Carson's Conspiracy

by Michael Innes

  Pluckworthy laughed abruptly – presumably as scorning this paltry consideration.

  ‘But isn’t it marvellous?’ he asked, turning to Cynthia. ‘Take it from me: the whole soul of the man is going to transpire on that canvas.’ Then, as if aware that this mocking magniloquence had taken him too far, he quietened down. He looked puzzled. He frowned. ‘Do you know?’ he said. ‘It seems to remind me of somebody. But I can’t think who.’

  ‘Of Robin!’ Cynthia breathed.

  ‘Well, yes – I expect there’s that. But I haven’t yet met your son, have I? It must be of somebody else.’

  ‘Of me, it’s to be hoped – if we’re to get our money’s worth.’ Carson said this quite crossly. ‘The bloody thing’s called a portrait, isn’t it?’

  ‘Again – well, yes. But surely…’ Pluckworthy broke off, and his frown deepened. ‘Me!’ he said suddenly. ‘It reminds me of me. Elusively, of course. But the me I see in my own photographs.’

  Not unnaturally, this occasioned a moment’s silence in the attic. It was Carson’s first thought that the young man had produced this sudden and bizarre statement preparatory to making a ludicrous but scandalous claim upon him: declaring, in fact, that he was his employer’s bastard son and entitled to cash in upon the fact. For a wild moment, Carson even wondered whether this could conceivably be true. He had no sooner seen that it could not than he came by a less disconcerting but yet faintly disturbing perception. There was a certain validity in what Pluckworthy had said. Between Carson’s portrait as it was evolving itself on the canvas and the young man now staring at it a fortuitous resemblance did exist. Pluckworthy might look rather like this when he was turned fifty. Alternatively, Lely’s work suggested that Carson might have looked rather like Pluckworthy twenty-five years ago. In addition to which, there was the further corollary – whimsical, indeed – that if Robin Carson had existed he might have been not unlike the young man now gaping at Robin’s putative father’s portrait.

  But the thing was elusive, as Pluckworthy himself had said. There was nothing striking about it. All that it need have suggested was the reflection that Peter Pluckworthy must have had his own photographic image much at his command. Carson, however, found himself otherwise affected. It might have been said of him that – like the boy who springs up from his knees in Robert Browning’s poem – he had been stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Carson said – casually, but favouring his assistant with a hard look the while. ‘However, you needn’t go round prating about it. And now, we’ll get you a drink, and you’d better be off. But don’t, in the next day or two, find yourself too far from your telephone. I’ll be contacting you.’

  3

  Although the thought was from the first indeed a splendid one, it was only gradually, and with a good deal of groping, that the elements of Carson’s conspiracy came together in his mind. At first it was hardly a conspiracy at all, since he saw himself as a lone operator, manoeuvring and manipulating other people, but taking nobody into his confidence.

  He had been much struck by the sagacity of Pluckworthy’s warning about the hazardousness of being detected as drawing in his horns. It went without saying that for what he had begun to contemplate with some urgency he would require a great deal of ready money, or at least of what was the next thing to that in his peculiar world. But if he started liquidating assets in a big way, and with no apparent financial or commercial objective in view, there would soon be plenty of people asking why. Of course he could go to work cautiously, so that eventually adequate funds were free and within his instant grasp. But the more he thought about one probing or another of his affairs that might already be going on, the less leisure did he see for anything of the kind. He had to create a situation, a crisis situation that yet held no hint of his true design, in which his suddenly requiring a great deal of ready money would appear not merely blameless but positively laudable.

  Carson possessed, as has been recorded, very considerable resources in the imaginative way. Had he become a scientist, he might well have been one exceptionally fertile in the crucial field of forming hypotheses. As a novelist or playwright, he would not have eschewed extravagant situations and hazardous tours de force. Addressing himself to his present problem, and examining its various facets as here outlined, he had found all sorts of promising schemes coming into his head. But when, one by one, he chased them up he invariably came on a serious snag. He thought, for example, of being stricken by some rare disease requiring years of costly treatment somewhere in the Himalayas. That would at least get him out of the country – perhaps uncomfortably on a stretcher, but at least moderately provided for in the way of cash. But in that particular regard moderation was something he didn’t care for. Extradition, moreover, was an engine nowadays conceivably operative even amid the snows of Everest. He had to vanish. Be dead to the world. Dead. That was the crux of the thought that had fleetingly come to him.

  But at what point, if any, would he actually be breaking the law? As his plan began to take shape, Carson asked himself this question with some anxiety. It must not be thought that, as was the case with young Pluckworthy, he found the notion of illegality attractive or exciting in itself. He would have described himself as a law-abiding man – meaning thereby that he had no impulse to go shoplifting or avoid paying for a dog or television licence. There were, of course, more complex fields in which the largest legal luminaries might differ as to the legitimacy of this or that. In those fields one could allow oneself what might be termed a reasonable private judgement and some freedom of manoeuvre.

  It wasn’t illegal to be dead. It wasn’t even illegal to be content to be believed dead, unless some element of fraud were involved. Was he heading towards fraud? He couldn’t see it. The money he was going to disappear with was his own – or most of it was his own – and this could not be affected by the manner in which he chose to make it immediately available to himself. It was true that, in a few months’ time, various people might be asserting their right to chunks of it. But that would be merely a civil matter, and in any case he wouldn’t himself be taking much interest in such claims. The main point was comfortingly clear. Even if something went wrong – even if, so to speak, they yanked him out of his grave – there would be a good deal of head-scratching before they found out what to charge him with.

  But nothing was going to go wrong. Nothing could go wrong. His plan, although it still had some rough edges he must work on, was simply too clever to go wrong. More precisely, its mainspring was to be so simple yet of so shattering an effect as to place it quite beyond the conceiving of any copper or private eye in England. Had it not started up in his mind like a creation – which is the hallmark, he had somewhere read, of genius on a job? Chaps like Einstein, and the earlier one who had been stopped short by the falling of an apple: their minds had worked that way.

  But neither of these fellow-geniuses had, so far as he knew, been married to a Cynthia. And Cynthia was one of the rough edges. It was going to be a tremendous shock to Cynthia – and what would be the effect of that? With any luck, of course, it would simply send her further up the pole – so wacky that nobody would listen to her. But what if it had the contrary effect? What if his wife turned wholly sane? What if she announced, not on any trick cyclist’s couch but to some rozzer, dick or flic, even perhaps to a judge, that Robin was an airy nothing, that she’d never had a son? Undeniably, the fat would then be in the fire, all right. But never mind, he said to himself. Never mind; these things take time; time to be over the hills and far away; excelsior!

  This last spirited ejaculation framed itself almost audibly on Carson’s lips as he climbed to the attic for what proved to be his final session with Humphry Lely. Having never had occasion to peruse the poetry of Longfellow, he was unaware that the scrap of dubious Latinity had once accompanied a stiffer ascent and presaged a distinctly chilly end.

  Artist a
nd sitter entered the improvised studio together. Lely removed the cloth from the easel. They stood side by side, looking at the painting.

  Just this hadn’t happened before. Becoming conscious of the fact, Carson wondered about it. Perhaps there was a convention involved, which he had hitherto obeyed without being aware of it. He had preserved from early days the habit of being on the look out for small social things he hadn’t got the hang of. But this thought detained his mind only for a moment. It was the painting itself that he continued to feel uneasy about. There wasn’t much sense in that. It had, of course, been idle chat about the painting which had triggered off the great thought. But there was nothing at all important about that; nothing about Lely’s daub was anywhere near the centre of his design; his sense of discomfort before the thing lay in some other area.

  ‘Just what would you say you’re up to?’ Carson was startled to hear himself ask an almost philosophical question, which wasn’t his style at all. But he persisted with it. ‘I mean to say, just what do you aim at?’

  ‘Bread and cheese. Shoes for the kids.’

  ‘There’s going to be that, I suppose. And fillet steak for quite some time as well.’ Carson had to make an effort to capture this lightness of air. ‘But it’s not what I mean, Lely. A young fellow of mine, looking at the thing lately, asked if you were going after an icon. It seems an icon is something you find in Russian churches, and lurking in Russian homes and hovels. So it didn’t make sense.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that. When a painter made that sort of icon – probably of the Blessed Virgin – he was out to produce something evoking reverence. And there’s always been plenty of that all over the place. Think of a Rigaud of Louis Quatorze.’ Lely paused, but Carson, being unable to achieve this think, remained silent. ‘Plenty of it in this country, too,’ Lely went on. ‘Both in pigment and marble. Newton with his prism and silent face. Or Watts doing Tennyson or Browning. Icons, decidedly.’

  ‘You’re not after that,’ Carson said, getting his bearings at last.

  ‘Well, no. Then there’s the likeness. There must have been a time when the ability to get a likeness out of some blobs of paint on a palette seemed downright miraculous. Most of the affairs you see at the Academy every year are likenesses – or likenesses cosmeticized. Over the past hundred years or so, the likeness has been taking some hard knocks from the photograph. On Tennyson, for instance, Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron were already neck and neck. Well, that leaves the portrait. By and large, the thing we’re now looking at aims to be a portrait.’

  ‘The portrait adds something to the likeness?’ Carson, so little a fool, was now right on the ball. ‘It’s more informative?’

  ‘So they assert.’ Lely was cautious. ‘But, you know, a lot of nonsense is talked about it all. Shakespeare was sceptical, wouldn’t you say? There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. It’s only the real swells that manage it. Raphael, painting a pope. Or Rembrandt, late on.’

  Carson was able to reflect that the chance of Humphry Lely being a Raphael or Rembrandt was insubstantial. He continued to be uncomfortable, nevertheless. And something of this Lely perhaps discerned, and was thereby prompted to his next remark.

  ‘But it seems to me there continue to be vestigial magic associations surrounding the whole thing. Have you noticed there are people who hate even being included in a snapshot? They slope off on any excuse that comes into their head. And in primitive societies it can be very marked – or even in some not so primitive. Arabs, now. They invented mathematics, and heaven knows what. But aim a camera at one, and he’ll knock it out of your hand. Probably give you a bloody nose as well. And it isn’t our sort of western nonsense about the invasion of privacy – although that may have the same roots, I suppose. It’s a superstitious belief that if I possess your likeness I thereby hold some supernatural power over you. Every established portrait painter has had soldiers and sailors, debs and duchesses, in whom the same sense has detectably lurked as they sat. Do you mind if we now get on?’ It seemed to be the implication of this question that Carson was himself not immune from the irrational responses that Lely had so fluently discussed. ‘It’s just that left ear, you know. I seem to have failed to hollow my way into it.’

  So the ear was attended to at some length – and a good deal to Carson’s annoyance. Since he was being depicted sitting at his preposterous desk, and only very slightly in profile, it didn’t seem to him that his left ear would have much prominence anyway. Moreover, one ear is surely much like another, and he felt that Lely could have achieved this particular finicky job with the help of an ear belonging to somebody whose time was less valuable than his own. Some kind of apprentice could surely, as it were, lend an ear. Moreover, when the ear was despatched, Lely began fiddling and fussing elsewhere. It was plain from his movements that he was now trafficking in mere minute dabs and dashes all over the canvas. Carson, who didn’t know that this particular phase in the creating of a painting is the most joyous and relaxed part of the job, became increasingly impatient. Lely was behaving like a barber in that sort of middling-grand shop in which it is pretended that the customer is excessively fastidious and demanding, and that he has a chauffeur driven car waiting for him patiently outside. Carson had to restrain himself from telling Lely to hurry up and have done with it. You might say that to a hairdresser or even a dentist, but to an artist it would imply a certain lack of savoir faire. In addition to which Lely was continuing to chat freely, which hitherto hadn’t been his habit while actually at work.

  ‘Fewer and fewer uses for the painter nowadays,’ he said. ‘It seems incredible that, in the eighteenth century, boys at sufficiently grand schools would commission leaving portraits of themselves by eminent artists, and dump them on the headmaster as they climbed into the family coach. Or think of the Kit-Cat Club: Kneller painting almost every one of his fellow-members just to fit into some panelling somewhere. Kit-cat size, you know. And think, before that, of monarchs sending ambassadors scurrying all over Europe with generously conceived portraits of marriageable daughters. Or Byron commissioning miniatures of himself by the gross, to leave tactfully on the mantelpiece as he said goodnight to lady friends. But when new uses turn up in our great democratic societies the photographer cashes in. Passports, for example. You can’t go anywhere today without your mug on one of those.’

  ‘I rather doubt that,’ Carson said.

  ‘Again, I never heard of a portrait being cited as evidence of identification in a criminal case. But I remember reading about what you might call a near miss there. Some royalist nobleman cornered during the Civil Wars, and disguising himself as one of his own gardeners in order to get away. He was nobbled and interrogated in his own hall – with his portrait by – I think – the elder Faithorne hanging on the wall directly behind him. But none of Cromwell’s chaps raised their heads, so he got away with it. Probably a mere yarn. But quite a good one, don’t you think?’

  Carson agreed that it was a good yarn, but somehow he didn’t care for it. He even wondered whether it was Lely who had made it up.

  ‘And that’s the job,’ Lely said cheerfully, laying down palette and maulstick. ‘Of course I have to take it away – just for a lick of varnish and one or two dirty tricks to get a small wrinkle out of the canvas. My wife’s bringing her little van over for it, and she may be here now. You’ll have the thing back, however, at the beginning of the week.’

  ‘That’s capital – and I’ll have your cheque waiting.’ Carson said this in a handsome manner, as if something quite unusual and even prodigal were in question. ‘And if Mrs Lely is here, we’d better go downstairs now.’

  They descended the service staircase in silence. Carson was wondering whatever to do with Lely’s damned painting. Perhaps he could present it to the National Portrait Gallery. The place would be bound to accept it with thanks, he supposed,
but would then dump it in a cellar so that it would never be seen again.

  It was during a pause on a landing that Carson saw that his whole attitude of obscure anxiety in front of this trifling piece of nonsense was absurd. But not merely that. He was in danger, not perhaps of losing his nerve, but at least of feeling it to be a little shaken. Those storm clouds were gathering; those rocks were now dead ahead. He had been delaying too long.

  ‘I think,’ he said suddenly, ‘my son Robin was mentioned when you and your wife lunched with us?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Lely was slightly surprised. ‘Mrs Carson said something about him.’

  ‘Cynthia is very fond of him, naturally. She’ll be delighted by the news.’

  ‘You’ve had news?’

  ‘Yes – although don’t mention it. I’m saving it up as a treat. Robin’s coming on a visit in no time. I had a cable from him the other day.’

  It was thus that Carl Carson crossed his Rubicon.

  4

  But affording Cynthia her treat wasn’t going to be plain sailing. And would it really be a treat? It had for long been his habit simply to acquiesce in her delusion, but he had never before taken any initiative in, as it were, fleshing it out. What would be the result now? Carson had no use for psychiatrists and their like, and his wife’s imaginings, although inconvenient and, of course, distressing, had never prompted him to seek any professional opinion on her. He had frequently told himself that there would be time enough for anything so embarrassing and expensive if and when the thing really got out of hand. That had never quite happened so far, and he had gone along with the nonsense without thinking all that about it.

  But he had to do some thinking now. There must, he supposed, be a corner of her mind in which Cynthia knew that she had invented Robin; that he had sprung, so to speak, not from her womb but from her head. Might not the news that such a phantasm was about to arrive at Garford simply terrify her to the point of screaming? And if he didn’t arrive (as, of course, he couldn’t) and she had to conclude that he had met with very considerable misadventure on the way, mightn’t she react more badly still – even to that dread point of proclaiming to the world that Robin Carson was a fake? Carson wasn’t yet altogether clear about the misadventure; his plan was proving, after all, to be still at an elementary stage; but he knew that misadventure there would have to be. And speedy misadventure. A glimpse or two of Robin was something somebody could perhaps be persuaded he had had. But what was going to happen must happen within, say, an hour of the phantasm’s touching down at Heathrow.