Silence Observed

by Michael Innes

  “Well?” Appleby said.

  But – very evidently – it wasn’t well. Gribble was standing frozen and like a man transformed. When he spoke, it was in a new and troubled voice.

  “Appleby – come over here. But I must be wrong, of course. I’ll be forgetting the date of my own birth next.” He gave a shaky laugh. “For God’s sake – come here!”

  Appleby crossed the room. Gribble’s index finger, trembling with agitation, was resting on the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet. Against the clear sunlight it was possible to distinguish a complicated little arabesque of lighter tone.

  “I suppose you know your watermarks?” Gribble asked huskily.

  “Good Lord, no!” Appleby laughed. “It’s something I remember having to get up once or twice, long ago. But I’ve clean forgotten all that technical stuff, I’m ashamed to say. At the Yard I’ve got a young man who knows the rudiments of paper – chemical processes, watermarks and all. And I’d go to a fellow in the British Museum, if I wanted more.”

  “You could come to me, for that matter. For I do know. And it’s no use pretending. I’m just not making a mistake now. This watermark” – and Gribble tapped the paper – “first appeared in 1924. Look – it’s on only one of the sheets of this Meredith stuff. And, indeed, there’s only about a third of it on that. But it’s fatal to the whole damned thing.”

  Appleby couldn’t help laughing. He could remember plenty of occasions on which little snags of this sort had meant the difference between guilt and innocence in grave matters. So Gribble’s seemed to him to be a very absurd and comical sort of dismay.

  “Too bad,” he said. “The great Geoffrey Manallace slipping up for once. But never mind. Perhaps it gives his Meredith forgery a bigger scarcity value than ever. It may represent the unique occasion on which Manallace did slip up.”

  But at this – very strangely – Gribble gave what could only be described as a howl of rage. It was so alarming a demonstration that Appleby could hear, behind him, the supposedly slumbering man jump up and hasten from the room.

  “You bloody fool!” Gribble cried – and it would have been impossible to tell whether he was addressing Appleby or apostrophizing himself. “Geoffrey Manallace – don’t you know, God help you? – Geoffrey Manallace died in 1922.”

  Appleby – although not precisely slow-witted even in what he had come to think of as his declining years – took a second to get at this. When he did, he once more couldn’t help laughing.

  “I congratulate you again,” he said presently. “Here is a completely new category of rarities. You and your fellow collectors have bumped up the value of Manallace’s forgeries to the point at which it becomes worth some ingenious person’s while to forge some. A forged forgery! I declare, I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Positively, my dear Gribble, it ought to be the pride of your collection.”

  But Charles Gribble refused to see the joke. Appleby was confirmed in the view that he had paid quite a lot of money for what he’d thought was Manallace’s Meredith. And its turning out to be – as one might say – X’s Manallace’s Meredith was upsetting him correspondingly.

  Still, the money couldn’t mean much to Gribble. It was his vanity – his specialized collector’s vanity – and not his pocket that had received the really severe blow. Hadn’t he been declaring, rather noisily, that he’d never been swindled in his life? Well, now he had been. And – what was worse – he’d slipped up in a humiliatingly elementary way. Not to have scanned every inch of those papers for watermarks before putting down his cheque was a beginner’s error in this particular game.

  “Well, well,” Appleby said comfortingly, “I suppose you can take the matter up with your dealer, whoever he was. If you’re an important customer of his, he won’t be disposed to stand by the principle of caveat emptor. He’ll cancel the deal – and keep quiet about it, too.”

  Gribble was now looking puzzled as well as angry.

  “That’s no doubt true,” he said. “He’s a little fellow with whom I’ve done a good many deals. And entirely reliable in what he tells you about the provenance and so forth of what you buy.”

  “But he doesn’t always tell you a great deal?”

  “Oh, exactly. These fellows often have to be very discreet. And that makes it correspondingly important that one should be able to trust their word absolutely. Otherwise one may find oneself embarrassingly mixed up in questions of legal title and so on. This little chap has a high reputation. And when he explained to me that there had been a lady involved – a lady very decidedly in Geoffrey Manallace’s confidence who was equally decidedly not Geoffrey Manallace’s wife – I was perfectly willing to leave it at that. But now I must take it up with him. I’m confident he hasn’t been consciously cheating me. It’s he who’s been had.”

  “At least in the first instance,” Appleby said. “But, even if you’ve been had too, mayn’t you be on to something rather interesting? This forger of forgeries may operate in quite a big way – and he’s clearly up to the standards of Manallace himself. Moreover, you are at this moment the only person to have tumbled to his existence. Go after him. Study the finer points of his technique – and then look around for more of him in the light of that knowledge. You might manage a virtual corner in him. The situation, to my mind, is full of promise.”

  Gribble brightened. If he recognised irony in this, he didn’t resent it.

  “Perhaps there’s something in what you say,” he admitted. “Yes, there’s something in it.” He looked more cheerfully at his sheaf of papers, and then thrust them into a pocket. “And I’ll start by having a word with my little chap. Share a cab? Bloomsbury’s my direction.”

  Appleby shook his head, and watched Gribble out of the room. Gribble, it occurred to him, had shown the true collector’s instinctive caginess in failing to mention the little chap’s name. And Appleby glanced at the notice above the chimney piece. It fitted, he thought. That sort of acquisitive world is one in which, habitually, a good deal of SILENCE IS OBSERVED.

  2

  Simple persons, of unassuming colloquial speech, will sometimes be heard to remark that one damned thing leads to another. But policemen are only too happy when it does. A distinguishable sequence or concatenation between events is just what they are after. And when one thing merely follows another they are sometimes a little slow to see that it is anything more than that. Appleby was going to feel that he had been slow in just this way in what he thought of at first as the Manallace affair.

  He had dropped into his club again at six. It was something he did twice a week for the purpose of glancing through a few continental newspapers. And this, of course, took him back to the little reading- room.

  He settled in with that morning’s Figaro.

  “Come out of this morgue,” a voice murmured. “We’ll have a drink.”

  A bishop who was reading the New Yorker looked round disapprovingly, pointed a solemn episcopal finger at the notice over the chimney piece, and then returned to his studies.

  It was an elderly man with a short grey beard who had paused for a moment beside Appleby’s chair. Sir Gabriel Gulliver was the Director of an august national institution. He was also some sort of connection of Appleby’s wife. So Appleby rose and followed him from the slumberous room. They walked in silence down the great staircase and into the hall. Through tall glass doors London showed rain-sodden and cheerless.

  “Disgusting,” Gulliver said. “To think that, if I’d been born an Italian, I might be living in the Vatican, looking after a few old walls and ceilings and things for the Pope.”

  Appleby shook his head.

  “My dear Gulliver,” he replied, “you might have the Brera, and be compelled to exist in Milan. Or be living out your life in Urbino. They’ve a nice little gallery, but I don’t think you’d care for their winters.”

  �
�No, no – it would have to be Rome. Have you ever wintered in Rome?” Gulliver was leading the way over stretches of obscure mosaic in the direction of the smoking room. “I never have. And that’s positively absurd. I might be a damned civil servant.”

  “But haven’t you spent years in Italy?”

  “Of course I have.” Gulliver was whimsically impatient. “How do you think I learned my job? But I tell you I’ve never spent a winter in Rome.”

  “You’d find it overrated, I don’t doubt. Better just to read about it in a nostalgic way in Edwardian novels. The reality would be disenchanting. I understand there’s a great deal of snow, and that the natives have never studied to accommodate their lives to it. Moreover in winter Rome is full of Romans, just as in spring London is full of Londoners. And you know how tiresome that is. No capital city is tolerable except when voided of its inhabitants.”

  Sir Gabriel Gulliver received this with appropriate amusement. Entering the smoking-room, he dived into a corner to ring a bell, and then returned to Appleby, still mildly laughing.

  “Nice of you,” he said, “to talk to an old buffer in what you conceive of as his own antique conversational mode. A good many of you youngsters, you know, have no conversation at all… Turned fifty yet?”

  “I’m fifty-three.”

  “Precisely. A youngster in my regard, you may well believe.”

  The arrival of a servant relieved Appleby for a moment from the necessity of keeping up this badinage. Gulliver was making some rather particular enquiries about Madeira. It was possible that the great gallery over which he presided had no retiring age for its Director, and he might well be on the farther side of sixty-five. His pose as an old dodderer, however, was merely an amiable affectation. He was in the prime at least of his intellectual powers, and there were wide stretches of art history in which he was still far ahead of any up-and-coming younger men. Appleby didn’t know him very well, despite Judith’s obscure cousinship with him. But he had always found him entertaining. Perhaps it was only to entertain him that Gulliver had yanked him out of the reading-room now.

  “And you?” Gulliver demanded, when the man had gone away. “Wouldn’t you have been born an Italian?”

  “To be Chief of Police in your blessed Rome, and spend my days investigating – or being told I was failing to investigate – monstrous orgies in high life? No, no, Gulliver. Give me London – with all its traffic problems, and with every acre of its stupid crime and squalid vice.”

  For a moment Gulliver was silent. He was quick to catch a tone. And when the Madeira arrived, he made an easy change of subject.

  “I hope Judith is well? She hasn’t been in the Gallery lately. Or she hasn’t, at least, looked in on me. When she does, it’s a habit I take kindly in her. I like reminiscing about dear old Luke and Everard.”

  “She’s very well, thank you.” It was a point in Gulliver’s favour with Appleby that he had been on terms of some intimacy with Judith’s variously gifted if crazy family. “Only she’s modelling something rather intricate. Spends her days knocking up maquettes and shoving them about like a kid with toy soldiers.”

  “Ah, you always take that philistine tone about the poor girl’s stuff. Actually, it disguises your vast admiration.”

  Appleby was amused.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “It does.”

  “And quite right, too. She’s getting better and better. We must have a dinner, or something, and launch a move to have the Arts Council make a pet of her. Don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.” Appleby didn’t resent this airy nonsense. “But you’d better make your kind suggestion to her.”

  “Of course, Judith is a shade on the traditional side. All those stones with holes through. Erosion, I’m told, has definitely gone out. Fuori, as our Italian friends express it. And corrosion is correspondingly in. Dentro. Do you know, there’s a Lapp who’s discovered a rapid process for corroding and encrusting barbed wire? He’s done a perfectly superb Madonna in it. You can see it somewhere off Bond Street, any day, by paying no more than a mere half-crown.”

  “I saw it last week. And we had the Lapp to dinner. Judith made me read an article on something called Anti-Art, in order that we might have a topic for rational conversation. But the Lapp, for all his rebarbative barbed wire, hadn’t heard of Anti-Art. In fact he confessed an interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. Not what you might call an informed interest. But still – there it was. I don’t find artists less perplexing as I grow old.”

  “Nor should I – doubtless – if I ever met any. But, of course, since I got away from that damned hole on the river, I converse only with the dead. Do you know, my dear Appleby, I believe I shall end up with the same creed as Bernard Shaw’s preposterous painter, in that play about doctors? I forget his name. Something like Tit for Tat.”

  “Dubedat.”

  “Precisely. And he dies on the stage, you remember, after announcing that he believes in Michaelangelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt. And I’m blessed if I don’t agree with him.”

  Sir Gabriel Gulliver paused, and took a considering sip of his Madeira.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s about Rembrandt that I want to talk to you.”

  Appleby felt familiar with this kind of approach. Almost, he’d thought he was being subjected to it only that afternoon by Charles Gribble. There are levels of English society in which nearly all professional advice is picked up free. Cabinet ministers murmur their symptoms negligently into the ear of distinguished consultant physicians when the ladies have withdrawn from the dinner table. Leading Queen’s Counsel know precisely what lies ahead of them when they find themselves on the right hand of brilliant and frequently dis-married hostesses. Top-ranking architects, summoned to indigestible feasts in ancient colleges, commonly take the precaution of bringing a junior staff with them and lodging them in an adjacent hotel.

  But for all this sort of seeking after knowledge there is at least a substantial pool of authorities to draw on. Only one man runs London’s police. He has, it is true, a large number of competent assistants. But these are not, somehow, persons largely current in society. The Archbishop of Canterbury – Appleby sometimes felt – had distinctly the advantage of him. He had all those bishops – to say nothing of his brother of York.

  “Rembrandt?” It was with well-practised civil interest that Appleby repeated the name. And he picked up his glass of Madeira, wondering just what it was going to work out at in terms of expenditure of time.

  “Well, yes – Rembrandt, more or less. It’s a rather delicate position, as a matter of fact. Not an affair which, at the moment, I’d like to have bruited abroad.”

  Silence is observed.

  “Do tell me,” Appleby said. It couldn’t be maintained that this little talk wasn’t running true to form.

  “People keep on bringing pictures,” Sir Gabriel Gulliver pursued. “One can’t very well have them simply turned away. So we run what is in fact a free-advice bureau. You read about it in the papers at times. And I’ve got it pretty well taped nowadays. One or another of my young men is available right through working hours. It doesn’t teach them all that much about painting, but it does help them to a little knowledge about human nature. And my sort of young man needs anything of that kind that he can pick up, the Lord knows.”

  “Remote aesthetes, are they?” Appleby asked. “What Kipling calls long-haired things with velvet collar-rolls?”

  “There you go on your philistine note again. But it’s true that some of them could do with a little common humanity. Well, old ladies come in with Arundel prints, or with shiny oleographic reproductions of the Laughing Cavalier or the Night Watch, manufactured in Leipzig in the 1880s. And my lads have to explain that the blessed thing is delightful to possess, but that the market isn’t precisely buoyant just at the moment. It’s a point of honour that the
old ladies should go away feeling rather pleased, despite their dreams of sudden wealth being unrealized.”

  Appleby nodded.

  “Rather,” he said, “like being in Complaints in a big store. The customer takes the article away again, feeling he’s had a thoroughly square deal after all.”

  “Just so. The analogy’s rather a commercial one, but fair enough. Except that we do always have the chance of a real find. All the young men believe that one day Great-grandfather’s Dobbin will actually prove to be by Stubbs.”

  “Or Great-grandfather himself be by Lawrence or Hoppner.”

  “Well, even Hoppner would be something. Only it doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen at all.”

  “Never?” Appleby was mildly surprised.

  “Next to never, anyway. It’s an odd thing, but there it is. Of course finds are made, even in England, from time to time. But not from among the treasuries of the simpler classes – who are naturally the people who do most of the walking up our steps. When your impoverished country gentleman starts hopefully turning out his attics, he usually begins by sending photographs of anything likely looking to the big saleroom chaps. And if he elicits a cautious expression of interest from them, he forks out for a regular expertise. So our little public service, as I’ve said, isn’t precisely a prolific field of art-world drama. In fact, we’ve never made the headlines yet. But are we going to, tomorrow or the next day? That’s my headache at the moment. As you can see, I’m a worried man.”

  Appleby found that he wasn’t disposed to question this. Gulliver, although talking with a great air of urbanity and leisure, did somehow suggest an underlying uneasiness of mind.

  “You can’t be worried, surely, simply because a real find has turned up at last?”

  Gulliver shook his head.

  “Not because it has turned up. Because it has disappeared again.”

  “A Rembrandt?”