The Golden Fleece (7 page)

Mercifully, he had his routines, and a heroic capacity to absorb himself in his work. That was what he did, accelerating the progress of his gene-designing, gene-manufacturing and gene-implanting experiments, looking forward to the day when he could actually begin field-testing. For the moment, he was working almost entirely in cyberspace and headspace, where the hitches rarely showed up, but he did contrive to get half a dozen new pigment genes—all patent-protected—into organic form, and to incorporate them into cultures of both wool and silk. Within a further ten days, he saw the first flecks of color born in his Petri-dishes, and knew that the foundations had been laid for a great ideative and industrial enterprise.

He allowed himself to feel a small thrill of triumph, but not to celebrate. The time for celebration was still a long way off.

For the moment, it looked as if his greens and blues were ahead of his golds, but he wasn’t upset by that. The golds would come through, in time; so would the blacks...and the reds too. Only splodges in dishes to begin with, but in time...maybe he could even produce Hellfire, if there turned out to a market for it. His progress was frustratingly slow, because his ambitions were so large, but he knew that Jason Jarndyke was right. Rome hadn’t been built in a day, and the Romans hadn’t made as great a job of it as they might have done, although the Goths and Vandals certainly hadn’t helped with its preservation. He had to be patient.

He was. He worked with relentless efficiency, by no means tirelessly but always effectively. He ate well. He cycled up and down the moors, enjoying the sun light and the subtle shades of coloration that the mosses and the heather presented, as the season slowly wore on. Everything went like clockwork, uninterrupted by superfluous cuckoos. He had plenty to think about without philosophizing, and he made the most of his opportunities. His head was full of molecules.

Eventually, though, the summons came. Jarndyke dropped round to his computer-station as if for a routine check-in, but added, before turning away: “Can you come to dinner Sunday? Angie has a few things she’d like to show you. Value your opinion.” He didn’t bother to remind him not even to think about saying no.

“Two o’clock?” Adrian queried.

“Two o’clock,” Jayjay confirmed. “Walk or bring your bike— all the same to us.”

Adrian decided to walk.

~ * ~

Dinner went reasonably smoothly. Angelica Jarndyke didn’t avoid looking at her guest, and played a much fuller role in the conversation, although she seemed to be avoiding the subject of art.

Jayjay was obviously aware of that, and it eventually offended his rule about not beating around the bush—although, when he eventually steered the conversation in that direction, even he took the scenic route.

“I noticed on your CV that you once went to a GRE conference in Oslo,’’ he remarked to Adrian. “Did you take in Gustav Vigeland’s sculpture park? The
Vita?”

“Of course,” Adrian said. “Not really my cup of tea, though. A bit austere. Colorless. Impressive, but...just not my sort of thing.”

“I liked it,” Jarndyke said, blithely. “What about the other brother? Did you visit
his Vita?”

That was the point, Adrian knew. Jason Jarndyke was fishing. Gustav Vigeland’s little brother Emanuel hadn’t been given a park in which to show off. He had been an official recorder, painting portraits of local dignitaries to hang in civic buildings, condemned to a humdrum existence of conspicuous underachievement, living in an ordinary house on an ordinary estate—until he’d ripped out all the floors in his ordinary house and made the entire interior into a single coherent space, on whose black-dyed walls he’d painted his own all-encompassing vision of human life, in all its aspects, which was designed to be looked at in dim light, so that visitors had to be in there for a good half hour before their eyes adjusted sufficiently to see it as it was meant to be seen.

A blind man could have spotted the hidden agenda. Jason Jarndyke had his own theory about what was going on in Angelica’s “barn.” Doubtless she had “dragged” him to see Emanuel’s house, which was only open to the public for a couple of hours a week, perhaps because the local authorities suspected his
Vita
of being pornographic.

“Yes,” Adrian said. “I saw it.”

“And what did you think?” was the inevitable next question.

“Original. Ingenious. Very effective. A masterpiece, in its way.”

“Not brilliant? Not a work of genius?”

“Maybe not entirely my cup of tea,” Adrian hedged. “More so than Gustav’s
Vita,
certainly, but still...in sum, less than the eye could have desired to see.”

“Angie liked it,” Jarndyke said, laying down the hook along with the lure.

She bit, but almost dutifully, because it was expected of her— or so Adrian thought. “Mr. Stamford’s right,” she said. “It’s a masterpiece, in its way. Original, ingenious and effective...but it used semi-darkness as a cloak, to shield its weaknesses. I can sympathize with that, I suppose, but...well, I did like it, but not as much as the Rothko chapel. Rothko could use near-black in a way that Vigeland junior couldn’t. Rothko understood its subtleties better.”

It wasn’t really a lead-in, but Jarndyke used it anyway.

“Angie has some pictures set up in the library that she’s like to show you,” he said to Adrian. “To demonstrate that she
does
understand near-black...as well as red and blue...and maybe even gold.”

“If only I were a reverse engineer instead of a mere dauber,” his wife retorted, a trifle sharply “what sweet music we might make...not to mention money. I fear that my paintings are never going to find much of a market.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Jarndyke said. “What matters is that
you
know what they’re worth.”

“I’m sure that Mrs. Jarndyke has always known that,” Adrian put in, trying to be gallant. “I’ll be very interested to see them. I’ve been looking forward to it immensely.”

“It’s only a small sample though,” Jarndyke put in. “Old stuff, I believe. All her recent work is in the barn. I haven’t seen any of it—she gave up asking for my opinion years ago. Can’t blame her.”

All that Angelica said in reply to that was: “It’s not a barn, Jayjay. It’s just an outbuilding. No livestock, no tractor, no bales of hay. Just amateurish dabbling—not worth seeing, really. I wish you wouldn’t go on about it so.”

“Sorry, Angie,” Jarndyke said, contritely.

“And it’s not a rip-off of Emanuel Vigeland either,” she said. “It’s not a collective vision of human life, pornographic or otherwise, to be seen in quiet light as if in a church.”

“Can’t blame a fellow for guessing,” Jarndyke said. “Are we going to the library, or what?”

“No,” said Angelica, suddenly stern.
“We
aren’t. Mr. Stamford and I are going to the library.
You
are going to stay here, Jason. This doesn’t concern you.”

That didn’t seem entirely fair to his employer, and Adrian felt slightly intimidated about the thought of being alone with Angelica, but he was too scared to say anything.

Jarndyke only shrugged, and said: “You can call him Adrian.”

That seemed a bit thick to Adrian, too, especially as Jason Jarndyke had never addressed him as anything but “Son,” but he raised no objection, and meekly allowed Angelica Jarndyke to escort him out of the room and along the wood-paneled corridor that presumably led to the library.

It was the kind of library that looked as if it had been put together with books bought by the yard, more to show off their old bindings than to provide reading material. Some were in Latin, others were standard sets of classic authors—but Adrian didn’t waste much time examining the bookshelves. He was infinitely more interested in the paintings.

There were seven, each set up on its own easel, the array carefully spaced, as if the intervals had been measured with a ruler.

Like the vision of Hellfire he had already seen, they would probably have looked like “splodges” to the everyday eye, Adrian thought. Like the vision of Hellfire, though, they weren’t essays in abstract impressionism. They were representative pictures— very subtle pictures, using extremely subtle gradations of color, but representative nevertheless. Some of them needed careful study, but there wasn’t one of them that left Adrian confused as to its subject.

He started with the yellow—or, to be strictly accurate, the gold. It was, as might have been guessed, a picture of the mythical Golden Fleece, with a triumphant Jason displaying it to an invisible crowd. Medea wasn’t present—unless she was invisible, although that would probably have been taking subtlety too far. The Jason in the picture wasn’t exactly a portrait, but it was obvious to Adrian that he was based on a real individual. A pity, he thought, that the image in question was invisible to the Jason in question—except, perhaps, subliminally.

The painting reassured him somewhat, after the anxieties he’d built up in consequence of the Dantean image of the inferno. It was a
pleasant
picture, which seemed to have been painted with a degree of affection. Angelica must have known that her husband wouldn’t be able to see the image suggestive of himself, but she hadn’t been tempted to be satirical in the depiction, let alone cruel. There was no mockery in it.

The blue was a mermaid, or perhaps a siren. It wasn’t a Hans Christian Andersen mermaid: the meek self-sacrificing innocent who had consented walk on daggers for a lifetime in exchange for the privilege of being able to keep a fisherman company; it was a temptress, willing and able to lead men to their doom with a seductive song. The limitations of Angelica’s draughtsmanship showed up more obviously in the top half of the central figure than the bottom. The fishy part was quite well-done, elegantly curled and beautifully colored in the scales, which were silver behind all the myriad blue reflections of water-modified sky. The human half, by contrast, was vague, the rippling blonde hair seeming in need of the attentions of a good hairdresser, and the features rather flat

Was this a sort-of-portrait too? Adrian wondered. Was the siren a means by which Angelica was trying to represent herself, metaphorically as well as literally? If so, what did her apparent failure—which might, of course be deliberate—signify? Loneliness, no doubt...a sense of difference, obviously...but what else?

Adrian had always felt more comfortable with pure exercises in color and form, like Rothko’s or Pollock’s. Monet’s gardens, too, he felt that he understood very well, and Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti...he had appreciated the pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, but not the siren quality of his women’s faces, the extreme subtleties of his attitude to the models with which he had had such tortured and convoluted personal relationships....

All in all, Adrian found the blue siren less unsettling than the red inferno, but there was still a hint of damnation about it that seemed menacing as well as uncanny.

The green was forest foliage, with hidden faces peeping through it: nymphs and fauns, Adrian assumed, or maybe mere fairy folk. Again, the faces were too vague to be identifiable, by species let alone as individuals. Some tended to the ugly, some to the beautiful, but none to the meek and sanitized. On the other hand, they were not exactly malevolent either—merely slightly unhuman, weirdly hybridized.

The composition of the picture, and the manner in which the foliage and the faces were intermingled, was very ambitious— perhaps a trifle too ambitious, although it showed off the artist’s technique to better effect than the simpler and more straightforward images. Complication helped to offset the slight individual faults of curvature. It was easier to see in this picture that Angelica had had some professional training, and had benefited from it, in spite of being handicapped by insufficient natural ability in her brushwork. Adrian had looked up her biography with the aid of a search engine, and knew that she had done two years at the Courtauld before dropping out—or, more accurately as well as more kindly, moving on. It must have become obvious to her over those two years that she would never be able to create a work of art as wonderful as the one she constituted in herself, even with the aid of full-spectrum color vision.

She had not given up, though. She had carried on painting, in private, concentrating increasingly on work that only she could see.