Silence Observed (6 page)

“It’s frightfully good of you,” Appleby said, “to find time to come to dinner with us. You must be tremendously busy and tremendously in demand.”

Miss Wildsmith – for she seemed to be that – was amused. And it was in a fashion, somehow, that told Appleby at once that she was a clever woman. Moreover as her amusement took the form of a momentary and entirely deliberate transformation of her neutral expression into one of extraordinary mobility and charm, he realised that at least he had got hold of her profession. And at once Judith, who had tumbled to his blankness before Miss Wildsmith’s name, confirmed this.

“Mary’s last enchanting part,” she said, “was as the Hungarian refugee in
Thunder Without Rain
.”

Appleby registered appropriate enlightenment.

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Everybody talked of it. I was extremely sorry not to see it.”

“But your wife says you
did
see it.” Mary Wildsmith again looked amused. But this time she looked, so to speak, like a different person being amused. She was a character actress, one must suppose, who enjoyed moving freely around.

Appleby nodded easily. If Judith said he had seen
Thunder Without Rain
then, no doubt, he
had
seen it. But it appeared to him absurd to expect any rational being to remember one West End play from another.

“Only the first act,” he said firmly. “Most unfortunately, I was called out of the theatre. So the last time I really had the pleasure of seeing you” – a genuine flash of memory about Mary Wildsmith had seemed to come to him amid all this nonsense – “was as the Countess of Rousillon in
All’s Well
. It must have been at the Old Vic.”

“We’re a theatrical family,” Miss Wildsmith said. “And that was my aunt.” She held out her empty glass. “But your sherry, Sir John, makes up for a great deal.”

It was at this moment – and rather to Appleby’s relief – that the Bendixsons arrived. He did at least know Carl Bendixson and his wife Gretta, and they were entirely estimable people. Bendixson was an auctioneer – but an auctioneer of the exalted sort who banged his hammer over the heads of Maillol bronzes and Renoir nudes. His wife was a painter of dazzling technique and – as far as Appleby knew – very little else. The Bendixsons lived in a much grander way than the Applebys did. Hammer-banging, after all, had been booming for years. But Judith was ahead of Gretta Bendixson as an artist favoured by the well-informed. And that no doubt evened things up. As Appleby handed the Bendixsons the sherry of which Mary Wildsmith approved, he was quite clear in his mind that
they
wouldn’t approve of it. Or not, that was to say, as an offering that could appropriately be commented on. But they were a reasonable couple, all the same.

And, fortunately, the Bendixsons proved to be thoroughly well clued up on this Mary Wildsmith. It seemed that Miss Wildsmith did a good deal of resting nowadays, but that she had quite a name for precisely what Appleby had conjectured: versatility in small character parts. At the same time, Appleby got the impression that there had been some sort of hitch in the lady’s career. Perhaps, he thought, Miss Wildsmith had been a little too intelligent to fit quite comfortably into all those imbecile plays. Yes – that might very well be it.

He became aware of Judith moving a candlestick on the chimney piece. She was doing this in order to look at the clock without appearing to do so. There could be no doubt that somebody had failed to turn up. The missing guest must be a male. And probably he was a male hitherto unknown to his host. That would be Judith’s way of balancing up her party.

And the clock, it seemed, had ticked its way past some deadline. Appleby saw his wife press a bell. In fact he saw her rapidly press it twice. So at least they would now get something to eat. The Appleby domestic staff was not extensive. Apart from a person so ephemeral that it was hard not to refer to her simply as the foreign girl, it consisted of two persons almost so answeringly ephemeral that Appleby was accustomed to think of them as the decayed couple. But it was undeniable that Judith always had these impermanent appearances on their toes. Those two rings had assured that the round dinner table would presently proclaim its expectation not of six diners but of five. The missing guest had been obliterated. No reference would be made to him. If he did now turn up, he would be received with cordiality and mild surprise. Judith’s art, Appleby reflected, remained notably
avant-garde
. But her social assumptions approximated more and more closely to those of her great-grandparents. Appleby, who didn’t regard himself as possessing great-grandparents, found this very amusing. But he certainly wouldn’t venture, later in this evening’s proceedings, to enquire baldly as to who hadn’t turned up. That would have to keep until bedtime.

“But what a heavenly thing!” Gretta Bendixson cried with amiable enthusiasm as she sat down. She was pointing at a somewhat battered object in the centre of the table. “It must be frightfully old.”

“Fourteen thirty-four,” Judith said briskly. “It came from a manor house in Kent, and I traced it in
Earliest English Wills
. ‘A feir salt saler of peautre with a feyre knoppe’. I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. Do you like the feyre knoppe?”

“Perfectly charming!” Carl Bendixson said, backing up his wife. “I really covet it. We have nothing like it ourselves. Except, perhaps, our ‘sex silver spones with knopis of oure Ladie’.”

“A small treasure,” Gretta Bendixson said, “which we picked up in the junk shop in the tiny place, Bryne Bay, where we keep our yacht. Would anyone have believed it?”

“And oddly enough,” Carl Bendixson pursued, “they’re authenticated by way of the
Testamenta
Eboracensia
. That seems unbelievable too. And one has to look out, where metals are concerned. The chemists and physicists can’t really do much for you.”

“You mean about faking?” Mary Wildsmith asked.

“Just that. Where organic substances are concerned, the fakers of really old objects have had it, you know. There are foolproof tests which have simply given them notice to quit.”

“How intensely interesting,” Mary Wildsmith said.

“For instance,” Bendixson went on, “it’s no good happily manufacturing a
cinquecento
bridal chest out of timber that was still alive and flourishing a couple of hundred years later. It’s immensely harder to get away with such things now than it was even twenty years ago. Appleby, wouldn’t you agree?”

“In a general way – yes.” It was with an effort that Appleby brought his mind back to this cultivated chatter. It had been drifting to a teen-age lad, nurtured and nudged by a squalid environment into mistaken notions of the function of footwear. “But ingenuity is still at work. Mummy, for instance.”

“Mummy?” Mary Wildsmith repeated. She seemed momentarily at a loss – as if supposing, perhaps, that Appleby was invoking his wife in her maternal relationship.

“Human flesh, suitably embalmed and of suitable antiquity, was for long prized by painters as a source of some of the finest pigments.”

“Like Sir Thomas Browne,” Mary Wildsmith said. “‘To burn the bones of the Kings of Edom for lime were no irrational ferity’.”

“Just that.” It seemed to Appleby rather notable that a woman out of inane drawing-room comedies could produce chit-chat like this. “And the next time you look at a Titian, remember that those gorgeous expanses of flesh may have real flesh in them.”

“Sir John – how utterly revolting!” Gretta Bendixson consumed a spoonful of soup with undiminished satisfaction. “And you don’t mean to say that when
I
paint a nude–”

Appleby laughed.

“I imagine not – nor when Renoir did, either. But I’m sure you know far more about the chemistry of your job than I do.”

“Oh, nothing at all!” Gretta Bendixson was at once airy and emphatic. “But if I were using mummy I think I’d know – just by a feeling creeping up the brush.”

“People do still use it, it seems. Not long ago, I had some concern with a fellow who wanted a licence to import an Egyptian mummy. Technically, a mummy is a corpse and nothing else – which is why a licence was necessary. He said the thing was to be put in some private museum. But I have a notion that the appropriate parts of it were really going to be manufactured into pigment. Probably for one of those borderlines between restoring and faking that exist in the fine-art trade.”

Bendixson nodded.

“They certainly do exist. I come across them, as you may imagine. But, in general, what I was saying a minute ago holds good. Faking or forging things supposed to have been created centuries back is for the most part now much too difficult to pay. Of course, there’s a large low-class trade of the sort – larger than it ever was. There are plenty of people who want ancient-looking things, and who haven’t much notion that there can be any effective check on them. They pay absurdly high prices at times, and the industry concerned is no doubt an extremely prosperous one. But it’s worlds away from the territory of the real collectors.”

“The people,” Judith said, “you knock things down to once a week.”

“Precisely. As the vulgar say, they know their onions.”

“Or think they do.” Appleby was remembering Charles Gribble. “But, if the successful faking of really old things has become so difficult of recent years, there is likely to be increased activity in the faking of comparatively recent ones? I’ve had to do with some cases of that.”

“Yes, indeed.”

Gretta Bendixson looked at her husband.

“Do you mean,” she said, “French painters at the turn of the century, and that sort of thing?”

“Yes, darling. Just that. It’s comparatively easy to bring them into being – after a fashion.”

“But what fun!” Gretta Bendixson looked round the table as if to gather attention to herself. “I’d love to produce a Cézanne or two.” She put down her spoon, and for a moment her right hand made comical but sensitive movements before an imaginary canvas. “And I believe I could. Oh, I believe I could!”

“I’d put nothing beyond you,” her husband said humorously. “Would you, Mary?”

“I’d believe anything of Gretta. She’d even make no bones about getting going on a mummy.” Mary Wildsmith spoke with cheerful conviction, and Appleby realized that these people were better known to each other than they were to their hosts. “And,” Miss Wildsmith went on, “if Gretta does a Cézanne I’ll make an offer for it at once. It would have what they call curious interest. It might even be valuable. Sir John, don’t you agree?”

Recalling the value of Geoffrey Manallace’s concoctions in the estimation of Charles Gribble and his American rivals, Appleby couldn’t but agree.

“But it has always seemed to me,” he said, “that parody is more interesting than forgery. It’s curious that painters haven’t exploited it more, if only as a critical instrument.”

“Picasso has,” Mary Wildsmith said. “But then Picasso has exploited everything – including Picasso.”

There was appropriate laughter.

Sixty years in a little general shop, Appleby thought, and kicked to death at the end of them.

It was at the conclusion of the evening that the talk came back to forgery. And it was Mary Wildsmith who brought it up again.

“I gathered,” she said, “that it’s Impressionists, and people of that sort, who are counterfeited now. The reputed artist must be dead, I suppose, since otherwise he might come along and repudiate the fake. But he mustn’t be too dead, because of those technical difficulties in fudging up anything that is going to claim substantial antiquity. But how does one market a bogus Cézanne? I mean, how does one account for it? One can hardly claim to have discovered it in one’s grandmother’s attics or cellars.”

Carl Bendixson nodded.

“That’s the crux of the matter,” he said. “And there are some uncommonly ingenious ways of providing a fake with a respectable provenance. I’ve met them in the way of business, and I know.”

“But how intensely interesting!” It would have been hard to tell, Appleby thought, whether Miss Wildsmith meant what she said by this formula, or was merely continuing to manufacture what might be called social noises. “
Do
tell us!” she went on.

But Bendixson shook his head. It was clear that he was going to strike his not unfamiliar humorous note.

“No, no,” he said. “Tricks of the trade. It might be putting ideas in your head, Mary. And in Gretta’s. Gretta as good as said she would make a marvellous forger. So I’m not going to put the ways and means in her hands. Lady Appleby, does your husband tell you tricks of the trade?”

“No. He keeps everything under his own hat. All his most exciting cases. Nobody else knows a thing until they’re all over.”

“How very vexing. And now Gretta’s making faces at me. It must mean that we have to go home.”

“A scattered sort of day,” Appleby said lazily, as he came back from the front door. “A bit of this, and a bit of that, and nothing much hitching on to anything else. By the way, who was it that failed to turn up?”

“Somebody like Mary Wildsmith,” Judith said. “I mean, somebody whom I think you haven’t met. A young man of Gabriel Gulliver’s. His name’s Jimmy Heffer.”

“How very odd!” Appleby stared at his wife. “And he sent no word?”

“None whatever. Presumably he just forgot, and there will be an abject letter of apology in a day or two. The young are extremely casual nowadays.”

“Yes,” Appleby said. “Yes. But you see, as it happens–”

A telephone bell rang in a corner of the room, and Appleby went over to the instrument and picked it up.

“John Appleby,” he said, and listened. “No, my dear Gribble – not at all,” he said. “Go ahead.” There was a pause, and Judith Appleby could hear a very excited voice at the other end of the line. “
Murdered
?” Appleby suddenly said. “
What
man?… Your little dealer…the Manallace man… Bloomsbury?… No, I’ve heard nothing – or rather I did hear that an antiquarian bookseller–” He broke off, and listened again. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Good night.” And he put down the telephone.