James Long - Sixth Column

‘Your Ladyship will of course know that Legros studied under Lecoq de Boisbaudran,’ said the gallery owner, looking nervously at her face. Lady Viola ignored him. She seemed to him to be looking at the frame, not the picture. ‘He was, of course, a leader of the Realist movement, very strong on detail and depth. You will have noticed the fine metallic effects.’

Lady Viola was peering closely at the picture. He thought she was taking in the sheen on the burnished iron of the cauldron in the corner of the canvas. She was in fact wondering whether the browns and yellows would go with the wallpaper in her morning room.

‘Blacksmith looks a bit like that sod Delors,’ she observed. ‘Frenchman, I suppose, this fellow?’ she barked, looking around.

‘Well, of course, Legros was a native of France but he did work chiefly in England. He was a Slade Professor of Fine Art for nearly twenty years…’ It seemed to be cutting little ice but in any case, he was interrupted by the arrival of the messenger.

Lady Viola ripped the envelope open, scanned the sheet of paper inside with cursory irritation which slowed through horror and then, as the meaning became clear to her, coalesced into fury. She read it again, looked about as if searching for something to kick and her gaze happened on the painting.

‘I hate the bloody thing,’ she said, ‘French rubbish. To hell with it. Why don’t you get some decent English pictures in?’

‘Well of course, your Ladyship will know that, as a gallery, we specialize in nineteenth century French…’ He was talking to himself. The door had slammed behind her and his sentence tailed off in a faltering mumble.

At GKC’s headquarters, Sir Greville had given instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He had the text of the intercepted material that Johnny had retrieved from Sir Michael’s desk and the first task was to construct a plausible set of answers for the Hurst Inquiry. That should be much simpler now he knew precisely what they had in front of them. The document which had been sent to them was incomplete. Thank Heaven for that. It could therefore be portrayed, with a bit of skill and care, as something else. Some marketing man’s joke, perhaps? The subject of a bit of mistyping? Perhaps, if he could be sure this was all they had, he could produce a new beginning and end to the document which would put a much less dangerous gloss on it.

Whatever, possession of the intercept gave him the upper hand but it had suddenly dawned on him that possession also gave him a possible ace in the hole in a totally different direction and he had given himself an hour’s peace to think it through.

He looked up with intense displeasure when the door opened but the white-faced secretary who stood helplessly beyond it was powerless to prevent Lady Viola in full swing going precisely where she wanted.

His wife seemed to push a bow wave of air before her like a tube train entering a station and he motioned to the secretary to shut the door behind her. He looked uneasily at Lady Viola, whose expression bordered on the manic. She threw Sibley’s transcript in front of him with an expression that implied that if he couldn’t quickly spot the problem then he would be bracketed with it and he turned his gaze to it with trepidation.

He soon thought he’d found some safe ground. ‘Well, I suppose we have to assume that Johnny’s becoming attached to this Heather Weston,’ he said.

Wrong.

‘Are you being deliberately stupid, Greville?’ Her voice wavered not with weakness but with the overload of hatred it was being forced to carry. ‘I don’t give a toss about the girl. That’s… that’s piffling.’ Venom gave a bizarre quality of menace to the schoolgirl word. ‘I can sort that out any time I want to. He’s visiting Michael again. Don’t you see? Anything could happen, anything at all. I’ve done everything I could to keep him from coming under that man’s influence, without very much support from you, I have to say.’ Her eyes seemed to bulge more and more as she paced up and down in front of his desk. ‘Now he’s going to have dinner with him. Johnny’s not clever, you know, Greville. He’s suggestible. Michael will take him and twist him like a piece of string. He’ll tell him all kinds of lies about me. We can’t just… can’t just…’ She was panting, hyperventilating. Sir Greville got up and helped her to a chair.

‘But Michael Parry doesn’t even know who Johnny is, does he? Johnny’s report to Sibley said he went under a false name.’

‘Johnny knows who he is. That’s bad enough. Absolutely anything could happen.’

‘Before we go off at the deep end, perhaps we’d better be in a position to hear just exactly what they do say to each other?’ her husband suggested.

Her breathing slowed down then and her eyes narrowed, became hooded. There was a long silence. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually, ‘we’ll hear all of it, every syllable of every word.’ She strode out of the office, pouring her molten anger into the cooling moulds of dangerous plans.

Her husband went back to composing what he hoped would be the most profitable fax message of his business career.

Maggie and Johnny went to the office separately. She was called to see Sibley and disappeared for the rest of the day. He was allocated to a boring and routine analysis and on the way home found himself looking forward to a quiet evening’s reading. There had been something spiritually exhausting about the past few days and the idea of two or three hours slouched comfortably in his soggy armchair with a Wilfred Owen collection had a deep appeal.

There was something odd in the porter’s manner when he opened the door to let Johnny in to the flats, a touch of matey joviality which he found unsettling.

He opened his door, thumbed through the post, went into the bedroom reading a circular letter about subscriptions from his shooting club and unbuckled his belt. When he had stepped out of his trousers and was stooping down to pick them up off the floor his eyes, close to the edge of the bed, focused on Maggie, lying on the bed on her stomach. Her hair, stretching down her back, was the only thing covering her. She turned her head and smiled.

‘You’ve been a long time,’ she said.

‘How did you get in?’

‘Johnny, you sound quite indignant,’ she said, amused. ‘It wasn’t difficult. The porter hadn’t forgotten me, you know.’

‘He let you in?’

‘You forgot to give me a key.’

‘I wasn’t…’ expecting you to come back , he had been going to say, but that sounded ungallant. ‘…sure you’d be coming.’

‘You didn’t think I was just using you as a one-night stand?’ Her voice was arch. ‘I’m not that kind of girl.’

He nodded slowly, seeing the course of his evening changing and regretting the change. Manners reasserted himself. What to do when confronted by a desirable but slightly unwelcome naked woman?

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.

She twisted over with studied grace and the full-frontal impact of her body tilted the scales a little further away from the war poets, though not as far as she might have hoped. Johnny felt like someone being offered a second Chinese Imperial banquet two hours after their last one.

He took a pair of jeans from the chair and put them on as if that was a necessary prelude to going to the kitchen. He chose a bottle of white wine from the fridge, took his time with the corkscrew, hoping she would appear from the bedroom into more neutral ground but she didn’t, so, drawn back to the vortex of her whirlpool, he went slowly back into the bedroom with two glasses and sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘Tell me a story, Johnny,’ she said as she squirmed across the bed and settled her head into his lap.