From London Far (36 page)

And then Mr Neff had been got at to collect. Don Perez, Properjohn, Flosdorf: these or others (and the story was common enough) had for their own advantage set him to buying art. But Mr Neff (in this unlike most magnates who are induced to walk into the dealer’s parlour) had not merely bought art. He had discovered it.

And at once some ever-present sense of inferiority was relieved. He was no longer merely a Merchant – the wealthiest of whose order all human testimony massively declares to be inferior to the poorest Scholar, the most meagre Artist. For his understanding of this new world of values was intuitive and immediate, and by this understanding his life was raised to a higher plane. He knew that art is beautiful – and this was more than his purveyor of pictures, Flosdorf really did. When people who lived unchallenged upon this peak of culture came to look at the Leonardo and Raphael cartoons, the Dürer drawings, and the Rembrandt etchings, they had the same understanding as himself – in essence the same and no more – of what turned upon the way the light fell and the lines went across the paper. The
outré
Neff, assertive and uneasy, abundantly aware of the absurdity of his Cottage with its dove and sharks and octopodes and moving platforms, discovered that Nature, after all, had endowed him with the purest and most exact aesthetic taste. And to this discrimination, therefore, he had hitched the most powerful impulses of his abundant ego. His self-esteem, although it feigned to be, as of old, wholly implicated in the Big-Business game, was actually packed in this new, single basket. He knew that art is beautiful; and so he could not have enough of it. Honestly or dishonestly, he bought it up. And somewhere in this fantastic building, then, was the Dragon’s hoard. Meredith and Jean were to be led to it that night.

Arrived thus far, and obliviously eating caviare for the first time in years, Meredith came back to the problem from which he had set out. Why Higbed? Why was that ill-treated but assuaged psychiatrist now kept lurking on the outskirts of Dove Cottage, like an ambulance or a fire-engine on the fringes of an aerodrome? What could the explanation be?

Across Mr Neff’s elaborately laden board Meredith caught Jean’s eye, and discerned in it a glint of provisional triumph. Certainly the stocks of Pygmalionism and iconolagnia had fallen low, for the nature of their host’s interest in the plastic arts was evidently as irreproachable as Ruskin’s had ever been, and a good deal more relevant. Indeed (thought Meredith, going into a learned reverie) there might be rather more reason for suspecting that Ruskin had made love-objects of pictures than there was for supposing that Mr Neff did so. It was, of course, not inconceivable that Mr Neff in all this led a sort of double life; that his secret collection sometimes satisfied his sheer artistic sense and at other times ministered to delusions or obsessions. It was not necessary to suppose that he would fain bite collops from the Horton
Venus
, or that he struggled with a temptation to invite his acquaintances to inspect her through a keyhole. Some less specific confusion might easily be dangerous to the employees who had criminally brought the collection together. Art was something new to Mr Neff; if his mental balance was naturally poor might it not have become a focus of attention so compelling as intermittently to usurp reality? Moving in a necessary secrecy and solitude amid a hundred resplendent evocations of the Renaissance, his eye constantly conversing with the glowing pastorals of Palma and the resplendent palaces of Veronese, travelling down the Venetian vistas of Canaletto and Guardi –

Meredith became aware of the grossly alliterative nature of this speculation and looked suspiciously at the wine-glass beside him. The stuff, whatever it was, had nothing of the qualities of Don Perez’s noble claret; it was far from clearing the brain; it favoured the silent composition of bad prose. But the point was this: might not Mr Neff, endlessly communing in his silent and secret gallery with all those potent memorials of another age, come imperceptibly to step in among them – or let them step from their frames like the deceased baronets in
Ruddigore
? And might not this be a likely road to sporadic delusions of grandeur to the control of which a Higbed might appositely be called – his patient one who had persuaded himself that he was a pope or a doge, a Borgia or a Medici or a Montefeltro? And Meredith, much taken with this new idea, looked up the table at his host. He looked up the table and sighed. For Mr Neff, somehow, did not look like even the most intermittent Borgia or Sforza or Gonzaga. He had the appearance of being altogether unintermittently Otis K Neff. It was evident that others besides Jean and Meredith had wind of the hoard, and that one of these was Mr Gipson. He was a dwarf of a man – it is dwarfs, after all, Meredith thought, who traditionally search out the hoards of dragons – but of those present at Mr Neff’s table tonight it was he who seemed to approach nearest to the status of a colleague rather than a client. Mr Neff was disposed to talk business, with occasional explanatory asides to Jean on the magnitude of the interests involved and the infinite guile required in the handling of them. But the mind of Mr Gipson was running on art. Almost certainly he had no notion that art was beautiful. But he was plainly confident that there must be something to it – probably money – if it was being covertly trafficked in by his astute friend. Mr Gipson therefore, without at all knowing what the attempt would reveal, was doing his best to look through the keyhole. And Mr Neff was opposing him. In fact, the Dragon – in this wholly unlike the man with half a dozen mistresses hidden about a town – had no disposition to let anyone glimpse his riches. If the Pantellis were to be let in, this was no doubt in order to impress them with the singularly little consequence in which the owner of so extensive a collection would regard a mere two or three dubious Giorgiones.

‘Neff,’ said Mr Gipson, ‘I wonder you don’t think to brighten this place up. A bit sombre, to my mind.’

‘That so? Take a drink.’ And Mr Neff turned back to Jean. ‘Yes,’ he said heavily, ‘nowadays it’s Time Factor all through. When I started it was Business Efficiency, which meant buying more comptometers and having your files so that only the Business Efficiency folk could handle them. But now it’s Time Factor that’s the secret. You saw me on the long-distance before we sat down? That was Jo’burg. And what they said means I leave for the Coast six tomorrow morning. Drummey’s out there on the lake tuning up now.’

‘Dear me!’ Jean was impressed. For there must be a genuine complexity about operations in which a message from Johannesburg sends a man shooting off to the shores of the Pacific. ‘And shall you be there long?’

‘Mightn’t even get there. A radio might come when we were an hour out meaning it might be best to turn round and meet a man for dinner in London.’

‘I see.’ Transport was evidently a very different thing for Mr Neff to what it was for his clandestine friends of the International Society. No furniture vans, no Flying Foxes, no interminable crawling obsolete submarines. Just up in the air with Mr Drummey and to all intents and purposes you were on your own magic carpet. ‘Do you often–’

But now Mr Gipson got going in earnest. ‘Take that drab picture,’ he said; ‘the one with the two women and the two kids fooling in a rockery.’

‘That’s a Leonardo,’ said Mr Neff quickly.

‘No doubt it is. I don’t say it’s not high-class. But I do say it’s drab.’

Jean twisted round. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the infant St John the Baptist (for it was these that Mr Gipson had described) were indeed posed before a vast grotto. There could, Jean supposed, be few more precious objects in the world than this unknown conflation of the Virgin of the Rocks and the Royal Academy cartoon. But the charcoal on brown paper, sparely heightened with white, was no doubt on the drab side.

‘Nice enough for a corner of your billiard-room,’ said Mr Gipson.

Mr Neff flushed and for a moment looked Renaissance enough – for the temper of some orgulous despot glinted in his eye. ‘Nice enough, hey?’ he said. ‘If you’d care to know, that cartoon is the one mentioned by Lomazzo as having been in the possession of a guy called Aurelio Luini. And now it’s mine. I bought it fair and square from a bankrupt Graf in Hungary a bit before the war.’

‘I don’t care whether you bought it from a giraffe or not.’ And Mr Gipson, as he produced this childish witticism, guffawed loudly. ‘I don’t care whether you bought it from a dromedary. It’s drab.’

‘Very well; it’s drab.’ And Mr Neff turned away to another of his guests. ‘About what I was telling you,’ he said. ‘Time Factor again. I locked that option in my safe just sixteen minutes before the news broke.’

‘And it’s not only drab. It’s odd.’

Had Mr Neff, it occurred to Meredith, exercised a little control over what he received in return for large cheques to his wine merchant, Mr Gipson might not have been so absolute. Or was he, perhaps, like a skilled
picador
enraging his bull?

‘It may be by Leon Ardo or Tom Ardo or Dick Ardo,’ pursued Mr Gipson. ‘But it’s odd, all the same. And I suppose you paid a tidy sum for it?’

‘I paid’, said Mr Neff breathing heavily, ‘a lot more than you could ever put your hand in your pocket for Jeff Gipson.’

‘I don’t say you didn’t. I’ve known folk interested in cattle would give any amount of money for a two-headed calf. And that’s just what that picture is.’

‘Jeff Gipson–’

‘Don’t you get mad. Just look and you’ll see it’s that. It’s not two women at all. It’s one woman with two necks and two heads.’

This was an acute observation on Mr Gipson’s part, and it set his host momentarily at a stand. But Mr Neff now looked so exceedingly angry that Jean though she would attempt a little pacification. ‘But that’, she said, ‘is because Leonardo when he was a child didn’t know whether he had one mother or two. That’s why the Virgin and St Anne are sort of fused together. Also when he was an infant he had an adventure with a bird, and so he keeps on putting the silhouettes of birds into his pictures without ever being aware of it.’

But this scientific information, with which Dr Higbed himself could not have been more ready, was not well received by Mr Neff. ‘Mothers?’ he said. ‘Stuff and nonsense! When those great painters are at their easels they aren’t thinking of Mother, same as we might be with the second Sunday in May coming along. Not even with the underside of their minds, they aren’t.’ And Mr Neff pointed a confident finger at the cartoon. ‘It’s the mass’, he continued, ‘and the planes and the edges. And getting the draperies monumental and to look like some great mystery. A mystery that kind of draws you right into itself.’ Mr Neff checked himself abruptly. ‘And so much for your two-headed calf, Jeff Gipson.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Gipson. ‘If you don’t know a whole heap! And all I say is, bring out a coloured one and brighten the place up. Looks like you might be a mortician with all that dingy stuff around.’

‘What d’you mean by dingy stuff, you ignorant cuss?’ And Mr Neff gestured largely round his dining-room. ‘What Berenson say – hey? What Borenius and Fry say – and Bredius and Brinkmann and Venturi?’

‘Never met ’em,’ said Mr Gipson. ‘And no more did you.’

‘And what you mean bring out a coloured one?’ Mr Neff had risen to his feet in his wrath. ‘What you mean by it, you Jeff Gipson?’

‘Kidding everybody!’ said Mr Gipson witheringly. ‘Kidding folk you collect art big! Kind of hinting and having your stooges whispering. Bring out a coloured one from the pictures you haven’t got. That’s what I mean.’

‘Who says I don’t–’ Mr Neff checked himself just in time. ‘Hell!’ he mumbled. ‘What is all this, anyway? I don’t go in for pictures any. Know what I like. A few quiet things you see about, like that Leonardo. Don’t attend to them much. Flosdorf picks them up for me when he has nothing better to do and hangs them about the place.’

Far down the table Meredith could see that the assistant thus invoked was mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief. And certainly to have his employer’s illicit hoard thus nearly betrayed in anger to the wily Gipson and a heterogeneous collection of guests must be harassing enough. It was something which might, indeed, be described as sitting on a volcano. But where – and once more Meredith approached the heart of the mystery – where, in this simple scheme of things, did Higbed come in?

The question was soon to have its sufficiently dramatic answer, and Meredith was to realize that long ago he had been given more pointers to it than one. Indeed, if he and Jean had set out looking, not for adventures, but for clues, they could quickly – he was to realise – have assembled the elements of an orthodox mystery around themselves. But his mind had not been working this way, and when the revelation actually came he was a good deal slower than Jean to tumble to it. Perhaps this was because he had been constrained to drink rather more of Mr Neff’s deplorably untrustworthy wines. Or perhaps it was because he was finally misled by what appeared to be the implication in certain observations of Flosdorf’s.

In stoutly asserting that his artistic possessions ran to no more than a few Leonardo and Raphael cartoons, some hundreds of Rembrandt etchings, a like number of drawings by Holbein and Dürer, together with such other exhibits of a quiet, drab, or monochrome nature as Flosdorf had hung about the Cottage, it was evident that Mr Neff had been obliged to make a herculean effort of self-denial. To dissemble for the purposes of some business manoeuvre his power or holdings in a dozen companies; to deny that the dove or the conveyor belts or the sharks and octopodes were children of his own brain: these would have been acts of abnegation as nothing in the comparison. For although Mr Neff might pretend still to a consuming satisfaction in the contemplation of options locked in a safe or in the lightning execution of plans prompted by long-distance calls to Johannesburg, his heart was in truth in none of these things. Wholly and utterly he was a collector and a lover of the old and beautiful things he secretly owned. To deny the existence of these must have been a severe trial to one who had long and largely indulged himself in habits of ostentation.