Thus Was Adonis Murdered (24 page)

The American girl, when I said this, looked at me with a certain apprehension; but said nothing.

It was agreed that she should return home, pack a small suitcase with such items as seemed necessary and return to 62 New Square, whence Selena would drive her to the airport. It was, Selena had said, with a rather severe glance at myself, the least she could do.

“What,” asked Ragwort, “will you tell your husband?”

“Well,” said Marylou, “there’s not too much empathy between Stanford and Julia. If I told Stanford

I was going to Venice to help Julia, I guess his reaction might be somewhat negative. So I figured I’d just leave a note saying my mother’s cousin Alice was very sick and I had to go to her. My mother’s cousin Alice is very into ecology and she lives in a farmhouse in Brittany, France, and doesn’t have a telephone.” She looked round anxiously, as if this proposed deception might incur censure. It did not.

“I say, Hilary,” said Cantrip, when she’d gone, “you aren’t having another of your loopy spells, are you? You’re sure it’ll do some good sending the poor grummit back to Venice?”

“No,” I answered, too preoccupied to take offence at the form of the question. “No, Cantrip, not entirely sure. I am assuming, you see, a fact for which there is no direct evidence.”

“Hilary,” said Ragwort, “do you mean to say that you have persuaded this girl, whom we hardly know, to deceive her husband and travel halfway across Europe merely on the basis—”

“My dear Ragwort,” I said, “I do wish you wouldn’t fuss. I am quite reasonably sure. To be entirely sure, however, I should need a further piece of information, and the only person from whom I might obtain it is Kenneth Dunfermline. I’d really prefer to avoid seeing him—it seems likely, in the circumstances, to be a depressing interview. Still, as you say, Ragwort, it would be irresponsible—would you be kind enough to come with me?”

Murmuring of wild geese and mare’s nests, Ragwort nonetheless consented.

“I am, of course, delighted,” said Selena, standing beside us on the pavement outside the Corkscrew as we waited for a taxi, “to know that you have a theory, Hilary. Does there happen, by any chance, to be the smallest scrap of evidence for it?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Yes, the evidence is almost conclusive. There is one point, you see, on which I agree with Julia—I attach great importance to the signs of nervousness displayed by Ned Watson on the morning of the murder.”

Kentish Town, though not far from my temporary home in Islington, is an area of London with which I am unfamiliar. The driver of our taxi, however, found the street without difficulty. It was a terrace of small Georgian houses—a little shabby, but nice enough. Or not, perhaps, quite nice enough for a young man of such delicate tastes as Ned.

“Sure you’ve got the right number?” said the taxi driver, turning to address us through the glass partition. “This one looks as if they’re all away.” The house did have, certainly, an unoccupied appearance: on a golden afternoon, the windows were blank with shutters. “Or as if someone had died.”

“Yes,” I said, “I think it’s the right place.”

My first ring at the doorbell brought no answer. After a minute or so, I rang again.

“He’s not there,” said Ragwort.

But the door did open. Framed between the doorposts, Kenneth Dunfermline looked large enough to carry them, lintel and all, like a yoke across his shoulders. He had evidently been working, for he was naked to the waist: I perceived that his bulk was not due to any surplus of flesh but to the massive development of his chest and the powerful muscles of his shoulders and upper arms. Not Julia’s sort of thing, certainly; but to any taste less morbidly aesthetic he might have seemed a rather magnificent figure, had it not been for the drab pallor of his skin—whatever occasions there had been that summer for sunbathing, Kenneth Dunfermline had not taken them. And his face—I would have thought, looking at his face, though I understand such a thing to be physiologically impossible, that in the five days since we had seen him he had not slept at all.

He stood looking from one to the other of us under the continuous line of his thick black eyebrows, as though dazed, like a bull sent suddenly from darkness into the harsh sunlight of the arena.

“Mr. Dunfermline?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, as if doubtful about it.

“I really must apologize,” I said, “for intruding on you without warning like this. I have only a short time in London and I was most anxious to meet you. I saw some of your work at Frostfield’s Gallery and Mrs. Frostfield was good enough to give me your address. I simply came round on impulse—it’s quite unforgivable, I’m really very sorry.”

“Not at all,” said the sculptor, vaguely, as if it were a phrase learned by rote as the appropriate response to an apology, but repeated without confidence that it was right. “It doesn’t matter.”

“My name, by the way, is Hilary Tamar. Professor Hilary Tamar, of St. George’s College, Oxford. This is my friend Desmond Ragwort, of Lincoln’s Inn.”

“You’d better come in,” said Kenneth. It sounded less grudging than the words might suggest: he knew, it seemed, that there was something he was supposed to do about people standing on the doorstep, but could not with certainty remember what it was.

We followed him through a little entrance hall and into his studio. Running the width of the house, it had windows at the back as well as the front; but those at the back were also shuttered. It was lit by fluorescent tubes, which hung by chains from the ceiling. The walls, never papered and for some years not whitewashed, had darkened to the colour of putty, the ceiling and woodwork to a similar but deeper shade. The floorboards were unpolished and uncarpeted.

The film of whitish dust which lay over everything and the diversity of the objects which the room contained—stacks of clay, coils of copper wire, bottles of turpentine—obscured, at first impression, its extraordinary tidiness; but after a moment or two one perceived that the tools and materials of the sculptor’s craft had been arranged in meticulous order on the rows of metal shelving which covered most of the wall space—he would not be delayed in his work by any difficulty in finding the right chisel.

There was no decoration. Even the photographs which covered one section of wall—some close-up studies of the hand, a series of still shots of a young man diving—seemed intended rather as
aides-memoires
to the structure of the human body. There was a set of landscape photographs—views from various angles of a place surrounded by olive trees—which served, at first sight, no utilitarian purpose. Looking, however, at the trestle table in the middle of the room, I saw laid out on it a model of the same scene, but with the addition of a fountain, its waters represented by blue polystyrene. I concluded that the landscapes also were intended to assist work in progress.

At least there was somewhere to sit—the studio couch near the front window had presumably been provided for the benefit of any live model whom the sculptor might have to employ. Upholstered in dark red velvet, it had been covered over with an old blanket—perhaps to protect it from the dust, but more probably, I thought, because Kenneth was irked by the intrusion of the splash of colour. Suspecting that it might be some time before he thought of inviting me to sit down, I did so without invitation. Ragwort followed my example. The sculptor, despite his evident weariness, remained standing.

“Do you,” he asked, “want anything?” He seemed to find the words with great effort, as if the language of human discourse were one foreign to him, in which he had laboriously acquired a small vocabulary.

“Yes,” I said, with a smile which I hoped was disarming, “and having intruded on you in this appalling way, the least I can do is to come to the point as quickly as possible. The position is, you see, that my College has conceived the notion of erecting a work of sculpture in the Quadrangle. Something in harmony with our existing buildings, but a distinguished piece of work unmistakably of our own time. The idea, I must emphasize, is in its infancy, I might almost say its gestation period. We are, I fear, a sadly dilatory lot. But people have suggested that I should explore the possibilities.”

“I don’t think—” said the sculptor, and stopped without my having interrupted him, but making a downward movement of his large hand which seemed to signify rejection of this and any other offer that the world might make to him.

“My dear Mr. Dunfermline, I am not for a moment suggesting that you should commit yourself at this stage. As I have indicated, we ourselves are by no means in a position to do so. We are simply trying, at present, to discover what would be involved in such a project—we are as children in such matters. We have very little idea, for example, of what it might cost.”

The massive shoulders rose slightly in a gesture of indifference and bewilderment.

“Depends what you want.”

“Yes, naturally. Much, no doubt, would depend on the material selected. We ourselves do not know what material an artist would consider suitable.”

“Stone,” said Kenneth, as if it were a credo that he would not, in the utmost weariness, forget. “Stone’s best.”

“A work in stone would, of course, harmonize admirably with our existing buildings. The design we would wish to leave very much to the judgement of the artist.” I looked towards the trestle table and received inspiration. “Some of my colleagues, however, have suggested that it might be agreeable to have a fountain. I perceive that you have been working on something of that kind. It looks, if it is not impertinent of me to say so, as if it would be a most impressive piece.”

The heavy shoulders rose again in the same gesture of indifference: he had wearied, it seemed, of the effort to find words. I looked rather desperately at Ragwort, sitting demurely beside me like a well-behaved schoolboy.

“Yes, it is most impressive,” said Ragwort. “But rather sombre, if you don’t mind my saying so.” It was true that there was something mournful about it. The central figure seemed to be that of a woman, whose flowing hair, however, covered her face and melted into the folds of the garment which enveloped her, so that one could not be certain which way she might be facing; round her, a dozen or so smaller figures, of children, girls and young men, were represented as lying, as if asleep, on the parapet round the fountain. I could see no particular reason for finding it a sorrowful scene; but Ragwort was right in saying that it was. “In the final version, I suppose,” continued Ragwort, “the figures would be life-size?”

“Yes. A little over.”

“And is it intended,” said Ragwort, “for a particular client?”

“It was. I shan’t make it. He’s leaving the place I was going to make it for.” I felt that I had been right to draw Ragwort into the conversation: three consecutive sentences was a considerable achievement.

“What a shame,” said Ragwort. “I hope you hadn’t spent a great deal of time on the preliminary work?”

“About a year,” said Kenneth, without resentment. “I’d done all the drawings and models. That on the table, that’s how it would have been. You’ve got to get it right, before you start cutting the stone. You can’t change your mind after that.”

Reluctant as I was to interrupt the flow of conversation, I felt able to delay no longer the question I wished to ask.

“I suppose,” I said, off-handedly, “that your client was Richard Tiverton?”

Ragwort made no exclamation; but he could not restrain a look of surprise. The possibility that Timothy and Kenneth might have a mutual client had plainly not occurred to him.

“Yes,” said the sculptor, his heavy eyebrows gathering in slow perplexity. “How did you know?”

“As I mentioned,” I said, “Desmond and I were at Frostfield’s the other day. Mrs. Frostfield was talking about the Tiverton Collection and she mentioned that you had been helping to sort it out—so I knew that Richard Tiverton was a client of yours.

And she also said something, I think, about him having to leave Cyprus. For tax reasons, I gather.” Ragwort now looked both surprised and severe—no doubt at my untruthfulness.

“Eleanor does talk,” said the sculptor, as if, had he had energy for such an emotion, the fact would have irritated him.

“Oh dear,” I said, “perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. If it’s confidential, you may rely on my discretion.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kenneth.

“I had no idea,” I went on, “that there was any secret about it. I would rather have imagined, if there had been, that Mrs. Frostfield herself would be as anxious as anyone to keep it. It must be rather an advantage to have information on such a matter not known to one’s competitors, and she did not strike me as the kind of woman who would readily forgo an advantage. Indeed, she gave me the impression of being rather ruthless. One would not put it past her, for example, to have suggested that you should sell her some of the more valuable items at a favourable price and share the profit.”

“She did,” said Kenneth. “Stupid—I wouldn’t do down Richard to please Eleanor. She’s quite stupid, really.” He spoke without indignation—though I remembered, from Julia’s account of the conversation on the terrace, that the proposition, when first made, had roused him to considerable anger.

“How ridiculous of her,” said Ragwort. “She must have known you were doing it as an office of friendship. One can hardly suppose, if I may say so, that an artist of your standing would undertake such a task on a purely professional basis.”

“An office of friendship,” repeated Kenneth, turning the phrase over like a piece of stone that pleased him. “Yes, that’s right.”

“It must be a great responsibility,” I said, “to have in one’s care a collection of such value. I gather from Mrs. Frostfield that it attracted interest from some rather unscrupulous characters. What was the name she mentioned? Bruce something—I can’t remember the rest of it, but you know who I mean, Mr. Dunfermline.”

“No,” answered Kenneth, with blank indifference, “I haven’t heard of anyone called Bruce.” Neither Ragwort nor myself venturing to touch more closely on the subject of his grief, nothing further was said of any significance. I urged him, before we left, if he should receive an invitation to come to Oxford and consider the artistic possibilities of our Quadrangle, not to reject it out of hand.