The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [48]
“I do not know where my brother is, but those are the addresses of Damian's gallery and his home. Either of those might be a good place to start.”
I looked at him in surprise. “You've simply been carrying this around?”
“When I heard that you were not with my brother, I knew it would not be long before you came looking.”
I grinned and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then reversed my direction.
“What shall I do with your valise?” he called after me.
I waved a hand in the air and broke into a trot.
To my surprise, the gallery that sold Damian Adler's paintings was not some narrow and dingy upper-storey hole several streets “off” Regent Street, but a prosperous, glass-fronted shop a stone's throw from the Royal Academy. A bell dinged at my entrance. Voices came from behind a partition at the back and a sleek woman in her early forties poked her head around the wall, giving me a brief but penetrating once-over. I did not think that I impressed her overmuch, since I had not intended to enact a patron of the arts when I left Sussex. “I shall be with you momentarily,” she said in a French accent.
“I'm happy to look,” I told her. She went back to her conversation, which had to do with the delivery of a painting.
The gallery had two rooms. The first displayed paintings, and a few small bronze sculptures, that would have been considered dangerously avant-garde before the War but were now just comfortably modern. I recognised an Augustus John portrait, and two of the bronzes were Epsteins. It was the next room that held the more demanding forms: one canvas made up of paint masses so thick, it could have been the artist's palette board mounted on the wall; three twisted sheets of brass that might be horses' heads or women's torsos, but in either case appeared to be writhing in pain; a gigantic, wide-brimmed cocktail glass tipped to pour its greenish contents into a puddle on the floor.
I spotted the first of Damian's paintings immediately I came into the room. It was an enormously tall, narrow canvas, twelve feet by two, and appeared at first glance to have been sliced from a larger, more complete image: branches and leaves at the top, giving way to a length of marvellously realistic bark and, at the bottom, the clipped grass out of which the tree was growing.
The centre of the image was a confusion of colours and shapes: a hand outstretched, a leg and foot dangling above the grass, and most troubling, a piece of a man's face with a staring, dead-looking eye. With a shock, I realised that I was looking at a strip, as it were, of a larger image, showing a man hanging from a tree—but if the eye was dead, that tensely extended hand was definitely not.
In a lesser craftsman, I would have thought he had painted the eye badly; in a lesser mind, I might have assumed the artist did not know how a dead hand would hang. But this was Damian Adler, so I looked at the card on which the title had been typed:
Woden in the World Tree
If I remembered my Norse mythology, the god Woden—or Odin-had hanged himself for nine days in the tree that supported the world, so as to gain knowledge. Woden was blind in one eye.
I nodded in appreciation, and moved to the next painting, that of a hand shaking itself in a mirror—clever, but nothing more. The one after that appeared to be a solid wall of leaves, meticulously detailed, until one noticed that the twin points of gleam to one side were eyes: The hidden image gradually resolved into the ancient pagan figure of the Green Man.
Next time I walked through the woods, the back of my neck was going to crawl.
The room's far wall at first glance seemed to have a window in it, but did not.
What it had was a trompe-l'oeil painting, with shadows falling naturally both on the inner sill and on the scene “outside.” It showed an alleyway, such as might indeed be on the other side of the wall: an expanse of dirty red bricks topped by a slice