‘D’you mean it might be worth a bit of the old folding?’
‘It might. Yes, just possibly it might. But I am not in a position to tell you. Anyway, it is the only thing even worth looking at in the house. I despaired of there being anything at all.’
‘So what do we do with it? Eh? What do we do with it now?’
‘Mr Ewart of Sotheby’s would be able to tell us more. I take it you would sell it, if it were worth putting up in the saleroom?’
‘Ra-ther.’ He looked around like a dog casting for a scent. ‘ There’s no liquor in this house. Wilfred, that’s the trouble. I’m thirsty as hell. My tongue’s too big for my mouth and I want to celebrate.’
‘It’s far too early to celebrate!’ I said testily. ‘And far too early to drink again. What is the time? Four o’clock. What do you want to do with the picture now? You can lock it up, and throw away those two so-called watercolours of the Seine. If –’
‘Sotheby’s open now?’
‘Oh yes, of course. But –’
‘How about us getting a taxi and going down straight away? No time like the present. Your man likely to be there?’
‘Quite probably. It is as you wish.’ To tell the truth I was not at all loth to accept his suggestion, for I was interested myself and would be glad to learn whether my interest was in any way justified.
So we wrapped up the picture in some old sheets of brown paper marked Colindale Laundry and went out and signally failed to find a taxi. So eventually we took the tube to Tottenham Court Road and caught a taxi there, Taylor holding the small parcel as nervously as if it were the crown jewels. I felt apprehensive lest he should be in for a terrible disappointment.
At Sotheby’s Mr Ewart was in, and he greeted me with the courtesy of a well-known client and took us up to his room. He unwrapped the parcel and stood the painting on an easel where the daylight fell strongly on it. Sam Taylor bit his nails and I, I believe, pulled at my lip, attempting to look more judicial than I felt.
‘Hm,’ said Mr Ewart, and then to Sam: ‘D’you mind if I take it out of its frame?’
Sam was by now accustomed to this question, but Mr Ewart was far more ruthless than I had been; in a few moments the board was in his hands.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ Yes, I thought it was Italian. Look, sir, it’s signed Longhi in the corner. You couldn’t see it for the frame. One can’t be absolutely certain without making the necessary tests. But it looks quite genuine to me.’
‘Well,’ I said, swelling a little. ‘That’s very satisfactory. I did feel myself that it was a genuine work. Now –’
‘Longhi?’ said Sam. ‘Who the hell’s Longhi?’
Mr Ewart looked very pained. ‘An Italian, Mr Taylor. Eighteenth century. A contemporary of Tiepolo. One of the best-known of the Rococo painters. Particularly of scenes such as this. A very good example. Do you wish us to sell it for you?’
‘Sure,’ said Sam. ‘If it’s worth – any idea what it’s worth?’
Well … assuming that it’s genuine – and that we shall know with reasonable certainty by tomorrow – it should fetch upwards of £10,000. Discreetly advertised beforehand, that is. It’s very small, of course: but there are very few of these Italian masters on the market.’
THREE
‘Discreetly advertised’, the painting was put up for auction the following month. I naturally went to the auction with Sam Taylor. The bidding was brief and unemotional and stopped suddenly at £26,000. I thought for a moment that Sam was going to be overcome with excitement and that I should have to help him from the room, but he just made it to the nearest public house.
Human nature is very unreliable and rather distasteful to contemplate. Sam never really thanked me for my help. He gave a large dinner at the Hanover Club and included me among his cronies, a dinner at which everyone except myself became the worse for drink. My stock in the club as a connoisseur naturally rose, and perhaps he thought that was a fair reward. At Christmas that year he sent me an art book which cost him £3.75. I wrote a thank-you note on the club paper and left it at the desk, thereby saving a stamp.
Human nature is unreliable, yet in some ways it runs true to form. Sam was dead within a year. He had never had unlimited money before, so restraint had always come from an empty pocket. Deprived of that restraint, he drank himself to death.
The money, or what was left of it, passed to his nephew, an indigent bearded young man who taught Biology at a Secondary Modern School.
The Basket Chair
Whiteleaf had his first coronary when he was staying with his niece Agnes and her husband Roy Paynter. He came through it, as of course he fully expected he would. When a healthy man is struck down with a near fatal blow it is as if he has walked into a brick wall in the dark; he is brought up starkly against the realization of his own mortality, and there is nothing to cushion the psychological shock. But Julian Whiteleaf had lived so closely with his own mortality for so long that a heart attack was just another obstacle to be carefully surmounted and added to his list of battle scars. No doubt this attitude of mind had helped him to stay alive when probability was not on his side.
But this was a nasty business, so painful and so disabling. It was hospital for three weeks and then it would be another four at least in Agnes’s house before he was well enough to go home. The doctor had been a little reluctant to let him out of hospital, but Whiteleaf badly wanted to leave and Agnes had had some training as a nurse and said she could manage, as Roy was out all day. She was a highly efficient woman.
Although she was his only surviving relative, Whiteleaf had never really cared for Agnes. She was a childless, stocky, formidable woman of forty, who made ends meet on Roy’s inadequate salary and found time and money for endless good works. Yet whether it was the Red Cross or the Women’s Institute or the Homebound Club, every good deed was performed with the same grim patient efficiency, so that joy was noticeably lacking from the occasion. Far better, Whiteleaf thought – and had sometimes said – if she took a paid job of her own to supplement the family income; but this advice was not appreciated.
So in some ways he would have been happy enough to stay another week or so in hospital; but as he had opted out of the Health Service some time ago it saved a great deal of money to leave, and anyway he rather thought Agnes liked making the effort to prove her devotion.
Another four weeks with Agnes, mainly confined to his bed, was a daunting prospect. But the time would pass. Whiteleaf was a great reader, and Agnes brought a portable radio up to his bedroom. He would have time to ruminate, time to rest. At sixty-five one became philosophical.
He had had an interesting life, and it bore looking back on. Born above a small bookshop in Bloomsbury, he had been vaguely literary from an early age, but his talents had lain in the unprofitable fields for which Bloomsbury in the ’thirties offered so much scope. Apart from helping in his father’s bookshop, he had worked on two Fabian magazines, then had been assistant editor on a Theosophist newspaper which shortly folded up; he had reviewed and done free-lance work, had dabbled in Spiritualism, and then become secretary to the Society for Psychoneural Research. Here he met Mrs Melanie Buxton who financed the society, and had become her lover.
At this stage the war had come and he had found himself a reluctant soldier entering a world which had almost no physical or psychological resemblance to the ingrown, rather intense, fringe-intellectual world he had inhabited before. For a while the fresh air and the hard life did him good. He strengthened and broadened and mellowed under it. But in 1943 he was invalided out, having been twice seriously wounded in the desert and having contracted asthma and a kidney complaint from which he would suffer for the rest of his life.
To his surprise he found himself a rich man. Mrs Melanie Buxton, who was twenty years older than he was, had just died, and she left the bulk of her personal fortune – about £200,000 – to Julian Whiteleaf, ‘to help him continue in the paths of research to which we are both devoted.’
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Whiteleaf sold the bookshop, which he had also just inherited, and at forty years of age settled down to the existence of a quiet, ailing, dilettante. He never went back to live in Bloomsbury but bought himself a pleasant service flat in Hurlingham and never moved again. There was no one to oversee his interpretation of Mrs Buxton’s will, but to fulfil the spirit of the bequest he kept the society in being with a tiny office and a secretary and continued to review books and write articles on paranormal phenomena. So, gradually, he had become something of an authority. Once or twice he helped to conduct inquiries into so-called haunted houses. He continued to dabble in Theosophy. He was known as a fair-minded commentator on the spiritualist scene. He was neither a committed believer nor a scoffing sceptic. Editors of national newspapers, confronted with an unusual book which did not quite fit into any of the recognized slots, would say: ‘Oh, send it to Whiteleaf; see what he makes of it.’
He never married. His experiences with Mrs Buxton had satisfied him, and his ill-health after the war was a sufficient disincentive to extreme physical effort.
He joined a good London club and had many friendly acquaintances there or among those with interests like his own; but he had no real friends. He did not feel the lack of them. He looked at life through books. He was a precise, quiet man, sandy and rather small, who spoke without moving his lips. He lived very much within his income and never gave money away, except £20 to his niece each Christmas.
His visits to her were annual and largely a duty. She was the daughter of his sister who had died in the ’fifties, and blood, he supposed, etc.… but it was really rather an effort. He would, he knew, have made an excuse to stop the visits before this, had it not been for her husband Roy, who had a responsible but dead-end and underpaid job on the railways, and who, apart from being a nice inoffensive chap for whom Whiteleaf felt some sympathy at having married Agnes, also appealed to the other interest in Whiteleaf’s life, which was the steam-engine.
This was the topic of conversation four nights out of the seven that Whiteleaf usually came to spend with them, especially when Agnes was out on some charitable mission; and sometimes at the week-end the two men would go to the railway museum, which was only a few miles away, and study the old locomotives and compare notes. It was a bond. And when he was dangerously ill two years ago after a gall-bladder operation, Roy had come up to London each week-end to see him and had brought up old catalogues and lists of engines from the days of steam, which he had been able to borrow from the local files.
Now that Whiteleaf was convalescing in their house and for a lengthy period, he felt he should pay them something for his keep, and he offered them £5 a week which Agnes accepted – grudgingly, he thought. But it would be a considerable help to them, he well knew, and not to be sniffed at, his weekly cheque. Agnes spent no more time on him than she would have done on her unpaid good works. The doctor called daily and Agnes took his blood pressure night and morning when she gave him his pills. And a starvation diet. His £5 was all profit.
Convalescence is a strange experience. Whiteleaf was used to it, but ‘every time,’ he wrote in his diary a couple of days after he came back from hospital, ‘it presents a new face. It is as if the mind during serious illness concentrates all its energies on survival; but once the crisis is past it relaxes. It even relaxes its normal vigilance and controls – so that strange fancies, wayward concepts, take a hold that in normal times of health they would never begin to do. Nerves are on edge, imagination gets loose, temper frays as if one were a child again. Why snap at Agnes over the fire in my room? She so obviously is doing her best. Why allow oneself to think so much about the basket chair?’
Whiteleaf’s diary was the one thing he had kept to all his life. Very often he wrote in it thoughts which later were useful to him when reviewing books or writing articles. He had been glad to get back to it when the doctor’s prohibition was removed, and to fill in the empty days. He had always done this after his operations, even calling on the nurses to help him. This time happily there had been no unconsciousness, only great pain and then forced immobility.
‘Of course,’ he wrote two days after that, ‘one wonders how far all paranormal phenomena are explained in this way. And in this context, what does ‘‘explained!’’ mean? ‘‘Imagination gets loose,’’ I see I wrote overleaf. But how do we separate illusion from reality? We define reality as something which because it is apprehended by the majority of men is therefore assumed to exist. But does consensus of opinion necessarily prove the positive of any theory of reality? Still less therefore can it disprove the negative. Galileo believed that the earth moved round the sun. His was the scientific eye, perceiving what others could not see. May not the psychic eye perceive another area of truth at present hidden from the rest of us?’
‘Is something worrying you, Uncle?’ Roy asked that evening when he was sitting with him after supper.
‘No. Why?’
‘You keep staring at the fireplace as if something didn’t please you.’
‘Not at all. Nothing is worrying me. But in fact I was looking at that chair on the other side beside the lamp.’
‘That one? What about it?’
‘It’s new, isn’t it? I mean new to you? Since my last visit.’
‘We’ve had it about a year. Agnes bought it at a sale. It’s a bit of a rickety old thing but it’s very comfortable. You’ll be able to try it in another week or so.’
‘It looks seventy or eighty years old to me.’
‘Maybe. But it’s strong. The frame’s strong. Like iron. It’s quite heavy to lift. I think Agnes paid a pound for it. About this film …’
They returned to discussing La Bête Humaine, which Whiteleaf had seen thirty years ago and considered the best film about railways ever made. Roy had never seen it and wanted to. There were copies in France, and being in railways he might be able to pull a string or two. He also knew the proprietor of the local cinema, who, between alternate bingo nights, was always willing to risk a bit of something way-out. He preferred sex or horror films, but if the French film were offered to him to show for a couple of nights without rental charge he would certainly agree to show it.
But it would cost money to bring it over and to put it on. It was no good Roy trying to do anything unless he knew Uncle Julian would bear the cost. Uncle Julian was doubtful, discouraging: he’d want to know a lot more about what he was letting himself in for before he even considered it. They discussed it for a long time and came as near an argument as they ever got, Roy pressing and Whiteleaf hedging away.
After Roy had gone Agnes came in and settled him down for the night. It was diuretic pills in the morning and potassium pills at night, and she gave him these now and saw his inhaler was within reach, threw some slack coal on the fire, which kept it in most of the night but almost extinguished it as a provider of heat, and then stood by the bed, square and uncompromising, and asked him if he wanted anything more.
He said no and she kissed his forehead perfunctorily and left. It was eleven o’clock. He read for a few minutes and then put out the light and composed himself for sleep. The room and the house were very quiet. Roy and Agnes were separated from him by the bathroom and the box room and their movements could not be heard. In the distance a diesel train hooted. It was a lonely sound.
Then the basket chair creaked as if someone had just sat down in it.
TWO
‘I think,’ said Dr Abrahams, ‘you might have stayed in another week. Are you moving about too much?’
‘No. Only once or twice a day, with my niece’s help, just as you advised.’
‘He never has need to stir a finger otherwise,’ said Agnes uncompromisingly.
‘Well, the electrocardiograms are satisfactory. But why aren’t you sleeping?’
‘I do well enough when I get off, but it takes an hour or two to – compose myself.’
‘He sleeps in the afternoon,’ Agnes said. ‘I expect that takes the edge off. I can never sleep
at night if I have a nap after lunch.’
‘The breathing all right?’
‘No worse than usual. I always need the inhaler a few times.’
After the doctor had gone, Agnes came back and found Whiteleaf writing in his diary.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It tires you. Dr Abrahams was asking me if you were worried about something. I said not so far as I know.’
‘Not so far as I know either. Tell me, Agnes, about that basket chair. Roy says you bought it in a sale.’
Agnes looked rather peculiar. ‘Yes. Why? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing at all. But what sale?’
‘Oh, it was that big house about a mile out of Swindon. D’you remember it? No, you won’t, I don’t expect.’
‘D’you mean Furze Hall?’
‘No. Beyond that. There was a Miss Covent lived there, all by herself with only one servant. It had thirty-four rooms. Fantastic. She was eighty when she died.’
‘What made you go?’
‘Oh, it was advertised. Carol Elliot wanted a few things – you know, from down the road – so I went with her. It was an awful old place; she’d let it go to ruin, this Miss Covent; all the roofs leaked, I should think; it’s being pulled down. Most of the furniture was junk but it went very cheap. I paid a pound for the chair and a pound for that bookcase in the hall and two pounds for four kitchen mats and –’
Agnes went on about her bargains and then switched to some other subject, which Whiteleaf ignored.
‘Did you know anything about it?’ he asked presently. ‘About the house where you bought those things?’
‘The Covents’ place? Well, of course, I’d never been in before. Hardly anyone had. It was like something out of Boris Karloff, I can tell you. The old lady must have been bats, living there alone. There was some story Carol Elliot was telling me about it but I didn’t pay much attention.’