“Here we go,” he said.
They collected the canvases from the car and walked to the Alleyns’ house, which was at the end of a blind street near Montpelier Square. It was such a natural and familiar thing for Nicola to take this evening walk that her anxieties left her, and by the time they reached their destination and Troy herself opened the door to them, she felt nothing but pleasure in their expedition.
Troy was wearing the black trousers and smock that meant she had been working. Her shortish dark hair capped a spare head and fell in a single lock across her forehead. Andrew stood to attention and carried his canvases as if they were something rather disgraceful that had been found in the guardroom.
“I’m in the studio,” Troy said. “Shall we go there? It’s a better light.”
Andrew himself fell in and followed them.
There was a large charcoal drawing on the easel in Troy’s studio: a woman with a cat. On the table where Troy had been working were other drawings under a strong lamp.
Andrew said: “Mrs. Alleyn, it’s terribly kind of you to let me come.”
“Why?” Troy said, cheerfully. “You’re going to show me some work, aren’t you?”
“Oh God!” Andrew said. “So Nicola tells me.”
Troy looked at him in a friendly manner and began to talk about the subject of the drawing, saying how paintable and silly she was, always changing her hair and coming in the wrong clothes, and that the drawing was a study for a full-scale portrait. Andrew eased up a little.
Nicola said: “There are one or two things to explain.”
“Not as many as you may think. Rory rang up an hour ago from Little Codling.”
“Did he tell you about Andrew’s stepfather?”
“Yes, he did. I expect,” Troy said to Andrew, “it seems unreal as well as dreadful, doesn’t it?”
“In a way it does. We — I didn’t see much of him. I mean—”
“Andrew,” Nicola said, “insists that the Cid has got him down among the suspects.”
“Well, it’s not for me to say,” Troy replied, “but I didn’t think it sounded like that. Let’s have a look at your things.”
She took her drawing off the easel and put it against the wall. Andrew dropped all his paintings on the floor with a sudden crash. “I’m frightfully sorry,” he said.
“Come on,” Troy said. “I’m not a dentist. Put it on the easel.”
The first painting was a still life: tulips on a window sill in a red goblet with rooftops beyond them.
“Hul-lo!” Troy said and sat down in front of it.
Nicola wished she knew a great deal more about painting. She could see it was incisive, freely done and lively, with a feeling for light and colour. She realized that she would have liked it very much if she had come across it somewhere else. It didn’t look at all amateurish.
“Yes, well of course,” Troy said, and it was clear that she meant: “Of course you’re a painter and you were right to show me this.” She went on talking to Andrew, asking him about his palette and the conditions under which he worked. Then she saw his next canvas, which was a portrait. Désirée’s flaming hair and cadaverous eyes leapt out of a flowery background. She had sat in a glare of sunlight and the treatment was far from being conventional.
“My mum,” Andrew said.
“You had fun with the colour, didn’t you? Don’t you find the eye-round-the-corner hell to manage in a three-quarter head? This one hasn’t quite come off, has it? Look, it’s that dab of pink that hits up. Now, let’s see the next one.”
The next and last one was a male torso uncompromisingly set against a white wall. It had been painted with exhaustive attention to anatomy. “Heavens!” Troy ejaculated. “You’ve practically skinned the man.” She looked at it for some time and then said: “Well, what are you going to do about this? Would you like to work here once a week?”
After that Andrew was able to talk to her and did so with such evident delight that Nicola actually detected in herself a twinge of something that astonished her and gave an edge to her extreme happiness.
It was not until much later, when Troy had produced lager, and they were telling her about the Grantham Gallery project, that Nicola remembered Mr. Period.
“I think,” she told Troy, “you’re going to be approached by my new boss. He’s writing a book on etiquette and his publishers want a drawing of him. He’s rather shy about asking because you turned down one of his lordly chums. You know him, don’t you? Mr. Pyke Period?”
“Yes, of course I do. He crops up at all the Private Views that he thinks are smart occasions. I’ll be blowed if I’ll draw him.”
“I was afraid that might be your reaction.”
“Well,” Troy said, “there’s no denying he really is a complete old phony. Do you know he once commissioned a pupil of mine to do a painting from some print he’d picked up, of a Georgian guardee making faces at a thunderstorm. He said it was one of his ancestors, and so it may have been, but after a lot of beating about the bush he made it quite clear that he wanted this job faked to look like an eighteenth-century portrait. My pupil was practically on the breadline at the time and I’m afraid the thing was done.”
“Oh, dear!” Nicola sighed. “I know. It’s there, in the library, I think. He’s like that, but he’s rather an old sweetie-pie, all the same. Isn’t he, Andrew?”
“Nicola,” said Andrew, “I daresay he is. But he’s a terrible old donkey. And yet — I don’t know. Is P.P. just plain silly? I doubt it. I rather think there’s an element of low cunning.”
“Childish, not low,” Nicola insisted, but Andrew was looking at her with such a degree of affectionate attention that she was extremely flustered.
“Well,” Andrew said. “Never mind, anyway, about P.P.”
“I can’t help it. He was so miserable all the afternoon. You know: trying to forge ahead with his tips on U-necessities, as he inevitably calls them, and then falling into wretched little trances. He really was in a bad state. Everything seemed to upset him.”
“What sorts of things?” Troy asked. “Have some more lager?”
“No, thank you. Well, he kept singing in an extremely dismal manner. And then he would stop and turn sheet-white. He muttered something about ‘No, no, I mustn’t — better forget it,’ and looked absolutely terrified.”
“How very odd,” Andrew said. “What was his song?”
“I don’t remember — yes, I do!” Nicola exclaimed. “Of course I do! Because he’d done the same sort of thing yesterday, after lunch: hummed it and then been cross with himself. But it was different today. He seemed quite shattered.”
“And the song?”
“It was the pop-song that ghastly Leonard kept whistling through his teeth at luncheon. He even sang a bit of it when they were looking at the cigarette case: If you mean what I think you mean, O.K. by me. Things aren’t always what they seem. O.K. by me.”
“Not exactly a ‘Period piece.’ ”
“It was all very rum.”
“Did you happen to mention it to Rory?” Troy asked.
“No. I haven’t seen him since it happened. And anyway, why should I?”
“No reason at all, I daresay.”
“Look,” Nicola said quickly, “however foolish he may be, Mr. Period is quite incapable of the smallest degree of hanky-panky—” She stopped short and the now familiar jolt of indefinable panic revisited her. “Serious hanky-panky, I mean,” she amended.
“Good Lord, no!” Andrew said. “Of course he is. Incapable, I mean.”
Nicola stood up. “It’s a quarter to twelve,” she said. “We must go, Andrew. Poor Troy!”
The telephone rang and Troy answered it. The voice at the other end said quite distinctly: “Darling?”
“Hullo,” Troy said. “Still at it?”
“Very much so. Is Nicola with you?”
“Yes,” Troy said. “She and Andrew Bantling.”
“Could I have a word with her?”
“Here you are.”
Troy held out the receiver and Nicola took it feeling her heart thud stupidly against her ribs.
“Hullo, Cid,” she said.
“Hullo, Nicola. There’s something that’s cropped up here that you might just possibly be able to give me a line about. After I left you today, did you discuss our conversation with anybody?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “With Andrew.”
“Anyone else? Now don’t go jumping to conclusions, there’s a good child, but did Mr. Period want to know if you told me anything about his luncheon party?”
Nicola swallowed. “Yes, he did. But it was only, poor lamb, because he hates the idea of your hearing about the digs Mr. Cartell made at his snob-values. He was terribly keen to know if I’d told you anything about the baptismal register story.”
“And you said you had told me?”
“Well, I had to, when he asked me point-blank. I made as little of it as I could.”
“Yes. I see. One other thing — and it’s important, Nicola. Do you, by any chance, know anything that would connect Mr. Period with a popular song?”
“A song! No — not—”
“Something about O.K. by me?”