Then the fitting would be over and the apprentice would bring in tea and wafer-thin biscuits as tasteless as the Eucharist and they would stand about with cups in their hands, chatting. Mr. Beaton always stood. He seemed to think sitting down was necessary only to see how cloth strained over the knee or rode up the calf. And when one stood, well, one stood. He always instructed his gentlemen to assume the same posture they would normally do—not to stand stiff as starch, not as they had been forced to stand in dancing class with books on their heads. Clothes were meant to fit facts, not fantasies.
When tea was done, the fitting was finished. It was a ritual in which everyone was secure and knew his lines.
Smiling, Melrose took his leave and retraced his way back down the steps and out in the Brompton Road. He could only describe himself and this day as “in fine fettle,” a phrase that had a pleasant metallic tinkle to it, and everything along the Brompton Road looked rich and thriving, as if the scene were made of British sterling. The sun was out, the shoppers bustled. Colors and sounds swept by and around him, jostled him just as elbows or umbrellas might do, and he wondered if the Old Brompton Road had undergone some Wordsworthian transformation, concrete, metal, and glass becoming one with a strangely natural setting. That long white banner flapping down the side of the Oratory like a waterfall; the road like a river running past the rocky excrescences of cars.
Melrose felt so totally London he could have wept.
2
O AIR! O sunlight!
Melrose escaped the travails of the Jubilee Line, walked from the Pimlico station, and crossed over to the Chelsea section of the Embankment, woozy with the Thames and Westminster up ahead. The Vauxhall Bridge behind him, the dark lacework of Waterloo Bridge off in the distance before him. He stopped, shielded his eyes with his hand, and looked toward Westminster Bridge and thought again of Wordsworth.
His dark blue (non-Beaton) cashmere coat open and swinging round his legs, Melrose walked along the Embankment once more imbued with the Spirit of London. Expansive, poetical, free of the shuddering Underground darkness, he watched a speedboat zip along the river, a sailboat bob, looked upward to where the sun was minting the tiny treetop leaves like coins, and blessed the Aboveground.
He entered the Tate Gallery, feeling a need to recover some sense of his own form by looking at others’—paintings, sculpture. In the anteroom of the Swagger Portrait exhibit (which had been held over) he paid for his headset. Melrose loved recorded guided tours because he loved having stories told to him. This one was told by an actor who had a fine, precise voice, one that registered enthusiasm for the paintings without sounding pompous or unctuous.
Some paintings! The first ones were wonderfully ostentatious, depicting feet on skulls with their subjects sitting on clouds; then there were the beautiful Reynoldses and the glamorous Van Dycks, with their subjects looking so grand and dignified they were removed from real life. A ride on the Jubilee Line might shake up you lot! thought Melrose, with a superior little smile.
He followed the injunction of the actor to stop the tape as he moved into the next room. Covertly, he glanced around at the other gallery viewers. This one, a middle-aged woman, had removed her headphones; that thin young man was swinging his from his hands; and most of the visitors didn’t even have any. Free spirits. He shrugged. Or poor. He started the tape again, listened to comments upon the British School, and agreed, yes, the subjects seemed a little more relaxed, more natural, not so full of swaggery self-importance. . . . Oh, this one of Mrs. Siddons! The unbelievable texture and color of that velvet! Maroon? Dark, dark brown? How glorious!
Then, through the door, Melrose saw a portrait that stopped him in his tracks. He did not know who the subject was (discovered, eventually, it was a Mrs. Chambers), nor the painter (discovered, too, it was Lawrence), but it was so overwhelmingly beautiful and so strongly resembled the portrait of his mother hanging in the dining room of Ardry End that Melrose honestly felt as if an enormous hand had fallen against his chest and shoved him back. He knew for once the exact meaning of one’s breath being “taken away.” The eyes! The yellowish light reflecting upwards from the dress, suffusing the skin of this woman. At first glance, and from beyond the doorway, he had thought this one portrait was separately lighted, for it seemed to be a source of light.
Melrose gazed at Mrs. Chambers for a long while, and when he could stand it no longer, left and dropped off his headset.
He found Room 9, which housed the Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and then found the bench that Mrs. Hamilton must have been sitting on and sat down himself. It was where Jury had said it would be, just in front of the portrait of Chatterton and the Holman Hunt. The Holman Hunt was not there; probably it had been moved. But the Chatterton certainly was there. Not, certainly, a painting that would ever have been included amongst the Swagger Portraits. There was no swagger in Chatterton. Not, perhaps, the most auspicious choice of painting to be sitting in front of, in his present mood.
He wondered how other people dealt with loss, of loss of persons and places. For they seemed to do it better than he himself, but then, how would one know? And why assume that everyone had to deal, anyway?
He thought of Nancy Fludd. Her name wasn’t Nancy, but he thought it fit her, and he was tired of calling her Miss Fludd. How did Nancy deal with her diminished world? How did she explain, rationalize, inhabit, color, frame it? There were probably a lot of people so intent upon the future that they found the past almost superfluous. The young, he guessed, must be like this. When he himself was young, did he ever feel regret or remorse? Probably not. Probably just as callow as this Beatrice and Gabe couple, who hadn’t even noticed a woman dying beside them.
He recalled what he had felt standing in the doorway of the last room of the Swagger exhibit, the breath knocked out of him, the hand against his chest, and when he then returned his gaze to the portrait of Chatterton, he wondered, had he something in common with this woman he didn’t even know, Frances Hamilton?
Sadness overwhelmed him; he judged it to be sadness and not despair, for he had always thought of despair as having no identifiable source. The source of his sadness was easily identified, stretched back to that whole bad business just before his mother died in their Belgravia house, lasted for how long? Months? A year? For what had seemed an endless time to him then. That Belgravia house that he had sold when he was thirty because he could no longer feel at home in it or even comfortable in it.
In his mind’s eye he saw himself in the dimly lit sitting room at the rear of the house, filled with exquisite furnishings whose outlines he could no longer make out, staring through the french window into the garden. Why, he wondered, was there always a garden in tales of love and betrayal? Eden, he supposed. Thus leaf goes down to leaf, thus Eden sank to grief.
And that meant a serpent. Nicholas Grey.
Affable, handsome Nick Grey. Friend of his father; shooting companion in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands; fishing mate in the icy trout streams of Wales. It was the Nick Greys of this world who could make good use of Mr. Beaton’s professional abilities. Or perhaps not, he observed. Perhaps not. Mr. Beaton’s “gentlemen” were not merely figures, like mannequins, on which he would hang his clothes. His customers were, well, “gentlemen,” persons of quality. And Nick Grey was anything but “quality.”
In that sitting room, where Melrose watched himself staring out of the window, he could also see the figure of Nick Grey over the months, the years, really, in one spot or another—slouched in one of the armchairs with a whisky in his hand; leaning against the ivory marble mantel, smiling; sitting on the library ladder, a volume from the bookcase open in his hands, and he looking puzzled. Gibbon or Virgil was far too much for him. Most was too much for him.
Melrose watched his mother moving like a ghost through the garden.
He thought about the women he’d known, and knew. He did not think he was too critical of women; indeed, the reverse was more likely true. His heart was too easil
y snared. But, then, he believed in love at first glance (although he was not absolutely sure of the depths of such love). For it was clearly of unconscious choosing, and not of conscious. Then, something got in the way, barred his path, like a figure in a passage or on a pavement that he couldn’t get round.
And in the last several years alone, there had been several: Polly Praed, who had so intrigued him in Littlebourne that first time. It could have been her. Or it could have been Ellen, whose very asperity was lovable. And, of course, Vivian. But it was too difficult believing Vivian had any romantic inclinations towards him at all. They’d been knocking about together for too long. Still. It could have been any of these women, if he were to try a bit harder (although it still eluded him, just what he was to try . . .). Yet, his vision always got clouded over by the ghost in the garden.
“I’m—sorry.”
Melrose came out of this trance with a jerk, looking up to see who she was and why she was sorry. He had utterly forgotten he was in the Tate, a public place.
“I’m sorry.” She said it again. Her face was a mask of concern. “I hate it when someone breaks in on me in this sort of way. But you do—or did—look, well, in a bad state. I thought you might be ill.”
Her embarrassment and her confusion as to whether she should have spoken at all were all too evident. He smiled at her, hoping to relieve it. What went through his mind was that here he was sitting on that same bench as Frances Hamilton had sat. And here was a Beatrice come to his rescue in a way the other Bea had certainly not helped Mrs. Hamilton.
Dark red hair, wide mouth, pale face, sympathetic. Not beautiful, but memorable. At any other time, he would have made some witty comment, asked her to come for a coffee, or if he might give her lunch. But not today.
“Is it the Chatterton?” she asked, pushing her dark thick hair back with a wedding-ringless hand. “That painting is upsetting, I think.” She glanced from the portrait back to Melrose.
It could have been you, was what he thought.
But what he said was, “Yes. It’s the Chatterton.”
TWENTY-ONE
“I’m sorry—” was very nearly the first thing Lady Cray said, and Melrose was instantly reminded of the woman in the Tate.
“—that I made Fanny out to be sillier than she was.” Lady Cray handed Melrose a thick cut-glass tumbler filled with an inch or so of Virginia Gentlemen. She had told him it was Fanny Hamilton’s favorite drink. “Cheers.”
They both raised their glasses and drank. The liquor was smooth, but sweet as mead. Despite the rather cloying taste of the whisky, he was glad to have it; he was especially glad to have the plate of chicken sandwiches the little maid had brought in. After the long morning’s trials, he had, on sinking back into the several silky pillows of an ice-blue armchair, realized that he was exhausted. By now it was after four o’clock and he still had other visits to make.
“I think I gave Superintendent Jury the wrong impression. Unfair of me.” She too sank back into the pillows of the sofa, her glass in both of her hands, her eyes trained on the ceiling.
“Never too late to amend it.” He smiled and thought how pleasant it was to sit in this room, not unlike one of those in Ardry End, and to be talking to a woman distinctly dissimilar to his aunt. What a difference in company and conversation! She was probably the same age, perhaps a bit older than Agatha. “Richard Jury is particularly interested in the trip she took to America. That is, the part of her trip after she went to Pennsylvania.”
Lady Cray’s frown deepened as she looked upward in thought, as if it had been brought on by the plaster cherubs whose chubby hands bore up plaster draperies. “Superintendent Jury seems to think there’s some connection with a woman who died in Exeter.” She sighed. “I have no idea how he makes this connection.”
“I’m not sure he’s the one making it. There’s a divisional commander who seems to be, but this particular policeman is seldom wrong.”
Somewhere, flute music played from the recesses of a room beyond this room. Flute music and then a deep sort of chanting. It was utterly unlike the melodic strains Melrose was used to. He mentioned the music.
“Fanny’s. She brought it back from the Southwest. Native American, I believe. I find it very restful.”
“So do I.” Melrose thought for a moment, then asked, “What was her nephew like?”
Lady Cray reflected on her answer to this question. Perhaps, having shortchanged Fanny Hamilton, she wanted to be sure she didn’t do the same to the nephew. “Honest. He was honest. I was struck by that.”
Melrose nodded, drank his drink, and waited for her to go on.
“You know, if you’re like that, you mightn’t have many friends. People find you disturbing, and you find other people, well, shallow. Because people who are not honest will talk about anything in the world except what they truly think and feel. We don’t do enough of that, I think. Most of us waste most of ourselves most of the time.” Lady Cray inspected her glass.
Melrose murmured agreement as he looked past the marble fireplace to the french windows and the little garden. The flute was by turns distant, eerie, haunted, clear, close. “And she went to America straightaway.” He watched the delicate branches of an ornamental willow lift in a stiff breeze and fall again into the drained concrete of an oval pool. He thought of Watermeadows. He thought of Hannah Lean. Poor Hannah. “It must be the worst thing imaginable. To lose the person most important to you. I don’t know how I’d handle that.”
“You’ve had to, haven’t you? Your parents are both dead.”
He did not turn his face from the overhanging willow and the empty pond. “Yes,” simply.
“Well, then.” She finished her drink.
Well, then.
Light had turned milky, nearly opaque and thick like fog, dense. The border of dahlias bent as if the light weighed too heavily. Light seemed to have crept into the room, not in shafts of sunlight or blue dawn or some late-afternoon rainbow diffusion. It had crept in.
“Do you have a picture of him?” he asked.
Lady Cray looked at Melrose, puzzled. “Of whom?”
“Sorry. Of Philip Calvert. Given Mrs. Hamilton was so fond of him, I’d imagine there were photos. Snapshots.”
“He was murdered,” she said, as if in answer to his strange question regarding the photograph.
“I was just thinking about something, something when I was sitting in the Tate. And I wondered—” Melrose broke off, not even sure what he wondered, then or now.
Lady Cray smiled, indicated the wall behind and to the left of the sofa where he sat. “Not very observant, are you?”
He turned toward that area of the wall between the two double doors leading to the long foyer. On the eight or ten feet of wall space above the moulding were arranged paintings of various sizes and variously framed. The largest in the top row, a portrait of a young man, was lit by a small lamp. Melrose got up and, then, as if a walk across the room would seem a rude departure, said, “May I?”
Lady Cray nodded.
The portrait showed Philip Calvert seated in a fancy Victorian chair drawn up to a small table, the sort of useless bits of furniture one often encounters in portraits, chairs and little tables too delicate to serve a purpose other than to rest an elbow on or position a hand or make a jaunty display of cap and scarf. All of these were here: Philip Calvert’s elbow rested on the table, his hand supporting his head; the other hand was furled against the end of the chair arm; a soft wool cap carelessly listed against the base of the lamp as if it had been tossed there (which of course it never would have been, not against that lamp) together with a pair of driving goggles. A dark cashmere scarf drifted away from his neck and fell along the arm of the chair, as if he’d been in the process of pulling it off. “Jauntiness” being, as it would seem, the effect aimed for. A young man, stopping between drives in his sporty car, barely able to restrain himself in the chair for all of this brushwork. But the composition itself was totally at odds wi
th Philip. Yes, he was smiling, but it was fleeting, one could tell. It made Melrose think of that pale and empty sky behind him from which the coil of birds had fled so swiftly, as if pursued by that encroaching light. All of the colors here were mournful variations of brown. The brown at the top of the canvas was so dark it was nearly black, and this melted down into sable shadows, then into the coffee color of lampshade and dubious drapery. The few colors in the weave of the cap—burgundy, flecks of hunter green—were so dark and dull they bled into their background. And so Phil Calvert’s pale face and light brown eyes approached a stage of near-translucency, caught as they were within these dark surroundings.
Melrose thought it was a wonderful little portrait, but something of a contradiction, its subject out of synch with his surroundings. It was all too redolent of comfort and privilege, of casual elegance. Too rich, much too rich. From what Jury had told him about Philip Calvert, Melrose wondered if the young man hadn’t been trying to escape all of that. And he said as much to Lady Cray.
Emphatically, she nodded. “That is exactly so. In a nice way, he used to argue with Fanny, for she, having so much money, naturally wanted him to share it. Money made Philip uncomfortable. It does so, with some people. I’ve never had enough to acquire that particular posture.”
Melrose said: “He does not look happy.”
“No. He does not. But I do not know why. For he seemed to be—not ‘happy,’ perhaps, but sure enough that he was doing the right things for himself that he was fairly content.”
In silence, they studied the portrait. Then she said, “But Mr. Plant. You’re surely not suggesting that that particular crime has something to do with Fanny’s death?”
“No. Philip Calvert’s murderer was discovered. I don’t mean it in that way.”
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