by Eric Ambler
At last a car appeared. He signalled, but the driver drove on, ignoring him. Another driver stopped.
“Cheriton Shawe?” he said. “Hop in.”
He was a small man, dried up, gnome like. He drove slowly and grimly.
“What sort of place is Cheriton Shawe?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t like the pub,” the man answered after some thought.
“Know Walden House?”
“Never heard of it.”
He did not seem to care for conversation. When there was some indication that Andrew might ask another question, he reached out and switched on the car radio. An orchestra was playing Till Eulenspiegel. He reached out again and hastily changed the station. A military band grappled with a waltz.
Andrew still heard Till Eulenspiegel. He swivelled to peer through the rear window. Absurd? Of course it was absurd. Especially as the whistler in the night had passed on his way, possibly innocent of any design but to reach his own home. And if you were inclined to argue that the Hallers and the Kretchmanns would be likely to pick up a fragment of Strauss, you had to remember that the trick was also within the scope of the Bert Smiths and the Alf Browns. Any time you turned the knob of a wireless set you might get Till Eulenspiegel. It didn’t mean a thing in itself. To see anything significant in it, you had to be of a very suspicious turn of mind and perhaps a trifle neurotic.
Andrew looked back a second time.
“What’s the matter?” asked the gnome. “Police after you?” “I’m interested in greenhouses.”
“Wouldn’t put my money in glass. It’s too brittle. Here’s your village. Don’t say I didn’t warn you against the pub.”
Andrew used it merely to ask the way to Walden House. First to the left past the church, and you couldn’t miss it; the big place on the rise with the high garden wall.
The wall was very high indeed and had a tiled coping. There were patches where it was mouldering away, but on the whole it was standing up to time and still efficiently obstructing the view of anyone who might be curious about the house and grounds.
Andrew skirted quite fifty yards of wall before he came to an opening. There were heavy brick gateposts. No doubt there had been ornamental gates, but now the only barrier to straying cattle was a length of rusty chain. The left-hand pier had been hit by a steam roller or something of equivalent weight.
The entry showed signs of having been churned into a morass by heavy traffic, but that had been some time ago; it was now grass covered. The drive, defined by deep ruts in neglected gravel, was visible for a few yards. Then it withdrew behind a dank screen of trees and overgrown shrubs. A notice board, newly painted, swung from the chain. It said:
Andrew stepped over the chain and, walking on the gravel between the ruts, started down the drive.
There was nothing round the first bend, only another screen of trees and bushes. Then the wheel ruts got impatient and, leaving the drive to its own graceful meanderings, crashed on through the undergrowth in a straight line. Andrew followed them and came upon a vista that pulled him up sharply. Beyond a wide, tree-dotted expanse of grass that may once have been a lawn stood a house.
It was unquestionably modern. The original idea, perhaps, had been to re-create a small French chateau, but even more lunatic counsels had prevailed and features reminiscent of a Norman castle and trimmings from a Rhenish Schloss had been applied with an apple-cheeked Teutonic exuberance that defied criticism. The whole looked like something from a beer-house frieze. There were corbels and machicolations everywhere. Cone-topped turrets sprouted from the corners. The main entrance had the stark simplicity of one of Ludovic of Bavaria’s nightmares.
The house was not the only startling feature. The grassy area in front of it looked as if it were shared as storage space by a monumental mason and a medieval stonecutter. There were statues everywhere, and shaped building blocks of granite and sandstone. There were sections of fluted columns, bits of broken capitals, cornices and gargoyles strewn about as if Samson had been there brawling with the Philistines. But all this was as nothing compared with the staggering collection of statuary which cluttered the place. Venus rose from the sea of grass in a dozen different attitudes, Hercules flexed his muscles or bent a bow, Atlas stood braced under the weight of the world, Perseus flourished the head of Medusa, while dozens of nonentities looked on with blind-eyed approval.
Andrew found it impossible to believe that one frail girl with red hair could have accomplished all this work. She might be a most prolific sculptor, but she just could not have had the time in her short life. Was it possible, then, that she had acquired all this rubbish in order to study it at home? Then she must be mad, and mad without method. At least there was no detectable system in either the selection or the arrangement of it all. Tarnished metal pieces stood in close companionship with bits of marble, and strewn among them, peeping through trees and peering over bushes, were plaster casts of the more renowned classics. Inevitably the weather had made havoc. Rain had finally penetrated protective paint, sodden limbs had dropped off, weary feet of clay had given way, white bodies had fallen, and weeds had grown up to bury them. Chariot wheels had ground the dust of gods into the mire of Hertfordshire.
Chariot wheels or army truck tyres.
Andrew stepped forward cautiously. The Emperor Augustus stood up under a protecting oak, one arm flung out, looking as portentous and arresting as a traffic policeman. The arm had a sign fixed to it with wire, a piece of wood with faded letters in stencilled characters: to the latrines. An inscription in indelible pencil was easier to decipher:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay
For alien legions — points the urgent way.
A worn path through the trees was still only partially overgrown.
Andrew hastened to the front door and looked for a bell push. A note had been pinned to the wooden spike of a dummy portcullis. It said: Gert, I’ve gone shopping. Hot up the pie and keep out of the studio. It also said, by implication, that there was nobody in, that he would have to wait.
He tried the bell. It rang loudly, and that was all. He walked round the house, examining it in detail. The building was not so large as the perspective view had suggested, but it was still overpoweringly horrible. There were three floors with probably twenty to thirty rooms between them. It had an uninhabited look, but that may have been due to a prevalence of drawn blinds. A few windows on the top floor showed curtains. Perhaps the family was away somewhere. Perhaps Ruth Meriden had come home in advance of them.
A small patch of kitchen garden in the rear showed signs of cultivation, but nobody was at work in it. Andrew returned to the front of the house and browsed among the statues. The indelible pencil had been used quite extensively and not always by the same hand. Beards, moustaches and other adornments had been added to Olympian immortals and Roman heroes. One noble soldier, whose victories were won in the pre-Christian Era, wore upon his toga a badge of more recent design. The drawing, in most cases, was extremely crude; but not nearly as crude as the comments and tags of mural wit that disfigured the flanks and other flattish surfaces of the female divinities.
Andrew wandered back to the house. He was just in time. The girl was approaching by a well-beaten short cut, wheeling a bike festooned with vegetables and paper parcels in string shopping bags. She was wearing a suede windbreaker, blue denim pedal-pushers, and tan sandals. Against the sombre background of fir and oak, her hair was a mop of incandescence.
She gave no sign of having seen him until she was about six feet away. Then she stopped.
“Hello! Looking for me?”
It was exactly the tone she had used at the airport-casual, indifferent, smug. Moreover, he had already opened his mouth to speak first and was thus left standing there gaping for a moment.
“Yes, Miss Meriden.” Something about her called up severity in him. He opened his mouth to speak again.
“Well,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting you till next week.”
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This time he really gaped at her. She walked on past him.
“I’ve just got home,” she added over her shoulder. “I’m afraid I haven’t much to show you. Positively nothing of any account. No doubt they warned you. Seen my woman anywhere?”
He stumbled after her.
“No. I-”
“Late again. Come inside. I’ll pop the pie in the oven; then I’ll be with you.”
Inside the hall a stencilled sign on the first door said: Q.M. Stores — Keep Out.
She called back from a bend in the corridor: “Wait upstairs. You’ll find more light.”
He found more tidiness, also. The ground floor was a wreck. The walls looked as if an elephant had been taking kicks at them. One floor board was up. Dry rot in others made walking perilous. But there were none of these hazards upstairs. The flooring was intact, and carpeted. The stencilling, too, was in a better state of preservation. Andrew passed battery office and contemplated officers’ mess for a moment. Memory thus stimulated was a shade depressing, and he found no ease before a door marked battery commander. He recalled one battery commander with septic tonsils. They had managed to get hold of a bottle of gin and…
The corridor was wide, with mullioned windows. It was like a small gallery and there were sculptures at intervals. There were a bust of a woman by Maillot, a girl’s head by Epstein, a small Heracles by Bourdelle, an old man by Rodin. At least, the chiselling strongly suggested these masters, but he rejected the idea that they could be genuine. Copies, of course; student pieces, chipped out for the annual exhibition of the Hertford Society of Arts, and now proudly preserved by the young sculptor. Here it became quite obvious what that critic meant by her eclecticism. There wasn’t an original line in any of the work. The Epstein, for instance, was pure Epstein. The Bourdelle departed from a characteristic devotion to plastic truth only in so far as it betrayed the smugness of the transcriber. The signature of Ruth Meriden was there to read. But it wasn’t bad. Andrew knew enough about this sort of sculpture to realise that it wasn’t bad. And, putting prejudice aside, looking at them fairly objectively, the other things weren’t bad either.
She came up the staircase, observing him quizzically.
“Like the show?” she inquired.
He had to say something, but it really was embarrassing. He was suddenly conscious of a dreadful weakness in some of the work.
“Very good,” he murmured. “Really quite good.”
“Junk!” she said.
He was surprised at this modesty, but also resentful. After all, he had merely tried to be polite. Still…
“I wouldn’t call it junk,” he answered generously. “Some of it has feeling. The head of the archer is very good. Bourdelle himself might have done it.”
“Bourdelle himself did do it,” she retorted. “It’s one of the early sketches for the big bronze in the Luxembourg. Poor old Emile! He never could get away from Rodin. Born fifty years later, he would have been a good sculptor. Let’s go upstairs.”
At that moment he would have liked the stairs to open and engulf him. It eased his embarrassment only a little to realise that she was unaware of what had been in his mind. She led the way to a long low attic with a considerable area of leaking skylight. She smiled as she opened the door. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile, and in that revolutionary moment he made an important discovery. There was nothing smug about her. She had not meant to be rude when she rejected his offer of help at the airport. She had been behaving merely in her normal casual manner. Through his absurd reaction to an imaginary snub, he had formed a wrong impression of her. The reality was that she was more trustful than suspicious. She accepted him now on completely even terms. She seemed to see him as a connoisseur who was interested in her work, and she, the artist, had invited him to view it. The accord was complete, and he hesitated to break it. The misconception, or whatever it was, afforded him an opportunity to study her. He would choose the moment to reveal himself.
The long room was fitted up like a carpenter’s workshop. There were benches with all kinds of vices and wheels. There was a lathe and an electric saw. There were polishing and burnishing devices, and backing the main bench was a long rack of gleaming tools, including handsaws of all kinds.
She said: “I’m really very sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”
“Maclaren,” he answered. “Andrew Maclaren.”
“Maclaren,” she repeated experimentally.
Along the wall opposite the benches and the lathe were a series of round, waist-high pedestals, each surmounted by an unusual object made of a plastic that looked like glass. The objects followed varied geometric patterns. None of them was very large. The tallest could not have measured much more than two feet from base to tip. It was a fragile, pyramidal thing of bisecting planes.
“I’m beginning to remember,” the girl said. “You’re the man the Glasgow critic spoke to me about. I had your name mixed up. I thought it was Macartney.”
He let that pass, making a noise in his throat that he hoped was noncommittal as well as inarticulate. He had no wish to impose on her, but this was definitely not the moment for revelation. She was looking on him as a human being. It was just as if she had removed a pair of sunglasses and he were seeing her eyes for the first time.
“This is the thing I’m working on.” She picked up a large drawing from the bench and held it up for his inspection. It was another of those objects, but here projected in perspective on the two dimensional sheet. It was like a sea shell with a highly complex series of convolutions-except that it was nothing like a sea shell.
“Too intricate,” she commented. “I’ll try to simplify it when I get it under my fingers. There’s a feeling here, I think.” Her tool scarred right hand reached graspingly towards one corner of the drawing, then described arabesques in the air. “Something new. I’m sick of these’ eternal comparisons. I must stand alone. Even the most incompetent critics must be made to see that I do stand alone.”
“They talk such a lot of rot,” Andrew murmured.
“Perhaps it’s because they have to deal with such a lot of rot.” Miss Meriden was grave. She lifted the drawing once more. “What do you see in this?”
He stared helplessly.
She went on. “I believe that this sort of art must create a new language. There may be here something that cannot be put into words, yet the thought is to be read by the sensitive mind. It must be inevitable, invariable, or the art is false. What does it give you?”
From gaping, he gulped. It gave him a complete blank.
“Nothing,” he murmured reluctantly. “Unless you mean it’s a sea-”
He was going to say sea shell, but it suddenly struck him that this would be one of the objectionable comparisons.
Again the imaginary spectacles came from the blue eyes.
“That’s really remarkable,” she said. “Nothingness, then the sea. Primordial. You feel it? This!” She pointed to some of the more excessive convolutions. “Before thought.”
“Yes,” he agreed uneasily. “Before thought.”
She watched him with a gleam of appreciation in her eyes, then led him across the floor to one of the displayed objects. “This is one of the earlier studies,” she told him. “To be disregarded, naturally. But I’d like your ideas.”
It was a primitive form of harp in transparent plastic, if it was anything. On second thought it was three harps stuck together. Either that or a dimpled bottle with the dimples pressed in to a point of dissolution. The harp suggestion was conveyed by a series of white strings that seemed to be imbedded in the plastic. Whatever you might think of it as a construction, the craftsmanship was superb.
Ruth Meriden leaned forward and touched an electric switch. The pedestal began to revolve slowly. Shifting light on the turning surfaces of perspex made enchanting effects. This might not, in the ordinary sense, be sculpture, but Andrew was full of approval. The only thing he regretted was that it had to mean any
thing. It was acutely embarrassing to be asked to make something out of nothing. It was like expecting a magician to produce a rabbit when the poor man was obviously without his top hat.
“Well?” inquired Miss Meriden, impatient for the rabbit.
He had seen the word “Etude” on a label before the pedestal began to turn. It recalled again the criticism he had read; he fished in memory for a tag from it.
“Music,” he answered her at last. “Scarlatti.”
“No.” The artist was disappointed. “Beethoven,” she insisted. “Definitely Beethoven. Possibly the Waldstein Sonata.”
She revolved the delicate pyramidal effect. Little pagodas turned within pagodas and glancing lights made chandeliers of ice. This time he had it. The Snow Queen’s Palace.
“I call it Shive Dagon,” Ruth Meriden announced. “Just as a joke, of course. It’s really an abstraction. I’ve never been in Burma.”
“I like it,” Andrew asserted. “It has brio.”
She looked at him with new attention, but this had nothing to do with his borrowed comment. She was puzzled. “Did you say your name was Maclaren?” she asked. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that we’ve met somewhere before. It keeps growing on me. Were you at the Edinburgh Festival last year?”
“No.” Andrew shook his head, but inwardly he nodded to himself. This was the moment. “I was on the plane from Athens the other day.” It startled her, he thought. At any rate she was arrested in a movement and turned slightly to stare at him.
“Then you’re not…” She broke off helplessly. Little coruscations from the revolving abstractions cast ripples of light between them.
“Of course,” she said, making up her mind. “You’re the man who spoke to me at the airport in Brussels. You…”
“I thought you needed help with the porter.”
