Carson's Conspiracy (2 page)

 

‘I'm sure you must be fearfully busy,' Cynthia was saying to the painter on an admiring note. ‘Haven't you been doing a portrait of the Lord Mayor?'

‘It depends on what you mean.' Lely was amused. ‘Not the Lord Mayor of
London
, you know. Quite obscure mayors have got themselves lorded recently.'

‘So they have,' Cynthia said. ‘Like bishops,' she added brightly.

This piece of ignorance produced a moment's silence, briskly broken by Mrs Lely. Lely's wife, like Appleby's, seemed to be a socially competent woman.

‘Humphry–' Mrs Lely said, ‘–do tell. It was rather amusing.'

‘Well, yes – I suppose it was. You see, he was a quite preternaturally red-faced chap…'

‘Not like his London colleague, then,' Carson interrupted quickly. ‘Daubeney is unusually pale. I was noticing it as I spoke to him the other day.'

‘Is that so?' For an instant Lely's glance at his host was of a penetrating order. ‘Well, the fellow had to be painted in a scarlet and fur affair like an overgrown winter dressing gown. And there were gongs, trinkets and gewgaws draped all over him. Incidentally, the gongs, etcetera, were brought along to my studio several days running by a functionary in a top hat. He stood by while I did justice to them.'

‘How very boring!' Cynthia said. ‘But if the sitter himself was
interesting
, I suppose the gewgaws wouldn't matter. If he had
strong
features, marked by
experience
…

This inane and silly talk on his wife's part went on for longer than Carson cared for. Then suddenly – for he was a clever man, with whom pennies dropped quickly – he saw what was cooking, and just why this Lely couple had been asked to lunch. Was he not himself exceptionally interesting? When he studied his own features as he shaved every morning was it not strength and experience that he saw written all over them? And could he prudently reveal, either to Cynthia or anybody else, that the four-figure bill fired at him for a portrait wouldn't be exactly a trifle? So if the woman had taken it into her head to have him painted, there wasn't much that he could do about it. He might, of course – bang off at this very moment – suggest that Lely have a go at
her
. But that wouldn't help. There would simply be two portraits as a result, one on each side of a fireplace, like a couple of china dogs.

Carl Carson saw, he marked with interest, that on this trivial-seeming matter he was of a divided mind. The idea of a portrait – particularly by an up-and-coming man, such as he gathered this Humphry Lely to be – tickled his vanity in a mild way. But somehow, and at the same time, he didn't want to be painted. He was proud of being a somebody, but he had an obscure sense that there was a sort of safety in being a nobody; in not, that was to say, scattering unnecessary memorials of himself here and there. It was a rum feeling, this. But it hitched up with a good deal that lay at present rather heavily on his mind.

And now Cynthia had gone back to the charms of the Caribbean again. He'd read in a book, and tried to pass on to her, that one didn't, if a good conversationalist, recur to a topic that had been on the carpet earlier in the sitting. But at least she hadn't gone back to Robin. There was more than irritation, there was even a lurking hazard, in Robin – chiefly because Cynthia was capable of sudden appeals to her husband to confirm one thing, or amplify another in the recent history of her tedious illusion. Responding to these appeals with an air of casual ease was a tricky matter – at least in any sort of vigilant company. There was always the possibility of appearing a shade uneasy or evasive. And nothing was worse for business – his sort of business – than that. One of the things he had to be (or so he believed) was a monument of all-round integrity. The Caribbean was at least okay here. Mustique was even better, since he did, in fact, possess a small property on the island. It was true that in this area of his wife's chatter shafts of obvious minor lunacy were apt to appear, whereas she was always coherent and persuasive about Robin. But that didn't matter. The chap's wife was a bit loco – so people would fleetingly conclude – and why not? Good luck to her.

‘I suppose,' the man called Appleby – Sir John Appleby – said, ‘that a good many people retire to those agreeable places nowadays. Plenty of sunshine, and no servant problems. Would you think of it yourself, Carson?'

Carson liked thus being ‘Carson' rather than ‘Mr Carson' quite early in an acquaintanceship of this sort. It was – as it wasn't among Yanks – the upper-class thing. A reply, nevertheless, required a fraction of a second's thought.

‘My dear Appleby,' he said humorously, ‘I'm blessed if I could afford it.'

‘Oh, Carl darling, what nonsense!'

This loyal interjection on Mrs Carson's part was of most harmless order – whereas she might have said, ‘Last night I dreamt that the bailiffs had come', or even (more gnomically), ‘Twice clogs, once boots'. And her husband immediately went into what was, in fact, a routine.

‘Of course, simple tastes – as you can see ours are – will take one a long way. I remind some of my friends of that when they start moaning about unfilled order books and horrible taxes. Take eighty thousand a year. You couldn't own racehorses on it. But you could send a couple of kids to Eton and such places, and have a bit over to stock your cellar. If the money came to you, that is, in the right way.'

‘There, no doubt,' Appleby said, ‘is the rub.'

Carson accepted this reflection with a confidential nod. It was possible, he thought, that this fellow Appleby knew his onions. Perhaps he had been high up in the Inland Revenue. If so, it was even conceivable that Carson himself had pulled off a smart one against the chap on some occasion now forever buried in the files. It was an amusing thought, and Carson became expansive.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘there are plenty of people who go off to those places just as they continue to do to Biarritz and Cap d'Antibes: the vulgar rich, as we used to say, with stacks of money to burn. But if you know your way about, you can manage tiptop style on not all that. Call it that eighty thousand – but merely in dollars, not pounds. And there I'm thinking more or less of a family. On your own, fifty thousand – or even forty-five – would run to pretty well anything you had a fancy for.'

‘I must remember that,' Cynthia Carson said, ‘when I become a widow.'

This remark, although doubtless gamesome and innocent, occasioned a moment of perceptible constraint. But if Carson himself was vexed, it was because of those eighties and fifties and forty-fives. He was recalling that among the sort of people who were his guests at the moment there existed a senseless disinclination to talk in general society about specific sums of money. Moreover the effect of his little speech hadn't been quite of the modesty he'd intended. So he decided, in effect, to declare the meeting closed.

‘Darling,' he said to his wife (for people
did
call their wives that), ‘perhaps we should have our coffee on the terrace? And then, since it's such a marvellous afternoon, our guests might care to stroll through the grounds.'

‘Yes, indeed.' Lady Appleby said this with a rapid decisiveness which entirely masked her finding her host's phraseology mildly funny.

‘Yes, indeed,' Sir John Appleby echoed loyally. He may have been judging that nothing but boredom was going to result from association with these newish and rather unattractive neighbours. But if this was his thought, Appleby was wrong.

 

‘Oh, very well,' Carl Carson said somewhat pettishly to his wife that evening. ‘Fix it up as you please. But that little dauber must come here. I won't go traipsing off to a studio.'

‘But of course Mr Lely will be only too pleased, I'm sure, dear. Such a chance for him! After that obscure provincial mayor, you know.'

‘I suppose that's so.' Although Carson knew perfectly well that it
wasn't
so, this tactful speech had its effect. ‘By the way, those Applebys from Dream. What about them? Before they put him out to grass, was the chap some tin-pot mandarin in Whitehall?'

‘Whitehall? I don't think so. I don't
think
Scotland Yard is in Whitehall.'

‘Scotland Yard?'

‘Sir John ran it, dear. He was called the Commissionaire, or something like that.'

‘Was he, indeed?' Not for the first time, Carl Carson reflected that the woman wasn't merely mad. She was pretty well an idiot too.

 

 

Carl Carson, who was so clearly not all that keen on his wife, had no particular fondness for his country either. At least until we reflect, we may judge this ungrateful in him. England had done him pretty well. As with John Bunyan's Mr By-Ends, his great-grandfather was but a waterman, and although his grandfather had risen to the ownership of a wherry, his father, while continuing to follow aquatic pursuits, had achieved his share in the family betterment through some years of loyal service to persons seeing to it that a reasonable number of crates of whisky and gin had fallen off the back of lorries serving London's docks. The devotion thus exhibited by Carl Carson's father had enabled him to put a little by. It hadn't, however, been nearly enough to preserve him from eventually being put by himself, and he had in fact been for some six months in gaol when his son Carl was born.

Although there are plenty of self-made men around, few have in fact made themselves from an initial station so strikingly disadvantageous as this of Carl Carson's. How had he managed it? Anybody asking himself this question (but perhaps nobody ever did) would have reflected that the man was seemingly devoid of any sort of intellectual distinction; was equally lacking in personal charm; and – unlike his dream-son – hadn't even the advantage of having passed through a slap-up Business School. What he did possess was nerve, and a certain reach and boldness of imagination. His path was littered with fallen rivals of whom it might be said that he had simply taken the breath away. And to these endowments there was undoubtedly something in the English social structure that gave abundant scope. Yet of that social structure Carl Carson was far from enamoured. This was because England, as everyone knows, is a terribly class-bound place.

Carson would have told himself that he simply hadn't bothered with the lingoes as he moved up the income brackets. He had learnt to play golf, and could have assessed very accurately the financial standing of the loud-voiced, confident men with the showy cars whom he met in the clubhouses. But he hadn't much listened to them, since they were insignificant people whom he was overtaking and leaving in his glittering wake. The habit of inattention had stuck, so that he was still liable to call a magazine a book, and had quite recently had a similar spot of linguistic trouble over Garford House, the country retreat in which we have been present at his entertaining the Lelys and Applebys. Garford House had some quite ancient bits and pieces, so he had managed to signalise his having acquired it by means of a small illustrated article in a society journal. Having gathered, however, that only rather low-class estate agents apply the word ‘home' to houses they are seeking to sell to anyone that comes along, he had taken exception to the appearance, in a caption, of the phrase ‘the country home of Mr and Mrs Carl Carson'. Unfortunately, instead of insisting on ‘residence', which would have passed muster on a slightly formal note, he had insisted on ‘seat'. ‘The Berkshire seat,' he had made the thing read, ‘of Carl Carson Esquire'. This, being distinctly on the pretentious side, occasioned mild amusement among his associates. In low company (which he still at times frequented in a quiet way) he even had to listen to coarse jokes about stately piles. Small misadventures of this kind could irritate him for days. He even told himself occasionally that he would be quite glad to pack up and quit his stuffy native land for good.

And the business of the portrait was proving curiously unsettling. It was going ahead at what he supposed was a brisk pace, since Humphry Lely came over to Garford almost every day to get on with it. (Probably anxious to get his money, Carson thought.) To see a large white canvas brought into your house, virgin except for certain faint pencillings suggestive of a gigantic piece of graph paper; to submit to a good deal of photography (meaning, surely, that the fellow is going to cheat); and then to watch, day by day, the coming into being of something that is another you, and yet isn't: this can be a disconcerting experience to run into. Carson had been told that artists are often cagey about a work in progress, and don't care for its being stared at. But Lely seemed quite indifferent about this. There the thing was, in a big empty room at the top of the house, and quite often when the painter had gone home Carson went back upstairs and peered at it. He didn't get quite the same effect as when studying (and admiring) himself in the shaving mirror. He even felt he was looking at something it might be wholesome to get away from. He wondered about what were one's rights if a commission of this sort wasn't to one's satisfaction. Could one tell the chap to clear out with it, and decline to pay him tuppence? Probably not. And, anyway, that sort of high-handedness was no longer greatly admired.

Then one evening his wife joined him in studying the portrait, now nearing completion. She looked at it in silence for some time, and when at length she turned to him saw with horror that there were tears in her eyes. How Robin, the crazed woman said, took after his father! The likeness was unmistakable, was it not?

This was perhaps the first occasion upon which Carson was really frightened by Cynthia. A woman subject to that degree of delusion simply wasn't safe. She oughtn't to be trusted with a carving-knife, a knitting-needle, or even a hair-pin. He wondered whether, if he took professional advice and went about it in the right way, he could get her put in a discreetly run private asylum.