A Family Affair Read online

  ‘Has Oswyn chosen a particular rank yet?’

  ‘I’m working on it all the time.’ Lord Oswyn Lyward gave Appleby the ghost of a vulgar wink. ‘I have serious thoughts of the Foreign Service. Hard work, of course. But great scope.’

  ‘Newfangled name for the thing,’ Cockayne said. ‘But goes on much as before. Boy might do worse.’ He watched Appleby take a first sip from his glass. ‘Unassuming stuff, eh? But port is in a confused way, these days – very confused, indeed. Shocking situation at Keynes, I may say. ’55 is thought to be pretty good, though, and should start its drinking life soon. Before I end mine, I hope.’ Lord Cockayne acknowledged his own witticism with an appreciative bark. ‘And now about this picture.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby betrayed no astonishment at this abrupt intimation that he had been summoned into Cockayne’s presence for professional purposes. It must be Oswyn’s doing. The young man had clearly taken it into his head that there was amusement to be extracted from stirring up this ancient matter.

  ‘Sorry your son’s not lunching with you,’ Cockayne said – much as if it had occurred to him that his preparatory civilities had been inadequate. ‘Bobby, eh? Been down to us once or twice. Brains. Straight bat as well, I’d say. Good stable-companion for Oswyn here. Always delighted to see him. Regret we haven’t met his mother. My wife knew her family very well.’

  Even as something thus announced politicly in a past tense, this was news to Appleby. He murmured suitably.

  ‘My father thinks,’ Oswyn prompted, ‘that we should have that picture back.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Cockayne nodded approval. ‘Joke’s gone on long enough. Happened some years back.’

  ‘That puts it mildly,’ Appleby said. ‘Wasn’t Lord Oswyn still in his pram?’ He paused on this question – which appeared, however, to produce only perplexity in Lord Oswyn’s father. There was more conducing to the old gentleman’s vagueness, one had to conclude, than a mere injudicious matutinal recourse to port. His wits were far from what they had once been. Appleby wasn’t sure that this rendered altogether agreeable his son Oswyn’s resolve to extract diversion from planting that ancient hoax or fraud once more actively on the carpet. On the other hand Appleby – although the Lywards, father and son, couldn’t be aware of it – was in London precisely for the purpose of poking into the series of mysteries which seemed to begin with their affair. So he couldn’t very well do other than go along with them now.

  ‘Fact is,’ Lord Cockayne was saying, ‘that somebody may have got away with something valuable. Been suggested to me before, you know. Was even suggested to me at the time. Perhaps something in it, eh? Value of things changing. Old Canadine – nice chap I met for the first time lately – telling me the other day of a thing he’d have called a garden ornament. His father – the Canadine there was the scandal about, you know, when some actress poisoned herself – had shoved a pipe through it and made a damned indecent sort of fountain of it. Pissing into a little pool, Appleby, not to put too fine a point on it. All right with statues of small boys, I suppose. Kind of thing the Italians call potties.’

  ‘Putti,’ Oswyn said.

  ‘But this wasn’t a small boy. Well, one night the thing simply vanished from the middle of its pool. At first Canadine thought very little about it. No great opinion of his father’s taste, I suppose – and, anyway, he thought what the thieves had been after was merely the value of the lead running through the thing. Its urinary system, one might say.’ Lord Cockayne suddenly looked surprisingly hard at Appleby, as if his reception of this harmless joke was to be a test of him as adequately a sahib. ‘But then some guest or other, who’d seen the statue before and turned out to be a bit of a connoisseur, told Canadine it was probably quite devilishly old – Graeco-Roman, as the art wallahs say – and probably worth a tidy sum. You see what I mean?’

  ‘I think I do.’ Appleby had put down his glass, and was staring at Cockayne. ‘And would I be right in supposing that the present Lord Canadine was rather reluctant to make a fuss?’

  ‘Quite right. Or rather, he had been, at the time the statue was made off with. He’d just made a speech in the Lords, as it happened, about pornography and so on. You know the kind of thing. Lady Chatterley’s Mother.’

  ‘Lover,’ Oswyn said.

  ‘Exactly, my dear boy. So it would have been rather embarrassing to call in the coppers. But when he was tipped the wink that this Venus, or Diana, or whoever she was, might be valuable – ’

  ‘He regretted his delicacy of feeling.’ Appleby didn’t venture to glance at Oswyn, who was clearly deriving keen satisfaction from this colloquy between his elderly companions.

  ‘Just that, Appleby. And I’m dashed if I don’t feel rather the same about my picture. Of course, one wants to do the decent thing by these people–’

  ‘Of course,’ Appleby agreed gravely. It was obviously the Royal Family who were being thus described.

  ‘But there are limits, after all. If this dashed daub was by Duccio–’

  ‘Or Pollaiuolo,’ Oswyn said, ‘or Mariotto Albertinelli, or Pietro Berretini da Cortona.’

  ‘Any of those.’ It was not without suspicion that Lord Cockayne glanced at his youngest son. ‘It would be a different matter, eh? I certainly think we should have the thing back. And let the long-haired chaps have a look at it.’ Lord Cockayne finished his third glass of port and looked quickly at Appleby. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘To recover your painting? Not, I hope, as long a time as it has been lost for. But you must consider that, if it is really valuable and was stolen because it was designed to make money out of it, then it probably passed through various hands long ago.’

  ‘Very true, of course.’ Cockayne nodded with a great appearance of sagacity. ‘But you must come down and have a look round on the spot. Fingerprints and so forth, eh? Get that boy of yours to bring you. He knows our ways.’

  Appleby, although doubtless gratified at having thus attributed to his son a familiar acquaintance with aristocratic courses, produced only a cautious reply. Only the day before, he had been announcing to Judith a positive determination to penetrate to Keynes Court. But now, as his old professional instinct was rekindled in the face of this whole bizarre affair, he had an impulse to preserve for himself a complete freedom of action. Moreover the notion of the slightly dotty Lord Cockayne breathing down his neck while he pottered round Keynes Court looking for fingerprints carelessly disposed there a generation ago was ludicrous rather than appealing. Moreover, just at the moment, he had a strong sense that Mr Hildebert Braunkopf of the Da Vinci Gallery was his immediate quarry. It was true that the anti-pornographic Lord Canadine, so awkwardly circumstanced because of his father’s indelicate comportment with a Graeco-Roman antique, constituted another beckoning presence. His small misfortune certainly belonged with the series, and enforced the conclusion that somebody variously well versed in artistic matters had been masterminding the whole thing. But Appleby didn’t know Lord Canadine, and he did know Mr Braunkopf. There had been a time when he was almost an authority on the workings of Mr Braunkopf’s mind.

  So Appleby got up with appropriate murmurs, and took his leave of the Lywards.

  Something had happened to the Da Vinci Gallery since his last visit. On that occasion Mr Braunkopf had assembled a number of works by Pietro Torrigiano – a surprising number, considering the known paucity of anything portable by that celebrated contriver of monumental sculpture. But then Mr Braunkopf was an enterprising man. In the modest window of his establishment, Appleby recalled, there had been exhibited a large photograph of the head of Joseph of Arimathaea from Michelangelo’s celebrated Pietà in Florence. It is well known that this is a self-portrait of Michelangelo – which is why Joseph is represented with a broken nose. For Michelangelo had his nose broken as a boy and by another boy, when the two ought to have been engaged decorously in the study of Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci chapel. This second boy – three yea
rs younger, indeed, than Michelangelo – was none other than Torrigiano, whom it has in consequence been incumbent upon all good Florentines to hate ever since. These interesting biographical particulars, appearing in neat print beneath St Joseph and repeated in the catalogue which Mr Braunkopf had prepared for his patrons within, had somehow had the effect of authenticating the objects on view. So (for the guileless, at least) had the scrupulosity with which a few bore descriptions like ‘Possibly an atelier piece’ and ‘Thought by Prof. Salignac to be by a pupil during the Seville period’ and ‘Almost certainly a copy by Gerard Christmas (ob. 1634)’. A congruous background, moreover, had been provided for the battered memorials of Torrigiano’s industry. The eroded stones and the shards of painted terracotta had been niched and nested protectively in sombre velvets, and the few bronzes were lit by very subdued spotlights. Mr Braunkopf had been subdued too; he had put aside the more exuberant of his persona (the Duveen one) in favour of the muted and hieratic stance which his intimates understood to be modelled upon the late Mr Berenson.

  But today all this had vanished. The not very extensive facade of the Da Vinci had been given a coat of brilliant acrylic paint; and in the interior, too, it might be said that everything had changed utterly, and a terrible beauty been born. The window, indeed, prepared one. Gone were the compassionate, if broken-nosed, features of St Joseph, and in their place hung what appeared to be an enormous blow-up from a strip cartoon. The face of a lady done in dots or stipples each the size of a sixpence was pensively posed upon an elongated and obtrusively manicured hand; and lest one should miss the implication of this brooding guise there was a wavy line ascending from the crown of her head to a bubble in which was inscribed the single word THINKS. Appleby (being a trained detective) had no difficulty in interpreting this evidence. Mr Braunkopf and the Da Vinci (for a few weeks, at least) had gone Pop.

  And Mr Braunkopf himself was on view. This, indeed, was the only way in which he could with propriety be described, so triumphantly had he achieved the appearance of being – so to speak – one of his own exhibits. Gone was the Duveen outfit which had been so finely congruous with Pietro Torrigiano, and which had been closely modelled upon the more formal morning attire of King George the Fifth. Instead of Savile Row Mr Braunkopf had betaken himself (it was to be supposed) to the neighbourhood of Carnaby Street. Except for his years (and, even more, for his figure, which was yet more rotund than of old), Mr Braunkopf was indistinguishable from one of those almost young gentlemen who alternate minstrelsy for the million with the final summits and acclivities of mystical experience. His nether limbs were encased in brilliant orange jeans so constricting as to suggest that they had been assembled on his person by a particularly muscular tailor required in some surgical interest to provide him with a new and permanent outer integument. Above this, Mr Braunkopf ballooned out in an ample velvet garment, predominantly magenta in colour, but with anything that might have been overpowering in this tastefully relieved with silver braid and unexpected excrescences in fur and feathers. On a slender chain round Mr Braunkopf’s far from slender neck hung a small silver bell.

  Becoming aware of Appleby, Mr Braunkopf rang the little bell with vigour. He then advanced with arms raised in a gesture combining astonishment, welcome, and a hint of priestly benediction.

  ‘The goot Sir John!’ Mr Braunkopf said. ‘Vot happinesses – yes, no? You come in the van?’

  ‘I’ve simply walked–’

  ‘And my other goot freund patron Lady Abbleby parking her limousine, puttikler difficult this distrik now on account of all these nobles gentry and other carriage persons’ – Mr Braunkopf gestured confidently at his largely untenanted rooms – ‘eagersomely frequenting this prestigious manifestation the Da Vinci Gallery?’

  ‘My dear Braunkopf – I don’t, to begin with, keep a van in London, and–’

  ‘You come in the van, yes, and Lady Abbleby in the rearguard, no?’

  ‘Oh, I see. No, my wife is in the country. She’ll be sorry to have missed your show.’ Thus masking his evil intentions from the innocent Braunkopf, Appleby glanced round the exhibition. It ran, he saw, to Op as well as Pop. There were some three-dimensional contraptions so delicately exploiting the principle of parallax that they appeared to be in ceaseless movement merely because it is impossible to maintain the organs of human vision perfectly immobile in space. Others, of grosser motion, required to be plugged into the Da Vinci’s electricity supply; they were a kind of aesthetic sophistication, Appleby reflected, of those coin-operated automata which had rendered glamorous the railway platforms and seaside piers of his childhood; one or two were constructed, by a perverse ingenuity, out of cheap plastic materials which would have contrived to be sensuously repellent even in the mere unworked sheet or slab. Most of the pictures on the walls operated – rather more successfully – on similar lines. The spectator was looking at a wilderness of hypertrophied advertisements and strip-cartoons, and in doing so he was also looking at designs of great formal precision and purity. Appleby found these disguisings and collidings disconcerting. They also made him aware of his umbrella and bowler hat. And Mr Braunkopf – a perceptive man in certain limited professional relations – appeared to read the signs and act on them.

  ‘For you and me, Sir John, it is not so goot, no? Our vorlt is vorlt of puttikler prestigious Old Masters Mantegna Martini Masaccio Masolino Magnasco Michelangelo Michelozzo, yes?’ Having thus – and as it were by means of some interior consultation of a Dictionary of Art – achieved this roll-call of the great, Mr Braunkopf paused impressively. He seemed to have forgotten the surprisingly trendy character of his present attire. ‘But for the yunk, Sir John, there is differences. For the yunk all this ephemerious art’ – Mr Braunkopf’s gesture round his gallery was now indulgent and patronizing – ‘is inciting, yes? Say for the enthusiastical but incriminating children of my goot freunds Sir John and Lady Abbleby. I keep one two three four special pieces this inciting art for birthday presents the incriminating children my goot freunds. Not expensive. Quite some not so expensive as the yunk would guess.’ Mr Braunkopf lingered appealingly on this last consideration. It was a favourite with him when the purchase of a present appeared to be in prospect. ‘You buy, Sir John, leaving me choose special bargains account our long cordial dissociation?’

  ‘Well, no, Braunkopf. I’m afraid not. Nothing quite of that sort today. I’m looking for something rather different, as a matter of fact.’ Appleby contrived to glance round about him in a cautious and even furtive fashion. ‘I have an uncle, you see, who is a very old man, and uncommonly rich. Fond of pictures, as it happens, and I thought it might be nice to make him a little present.’ Appleby lowered his voice significantly. ‘But what he likes are – well, pictures of a certain character. You understand?’

  It was evident that Mr Braunkopf understood. Nor did he betray any sign of finding at all out of the way the appearance in the Da Vinci Gallery on such an errand of a retired Commissioner of Police. Dignified and unperturbed deliberation was what his attitude now suggested. His establishment was known, after all, to be an almost preternaturally ethical concern. Its monolithic character in this regard was no doubt such that it could suffer a chip or two from time to time without much noticing.

  ‘A goot class of erotica, yes?’ he murmured. ‘Sir John, you please stamp this way. You stamp into my sanctum quick look three four superior curiosa-type vorks of art for authentink connoisseurs. Henry Fuseli, Sir John. Most respectful reputacious artist and religious person. Royal Academician, the same as John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, J M W Turner.’

  ‘I don’t think my uncle would care to own any Fuselis. As you say, Fuseli was a clergyman before he turned artist. That would make my uncle a little uneasy, I feel. As a matter of fact, I have something else in mind. An old colleague has told me about the shameful manner in which you were deceived about a Giulio Romano. I gathered you suffered a heavy financial loss.’

  ‘That was nothings, Sir John.’ Mr
Braunkopf produced a lavishly careless gesture which failed entirely to obscure the sudden wary expression on his face. ‘A large concernment like the Da Vinci, with close connectings Paris New York San Francisco Berlin Milan Valparaiso, is undefected by such small swindlings. Sir John, I have one puttikler genuine ancient Roman brothel scene–’

  ‘What has struck me, Braunkopf, is that you must still possess the copy of the Giulio that you were left with. A firm of your reputation couldn’t think of putting such a thing on the market. I suppose you have it simply stowed away somewhere on the premises?’

  ‘Of course, Sir John. Entiresomely of course.’ Mr Braunkopf – Appleby felt himself instructed to observe – was now almost agitated. ‘But, Sir John, I have two three voonderble stimulacious top-class pornographical–’

  ‘I’d like to see the copy of the Giulio now, please. As a matter of fact, Braunkopf, I might take it off your hands at a moderate price. If Nanna and Pippa are what they are cracked up to be, you know, my uncle would probably like them very much. And he wouldn’t care a damn about the thing being a copy. So a deal might be to our common advantage, wouldn’t you say?’

  Braunkopf had palpably no inclination to say anything of the sort. He was looking at his good friend Sir John Appleby with something like animosity. Appleby naturally found this interesting. It had been quite on the spur of the moment that he had invented a salacious uncle for himself. Now he had a sudden suspicion that this freakish performance was going to pay off; that revelation, if only of a minor order, was just round the corner. And this persuasion increased with him at Braunkopf’s next move.

  ‘Misfortunately, Sir John, it is not possibles.’ The harassed proprietor of the Da Vinci spread out apologetic hands. ‘I just recollek this small trifling fraud been loaned to manifestation of fakes frauds forgeries copies National Museum of Patagonia.’