“Anything?” asked Bard, leaning down.
“I don’t know.”
“Shall I get a damp cloth or something?”
“Yes, do. If the Hewsons don’t mind.”
Miss Hewson was in ecstasies over a Victorian scrap depicting an innocent child surrounded by rosebuds. She said: “Sure, sure. Go right ahead.” Mr Hewson was asleep.
Troy wiped the little painting over with an exquisite handkerchief her husband had bought her in Bruges. Trees. A bridge. A scrap of golden sky.
“Exhibit I. My very, very own face-flannel,” said Bard, squatting beside her. “Devotion could go no further. I have added (Exhibit 2) a smear of my very, very own soap. It’s called Spruce.”
The whole landscape slowly emerged: defaced here and there by dirt and scars in the surface, but not, after all, in bad condition.
In the foreground: water-and a lane that turned back into the middle-distance. A pond and a ford. A child in a vermilion dress with a hay-rake. In the middle-distance, trees that reflected in countless leafy mirrors, the late afternoon sun. In the background: a rising field, a spire, a generous and glowing sky.
“It’s sunk,” Troy muttered. “We could oil it out.”
“What does that mean?”
“Wait a bit. Dry the surface, can you?”
She went to her cabin and came back with linseed oil on a bit of paint-rag. “This won’t do any harm,” she said. “Have you got the surface dry? Good. Now then.”
And in a minute the little picture was clearer and cleaner and speaking bravely for itself.
“ ‘Constables’,” Caley Bard quoted lightly, “ ‘all over the place’. Or did you say ‘swarming’.”
Troy looked steadily at him for a moment and then returned to her oiling. Presently she gave a little exclamation and at the same moment Dr Natouche’s great voice boomed out: “It is a picture of Ramsdyke. That is the lock and the lane and, see, there is the ford and the church spire above the hill.”
The others, who had been clustered round Miss Hewson’s treasures on the table, all came to look at the painting.
Troy said: “Shall we put it in a better light?”
They made way for her. She stood on the window seat and held the painting close to a wall lamp. She examined the back of the canvas and then the face again.
“It’s a good picture,” Mr Lazenby pronounced. “Old fashioned of course. Early Victorian. But it certainly looks a nice bit of work, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn?”
“Yes,” Troy said. “Yes. It does. Very nice.”
She got down from the seat.
“Miss Hewson,” she said, “I was in the gallery here this morning. They’ve got a Constable. One of his big, celebrated worked-up pieces. I think you should let an expert see this thing because—well because as Mr Lazenby says it’s a very good work of its period and because it might have been painted by the same hand and because—well, if you look closely you will see—it is signed in precisely the same manner.”
-4-
“For pity’s sake,” Troy said, “don’t take my word for anything. I’m not an expert. I can’t tell, for instance, how old the actual canvas may be though I do know it’s not contemporary and I do know it’s the way he signed his major works. ‘John Constable. R.A.f.’ and the date, 1830, which, I think, was soon after he became an R.A.
“R.A.?” asked Miss Hewson.
“Royal Academician.”
“Hear that, Earl? what’s the ‘f’ signify, Mrs Allyn?”
“Fecit.”
There was a considerable pause.
“Fake it!” Miss Hewso said in a strangled voice. “Did you say ‘fake’?”
Dr Natouche made a curious little sound in his throat. Mr Lazenby seemed to choke back some furious ejaculation. Troy, with Caley’s devilish eye upon her, explained. There was a further silence.
It’s bloody hot down here,” said Mr Pollock.
“Tell us more,” Caley invited Troy.
She glared at him and continued. “Of course the thing may be a copy of an original Constable. I don’t think there’s an established work of his that has Ramsdyke Lock as its subject. That doesn’t say he didn’t paint Ramsdyke Lock when he was in these parts.”
“And it doesn’t say,” Mr Lazenby added, “that this isn’t the Ramsdyke Lock he painted.”
Miss Hewson, who seemed never to have heard of Constable until Troy made her remark at Ramsdyke, now became madly excited. She pointed out the excellencies of the picture and how you could just fancy yourself walking up that little old-world lane into the sunset.
Mr Hewson woke up and after listening, in his dead-pan, honest-to-God, dehydrated manner to his sister’s ravings asked Troy what, supposing this item was in fact the genuine product of this guy, it might be worth in real money.
Troy said she didn’t know—a great deal. Thousands of pounds. It depended upon the present demand for Constables.
“But don’t for Heaven’s sake go by anything I say. As for forgeries, I am reminded—” She stopped. “I suppose it doesn’t really apply,” she said. “You’d hardly expect to find an elaborate forgery in a junk-shop yard at Tollardwark, would you?”
“But you were going to tell us a story,” Bard said. “Mayn’t we have it?”
“It was only that Rory, my husband, had a case quite recently in which a young man, just for the hell of it, forged an Elizabethan glove and did it so well that the top experts were diddled.”
“As you say, Mrs Alleyn,” said Mr Lazenby, “it doesn’t really apply. But about forgeries. I always ask myself—”
They were off on an argument that can be depended upon to ruffle more tempers in quicker time than most others. If a forgery was “that good” it could take in the top experts, why wasn’t it just as good in every respect as the work of the painter to whom it was falsely attributed?
To and fro went the declarations and aphorisms. Caley Bard was civilised under the heading of “the total oeuvre,” Mr Hewson said, wryly and obscurely, that every man had his price, Mr Lazenby upheld a professional view: the forgery was worthless because it was based upon a lie and clerical overtones informed his antipodean delivery. Mr Pollock’s manner was, as usual, a little off-beat. Several times, he interjected: “Oy, chum, half a tick—” only to subside in apparent embarrassment when given the floor. Miss Hewson merely stated, as if informed by an oracle, that she just knoo she’d got a genuine old master.
Dr Natouche excused himself and went below.
And Troy looked at the little picture and was visited once again by the notion that she was involved in some kind of masquerade, that the play, if there was a play, moved towards its climax, if there was a climax, that the tension, if indeed there was any tension, among her fellow-passengers, had been exacerbated by the twist of some carefully concealed screw.
She looked up. Mr Lazenby’s dark glasses were turned on her, Mr Pollock’s somewhat prominent eyes looked into hers and quickly away, Miss Hewson smiled ever so widely at her and Mr Hewson’s dead-pan grin seemed to be plastered over his mouth like a gag.
Troy said good night to them all and went to bed.
The Zodiac left for the return journey before any of the passengers were up.
They had a long morning’s cruise, passing through Crossdyke and arriving at Tollardwark at noon.
That evening the Hewsons, Mr Pollock and Mr Lazenby played Scrabble. Dr Natouche wrote letters and Caley Bard suggested a walk but Troy said that she too had letters to write. He pulled a face at her and settled with a book.
Troy supposed that Superintendent Tillottson was in Tollardwark and wondered if he expected her to call. She saw no reason to do so and was sick of confiding nebulous and unconvincing sensations. Nothing of interest to Mr Tillottson, she thought, had occurred over the past thirty-six hours. He could hardly become alerted by the discovery of a possible “Constable”: indeed he could be confidently expected if told about it to regard her with weary tolerance. Still less could she hope to interest him in her own fanciful reactions to an unprovable impression of some kind of conspiracy.