‘A black-out, you mean?’
‘No. Oh, no. Just being an automaton. Saying the lines and doing the business and thinking of something else all the time.’
‘If all reports are true that’s no unusual matter where actors are concerned.’
‘Oh, in moderation, no. Johnny Garson can tell you how much paper there is in the house while he is sobbing his heart out on someone’s lap. But that’s different from being “away” for half an act. Do you realise that Geoffrey had turned his son out of the house, quarrelled with his mistress, and accused his wife of having an affaire with his best friend all without being aware of it?’
‘What was he aware of?’
‘He says he had decided to lease his Park Lane flat to Dolly Dacre and buy that Charles The Second house at Richmond that the Latimers are giving up because he has got that Governor’s appointment. He had thought about the lack of bathrooms and decided that the little upstairs room with the eighteenth-century Chinese paper would make a very good one. They could remove the beautiful paper and use it to decorate that dull little room downstairs at the back. It’s full of Victorian panelling, the dull little room. He had also reviewed the drainage, wondered if he had enough money to take the old tiling off and replace it, and speculated as to what kind of cooking range they had in the kitchen. He had just decided to get rid of the shrubbery at the gate when he found himself face to face with me, on a stage, in the presence of nine hundred and eighty-seven people, in the middle of a speech. Do you wonder that his eyes popped. I see that you have managed to read at least one of the books I brought you if the rumpled jacket is any criterion.’
‘Yes. The mountain one. It was a godsend. I lay for hours looking at the pictures. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.’
‘The stars are better, I find.’
‘Oh, no. The stars merely reduce one to the status of an amoeba. The stars take the last vestige of human pride, the last spark of confidence, from one. But a snow mountain is a nice human-size yard-stick. I lay and looked at Everest and thanked God that I wasn’t climbing those slopes. A hospital bed was a haven of warmth and rest and security by comparison, and The Midget and The Amazon two of the highest achievements of civilisation.’
‘Ah, well, here are some more pictures for you.’
Marta up-ended the quarto envelope she was carrying, and spilled a collection of paper sheets over his chest.
‘What is this?’
‘Faces,’ said Marta, delightedly. ‘Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.’
He picked a sheet off his chest and looked at it. It was an engraving of a fifteenth-century portrait. A woman.
‘Who is this?’
‘Lucrezia Borgia. Isn’t she a duck.’
‘Perhaps, but are you suggesting that there was any mystery about her?’
‘Oh, yes. No one has ever decided whether she was her brother’s tool or his accomplice.’
He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late-eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals was printed the words: Louis XVII.
‘Now there’s a beautiful mystery for you,’ Marta said. ‘The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?’
‘Where did you get all these?’
‘I routed James out of his cubby-hole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I’m sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.’
It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a Civil Servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.
He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearls. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.
‘So that is Elizabeth’s Robin,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ever saw a portrait of him before.’
Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: ‘It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn’t paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now? Something on a playing card. Nowadays, we know what Tennyson was like before he grew that frightful beard. I must fly. I’m late as it is. I’ve been lunching at the Blague, and so many people came up to talk that I couldn’t get away as early as I meant to.’
‘I hope your host was impressed,’ Grant said, with a glance at the hat.
‘Oh, yes. She knows about hats. She took one look and said “Jacques Tous, I take it”.’
‘She!’ said Grant surprised.
‘Yes. Madeleine March. And it was I who was giving her luncheon. Don’t look so astonished: it isn’t tactful. I’m hoping, if you must know, that she’ll write me that play about Lady Blessington. But there was such a to-ing and fro-ing that I had no chance to make any impression on her. However, I gave her a wonderful meal. Which reminds me that Tony Bittmaker was entertaining a party of seven. Magnums galore. How do you imagine he keeps going?’
‘Lack of evidence,’ Grant said, and she laughed and went away.
In the silence he went back to considering Elizabeth’s Robin. What mystery was there about Robin?
Oh, yes. Amy Robsart, of course.
Well, he wasn’t interested in Amy Robsart. He didn’t care how she had fallen down stairs, or why.
But he spent a very happy afternoon with the rest of the faces. Long before he had entered the Force he had taken a delight in faces, and in his years at the Yard that interest had proved both a private entertainment and a professional advantage. He had once in his early days dropped in with his Superintendent at an identification parade. It was not his case, and they were both there on other business, but they lingered in the background and watched while a man and a woman, separately, walked down the line of twelve nondescript men, looking for the one they hoped to recognise.
‘Which is Chummy, do you know?’ the Super had whispered to him.
‘I don’t know,’ Grant had said, ‘but I can guess.’
‘You can? Which do you make it?’
‘The third from the left.’
‘What is the charge?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t know anything about it.’
His chief had cast him an amused glance. But when both the man and the woman had failed to identify anyone and had gone away, and the line broke into a chattering group, hitching collars and settling ties preparatory to going back to the street and the world of everyday from which they had been summoned to assist the Law, the one who did not move was the third man from the left. The third man from the left waited submissively for his escort and was led away to his cell again.
‘Strewth!’ the Superintendent had said. ‘One chance out of twelve, and you made it. That was good going. He picked your man out of the bunch,’ he said in explanation to the local Inspector.
‘Did you know him?’ the Inspector said, a little surprised. ‘He’s never been in trouble before, as far as we know.’
‘No, I never saw him before. I don’t even know what the charge is.’
‘Then what made you pick him?’
Grant had hesitated, analysing for the first time his process of selection. It had not been a matter of reasoning. He had not said: ‘That man’s face has this characteristic or that characteristic, therefore he is the accused person.’ His choice had been almost instinctive; the reason was in his subconscious. At last, having delved into his subconscious, he blurted: ‘He was the only one of the twelve with no lines on his face.’