The Bohemian Girl

And indeed, the Christ has a nose like Shylock in a burlesque, but everybody else in the painting is as English as Boadicea, so it looks as if the Jew of Malta has wandered into a palace garden party. Himple is unmatchable — a genus unto himself.’

Denton was turning over the name — Himple. Somebody else had mentioned Himple. Who was it? He was eating chicken pie, bending to look over John’s shoulder at the drawing. ‘I thought maybe the man in the drawing was screaming.’

‘Well, he could be. One’s never quite sure with Himple. You know, on closer inspection, I think that Lazarus looks a bit like the woman in the big drawing? And I wonder if she was perhaps the model for Lazarus’s sister, who’s shown in the painting as tripping over the ground as if she’s weightless, one hand extended like a hostess introducing the dustman to the Prince of Wales.’

‘I should have a look at the painting.’

‘It’s worth the trip, if only for the comic effect.’

‘But why would Lazarus look like a woman?’

‘The girl in the drawing was a model?’

‘Now and then, they say.’

‘There you are.’

‘For Lazarus and the sister?’

‘Well, it’s like old Himple to want to show a family resemblance. He likes to be authentic, you know — brothers and sisters always look alike, right?’ He laughed. ‘Like Gwen and me.’

Denton looked more closely at the little drawing. ‘And Lazarus is what she’d look like as a man?’ He was thinking of the brother who had picked up Mary Thomason’s trunk from her lodging house.

John stirred. He found a pencil in a pocket, searched through others until he found a folded piece of cartridge paper, on one side a list of some sort. He smoothed it out on the table and began to draw with quick, sure strokes. To Denton, it was like theatrical magic: one moment, blank paper, the next a face very like Mary Thomason’s but male.

‘I’ve cut his hair for him. Or we could have him with a beard, like Lazarus.’ He made another sketch just as quickly, and the same young face appeared with a short beard, even the slight scantiness of the youthful hair shown. The economy of line was remarkable, and all at once Denton understood ‘the Slade look’. He told John as much, praised his ability.

‘I’ve thought of doing portraits in Trafalgar Square — sixpence a head. I’d make a fortune.’

‘Can I keep those?’

John slid the paper over the tablecloth. ‘You can tell your grand-children you own an original Augustus John.’ He took the paper back and dashed off a signature, shoved it over again.

‘You’re not lacking in confidence, anyway.’

John laughed. ‘Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’ He sighed. ‘I mean to get very drunk and possibly find myself a woman. That sound like a programme that would interest you?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘I think Gwen wondered if you were attached to anybody just now.’

‘I am, actually.’

‘Oh.’ John slid down on the banquette again. ‘It’s just as well. Gwen’s really interested only in her art. Everything else is “secondary”, as she puts it. I wish I had her concentration. You heard I was married?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Hard on the concentration. Gwen’s quite right, actually. She’ll wind up a nun of art. I’ll wind up a bigamist. Or a trigamist. I can’t live without women. Half a dozen of them, if I could afford them. Oddly, having only one is surely more distracting than two or three — they could entertain each other. Isn’t that so?’

Denton had ordered coffee. He sipped. ‘I was married once. It was distracting, yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘She killed herself.’

John seemed to ponder this. He put his eyebrows up, then cocked his head, frowned. He said, ‘I came to London to cheer myself up, and I’m not being cheered. It’s time to get drunk.’ He wandered away.

Denton remembered that he had meant to ask about Wenzli, the man who had put down the deposit on the ‘little Wesselons’. He also remembered who had first mentioned Himple — Henry James, at the dismal party at his publishers. Something about Himple’s having gone away.

Maybe he had come back.

‘Mary Thomason as a young man, with and without beard.’ He spread the piece of paper on his desk. Janet Striker, his dressing gown held closed at her throat, bent to look at it. It was Atkins’s evening off.

‘We should look at the painting,’ she said.

He put his hand on her buttock. She flinched.

‘I’m taking liberties,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I’ll get used to it.’

‘I hope not.’ He tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t.

It was the same skittishness. He wondered when she would end it.

The Raising of Lazarus was indeed an enormous painting, the figures life-sized, the landscape so expansive that it was impossible to take in the whole thing at once. A printed note said that the actual site of the Apostle John’s account was shown, sketches for it made in the Holy Land by the artist himself. The clothes, mostly cloaks and shifts, were ‘archaeologically authentic’, but the faces were, as Augustus John had said, as English as Spotted Dick. Despite the seriousness of the subject — a man raised from the dead, after all, a miracle by the Messiah — there was something terrifically lightweight about it.

‘Like Handel played on the tin whistle,’ she murmured.

He actually knew who Handel was. ‘They’re all play-acting,’ he said.

‘Oh, that is it, isn’t it. He’s posed them all. As if it’s a studio photograph that went on too long. It is frightful, isn’t it.’

He went closer and studied Lazarus. There was no mistaking that face now. With the memory of the drawing and John’s sketches in his head, he thought of Lazarus as ‘Mary’s brother’. He said, ‘Himple used her for the sister and her brother for Lazarus.’

‘If they really look so much alike, he could have used either to model both.’

A lot of handsome young men filled the crowd that followed Jesus. Denton said, ‘Either Jesus or the artist favours the good-looking ones.’

‘Mmm, boys. Yes, I suppose. That might cast another light on the brother.’

‘What are you saying — Himple liked young men but used Mary as a model? Or her brother? I told you that James said that Himple had “decamped”. I wonder if we can find him to ask some questions. ’

She turned back before they left the gallery. ‘It’s so huge. Can you imagine having that on your wall?’

‘It would cover a lot of cracked plaster.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Denton wrote to Erasmus Himple, RA, but had no answer as yet. On her own initiative, Janet Striker went to the Reading Room and brought back what there was in the obvious sources about Francis Wenzli, the artist who had put down a deposit on the Wesselons. Wenzli was apparently a few years younger than Denton, the latest in a line of minor, originally Austrian painters who had emigrated to England to escape Napoleon. The current incarnation, according to an article on ‘Our Contemporary Artists’ in Pearson’s, was a society portraitist and landscape painter who specialized in country houses.

‘It appears he can put both your wife and your country place on the wall for you,’ Denton said to Atkins. ‘And you, yourself, if you’ve a mind.’

‘Maybe he gives discounts for quantity, like the insurance men — “Family Rates Our Speciality”.’

Denton was getting ready to go out, his work day over. His brain felt blurry. He thought that if he didn’t finish