A Private View Read online

Appleby took a look. The picture space was entirely occupied by what appeared to be the representation of a work of statuary in an improbable green marble. The figure, a female one, was ingeniously contorted so as to provide the form of a solid cube; and the effect was the more striking in that the subject seemed to be an advanced case of dropsy complicated by elephantiasis. The upper limbs had approximately the same girth as the torso, and the neck had a greater circumference than the head. Appleby cast round for an appropriate word. ‘Chunky,’ he said.

  ‘Of course that was the idea.’ Boxer shook his head sombrely. ‘I got it from one of those tin-plate advertisements in a railway station, showing a pound of pre-war sausages done up square. It made me think of Grace at once. By the way, that’s Grace. Miss Brooks to you.’

  Appleby glanced across the studio. Reclined on a divan was a young woman of proportions surprisingly like those disposed on Boxer’s canvas. One felt at once that she ought to be reminiscent of a fat lady in a circus – and in the same instant one realized that this was an entirely inappropriate comparison. Miss Brooks was chunky – preternaturally chunky – and not fat; in fact she was the very fleshly embodiment of ideas that had begun to spread themselves over canvas and insinuate themselves into stone somewhere in the early 1920s. It was, Appleby reflected, what always happened. Rossetti stunners had begun getting themselves born just about the time when Dante Gabriel himself was giving over… But this train of reflection must not be allowed to induce an impolite silence. ‘Good evening,’ Appleby said.

  Miss Brooks blinked. She appeared to be in a sort of stupor or coma. Or perhaps it was a rigor. In deference to the arrival of non-professional visitors she had drawn some species of light wrapping round her monumental limbs: nevertheless these were discernibly still disposed in approximately the attitude displayed on the canvas. Miss Brooks blinked again. ‘Evening,’ she said dully – and turning her eyes but not her head towards Boxer added, ‘Is it the rent?’

  ‘Not the rent – the police.’ Speaking absently, Boxer walked over to Miss Brooks and peered glumly between her shoulder blades. ‘If you could just flex a thought more there–’

  ‘I’ve flexed till I’m never likely to unflex again.’ That Miss Brooks was indeed disposed to sulk now became apparent. ‘I told you at the grocer’s it was no good. I told you the moment we saw the thing.’

  ‘It’s that confounded crate.’ Boxer, turning back to Appleby, pointed to a small cage-like structure in the middle of the floor. ‘I had to give three bob for it – the only perfect cube in the shop. But Grace won’t go in – or not without getting rolls of flesh where they’re no good to me. I’ve shoved and I’ve pummelled, but she just won’t go. It’s the shoulders. She bulges – just where I want to get the articulation of the humerus and the scapula like M A Buonarroti himself.’

  ‘That must be one of the Glasgow crowd living off the Euston Road.’ Miss Brooks, although still dazed, appeared to consider it only civil to give this explanation to the laity. ‘Boxer’s always mad about them.’

  ‘What about putting her in head first?’ Boxer’s gloomy features suddenly displayed genuine artistic inspiration. ‘We could get more purchase, shoving hard on her behind. Particularly with three of us on the job. Get up, Grace. I believe we’ve got it.’

  Miss Brooks – although with obvious reluctance – prepared herself to comply. Cadover looked at Appleby in alarm. ‘Perhaps, sir–’

  ‘Quite so.’ Appleby, although perfectly ready to assist an artist in the pursuit of his plastic idea, felt that it was hardly fair not to come to his subordinate’s relief. ‘We’ll get along upstairs. But if Miss Brooks doesn’t mind resting for another couple of minutes, perhaps we might have a word or two with Mr Boxer about this fellow Limbert.’

  ‘Must you people really go on chewing over Gavin?’ Somewhat unexpectedly, Boxer produced a packet of cigarettes and hospitably dispensed them to the company. ‘He’s been terribly lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Cadover was perplexed.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  The simplicity of this left Cadover momentarily without a reply, and Appleby interposed. ‘You take rather a poor view of the human situation, Mr Boxer?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about situations – except the one I started off in. That was in a draper’s shop, and it was bloody awful. But if you mean life, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Life’s all right. You should get into training for a bit, and then try it.’

  Just as real life labours after art, Appleby reflected, so do artists labour after literature. At least young artists do. In each generation they find their Portrait of an Artist in the work of some accomplished novelist – and then they live up to it hard. Boxer was doing that, and it would be naïve to be offended by him. ‘But about Limbert?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘He’d set his heart on being a painter. That’s why he’s lucky to be dead. Not on painting – but on being a painter, with books written about him for the edification of posterity. Pitiful.’ Boxer reflected. ‘Not that he wasn’t a genius in his way.’

  ‘A genius?’ Cadover interrupted with involuntary respect. ‘Limbert’s painting was really good?’

  ‘Pitiful. A nice Cambridge boy, who had made squiggles in his notebooks between lectures on Julius Caesar and more lectures on Caesar Augustus. And held an exhibition above a tea shop. And was told by all the wives of all the professors that he was a True Artist. So he went to Paris, and worked ever so hard at the squiggles and wriggles and squirts – determined, you might say, to teach the worms their business. Now they’re teaching Gavin. Only he did have a genius. For being a nice Cambridge boy.’

  Appleby received this picturesque speech thoughtfully. ‘Do you mean that he was dead set on doing really well as a painter – so dead set that disillusion would have been very bitter to him?’

  ‘I say he was dead set on being a painter – and a great one. So when he cracked up on that he wouldn’t have had the consolation of just painting. He’s well out of it.’

  ‘You mean that–’

  ‘Oh, to hell with what I mean! Gavin’s dead, isn’t he? Let be, man.’ Boxer strode across the studio and gave the grocer’s crate a vicious kick. ‘I think I’ll have to put Grace into a double cube, after all. Disgustingly dull work. But if she won’t fit, she won’t. Impossible to shave her down, unfortunately. If you prick her, she bleeds.’

  ‘Limbert bled. Through the ceiling.’ Miss Brooks had sunk back again upon the divan, but this time without much troubling to veil her marmoreal splendours. ‘Zhitkov was furious.’

  ‘Zhitkov?’ Appleby looked at Cadover.

  ‘A sculptor who lives across the passage. Limbert’s studio was just above him.’

  ‘And Limbert dripped on his Venus.’ It was Miss Brooks who continued in this informative vein. ‘Zhitkov was really mad at him for being so inconsiderate. He says that blood is the one thing you can’t get out of a stone.’

  ‘Gavin had a right to drip where he chose.’ Boxer spoke with mournful indignation. ‘And, anyway, Zhitkov’s carvings are utterly–’ Words seemed to fail him.

  ‘Pitiful?’ Cadover offered this with large irony.

  Boxer looked surprised. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You’ve hit on a damned good way of putting it. Pitiful. He ought to stick to his waxworks. But I’d nearly forgotten. Grace has something to say. In fact she has been wanting to make a statement to the police. I’ve told her not to be silly.’

  Cadover frowned. ‘That was most improper.’

  ‘Rubbish. The only statement that Grace is qualified to make is a purely spacial one. In a cube. But, as you’re here, perhaps she’d better talk. It may sweeten her up a bit. Grace – state away.’

  Thus abjured, Miss Brooks sat up and folded her wrap around her. ‘There was a man stalking Limbert,’ she said. ‘All that day. He was coming down the stairs as I came in to sit for Boxer about ten. It sounded as if Limbert was turning him out. “You can’t say it isn’t a fair offer,” he was sa
ying. “It sounds to me much more like a foul one,” Limbert said. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “Oh, don’t you?” Limbert said. “You’re taking unnecessary offence,” he said. “If you think I can’t take a guess at what this is about,” Limbert said, “you must think I’m a fool.” “I’ll double it,” he said – and it seemed to me he sounded pretty desperate. “Double it?” Limbert said; “double it? You can double, double, toil and trouble it out of this.” “It wasn’t a valid purchase,” he said, “and I can bring in the law.” “You can go and eat yourself,” Limbert said. Or at least he said something like that. And then he pushed the chap out of the front door there.’

  ‘One moment.’ Cadover raised in an admonitory way the pencil with which he had been taking shorthand notes. ‘This will be transcribed and read back to you and you’ll be asked to sign it – see?’

  ‘I should hope so. And I’ll expect it to be in the papers too.’ Miss Brooks was indignant. ‘For that’s not all. The chap stayed skulking about in one or other of those mews opposite, pretty well all day.’

  ‘We ought to have been told about this long ago. Can you describe the man’s appearance?’

  ‘He was middle-aged and ordinary-looking and in the usual sort of clothes.’

  ‘What do you mean by the usual sort of clothes?’

  ‘Just ordinary ones. I think he had a grey overcoat. And there was nothing special about him. If he’d had a bad limp, or a glass eye, or a horrible scar across one cheek I’m sure I’d have noticed it.’

  ‘No doubt. By the way, Miss Brooks, at what hour did you leave Gas Street yourself that day?’

  ‘I was back here for Boxer in the afternoon. I stopped to do him a fry about eight – you’d think any man could do himself a fry, but he can’t – so that it was dark by the time I left. That chap might have been lurking about the place still.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Cadover closed his notebook with an impressive snap. ‘The Assistant Commissioner and I are now going upstairs. But we may want another word with both of you in half an hour’s time.’

  Boxer, who had returned to stare darkly at his canvas, looked up at this. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Any time. We shan’t insist on the presence of our solicitor.’ And he accompanied his visitors politely to the door. In the passage his eye fell on the Crucifixion opposite. ‘Mind you,’ he broke out suddenly, ‘there was nothing wrong with Gavin’s painting. No vice in it. A daub like that gave him a pain in the neck. But – well, paint hadn’t been given him in his cradle. That’s all.’

  Cadover had turned to the staircase. Suddenly he stopped. ‘Mr Boxer, there is one further thing I must ask you now. Did Miss Brooks in fact leave your studio at eight o’clock, or did she stay – later?’

  Boxer stared. Then he broke into a laugh. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I quite see. La vie de Bohême, as pictured in the Police Gazette. I assure you that Grace is utterly virtuous. The perfect cube, warranted free from distracting erotic associations. You have only to look at her, after all. Brooks too broad for leaping, as the poet says. So long.’

  Cadover made no reply, but stumped up the stairs behind Appleby. Even more than commonly, there was a heavy deliberation in his tread.

  3

  Here a man had died, mysteriously. Probably he had been murdered – standing on this floor. Appleby found that he had almost forgotten the sensation of entering such a room. And quite suddenly Gavin Limbert, whom he had never seen nor would ever see, became real to him. The people downstairs, the crush at the Da Vinci, Cadover glowering beside him, even Judith at home bathing the children: these had all become for the time background figures, lightly washed in behind the solid form of the unknown dead man. Limbert, pale and resolved, thrusting a revolver against his palate. Limbert, his eyebrows raised in astonishment, opening his mouth to speak, to cry out… There were these and other hypothetical pictures. Only one could correspond with the actual fact of the matter. But for the moment they were all grimly real – as real as the spinning plug of lead that had instantaneously ripped apart mind and matter in a young man’s brain.

  Limbert had occupied the whole of this floor. It was in fact no more than one long room, running north and south and with windows at each end, but with an archway and curtains indicating an indecisive division into a studio and a bedroom. Opening off the studio end was a tiny kitchen, and off the bedroom end an equally tiny bathroom: these occupied, actually, no more than the breadth of the staircase outside. Appleby saw at once that it was a desirable place. The length was useful, and the north window had been properly enlarged and raised to the ceiling. Limbert had no doubt been living on threepence – the evidences of orthodox artistic indigence were not lacking – but he had not been living on twopence, as Boxer down below had no doubt long been constrained to do. The studio was entirely masculine in suggestion, with a minimum of furniture, functionally arranged and chosen on severely utilitarian principles. But there was nothing austere about it, or aloof; one could readily people it, in imagination, with the dead man’s Cambridge friends, ironical but secretly impressed before the spectacle of the new world in which Gavin had established himself; or with hovering aunts, presenting themselves only upon due notice, bearing pots of jam or – upon high occasions – bottles of decayed wine abstracted from some deceased uncle’s cellar. Limbert’s own work had all disappeared, swept away by the astute Braunkopf. But there was a scattering of pictures on the walls, disposed in the random manner favoured by painters; these were mostly reproductions of drawings, pen and ink over silverpoint, by Leonardo. Over the fireplace was a small oil painting of a gentleman in a curricle, with a groom holding the horses’ heads. Appleby walked over and examined this. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The lad can’t have been in any anxiety about tomorrow’s breakfast. Perhaps he only had this on loan from his family. But, if so, they trusted him with it, and must have been on good terms with him. It’s a Stubbs.’

  ‘Valuable?’ Cadover eyed the picture with provisional respect.

  ‘Decidedly. Stubbs is all the go. So it’s significant that this stayed put.’

  ‘We thought of robbery. You see, sir, either Limbert had suffered a bit of a brainstorm or the place had been ransacked by the person who attacked him. Everything was at sixes and sevens. If you look at the books that have been put back on the shelves there, you’ll see they’ve been pitched all over the place, and half the spines broken.’

  Appleby looked at the books. They were a mixed lot: school prizes, mostly for woodwork or mathematics; a German history of art in a dozen battered volumes; three or four expensive monographs on modern abstract painters; a complete Conrad; a dozen books of verse, preponderantly by Auden and Day Lewis; a litter of Penguins; a shelf of miscellaneous French books, mostly in paper covers. Appleby made a systematic examination. ‘Do you think,’ he asked presently, ‘that Limbert would get so excited when reading an improper book that he would rip open the pages with his fingers?’

  Cadover considered a suitable reply to this. ‘I can’t judge. But I hope not.’

  ‘Ever read Sade’s Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Here it is, with about a hundred pages carefully cut and the rest torn open anyhow. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Limbert read a hundred pages and got bored. Then somebody else attacked the thing not as a reader but as a searcher.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘Precisely. And there are several other books that have been served in the same way. There was a search – and for something so small that it could have been slipped up between the uncut pages of a book.’

  Cadover scratched his jaw. ‘Or at least so slender that it could have been torn up and distributed in that way. Things like these, for instance.’ He pointed to the Leonardo drawings pinned to the wall. ‘Or a diary, or letters, or a will.’

  ‘Or a good many other things. Let’s take it as established that the studio was combed for some small object or a set of small objects. It makes the th
eory of a brainstorm followed by suicide unlikely, although not impossible.’ Appleby frowned at the book still in his hand. ‘He read a hundred pages of Justine and then gave over. Probably had a go at Conrad instead. And that yarn about his showing some shifty character the door. It sounded all right, don’t you think? In fact a nice lad with honourable if injudicious ambitions, just as that fellow Boxer describes him. Why should he suddenly have his brains scattered by a revolver bullet?’ Appleby strode to the big north window and stared out. The last light was fading from a low London sky, and the rumble of traffic from King’s Road was like that of some clumsy stage machinery letting down a curtain of darkness over Chelsea. ‘Let me have the picture, Cadover, as it came to us.’

  ‘It starts with this fellow Zhitkov, who has the room down below, next to Boxer.’

  ‘Zhitkov is beneath one part of this and Boxer beneath the other?’

  ‘Quite correct, sir. Well, at about nine o’clock on the morning of Tuesday the 23rd of October – ten days ago, that is – Zhitkov presented himself at the local station, looking like a ghost. He said there was blood pouring through his ceiling. That was a new one on the station sergeant, who answered, very truly, that blood just doesn’t behave in that way. But Zhitkov was thoroughly shaken, and a constable came back with him to see what it was all about. Sure enough, on Zhitkov’s ceiling, which was in uncommonly poor repair, there was a small brown stain. And from it something really had dripped on a piece of statuary below. It was no more than a drop or two, but the constable had a kind of feeling that it was blood, human or other. So up he came to investigate. Limbert’s door was locked – a Yale lock – and there was no reply to any amount of knocking. The constable was just going away to report when Boxer appeared with a spare key. He kept one hanging in his studio, it seemed, so that he could show Limbert’s stuff to any possible clients or dealers when Limbert was out. A friendly – and as you might say optimistic – arrangement.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘Certainly optimistic. But quite a common arrangement among studio folk.’