‘Yes, of course. Until we’ve finished our drink.’
‘There’s a question you forgot to ask me.’
‘Don’t tell me! Is Stephen Aymas our X?’
Gently nodded, at the same time reaching for the sketching block. He was rather surprised, then, to find what Mallows had been making of him. Other people had sketched Gently at one time or other, but, allowing for different techniques, they had shown a unanimity in their portrayals. Mallows had found something different, something the others had missed. He had shown Gently looking younger and with a wondering expression in his eyes. Yet it wasn’t youthfulness either, but some sort of inner illumination; he had done it by lightening all the tones, by smudging and thumbing away the charcoal.
‘So what is your answer going to be to that one?’
‘I don’t quite know. I don’t think it would be Aymas.’
‘Too much of an extrovert — yes, I agree. An ambitious soul, mind you, but quite a healthy little monad. He would tell the world his wrongs rather than simmer them over in private.’
‘You have your own suspicions, of course?’
‘If I have, I don’t tell my suspects. Don’t forget one important point — you were the last person to see Shirley alive.’
‘Yes.’ Gently laid the sketch down on the bench, undecided whether or not he found it flattering. Twice, now, Mallows had recurred to that point… why did he feel the need to emphasize it so much?
‘If you like I’ll go on with my interrogation — this is a game that ought to be popular at parties! Now consider this carefully: you’ve been cagey about the meeting. There was more going on there than you admitted to, wasn’t there?’
‘A good deal more… there was a row between Aymas and Mrs Johnson. To be frank, it got to the stage where he was calling her a liar. There was such a row down there that it interfered with a darts match in the bar — and it went on for about an hour. It should have been quite a memorable set-to.’
‘You are right, quite right — it should have been indeed.’ Mallows showed no surprise at the extent of Gently’s information.
‘On that basis, perhaps, you could make some suggestions?’
‘Don’t hurry me, man! I’m on the point of putting some to you. Let me see…’ He did a miming of intense concentration. ‘You admitted, I remember, that the Palette Group had suffered a split. On the one side stood the traditionalists (of whom you yourself are a prominent member), and on the other the modernists, and all that sort of flim-flam.
‘Shirley Johnson, you tell me, had a foot in either camp, and by her pictures you couldn’t discover if she were biased in a particular direction. Both sides had a claim to her and supplied her with favourites.
‘Now, I put it to you that you can tell me what happened that evening.’
Gently slowly nodded. ‘I could hazard a guess, I think! It seems to fit that she dropped her neutrality and committed herself, that evening…’
‘Which is exactly what I suspected: she committed herself to the modernists. It was done in a fit of temper, you can bet your last sou on that. Something had happened to upset Shirley before she ever arrived at that meeting, so she picked a quarrel with Aymas, and after him, with the rest of the tribe.’
‘She picked it with him because, being her favourite…’
‘Just so. He was the one she could hurt the most. It was never a question of artistic conviction, just a wicked talent for finding the rawest spot.’
‘And what would you make of her breaking out like that?’
‘Ah! The first time, too, after she’d ridden the fence for years. But you mustn’t try to quiz a Superintendent, you know — you must leave him alone to add his two and two together. By the bye… do you think you could use me at Scotland Yard?’
It may have been the result of the sherry, but they both suddenly found themselves laughing — Mallows, indeed, doubled up with mirth, and had to wipe the tears out of his eyes.
‘I’ve told you everything — everything — haven’t I? Everything you were going to ask me! That’s the silliest interrogation — and the best — you’ve ever done!’
‘There were one or two other points…’
‘You devil, Gently! But not before lunch, I shan’t permit it. We’ve had quite enough of cops and suspects — damn it, man, I haven’t shown you a single picture.’
There was no calling Mallows to order even if Gently had wanted to, but the academician had already given him more to chew on than he had expected. What was more, and this was rare with Gently, he felt an affinity with the man; Mallows had charm and more than charm — one felt at home with him in a moment.
‘These are things I’ve done for myself, all the ones you see stored in the racks, and there are one or two early canvases which I didn’t sell at the time. One day, I’m going to build a gallery. I want to see them all set out. Some artists can’t stand their own pictures — avec raison, you’ll say, of some contemporaries.’
‘Wouldn’t you find it a bit… overpowering?’
‘Not a whit. I’ve got the devil’s own ego. Then it’s nice to be able to see the subjects that you’ve got rid of — you won’t have to paint that again, or these, or those. You can’t guess what a satisfactory feeling it gives you.’
‘Don’t you enjoy painting, then?’
‘It’s a bed of thorns, my dear fellow. An artist is the most tormented devil alive. He loathes the sight of a blank canvas and yet he’s always standing in front of one — he sees a vision which gets on his nerves, and somehow then he has to get rid of it. Until that’s done, he can’t live with himself. He’s like a prophet with a gag in his mouth. You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: either you paint for someone, or else you’re not an artist; and that goes for every other art under the sun.’
While he spoke he was pulling out one canvas after another, bewildering Gently by the succession of subjects. Unlike most of his contemporaries Mallows scorned to specialize, and his astonishing talents seemed to embrace the entire cosmos. Landscape, seascape, portraiture, still life, each one had come to be conquered by that luminous, rich brush; crowd scenes, architecture, horses, snowscapes, even historical reconstructions; there seemed nothing that he hadn’t attempted.
‘Do you see what it is I’m trying to do? Good lord, what a period this is for an artist! For years I’ve been telling people where they stand with art, and might as well have shouted it up a chimney. We’ve changed our whole footing, that’s the point of departure. Without noticing it, we’ve crashed through a spiritual sound barrier. There’s a curtain pulled, Gently, across the centuries preceding us, and it’s cut off the old sun to leave us blinded by the new.
‘Do you know what engendered art, and society, and everything else? It was fear, plain fear, nothing bigger or nobler than that. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of all the great Unknown: it drove men to get together, to search for a meaning, to increase their stature.
‘Just as it did our old friend, X! This was his tragedy, historically foreshadowed. A race of X’s were driven together, to glorify themselves and to tame their universe. They insisted that it should be significant and they set up gods who understood it; and then, by pomp and rank and circumstance, they added divinity to man.
‘Which was where art came into the picture — its job was to gild the ersatz lily. It had to inject mere nature with significance, and to exhibit man as larger than life. And that, my dear fellow, it was doing, up and down the painful centuries; until a handful of decades ago, art had no other aim at all.’
‘But now…?’ Gently pressed him hesitantly, painfully conscious of his threadbare ignorance.
‘Ah! There’s the question which vexes the age — the flywheel has dropped off, and the machine has flown to pieces.
‘It happened, as it was bound to, that man came to his senses. It was a long time stirring but it came to a head in the last century. He was in fact growing up, he was throwing away his baubles; he had begun to grasp his universe and himself, and how things worked. So he could do without the gilt, having trampled on the lily. There was scarcely any need for the sublime any longer. The arts, which had always purveyed it, were rapidly stranded high and dry; they had lost their raison d’etre and they were left with the bleak, flat truth.