Lord Mullion's Secret Read online

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Lord Mullion said, glancing round him, ‘this is a familiar set-up to me at the moment. I’ve been sitting to a chap not a mile away. Is “sitting” right? He did me standing, as it happens. It made me feel so much like my own butler that I expect to have a thoroughly butler-like appearance in the finished portrait. Fair enough. The Wyndowes started off as butlers, as everybody knows.’

  ‘Probably quite some time ago.’

  ‘Well, not really. Round about 1580, say. But the trouble has been that they’ve regularly had themselves painted or limned or whatever they called it ever since, and, my children got together and said my turn had come. And standing up seemed to be the traditional thing. Holding a sword or a hunting-crop or a six-foot walking stick, or pointing out an order of battle on a map. Actually, remaining on my two feet was something of an advantage, since I was able just to take a turn around the place when I had a prompting that way. The painter didn’t seem to mind. He’s a nice chap – although no genius, if you ask me.’

  ‘Not many of us are that, Henry. But you never know how posterity may judge. Can’t you hear somebody saying, “They’ve sent a decent little Dutchman to take my likeness. Name of Rubens, or some such. No reason to suppose he can paint for toffee. But a useful man, I’m told, to send on a confidential mission”?’ Honeybath was hospitably producing drinks as he offered this whimsical travesty of art-history. ‘Will you take a glass of madeira?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. The truth is, Charles, that I’ve come on a confidential mission myself. Or not exactly a mission, since nobody has sent me and it’s all my own idea.’ Lord Mullion paused – seemingly to take a sniff at the madeira, but actually (Honeybath discerned) because of some uncharacteristic embarrassment. This, indeed, wasn’t difficult to elucidate. It troubled Lord Mullion that the commission he had just described hadn’t been offered to his old schoolfellow. And now – this was clear too – he had some delicate point to make. ‘I’m wondering, you see’ – he resumed, taking a plunge – ‘whether you’d consider painting Mary. For the other side of the fireplace, so to speak. She’s a damned sight better worth painting than I am, and a tiptop painter ought to be rounded up to do the job. Would you consider it, Charles, my dear fellow?’

  So here, suddenly, was a tricky situation – but of a kind with which Honeybath was by no means unacquainted. Painting the portrait of an old chum is usually plain sailing. You simply go straight ahead, and within half-a-dozen sittings you are revealing what you have never noticed in forty years: the ape or poodle or clown or saloon-bar type that lies at scratching distance beneath that familiar mug. But the old chum knows what he has booked in for, and is delighted (even to the pitch of roaring with laughter rather than rage) when what you have made of him is revealed to his astonished gaze. For the entire candour of schoolboys, of undergraduates, is between you still, and carries the day. But an old chum’s wife is a different matter, and you may find yourself in the end faced with a polite but angry couple. What you have put on your canvas isn’t what the woman sees in her looking-glass and has taught her husband to see. The woman may know her ‘weak points’ even to excess, and be coldly candid about them when having her clothes cut and her hair dressed. But all this is mere aesthetics. And portrait-painting is about something more and other than how near, or remote from, winning a beauty contest your subject happens to be. In fact portrait-painting, like major surgery, ought not to be undertaken by a family friend.

  Of course Honeybath, as has been explained, was scarcely that so far as the Mullions were concerned. He had done no more than meet Lady Mullion three or four times on essentially public occasions. And what he could recall of her now was reassuring. She was a handsome woman, and one who hadn’t flinched from letting what of good and ill had come to her stamp itself on her face. Honeybath knew he would enjoy painting Lady Mullion. This didn’t necessarily mean that he would make a success of the job. But it was a favourable omen, all the same.

  ‘But of course I’ll consider it!’ he said. ‘I’m very, very pleased, Henry, that you should propose the idea.’

  ‘I know that you must be tremendously busy, Charles.’ Lord Mullion was clearly delighted, and spoke as if a burden of guilt had been lifted from his shoulders. ‘You’ll understand, I’m sure, that the other affair was arranged by the young people entirely above my head. But if I can have Mary by you–’

  ‘As you certainly shall. It’s true it will take a little fitting in, but it will be at the cost of no more than a few harmless fibs. How long are you both staying in town?’ Honeybath was well accustomed to having the exigencies of ‘the Season’ (followed by the necessity of shooting grouse) obtruded upon the craft of portraiture.

  ‘In town?’ There was simple surprise in Lord Mullion’s repetition of the phrase. ‘My dear man, I’m up only for the night myself. And Mary no longer comes near the place. She can’t stick London, and I’m bound to say I sympathize with her. We’re very quiet folk, you know – very quiet folk, indeed. Except on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that is – but I’ll tell you about that later. You must come down and stay with us at Mullion, of course, and get a bit of country air, and tackle the assignment in your spare time and the occasional wet day.’ Lord Mullion chuckled happily, well aware that this derogatory manner of speaking of the ‘assignment’ couldn’t be taken as other than a joke. ‘Dash it all, you’ve owed us a long visit for a long time.’

  This last remark might perhaps have been described as a little lordly, since Honeybath (as has been recorded) had never been to Mullion Castle in his life. But here again was old-chum fun, and Honeybath didn’t see how it was to be resisted. Accepting commissions on, as it were, a residential basis was something he had learnt to be chary of. It had got him into trouble before, and was basically unsound. It meant your becoming, in a restricted sense, a kind of court painter. You sketched the children, and even the dogs. You had to take a fancy to this and that nook and corner of house and gardens and park, and delight yourself in consequence with little topographical tasks. It could be entirely enjoyable, and probably at Mullion it would be. Still, Honeybath’s studio was where Honeybath liked to work.

  Lord Mullion sensed this hesitation, and had the guile (an immemorial inherited guile) to begin making anxious alternative suggestions at once. The Mullions themselves no longer had a town house, or even a town chicken-coop. But their son already kept a pad (odd term, eh?) in Kensington, and something could certainly be fixed up. Honeybath, aware that he had been on the verge of graceless behaviour, hastened to express his pleasure at the prospect of being a guest at the castle. He even remembered the Hilliards, which were famous, and said how much he looked forward to being shown those minute masterpieces. Presumably – although he couldn’t remember – they were portraits of early Wyndowes. He did remember that Hilliard had engraved Queen Elizabeth’s second great seal in 1586– a fact suggesting that Henry’s family must have prospered in the buttling line with notable rapidity.

  It was of his family – but of his family as at present constituted – that Lord Mullion now began to speak.

  ‘There are a great many Wyndowes around,’ he said, ‘and most of them in what you might call obscure circumstances. Not in indigence or gaol or anything embarrassing of that kind. But in the colonies or in business: that sort of thing.’ Lord Mullion paused on this; it was frequently apparent that he enjoyed indulging in mild humour. ‘You don’t often find them in the news. But there they are, beavering away at this and that with the greatest devotion. A lot of them turn up on us from time to time, and it’s not a thing to take exception to. The head of a family can’t ignore an occasional nod from a kinsman, or even deny him a square meal when it appears to be called for. Still, there are undeniably the devil of a lot of Wyndowes. A kind of Crystal Palace of them, in fact.’ This was clearly a familiar witticism. ‘Fortunately Mary is uncommonly good at keeping tabs on them. She has one of those little card-index things, and can do you the gen on anybody who calls cousins in
two ticks.’

  ‘That must be very useful.’ Honeybath felt he had been innocently required to admire this blending of a modish with an archaic vocabulary. ‘But what about your immediate household, Henry?’

  ‘Ah, that’s not complicated at all, I’m glad to say. Everybody quite tolerably pleased with everybody else, for one thing – which is not a particularly fashionable state of affairs in families nowadays, I’m told. Applies even to Camilla.’

  ‘Camilla?’

  ‘Great-aunt Camilla, you know. At least that’s what we call her, although of course she can’t be the great-aunt of everybody around the place. She’s the niece of my Wyndowe grandfather – so I have to regard her as a close relation, and there she is. At Mullion, I mean – and has been for a long time. Never married, and that’s no doubt what made her a bit difficult in middle life. But since going out of her mind she’s been no trouble in the world. Or only now and then.’ Lord Mullion accepted a second glass of madeira. ‘There’s a streak of oddity in us that shows up every now and then. Not one of those predictable things that regularly skips a generation or a couple of generations, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so forth. Whether it’s advantageous to have that sort of advance notice of such troubles it’s hard to say. My own children are sane enough, and commonly thought to take after their mother. I think you’ll like them.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall. Are they mostly at home still?’

  ‘The girls seem content to spend most of their holidays with us – and Cyprian most of his vacations, for that matter. Cyprian’s a Kingsman now, I’m glad to say, and enjoying Cambridge very much. Doing very well, too, in some boat or other. He went in for wet bobbing at the start, of course. Wasn’t our line – eh, Charles?’

  ‘No more it was.’

  ‘I could never understand the desire to be a galley-slave. Much better to do something you can let up on when you want to.’ Lord Mullion appeared to seek for an exemplification. ‘Painting, for instance. Eh, Charles?’

  ‘I’ve known painting to turn a little compulsive at times. And some of its swells are on record as having been quite unable to stop.’

  ‘Amateurs, too, come to think of it.’ Lord Mullion, who seemed to have time on his hands, had settled back contentedly in a shabby but commodious armchair. It struck Honeybath that he was, in fact, the very type of the perfectly contented man: one whose demands upon life had been modest and had seldom failed of fulfilment. ‘You’ll remember, Charles, that when we were small boys watercolour sketching still headed embroidering, and thumping the piano and the like, with the elderly idle women. I’ve known country houses plastered with the labours of female relatives from floor to ceiling. And Camilla had the mania in her time. We have stacks of her stuff stowed away at Mullion, and a few specimens tactfully on view as well. They may interest you.’

  Honeybath, who (mistakenly, as it was to turn out) judged this improbable, asked a few questions about the interests and pursuits of Lady Mullion and her children. He heard without surprise that Lady Mullion was a devoted gardener. So was her elder daughter, Patty. Patty, indeed, was rapidly overtaking her mother in command of the more esoteric aspects of this appropriate pursuit. Boosie, the younger girl, had chosen on the other hand to take a precocious interest in politics, a sphere of activity to which singularly few Wyndowes had been notably drawn for some centuries. Boosie (it was a traditional family name, Lord Mullion explained) had successfully politicized the boarding-school of which she was now head girl, with the result that its ponies and lacrosse-sticks were at a discount, and ideological confrontations all the go. Of Cyprian, the future earl, it couldn’t be said that he would ever be likely thus to move men. When he had done with all that strenuous ploughing up and down the Cam he would undoubtedly have to be ‘got into something’. His father, it was true, had never very strikingly got out of Mullion Castle. But times were changing, and Cyprian would have to be found what Lord Mullion frankly expressed as ‘a niche with a good screw to it’. Cyprian – Lord Mullion reported with satisfaction – said that he was all for a good screw.

  ‘And that’s the lot,’ Lord Mullion said. ‘Except, of course, that there are a few other Wyndowes within a bow-shot or two. My brother Sylvanus, for example. Sylvanus has the dower house – naturally on the understanding that he clears out if and when Mary lines up for it. Sylvanus is much younger than I am, but at a bit of a loose end. They kicked him out of the army.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Honeybath felt that this ought to be said soberly.

  ‘No, no – nothing of that kind.’ Lord Mullion was amused. ‘It was simply that Sylvanus isn’t at all bright, and so they plucked him. He was quite frank about it. Nowadays the army is exams all the way up, and if you fail them they give you a nod and a wink, and that’s that. Changed times again. It didn’t help the poor devil a bit that he was Major the Honourable Sylvanus Wyndowe. Rather the opposite. Thought to be cumbrous, perhaps. However, he’s fortunately given to what you might call rural pursuits. Proper in a Sylvanus, eh? Another old family name, of course. Camilla’s father, another second son, was a Sylvanus. And so was mine.’

  ‘Your father was a second son?’ It didn’t occur to Honeybath to dissimulate the fact that he was not well informed about Lord Mullion’s ancestry.

  ‘Good Lord, yes. My uncle Rupert would have succeeded, you know. But he died quite young and unmarried, so it was my father who came in. That’s why I was Lord Wyndowe as a kid.’

  ‘Which is what Cyprian is now.’

  ‘Yes. Rather dull, he thinks it. But there isn’t a handy second title around. Viscount Tom-noddy, or whatever. Rum things, titles of honour, and tiresome in shops. When I say “Lord Mullion” to a fellow I’m giving an order to he suspects me of being a con man at once.’

  On this improbable note Lord Mullion got to his feet and took his leave, remarking that he would write about the details of ‘their little plan’ in a few days’ time. It seemed probable to Honeybath that Henry’s wife as yet knew nothing about it. Perhaps Henry was plotting a birthday present, and perhaps Lady Mullion wouldn’t be too keen on the boring business of sitting for her portrait. But her husband gave no hint of this, and at the door of the studio he did get one detail clear.

  ‘I’m told,’ he said briskly, ‘that two thousand guineas is the going rate.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Capital, Charles, my dear fellow.’ Lord Mullion, already half in the open air, paused and chuckled cheerfully. ‘Gad!’ he said. ‘It must be marvellous to coin money at that rate. Particularly, mark you, when richly deserved. Do you know? I can’t be said ever to have earned a penny in my life – or not since you used to tip me half-a-crown for extra chores, eh? We’ll look forward tremendously to your coming down.’ And with this Lord Mullion waved his hat and walked away.

  Left to himself, Charles Honeybath consulted his desk diary. It showed a good many portrait commissions lined up, and several of them would involve him with a man or woman who had booked his services – for that was what it came to – virtually on a postcard or over the telephone, and this after no more than a casual reconnaissance in a club or over a luncheon table.

  It was like whoredom, he told himself, this endless intimate clinching with total strangers. Or at least it was like this when one was feeling bad. When one was feeling good it was like something quite as exhausting and at the same time more difficult to define. In essence, perhaps, having an easel between you and a human being was no different from having it between you and a landscape. It was the same exploring and unveiling job. But at least a landscape didn’t talk, or take irrational likings or dislikings to you. How pleasant to have been Corot, or one of those innumerable landscapists of the past who had their compositions unobtrusively peopled by figure-painters fetched in for the job.

  This was a well-trodden little path in Honeybath’s thought processes, and it didn’t really mean much. He was in fact devoted to the region into which his bent and talents had taken him. And
he found himself quite looking forward to the assignment which young Henry Wyndowe (now not so young Lord Mullion) was fixing up.

  3

  Lady Patience Wyndowe – ‘Patty’ in the family – nowadays frequently found herself wondering how Swithin Gore had come by his not very common Christian name. His father, she had gathered, had been Ammon Gore. ‘Ammon’, although not very common either, had apparently at one time enjoyed a certain rustic currency, whereas the only other Swithin she had ever come across was in a novel. The fictitious Swithin hadn’t been a gardener’s boy (which was the real Swithin’s condition) but he had belonged roughly to that class of society – although there had been, at the same time, some gentle component to him the explanation of which now escaped Patty’s memory. Sometimes it was possible to feel that a similar suggestion attached to Swithin Gore. The suggestion chiefly connected up with the way he looked at her when receiving this or that horticultural instruction. Swithin (who wasn’t really a boy, and must indeed be within a year or two of her own age) owned a very direct glance. It wasn’t impudent, or in any manner bold in the slightest degree. But it was direct, and at the same time distinguishably wondering. Wondering rather than admiring – and this had the happy effect of rendering it wholly unembarrassing. Patty felt that she was getting to know Swithin, with whom she had much to do, quite well. At least enough to realize, for instance, that he was an intelligent young man. It wasn’t, however, well enough to ask him about his name. Or at least so Patty thought until she suddenly found that she was doing so.

  ‘Swithin,’ she said, ‘what made them call you Swithin?’

  Swithin straightened up – rather fast – from the flower bed over which he had been bending. Physically, Swithin was undeniably attractive. He was this all over. Even in the posture he had just abandoned, and when thus viewed from behind, this held of him – although its normal association for Patty would have been with vulgar postcards glimpsed at the seaside. But now Swithin was facing her, and he looked very well indeed.