A Family Affair Read online

  ‘Picture? Nothing of the kind. What would a picture have to do with my golden wedding? This bell for the church, of course. Come this way.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Appleby said, ‘that there is some misapprehension.’

  ‘Misapprehension? Nonsense! If you had been married for fifty years, my dear sir, you wouldn’t be in any misapprehension about it.’

  ‘I hope the bell will be a great success. But I have nothing whatever to do with it.’

  ‘Nothing to do with it! Do you mean to assert that you are not the fellow recommended to me by the Campanological Society?’

  ‘The only bells I know much about are in police cars and fire engines and ambulances.’

  ‘God bless my soul!’

  ‘My name is Appleby, and I’ve come down to Keynes at your invitation, Lord Cockayne, to look into the matter of a missing picture. A picture missing for a long time.’

  ‘Perfectly right. I’ve been feeling for months that something ought to be done about it.’ Lord Cockayne thus changed gear without a trace of discomfiture. ‘And, of course, we knew that you were the man, my dear Sir John. My youngest boy – I wonder whether you know Oswyn? – was quite clear that you were the man. If a person of your eminence could at all be interested in the matter, that is to say. And here you are. Most delightful. I hope you can stay to lunch? Or till the end of the month? I’m very sorry my wife’s away from home. Gone to visit a former housekeeper of ours in Cheltenham. We got her turned into a Distressed Gentlewoman. One must be a shade unscrupulous, these days. Not that I don’t recall her as a very civil-spoken person. Now, where would you say we ought to begin? I am entirely at your command – my dear Appleby, if I may so address you. Except that I am expecting a man about a bell. Tell you about that over luncheon. Ties up with having been married the devil of a long time. Would you care to see where the picture hung?’

  The picture had hung in the Long Gallery. This was a magnificent specimen of its kind, running the full length of the main facade of Keynes Court. In contrast with the gloomy hall below, it gave an impression of being filled with light – partly because it broadened several times into roomlike bays with enormous windows, and partly because its moulded ceiling and elaborately panelled walls had been painted white and enriched with gilding. But these decorations appeared to have been achieved a long time ago, for the paint had taken on a yellow tinge and the gilding was in places flaking away.

  ‘Sense of elbow room up here,’ Lord Cockayne was saying. ‘Not much used, however, since the children grew up. All sorts of games in wet weather: badminton, skittles, even archery. So quite a sensible place, really. One’s surprised that people don’t build more of them. Got one yourself?’

  ‘Well, yes – but nothing near a quarter as long, I’d say.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lord Cockayne was sympathetic. ‘All right for draughts and dominoes, eh? The picture hung there, my dear fellow. Haven’t put anything in its place, as yet, although I’ve been meaning to for some little time. Miss it, rather.’

  Appleby looked at the blank space on the wall. It didn’t seem too informative – but then he had scarcely expected it to be.

  ‘You miss it?’ he said. ‘You’d recognize it, if you saw it again?’

  ‘Recognize it?’ It could only be said that Lord Cockayne stared. ‘Why, it’s one of my favourite things up here. Tell you the truth, I was most devilishly annoyed when my exalted visitor showed she had a mind to it.’

  ‘But she wasn’t an exalted visitor at all – only somebody dressed up as one.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Lord Cockayne seemed just to have recalled this fact, and to be prepared to regard it as an exacerbating circumstance. But then his mind wandered again. ‘I’ve always insisted, you know, that they’re very decent people in their way. Take George the Third. Shockingly maligned, but a thoroughly nice chap. Bit of a statesman, too. Managed to lose us the Americans – ha ha!’

  Appleby echoed ‘ha ha!’ rather absent-mindedly. He was reflecting that almost his only information about the Keynes Court affair came from Oswyn Lyward, and that Oswyn’s account had been influenced to an unknown degree by the need to sustain before his fellow Patriarchs a cherished reputation as a raconteur. He was diverted, however, from pursuing the implications of this further by observing a fresh oddity in the behaviour of his host. Lord Cockayne was sniffing the air of his Long Gallery as a man might do who thinks that something has gone wrong with the gas.

  ‘At least the paint has stopped smelling,’ Lord Cockayne said.

  ‘The paint?’

  ‘It was one of the awkward things about that bally royal visit–’

  ‘That bogus royal visit.’

  ‘So it was.’ Lord Cockayne nodded sagely. ‘We were doing some decorating in rather a big way, as you can see.’ He waved comprehensively at his surroundings. ‘All this white paint, for example. And it’s not a smell that such people are used to, eh? Did I tell you that there was something odd about her voice?’

  ‘The august visitor’s?’

  ‘Yes. We thought she had a bad cold, but she may have been what’s-its name to paint.’

  ‘Allergic?’

  ‘That’s it. Newfangled word, but my own mother suffered from the thing. Riding to hounds would bring her out in spots. Tragic, eh? And she didn’t stay long.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘No, no – this royal impostor. Nobbled my Madonna, and off she went.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby reflected that there were at least substantial correspondences between Lord Cockayne’s uncertain recollections and Lord Oswyn Lyward’s not wholly reliable narrative. ‘What sort of a Madonna was it?’

  ‘Very attractive. Good, broad hips. In fact, nearly all hips. Capital for childbearing, you know. Obviously the Holy Ghost–’

  Lord Cockayne checked himself. ‘The children called her the Wedge. She was rather that shape.’

  ‘She sounds like an Italian Primitive.’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned it to anybody, or that it has so much as come up into my head since. But some long-haired chap brought down here by my wife once told me he thought he could put a name to the painter. Duccio. Ever heard of him? Operated before the real nobs, of course.’

  Such is the irrational influence of great names that Appleby found himself looking with momentary awe at the small blank space on the wall in front of him. Duccio di Buoninsegna, first and greatest of the Sienese, hung here. Or so some long-haired chap had thought.

  ‘Can you recall,’ Appleby asked, ‘the name of the man who suggested to you that the painting might be by Duccio?’

  ‘Lord, no!’ Lord Cockayne appeared surprised. ‘All sorts of people come around, you know. Tiresome having to be civil to them sometimes. Duty, all the same.’

  ‘Yes.’ Appleby reflected that he himself was receiving civility. ‘Is there anybody else who might know?’

  ‘I hardly think so. But – yes, by Jove! – young Sansbury might. And he’s here for the weekend.’

  ‘I know Professor Sansbury, and I saw him in your park. A long-haired chap himself, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Lord Cockayne glanced with momentary suspicion at Appleby. ‘But he’s an old friend, as a matter of fact. Been around Keynes from time to time ever since he was a kid. Lord knows who the Sansburys were. But his mother was a Southdown.’ Lord Cockayne paused. ‘Never gone in for snobbery,’ he said. ‘Set my face against it in India. Raised difficulties sometimes. But not the right thing in old families.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt you’re right.’ Appleby spoke inattentively; he was suddenly looking yet more seriously at the wall in front of him. ‘Lord Oswyn,’ he said, ‘–who was good enough to introduce me to you, you know – has told me the story of the picture’s disappearance. But, of course, he was much too young to be present. He speaks from hearsay, and may have got things a little wrong. He says that you yourself took the picture from the wall, blew some dust off it, rather to the anno
yance of Lady Cockayne–’

  ‘Oswyn says that? Absolute nonsense! How could there be dust on the thing, with this whole gallery still sticky with new paint?’

  ‘It does seem a point. Oswyn then says that a well-drilled equerry took two steps forward, received the picture from you, and took two steps back. He was accustomed to the whole manoeuvre, that is to say. And then the visit ended. Would you say that’s right?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind, my dear fellow. I’d have been less offended if it had been. And – do you know? – looking back on the affair, I can see it was a point at which these impostors slipped up. I can’t think why I didn’t spot it at the time. What happened was that, the moment I’d said what pleasure it would give me if my visitor would accept the thing, this court functionary, or equerry as you call him, stepped forward and took the picture from its hook himself. Incredible, once you think of it. Too damned bad form for these – Too damned bad form, I mean. I was deuced glad the bally bounder messed himself up.’

  ‘Perhaps you mean – ?’ Appleby had advanced closer to the wall.

  ‘The white paint, or enamel, or whatever it is. It was what they call tacky, you know.’ Lord Cockayne paused – and then added with his intermittent vagueness, ‘Of course, it’s dry now, as you can see.’

  ‘I can see more than that.’ Appleby was staring almost incredulously at the ancient paintwork before him. ‘He put a finger on the stuff, and the print’s there still.’

  ‘Most interesting to have met here,’ Professor Sansbury said. He and Appleby were alone together after lunch. For the person recommended by the Campanological Society had now really arrived, and Lord Cockayne had withdrawn to confer with him.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Appleby said. ‘I had no idea you were a friend of the Lywards.’

  ‘I don’t quite know why you should.’ Sansbury had raised his eyebrows. ‘It was only the other day that you and I met for the first time, after all.’

  ‘Very true. A casual introduction in a club smoking-room. But we did fall into a certain amount of talk about missing pictures. And I mentioned my interest in one that had vanished from Keynes Court.’

  ‘So you did. It had quite escaped me.’ Sansbury spoke without any appearance of concern. ‘I had rather forgotten, I’m afraid. It was naturally the Braunkopf affair – which had a good deal worried me, you recall – that was in my mind. Oddly enough, Cockayne has never mentioned his own loss to me. The circumstances, so far as I gathered them at lunch, seem to have been exceedingly odd. But it was all a long time ago, was it not?’

  ‘Certainly it was. But not, I believe, before you were in the habit of visiting at Keynes. Lord Cockayne even believes you may remember something important from that time. A casual guest told him that the picture we are now concerned with might be by Duccio. Cockayne thinks you might remember who that person was.’

  ‘I know nothing whatever about it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And you don’t recall ever having taken note of the picture yourself? There it was, after all, in the Long Gallery. And the history of art was already your profession, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course. But I doubt whether I was ever so much as shown the Long Gallery in those days. Cockayne has perhaps exaggerated the extent of my intimacy with his family. It has been quite occasional. The old gentleman is apt, you must have noticed, to get things a little distorted. Particularly the passing of time.’

  ‘That is true. But, talking of oddity, I’m rather struck, Professor, by the fact that your having a long-standing, even if intermittent, acquaintance with Keynes didn’t turn up in our first conversation. The run of our talk, I seem to recall, would have made it natural.’

  ‘May I speak of oddity too, Sir John?’ With fingers which Appleby thought were not wholly steady, Sansbury was stuffing a pipe. ‘To be quite frank, there is something more than a little odd in the way you are presuming to question me. I hope I don’t offend you.’

  Appleby took his time about meeting this challenge. He was not sure that Sansbury had done well to offer it. Sansbury was a person of some eminence in his particular walk of life. One was inclined to assume that he was a very clever man, and it was certain that he couldn’t be a fool – or not in the sense of being slow-witted or stupid. He could hold his own, clearly enough, in any sort of sophisticated conversation. That was what he had been doing when Appleby first became aware of him – putting up lively academic chit-chat with no less a personage than the Astronomer Royal. But was he, for example, conceited in a hazardous fashion? Was he a man who, somehow, had been carried a little – or a lot – out of his depth? Quite a short time – Appleby told himself – was now going to show. Meanwhile, the best policy was attack – but attack pressed not quite home.

  ‘You must forgive my curiosity,’ he said urbanely. ‘One of my interests – an old professional interest, you will understand – is what may be called the limits of coincidence. How thick on the ground must coincidences be before one is obliged to admit that something not coincidental is involved? I don’t presume to ask myself this in terms of the theory of probability. I’m neither a mathematician nor a philosopher, but just a plain retired policeman. Can I give you a match?’

  It was true that Professor Sansbury was making rather an ineffective business of lighting his pipe. Appleby paused long enough to allow ample time for the operation, and then went on.

  ‘And you are, if I may say so, a most interesting case in point. I’m not unaware – indeed, I was remarking on it to somebody the other day – that yours must be quite a small world. Smaller, say, than my own, or than that of the professional criminal. So, in matters relating to your calling, my dear Professor, it would be quite natural to find your name – a most distinguished name – bobbing up quite a lot. That’s certainly what I’ve been finding.’

  ‘You really talk in riddles, Sir John. A trick of the trade, no doubt.’

  ‘I think you know Sir Thomas Carrington?’

  ‘Carrington? Sir Thomas Carrington? The name does seem to ring a bell.

  ‘The name ringing a bell is that of a gentleman who was ingeniously robbed of a picture by George Stubbs.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’ Sansbury’s smile might have been intended as urbane, but in fact rendered a slightly strained effect. ‘Why ingeniously, Sir John?’

  ‘I suspect that the Stubbs could have been stolen in a much more straightforward fashion. The ingenuity seems to have been partly the consequence of a perverted sense of fun – an impulse to do things the play way, as it were. But it was partly a matter of making Carrington feel ridiculous, and so indisposed to create a fuss.’

  ‘How very curious. And now I do recollect. I valued the man’s pictures. A routine job, not leaving much mark on the mind.’

  ‘Did coming on a Stubbs leave no mark on your mind? At the time, at least, you were sufficiently interested to offer to take the picture away and have it cleaned.’

  ‘An obvious civility. Yes, the incident does come back to me.’

  ‘Does your correspondence with Lord Canadine come back to you?’

  ‘Good Lord, yes! The affair of the outraged statue. Who could forget a thing like that? When I heard that it had gone, I thought I ought to write to him, letting him know how valuable it was. He hadn’t a clue, and it seemed a plain public duty. Of course I ought to have let him know – or found out whether he did know – the moment I saw the thing so vulnerably disposed in his garden. But it would have been awkward, in view of the indelicate manner in which it had been treated.’

  ‘I see. But I think I’m right in saying that, once you had, so to speak, broken the ice, you continued to correspond with Canadine?’

  ‘I did, indeed. I wanted to discover where the stolen statue had come from, and so forth. Its story would have a distinct place in the history of taste.’

  There was now a pause in this curious catechism. Sansbury was being told nothing that it had been particularly difficult to find out – yet what he was dissimulating was
quite as much surprise as alarm. He had remarked that Lord Cockayne was a little shaky about the passing of time; it was perhaps something that might be called the telescoping of time that was shaking him in his turn. And Appleby felt that he had now been sufficiently perturbed; that, if possible, he ought to be, as it were, left gently toasting. Appleby glanced at his watch.

  ‘I must find Cockayne, and take my leave,’ he said. ‘He has a touching faith in my detective powers, but it isn’t really reasonable to expect much in the way of results after all these years. But I’m glad that you and I have had this chat. It really is curious that you should have been on the periphery of quite a bunch of these affairs. But it has been over a considerable period of time, which makes the coincidence we were speaking of a good deal less striking.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Sansbury took a more confident puff at his pipe. It was nevertheless improbable – Appleby thought – that he could imagine it was more than a truce that was being declared.

  ‘And, of course,’ Appleby pursued, ‘I came in on Cockayne’s ancient problem only in the most casual way. I believe I mentioned it to you at our first meeting. His youngest son is an acquaintance of my youngest son.’

  ‘Ah, yes – Oswyn. A nice lad. They are at Oxford together?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Appleby’s tone was entirely indifferent. ‘My boy is at Cambridge. He has heard some of your lectures, if I may mention the fact, with great satisfaction. He and Oswyn Lyward were simply at the same prep school.’

  17

  Mr Patrick Moyle (distinguished authority on practical jokes) and Mr Robert Appleby (scrum-half, retired) were both shortly to address themselves to the Final Honour School of Literae Humaniores. It might therefore be expected that, when confabulating together in the latter’s digs in Holywell, the topic engrossing them would be – such is the curious constitution of that celebrated Oxford curriculum – either very ancient history or very modern philosophy.

  But at the moment this seemed not to be the case. Signs of Bobby’s studious disposition, indeed, were thick on the ground – literally so in the form of books rapidly consulted and then tossed ungratefully on the floor, crumpled notes, abandoned cups of black coffee, tumbled ashtrays, empty gin bottles, half gnawed bars of chocolate, and sundry other common indications of undergraduate addiction to learning. But for the moment, at least, neither young man appeared to have provided himself with useful employment of any sort. Mr Moyle was lying supine on the carpet, softly whistling to the ceiling. Now and then he would vary this posture and pastime by turning over on his tummy and cocking either a foot or a grotesquely clutching hand in air – the idea being to suggest that he was the worsted party in some desperate gunfight, and now in articulo mortis. Mr Appleby, properly enough, was paying no attention to this childish mime; instead, he prowled moodily about the room, and every now and then stuck his head out of the window, uttered an exclamation of gloomy impatience, and flung himself on a sofa before at once jumping up again and resuming his perambulation. Presently he varied this routine by going over to Mr Moyle and digging a toe hard into his ribs.