But the house itself was yet to be explored, and Penelope turned back to it now. The ground floor presented a long row of identical French windows, and at first all of them appeared to be shuttered. This might well be a normal practice on a hot summer afternoon, but on the present occasion was presumably due to the fact that the dwelling was unoccupied. She felt in her handbag for the bunch of keys she had been given, but as she did so became aware that one of the shutters and the French window behind it were only half-closed. So there, at its eastern end, one could walk straight into the house. For a moment Penelope was alarmed. Nothing had been made clearer to her than the substantial isolation of Le Colombier. It stood, indeed, only a couple of hundred yards from the quiet country road on which its unassuming entrance gate lay, but on every other hand stretched empty woodland which was now hers alone. The nearest dwelling must be half a mile away.
And now she recalled that conversation with Dora Quillinan, only half-serious, about Le Colombier’s being conceivably a small treasure-house of collector’s pieces of this and that. The villa was a sitting target for burglary – and perhaps there were burglars in it now. But she was already advancing upon the single window when she recalled that slight suggestion she had been given that the keys were not of essential present utility after all. So perhaps there was some sort of femme de charge in residence, or at least somebody sent in for the day to make reasonable provision for her arrival. Taking courage from these speculations, she walked straight up to the open window, and entered the house.
She was in a large room, furnished, as she sensed at once, with considerable elegance, but oddly and confusingly lit by the single bar of strong sunlight behind her. Yet this was enough to show her that the room was not untenanted. Near its centre a young man was standing before an easel, and he swung round and confronted her now.
‘Oh, hello,’ the young man said in English. ‘I’ve just been monkeying around with edges in an odd light. Op art, I suppose they’d call it. Purely academic, and not my sort of thing at all.’ He paused for a moment, as if realising that this, if informative, was scarcely adequate to the situation. ‘I say,’ he went on, ‘you’re not Penelope, are you? But of course you are! I knew you were coming, but didn’t know it would be so soon. Let’s have more light on the state of the case.’ This remark was intended in a literal sense, since the young man rapidly pushed back two pairs of shutters and filled the room with sunshine.
‘Yes,’ Penelope said, ‘I am certainly Mrs Ferneydale.’
‘That’s splendid. Welcome to Le Colombier. I think you’ll find all quiet, and everything ship-shape. Although it was only a couple of days ago that I had to repel boarders.’
‘Boarders?’ Penelope managed no more than this stupid echo because considerably taken up by the appearance and the implications of this strange young man. He was much younger than herself, and very good-looking. Penelope believed herself to be rather prejudiced against good-looking men, and particularly against that odd sub-species among these to whom ‘beautiful’ was an applicable term. This youth was certainly beautiful, and was certainly going to remain handsome. She was also inclined to dislike male persons in whom a marked ease of manner and conversation too rapidly made itself apparent. So she ought not to have been attracted by this unexpected and so-far anonymous intruder upon her property. The situation, however, wasn’t working like that. It was all rather surprising. But she found herself much disposed to accord it the provisional benefit of a doubt.
‘Just that. Pirates, you might say. Tiresome Sophie, with her Silvan in tow. A hulking great brute, isn’t he?’
‘I’ve never met Silvan Ferneydale.’
‘Then you haven’t missed much. They simply rang the bell – Sonnez ici, you know – and demanded the picture.’
‘Not the Cézanne?’ Penelope was recalling again that recent conversation with Dora.
‘The Modigliani. Silvan declared it to be the property of his Mum, and actually made to take it from the wall. That just couldn’t be put up with, and I had to deal with him a shade roughly. No, Penelope, I’m not romancing – slender of frame though you see me to be. Just a spot of karate, followed by something that tends rapidly to hurt quite a lot. Finally I let him bolt howling, with Mum behind him. They haven’t a shadow of a legal claim, you know, so we shan’t have any nonsense from them again. And now sit down. I’m going to make you some tea.’
Penelope sat down. She had received an instruction, and had obeyed it. This in itself required thinking about. Who was this young man, and what was his function? He was at least to some extent conversant with Ferneydale family affairs, and it had been without any effect of impertinence or presumption that he had addressed her by her Christian name. Was he perhaps a Ferneydale of sorts himself – a kind of cousin of her own, for instance, born on the wrong side of one of Fulke’s innumerable blankets? Or was his connection with Fulke merely of a professional kind, which had nevertheless taken on a friendly and intimate character? Her thought had gone a little beyond this, and she was on the brink of remembering some name she had once heard mentioned, when the young man reappeared, carrying a tray.
‘The parfumé à I’essence de la bergamote,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Exporté par Jacksons of Piccadilly. But en motisseline, I’m afraid. Which means tea-bags.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Having accepted her cup, Penelope decided that the moment for firmness had come. ‘May I ask,’ she said, ‘what is your position here?’
‘I suppose it does need a little explaining.’ For a moment the young man showed some sign of turning serious. But then his gaiety returned. ‘I’d be inclined to put it,’ he said, ‘that my position is like the Modigliani’s or the Cézanne’s. I go with the house.’
Penelope found this a disconcerting remark. It had been uttered whimsically or lightly, and perhaps she should have replied, ‘Like a washing-machine, you mean, or a billiard-table?’ But something made her reject this. ‘And does anybody else go with the house?’ she asked.
‘There’s an old woman who comes as well as goes, and who does the washing up. And a boy called André, who looks after the grass. But essentially just me, Penelope. Fulke never had more than one secretary. At a time, that is.’
‘Then are you Cyril?’ This was the name some casual mention of which had come back to her.
‘Cyril? Good heavens, no! I’m Bernie. I never set eyes on Cyril, or so much as knew his surname. Two or three before me, Cyril must have been.’
‘I see. My brother-in-law can’t have been too fortunate in his secretarial assistance. May I know your surname, please?’
‘Huffer. But I’ll consider myself snubbed if you call me that way. I’ll call you Mrs Ferneydale, and it won’t sound friendly at all. Not if we’re going to work together. “Bernie” it would have to become, and “Bernie” it had better be now.’
Bernie said this while pouring Penelope more tea. She had held out her cup when it became apparent he proposed to do so. Part of what Bernie had said was perfectly true. He was a good deal her junior, so it would be absurd to address him as if he were an elderly gardener. There was something singular about the whole thing, all the same.
‘Very well, then – Bernie. But I don’t understand what you said about our working together. Judging from that’ – and Penelope pointed at the canvas on its easel – ‘what you are is a professional painter. I don’t think amateurs go after quite what you’re trying to do there.’
‘Well, perhaps not. But one can test oneself, you see, by seeing whether one has the technique to master other people’s tricks. Those lines and areas I’ve been daubing on are perfectly static and inert on the canvas. But I want to make you believe that you see them moving as you look at them. It’s fascinating in a way, but even if it succeeds it’s no more than a superior form of conjuring. Much like a lot of Fulke’s writing, as a matter of fact. He wants to kid us that things created by him are moving when they are not. And at a certain level he gets away with it.’
‘I suppose I follow that.’ Bernie, it seemed to Penelope, was possessed of rather more of critical intelligence than of simple loyalty to his former employer. ‘But you still haven’t told me how and why we’re to work together.’
‘On Fulke’s papers. There’s a letter about them waiting for you upstairs which I imagine to be similar to one he left for me. He wants the papers to remain in this house – your house – and the copyright in them is vested with you entirely. He hopes we’ll sift through them, and prepare a certain amount of them for publication.’
‘But it’s absurd, Bernie. I read English at Oxford long ago, but I’m not any sort of literary person. It can be nothing but a sick man’s fancy.’
‘Fulke says – a shade enigmatically for me – that he once tried to place something rather important in your hands, and failed. He wants to do the same with something less important now.’
This small thunderbolt silenced Penelope through her second cup of tea. But when she did speak, it was to the point.
‘Bernie, do you yourself much want to take part in this job you talk about? You sound to me as if not all that impressed by Fulke’s talent and his success with it. And your association with him seems to have been fairly brief. Do you really want to get to work on his stray papers?’
‘I like Le Colombier. And now I like you.’
‘That’s a frivolous thing to say. You haven’t known me for half an hour.’
‘Well, in a way I haven’t. But my feeling is that here at last you are, and that it would be nice to do the work together. If that sounds silly, I’m sorry. By the way, when I said “Le Colombier” I meant it literally in one sense. I have quarters in the dovecot. And I’ll promise, if you like, never to emerge from them before blowing a whistle to let you know. The propriety of the situation shall be unflawed.’
‘Whistle or no whistle, it will certainly be that.’
‘Sorry again, Penelope. When I’m nervous I tend to produce silly quips. And I’m as nervous as hell. It has all been a bit sudden, for one thing. I suppose you knew – as I didn’t – that Fulke rather went in for making quirky wills. Every now and then a new one, with fresh ideas turning up. Quite a gold-mine to his lawyers, Fulke must have been.’
‘No, I didn’t know – although I was told the effective will was of very recent date.’
‘And those letters to be posthumously delivered: it seems that was a thing of his too. The creative impulse getting a bit out of hand, I suppose. But let’s drop Fulke for a moment. Do you know what I’m going to do? Leave you for a couple of hours to settle in, and then come over and cook a meal and find a bottle of wine. I’ve been a pretty good cook for rather a long time. But with wine it was a matter of a crash course with our late friend.’
‘Was Fulke—’
‘No, Penelope – not another word about Fulke now. There’s a lot I want you to know about him – or I think there is – but I must arrange my thoughts on the subject or I’ll just muddle him. Would you judge champagne a vulgar and unpromising start to our association?’
‘I’m not sure there’s going to be an association, Bernie. But I’ve no doubt whatever that Fulke owes us a bottle of champagne.’
‘Good girl! Do you mind my calling you that? I’m beginning to work it out that you must be – but amazingly – a few years older than me. But then I’m very young indeed.’
‘Go away, Bernie. That couple of hours not filled with incomprehensible nonsense may remove some of the lines from my brow. But I look forward to my dinner.’
‘And there’s the same promise of propriety—although I never gave a harder—’
‘Go away?’ Penelope found herself – distinctly with surprise – uttering this command with amusement rather than indignation. Bernie Huffer obeyed it at once. So Penelope was left to make what she could of as strange an encounter as she could remember. She tried to tell herself that ‘perky’, or even the more demotic ‘fresh’, was the correct and sufficient epithet for Fulke’s late secretary. But she saw that nothing of the sort would quite do. She had been amused by Bernie Huffer. And it was undeniably rather a long time since she had been much amused by anybody else.
Bernie proved to be indeed a very good cook, and he produced a dinner much superior to the one Penelope had judged it prudent to order for herself in Amboise. Moreover he was tactful over the champagne, ensuring that the bottle should be empty before she had finished her second glass. His guest (or employer) was left not without misgivings, all the same. Although now a widow who would not again see thirty, she still – as has been remarked – carried around with her at least a residue of her father’s persuasions in several fields. Mr Rich would distrust a young man who, being born or at least bred in no sort of menial condition, had turned himself into a competent chef. And Mr Rich would judge it decidedly strange that his daughter should sit down to any sort of meal at all in a secluded situation and the sole company of her late brother-in-law’s male secretary. But although such notions did lurk in some corner of Penelope’s own mind they didn’t greatly trouble her. And she found that Bernie was much more capable of a discreet comportment than her first rather bewildering encounter with him might have suggested.
He provided an amusing preview of the character both of Mme Saval, who came in to clear up and clean around, and of André, who looked after the lawns and the terrace and everything else outside. After this he talked a good deal about Fulke – and on the unstated but perfectly just premise that Penelope’s information on this family benefactor was of a sketchy sort. Penelope did know that Fulke’s life had been not such as Mallows could approve. It had to be admitted, Bernie said, that Fulke was a man too frequently liable to be fondly overcome with female charm. But he had been a good-hearted chap, and amusing in a variety of ways. At this point, although always waiting to be prompted by some question or other token of interest, Bernie’s conversation took on an anecdotal turn. His stories about his late employer were sometimes very funny, but at the same time not without a hint that a certain improvised expurgation was operative as he talked.
‘I suppose,’ Penelope asked as she did finish her champagne, ‘that he was the sort of person – eminent as a writer, I mean – whose life will have to be written by somebody?’
‘It’s sure to be. I’d say there are bound to be two or three books before the world begins to forget about Fulke Ferneydale.’
‘Does this business of going through his papers hitch on to that? Is there stuff that will have to be suppressed, at least for the present, before the papers are made available for research?’
These acute questions, which were perhaps the fruit of Penelope’s study of English literature at Oxford, visibly impressed Bernie as entirely relevant.
‘I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen much of the stuff, which is all up in Fulke’s work-room in the attics. But I don’t think you and I are expected to work as censors. And it’s my guess that we’re not likely to come on anything much in the way of autobiography, or materials for a memoir. It’s likely all to be working stuff: note-books and stray observations, and abortive starts on plays and novels. There were several such miscarriages and pseudo-pregnancies during the comparatively short time I was with him. I don’t know that you’re going to find it particularly interesting, or that it’s quite your sort of thing – or mine either, for that matter. I think that if we just sort things into categories our duty will be done. After that, you’ll simply have to discover the appropriate chaps to hand it all to. Or nearly all to. For processing, you know, before it’s shoved profitably into print.’
‘I still find it rather puzzling.’
‘Yes, it is in a way. And – do you know? – I think we should put it all off for a little. You’re entitled to be much more interested in the house and the countryside than in that particular chore. Or in me, for that matter. And that brings me to a first suggestion. It’s that I take myself off for a few days – I’ve friends in Le Bugue I rather want to visit – and that then I come back – supposing, that is, you want me to – and that we get through the job as briskly as we can. Old Mme Saval isn’t all that bright, but she’ll be able to answer any questions of a practical sort. Sit on the terrace and absorb the view. Like the house, it’s your very own, because there’s nowhere else from which just that view is to be had. And André, circling the place on his little motor-mower, makes a kind of mobile repoussoir to the scene.’
Penelope felt that dinner had produced a rather different Bernie Huffer from the one she had first and briefly encountered. It might almost be said that decorum had been the key-note of the meal. And both his proposal to take himself off for a time and his disposition to deal lightly with Fulke’s whimsical notion of an archivist or literary executor seemed to be considerate gestures. Yet, curiously enough, she wasn’t altogether grateful. Perhaps Bernie had simply decided that she was an unpromising female from some undivulged point of view of his own, and that at Le Bugue – wherever that might be – lay metal more attractive. And he wasn’t particularly looking forward to being associated with her in the hunt through what she was coming to think of as Fulke’s lumber-room.
Having these last thoughts passing through her mind didn’t please Penelope at all. They belonged, she told herself, to a green girl. But then she reflected that if she had turned up, as she expected to do, at an entirely deserted Le Colombier, she might have been conscious of her adventure as essentially a lonely affair. So she received Bernie’s proposals with a good grace, and closed the door behind him almost with regret when he took himself off to his dovecot again at a fairly early, and therefore seemly, hour. Not, on the other hand, that he had bolted as quickly as he decently could. He had lingered to stack the dishes considerately for Mme Saval in the morning, and had given Penelope herself various pieces of information about what was where and how you coped with this or that. And he had said good-night with a touch of warmth but also with the deference of a well brought up boy to an older person. But this brought Penelope’s thoughts – or feelings – full circle, and again she wasn’t too pleased. To escape from the slight discomposure accompanying such unstable behaviour she made a short tour of the house before going to bed. Besides the Modigliani there was a Mondrian and a Picasso and a spindly Giacometti bronze – and probably in Fulke’s upstairs work-room, which was locked and to which she found herself without a key, there would be further things of the same sort. She had never in her life seen such treasures except in public galleries, and the progressive sense of owning a museum was almost as disquieting as having inherited a secretary. When she went to bed, however, she fell asleep at once.
Mme Saval turned up while Penelope was still finding herself breakfast, and proved to be already aware that the new proprietor of Le Colombier had arrived. In fact she had brought a gift in the form of a couple of croissants, and she stood by as if to make sure that her English patronne consumed these luxuries with due appreciation. She seemed to be a very old woman, but this may have been the effect of a contorted frame and generally weather-beaten appearance which spoke of long habituation to the life of the fields. It was clearly her intention to be copiously informative, but her volubility and dialect were alike such that Penelope was left groping for her meaning more often than not. She had a good deal to say about the villa’s late owner, venturing confidently into literary criticism with a vehement pronouncement that he had been le plus grand écrivain anglais de ces derniers temps. And she had a good deal to say about Bernie as well, but to an even less intelligible effect. The words filles and fillettes kept cropping up, however, sufficiently often to suggest that the young man was not particularly addicted to a monastic sort of life at Le Colombier. But was it Bernie who was mad about the girls, or the girls who were mad about Bernie? Perhaps, Penelope thought, what she was being told about was a rapid series of reciprocal attachments. But Bernie’s love-life wasn’t – couldn’t conceivably be – any affair of hers, and in order to escape from Mme Saval (who disturbingly accompanied her conversation with a vigorous manoeuvring of various primitive sweeping and dusting implements) she offered a firm remark on the beauty of the morning and went out to the terrace, there to survey what Bernie had declared to be her very own view.
This proved to be not quite true. She was sharing the prospect, if from a very different angle, with two black kites, whose slow wheeling over what they must be jealously guarding as their sole territory was at once impressive and obscurely ominous. They were patiently waiting, Penelope thought, for a rendezvous if not with anything living then with something dead.
‘Hullo, Penelope. I hope you slept well.’ Bernie had appeared suddenly beside her, so that she started slightly before turning to him. And this he observed. ‘Sorry to have forgotten to blow that whistle,’ he said. ‘But I’m just off, and wanted to pass the time of day. I say! There’s a bit of poetry about you. But not by me. William Morris, I rather think. With wide wing the fork-tailed restless kite sailed over her, hushing the twitter of the linnets near. I rather like poetry. Fulke didn’t.’
‘It certainly is very still. But perhaps there aren’t any linnets to hush. The indigenous humans have shot and eaten them.’
‘They prefer larks, as a matter of fact. A horrible people, don’t you think? What about Mme Saval – didn’t you find her horrible?’
‘Not in the least. Only garrulous. But I fail to understand every second sentence she utters.’
‘You have to get tuned in. Then you’ll find her no end informative. Particularly about me, if you happen to be at all curious. But there I go again. Another silly quip.’ Bernie had thrown back his head momentarily, so that his hair, which was fine and of the colour of ripe corn, stirred like ripe corn in a breeze. ‘But at least I’m departing, as I said. And I’ll be back on Friday, and we can start in on those papers – unless, of course, you’ve decided to have nothing to do with them. By the way, do take a prowl through the dovecot. I’d like to think of you as inspecting the lair of the monster. Good-bye! And don’t let the kites depress you. They’ve been there ever since I have, and I look on them as tutelary spirits.’ Bernie Huffer had taken two steps backward, rather as if quitting the presence of royalty, and from this position he offered a small and nervous-seeming gesture, at once friendly and diffident. Then he walked quickly away round a corner of the house, and the sound of a car being started made itself heard a minute later.
Penelope felt no disposition to be depressed by the kites. But she found, rather to her surprise, that she at least wasn’t heartened by Bernie Huffer’s departure. He could be seen as a frivolous or at least dilettante young man, and he had adopted from the first a familiarity of address which didn’t quite meet with her notions of what was proper at the beginning of an acquaintance. But Bernie must be at least ten years younger than she was. That was half a generation, and a period in which manners might change substantially without being noted as doing so by somebody who had been living so retired and even provincial a life as herself. At least Bernie was civilised and apparently well-read; he had produced that dinner with no fuss or bother whatever; and his taking himself off for a few days while she independently felt her feet at Le Colombier had been something markedly considerate. Moreover Bernie was tactful. He hadn’t asked her if she had read Fulke’s letter – and as a matter of fact she had not. There it had been, on a bureau in what had plainly been intended as her bedroom – and she had been weak enough to defer what she knew might be a disturbing experience. That was bad. So now she went back to the house at once, secured the letter, and returned to the terrace to read it in the comfortable warmth of the morning sun.
Dear Penelope,
I hope that before you have opened this letter you have accepted Le Colombier, arrived there, looked around you, and like the place. I feel I owe you a small gift, and the house, together with whatever happens to be in it when I die (which is to be quite soon) is just that. There are several pictures and things which poor Sophie may be prompted to appropriate. This I exhort you to resist.
There is also a young man called Bernard Huffer, who wants to be a painter but is at present my secretary. I’ve given him several thousand pounds to cover him over the longish period it may take to get matters as I should wish at Le Colombier, and cope with a shocking lot of uncompleted scribblings. Please give him a hand.
You are yourself, after all, right at the top of my list of unachieved proposals, and I like to think of you as turning over, and perhaps reading, the rest. A codicil to my will gives you formal control of it all. But of course you can, at any stage you choose, instruct Bernie to hand the material over to the professionals who have yanked me through my not altogether satisfying literary career.
There may be people who tell you that all this is rather rum, and bears the impress of a sick man’s vagary. Don’t believe them. I am entirely, as the lawyers say, compos mentis, and know what I am about.
Yours affectionately, Fulke
P.S. I hope, and believe the leeches would agree, that you are likely to be reading this letter at Le Colombier in early summer. If so, lay it down where you picked it up, go outside, and don’t get so absorbed in our famous view that you fail to see, and count, the wild flowers. F.F.
So here at least, Penelope thought, was something she could do at once and without misgiving. Indeed, she had already begun to comply, since she was sitting on the terrace with the view before her – which was seductive enough. But between her and that broad prospect of cultivated land south of the Dordogne there lay first the boy Andre’s close-shaven lawn and then that meadow-like expanse of longer grass sloping gently downwards to a belt of woodland lying beyond. Of the wild flowers on this terrain she had been aware on her arrival the day before; there were clumps of them immediately catching the eye, and others less obtrusive there must be in abundance awaiting discovery. Penelope knew her flowers and birds, since her stepmother (when still Mrs Martin) had held them in a rather old-fashioned regard as essential elements in a well brought up girl’s education. And she now felt that she would be a good deal more at home with orchids and spurges than with her late brother-in-law’s residual papers. Had Fulke known about her fondness for the simple pleasures of botany, so that the final injunction in his letter harboured some faint irony? It was very improbable, and could scarcely have come even momentarily into her head had she been of a perfectly easy mind about her strange acquisition. But at least the papers were going to wait until Bernie’s return to Le Colombier, and meanwhile the flowers were in front of her. She crossed André’s commonplace lawn to the longer grass besprent with them, and the first thing she came upon was a patch of yellow Rock-rose, pretending as usual to be buttercups. Next to these, all stalk and tiny flowers, was what she knew only as Treacle Mustard. Lizard Orchids, Bee Orchids, Yellow Wort, St John’s Wort: Penelope realised that to obey Fulke’s injunction would be to go on botanising for hours. And this she might have addressed herself to had a woman’s voice not suddenly spoken from behind her.
‘So there you are, Penelope! I couldn’t make head or tail of what that dirty old woman said as to your whereabouts. And there was no sign, even, of the impertinent young man.’
Penelope, who had been kneeling over a late-flowering patch of Spurge Laurel, stood up to find herself in the presence of Fulke’s widow. There was no mistaking this abundant presence for other than the former Sophie Dix, although long years had passed since Penelope had set eyes on her. So Bernie’s confident assertion that Sophie had been repelled for good was proving to be ill-founded.
‘Hullo, Sophie! But where is Silvan?’ Penelope made this inquiry by way of receiving an unwelcome intrusion with proper polite behaviour. But she had to wonder what she should do if; in Bernie’s absence, another determined attempt was going to be made upon the Modigliani. She had remembered during the night something about the picture that made any demand for it peculiarly outrageous.
‘I persuaded Silvan not to come. We came together – on business, you will understand – a few days ago, and Silvan treated your insufferable Mr Huffer rather roughly. I had to restrain him, as a matter of fact.’
‘Indeed?’ Penelope produced this brief response on a note of decently muted scepticism. ‘If you have come about a painting by Modigliani I’m afraid I can’t help you. And my own business, at the moment, is simply looking at the flowers. I’ve always wanted to own what might be called a wild garden. And now I do.’
‘I don’t question that. I don’t question Fulke’s foolish behaviour over this little house. But the pictures—’
‘Look, Sophie – Prunella vulgaris. Or Self-heal. The popular names are always the nicest, don’t you think? And just at your feet is Soap-wort – although the learned call it Saponaria.’ It was with perhaps a censurable levity that Penelope thus engaged in the activity (recalled from childhood) of showing a guest round the garden. ‘But shall we have a cup of coffee? It’s very pleasant on the terrace.’
‘We will stick to business here where we are, if you don’t mind.’
‘Just as you wish, Sophie dear.’ Penelope was far from displeased that her offer of modest hospitality had annoyed her visitor very much. And now the two Ferneydale widows were facing one another squarely on their flowery carpet. To the kites high above them they might have appeared to be a new species of rodent resolved to fight it out over a bone.
‘All the pictures are mine,’ Sophie said. ‘Fulke expressly made me a present of them.’
‘Walked in with them under his arm, do you mean? How very extraordinary!’
‘Don’t be foolish, Penelope. They were gifts made at various times.’
‘That must have been very gratifying. But why are you so particularly keen on the Modigliani?’
‘Because Silvan likes it. In fact, I have promised that he may have it in his rooms when he goes up to Cambridge.’
‘How very odd.’ And Penelope really did think it very odd. Modigliani’s nude as a work of art was presumably of high quality, but its erotic interest stood surely very close to zero. A Renoir of a lady similarly posed might have been another matter. But what Silvan wanted was simply a naked woman – and that was that. ‘And Fulke,’ she asked, ‘bought it for you long ago?’
‘Yes, of course. It was soon after our marriage.’ Sophie hesitated for a moment. ‘I remember the occasion so clearly.’
‘I’m afraid there must be some confusion, Sophie. Perhaps there were two Modiglianis. Because what you say can’t be true of the one here at Le Colombier.’
‘Just what do you mean?’
‘Caspar never talked very much about his brother.’
‘I’d suppose not. Caspar must have been very jealous of Fulke’s success. But you’re getting away from what we have to discuss.’
‘Far from it. I think it was just that Fulke had ceased to be very much in Caspar’s mind. But Caspar did once happen to tell me how his brother came to own a Modigliani. It was long before the price of such things became grotesquely high. When, in fact, they were both undergraduates at Oxford. Of course it is conceivable that it was for you he destined it. He’d probably already glimpsed you once or twice. But it wouldn’t be a story, Sophie dear, that would go down very well in a court of law. Or so I’d judge.’
‘I shall consult my solicitor.’
‘That’s a thoroughly good idea. He may save you from making a further fool of yourself.’ Penelope felt a decent slight dismay as she heard herself come out with this brutal remark. Had she not concurred with Dora Quillinan’s suggestion that one or two of the artistic treasures possibly harbouring in Fulke’s French villa might gracefully be ceded to his widow? But Sophie, she now told herself, was an impossible person. Almost everything the woman had said was objectionable – including her aspersing Mme Saval as a dirty old woman, and (more particularly, perhaps) her describing Bernie as impertinent and insufferable. It was true that about Bernie she had initially harboured some such thoughts herself. But she was of quite a different opinion about him now.
‘And meantime,’ Sophie said, ‘I am very sorry to gather that you are living in a totally indecorous manner cheek by jowl with that insolent young man. I never liked him. I seldom liked any of Fulke’s secretaries. For such a great writer, Fulke was a singularly poor judge of men.’
‘Was he, indeed?’ Penelope considered this to have been a particularly stupid remark. ‘I can’t recall its being recorded in that long obituary in The Times. But I suppose you were in a position to know. And please take a message to your son. It is simply that if he engages in any further smash-and-grab adventures here at Le Colombier I shall send for the police at once.’
And at this these two English gentlewomen parted. The kites, which had been narrowing their circle as if the altercation were exercising upon them some centripetal force, wheeled away on larger and yet larger arcs, sweeping alike over woodland and meadow and the quietly flowing Dordogne.