by John Creasey
“I heard and I think I understand,” he answered.
“You only think!”
Mannering said sharply: “Would you rather I give you a slick answer, off the top of my mind? Or do you want a considered reply?”
She was almost abashed, on the instant.
“Considered,” she admitted.
“Then answer one or two questions.” Mannering was aware of the hot sun drying him quickly, and moved towards the shade of an enormous red umbrella, but Venella stood in the blazing light without giving it a thought. “Do you seriously believe that I think Australia has no right to this kind of possession?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“You made sure we didn’t get the Alda insignia.”
“Do you seriously think I would prefer British treasures to go to America rather than Australia?”
“That’s the evidence,” Venella declared.
“Well, don’t be taken in by it. If I had a choice I would certainly keep that kind of historical relic in England. But we have to sell a lot of treasures overseas, and if I’ve a preference, it’s for selling to a Commonwealth country. America has a lot of British tradition, so I would rather they went to America than Japan, say, or France. But that’s only one aspect of it.”
Venella said sardonically: “You’re telling me.”
“What’s on your mind now?”
“The biggest penny.”
“Venella,” Mannering said, “you’ve got too many things wrong. I can’t alter the governing factor that the highest bidder gets the goods, but. . .”
“Don’t stick your neck out, Mister Mannering,” Venella interrupted, but her manner had thawed slightly.
“-But in a dozen, in a hundred cases of private sale I’ve allowed jewels and antiques, a great many precious things, to go to the man who cared for them rather than to the collector who simply wanted possession.” As he stared at Venella something seemed to click in his mind, an answer to a problem which was satisfying to himself even if it would not satisfy everyone. He went on almost pompously although with absolute conviction: “These things don’t belong to any nation. We have our emotional reasons for wanting them in one place or another, but in fact they belong to the world.”
“Crap,” Venella said.
“Really believe it’s crap?”
“If you think that, you’re fooling yourself.”
“I do think it,” Mannering said. “And I’ll go on thinking it, but I’m not going to spend time trying to convince you. If I have to convince anybody, it will be Nathaniel Brutus. I’ve seen all I want to, here.”
“You’ve only seen half of the collection!”
“I haven’t seen a fake or a stolen piece,” Mannering said, and then he laughed. “But you’re right, I ought to see the lot before I can advise anyone to buy. How wealthy is Brutus?”
“Very wealthy,” answered Venella.
“Could he buy all the Melbury Collection?”
“He could buy four Melbury Collections without selling a single sheep.”
“I think I ought to go and see him at once,” Mannering decided. “How long will it take me to drive from here? Do I have to go to Brisbane first?”
“You can’t drive to Baratta from here without using the worst roads in Australia,” Venella told him. “Do you really want to go?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take you by air,” Venella offered. “We’d better leave at dawn, so you’ll have time to look at everything in Melbury House twice.” She paused. “Did you really believe much of the Collection might be stolen?”
“I half-believed it,” Mannering said. “Venella, what happened to your Picasso?”
The question took her absolutely by surprise, and she stared at him open-mouthed. He thought she was going to give him an evasive answer, but slowly her eyes cleared and her surprise died away.
“Who told you about that?”
“The Sydney police.”
“It’s no business of theirs,” she said. “It’s no business of yours, either.”
That was all she would say, but she must have realized that Mannering felt sure he knew what had happened-that her brother had stolen the Picasso.
If he had indeed stolen it, the truth would come out sooner or later.
It was half-past ten that night.
Mannering and Venella stepped out of the library of Melbury House, into the great hall. No one was in sight; except for their breathing and for their movements, there was no sound. Lights shone startlingly over each of the great paintings. Little numbered stickers, catalogue numbers for the auction now only a week away, were now attached to the frames. Venella said wistfully: “If only it could stay like this.”
“You really love the place, don’t you?”
“Every stone, every window, every floorboard, every room, every part of it.” She turned to Mannering. He had never seen her more beautiful; the light was absolutely right for her, and the colour in her eyes took on an almost golden tint. She wore a low-cut dress of some diaphanous material. It left one shoulder bare, exposing her back and flawless shoulders. As she stood close to Mannering, he felt his heart beat faster, his studied indifference melting away.
“Yes,” she went on, “I love it.”
“I think I know how you feel.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You’re not Australian. You can’t imagine what it feels like to long for tradition, to want to create tradition and impose culture-to add greatness to greatness. You simply can’t understand it, John.”
“It’s no use going around thinking you can create tradition -you can’t. It just grows. And it’s no use thinking that you can impose culture-you can’t. It has to be acquired. If you keep up your pretence, the tougher you will find a lot of things. The important thing about tradition is that you come to revere it, no matter how old or how recent it is. And the important thing about culture is to desire it; once the desire is strong enough, the culture comes. You don’t have to be a Frenchman or an Italian or an Englishman to appreciate the arts, you simply have to hunger and thirst after them.” He stopped, feeling very pontifical, wondering if what he said meant anything at all to Venella.
She kept on staring at him.
Suddenly, she said: “I get the point. Will you go and find out if Nat Brutus hungers and thirsts after it?”
Mannering’s heart leapt.
“I want to very much.”
After a long pause, Venella said: “So I only had to ask. I didn’t have to bribe or blackmail you, or suffer the fate worse than death.”
“I’m never really convinced there is such a fate,” Mannering said lightly. Seeing the expression in her eyes, he felt momentarily uneasy, and turned towards the stairs: “If we have to be up at dawn, we shouldn’t be too late getting to bed.”
“No,” she said. “We shouldn’t, should we? We’ll have a night cap, and then I’ll leave you and love you.”
Mannering turned off the lights of the bedroom, and stepped to the window, looking out at the moon shining on the water of the swimming pool, on the trees beyond it.
There was no movement except a slight ripple of the water, no sound. His mesh window was closed against the fluttering insects, but the main window was wide open. The intense heat had settled down to a pleasant warmth. He undressed slowly, enjoying the mild and temperate air, got into his pyjama trousers, and went into the bathroom. Brushing his teeth, he thought he heard sounds nearby, paused, but listened only to the silence. He wondered in which direction Baratta lay, and whether Lorna was aware of this bright moonlight. It was beautiful enough to make her lyrical, in certain moods. She certainly hadn’t felt like being lyrical with him for a long time. Too long a time.
Was he to blame?
Or was she?
Were they growing apart, so that they could no longer see things in the same way?
Had they been all-in-all to each other for too long?
It was a crazy tho
ught. Lorna’s near-criticism of him was a passing phase, a natural enough one for a woman in her forties. Once this affair was settled, they would go back to London and would soon start laughing at themselves. He tried to make himself believe that, stepped to the bathroom door and flicked up the switch.
Only the moonlight shone in the bedroom.
He was puzzled, because he thought he had left a light on; then he remembered switching it off, so that he could see the beauty of the night more clearly. Now, the whole room was lit by the moon, and he could not resist going to the window and gazing out again. He stood there for a long time, still thinking of Lorna and the situation between them.
Then he turned towards the looming four-poster bed. He stopped short, astounded.
Venella lay there.
The sheet, only the sheet, was drawn up to her shoulders. Her hair was beautifully groomed, and rested delightfully on the pillow. The sheet moulded her figure. The moonlight darkened her eyes, as she looked towards him.
He remembered vividly what she had said in the hall. “We’ll have a night-cap, and then I’ll leave you and love you.”
He was half-way between the window and the bed, naked to the waist. He wanted to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.
“John,” Venella said, “come to me.”
He didn’t move.
“John,” she said, “I’m here because I want to be, not because I want to persuade you to do something for me. I’m here simply because you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever known, and because you’ve the finest body I’ve ever seen. I mean that.”
Mannering said: “Venella, please go away.”
“John,” she said in a soft, seductive voice, “remember what you said to me about culture. You simply have to hunger and thirst after it. Put it another way: you have to want it desperately. I want you, desperately. Not because you’re a man but because you’re the man you are. Not only because of your body, there are a lot of fine bodies, but because. . .” she hesitated, and then slowly turned to face him, every movement considered; as slowly, she raised her arms, pushing the sheet back, until her arms and her shoulders and the mounds of her breasts and the valley between were revealed to tempt him. . .”but because once I’ve slept with you, I’ll be unique; won’t I, John? The only woman you’ve known except your wife.”
He felt the perspiration gather at his forehead, and the stirring in his loins.
“Venella,” he made himself say. “You’ll only regret it.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I won’t regret it and I won’t ask again. In the morning I will fly you back to your wife, and let you go-I will let you go much more freely if we share this night, than I would if you were to send me away. If you send me away, I’ll haunt you.” She stretched out her arms.
15: “WHAT BROUGHT YOU?”
Nearly a thousand miles to the north-west, Lorna Mannering stood on the patio of Nathaniel Brutus’s home, and looked at the moon swept countryside. The light was bright enough for her to see the patch of ghost gums away to the right, pale and eerie even by day. It showed the buffalo grass of the lawns, and beyond, the near-desert land, with dried-up spiniflex and some mulga trees and patches of coarse grass. She saw no sheep, although that day she had sat next to Brutus in a Landrover, and driven past thousands of them, thick wool stained by the reddish-coloured earth which looked too dry for anything to live on it.
“But it keeps me alive,” Brutus had said.
She could remember the quirk at his lips when he had said that, almost the first time he had not kept a poker face. He had been courteous enough, made her formally welcome at a small but luxurious house set in bush country which was desert in all but name. Everything was modern, everything was spick-and-span. He had an elderly housekeeper, a Scotswoman, wife of his station manager. There was at least a dozen aborigines-station blacks he called them- on the station, and half-a-dozen children, apparently all thoroughly happy. Prosperity exuded from every corner, from the pale pink Cadillac to the high frequency radio, from the beds to the colourful Persian rugs. There were a few pictures, all abstract, and one of them was in this room on the wall behind her.
It was Picasso’s Black Day. The missing painting.
She turned away from the patio and went into the long room which ran the whole length of the house, furnished in contemporary Swedish style. Brutus sat in an armchair, reading one of the glossy magazines, soft music was wafted from the corners of the room, more like an echo of sound than sound itself.
The mesh door swung to behind Lorna. Brutus looked up, and Lorna almost caught her breath. There were moments when she felt a wild desire to rush to her paints and an easel in an endeavour to capture this man’s face and expression. There was a purity of line and colour and a vitality which, merged together, created a face such as she had never seen before.
“What’s the matter with me?” he asked, laconically.
“Nothing’s the matter with you,” Lorna said.
“That I don’t believe. I can tell you something.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“You’ve got a quick tongue,” Brutus said. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you married the wrong guy.”
Lorna didn’t speak. She felt a curious affinity with this man, who so obviously belonged to a different world. No one else of her acquaintance would have sat there, staring with an air which was almost insolence, although she knew that was the last thing to call it. Arrogance of a kind, perhaps, but nothing worse.
“Have a drink,” he said, and pointed to the cabinet where bottles and glasses would have done justice to the Casino Royale. He himself was drinking beer. She hesitated, then poured out a Dubonnet, and sat on a square, thong-seated stool. Brutus was watching her closely, and once again she noted the brilliant blue of his eyes. “Penny for them,” he went on, clipping his words.
She hesitated.
“Truth or nothing,” he said, even more sharply.
“You can be the rudest man I know,” she told him.
He grinned. “Too right-I deal with men who don’t understand anything but plain speaking.”
“Women seldom react favourably to the treatment dealt to men.”
“The men don’t either. They take it, or they get out.” Brutus finished his drink and picked up another bottle, which was by the side of his chair. He opened the metal cap and poured the beer into a glass without spilling a drop. “So that’s my penny’s worth.”
“Is it all you want?”
“No,” he said. “No, ma’am. I know it’s asking for the moon but I want to know what was in your mind when you came in. You looked as if you would like to cut my throat.”
“Did I?” she asked, almost wonderingly. “Is that really how you interpreted the way I looked?”
“It was the way you felt.”
“If you really think that, it’s easy to understand how wrong you were about John.”
“We’ll leave him out of this.”
“He’s why I came,” Lorna said simply.
“He’s not why I let you stay.” Brutus drank deeply, and shifted his position. “That’s another question I would like to get around to. Why did you come?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“The one about coming to ease my troubled mind. Forget it.”
Lorna didn’t comment, and Brutus said. “Come on, let’s have it. What did you think when you came in at that door and saw the digger lying back in the lap of luxury?”
After a long pause, Lorna answered.
“I wanted to paint you.”
He jerked up, utterly surprised. “What?”
“I wanted to put you on canvas,” Lorna said.
“For hell’s sake, why?”
“You’ve an interesting face.”
“I don’t want any patronage,” he said shortly.
“I doubt if you know what you do want,” Lorna said, “you’re too busy being sorry for yourself, cosseting a sense of imaginary insults-my goodness, you
don’t know how lucky you were that you came to my husband and not one of the sharks in the business.”
Brutus lowered his glass slowly, and exclaimed: “My!” He smiled as if with real enjoyment and repeated, “My, my. So she’s got claws.”
Lorna controlled the impulse to snap at him, sipped the Dubonnet, and said: “I have my paint-brushes with me.”
“You don’t have to keep this story up.”
“Nathaniel Brutus,” Lorna said, “a painter doesn’t have to like the subject he wants to paint. I would jump at the chance of painting the Devil if he came in here-or a whore, if I thought her face had anything fresh, or one of your station blacks if he had an interesting face.”
“So you want to paint me for my face, not for my sweet self?”
“That is so.”
Brutus was silent for a long time, before saying slowly: “How long would it take?”
“If it went well, a few hours to get the basic work done.”
“And then?”
“I could finish it at my leisure.”
After another pause, he asked: “How much?”
“We can discuss that if I want to sell it and you want to buy. After all, you might not like the picture I would paint of you.”
Brutus chuckled.
“You can say that again. Do you know how much that Picasso cost?”
“If it was more than ten thousand pounds sterling, you were robbed.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Then I was robbed.”
“You weren’t robbed at Catesby’s,” Lorna flashed.
“There could be two ideas about that,” retorted Brutus. “Would this light be all right?”
“I would much prefer daylight.”
Unbelievingly, Brutus said: “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Seven-thirty,” he said. “Seven-thirty. Where will you be?”
“I’ll see what the light’s like and choose the best place,” answered Lorna. She was smiling, quite unable to hide her pleasure. “I’m very glad.”
“I’ll tell you if I’m glad after I’ve seen it,” Brutus said. He stood up slowly, and looked down on her. There was a change in his manner but she could neither understand nor define it, he reminded her very much of the way John sometimes looked at her at this hour of the evening. Then a thought flashed startlingly into her mind. Immediately her whole mood changed, from her satisfaction at Brutus’s promise to an uneasy kind of awareness that he was very much a man. She had known times when she had been sitting looking up at John, just as she was now looking up at Brutus, and he had suddenly jumped to his feet-as Brutus had-and stood staring down at her-as Brutus was. After a few moments John would move across to her and clutch her shoulders, kiss her with rare passion, and say: “Let’s go to bed, my sweet.”
