‘I suppose the account given in Braunkopf’s catalogue of the Wamba revolution and so on is quite inaccurate?’
‘Sure to be, I’d say. As a matter of fact, I didn’t read it. There were bits of poetry and God knows what. It looked revolting.’
‘So it is. But go on, please, with your authentic narrative.’
‘I don’t see that there’s much more that it’s essential for you to know. I’m not hired to do you bedtime stories.’ Holme looked sulky again as he made this childish remark. ‘Of course there was the beard. That’s rather crucial. You see, I’d been up country on my own just before this happened, and I hadn’t bothered to shave. It’s a thing I’d never done before – and I had realized that it made me look uncommonly like Gregory. And there was Gregory dead, you see, and all hell let loose outside – and by that time I knew that Ushirombo was out for my blood. Being cuckolded is a fearful insult among the Wamba. They simply don’t live and let live. I’d have been boiled in oil–if I was lucky.’
‘Is this Ushirombo a real professor?’
‘Oh, yes – or at least he’s a PhD London, which must be the same thing. Civilized tastes. Collects pictures. But then so did Goering.’
‘I’d suppose he’d have it in for your brother too – just because he
was
your brother. If he’s as vengeful as you say, that is.’
‘Oh, not at all. All his people had orders to treat Gregory very respectfully. So had Mbulu’s people, for that matter, and Mkaka’s people as well. It was as I told you: Gregory was much too useful for any of the native parties to want to get across him. He could whistle up guns for you almost as soon as you asked for them.’
‘Then there was no need for him – or you – to cut a way out of the mob with a
prog
?’
‘A
prog
? I never heard of it.’
‘Or to board a
krimp
?’
‘That’s a Wamba word for a kind of yam sandwich.’
‘It doesn’t seem to me that there’s an atom of truth in the Da Vinci catalogue. It says that while your blessed hotel was burning, Ushirombo and his lot were shut up in an old colonial gaol.’
‘Wherever he was, he was going to come out on top – whether in hours or days. And there was poor old Gregory, beastly dead.’
‘You changed clothes with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And cut off his beard and shaved him?’
‘Yes. Of course it was rather bloody awful. But you shave a corpse anyway, I’m told, if it’s to go reasonably tidy to the grave. And Gregory wouldn’t have minded. He was a really decent chap.’
‘You left one of your sketch-books in his pocket?’
‘Yes. I felt, you know, the job was worth doing well. But now I rather wish I hadn’t. It had some good things in it. Including a few last-moment sketches of the actual attack on the hotel.’
‘That
was clever.’ Cheel, although Holme’s whole account made him feel rather queasy, found himself unable to withhold this tribute. ‘But about the pictures. You’re sure they all went west?’
‘Quite sure. I can’t think why Hedda should suppose otherwise. Except that she’s an absolutely awful woman. Did I tell you that? Mind you,
en déhanchement
– and specially with the weight on the left leg – there’s a particular tilt to her pelvis that would have staggered Ingres. But there’s nothing else to be said for her whatever.’ Holme paused as if to consider for a moment. ‘Or almost nothing,’ he emended soberly.
‘Did she ever make any of those African trips with Gregory and yourself?’
‘Good Lord, no. Her only notion of travel is trips to Paris and trips back to New York.’
‘Holme, you’re
sure
one or two of those pictures of yours from the Wamba Palace mightn’t turn up?’
‘Quite sure.’ Holme appeared puzzled by Cheel’s compulsive return to this theme. ‘You should have seen the place.’
‘Your wife says she has a catalogue. Is that possible?’
‘I suppose so. There was a catalogue. It was to be quite an affair, you see. Until Ushirombo turned out to be the little bicycle man, and until his taking over the government provoked all that chaos.’
‘Did the catalogue state the dimensions of the pictures?’
‘Yes, it did. It always gives a catalogue tone if you do that.’
‘You’ve got a copy yourself?’
‘Yes, I have – although I can’t bear to look at it. You remember the chap in Shakespeare’s play – not Macbeth but Mac-somebody-else? “All my pretty ones”, he says. It’s a real feeling.’
‘Macduff’s children were what you call beastly dead, and there was nothing to be done about it. But paintings can be–’ Cheel checked himself. ‘What sort of people had seen them already: that whole set of canvases you’d done out there? Any other painters? Any critics, or fellows in the trade?’
‘Of course not. There’s nobody of that kind in those parts.’
‘But some of them must have been viewed by people with some notion of painting? Cultivated amateurs, I mean. After all, they were
going
to be shown to some sort of public, as well as to the gratified Professor Ushirombo.’
‘Yes, of course. But there was nobody who’d really have looked at them – except, of course, Gregory. The pinko-greys out there aren’t exactly aesthetes, you know. They’re business people who can’t afford to be in business anywhere else. That and a handful of ex-nigger-kicking police-officers on the way out. But I can’t see what you’re getting at with all this.’
‘Can’t you, my dear chap?’ This obtuseness on Sebastian Holme’s part positively put Cheel in a good humour. ‘Well, listen–’
Cheel broke off – aware that they were both suddenly listening to something else. There had been a firm tread in the corridor outside his undistinguished apartment. Now there was a thunderous knock on the door.
‘Oh, I say!’ The noise had brought Sebastian Holme to his feet in near-panic. ‘Do you think that may be Hedda?’
‘Most improbable – no need to be alarmed.’ Cheel’s tone belied his assurance. The interruption, he was conjecturing to himself, was by a person who had lately been making progressively insolent applications for the payment of rent. He moved towards the door. ‘If I just shoot that bolt, and if we keep quiet–’
It was too late. For the door had been thrown open with some violence and a formidable presence had entered the room. The man appeared, it was true, elderly or even old. But he stood well over six feet, had a breadth of shoulder emphasized by a flowing grey cloak worn with considerable
panache
, sported a broad-brimmed black hat over a generous mane of silver hair, and was carrying a long cane lightly flexed between two powerful hands. He certainly wasn’t going to be interested in the rent. Cheel didn’t at all like the look of him, all the same.
The stranger took a quick glance at the room’s two occupants, and then strode up to Holme.
‘I wonder, now,’ he said, ‘if this would be the ruffian? Would this, I ask myself, be the unspeakable blackguard I seek?’ He paused for a moment in this self-communion and stared fixedly at Holme – the cane behaving in a rather ugly way in his grasp meanwhile. ‘I judge not. Yet isn’t this fellow familiar to me?’ He took one hand from the cane, and with the other flicked it in the air – and sufficiently sharply to make it produce a distinctly unpleasant hiss. He placed the free hand lightly on Holme’s shoulder – an inoffensive, even if over-familiar, gesture which nevertheless made the young man jump as if upon the transmission of an electric current. ‘I think I know you, don’t I?’ the stranger continued – making use, for the first time, of direct address.
‘I don’t think so. In fact, certainly not.’ That Holme was almost totally unnerved was a fact evident to Cheel even through his own mounting alarm.
‘You surprise me. In fact you fail to convince me.’ The stranger stared at Holme harder still. ‘Aren’t you–’ He broke off. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked. His voice as well as his stance was now minatory to an alarming pitch.
‘My name?’ For a moment Holme seemed totally helpless. ‘I’m Sebas–’ He managed to silence himself. ‘My name’s P-p-p–’ It looked as if Holme, in a spurt of feeble invention, was trying to think of ‘Pierce’, ‘Patterson’, ‘Pool’ or some other plausible cognomen beginning with the arbitrarily chosen consonant. ‘My name’s P-p-p-icasso,’ was what Holme managed to say.
‘Most curious.’ The stranger stood back a little. He might have been proposing to give himself elbow-room or arm-room. ‘Do you know, that vaguely suggests itself to me as rather a Spanish sounding name? Yet you don’t look Spanish – not in the slightest degree.’
‘A grandmother,’ Holme said. ‘I mean a grandfather, I had one Spanish grandfather. But the strain has rather bred itself out. You see I have quite a lot of Danish blood too.’
‘Interesting,’ the stranger said. ‘But whether Spanish or Danish, I judge you not to be my man.’ He swung round on Cheel. ‘So now,’ he said, ‘I’d better take a look at
you
.’
Cheel backed away. Though intimidated, it wasn’t escaping him that Sebastian Holme, despite his history of romantic places, had been intimidated too. Meanwhile, however, he himself was very intimidated indeed. For the stranger, tucking his cane under his arm, had produced from a pocket of his capacious cloak a newspaper which he now proceeded to unfold and to thrust under Cheel’s nose.
‘Perhaps,’ the stranger said, ‘you are familiar with the appearance of this?’
‘Certainly not. I’ve never set eyes on it before.’ It was – as always – with regret that Cheel had thus to commit himself to prevarication. But the exigency seemed to require it. Were Holme to join with him, indeed, in an instantaneous assault upon the intruder it was no doubt possible that they could, without too much damage to themselves, bundle him from the apartment. But Holme showed no sign of being available for any enterprise of the sort. He had simply sat down and was looking glum. ‘It appears to be a newspaper,’ Cheel said. ‘A provincial newspaper. Let me see.’ He affected to peer more closely at the outspread page. ‘Circulating in some God-forsaken industrial hole in the Midlands.’
‘The God-forsaken industrial hole,’ the stranger said, ‘happens to be the town in which I was born and grew up. Although no longer frequently resident, I am in the enjoyment, I am proud to say, of good repute among my former fellow-citizens. There are those who have been kind enough to say that I am a credit to them.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ Cheel said. ‘Of course I don’t know why they should cherish such a notion – but I’m delighted to hear it all the same.’ He took a further couple of steps backwards as he spoke. This utterly irrational person – it had occurred to him – might be prompted to treat a delicate witticism as a stroke of insolence.
‘Um.’ For the moment, the stranger did no more than eye Cheel appraisingly. ‘May I ask if you are familiar with the name of Albert Rumbelow?’
‘Rumbelow?’ Cheel looked thoughtful.
‘Albert
Rumbelow? I believe I am. I think – Yes, he was surely a painter. Didn’t he go in for vast daubs depicting coronations and civic centres and new bridges and anything else that was large enough? He must have been enormously hard-working, as well as totally untalented. Dead now, probably. Cheel would know.’
‘Cheel?’ the stranger repeated ominously.
‘Mervyn Cheel. Fellow who lives in this flat. Merely in a temporary way, I believe. I was hoping to find him in. Decided to wait for him.’
‘I see.’ There could be little doubt that the stranger did entirely see. ‘I
am
Albert Rumbelow – as you may guess.’
‘How do you do,’ Cheel said. ‘This is–’ With his usual high regard for formal manners, he had been about to pronounce some introductory words on Holme. It seemed absurd, however, to say ‘This is Mr Pablo Picasso.’ ‘This,’ he emended, ‘is another friend of Mr Cheel’s.’
‘Indeed. I am surprised. I am surprised that a creature so base and venomous as this Cheel should have friends. Or enemies, for that matter. For who would break a butterfly’ – he gave a whisk in the air with his cane – ‘let alone a valuable weapon upon a Cheel?’
‘I am afraid I fail to understand you.’ Mr Albert Rumbelow’s absurd perversion of the poet Pope had, very naturally, further offended Cheel. ‘If you have any message that you would care to leave–’
‘I am inclined to think that you are not yourself the man Cheel.’
‘Precisely,’ Cheel interrupted, much relieved.
‘It is true that you make an unfavourable impression on me. I should judge you to be petty, dishonest and malign. It seems likely, however, that this Cheel is even more loathsome.’
‘Exactly,’ Cheel said emphatically.
‘It would be my conjecture that his outward appearance answers pretty clearly to the inward man. In which case he can hardly be distinguishable from a toad. I would wish him to know that this is the expectation in which I came to see him.’
‘Certainly,’ Cheel said, and edged hopefully towards the door. ‘I’ll tell him exactly what you’ve said.’
‘But there is rather more. I am at present engaged in executing a series of very large wall-paintings on canvas. The theme running through them is the British Way of Life, and they are intended to embellish what is to be called, I understand, a Palace of Industry in one of the new Commonwealth countries. Several have been exhibited, and I have already given much thought to the design of several more. Sketches for these are to be seen in the present Exhibition of the Royal Academy.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ Cheel said.
‘The earlier examples were favourably, or at least candidly, received by numerous critics. Some made adverse comments of a rational kind which I hope have been helpful to me. And your friend Mr Cheel wrote in
this
.’ Once more, the abominable Rumbelow held up the newspaper. ‘It is a respectable journal – but not in a position, I imagine, to retain the service of an art critic of any standing in London. What Cheel – who is so clearly of no account – has to say would be of no moment to me but for one circumstance: that he has sought to ridicule me in the eyes of persons among whom I happen to have grown up. You follow me?’
‘Oh, quite,’ Cheel said. ‘Oh, perfectly. I’ll put all this to Cheel.’