Patricia Wentworth - The Listening Eye

Miss Silver – #27

THE gallery was well lighted. Paulina Paine had a vague feeling that it was too well lighted. A good many of the pictures might have looked better if it had not been possible to see them quite so clearly. Everything about Miss Paine declared that she was a sensible person. She was fifty-seven, and she wore the kind of clothes which she considered appropriate to her age and her position in life. Her sturdy form was comfortably and sensibly attired in a thick tweed coat, grey with a black and white fleck in it. She wore sensible laced-up shoes and a dark grey felt hat with a plain black ribbon. She could not, in fact, have looked a less likely person to be visiting one of those small winter shows which display the kind of picture more calculated to shock than to sell. Unless, of course, the artist suddenly becomes famous, in which case art critics embark upon lively praise, dispraise, and argument, and millionaires begin to compete. Miss Paine was not here because she admired this type of work. Far from it. She did not. But if someone paints your portrait and it is put in an exhibition, you do feel obliged to go and see what it looks like there. As a matter of fact she thought it looked very well-much better than it had done in David Moray’s studio, which was the rather flattering name he had bestowed upon her top attic, a bare untidy room in which he cooked horrid-smelling messes and slept on an iron bedstead several sizes too small for him. She stood in front of the portrait and was gratified on two points. It wasn’t labelled with her name. It wasn’t even called Portrait of a Lady , or, more realistically, of a landlady. It was just called The Listener , and she could see what David meant by the name-there was that kind of look about the eyes, and the turn of the head. It vexed her a little, because she thought she had got rid of looking as if she were trying to hear all the things that she would never hear again. The second thing that pleased her was that the picture was marked “Sold”. She couldn’t imagine why anyone should want to buy it. Even when she was quite young she had had no pretensions to anything beyond pleasant, sensible looks. At fifty-seven-well, she hoped that she still looked pleasant, but she couldn’t think why anybody should want to hang her on a wall. There had been quite a flattering notice in an Art Journal, but she still couldn’t understand why the portrait should have sold.

Her own picture was not, of course, the only reason why she had come. It wasn’t even the chief reason. Her cousin Hilda Gaunt’s son had two pictures in the gallery, and her sense of family duty required that she should come and see them and write and tell Hilda that she had done so. If it was possible to find anything to admire in them she would say it, but she was not prepared to tell lies, which in her opinion very seldom deceived anyone and were apt to lead to complications. Wilfrid’s first picture puzzled her. She thought she might perhaps describe it as enigmatic. There was a broken tombstone looming up out of a kind of blue fog, there were some bones that looked as if they might be human, there was an aspidistra in a bright pink pot. The aspidistra was really quite well painted. It was in fact immediately recognizable as an aspidistra. She had known plants of which it was the spit and image, she had known pots of china in just that shade of pink. She thought perhaps she might say that she found them lifelike, but it was difficult to suppose that this would satisfy Hilda’s maternal pride.

She moved on to Wilfrid’s second picture, and it was Worse. There was, unfortunately, nothing enigmatic about it, it was plain Nasty. She had taken a seat in front of it because her feet were killing her, and until she had taken her weight off them and drawn several deep breaths of relief she didn’t realize just how nasty the picture was. She simply couldn’t imagine what she could possibly say about it to Hilda. The word daring presented itself. Anyhow, now that she was sitting down she wasn’t going to get up again-not until her feet had had a rest. But go on looking at that revolting picture she could not. What she could do and did do was to avert her gaze and look down the room. There was a seat away to the left and quite a long way off. A man sat there. He had a catalogue in his hand, and he appeared to be studying it. She had a vague impression that he had been there for some time.

Just as she looked round, another man came in through a door at the far end. He too carried a catalogue. Paulina Paine watched him idly as he consulted a page and stood looking at what suggested the explosion of an atom bomb. She had excellent sight, and she couldn’t imagine that it could possibly be intended for anything else.

Presently he transferred his attention to a greenish female who appeared to have had several of her bones broken, after which he stepped backwards in the direction of the seat and sat down. So there they were-two ordinary men on a shiny seat with a civil distance between them. Paulina found herself wondering whether their reactions to the dislocated lady would be strong enough to induce them to exchange views on the subject. If anyone had come to sit on the same bench as herself, she would have found it difficult to refrain from speech. She sat and watched the men. They were to all intents and purposes as much alone as if she had not been there. It would not have been possible for her or for anyone else to hear what they might say. In point of fact even if she had been sitting on the same seat she could have heard nothing. The last sound which had reached her, or would ever reach her in this world, was the crash of the bomb which had brought her office down over her head in 1941. She had been buried in the ruins for twenty-four hours, and when they got her out she was stone-deaf, and had so remained. With characteristic energy and fortitude she had learned lip-reading, developed a talent for cooking, and taken a post as housekeeper at a school in the country. Just before the war ended her uncle, Ambrose Paine, died. He was a very cross, determined old man whose motto through life had been “When I say a thing, I mean it.” In the course of a long and rather dreary life he had said a number of disagreeable things, and at least one courageous one. He said he would see the war out in London, and he had almost brought it off, dying only a week before the Armistice in the big old-fashioned house where he had been born. He left it, with what remained of his capital, to his niece Paulina, and she came back to town and let off all the rooms except two on the ground floor, which she kept for herself. Ambrose Paine would have been outraged and scandalized, but Paulina hadn’t really liked school life or communal cooking, and she loved London. It was odd at first to walk down familiar streets where the traffic had roared and see it go by as silently as if it were no more than a picture on the screen at a cinema. But she got used to it, and she got very good at her lip-reading. Practising it continually, it had become second nature. Interesting too. She had read some curious things from lips whose words were pitched for the ear of a friend, a lover, or an enemy. She could sit in a restaurant and know what people were saying at some table isolated by a barrage of talk and music-She looked along the gallery and read what the man who had just come in was saying.