The Language of Bees

poised to open. Taking a step back felt like a natural response.

I was not surprised to see the signature in the corner: The Addler. Suddenly, I saw why it looked familiar: If the brick walls had been sandbags and the businessman replaced by three soldiers, I would be looking at his 1915 drawing of the trench under fire.

“Mesmerising, is it not?” came a French accent from behind me.

“Disturbing,” I said.

“Great art often is.”

I thought about that. Was it possible that time would declare Holmes' son great? That the peculiarity of Damian's work was less the sign of a troubled mind than the fearless exploration of an artistic vision? Many had thought Holmes himself unbalanced. “Great or not, I don't know that I'd want it in my sitting room.”

It was the wrong thing to say: When I turned, the woman had raised a polite and condescending face. “Surrealism expresses thought without reason, pure artistic impulse with no hindrance from rationality or aesthetics. Perhaps you should take a closer look at the other room. Vanessa Bell has just sent me a very nice portrait that would look good on a sitting room wall.”

I hastened to get back into the woman's better graces. “Oh no, I like Damian's work enormously. I like him, for that matter. It's just that some of his paintings are, what? A little too compelling for comfort?”

The small woman tipped her perfect head at me, considering. She herself was an artifice-at any rate, a flawless appearance and a sympathy for Bohemian artists did not go hand-in-hand. In the end, she decided that I, too, was not what I appeared.

“You have met Mr Adler?”

“I've known him for years,” I said, which was the literal, if not the complete, truth. “He came to dinner the other night. When I heard you were displaying his work, I thought I'd stop in. This is another of his, isn't it?”

The other painting, on the room's back wall, bore his characteristic hand: painful, nightmare images painted with such loving realism, one was tempted to reach out and touch the surface, just to reassure one's self that it was two dimensional.

The moon, again. Only this time, it was a pair of moons, two bright eyes in the night-time sky, staring down at the eerie blue-tinged outlines below. The shapes of the landscape were difficult to determine. At first I thought it was a group of bulky figures walking along an unlit street. Moving closer, I noticed that the shapes were nearly square: tall buildings in a modern city during an electrical outage? The painting occupied the room's darkest corner, which did not help any. But when I was nearly on top of it, the details became clear.

The painting showed a prehistoric site, a grouping of massive stones both upright and fallen, forming a rough circle on a moonlit hillside. The grass around them was composed of a million delicate black and blue-black brushstrokes, the texture of a cat's fur.

I lifted my gaze to the dual moons, and saw that the craters and patterns on their near-white surfaces had been re-arranged to suggest a retina and iris: Two great pale eyes gazed down from a sable sky.

Had I seen this painting earlier, I should never have fallen asleep on the moonlit terrace.

“The Addler is known for his moons,” the Frenchwoman said.

“Lunacy,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Lunacy. From Luna, the moon. There's a long belief that madness is linked to the phases of the moon.”

“Most interesting,” she replied in a chill voice, “but The Addler is not mad.”

“Isn't he?”

“No more than any artist,” she protested, then gave an uncomfortable laugh, as if to acknowledge that we were both indulging in clever badinage.

“The madder the better, when it comes to art,” I agreed. “Have you met his wife?”

“But of course. And the child, such a winsome thing.”

I thought about that word: Either the woman didn't like children, or she didn't approve of this particular child.

While we spoke, I had been studying the two-moon painting, the shapes of the stones, the texture of the black-on-black hillside. The man had skill, no denying that, although producing an endless string of works that made the viewer uneasy might not guarantee commercial success.

I started to turn away, then stopped as a shape redefined itself in the corner of my eye.

What I had taken for a flat stone in the centre of the circle was not an even rectangle; under scrutiny, the faint reflections of moonlight off the myriad leaves of grass made the shape appear to have extremities. I removed my glasses; with lack of focus, it became clearer. The stone had the outline of a human, arms outstretched, as if bathing in the moonlight.

With my glasses on again, the suggestion of humanity faded, until I could not be certain it was there at all.

“How much is this one?” I asked.

She arched an eyebrow at my two-year-old skirt and unpolished shoes, and named a price approximately three times what I anticipated. Then she added, “I might be able to come down a little, since you are a friend of the artist.”

“I'll take it. And I'll think about the others.”

She frankly gaped at me, but I knew Holmes would like the piece-although I might ask him to hang it in one of the rooms I did not spend much time in.

I made the arrangements for shipping it to Sussex, and left, meditating on the idea of painting thought without reason and pure artistic impulse. If Damian had searched long and hard for a way to set himself in opposition to his rationalistic father, he could not have found a better style than that of Surrealism.

I rode the Piccadilly line down to South Kensington and walked towards Burton Place. After the prices the Frenchwoman had quoted me, Damian's home address became more understandable.

Bohemia was torn between a scorn for money and a basic human appreciation for comfort. Too much success in art was seen as a dubious achievement, if not outright treason to The Cause, proof that one had strayed onto the side of the bourgeois and middle-class. Money (be it earned or inherited) could be justified by sharing it with less fortunate members of the Bohemian fraternity, but from the image of Yolanda that I had begun to form, I rather doubted Damian's wife would be enthusiastic about hangers-on.

Number seven, Burton Place, proved to be on a quiet cul-de-sac, one street over from a park, in an area composed of similar neat, narrow, two-and three-storey houses. Indeed, as I strolled up and down the adjoining streets, I began to feel I was walking the human equivalent of honeycomb, identical compartments broken only by the occasional queen cell. Not the sort of neighbourhood one might expect to shelter a bearded painter of staring moons and bizarre city-scapes- Chelsea was for the well-heeled, unlike the more working-class Fitzrovia where the true artists nobly starved.

There was no sign of life within the Adler house, but much coming and going from those nearby: Any break-in at this time of day would not go unnoticed.

So I did what any investigator would do on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and went to talk to the neighbours.

17

Reward (1): Mere weeks after he has been transformed,

the new-born man learns that this most ephemeral of

apprenticeships has preserved the mortal life of the Guide

from flames and the turmoil of an angry earth: a reward.

Testimony, II:2

THE REACTIONS AT TWO HOUSES SUGGESTED, and the third confirmed, that I was not convincing for my role.