Silence Observed

by Michael Innes

  “Very true,” Heffer said. “We’ve found something to agree about at last.”

  “And an Old Master of the first quality, provided it engages the interest of the right competitors, may fetch such a sum that a mere rake-off from the total would rate as a substantial private fortune.”

  This time Heffer was silent.

  “So we mustn’t laugh out of court the notion of squaring Gabriel Gulliver. One might indulge it. One might feel one had glimpsed some weakness in the man. One might go forward on that basis. And one might find, too late, that one had been all wrong.”

  “Too late?” Heffer said. He was now as pale as a sheet.

  “Just that. One might have burned one’s boats.”

  “And then?”

  “Well – something rather definitive might happen.”

  “And then?” Heffer had stood up, like a man who is about to take his leave.

  Appleby got up too, and led his guest from the room.

  “To that one,” he said, “the answer can only come from you.”

  “One would have to fight,” Heffer said. He spoke with a quiet, cold finality, which was yet oddly touching. “There would be nothing for it but that.”

  11

  Fair warning – Appleby thought, as he turned away from the door to which he had conducted his guest. I gave him fair warning. Did he give it to me too?

  There is a good deal that I don’t believe about Jimmy Heffer – he told himself, making his way back through the club. The question is: Does my disbelief extend one point too far? I’d know a good deal more – probably a great deal more – if I could just contact the girl who called herself Astarte Oakes. And there can’t be all that many absolute Botticelli Venuses in England. Perhaps I’ll know her when I see her.

  He turned into the little reading-room. Silence is observed. A voice, however, spoke to him at once.

  “Hullo, Appleby. That was a most delightful dinner party last night.”

  “We were so pleased that you were able to come.” As he made this conventional reply, Appleby saw that Carl Bendixson had lowered a newspaper and appeared to propose conversation.

  “Shocking news about Gabriel Gulliver,” Bendixson said. “Only just heard it. Fellow told me as I came across the hall.”

  “Yes,” Appleby said. “Shocking.”

  “Shot in his own fastness! It seems incredible. And not thought to be a matter of robbery, I’m told. Have they caught the chap who did it?”

  “Chap?” Appleby said.

  “A madman, or I wouldn’t be surprised. I shall positively tremble the next time I get up on my little rostrum and bang my little hammer.” Bendixson laughed – not entirely easily. “Make a damned good target.”

  “There will be a clear motive in your case.” Appleby appeared willing to talk nonsense. “A disgruntled bidder, who feels you failed to catch his nod – or that you caught it once too often.”

  “Yes, yes.” Bendixson assumed the whimsical expression of one who indulges in meaningless self-depreciation. “I live by coaxing out of people more money than they mean to give. Nothing could be more impossibly debased. I knocked down a very indifferent Romney portrait this morning for you wouldn’t believe how much. And – do you know? – I positively caught the fellow on the canvas curling his aristocratic lip at me. I wish I auctioned fat cattle or the residual effects of bankrupt greengrocers.”

  “No,” Appleby said. “You don’t. It wouldn’t be so lucrative. And it wouldn’t be such fun.”

  “Too true.” And Bendixson sighed resignedly. “But talking of fun, isn’t Mary Wildsmith delightful? Gretta and I always adore the opportunity of meeting her.”

  “Yes, quite delightful.” Appleby decided that he would give not more than a further two minutes to this twaddle. “But I don’t often see her on the stage,” he said – this merely because a sentence or two of further small talk must be found. “Judith said something about her being a good deal in France. I gathered that she is French on her mother’s side. No doubt that’s part of the charm.”

  “No doubt. And, now you mention it, I believe she goes over occasionally to do character parts on their radio or television or something. Little Anglo-French comedies.”

  “Ah, yes. I wonder whether she was by any chance a friend of Gulliver’s?” Appleby couldn’t have told why he asked this question. Perhaps it was just long habit in trying to link up one thing with another.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Bendixson gave what might have been called a well-informed laugh. “He had his favourites, or so one has been told. But I doubt whether Mary was one of them. But a chap she does know there is young Jimmy Heffer. Do you know him?”

  “I’m beginning to.” Civility satisfied, Appleby was moving towards the door. Then he remembered something. “By the way,” he said, “there’s something with which you might help me. Would you describe yourself as good at eyes?”

  Bendixson stared.

  “At making them, you mean? What Shakespeare calls strange oeillades and most speaking looks?”

  “No – at recognizing them.” Appleby had produced his pocket book, and from this he drew the scrap of paper which he had rescued from a Bloomsbury garbage bin. He handed it to Bendixson. “Can you place that?”

  “Is this a new parlour game?” Bendixson was looking idly at the fragmentary eye. “Something to replace jigsaw puzzles?”

  Appleby laughed.

  “It’s detective investigation, as a matter of fact. Somebody tore up a colour print, and this scrap happens to survive. The problem is to identify the print.”

  Bendixson looked mildly embarrassed. And this was clearly because the problem was so simple that nobody of moderate general cultivation ought to be held up by it.

  “Only Van Gogh,” he said, “ever painted an eye in that way.” And he handed the scrap back to Appleby.

  “Well, that’s fine. And the queer thing is that – even while I didn’t see what you’ve now told me – I felt familiar with the thing. Can you name the actual painting? Oddly enough, it was a question I was minded to put to Gulliver.”

  Bendixson nodded absently. He thought for a moment.

  “I’m no authority on Van Gogh – Lord knows,” he said. “I don’t even like the man. But – yes – I can see the picture. It’s a self-portrait, painted round about 1886. And now it’s knocking about the Mediterranean, on board some millionaire’s damned brassy yacht.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been on board a millionaire’s damned brassy yacht. And yet I have this feeling that it’s familiar to me. So that would be in a reproduction too.”

  “No doubt. It’s a familiar print, I think.” Bendixson hesitated. “Is it permissible to ask how such a thing can be of any interest to you professionally?”

  “A lot of odd things are.” For a moment Appleby let this reply serve. “I’d like to know who owned the print, and where it ultimately came from.”

  “It doesn’t sound easy. But let me look at it again.” Bendixson took the scrap and examined it more carefully this time. “You want the opinion of a first-class print-seller,” he said. “But I think I know what he’ll tell you. It’s an absolutely tip-top job. German, probably. The Germans do most of the best things that have high-grade optical work behind them. Almost depressing – the excellence of this sort of stuff nowadays. Science catching up on inspiration, and so forth.” Bendixson offered this lazy bit of thinking with a suitable air of laziness. And he picked up his newspaper again. “Do tell your wife how much we enjoyed it,” he said.

  “She’ll be delighted,” Appleby said. And he went out of the room.

  It was only to collide, however, with somebody in the doorway. And the newcomer, having glanced past him, drew back.

  “That that fellow Bendixson?” the newcomer murmured
.

  Appleby shut the door.

  “Yes,” he said. “Bendixson. He’s in process of recovering from a disdainful look cast at him by a Romney.”

  “I’m dashed if I want to see the beggar. Only the other day he made me pay the deuce of a lot for a Toulouse-Lautrec.”

  Appleby laughed.

  “My dear fellow – if you must please yourself with buying these fashionable things, what are you to expect? Not even shipping will stand it for long.”

  The newcomer – his name was Moultrie and he was a very wealthy man indeed – nodded gloomily.

  “True,” he said. “Absolutely true. It’s a mug’s game. I wish I’d taken up postage stamps.”

  “You don’t wish anything of the sort.” The two men were now strolling down a corridor, “I can see that you’re just stuffing with satisfaction over your blessed Toulouse-Lautrec. Of course that’s nothing singular in this club. A place more reeking of acquisitive instinct doesn’t exist in London. How I drifted into it, I just can’t think.”

  “Beer mugs dug up at Stonehenge, I’ve been told. Haven’t you more of them than any other man in the country? So I’ve been assured.” Moultrie was evidently in high good humour. “And as for this new picture of mine, I’m not at all sure. There seem to be rather a lot of the little devil’s canvases about.”

  “Ah,” Appleby said. “Doubt about the scarcity value. Well, well.”

  “You think of me, Appleby, just as another damned commercial man.” Moultrie was genially unoffended. “But in fact I have a passion for the artistic life. I don’t merely buy these things. I read about the chaps who made them. It’s a world full of horror and romance and all the rest of it. This fellow Lautrec, for instance, that Bendixson has peddled me–”

  “Peddled you?” Appleby was interested. “You mean he sold you this painting privately? You didn’t get it at auction through his firm?”

  “Just that. And I’ve paid, as I said, a damned sight too much. But that was because of the romantic slant on the affair – which is what I was getting round to telling you. Not that I ought to tell you. Bendixson wouldn’t approve.”

  “Silence is observed,” Appleby said.

  “What’s that? Oh, I see.” Moultrie had sat down on a somewhat decayed leather settee in the corridor, and he gestured to Appleby to do the same.

  “But, since I’ve started, here goes. Lautrec, you remember, was a shocking little slobbering dwarf. Tough on him. Old aristocratic French family, you know, with men who thought mostly about hunting and hawking and capturing women. But for this wretched little cripple all that was out. So he became a painter. Amazing thing.”

  “Amazing thing,” Appleby said.

  “Tremendous virility, the little chap had. Awkward for him. But it seems that talented women gave him a spin now and then. Suzanne Valadon, for example. I’ve got her. Of course she wasn’t anything like the painter her illegitimate son was. Utrillo, you know. I’ve got him too. Middle period, before his brain and his painting went soft.”

  “That’s splendid,” Appleby said.

  “Lautrec’s life was mostly brothels and drink. A terrible story, really terrible. Died at thirty-seven. DTs, and the inevitable sort of disease. Quite shocking. During his last year or two his work went off badly – except for one notable period of recovery. But perhaps you know all this.”

  “I don’t know about the notable period of recovery,” Appleby said. He was finding the tone of this talk rather hideous. But instinct prevented him from breaking it off.

  “Exactly!” Moultrie’s voice had a ring of triumph which was only too familiar to Appleby. It went with collector’s mania. “It happened here in London, as a matter of fact. Lautrec came here from time to time. His English was good, and he liked it. Sometimes he went round with friends among the English painters. They would take him to see Oscar Wilde, and that sort of thing. But sometimes he’d come and just wander around in solitude, like a lost soul. His last visit – it seems to have escaped his biographers – was like that. But then, one day in the British Museum, he met this girl.”

  “This girl?” Appleby repeated. He had a sudden fascinated sense of the direction in which Moultrie was taking him.

  “A French girl, as a matter of fact. Her name was Armandine de la Gallette–”

  “It was what?”

  “Armandine de la Gallette. A noble but impoverished family, it seems, and the girl had taken a job as a governess in the household of some English lord or duke. But she had seen Lautrec’s work in Paris, and she revered his genius.”

  “So she set about saving him?”

  “Just that.” Moultrie appeared impressed by this perceptive question. “She was what poor Lautrec had always dreamed of: a pure and cultivated woman who was not revolted by his physical appearance. They spent three weeks at Rye together, before Armandine’s people heard of the affair and insisted on bringing her home. She was only nineteen.”

  “I see. And in those three weeks Lautrec painted your picture.”

  “Exactly, Appleby.” Moultrie was again struck by this penetration. “It’s called Femme assise. ‘Seated Woman’, you know. Needless to say, it’s of Armandine de la Gallette herself. And I don’t think it’s too much to say that it’s Lautrec’s masterpiece.” Moultrie paused. “I certainly hope it is,” he added, a little wistfully. “For there’s no doubt I paid the devil of a price. I only wish that poor Armandine had got the money. She’s quite, quite charming.”

  Appleby stared.

  “You mean she’s alive? Didn’t Toulouse-Lautrec die in about 1900?”

  “1901. Armandine must be nearly eighty. The fascinating thing is that she’s quite recognizable in the portrait. It gave me a turn, that did, I’m bound to say.”

  “It certainly gives a touch of refinement to the whole affair. You say the painting wasn’t in her possession?”

  “No. It was in the hands of a private collector, who didn’t want to be known. That was why Carl Bendixson fixed it up that I should actually see the old lady and question her. It fixed the provenance of the painting so securely.”

  “‘Fixed’ seems just the word.” Appleby was staring at Moultrie rather grimly. “Where did you see her?”

  “A little place in the New Forest, Winterbourne Crucis. She has a cottage. Rose Cottage, it’s called. Rather commonplace, eh? But the interior’s a dream.”

  “A dream? Well, well.” Appleby was now looking rather wonderingly at this captain of industry. “How has Armandine come to end up there? I thought her people had taken her home.”

  “So they had. But she was always very Anglophile. When she came into a minute private fortune, she decided to retire into the English countryside. She brought a few sticks of furniture with her. The finest eighteenth-century French stuff. But the rest of the place is quite bare. It’s too touching. And – do you know? – I rather took advantage of her being so poor. Not that I didn’t give her a terrific price.”

  “I thought you said–”

  “Oh, not for the painting. All she could do was to tell me the story of that. What she sold me was her last relic of Lautrec. His famous walking stick flask.”

  Appleby found himself taking a deep breath.

  “You astonish me,” he said.

  “You see, when Lautrec was a hopeless alcoholic, his family provided him with a keeper. Some sort of poor relation who went round with him and had the job of keeping him off the bottle. So Lautrec had this walking stick made. Hollow, you know, and would hold half a litre of brandy. At Rye, the poor chap believed that Armandine had reformed him for good. So he presented her with the thing. Too sad, eh? And I could see that the whole business of bringing up the past was extremely painful to the old lady. In fact, she made me promise something. You’d never guess what.”

  “Not to visit her again.”
/>
  “You’re absolutely right. Remarkable knowledge of human nature you have, my dear chap.” Moultrie was looking at Appleby with deep respect. “And, of course, I’ll keep my word to her. I shall find the whole episode rather a beautiful memory.”

  “And so will she, I don’t doubt.” Appleby stood up. “By the way, have you ever been to Albi?”

  “Albi? Where’s that?”

  “About fifty miles from Toulouse. I seem to remember that it has some associations with Lautrec.”

  “Oh, a place in France. No – you know, I hardly ever go abroad. I simply haven’t the time, my dear fellow.” Suddenly Moultrie gave Appleby his rather wistful and uncertain smile. “Well, what do you think of my yarn?”

  “What do I think?” Appleby, in return, was quite unsmiling. “I think that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Just a little mad, for a start. Inclined, say, to unseasonable jokes in the course of business. But later – well, very mad indeed.”

  12

  It was barely half-past two, and there were still plenty of lunchers lingering in the club. This gave Appleby an idea. Before putting it into execution, however, he went to the telephone room, shut himself firmly in, and called Judith.

  “Busy?” he asked.

  “Not in your sense, darling. Of course the little woman has her small employments about the house. Dusting hubby’s study – or is it den? – without disturbing the litter. Beginning to think about something tasty for his–”

  “Stop it. I’m in a hurry. Do you think you could get to a place in the New Forest and back by dinnertime?”

  “I might. What place?”

  “It’s called Winterbourne Crucis. I seem to remember it vaguely. You find out about Rose Cottage. Whether it’s inhabited, and by whom. If it’s not, whether it’s furnished or empty. Previous tenants. Village worthies who worked there. Everything.”