The Stargazey (21 page)

Jury paused. “She didn't come to see you then?”

At first, the priest seemed not to grasp Jury's meaning. When he had, he paled, whether from anxiety or anger, Jury didn't know. “I've told you, Superintendent. I've told you what happened.” His tone was cold.

Now Noailles was on the defensive, and it was doubtful he'd get any more out of him. Jury tried to recoup by saying it was merely a routine question. “We truly appreciate your coming forward.” He rose. “We'll leave you to your work.”

Wiggins rose too, seemingly reluctant to leave the far-flung planets.

At the door, Jury paused and turned. “What about the little girl? The McBrides' daughter. Did you know her?”

The priest shook his head. “No. Only him, Michael. He didn't talk about her, but of course there's no reason their children would have come into the conversation. It was his spiritual dilemma we talked about, not his family. Anyway, as I said, I didn't know his wife—”

“—very well.” Jury finished it for him, smiled, and they left.

R
alph Rees was not exactly what Melrose expected; he didn't put on the painterly ennui that often goes with absence of talent. He was dressed for the stereotype, though—black turtleneck sweater under a cream wool jacket with drooping shoulders and sleeves turned up a couple of times—and he rather cultivated the stereotypical artistic look: thinnish, a little peaked, with hair not quite to his shoulders and the nervous habit of shaking it back off his face.

There was, however, no question about his being glad to meet Melrose; in his enthusiasm for this British aristocrat, he crushed Melrose's hand between both of his. He was quite overcome with delight that the gallery had sold one of his paintings, more so that a customer had been able to appreciate it.

“The series gets a blank look from some people.”

Including me, thought Melrose. But Ralph Rees seemed, in saying what he did, utterly ingenuous, and Melrose began to warm towards him, lackluster painter that he was. Ralph Rees appeared to have all the enthusiasm for his own work that a four- or five-year-old would have as he rushed to Mum with his latest finger-painted tree or house. Melrose wondered, then, and asked, “You've probably done other sorts of work, Mr. Rees?”

“Call me Ralph. I pronounce it ‘Rafe,' in the old way. Whichever.” A smile beamed in Melrose's direction.

“Right. I was saying you no doubt have done other kinds of painting.”

“Oh, yes. But, you know, derivative stuff.”

Sebastian put in: “Portraits and Venetian canals and the Swiss Alps.” He discounted Rees's past efforts with a dismissive smile.

“Really? I've always had a liking for a portrait, and certainly J.M.W. Turner was never afraid of paintings of Venice being labeled derivative.” He was grateful for the whisky in his hand that Olivia had seen he got immediately, and with a rather merry look that suggested it might be the only way to get through this dinner.

They laughed in different ways. Rees was sincere and Olivia appreciative. The Fabricant brothers were less so.

It was at this point that the living room door slid back and Ilona Kuraukov entered. Melrose knew it was she; it could be no one else, not from Jury's description. Nicholas and Sebastian both greeted her as “Mum.” She was far from Melrose's idea of one. She looked rather as if she should be displayed on one of those Art Deco posters with a wolfhound at her side and a Pernod in her hand.

It seemed only reasonable that she should be wearing mink—or was it sable?—(which Nicholas was now helping her out of). Underneath it was a dove-gray dress of some soft material that draped easily across bosom and hips and made her eyes (that might be gray-blue) grayer. Her pale hair was pulled back in a French twist, a hairdo Melrose hadn't seen in some time, but Ilona Kuraukov could easily revive the fashion. And models would have killed for those cheekbones. It was very hard to imagine that Sebastian was her son; how could she be old enough? In her late sixties, even her early seventies? She might be as old as Agatha! How he wished he could take a couple of Polaroids back.
Now, dear Aunt, how old would you say my friend Ilona Kuraukov is
?

After the coat came the drink—vodka that had apparently been kept as frozen as an ice floe, the bottle shoved down in the ice. She took this straight from Seb (as she called him) and sat down by Nikolai (as she called
him)
and patted his knee. Then she sat back with her drink and took her time apologizing for her lateness. When she plugged a cigarette into an ornate holder, Melrose was up in a flash to light it. Her eyes regarded him through a curl of smoke.

He sat down again and, not wanting the subject of Rees's paintings to drop while they turned to other and more banal topics, said, “We've been talking about art. About Mr. Rees's—Ralph's”—Melrose inclined his head politely toward Rees—“
Snow
series.”

“Ah, yes.” Ilona Kuraukov nodded. “Quite different, quite a—how do you say it?—departure! Yes.”

Melrose was interested in this departure. That is, he was interested in talking more about the art Ralph Rees was departing
from.
He was about to say something to this effect when the door opened again and a young girl entered: Pansy, the last of their household.

Melrose wondered if late appearances were Pansy's stock-in-trade, arriving late and last, thereby dramatizing her entrance and herself, though she hardly needed to. She was, in her own way, as dazzling in her youth as Ilona was in her age. The girl was her granddaughter. Melrose wondered which of them resented this relationship the most. He could imagine competition among these people was fairly intense, if not absolutely insane.

And now here was Pansy, quite prepared to astound any newcomer but being outshone by Melrose himself, who was a newcomer with a title. Yes, Pansy was gorgeous, a floral centerpiece, but Melrose was the guy the whole table had been set for, the one with the money, the titles, the land, and the privilege. She seemed not to know whether to disdain all that or try to get her hands on it. This amused him. Pansy would have to make an effort, which, he thought, might be uncharted territory for her. It amused him also, watching her size him up. Jury had said she was thirteen or fourteen, but she looked several crucial years older: seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. When she sat down on the end of the sofa nearest the fireplace, hence nearest him, she did so with a regal bearing she must have copied from her grandmama. Then she looked up at him and asked if he had horses on his land in Northamptonshire.

“No. There's only the house; there are no outbuildings, paddock, or anything of that nature.”

“It's what I loathe about London, its not being country,” she said, pleating her white silk skirt between her fingers and sounding as if she loathed every inch of the place. She looked around the room, challenging them to disagree.

Here was beauty unsullied by a shred of intelligence. “Yes, I've noticed that about London. Well, you'd find Ardry End pretty uncountrified, too, without horses and sharing the loathsome London aspect, so you'd better not come.” He smiled brilliantly.

Had she missed something? Her eyes were wide with uncertainty and surprise, as if some invitation had been extended and she not made part of it. “I—”

Melrose simply cut across her. He had business to attend to, and it didn't include humoring a girl too much taken with herself anyway. “You mentioned Ralph's departure,” he said to Ilona. “Is it the portrait-and-Venice thing he's departing from?”

Ilona regarded him coolly over the cigarette in the long black holder. His presence in their—or was it her?—house appeared questionable to her. “You're interested in the
Siberian Snow
series, then?”

Ralph Rees explained. “Madame Kuraukov, Lord Ardry—”

“Please call me Melrose. All of that ‘lord' stuff gets to be boring.”

“—Melrose here bought one of the paintings.”

The holder in her hand stopped in midair. “But that's—quite marvelous.” Then she inhaled and asked, “Which one?”

“Number four.” He hoped he hadn't made it sound like a double-decker bus. But he couldn't imagine anyone but the artist and the gallery owners taking those canvases seriously.

“Mum paints,” said Nicholas. “Or did, once upon a time. Very good, her stuff was, too. Why'd you stop?” It seemed just to have occurred to him to ask.

Ilona gave a little laugh. “Don't be silly, Nicky.”

He accepted that as an answer.

Then Olivia said, “I'm afraid I'm the odd man out here. Forgive me, Ralph, but I honestly liked your landscapes.
And
your portraits. Mona's—that one especially. I don't understand this new white progression of yours.”

Melrose wanted to cheer.

Ralph Rees was perfectly good-humored. “It's not for me to say, Libby. I count only as one more critic of the work.”

Oh, hell, Melrose thought. Rees was into that “new criticism” that made such a splash several decades ago. Empson, I. A. Richards—the textual purists who counted a writer's life as wholly separate, or other than, the work he produced. Melrose had always thought that literary stance an exquisite piece of hocus-pocus. Anyway, if Ralph Rees didn't know what the hell he was doing, that made three of them, including Olivia.

He wondered about her position in this household. She might be at a serious disadvantage if she was Clive Fabricant's daughter. A half sister by Fabricant's first wife probably would not be overly popular. But then he had no idea what was at stake. She would be a steadying influence on Pansy (who gave Melrose the impression of being completely unmanageable), if Pansy were amenable to such an influence, which he doubted.

He laughed (somewhat superciliously). “But you certainly had some inspiration for painting those five canvases. So you must have
some
understanding of your own work. Critics are, after all, permitted their opinions.” (No, they weren't. That's why they were critics.) “And, anyway, am I correct in thinking your
Snow
series can't be articulated? I mean, it doesn't lend itself to analysis and interpretation.” What in hell was he talking about? If you had money you could say anything and nobody gave a damn. And why had the new criticism popped up in his thoughts? Empson—well, he was always hovering, but Richards? Good lord, he hadn't thought of him in a hundred years, not since that last course he'd taught in the Romantic poets. He laid it on. “It's completely visceral, a metaphor for emptiness. I liked your”—here he turned to Olivia—“seeing it as a ‘white progression.' Though I myself look at it as more of a regression.”
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
How could they listen? The idle rich, minting coins with their mouths.

At this magic moment a middle-aged woman in an apron entered the room to whisper to Madame Kuraukov that dinner was ready. She was thinnish and of a mousy-brown plainness that made her fade right into the wallpaper, or the shadows, whatever was around to blend with. She seemed quite shy, for as Ilona said, “Thank you, Hedda,” the woman turned and left the room without having made eye contact with anyone.

Melrose supposed what he was doing was allowing himself to register on their minds as a transcendent bore. This was a disguise that had suggested itself the more he rattled on. It occurred to him that the crotchety pair of Neame and Champs would never excite suspicion, would never raise questions in other people's minds—
Ah-ha! What are they up to
?—unless one saw the skull beneath the skin of those two.

Rees, of course, would not think Melrose boring at all. Far from it. To him, Melrose would be a fount of wisdom because he was talking about Rees's work. And, not surprisingly, it was Ralph who prompted him to continue as they all sat down to dinner in a jumble and got bibbed up.

“As I said, I get this feeling, it's like a fist in the solar plexus”—here Melrose demonstrated by hitting himself—“that the entire series is more than the sum of its parts.”

Rees nodded eagerly. “To take them all in at one gulp, that's what you should do. That's why I'm so grateful to Seb and Nick for giving me a place to hang all of them.”

Ilona said, from the bottom of the table (Sebastian was sitting at the top), “It must be gratifying to you, Ralph—all this enthusiasm. Please remember I insist on buying one for myself. I told you that.”

This rather surprised Melrose. She couldn't actually
admire
these white paintings. He asked her, smiling, “Which one?”

In the smile Ilona returned, and in the tiny inclination of the head—as if conceding a point—Melrose thought there to be more than a glimmer of irony, as if she recognized his question as a repetition of her own. “Oh”—she waved his question away—“I haven't decided yet.”

Melrose made no comment on the puzzling nature of this way of regarding art. But he was concentrating now on what looked like an excellent poussin being handed round by the colorless Hedda. She seemed to have been banished to some fairy tale in which she would vanish if looked upon too openly and directly. Her existence depended upon her invisibility. Well, if the excellence of the chicken matched that of the soup, he was in for a treat. And when he tasted one of the carmelized new potatoes, he only hoped that no one would be silly enough to stare at Hedda and make her disappear in a puff of smoke. People could kill for such cooking.

“You'd better, Mother. They're going like hotcakes!”

Both the cliché and the voice in which Sebastian uttered it were so resoundingly hollow that it struck Melrose for the first time that he was not enthusiastic after all about the
Snow
paintings. Nor did Melrose understand the actual content of what he'd said. Had more of the paintings been sold than the one to him? he asked.