Hearing secret harmonies (31 page)

‘Oh, hullo, Nicholas. You received our card all right? I was afraid it might have gone astray, as you hadn’t been in.’

‘I couldn’t get to the Private View.’

‘I hope your wife will look in, too, before the Deacon show closes. I always remember how good she was about our turning up once with that awful man. I was quite ashamed at the time. We went crayfishing, do you remember? It was an unusual experience. I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Still, I didn’t enjoy anything much in the circumstances of what my life was then. I hope you like these pictures – and the ones in the next room too, which are by various painters. Bosworth Deacon is one of my own discoveries.’

‘I used to know him.’

‘Know whom?’

‘Edgar Deacon.’

‘Who was Edgar Deacon – a relation of Bosworth Deacon?’

‘He was called Edgar. Bosworth was only his middle name.’

‘No, no. Bosworth is the painter’s name. Are you sure you aren’t confusing your other Deacon man? Bosworth Deacon is a most remarkable artist. In his way unique. I can think of no other painter like him.’

Henderson, possibly with reason, was not in the least interested in whether or not I had known Mr Deacon. Perhaps it was not really a relevant subject; or rather seemed relevant only to myself. It was clear that Mr Deacon – born a hundred years before – seemed in Henderson’s eyes a personage scarcely less remote in time than the kindly slave-master of the artist’s own self-image.

‘I saw you were making for
Boyhood of Cyrus
, one of Deacon’s best. On the whole I prefer the smaller compositions. He’s more at ease with figure relationships. Several of the critics picked out
Cyrus
in their notices. I sold it within an hour of the show opening.’

‘The background looks rather like the quarry to be seen from our windows. You may have noticed it on your caravan visit?’

Henderson raised his eyebrows. They could have been plucked. The comparison of Mr Deacon’s picture with the quarry landscape struck no chord. Henderson sold pictures, rather than pondered their extraneous imagery.

‘Surely the palace in the distance represents Persepolis. It’s symbolic.’

‘Well Persepolis isn’t unlike Battersea Power Station in silhouette. An industrial parallel is not excluded out of hand.’

Henderson did not reply. He pursed his lips a little. We were getting nowhere. The subject was better changed. Eleanor Walpole-Wilson had probably sold
Cyrus
after her parents died. When, in days of frequenting the house, I had once referred to’ their Deacon’, she was all but unaware of its existence, hanging over the barometer in the hall.

‘When I was young I sometimes dined with the people to whom
Boyhood of Cyrus
used to belong.’

At this information Henderson regarded me with keener interest.

‘You knew Lord Aberavon?’

He was not incredulous; merely mildly surprised. One had to be grateful even for surprise.

‘Not actually. Aberavon died five or six years before I was born. My hostess was his daughter. She owned the picture. Her husband was a diplomat called Walpole-Wilson.’

Henderson was no more prepared to allow that the Walpole-Wilsons had once possessed
Boyhood of Cyrus
than for Mr Deacon to have been commonly addressed as Edgar.

‘The provenance of
Cyrus
has always been recognized as the Aberavon Collection. Several Aberavon pictures – by a variety of artists – have been coming on the market lately. They’re usually good sellers. Aberavon was an erratic collector, but not an uninstructed one. Have you looked at
By the Will of Diocletian
? It hasn’t found a buyer yet. Owing to being rather large for most people’s accommodation these days it is very reasonably priced, if you’re thinking of getting a Deacon yourself.’

‘The younger of the two torturers is not unlike Scorpio Murtlock.’

This time Henderson reacted more favourably to extension of a picture’s imaginative possibilities.

‘Canon Fenneau said the same, when he was in here the other day. He’s someone who knew Scorp when he was quite young. One of the few who can control him.’

‘Where did you come across Fenneau?’

‘Scorp once sent me with a message to him. Chuck and I sometimes go to his church. It was Canon Fenneau who told me that
By the Will of Diocletian
was painted during Bosworth Deacon’s Roman Catholic period.’

‘Do you ever hear of Murtlock now? Or Widmerpool?’

Henderson, facetiously, made the sign to keep off the Evil Eye.

‘As a matter of fact I do once in a way. Somebody I knew there comes to see me on the quiet if he’s in London. There’s a thing I’m still interested in they’ve got in the house.’

‘Would coming to see you not be allowed?’

‘Of course not.’

Henderson might perhaps have said more on that subject had not Chuck appeared from the inner room. Chuck (perhaps also of seafaring origins) had some of the same burly working-class geniality – now adapted to the uses of the art world – that had once characterized Hugo Tolland’s former partner, Sam.

‘Can you come through for a moment, Barney? Mr Duport wants a word.’

Henderson indicated that he would be along in a moment. Towards Chuck, too, his manner had changed. Himself no longer a victim requiring rescue, Henderson had become something not much short of Mr Deacon’s benign slaveowner. No doubt mutual relationship was carefully worked out in that connexion, Chuck showing no resentment at the readjustment. On the contrary, they seemed on the best of terms.

‘There are some rather interesting people in the further room. The actress, Polly Duport, and her parents. Far the best of the Victorian marine painters show come from the Duport Collection. He’s decided to sell now the going’s good. He’s quite right, I think. I expect you’ve seen Polly Duport in the Strindberg play. Super, I thought. She’s an absolute saint too, the way she looks after her father. Wheels him round all the time in that chair. He’s not at all easy. Can be very bad mannered, in fact. He was a businessman – in oil, I’m told – then had to retire on account of whatever’s wrong with him. He’d always been interested in these Victorian seascapes, picked them up at one time or another for practically nothing. Now they’re quite the thing. He comes in almost every day to see how they’re selling.’

‘I know Polly Duport – and her father.’

‘Do you? But you won’t know her mother, who’s come with them this afternoon. She’s lived most of her life in South America. She must be partly South American, I think. She looks like one of those sad Goya duchesses. She and Robert Duport, the owner of the Collection, have been separated for years, so Polly Duport told me, but have been seeing a good deal of each other lately. He’s never brought her along before. She was married to a South American politician, who was killed by urban guerillas. That’s why she came back to England.’

Henderson’s explanation had taken so long that the people next door, tired of waiting, now moved into the room where we were talking; Duport’s wheeled-chair pushed by his daughter. Her mother followed. Norman Chandler, who was directing the Strindberg production to which Henderson referred, was one of this party. Henderson was right about Jean. The metamorphosis, begun when the late Colonel Flores had been his country’s military attaché in London at the end of the war, was complete.

She was now altogether transformed into a foreign lady of distinction. The phrase ‘sad Goya duchess’ did not at all overstate the case. Chandler gave a dramatic cry of satisfaction at seeing someone with whom he could exchange reminiscences of Mr Deacon.

‘Nick, so you’ve come to see Edgar’s pictures? Who’d ever have thought it? Do you remember when I sold him that statuette called
Truth unveiled by Time
? Barney and Chuck ought to have that on show here too. I wonder where it is now?’

Duport stirred in the wheel-chair. He looked a rather ghastly sight. All the same he recognized me at once, and let out a hoarse laugh.

‘How the hell do you know he hasn’t come to see my pictures, Norman, not these naked Roman queers? He probably loves the sea.’

He turned in my direction.

‘I can’t remember your name, because I can’t remember anyone’s name these days, including my own most of the time, but we were in Brussels together, looking after different fragments of the Belgian military machine.’

‘We were indeed.’

I told Duport my name. Chandler hastened to make additional introductions.

‘So you and Bob know each other, Nick, and I’m sure you’ve met Polly. This is her mother, Madame Flores —’

Jean smiled graciously. She held out the hand of a former near-dictator’s lady – Carlos Flores cannot have been much short of dictator at the height of his power – a clasp, brief and light, not without a sense of power about it too. There could have been no doubt in the mind of an onlooker – Henderson, say, or Chuck – that Jean and I had met before. That was about the best you could say for past love. In fact Jean’s former husband, whom I had never much liked, was appreciably less distant than she.

‘I’ve gone down the drain since those Brussels days. It all started in the Middle East. Gyppy Tummy, then complications. Never got things properly right. Look at me now. Shunted round in a bathchair. Penny for the guy. That’s how I feel. One of the things I remember about you is that you knew that château-bottled shit Widmerpool.’

Polly Duport patted her father’s head in deprecation of such forcible metaphor. Duport’s appearance certainly bore out an assertion that he was not at all well. There seemed scarcely room in the chair for his long legs, the knees thrust up at an uncomfortable angle. Spectacles much altered his appearance. His daughter looked much younger than her forties. Firmly dedicated – somebody said like a nun – to her profession, she was dressed with great simplicity, as if to emphasize an absolute detachment from anything at all like the popular idea of an actress. This was in contrast with Jean, who had acquired a dramatic luxuriousness of turnout, not at all hers as a girl. Polly had always greatly resembled her mother, but, their styles now so different, perhaps only someone like myself, who had known Jean in her young days, would notice much similarity. Duport was not in the least disposed to abandon the theme of Widmerpool, whom he regarded as having at one moment all but ruined him financially.

‘Polly once saw Widmerpool knocked out by an American film star. I wish I’d been there to shake him by the hand.’

‘He wasn’t really knocked out, Papa. Only his specs broken. And Louis Glober wasn’t a film star, though he looked like one.’

‘It was something to break that bastard’s glasses. I’d have castrated him too, if I’d ever had the chance. Not much to remove, I’d guess.’

Jean made a gesture to silence her former husband.

‘How are you, Nick? You’re looking well. Better than the time you and your wife came to a party we gave, when Carlos was over here. Everybody in London was so utterly tired out at the end of the war. Do you remember our party? How is your wife? I liked her so much.’

‘I was sorry to hear —’

Before Jean could answer, Duport, recognizing the imminence of condolences for the death of Colonel Flores, broke in again.

‘Oh, don’t worry about Carlos. Carlos didn’t do too badly. Had the time of his life, when the going was good, then went out instantaneously. Lucky devil. I envy him like hell. Wish I’d met him. He always sounded the sort of bloke I like.’

Jean accepted that view.

‘I’ve often said you’d both of you have got on very well together.’

Polly Duport, possibly lacking her parents’ toughness in handling such matters, at the same reminded by them of emotional complications suffered by herself, turned the conversation in the direction of these.

‘You know Gibson Delavacquerie, don’t you?’

‘Of course. I haven’t seen him for a month or two. He said he was working very hard.’

‘Gibson and I are getting married.’

‘You are? How splendid. Best possible wishes.’

‘He’s got a new book of poems coming out. That’s why he’s gone into retirement as much as possible.’

She looked very pleased; at the same time a little sad. I wondered whether the poems had anything to do with the sadness. In any case there had been quite a bit of sadness to surmount. She had given this information in an aside, while her parents were laughing, with Chandler and the owners of the gallery, about some incident illustrated in one of the Deacons, to which Chandler was pointing. Now he turned to Polly and myself.

‘Goodness, don’t these bring Edgar back? Do you remember his last birthday party when he fell down stairs at that awful dive,
The Brass Monkey
?’

‘I wasn’t there. I knew that was the final disaster.’

Duport stared round disapprovingly.

‘I prefer my wind and waves. Smart of me to hang on to them all these years, wasn’t it? That took some doing. Do you remember, Jean, how your brother, Peter, used to grumble about looking after my pictures for me, when I was in low water, and hadn’t anywhere to put them. He hung them in the dining-room of that house he had at Maidenhead. He’d no pictures of his own to speak of – except that terrible Isbister of his old man – so I can’t see what he was grousing at. I might easily have got rid of them, but was spry enough not to sell. They wouldn’t have made a cent.’