
for
Holme, too.’ Cheel was recovering something like good humour. It seemed to him that Holme’s rather crude phrasing of the matter wasn’t wholly unpromising. ‘But, of course, I may have got the thing wrong. So I want the facts. In the first place, about Wamba, or Wamba-Wamba, or whatever its name is.’
‘Wamba is the territory – the state, as they now call it. Wamba-Wamba is the town, or capital. The people are called the Wamba. They’re terrific. Particularly in a dapple of light through jungle foliage. You just wouldn’t believe what happens to their skins. There’s not the minutest area that you couldn’t explore for days. I’d done no more than make a beginning at that. And now I’ll never be able to go near the place again.’ Holme glanced up at Cheel – his mood of anxiety and incipient dependence suddenly returned to him. ‘I take it your damned cleverness doesn’t see a way to my doing
that
?’
‘One thing at a time, my dear chap. We must walk before we can run. Now, what about your manner of living at present? To just what extent are you being your brother Gregory?’
‘I collect his money from the bank, to begin with. Only they tell me there isn’t much left.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ In point of fact, Cheel found this information satisfactory. Sebastian Holme had been forging his brother’s signature. Knowledge of this would be useful if the young man later turned recalcitrant. ‘What else?’
‘Well, I keep away from people who knew Gregory, and and I skip around pretty quickly from one set of digs to another. I couldn’t manage a real impersonation. And Hedda has been trying to contact me. I mean she’s been trying to contact Gregory. It’s all very confusing. And there’s no future in it, as I said. I wouldn’t have come back to England at all, if there hadn’t been some stupid difficulty about drawing on Gregory’s money abroad. And yet I
wanted
to come back. If I can’t be in Wamba, I’d sooner be in England.’
‘What sort of a person was your brother Gregory?’
‘Oh, absolutely splendid!’ Sebastian Holme spoke with a new animation. ‘When he first began to take me around his bits of Africa and so on it was on the score of his needing a reliable lieutenant. That’s how he represented it. But he really knew, I think.’
‘Really knew? I don’t follow you.’
‘That it was what I needed if my painting was going to
be
painting, of course. Mind you, my painting was useful to
him
, if anybody got too curious about the yacht, I’d set up a whacking great canvas on the deck and start painting as showily as possible. I was a wealthy amateur, and Gregory was just the nautical character I hired to get me around exotic parts.’
‘What was there about the yacht for people to get too curious about?’
‘Well, of course, our main business was gun-running. You’d hardly believe the number of people in Africa that you can flog guns to. Guns are in. Just as gin and bibles are out.’
Braunkopf’s catalogue, Cheel remembered, credited the Holme brothers with ‘a small but highly significant import business’. This, presumably, was it.
‘And other things as well?’ he asked.
‘We did a good deal with refugees. Choose any two territories with a seaboard, and you’ll find quite a surprising two-way traffic of that sort.’
‘And it was activities of that kind that got you into real trouble?’
‘Lord, no.’ Sebastian Holme seemed surprised. ‘Gregory, you know, who stuck to these ploys, was never in serious trouble at all. It was quite
safe
being Gregory. That’s why I turned into him.’
‘You turned into him, I gather, after he was dead – which hardly suggests that his position was a safe one.’
‘Oh, anybody can get killed in a riot, or in what they call a revolution. What Gregory was safe from was being nabbed by one or another government of the moment. Top blacks came and went, you know. They all had a notion that Gregory might be useful to them later on. My position was different. But how was I to know that the girl’s wretched little husband was really Professor Ushirombo? There he was, peddling bicycles and bicycle tyres – they’re dead keen on bicycles – in an obscure hamlet in the middle of the jungle. He was disguised and in hiding, you see. It wasn’t a bit fair – was it?’
‘They say all’s fair in love and war – and I gather you were mixing up the two.’ Cheel gave a cackle of laughter at this joke, but at once recovered himself. ‘You’re telling me,’ he asked with distaste, ‘that you were involved in some low
amour
?’
‘Come off it, Cheel.’
‘And this Professor Ushirombo, whose wife you seduced among the bicycle tyres – didn’t he overthrow somebody?’
‘The Professor overthrew the chap who called himself the Field-Marshal. Mbulu, his name was. He wasn’t much of a one for the arts, or not what we think of as the arts over here. That was why my shirt was on Ushirombo, although I’d never set eyes on him. I mean although I
thought
I’d never set eyes on him. Actually, I’d locked him up in his own thunderbox.’
‘His own what?’
‘Kind of jakes. And there I was in that damned so-called hotel, arranging an exhibition of my paintings in honour of the liberator, who was said to be dead nuts on culture. And, all the time, he was the little chap I’d lassoed and shut up for the night in the company of his own and other’s ordures. It was just too funny. And now there he is, virtually a dictator, and I suppose the girl – a fabulous girl – is ensconced in the presidential palace, and calling herself the First Lady of Wamba.’ Holme stared at Cheel. ‘What are you making a face like that for?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Cheel realized that his indefatigable moral and aesthetic fastidiousness had betrayed him. He had no wish unnecessarily to offend Holme. ‘I suppose I find something a little stiff in an affair with a female Hottentot.’
‘Female Hottentot my foot. She was Eurasian and astounding. But all that’s neither here nor there. It belongs to the past, worse luck.’