A Family Affair (6 page)

Appleby tucked the Braunkopf papers back in their file, and glanced round the dining room. The average age of those lunching (he had calculated on a previous occasion) was about five years short of the age at which those male persons die whose age at death is recorded by their sorrowing relatives in
The Times
newspaper. In the year 1968, that was to say, here was a roomful of people who were quite strictly to be defined as Victorians. But – Appleby had turned his head a little further – there was one surprising exception. Quite a young man had strayed into the club. He could conceivably have done so, of course, only as a guest – and indeed there was a more than reasonably elderly man at the same table with him. They were father and son, or uncle and son, or conceivably grandfather and son. And about the young man there was something familiar.

It was no doubt only because his mind had been far away that Appleby was thus for a moment tardy in recognizing so recent an acquaintance as Lord Oswyn Lyward. For it was certainly he. Here, rather oddly, and dutifully sipping port in evident deference to his host, was the prime mover of Appleby in his present courses. Nor could there now be much doubt as to who was entertaining him. Father and son had been the correct conjecture. Here was Lord Cockayne himself.

The young man glanced up, and caught Appleby’s glance. On his part, recognition was immediate. He jumped to his feet, and strode across the room.

‘Oh, I say, sir!’ he said. ‘What luck running into you in this mausoleum. Won’t you come over and meet my father?’

Lord Cockayne stood up – an action which the difficulty of the operation rendered all the more gracious in this amiable nobleman. For Lord Cockayne was distinctly ancient; surprisingly so, indeed, for the father of an undergraduate son. Within his tweeds – which had once been of a peculiarly hairy variety, but were now worn smooth except in quite small patches – he creaked alarmingly as he moved. This was the more disconcerting in that, for the moment at least, Lord Cockayne appeared tolerably well oiled. He had lunched comfortably and was now taking no more than a second glass of port, but perhaps he was to be accounted among that class of elderly persons whose heads lighten as they age. It was with a certain vagueness of direction that he extended his hand.

‘How-d’y-do?’ Lord Cockayne said. ‘Glass of port?’

Appleby agreed to a glass of port. He couldn’t recall having seen Cockayne in the club before, and he wondered whether he often favoured it with his presence. This speculation received, as it happened, an answer now.

‘Like to give Oswyn lunch here once in a way,’ Lord Cockayne said. ‘Good atmosphere, eh? Self-made fellows with plenty of effort in their lives: bishops, professors, top sawbones, smart chaps at the Bar. The boy should take their measure, you know. See what he’s up against. As my father used to say to my brothers: younger sons must be prepared to take their place in the ranks.’

‘Has Oswyn chosen a particular rank yet?’

‘I’m working on it all the time.’ Lord Oswyn Lyward gave Appleby the ghost of a vulgar wink. ‘I have serious thoughts of the Foreign Service. Hard work, of course. But great scope.’

‘Newfangled name for the thing,’ Cockayne said. ‘But goes on much as before. Boy might do worse.’ He watched Appleby take a first sip from his glass. ‘Unassuming stuff, eh? But port is in a confused way, these days – very confused, indeed. Shocking situation at Keynes, I may say. ’55 is thought to be pretty good, though, and should start its drinking life soon. Before I end mine, I hope.’ Lord Cockayne acknowledged his own witticism with an appreciative bark. ‘And now about this picture.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby betrayed no astonishment at this abrupt intimation that he had been summoned into Cockayne’s presence for professional purposes. It must be Oswyn’s doing. The young man had clearly taken it into his head that there was amusement to be extracted from stirring up this ancient matter.

‘Sorry your son’s not lunching with you,’ Cockayne said – much as if it had occurred to him that his preparatory civilities had been inadequate. ‘Bobby, eh? Been down to us once or twice. Brains. Straight bat as well, I’d say. Good stable-companion for Oswyn here. Always delighted to see him. Regret we haven’t met his mother. My wife knew her family very well.’

Even as something thus announced politicly in a past tense, this was news to Appleby. He murmured suitably.

‘My father thinks,’ Oswyn prompted, ‘that we should have that picture back.’

‘Quite right,’ Cockayne nodded approval. ‘Joke’s gone on long enough. Happened some years back.’

‘That puts it mildly,’ Appleby said. ‘Wasn’t Lord Oswyn still in his pram?’ He paused on this question – which appeared, however, to produce only perplexity in Lord Oswyn’s father. There was more conducing to the old gentleman’s vagueness, one had to conclude, than a mere injudicious matutinal recourse to port. His wits were far from what they had once been. Appleby wasn’t sure that this rendered altogether agreeable his son Oswyn’s resolve to extract diversion from planting that ancient hoax or fraud once more actively on the carpet. On the other hand Appleby – although the Lywards, father and son, couldn’t be aware of it – was in London precisely for the purpose of poking into the series of mysteries which seemed to begin with their affair. So he couldn’t very well do other than go along with them now.

‘Fact is,’ Lord Cockayne was saying, ‘that somebody may have got away with something valuable. Been suggested to me before, you know. Was even suggested to me at the time. Perhaps something in it, eh? Value of things changing. Old Canadine – nice chap I met for the first time lately – telling me the other day of a thing he’d have called a garden ornament. His father – the Canadine there was the scandal about, you know, when some actress poisoned herself – had shoved a pipe through it and made a damned indecent sort of fountain of it. Pissing into a little pool, Appleby, not to put too fine a point on it. All right with statues of small boys, I suppose. Kind of thing the Italians call potties.’

‘Putti
,’ Oswyn said.

‘But this wasn’t a small boy. Well, one night the thing simply vanished from the middle of its pool. At first Canadine thought very little about it. No great opinion of his father’s taste, I suppose – and, anyway, he thought what the thieves had been after was merely the value of the lead running through the thing. Its urinary system, one might say.’ Lord Cockayne suddenly looked surprisingly hard at Appleby, as if his reception of this harmless joke was to be a test of him as adequately a
sahib
. ‘But then some guest or other, who’d seen the statue before and turned out to be a bit of a connoisseur, told Canadine it was probably quite devilishly old – Graeco-Roman, as the art wallahs say – and probably worth a tidy sum. You see what I mean?’

‘I think I do.’ Appleby had put down his glass, and was staring at Cockayne. ‘And would I be right in supposing that the present Lord Canadine was rather reluctant to make a fuss?’

‘Quite right. Or rather, he had been, at the time the statue was made off with. He’d just made a speech in the Lords, as it happened, about pornography and so on. You know the kind of thing.
Lady Chatterley’s Mother
.’

‘
Lover
,’ Oswyn said.

‘Exactly, my dear boy. So it would have been rather embarrassing to call in the coppers. But when he was tipped the wink that this Venus, or Diana, or whoever she was, might be valuable – ’

‘He regretted his delicacy of feeling.’ Appleby didn’t venture to glance at Oswyn, who was clearly deriving keen satisfaction from this colloquy between his elderly companions.

‘Just that, Appleby. And I’m dashed if I don’t feel rather the same about my picture. Of course, one wants to do the decent thing by these people–’

‘Of course,’ Appleby agreed gravely. It was obviously the Royal Family who were being thus described.

‘But there are limits, after all. If this dashed daub was by Duccio–’

‘Or Pollaiuolo,’ Oswyn said, ‘or Mariotto Albertinelli, or Pietro Berretini da Cortona.’

‘Any of those.’ It was not without suspicion that Lord Cockayne glanced at his youngest son. ‘It would be a different matter, eh? I certainly think we should have the thing back. And let the long-haired chaps have a look at it.’ Lord Cockayne finished his third glass of port and looked quickly at Appleby. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked briskly.

‘To recover your painting? Not, I hope, as long a time as it has been lost for. But you must consider that, if it is really valuable and was stolen because it was designed to make money out of it, then it probably passed through various hands long ago.’

‘Very true, of course.’ Cockayne nodded with a great appearance of sagacity. ‘But you must come down and have a look round on the spot. Fingerprints and so forth, eh? Get that boy of yours to bring you. He knows our ways.’

Appleby, although doubtless gratified at having thus attributed to his son a familiar acquaintance with aristocratic courses, produced only a cautious reply. Only the day before, he had been announcing to Judith a positive determination to penetrate to Keynes Court. But now, as his old professional instinct was rekindled in the face of this whole bizarre affair, he had an impulse to preserve for himself a complete freedom of action. Moreover the notion of the slightly dotty Lord Cockayne breathing down his neck while he pottered round Keynes Court looking for fingerprints carelessly disposed there a generation ago was ludicrous rather than appealing. Moreover, just at the moment, he had a strong sense that Mr Hildebert Braunkopf of the Da Vinci Gallery was his immediate quarry. It was true that the anti-pornographic Lord Canadine, so awkwardly circumstanced because of his father’s indelicate comportment with a Graeco-Roman antique, constituted another beckoning presence. His small misfortune certainly belonged with the series, and enforced the conclusion that somebody variously well versed in artistic matters had been masterminding the whole thing. But Appleby didn’t know Lord Canadine, and he did know Mr Braunkopf. There had been a time when he was almost an authority on the workings of Mr Braunkopf’s mind.

So Appleby got up with appropriate murmurs, and took his leave of the Lywards.

Something had happened to the Da Vinci Gallery since his last visit. On that occasion Mr Braunkopf had assembled a number of works by Pietro Torrigiano – a surprising number, considering the known paucity of anything portable by that celebrated contriver of monumental sculpture. But then Mr Braunkopf was an enterprising man. In the modest window of his establishment, Appleby recalled, there had been exhibited a large photograph of the head of Joseph of Arimathaea from Michelangelo’s celebrated Pietà in Florence. It is well known that this is a self-portrait of Michelangelo – which is why Joseph is represented with a broken nose. For Michelangelo had his nose broken as a boy and by another boy, when the two ought to have been engaged decorously in the study of Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci chapel. This second boy – three years younger, indeed, than Michelangelo – was none other than Torrigiano, whom it has in consequence been incumbent upon all good Florentines to hate ever since. These interesting biographical particulars, appearing in neat print beneath St Joseph and repeated in the catalogue which Mr Braunkopf had prepared for his patrons within, had somehow had the effect of authenticating the objects on view. So (for the guileless, at least) had the scrupulosity with which a few bore descriptions like ‘Possibly an
atelier
piece’ and ‘Thought by Prof. Salignac to be by a pupil during the Seville period’ and ‘Almost certainly a copy by Gerard Christmas (ob. 1634)’. A congruous background, moreover, had been provided for the battered memorials of Torrigiano’s industry. The eroded stones and the shards of painted terracotta had been niched and nested protectively in sombre velvets, and the few bronzes were lit by very subdued spotlights. Mr Braunkopf had been subdued too; he had put aside the more exuberant of his
persona
(the Duveen one) in favour of the muted and hieratic stance which his intimates understood to be modelled upon the late Mr Berenson.

But today all this had vanished. The not very extensive facade of the Da Vinci had been given a coat of brilliant acrylic paint; and in the interior, too, it might be said that everything had changed utterly, and a terrible beauty been born. The window, indeed, prepared one. Gone were the compassionate, if broken-nosed, features of St Joseph, and in their place hung what appeared to be an enormous blow-up from a strip cartoon. The face of a lady done in dots or stipples each the size of a sixpence was pensively posed upon an elongated and obtrusively manicured hand; and lest one should miss the implication of this brooding guise there was a wavy line ascending from the crown of her head to a bubble in which was inscribed the single word
THINKS
. Appleby (being a trained detective) had no difficulty in interpreting this evidence. Mr Braunkopf and the Da Vinci (for a few weeks, at least) had gone Pop.

And Mr Braunkopf himself was on view. This, indeed, was the only way in which he could with propriety be described, so triumphantly had he achieved the appearance of being – so to speak – one of his own exhibits. Gone was the Duveen outfit which had been so finely congruous with Pietro Torrigiano, and which had been closely modelled upon the more formal morning attire of King George the Fifth. Instead of Savile Row Mr Braunkopf had betaken himself (it was to be supposed) to the neighbourhood of Carnaby Street. Except for his years (and, even more, for his figure, which was yet more rotund than of old), Mr Braunkopf was indistinguishable from one of those almost young gentlemen who alternate minstrelsy for the million with the final summits and acclivities of mystical experience. His nether limbs were encased in brilliant orange jeans so constricting as to suggest that they had been assembled on his person by a particularly muscular tailor required in some surgical interest to provide him with a new and permanent outer integument. Above this, Mr Braunkopf ballooned out in an ample velvet garment, predominantly magenta in colour, but with anything that might have been overpowering in this tastefully relieved with silver braid and unexpected excrescences in fur and feathers. On a slender chain round Mr Braunkopf’s far from slender neck hung a small silver bell.