Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 16

Then Olivia said, "I'm afraid I'm the odd man out here. Forgive me, Ralph, but I honestly liked your landscapes. And your portraits. Mona's-that one especially. I don't understand this new white progression of yours."

Melrose wanted to cheer.

Ralph Rees was perfectly good-humored. "It's not for me to say, Libby. I count only as one more critic of the work."

Oh, h.e.l.l, Melrose thought. Rees was into that "new criticism" that made such a splash several decades ago. Empson, I. A. Richards-the textual purists who counted a writer's life as wholly separate, or other than, the work he produced. Melrose had always thought that literary stance an exquisite piece of hocus-pocus. Anyway, if Ralph Rees didn't know what the h.e.l.l he was doing, that made three of them, including Olivia.

He wondered about her position in this household. She might be at a serious disadvantage if she was Clive Fabricant's daughter. A half sister by Fabricant's first wife probably would not be overly popular. But then he had no idea what was at stake. She would be a steadying influence on Pansy (who gave Melrose the impression of being completely unmanageable), if Pansy were amenable to such an influence, which he doubted.

He laughed (somewhat superciliously). "But you certainly had some inspiration for painting those five canvases. So you must have some understanding of your own work. Critics are, after all, permitted their opinions." (No, they weren't. That's why they were critics.) "And, anyway, am I correct in thinking your Snow series can't be articulated? I mean, it doesn't lend itself to a.n.a.lysis and interpretation." What in h.e.l.l was he talking about? If you had money you could say anything and n.o.body gave a d.a.m.n. And why had the new criticism popped up in his thoughts? Empson-well, he was always hovering, but Richards? Good lord, he hadn't thought of him in a hundred years, not since that last course he'd taught in the Romantic poets. He laid it on. "It's completely visceral, a metaphor for emptiness. I liked your"-here he turned to Olivia-"seeing it as a 'white progression.' Though I myself look at it as more of a regression." Blah, blah, blah, blah. How could they listen? The idle rich, minting coins with their mouths.

At this magic moment a middle-aged woman in an ap.r.o.n entered the room to whisper to Madame Kuraukov that dinner was ready. She was thinnish and of a mousy-brown plainness that made her fade right into the wallpaper, or the shadows, whatever was around to blend with. She seemed quite shy, for as Ilona said, "Thank you, Hedda," the woman turned and left the room without having made eye contact with anyone.

Melrose supposed what he was doing was allowing himself to register on their minds as a transcendent bore. This was a disguise that had suggested itself the more he rattled on. It occurred to him that the crotchety pair of Neame and Champs would never excite suspicion, would never raise questions in other people's minds-Ah-ha! What are they up to?-unless one saw the skull beneath the skin of those two.

Rees, of course, would not think Melrose boring at all. Far from it. To him, Melrose would be a fount of wisdom because he was talking about Rees's work. And, not surprisingly, it was Ralph who prompted him to continue as they all sat down to dinner in a jumble and got bibbed up.

"As I said, I get this feeling, it's like a fist in the solar plexus"-here Melrose demonstrated by hitting himself-"that the entire series is more than the sum of its parts."

Rees nodded eagerly. "To take them all in at one gulp, that's what you should do. That's why I'm so grateful to Seb and Nick for giving me a place to hang all of them."

Ilona said, from the bottom of the table (Sebastian was sitting at the top), "It must be gratifying to you, Ralph-all this enthusiasm. Please remember I insist on buying one for myself. I told you that."

This rather surprised Melrose. She couldn't actually admire these white paintings. He asked her, smiling, "Which one?"

In the smile Ilona returned, and in the tiny inclination of the head-as if conceding a point-Melrose thought there to be more than a glimmer of irony, as if she recognized his question as a repet.i.tion of her own. "Oh"-she waved his question away-"I haven't decided yet."

Melrose made no comment on the puzzling nature of this way of regarding art. But he was concentrating now on what looked like an excellent poussin being handed round by the colorless Hedda. She seemed to have been banished to some fairy tale in which she would vanish if looked upon too openly and directly. Her existence depended upon her invisibility. Well, if the excellence of the chicken matched that of the soup, he was in for a treat. And when he tasted one of the carmelized new potatoes, he only hoped that no one would be silly enough to stare at Hedda and make her disappear in a puff of smoke. People could kill for such cooking.

"You'd better, Mother. They're going like hotcakes!"

Both the cliche and the voice in which Sebastian uttered it were so resoundingly hollow that it struck Melrose for the first time that he was not enthusiastic after all about the Snow paintings. Nor did Melrose understand the actual content of what he'd said. Had more of the paintings been sold than the one to him? he asked.

Nicholas answered, "Two of them, perhaps. More than one person is interested, and we're very hopeful." He smiled warmly at Ralph.

Before he said anything, Melrose allowed the morsel of roast young chicken to melt in his mouth. He took a sip of the wine, and it and the chicken converged in an ambrosial meeting of flavors. He thought Hedda went unappreciated, for no one was remarking on this wonderful food. Being careful not to look at the cook (who had brought in some hot rolls and was pa.s.sing them), he said, "This chicken is more inspired than your painting, Ralph. If there were four more ways of cooking it, we'd none of us need art." He kept his eyes on his plate, smiling. And from somewhere came a giggle. He looked up, only to see the door to the kitchen swing a little in a ghostly encounter.

Olivia did remark that Hedda was a marvelous cook. She hoped they weren't taking the woman for granted; they should get someone to help her, at least to do the serving. "Several of our friends have tried-" Just then, the cook came back through the swinging door to go into the living room. Olivia stopped talking until she was out of the room, then continued in a whisper. "Our friends have tried to steal her away from us with offers of much larger salaries."

"Oh?" Heartily he declared, "Well, they can't be friends, and they can't have enough money." That was properly vulgar, he thought, for a t.i.tle.

Predictably, they all chuckled. Wasn't it dreadful that social convention demand they all put up with the crude, the vapid, the vulgar, and-worst of all-the boring? He felt like reciting aloud the poem that was going through his head: My wife and I have asked a crowd of c.r.a.ps/To dine with us. . . . Melrose smiled. . . . Philip Larkin. There was someone who knew the dreadful prospect of c.o.c.ktail parties and dinners.

But he was doubly frustrated because he could find no opening at all to bring the talk around to the Fulham Palace murder. Then he saw, though the archway into the living room, Hedda folding Ilona's coat over her arm, probably preparatory to putting it away in some cupboard. If she would only cross through the far end of the dining room . . . ah! She was!

Ilona saw her too. "Hedda, just leave that out, will you?"

A weak "Yes, madam" came from the hallway.

"Fur is not popular these days, is it?" She said this on an almost challenging note, in case there were any hunt saboteurs among the dinner guests.

Melrose very much doubted animal-rights activists could influence Ilona Kuraukov in any way. He took advantage of the incident. "That's a very handsome fur, Madame Kuraukov. Mink, is it? Sable?"

"Sable. It was given me by my late husband." Here she colored slightly, as if everyone, including Melrose, also knew of Mona Dresser's sable, and that Clive Fabricant was handing out furs right and left.

Unfortunately, Melrose couldn't be that knowledgeable, couldn't have read about the coat on the dead woman having belonged to Fabricant's last wife-Mona Dresser-for the newspaper accounts had made no such disclosure. He was left, then, with an oblique maneuver. "Every time I see a fur coat these days"-ye G.o.ds, that was clumsy enough!-"I can't help thinking about that queer murder. Did you read about it? The woman found in the grounds of Fulham Palace?" To Melrose, it seemed they all should be able to see right through him: that he was a mole, planted here in their house by police. But he plodded on; there was no way he could reintroduce it more skillfully. "We're near Fulham here, aren't we? Is this South Ken?"

"Chelsea." A hint of disbelief that anyone could confuse the three.

"Oh. Well, I expect such news leaks across the border, doesn't it?" He wasn't sure, but he thought Olivia was looking at him with slightly narrowed eyes. She had stopped eating and was resting her chin on her palm, looking at him. "Every time I think of sable"-seldom enough-"I remember that film Gorky Park. Did you see it?"

Pansy, who had said next to nothing and eaten next to nothing and had simply kept turning her fork over and over, said, "I saw it on video. I thought it was awfully dull."

"It was all that snow and those sables I remember. Lee Marvin, what an unappreciated actor."

"He was awfully old, wouldn't you say?" Pansy said.

h.e.l.l, in attempting to bore them all again he saw the talk was going towards something entirely different and he'd have to s.n.a.t.c.h it back. "Old? He was only fifty or so, wasn't he?"

Pansy shrugged and looked away. "That's what I mean."

"He was certainly a commanding presence, standing there in the snow with a gun in his hand. Was she shot? I can't remember."

"Was who?" Sebastian frowned.

"The woman at Fulham Palace."

"Yes," said Nicholas, looking uncomfortable. "We've had police here all-"

"Nikolai," said Ilona, reprovingly, trying to shut him up. But he'd already mentioned the magic word.

"Police? Good G.o.d! Whatever for?" Melrose feigned astonishment.

Pansy announced that she "went absolutely spastic." Sebastian gave Nicholas a dirty look for introducing the subject.

It was Olivia who calmly told him the reason. "It was the coat, you see. Actually, it was mine."

Melrose gasped. "Yours?" He looked around the table as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard and would someone please explain.

Ilona Kuraukov looked as if she'd rather shoot him than inform him.

"You're joking!" He kept it up.

Olivia took a sip of wine, regarded him over the rim of her gla.s.s, and with a rueful shake of her head, said, "No. It's quite true. It wasn't my coat originally. It belonged to Daddy's last wife, Mona Dresser. She had it for years and scarcely ever wore it and finally just gave it to me."

Melrose said the name over. "Mona Dresser, Mona Dresser. Why does that name sound familiar?"

"Because she used to be a film star," said Nicholas. "Quite famous in the 'forties and 'fifties."

"Of course," said Melrose. "So she gave the coat to you?"

"And after a while-well, I'm not really too fond of fur. So I put it in a consignment shop. A little place in the Brompton Road."

She showed signs of wavering, so Melrose prompted her. "Yes?"

Olivia shrugged. It was rather a s.h.i.+very shrug. "They sold it. Presumably to this woman." Olivia smiled wanly.

Ilona put in, "It's all ghastly, but there it is." Her tone was an attempt to be dismissive, but strain underlaid it.

"I wonder you didn't put it with Christie's or Sotheby's," said Melrose irrelevantly. "After all, the coat had been Mona Dresser's."

"Yes, you're right."

Melrose thought his interest in this sable venture might seem a bit too pointed, so he backed off and brought on the pedant, Lord Ardry. "Christie's do quite well. I've put some of my own objets d'art under the hammer there." He laughed affectedly. "A bureau du roi that fetched quite a handsome price." And he went on in the most tedious detail about the bureau, the blanket chest, the bonheur du jour (all of these belonging to his friend Max Owen, in Lincolns.h.i.+re, where he had done a pa.s.sable impression of an antiques appraiser earlier that year).

Pansy made no effort to hide her boredom, Sebastian took a covert glance at his watch, and Ilona studied her fine hands. Nicholas filled up the winegla.s.ses. Only Olivia and Ralph were listening. If he wanted to be invited here again, he had better not bore them to death, so he stopped. He did not revert to the sable coat, however. He would leave immediately after consuming this delicious-looking lemon mousse that had been set before him by Hedda. It was frozen and sitting in a raspberry ca.s.sis.

"This mousse is exceptional," said Melrose.

"One of our favorites," said Sebastian, who had broken out a Sauternes to go with it.

"And that chicken! But where does your cook come by lavender flowers? I can't recall ever having anything laced with lavender."

Olivia said, "There's an herb garden out behind the house."

Pansy still played with her fork and yawned. "That's where they found her. In the lavender." When all eyes turned to her, she looked a trifle disgusted, as if only she had been taking the trouble to follow the dinner-table conversation. "The dead woman. At Fulham Palace."

20.

Somnolence settled over Melrose Plant like a cloak as he sat the following morning in one of the club's wing chairs, digesting his full English breakfast and ruminating over the next job Jury had given him: to visit Mona Dresser and her niece, Linda Pink.

Having decided to pay his visit that afternoon, he then set about reading the arts section of the Times. His eyelids did not want to cooperate in this venture, and his dozy brain went along with this mutiny and he drifted off.

He was torn from sleep a few minutes later by a rant coming from behind another newspaper, where a member was declaiming, "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish," in a voice not unlike Lear's as he wandered across the vasty moors of both the stage and his mind. Melrose sat, waiting for the final "rubbish."

"Rubbis.h.!.+" The paper came down from in front of the face of a member in the sixty-to-eighty age range Melrose had come to expect. This face, however, was far livelier than those of most of the members. He addressed Melrose without preamble.

"Have you read the so-called 'arts' section? You have the Times there." This was said in an accusatory manner, suggesting that if he had that paper, he had d.a.m.ned well better have read it.

"Ah. Actually, I just seemed to doze off before I got to . . . " Under the dark cloud of the man's countenance, the jutting gray rock of his eyebrows, Melrose felt excuses were unacceptable.

This gentleman shook his head slowly. "That's the trouble with you young men. No sticking power. I'll read it to you." He snapped the paper once or twice to let it know which was master, which was slave, and read: "The startling exhibit of Charlie Chambers. Sounds more like a tap dancer than a painter.

"Chambers begins with his representational portraits, carries us through his neo-cla.s.sical nude period, and ends with a post-Abstract Realism that distorts vision through the use of acrylics, fingerpaints, and, most astonis.h.i.+ng of all, multicolored Gummy Bears."

The paper came down again like a lead balloon. "What do you think of that?"

Oh, art, art, art. . . . Now Melrose felt like Lear. "I'd say it's rubbis.h.!.+"

If the old man thought his nose was being tweaked, he didn't seem to care. "You agree, then. I saw this so-called exhibit of 'neocla.s.sical nudes,' and I'd sooner visit a frozen meat locker. I left before I acted on my impulse to go out for a can of spray paint. My name's Pitt, incidentally. Simeon Pitt."

"Mr. Pitt, happy to meet you." Melrose thrust his hand across the open s.p.a.ce between them. "Melrose Plant." He could not bear to trot out the t.i.tles again. "That bad, was it?" He warmed almost immediately to Mr. Pitt and wondered what comment this made on his own tolerance level. Was it zero?

"That bad does not begin to describe it. I'd be giving the so-called artist too much credit by calling his work 'anarchic' or 'counter-art' or something like 'post-Warholian.' Christ, even Warhol-whom I dislike, only not so much-had some sort of idea-exploiting consumerism-of what he was doing. This one"-and here he balled up the paper as if he'd crumple the whole newspaper world-"has about as much notion of paint as a two-year-old would. This Chambers fellow couldn't paint a cow if it posed for him in a field of sheep. And now we've got old Phinny Fogg lauding the d.a.m.ned exhibit to the skies. It's a disgrace." He tossed the crumpled ball of paper towards the big fireplace. "Rubbis.h.!.+" Then he sat back and his eyes made a slow circuit of the room, as if to see whether his act had cleared the air at all. "I'm having a whisky. Want one? Or is it too early for you?"

"Is it ever too early?" Melrose was enjoying his companion; it was a conversation begun in medias res, a style of presentation he'd always liked, the style of which White Ellie Cripps was mistress, for it meant that small talk had already been dispensed with, given that the conversation began in the middle, and in the middle of something the speaker had feelings about.

Mr. Pitt laughed a laugh that sounded something like a drowning man desperately grabbing at air, a kind of sucking in and snorting out. "Good man! Whisky? Or something else for you?" He raised two fingers and beckoned to Young Higgins, who nodded and started his infinite journey to the center of the room, as if it were the Outer Hebrides where they sat.

"Whisky's fine." Melrose took the lull in the talk (which he imagined wouldn't last long) to consult his copy of the arts section. Apparently, this Phineas Fogg really was the art critic for the Times. . . . Well, Melrose should have gathered that. The exhibition in question was at a small gallery, and the artist this Charlie Chambers fellow. Melrose had never heard of him, but that was hardly a blight on Mr. Chambers's career.

Young Higgins made it and took the order and clarified one or two confusing issues about the drink.

Whisky and soda on its way, Mr. Pitt settled in to make mincemeat of old Phinny Fogg's artistic pretensions. "This exhibit that Fogg finds so sublimely"-he checked the column again-"no, so beatifically beautiful-" Pitt shook his head and closed his eyes. "Has there been any artist since Turner you can say that about?"

"You mean J.M.W. Turner?"

Simeon Pitt c.o.c.ked his head. "How many Turners are there?"

Melrose smiled. How refres.h.i.+ng. Mr. Pitt was not one to allow place to rhetorical questions. "Only the one, I think." He thought of Bea Sloc.u.m. "I wonder-"

"Words can only hint at the bottomless despondency one feels looking at the so-called art of this Chambers fellow. He stands for so much one loathes on the current art scene." Pitt's fingers drummed on the arm of his chair. By the round, cherubic look of him and the thin veil of whitened hair that covered his otherwise bald pate, Simeon Pitt looked to be in his late sixties, at least. He acted more like sixteen, as if nothing took place in his life that did not require physical emphasis. "He's getting all this adulation now, as a result of this." He picked up the arts page and shook it as if he might be able to shake it free of the redoubtable Fogg's words. "People will swarm to his exhibit and talk him up because they've been told he's good, while a really deserving fellow has to scrabble for pennies to buy paints."

Melrose smiled. "I was getting the impression there were no really deserving fellows."

"Untrue, untrue! They are few and far between, mind you. We're lucky to see one come along once in a decade. Ah, here comes Higgins."

Whenever Young Higgins crossed the room with a tray, Melrose had the impression of an elderly bat boy. The contents of the soda syphon sloshed and the gla.s.ses slid and rattled, but in general the tray was brought safely home.

"Thank you, sir," said Pitt, signing the ticket with a flourish. "No, no, don't you bother; I'll splash the stuff into the gla.s.ses. . . . Be here all day, otherwise," he added, after Higgins had wandered off. Pitt pushed the soda syphon as if he were going to put out a fire. He handed Melrose his whisky. "What were we saying? Oh, yes. You see, what makes me see red is that there may be more real artists among us, but they can't manage, can't eke out an existence in a loft with a skylight and not enough money for a loaf."

This amused Melrose. Simeon Pitt's idea of unrecognized genius was quite stereotypically romantic.

"A few years back there was one, fellow named Jeremy Grey, whom you've never heard of because none of these d.a.m.ned gallery twerps would take him on. So reviewers like me, we never saw him. When I finally did, he was dead. And where I saw three of his paintings was in a pub. That's right, a pub. Some publican had traded drinks, probably, for the paintings. Remarkable work. I wrote a double column about Grey, wrote about him for a month."

It came to Melrose finally. Simeon Pitt! "You're that Pitt. The art critic for the Times. Before Fogg." Melrose seemed to recall this critic had been more than once referred to as "Pitt bull."

"How could I have been so stupid not to put that together immediately?"

"Why, I don't know, man. How could you?"

Pitt was regarding Melrose over the rim of his gla.s.s. He looked so gleeful that Melrose had to laugh. Then he asked, "Do you know the Fabricant Gallery?"