out, looking as portentous and arresting as a traffic policeman. The arm had a sign fixed to it with wire, a piece of wood with faded letters in stencilled characters: to the latrines. An inscription in indelible pencil was easier to decipher:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay
For alien legions — points the urgent way.
A worn path through the trees was still only partially overgrown.
Andrew hastened to the front door and looked for a bell push. A note had been pinned to the wooden spike of a dummy portcullis. It said: Gert, I’ve gone shopping. Hot up the pie and keep out of the studio. It also said, by implication, that there was nobody in, that he would have to wait.
He tried the bell. It rang loudly, and that was all. He walked round the house, examining it in detail. The building was not so large as the perspective view had suggested, but it was still overpoweringly horrible. There were three floors with probably twenty to thirty rooms between them. It had an uninhabited look, but that may have been due to a prevalence of drawn blinds. A few windows on the top floor showed curtains. Perhaps the family was away somewhere. Perhaps Ruth Meriden had come home in advance of them.
A small patch of kitchen garden in the rear showed signs of cultivation, but nobody was at work in it. Andrew returned to the front of the house and browsed among the statues. The indelible pencil had been used quite extensively and not always by the same hand. Beards, moustaches and other adornments had been added to Olympian immortals and Roman heroes. One noble soldier, whose victories were won in the pre-Christian Era, wore upon his toga a badge of more recent design. The drawing, in most cases, was extremely crude; but not nearly as crude as the comments and tags of mural wit that disfigured the flanks and other flattish surfaces of the female divinities.
Andrew wandered back to the house. He was just in time. The girl was approaching by a well-beaten short cut, wheeling a bike festooned with vegetables and paper parcels in string shopping bags. She was wearing a suede windbreaker, blue denim pedal-pushers, and tan sandals. Against the sombre background of fir and oak, her hair was a mop of incandescence.
She gave no sign of having seen him until she was about six feet away. Then she stopped.
“Hello! Looking for me?”
It was exactly the tone she had used at the airport-casual, indifferent, smug. Moreover, he had already opened his mouth to speak first and was thus left standing there gaping for a moment.
“Yes, Miss Meriden.” Something about her called up severity in him. He opened his mouth to speak again.
“Well,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting you till next week.”
This time he really gaped at her. She walked on past him.
“I’ve just got home,” she added over her shoulder. “I’m afraid I haven’t much to show you. Positively nothing of any account. No doubt they warned you. Seen my woman anywhere?”
He stumbled after her.
“No. I-”
“Late again. Come inside. I’ll pop the pie in the oven; then I’ll be with you.”
Inside the hall a stencilled sign on the first door said: Q.M. Stores — Keep Out.
She called back from a bend in the corridor: “Wait upstairs. You’ll find more light.”
He found more tidiness, also. The ground floor was a wreck. The walls looked as if an elephant had been taking kicks at them. One floor board was up. Dry rot in others made walking perilous. But there were none of these hazards upstairs. The flooring was intact, and carpeted. The stencilling, too, was in a better state of preservation. Andrew passed battery office and contemplated officers’ mess for a moment. Memory thus stimulated was a shade depressing, and he found no ease before a door marked battery commander. He recalled one battery commander with septic tonsils. They had managed to get hold of a bottle of gin and…
The corridor was wide, with mullioned windows. It was like a small gallery and there were sculptures at intervals. There were a bust of a woman by Maillot, a girl’s head by Epstein, a small Heracles by Bourdelle, an old man by Rodin. At least, the chiselling strongly suggested these masters, but he rejected the idea that they could be genuine. Copies, of course; student pieces, chipped out for the annual exhibition of the Hertford Society of Arts, and now proudly preserved by the young sculptor. Here it became quite obvious what that critic meant by her eclecticism. There wasn’t an original line in any of the work. The Epstein, for instance, was pure Epstein. The Bourdelle departed from a characteristic devotion to plastic truth only in so far as it betrayed the smugness of the transcriber. The signature of Ruth Meriden was there to read. But it wasn’t bad. Andrew knew enough about this sort of sculpture to realise that it wasn’t bad. And, putting prejudice aside, looking at them fairly objectively, the other things weren’t bad either.
She came up the staircase, observing him quizzically.
“Like the show?” she inquired.
He had to say something, but it really was embarrassing. He was suddenly conscious of a dreadful weakness in some of the work.
“Very good,” he murmured. “Really quite good.”
“Junk!” she said.
He was surprised at this modesty, but also resentful. After all, he had merely tried to be polite. Still…
“I wouldn’t call it junk,” he answered generously. “Some of it has feeling. The head of the archer is very good. Bourdelle himself might have done it.”
“Bourdelle himself did do it,” she retorted. “It’s one of the early sketches for the big bronze in the Luxembourg. Poor old Emile! He never could get away from Rodin. Born fifty years later, he would have been a good sculptor. Let’s go upstairs.”
At that moment he would have liked the stairs to open and engulf him. It eased his embarrassment only a little to realise that she was unaware of what had been in his mind. She led the way to a long low attic with a considerable area of leaking skylight. She smiled as she opened the door. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile, and in that revolutionary moment he made an important discovery. There was nothing smug about her. She had not meant to be rude when she rejected his offer of help at the airport. She had been behaving merely in her normal casual manner. Through his absurd reaction to an imaginary snub, he had formed a wrong impression of her. The reality was that she was more trustful than suspicious. She accepted him now on completely even terms. She seemed to see him as a connoisseur who was interested in her work, and she, the artist, had invited him to view it. The accord was complete, and he hesitated to break it. The misconception, or whatever it was, afforded him an opportunity to study her. He would choose the moment to reveal himself.
The long room was fitted up like a carpenter’s workshop. There were benches with all kinds of vices and wheels. There was a lathe and an electric saw. There were polishing and burnishing devices, and backing the main bench was a long rack of gleaming tools, including handsaws of all kinds.
She said: “I’m really very sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”
“Maclaren,” he answered. “Andrew Maclaren.”
“Maclaren,” she repeated experimentally.
Along the wall opposite the benches and the lathe were a series of round, waist-high pedestals, each surmounted by an unusual object made of a plastic that looked like glass. The objects followed varied geometric patterns. None of them was very large. The tallest could not have measured much more than two feet from base to tip. It was a fragile, pyramidal thing of bisecting planes.
“I’m beginning to remember,” the girl said. “You’re the man the Glasgow critic spoke to me about. I had your name mixed up. I thought it was Macartney.”
He let that pass, making a noise in his throat that he hoped was noncommittal as well as inarticulate. He had no wish to impose on her, but this was definitely not the moment for revelation. She was looking on him as a human being. It was just as if she had removed a pair of sunglasses and he were seeing her eyes for the first time.
“This is the thing I’m working on.” She picked up a large drawing from the bench and held it up for his inspection. It was another of those objects, but here projected in perspective on the two dimensional sheet. It was like a sea shell with a highly complex series of convolutions-except that it was nothing like a sea shell.
“Too intricate,” she commented. “I’ll try to simplify it when I get it under my fingers. There’s a feeling here, I
