The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [18]
“I grew brown, I grew muscle, and at night—you can't imagine the dreams I'd had, before, but under that regimen, I'd fall into my bunk and sleep like a baby. Do you know what a blessing sleep can be?”
“Yes,” Holmes said.
Damian's question had been rhetorical, but at Holmes' answer he paused to squint at him through the smoke, then gave a thoughtful nod. “So, six months: across the Atlantic, working our way down the coast of Brazil, taking on rum and coir in one place, trading the rum for timber in another, buying hides farther down, transporting the odd passenger who might have needed to leave a town quickly and without notice—whatever took the Captain's fancy. We rounded the Horn and worked our way up Chile to Mexico and San Diego, then set off across the Pacific. The Hawaiis, Japan.
“Finally, we came to Shanghai. Have you been there?”
“Once, briefly.”
“A seething mass of corruption and vice—I think you'd enjoy the straight-forward criminality of the place. I found it filled with temptation, which you'd have thought a poor choice for a man in my position, but I was hungry to join the world again.
“With nothing to spend my pay on, I'd accumulated enough to take a small room in a … well, I thought at first it was simply one of the compounds they have in the city—Wong houses, they're called, with a number of units set into a series of courtyards, and a single entrance from the street. Within a day or two I couldn't help noticing that there were rather a lot of young girls living there who had a series of older male visitors. The whole Wong was one pleasure-house compound. I eventually found out that my landlord had three such, and made a habit of installing one or two large young men in each to help keep the peace. He may have expected that I should eventually become a client myself, but in fact his girls were little more than children, and my taste has never run in that direction. I became a sort of brother to them, and they could practice their English and come to me with problems. I took a job in the afternoons, washing dishes in a noodle shop. It paid a pittance—I still had no identity papers, so my choice was limited—but it gave me two meals a day and mornings free.
“The mornings I needed for the light, because I'd started to paint again. Er, I think you knew, that…?”
For the first time, the young man's self-assurance faltered, with the question of what his father had or had not known. Holmes rose and walked into the house; Damian gave me a sharp look that called to mind his father's hawk-like arrogance, but I could only shrug.
Holmes came back carrying a flat object a foot wide and eighteen inches tall. He set it on the stones, propping it upright against an unoccupied chair.
“That's his?” I exclaimed. “That's yours?”
The unsigned painting had hung for years on a wall of Holmes' laboratory upstairs, a puzzle to me, although I'd caught him studying it from time to time. Holmes owned little art, and had showed no interest, before or since, in a thing as jarringly modern—weird, even—as this one.
Damian picked it up to examine it by candle-light; his expression softened, although I could not tell what he thought of the painting, or of finding it here. “Yes, this is one of mine. From before the War.”
“I was told 1913,” Holmes agreed.
“I would have been nineteen. Imagine, being nineteen. It's not bad, considering. How do you come to have it?”
“It came on the market in March 1920.”
Damian turned his hawk-gaze on Holmes. “It was one of Hélène's?”
“Yes.”
Damian put the painting down again, and we all three studied it.
The canvas showed a bizarre dream-image of the sort that came to be called Surrealism. In technique it was masterful, closely worked and as detailed as a photograph. Its background was an English landscape: neat fields set inside hedgerows, a lane with a bicycle, a cow in the distance. On the horizon, white lines described the chalk cliffs where the South Downs fell into the Channel—not far from where we sat. In the foreground was a table, the weave of its spotless white cloth