Money from Holme

by Michael Innes

  ‘Is that so?’ Cheel said stiffly. He was always quick to deprecate coarse language.

  ‘And particularly death. I’ve spent all my days in the place, and I know.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Cheel said. The party was now making its way down the broad staircase that leads to the outer vestibule of the Royal Academy. Cheel wondered whether he ought to make a bolt for it, after all. Debby had her attractions, but he saw very little probability of being in a position to set finger and thumb to them. Both the men were unbearable.

  ‘People do die, you know, from time to time,’ Wutherspoon continued. ‘I agree that the fact is kept pretty dark in this part of the world. Still, it does, I should imagine, leak out. It isn’t inconceivable that you’ll die yourself – although I doubt whether you’ve ever entertained the notion.’ Wutherspoon gave Cheel an unpleasant sideways glance. ‘But in Wamba everybody dies. Sooner or later, everybody born there dies. Can you imagine it? And what’s more, everybody is aware of the fact. I see I’ve shocked you.’

  Cheel said no more for the moment. Quite as many rounds of drinks as Duffy seemed to envisage, he thought, would be necessary if sitting down at table with these people were to be conceivable. He was even resigned to paying for whole bottles of gin himself. But at least he might as well give them all the works. And now, when they were out in the courtyard, he had the opportunity to make a start.

  ‘If you care to hop into my car,’ he said casually, ‘we’ll go wherever Debby has a fancy for.’

  19

  Duffy, like most corpulent men, ate a great deal. Wuggles, like most cadaverous men, ate a great deal too. As the dinner went on, and Cheel mentally totted up the lengthening bill, he reflected that Debby represented the only break in the gloom. In spite of having announced herself as famished, Debby ate very little, and could only have been described as distraite. She glanced at her watch much more frequently than was civil in the presence of a host; the look in her eye was far-away; she no longer appeared to take any more interest in Wuggles than she did in Cheel himself. It came suddenly to Cheel that she had remembered something – and that it was something that made her discontented with her present company.

  But Cheel’s serious business did not lie in speculations like these. During the past weeks he had attempted in various ways to equip himself as a modest authority on Wamba and its people and institutions. But reliable information was hard to come by. Often one ostensible authority blankly contradicted another. In some ways this was all to the good. The more confused the record, the less likely was anybody effectively to question the story he had himself told Braunkopf, and which Braunkopf would have to pass on in a hush-hush manner to whatever customers came forward for the supposedly recovered – but actually so marvellously re-created! – Sebastian Holmes.

  Nevertheless Cheel ought to pick up whatever news out of Wamba he could come upon. And here Wutherspoon was very much his man. Indeed if Wamba-Wamba Diary was to be believed, Wutherspoon was the top authority one could find.

  ‘Tell me, Wuggles,’ Cheel said casually, ‘what is the food like out in Wamba?’ The specific topic was not one upon which he felt any curiosity, but it seemed an apposite opening with a man who – at great expense to oneself – was stuffing sixteen to the dozen.

  ‘The food?’ It was with an increased moroseness that Wutherspoon repeated the word – much as if here was a subject in all circumstances totally revolting to him. ‘There is no food in Wamba.’ He appeared to weigh this statement carefully. ‘Or virtually none.’

  ‘No food!’ Duffy, who had been silent for some time over what he doubtless thought of as his trough, was roused to dismay. ‘Dash it all, the chaps must eat something.’

  ‘Occasionally there is a sparse crop of ground-nuts, and in good seasons there may be a little wild cabbage. The swampy territories are a shade better off. A frog or lizard can be bagged from time to time. Of course, the chiefs and their families do not do too badly. They have boko-boko.’

  ‘Most interesting,’ Cheel said.

  ‘Quite possibly’ – Wutherspoon pursued contemptuously – ‘you have never eaten boko-boko. It’s a great delicacy: a species of rather bitter carrot, which has been pre-masticated by the sacred baboons.’ Wutherspoon ingested a further supply of quail in aspic. ‘There is something very palatable about boko-boko.’

  This was the first occasion, Cheel reflected, in which Wutherspoon had uttered in what might be termed a commendatory sense. Perhaps he was mellowing, if so, now was the moment for cautiously pressing forward.

  ‘The country seems to have been making remarkable strides politically,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve been a close friend of the present Prime Minister, Professor Ushirombo?’

  ‘A damned scoundrel!’ Wuggles was suddenly explosive; it was even possible to imagine that his complexion had become faintly tinged with red. ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us. Some poet fellow puts it very well. Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat. I made the MADS, you know. I positively created them as a political voice. The Syndicalists were right out on a limb, I can tell you. Literally, many of them. Too scared to come down from the trees. But I negotiated a concordat with the Moderate Advanced Democrats. That did the trick at once. Ushirombo was able to come out of hiding (he’d been peddling bicycles, or some such thing) and seize power. Well’ – Wutherspoon savagely speared his last fragment of quail – ‘the first thing he did was to run me out of the country. That’s why I’m here now – and facing penury into the bargain. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. Shakespeare.’

  Wamba-Wamba Diary, it appeared, had been a shade out of date. Wuggles’ present political affiliation, however, was of very little interest. What Cheel wanted to get hold of was chiefly an authentic narrative of the last hours of the Wamba Palace Hotel. The truth was that he was still haunted by doubts. What had put it into Hedda Holme’s head that her husband’s pictures had been saved? It was, of course, all to the good that there should be some dark rumour of their preservation going around. But it would be disastrous if they had been preserved. So what if Sebastian Holme himself were not a reliable witness? At least it would be reassuring to get confirmation out of Wutherspoon.

  ‘I suppose,’ Cheel asked, ‘you were closely involved with events on the day of the revolution?’

  ‘Day of the revolution?’ Wuggles was puzzled. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. Revolutions were going on all the time.’

  ‘I mean the night the mob burnt down the Wamba Palace Hotel. I’m interested, you know, as a painter and as a critic of–’

  ‘You a painter!’ It was Debby who had broken in with this. ‘You can’t be a painter. I adore painters!’ She yawned, and looked at her watch again.

  Unmannerly and offensive as this was, Cheel thought well to ignore it.

  ‘There was the talented young fellow Holme,’ he said. ‘I gather that he and his brother were in Wamba a good deal – and that a whole collection of his paintings was in fact destroyed in that hotel at the time when he was killed.’

  ‘Quite right!’ Pushing away an empty plate with a gesture more robust than refined, Duffy interrupted in his turn. ‘As a result, the fellow’s pictures are damned scarce. I got one, you know. As Debby’s just said, she and I are dead keen on pictures. The nineteen-fifties for Equities, my boy, and the nineteen-sixties for pictures. Take my tip.’

  ‘Ah, those two brothers,’ Wutherspoon said. ‘Up to all manner of mischief. May have been in with JUMBO, for all I know. The elder of them – name of Gregory, I fancy – got away. T’other one was killed. A painter, did you say? Never had any truck with them. Velvet collar-rolls. Moo and coo with womenfolk. One of the poets again.’

  ‘But you must take some interest. You and I, after all, have just met at Burlington House.’ Cheel was not only puzzled; he was, for some reason, faintly alarmed. ‘You went, I gather, to look at the designs of an atrociously bad painter called Rumbelow that have been commissioned for some place in Wamba.’ As he spoke,
Cheel was aware of a movement beside him. Debby had risen and was wandering away. As both her husband and Wuggles remained ungallantly seated, Cheel did the same. The woman had gone, he supposed, to powder her nose. ‘So you can’t be all that uninterested,’ he went on. ‘Did you actually go and see that show of Holme’s at the Wamba Palace?’

  For a moment Wutherspoon made no reply to this perfectly civil question. He was studying the menu. Indeed, Cheel could distinguish clearly that his eye was running down a column devoted to dishes of a particularly rich and costly order. If he had really been expelled from Wamba into penury, he was evidently well practised in making the most of a gastronomic windfall. So, for that matter, was Duffy – although Duffy was presumably deep in the buy. Cheel continued mountingly to dislike them both.

  ‘See the fellow’s pictures?’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Often dropped into the Wamba Palace of a morning for a peg. And in the evening for a sundowner. Yes, I remember noticing them, come to think of it.’

  ‘What’s happened to Debby?’ Duffy asked. ‘Oughtn’t to be spending all that time in the loo. Irritating habit. Got her better house-trained than that. And she’ll miss her kickshaw.’

  For a moment the kickshaw distracted Cheel’s attention. The chef had been produced to prepare it; he was flanked on one side by the head waiter and on the other by the sommelier (grasping a bottle of Green Chartreuse); underlings in sinister profusion stood ranked behind. The dish was some sort of flambé affair that Cheel himself detested. Mon argent est flambé, he told himself in a mournful pun. But perhaps he would be able to flog one of the new Holmes quietly to Duffy to tuck away in his portfolio in place of another wad of Equities. There was comfort in that thought.

  ‘I suppose,’ Cheel said to Wutherspoon, ‘that they were undoubtedly all destroyed?’

  ‘All destroyed? Don’t know what you’re on about.’ Wutherspoon, who was concentrating upon the culinary process proceeding beside him – and in the particular interest, it seemed, that the sommelier did his stuff generously – glanced at Cheel with irritation. ‘I’d have him add a dash of their Champagne Cognac, if I were you. 409 on the list. And then a glass of it will go well with the coffee.’

  ‘Capital,’ Duffy said. ‘Good old what’s-your-name!’

  ‘Mervyn,’ Cheel said, between teeth suddenly chattering with rage.

  ‘Mervie. I’ll call you Mervie. Good old Mervie.’ Duffy drained his glass in the expectation of what was to come. He could only have been described as already in liquor. ‘And tell him to get out his Hoyo Coronas at the same time. There’s not a better six-and-sixpenny cigar in London.’

  ‘I quite agree.’ To his own ear, Cheel managed this concurrence with an air of easy authority. He gave the necessary instructions to the head waiter, who received them with every appearance of courteously dissimulated contempt. ‘Sebastian Holme’s pictures,’ he said firmly to Wutherspoon. ‘I’m asking you whether, to your own certain knowledge, they were all definitely destroyed?’

  ‘Damned impertinent inquisition!’ Wutherspoon produced this with a sudden and flabbergasting roar as he dug a fork savagely into the ruinous concoction before him. ‘Duffy, who is this awful little man? What’s he doing at our table? Have him put out! Have him taken away!’

  ‘Steady, Wuggles my boy.’ Duffy was admonitory but not disturbed. ‘This is Mervie, you know. Civil little man I picked up somewhere on the Riviera. Not just one of us, perhaps. But a decent sort of yob, and swimming in the gravy. You should see his bloody car.’

  Cheel rose to his feet, gibbering with fury. Then he abruptly sat down again. He realized with horror that both these ghastly men had contrived to get drunk without his noticing it. Perhaps that was why Debby had withdrawn. And now people at the nearer tables were turning and staring. He remembered the rather ticklish exit he had been constrained to make with Hedda Holme from another and less pretentious restaurant. This time, it looked like being worse.

  ‘Put him out!’ Wutherspoon shouted again. ‘A damned insolent intrusion!’ He took a large gobbet of the disgusting soufflé, or whatever the thing was. Ingested in such a passion, it ought to have choked him. But its effect was quite different. ‘Just quieten down,’ he said to Cheel. ‘You’re in danger of creating a scene, my dear chap. Nobody minds a fellow getting a bit tight. But hold it, old boy. Hold it like a gentleman.’

  ‘Good old Wuggles!’ Duffy said. ‘Good old Mervie! Good old Debby!’ He broke off and looked around him. ‘Where the hell is Debby?’

  This question was answered as he spoke. An enormous figure, livened in the manner of a doorkeeper or linkman, had appeared at the entrance to the restaurant and was now advancing upon the three diners. Cheel took it for granted that they were all about to be chucked out. The man, however, paused beside Duffy, and made a respectful bow.

  ‘Madam’s compliments, sir, and she regrets she has had to leave.’

  ‘Had to leave, eh?’ Duffy seemed not particularly perturbed. ‘Tummy gone wrong, perhaps?’

  ‘No, sir. She sent a message, sir. Something she had remembered. A visit to pay. An overdue visit, she said, to her old governess. With her compliments, sir, as I said.’

  Duffy received this communication – which could scarcely have been intended for credence, Cheel supposed – with an amiably dismissive wave of the hand. Then he seemed to recollect himself.

  ‘Mervie, old boy,’ he said, ‘give this chap half-a-crown – there’s a good fellow. No – damn it! – give him five bob. And where’s that brandy? We’ve the night before us.’

  20

  To revel into the small hours with Duffy and Wuggles was something Mervyn Cheel simply couldn’t take. His mature self knowledge (which has already so variously exhibited itself in this narrative) told him at once that if he made the attempt he would probably end up by committing murder. He therefore worked the lavatory game. That is to say, he withdrew from his companions precisely as Debby had appeared to do; and like Debby he didn’t return. Unlike Debby, however, he sent back no message about an old governess, or even about an old tutor. He just collected his hat and coat, and walked out. The perfect simplicity of this manoeuvre pleased him very much – particularly when he reflected that it had left Duffy and Wuggles to face the bill, after all. He had decided that, in the way of information, there was nothing more to be got out of either of them. And as neither of them looked like being good for anything else – or for anything more, say, than an occasional casual drink – they were in the most obvious sense expendable. It was true that they might, upon some future occasion, fall in with him and exact vengeance. They might even deliberately chase him up with that in view. But on the whole this seemed not probable, since they were both so tight that it was unlikely they would preserve any clear memory of what the evening had been about.

  It was in very reasonable good humour, then, that Cheel recovered his splendid car and drove home to the comfortable flat with which he had now provided himself. The arduous day could close with the most innocent of pleasures: a hot bath, a night-cap, and a quiet half-hour with a volume chosen at random from his very respectable collection of refined erotica.

  Unfortunately this plan didn’t materialize. He had hardly closed the door behind him when he realized that beneath his good humour an indefinable uneasiness was at work. The feeling was the more unpleasant because he felt that he ought to be able to explain it. For some time he mooned about indecisively. He turned on a bath, and then turned it off. He poured himself a drink, and then abandoned it on the chimney-piece. He chose a book, and it didn’t seem to tickle him at all. Perhaps, he thought, he was suffering delayed shock from the atrocious behaviour of the savage Rumbelow in Burlington House. Perhaps he didn’t trust Braunkopf. Perhaps –

  Quite suddenly, Cheel spotted the trouble – the operative trouble at the moment. (There were a good many others, after all, rather ominously prowling on the horizon.) There had been something factitious – something bogus, to use a vulgar expression – about that
sudden outburst from the man Wutherspoon when he had been tackled about Sebastian Holme’s pictures. At the time, the gross indignity of the expressions then directed at Cheel had obscured this fact from him. But he saw it clearly now. Wutherspoon had been concerned to break off the topic. In other words, Wutherspoon knew something he had been trying to conceal. Could he, conceivably, be possessed of the truth about Sebastian Holme’s continued painful drawing of breath in this harsh world? If he were, could he be hoping (as would be only rational, after all) somehow to cash in on his knowledge? He had spoken bitterly of having returned to England in penury. Did he know something that might get him out of it?

  Mervyn Cheel prowled up and down, gloomily perpending these questions. He had a baffled feeling that they had got him well into a target area, but that he still hadn’t scored a bull’s-eye. This irritated him. Glancing around him, he saw, carefully wrapped up in brown paper, the only freshly re-created painting of Holme’s that now remained to him. That morning there had been two. But ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ was now locked up in the Da Vinci Gallery.

  Holme must be given a sharp prodding. This persuasion came to Cheel with a force from which he ought to have taken warning that it wasn’t entirely rational. In sober fact, the painter’s industry was phenomenal; there were several virtually completed pictures in his attic fastness now; within the week, another had been coming along. These circumstances should have been prominent in Cheel’s mind at this moment. It would have been well if he could have realized that Passion was usurping the Rule of Reason in his mind. He had been a good deal harried in the course of the day. He wanted to harry Holme.

  Another thought came to him. Within this same past week, Holme had for the first time demanded quite a lot of money. Not, it was true, in any absolute reckoning a considerable amount. In fact it had been no more than £50. But what earthly occasion did the man have for even that? When one looked at it in this way, one saw clearly that Sebastian Holme was becoming displeasingly grasping. Not only must he be prodded along. He must also be pulled up.