Death of a Ghost Read online

  Mr Campion looked curious. ‘What sort of man was Tanqueray?’ he said.

  Mrs Lafcadio wrinkled her nose. ‘A clever man,’ she said. ‘And his work sold more than anyone else’s in the nineties. But he had no sense of humour at all. A literal-minded person and distressingly sentimental about children. I often think that Johnnie’s work was unspoilt by the conventions of the period largely because he had a wholly unwarrantable dislike of children. Would you like to come down and see the picture? All’s ready for the great day tomorrow.’

  Mr Campion rose to his feet.

  As she tucked her arm through his and they descended the staircase she looked up at him with a delightfully confidential smile.

  ‘It’s like the mantelpiece in the Andersen story, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘We are the china figures. We come alive on one evening of the year. Tomorrow afternoon we shall retaste our former glory. I shall be the hostess, Donna Beatrice will supply the decorative note, and Lisa will wander about looking miserable, as she always did, poor creature. And then the guests will go, the picture will be sold – Liverpool Art Gallery this time, perhaps, my dear – and we shall all go to sleep again for another year.’

  She sighed and stepped down on to the tiled floor of the hall a little wearily.

  From where they stood they could see the half-glass door to the garden, in which stood the great studio which John Lafcadio had built in eighty-nine.

  The door was open, and the famous view of the ‘master’s chair’, which was said to be visible to the incoming guest once he stepped inside the front door of the house, was very clear.

  Belle raised her eyebrows. ‘A light?’ she said, and added immediately, ‘Oh, of course, that’s W. Tennyson Potter. You know him, don’t you?’

  Mr Campion hesitated. ‘I’ve heard of him and I’ve seen him at past Private Views, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually met him,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, well, then –’ She drew him aside as she spoke, and lowered her voice, although there was not the remotest chance of her being overheard. ‘My dear, he’s difficult. He lives in the garden with his wife – such a sweet little soul. I mean, Johnnie told them they could build a studio in the garden years ago when we first came here – he was sorry for the man – and so they did. Build a studio, I mean, and they’ve been here ever since. He’s an artist; an engraver on red sandstone. He invented the process and of course it never caught on – the coarse screen block is so like it – and it blighted the poor man’s life.’ She paused for breath and then rushed on again in her soft voice which had never lost the excited tone of youth. ‘He’s having a little show of his engravings, as he calls them – they’re really lithographs – in a corner of the studio as usual. Max is angry about it, but Johnnie always let him have that show when an opportunity occurred, and so I’ve put my foot down.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ said her escort.

  A gleam came into Mrs Lafcadio’s eyes. ‘Oh, but I have,’ she said. ‘I told Max not to be greedy and to behave as though he was properly brought up. He needs his knuckles rapped occasionally.’

  Campion laughed. ‘What did he do? Hurl himself at your feet in an agony of passionate self-reproach?’

  Mrs Lafcadio smiled with a touch of the most innocent malice in the world.

  ‘Isn’t he affected?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid Johnnie would have made his life unbearable for him. He reminds me of my good grandmother; so covered with frills and furbelows that there’s no way of telling where they leave off. As a child I wondered if they ever did, or if she was just purple bombasine all the way through. Well, here we are. It’s a darling studio, isn’t it?’

  They had crossed the narrow draughty strip of covered way between the garden door of the house and the studio, and now entered the huge outside room in which John Lafcadio had worked and still entertained. Like most buildings of its kind, it was an unprepossessing structure from the outside, being largely composed of corrugated iron, but inside it still reflected a great deal of the magnificent personality of its owner.

  It was a huge airy place with a polished floor, a glass roof, and two enormous fireplaces, one at either end. It was also bounded on the northern side by a low balcony, filled in below with cupboards composed of linenfold panelling rescued from a reconstructed farmhouse in the nineties. Above the balcony were five long windows, each about twelve feet high, through which was a magnificent view of the Regent’s Canal. Behind the fireplace nearest the door was a model’s room and lavatory, approached by a small archway at the extreme western corner below the balcony.

  The skeleton of the room, which is always in evidence in a building of the kind, was far more massive than is usual and effectually removed the temporary air of church hall or army hut.

  At the moment when Belle and Campion entered only one of the big hanging electric lamps was lit, so that the corners of the room were in shadow. There was no fire in the grate opposite the door, but the big old-fashioned stove in the other fireplace at the near end of the room was going and the place was warm and comforting after the chilly garden.

  Out of the shadows the famous portrait of Lafcadio by Sargent loomed from its place of honour over the carved mantel.

  Of heroic size, it had all the force, truth, and dignity of the painter’s best work, but here was an unexpected element of swashbuckling which took the spectator some time to realize as a peculiarity of the sitter rather than of the artist. In his portrait John Lafcadio appeared a personage. Here was no paint-ennobled nonentity; rather the captured distinction of a man great in his time.

  It is undeniably true, as many critics have pointed out, that he looked like a big brother of the Laughing Cavalier, even to the swagger. He was fifty when the portrait was painted, but there was very little grey in the dark red hair which galloped back from his forehead, and the contours of his face were youthful. He was smiling, his lips drawn back over very white teeth, and his moustache was the moustache of the Cavalier. His studio coat of white linen was unbuttoned and hung in a careless bravura of folds, and his quick dark eyes, although laughing, were arrogant. The picture has of course become almost hackneyed, and to describe it further would be superfluous.

  Belle kissed her hand to it. She always did so, and her friends and acquaintances put the gesture down to affectation, sentimentality, or sweet wifely affection according to their several temperaments.

  The picture of the moment, however, stood on an easel on the left of the fireplace, covered by a shawl.

  Mr Campion had taken in all this before he realized that they were not alone in the room. Over in the corner by the stove a tall thin figure in shirt-sleeves was hovering before a dozen or so whitewood frames arranged on a curtain hung over the panelling of the balcony cupboards.

  He turned as Mr Campion glanced at him, and the young man caught a glimpse of a thin red melancholy face whose wet pale eyes were set too close together above the pinched bridge of an enormous nose.

  ‘Mr Potter,’ said Belle, ‘here’s Mr Campion. You two know each other, don’t you? I’ve brought him down to see the picture.’

  Mr Potter put a thin cold hand in Mr Campion’s. ‘It’s very fine this year – very fine,’ he said, revealing a hollow voice of unutterable sadness, ‘and yet – I don’t know; “fine”, perhaps, is hardly the word. “Strong”, perhaps – “dominating” – “significant”. I don’t know – quite. “Fine”, I think. Art’s a hard master. I’ve been all the last week arranging my little things. It’s very difficult. One thing kills another, you know.’ He sent a despairing glance into the corner whence he had come.

  Belle coughed softly. ‘This is the Mr Campion, you know, Mr Potter,’ she said.

  The man looked up and his eyes livened for an instant. ‘Not the –? Oh, really? Indeed?’ he said, and shook hands again. His interest faded immediately, however, and once more he glanced in misery towards the corner.

  Campion heard the ghost of a sigh at his elbow and Belle spoke.

  ‘
You must show your prints to Mr Campion,’ she said. ‘He’s a privileged visitor and we must take him behind the scenes.’

  ‘Oh, they’re nothing, absolutely nothing,’ said Mr Potter, in agony; but he turned quite brightly and led them over to his work.

  At first sight of the array Mr Campion began to share Mr Potter’s depression.

  Red sandstone does not lend itself to lithography, and it seemed unfortunate that Mr Potter, who evidently experienced great difficulty in drawing upon anything, should have chosen so unsympathetic a medium. There was, too, a distressing sameness about the prints, most of which appeared to be rather inaccurate and indefinite botanical studies.

  Mr Potter pointed out one small picture depicting a bowl of narcissi and an inverted wineglass.

  ‘The Duke of Caith bought a copy of that once,’ he said. ‘It was the second year we started this posthumous show idea of Lafcadio’s. That was 1923. It’s now 1930: it must be seven years ago. That one has never gone again. I’ve put in a copy every year since. The picture business is very bad.’

  ‘It’s an interesting medium,’ said Mr Campion, feeling he was called upon to say something.

  ‘I like it,’ said Mr Potter simply. ‘I like it. It’s a strain, though,’ he went on, striking his thin palms together like cymbals. ‘The stones are so heavy. Difficult to print, you know – and shifting them in and out of the acid is a strain. That one over there weighed thirty-seven pounds in the stone, and that’s quite light compared with some of them. I get so tired. Well, let’s go and look at Lafcadio’s picture. It’s very fine; perhaps a bit hot – a bit hot in tone, but very fine.’

  They turned and walked down the room to where Belle, who had removed the shawl from the picture, was fiddling with an indirect lighting device round the frame.

  ‘This is Max’s idea,’ she said, shaking herself free from the tangle of flex. ‘People stay so late and it gets so dark. Ah, here it is.’

  Immediately the picture sprang into prominence. It was a big canvas, the subject the trial of Joan of Arc. The foreground was taken up with the dark backs of the judges, and between their crimson sleeves one caught a vision of the girl.

  ‘That’s my wife,’ said Mr Potter unexpectedly. ‘He often painted her, you know. Rather fine work, don’t you think? All that massing of colour. That’s typical. Great quantities of paint too. I used to say to him – in joke, you know – it’s lucky you make it yourself, John, or you’d never be able to afford it. See that blue on her scarf? That’s the Lafcadio blue. No one’s got that secret yet. The secret of the crimson had to go to help pay the death duties. Balmoral and Huxley bought it. Now any Tom, Dick, or Harry can get a tube for a few shillings.’

  Belle laughed. ‘Both you and Linda do so begrudge anyone having the secret of his colours. After all, the world’s got his pictures; why shouldn’t it have his paint? Then they’ll have the copy and the materials, and if they can’t do it too, then all the more honour to Johnnie.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Potter, ‘remember Columbus and the egg. They could all make it stand up after he’d shown them how to crack it at one end. The secret was simple, you see, but Columbus thought of it first.’

  Belle grinned. ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘as one of the busiest investigators of our time, has the real significance of the Columbus story ever dawned on you?’

  Mr Campion indicated that it had not.

  ‘That the egg was boiled, of course,’ said Belle, and went off laughing, the white frills of her bonnet trembling.

  Mr Potter looked after her. ‘She doesn’t change,’ he remarked. ‘She doesn’t change at all.’ He turned back to the picture. ‘I’ll cover it up,’ he said. ‘Lafcadio was a chap you didn’t mind waiting upon. He was a great man, a great painter. I got on with him. Some people didn’t. I remember him saying to me, “Potter, you’ve got more sense in your gluteus maximus than old Charles Tanqueray has in the whole of his own and his damned art committee’s heads put together.” Tanqueray was more popular than Lafcadio, you know, with the public; but Lafcadio was the man. They all see it now. His work is fine – very fine. A bit hot in tone – a bit hot. But very, very fine.’

  He was still muttering this magic formula when Mr Campion left him to rejoin Belle in the doorway. She took his arm again as they went into the house.

  ‘Poor Tennyson Potter,’ she murmured. ‘He’s so depressing. There’s only one thing worse than an artist who can’t draw and who thinks he can, and that’s one who can’t draw and knows he can’t. No one gets anything out of it then. But Johnnie liked him. I think it was all the stones he uses. Johnnie was rather proud of his strength. He used to enjoy heaving them about.’

  Her remarks were brought to a sudden end as they came into the hall by the appearance at the top of the stairs of an apparition in what Mr Campion at first took to be fancy dress.

  ‘Belle!’ said a feminine voice tragically. ‘You really must exert your authority. Lisa – oh, is that someone with you?’ The vision came down the stairs and Campion had time to look at her. He recognized her as Donna Beatrice, a lady who had caused a certain amount of flutter in artistic circles in 1900.

  In 1900, at the age of thirty, she had possessed that tall beauty which seems to have been a peculiarity of the period, and she had descended upon the coterie which surrounded Lafcadio, a widow with a small income and an infinite capacity for sitting still and looking lovely. Lafcadio, who could put up with anything provided it was really beautiful, had been vastly taken by her and she was referred to as ‘his Inspiration’ by those romantic feather-brained people who were loth to be uncharitable and at the same time incapable of understanding the facts.

  There were two superstitions connected with Donna Beatrice. One was that in the days when everyone was chatting about the beautiful peacock strutting so proudly about the studio, she had approached Mrs Lafcadio and, in that sweet vacant voice of hers, had murmured: ‘Belle darling, you must be Big. When a man is as great as the Master, no one woman can expect to fill his life. Let us share him, dear, and work together in the immortal cause of Art.’ And Belle, plump and smiling, had patted one of the beautiful shoulders and whispered close to one of the lovely ears: ‘Of course, my dear, of course. But let us keep it a secret from Johnnie.’

  The other superstition was that Lafcadio had never allowed her to speak in his presence; or rather, had persuaded her not to by the simple expedient of telling her that her pinnacle of beauty was achieved when her face was in repose.

  For the rest, she was an Englishwoman with no pretension at all to the ‘Donna’ or the ‘Beatrice’, which she pronounced Italian fashion, sounding the final ‘e’. Very few knew her real name; it was a secret she guarded passionately. But if in Lafcadio’s lifetime she had been content to remain beautiful but dumb, on his death she had developed an unexpected force of character inasmuch as she had shown very plainly that she had no intention of giving up the position of reflected glory which she had held so long. No one knew what arguments she had used to prevail upon Belle to permit her to take up her residence in the house, but at any rate she had succeeded now, and occupied two rooms on the second floor, where she continued her hobby of manufacturing ‘art’ jewellery and practising various forms of semi-religious mysticism to which she had lately become addicted.

  At the moment she was dressed in a long Florentine gown of old rose brocade, strongly reminiscent of Burne-Jones but cut with a curtsy to Modernity, so that the true character of the frock was lost and it became an odd nondescript garment covering her thin figure from throat to ankle. To complete her toilet she had draped a long pink and silver scarf across her shoulders and the two ends rippled beneath her with the untidy grace of a nymph on the cover of Punch.

  Her hair was frankly 1900. Its coarse gold strands had faded and there were wide silver ribbons amongst them, but the dressing was still that of the Gibson Girl, odd in a convention not old enough to be romantic.

  An incongruous note was struck by a black cord run
ning from beneath her hair to a battery on her chest, for her hearing, never good, had declined with the years and she was now practically stone-deaf except when equipped with this affront to her vanity.

  Round her neck was a beaten silver chain of her own making, hanging to her knees and weighted by a baroque enamel cross. She was a figure of faintly uncomfortable pathos, reminding the young man irresistibly of a pressed rose, a little brown about the edges and scarcely even of sentimental value.

  ‘Mr Campion?’ A surprisingly hard bony hand was thrust into his. ‘You’ve been seeing the picture, of course?’ The voice was soft and intentionally vibrant. ‘I was so thrilled when I saw it again after all these years. I remember lying on the chaise-longue in the studio while the Master painted it.’

  She dropped her eyes on the name and he had the uncomfortable impression that she was about to cross herself.

  ‘He liked to have me near whilst he was painting, you know. I know now that I always had a blue aura in those days, and that’s what inspired him. I do think there’s such a lot in Colour, don’t you? Of course, he told me it was to be a secret – even from Belle. But Belle never minds. Dear Belle.’

  She smiled at the other woman with a mixture of affection and contempt.

  ‘Do you know, I was discussing Belle with Doctor Hilda Bayman, the Mystic. She says Belle must be an old soul – meaning, you understand, that she’s been on the earth many times before.’

  Campion gave way to the embarrassment which Donna Beatrice’s mystic revelations invariably produced upon her more acute acquaintances. Pampered vanity and the cult of the Higher Selfishness he found slightly nauseating.

  Belle laughed. ‘I love to hear that,’ she said. ‘A dear old soul, I always hope. A sort of old Queen Cole. Has Linda come in yet? She went to see Tommy Dacre,’ she continued, turning to Campion. ‘He came back from Florence last night, after three years at mural work. Isn’t it tragic? The students used to paint cathedral ceilings: now they paint cinema roofs.’