A Family Affair (3 page)

‘Natives?’ the host of the evening asked with serious interest. ‘I mean, was it one of the periods for that sort of thing?’

‘Not in the least. My father was extravagantly liberal-minded and humane. He simply went into jungles and places in a big way, and shot all sorts of lions and tigers. He brought them home – either stuffed or decapitated or flattened out as rugs – and we have them all over the place. Not that they have much to do with what I’m telling you. They just serve to sketch in my father.’

‘Is he what is called a backwoods peer?’ somebody asked politely.

‘Yes, that’s exactly him. And it’s an important part of the story, as a matter of fact. You see, in spite of India and all that, my father has never much taken up with people. Hardly ever goes to Town, really. Always been very much one for the private life. He did High Sheriff once, and found it awful. Particularly the Assize Judges. Old gentlemen dressed up like Father Christmas, and hanging people right and left. They never did that in India, he says. As for Lord Lieutenant, he turned it down flat, although it created a bit of a stink. Family always
has
done the job, I suppose. But he just said wandering royalty would be a bit too much. Not what you might call a Buck House type, my father. That’s where the story begins, as a matter of fact.’

‘We perceive,’ the man who had been interested in Cellini said, ‘that we are to make an incursion into high life.’

‘Pretty dubious high life, as you’ll hear in a minute.’ Oswyn turned to Appleby. ‘I don’t know, sir, if you’ve ever taken time off to look at the amateur side of your job – Sherlock Holmes, and all that?’

‘I think I know my Holmes pretty well.’ Appleby was amused by this reference to his career. ‘But I’m not so good on his successors.’

‘Well, it’s Holmes I’m thinking of. You remember how, every now and then, he’d receive an emissary from an Exalted Personage, who would ask him to save the Empire, or preserve the reputation of a Personage more Exalted still. And finally Watson would ask him where he’d been one day. And he’d produce a pair of diamond cuff links, and murmur modestly that he’d been to Windsor, and received them from the hand of a Very Gracious Lady. That sort of thing.’

‘That
sort
of thing,’ Appleby said. ‘Although I doubt whether your account quite measures up to the scholarship of the subject.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. All I’m saying, really, is that it was a Very Gracious Lady who came at my father. Of course she’s dead now, God rest her soul. My father simply had a telephone message that she was coming to tea. At Keynes, that is. Keynes is the name of our house.’

‘Quite out of the blue?’ somebody asked.

‘Entirely. But there was nothing odd about it. My father and mother were quite proper people to hand the muffins and pour the fragrant Lapsang in such circumstances.’

‘Muffins?’ Mr Moyle asked curiously. ‘Would there really be–’

‘Well, whatever Very Gracious Ladies do consume. This one had a fancy for going round people’s houses. And she had rather a vexatious habit as well.’

‘A notion,’ Appleby said, ‘of what should appropriately mark such an occasion.’

‘Just that, sir. She had old-fashioned ideas, just as my father had. It seems that well into the eighteenth century, at least, a visitor whom one desired to distinguish was always given anything he fancied to take away. A volume from your library – that sort of thing. There are shocking gaps, it seems, in some libraries of importance, just because of this habit. My father’s august guest kept this up in quite a big way. It was a kind of joke, it seems, among the sort of people who were likely to suffer from it. Everybody knew about it – or nearly everybody. I’m not sure about my father. He’s a person who lives rather remote from gossip, and so on.

‘Well, the circus arrived. All very much in order: police escort, Rolls, equerry, lady-in-waiting – the entire works. I think my mother was quite pleased; she didn’t dislike the notion of her bun fight figuring in the Court Circular next morning. The Very Gracious Lady seemed to have a bad cold, but the occasion went swimmingly, all the same. Only, she didn’t stay very long.’

‘Ah!’ Appleby said.

‘She was a good deal taken with the Hilliards, but as they are ancestors she couldn’t very well make improper suggestions about them. What she
did
declare herself enchanted with – what she
much
envied my father the possession of – was some odd little daub, about twelve inches square, which I expect he was hardly aware of the existence of. But that was that. India, of course, had made him pretty good at taking a hint. He yanked the thing from the wall, rather annoyed my mother by blowing a lot of dust from it, and handed it to the equerry. The chap had the drill pat: two steps forward, receive picture, two steps back. Conclusion of visit.’

‘And the next morning,’ Appleby said, ‘there was nothing in the Court Circular?’

Nothing at all. Nor was there a letter the next day. My father, as a matter of fact, is rather a stickler in such things – India again, I suppose – and he wasn’t pleased. A letter from the Private Secretary, it seems, is
de rigueur
on such occasions–’

‘And a signed photograph?’ somebody asked. ‘Or do they go only to the middle classes?’

‘Probably a signed photograph as well.’ Oswyn was not offended. ‘So my father wrote in, expressing the loyal hope that the VGL’s cold was none the worse for her trip. Well, there was a chap down from London in no time, dead keen that the whole hoax should be kept mum.’

‘It
was
a hoax?’ Mr Moyle asked.

‘Of course it was a hoax. And one just like the inspecting of that battleship. The type of the purely disinterested practical joke that Sir John was talking about.’

‘Only you don’t believe it
was
disinterested,’ Appleby said. ‘Your narrative has emphasized something it was meant to emphasize. The little daub.’

‘That’s perfectly true, sir. Ever since I was told the story, I have rather wondered about the small picture.’

‘And your father – hasn’t he wondered?’

‘I just don’t know. But I rather think not.’

‘I see.’ Appleby looked curiously at the young man who had entertained the Patriarchs to so odd a tale. ‘But simple curiosity would surely prompt one to inquire? There must be a catalogue, an inventory, records from the last occasion upon which death duties were paid–’

Perfectly politely, Oswyn interrupted this with a low laugh.

‘You should come and have a look at us,’ he said. ‘My parents would be delighted. You must have Bobby bring you.’

‘That would be very pleasant.’ Appleby was aware of a stir among the Patriarchs, and of the beer crate being tugged from beneath the table. ‘But this is very much a matter of past history?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Oswyn was airily vague. ‘Donkeys’ ages ago, as I said. Such things don’t happen nowadays.’

Appleby said good night to Bobby outside the Master’s Lodging. The quad was filled with a faintly luminous yellow fog, as if some giant hand had ladled into it an unpalatably dilute pea soup. There was a faint smell, deceptively rural, of sodden leaves. A piano was being played in a farther quad, but the notes came without resonance, as if through wet flannel. Somewhere a great bell began to sound, and then many lesser bells. The piano ceased abruptly, suggesting that it must be in the proprietorship of someone of nervously law-abiding disposition. The big bell stopped decisively, and then the little bells rather at random. Appleby opened the door of the Lodging, and went in.

The Master was reading Plato in his library, with a tall glass and a whisky decanter as his only aids. It must be wonderful, Appleby thought, not to require a Liddell and Scott. The Master pushed the decanter absent-mindedly forward. He had not the air of one politely waiting up for a wandering guest.

‘I hope I didn’t stay too long, or leave too early,’ Appleby said.

‘You could scarcely have achieved the former, I imagine, so far as the young men were concerned.’ The Master didn’t seem to have given much thought to the evolving of this courtesy; the
Parmenides
, a teasing affair, takes some emerging from. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘Was it the Rugger Club?’

‘It was the Patriarchs.’

‘To be sure. I recall that your son is the Great Amphibian of his year. I was a Patriarch myself once. Conceivably I am still their Senior Member. But, guests apart, there is an age limit on actual attendance.’ The Master closed his Oxford Classical Text a shade reluctantly. ‘Very pleasant lads,’ he said.

‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby saw no reason to dissent from this urbane judgement. At the same time he wondered whether there could ever be any conceivable group of young men of whom the Master would say briskly ‘Scruffy little tykes’ or ‘Idle and insolent parasites’. ‘A boy called Oswyn Lyward,’ Appleby went on, as he poured himself a token whisky, ‘told us an amusing story of a hoax played on his father.’

‘Ah, the Very Gracious Lady!’

‘You’ve heard of her?’

‘Lyward told me the story on, I think, the third occasion of his lunching with me. Just the right stage, wouldn’t you say, for an undergraduate to launch out on quite a stretch of narrative?’

‘No doubt.’ Appleby wondered irreverently whether the younger sons of marquises got invited to lunch in the Lodging more frequently than commoner commoners. ‘Do you know his father?’

‘Slightly.’ The Master tossed his book on a table and rose to attend hospitably to the fire. ‘The worthy Lord Cockayne is an old member of the college, and turns up at a Gaudy or the like from time to time. He’s getting on. Oswyn is the youngest child.’ The Master turned from the fireplace to glance at his guest in benign amusement. ‘My dear Appleby, I believe you are taking a professional interest in the lad’s story. A trick of the old rage, is it not?’

‘Perhaps so.’ Appleby put down his glass. ‘Such as it has been, you see, my career as a copper began in a college just across the High. The affair of poor President Umpleby.’

‘To be sure. Peace to his bones.’

‘There were rather a lot of bones, as a matter of fact. His study had virtually the character of an ossuary.’

‘Is that so? The details escape my memory. But he was my tutor, of course. We once made a trip up the Rhine together. It was the thing to do. But I seem to remember he was to be given an honorary degree at Bonn. Very much at random, often, the distribution of these things. He was no scholar, poor man, although as a tutor he was well enough. What were we talking about?’

‘The small painting carried off from Keynes Court. Or at least we were coming round to it. Being stolen property, it has its legitimate interest for me as an ex-policeman.’

‘Wasn’t it all rather a long time ago? The young man himself surely has no recollection of it?’

‘I don’t think he has. He was rather vague, but it was my impression that he was, as yet, either unborn or still in his well-sprung aristocratic pram.’

‘The latter, I’d guess. But we can readily arrive at the
terminus ad quem
.’ The Master moved over to a bookcase. ‘All we need is the appropriate volume of
Who Was Who
. And this will be it. We want the year of the VGL’s death. Deplorable that one doesn’t carry in one’s head notable dates of that sort.’ The Maser’s practised fingers turned the pages rapidly. ‘Here we are. The Royal Personage in question died in 1950. The episode certainly occurred before Oswyn had passed from his nanny to his governess.’

‘And rather before stealing pictures from great houses became really fashionable.’ Appleby got to his feet. ‘What we are confronting is a pioneer operation.’

‘You fascinate me. But can you be quite sure? I mean, that the picture was of any importance? As a crime, if you will forgive my saying so, the affair strikes me as totally fantastic. As a practical joke, it is another matter. Might not there have been a wager involved? May not the spurious VGL have undertaken to “bring off” – I imagine that would be the term – the triumphant carrying away of some object totally without value? Only persons with a certain position in the world – or at least of a certain sophistication – could hope to bring off this particular hoax successfully. I can imagine their giving great care precisely to
not
asking the innocent Marquis of Cockayne for anything that could possibly have monetary value.’

‘That, Master, if I may say so, is a most cogent observation. Still, one doesn’t quite know.’

‘And there’s another thing. Oswyn Lyward, as I remember him, gives a most amusing account of Keynes Court as a gigantic lumber-room. But it can’t really be so. Such places have librarians and other semi-learned persons who know all about everything, wouldn’t you say? What
could
this little picture be, that the people of that sort – and lawyers and so on, if it had any value – didn’t know of?’

‘Almost anything.’ Appleby, who was about to say good night, spoke with confidence. ‘We come here, Master, to something I know about. What can lurk unknown in a place like Keynes Court is quite incredible. What about, say, Raphael?’

‘Raphael!’

‘Early on, he was rather fond of doing panels about twelve inches square. Think of the little St George and the Dragon–’

‘Forgive me, my dear fellow – but what exactly
is
a Raphael? Philosophically or metaphysically regarded, I grant you, it is an artefact brought into being – on wood or canvas, and with the aid of brushes and pigments – by a certain Raphael Sanzio, who died, I believe, round about 1520. But, in practical and pragmatic terms, what is a Raphael? Surely it is a similar artefact, which happens to have a reputable provenance connecting it with this particular painter? The notion that there are persons called “experts”, who can look at an artefact with
no
provenance and say “Raphael” with authority–’

‘You are quite wrong, Master.’ Appleby was amused. ‘All that may be absent is
certainty
. And that goes, really, for many things with a most impeccable provenance: detailed description by Vasari, say, and a chain of known owners from that day to this.
Authority
is another matter. There is quite enough of it around to establish an
unknown
Raphael as an
authentic
Raphael. A favourable expertise by the right people, and the job is done. So postulate a thief who happens to know that Lord Cockayne owns a Raphael which nobody has thought of as a Raphael – or really so much as noticed – for hundreds of years. He at once knows something else as well: that if he can lay his hands on it, and invent some harmless story as to how the obscure thing came into his possession, he has possessed himself of something which he can part with for tens of thousands of pounds.’