While the Light Lasts - Agatha Christie [49]
In the middle of the bridge he saw the picture he was going to paint. It came to him from nowhere at all, out of the blue. He saw it, there in the air, or was it in his head?
A little, dingy curio shop, rather dark and musty-looking. Behind the counter a Jew–a small Jew with cunning eyes. In front of him the customer, a big man, sleek, well fed, opulent, bloated, a great jowl on him. Above them, on a shelf, a bust of white marble. The light there, on the boy’s marble face, the deathless beauty of old Greece, scornful, unheeding of sale and barter. The Jew, the rich collector, the Greek boy’s head. He saw them all.
‘The Connoisseur, that’s what I’ll call it,’ muttered Alan Everard, stepping off the kerb and just missing being annihilated by a passing bus. ‘Yes, The Connoisseur. I’ll show Jane.’
When he arrived home, he passed straight into the studio. Isobel found him there, sorting out canvases.
‘Alan, don’t forget we’re dining with the Marches–’
Everard shook his head impatiently.
‘Damn the Marches. I’m going to work. I’ve got hold of something, but I must get it fixed–fixed at once on the canvas before it goes. Ring them up. Tell them I’m dead.’
Isobel looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two, and then went out. She understood the art of living with a genius very thoroughly. She went to the telephone and made some plausible excuse.
She looked round her, yawning a little. Then she sat down at her desk and began to write.
‘Dear Jane,
Many thanks for your cheque received today. You are good to your godchild. A hundred pounds will do all sorts of things. Children are a terrible expense. You are so fond of Winnie that I felt I was not doing wrong in coming to you for help. Alan, like all geniuses, can only work at what he wants to work at–and unfortunately that doesn’t always keep the pot boiling. Hope to see you soon.
Yours, Isobel’
When The Connoisseur was finished, some months later, Alan invited Jane to come and see it. The thing was not quite as he had conceived it–that was impossible to hope for–but it was near enough. He felt the glow of the creator. He had made this thing and it was good.
Jane did not this time tell him it was splendid. The colour crept into her cheeks and her lips parted. She looked at Alan, and he saw in her eyes that which he wished to see. Jane knew.
He walked on air. He had shown Jane!
The picture off his mind, he began to notice his immediate surroundings once more.
Winnie had benefited enormously from her fortnight at the seaside, but it struck him that her clothes were very shabby. He said so to Isobel.
‘Alan! You who never notice anything! But I like children to be simply dressed–I hate them all fussed up.’
‘There’s a difference between simplicity and darns and patches.’
Isobel said nothing, but she got Winnie a new frock.
Two days later Alan was struggling with income tax returns. His own pass book lay in front of him. He was hunting through Isobel’s desk for hers when Winnie danced into the room with a disreputable doll.
‘Daddy, I’ve got a riddle. Can you guess it? “Within a wall as white as milk, within a curtain soft as silk, bathed in a sea of crystal clear, a golden apple doth appear.” Guess what that is?’
‘Your mother,’ said Alan absently. He was still hunting.
‘Daddy!’ Winnie gave a scream of laughter. ‘It’s an egg. Why did you think it was mummy?’
Alan smiled too.
‘I wasn’t really listening,’ he said. ‘And the words sounded like mummy, somehow.’
A wall as white as milk. A curtain. Crystal. The golden apple. Yes, it did suggest Isobel to him. Curious things, words.
He had found the pass book now. He ordered Winnie peremptorily from the room. Ten minutes later he looked up, startled by a sharp exclamation.
‘Alan!’
‘Hullo, Isobel. I didn’t hear you come in. Look here, I can’t make out these items in your pass book.’
‘What business had you to touch my pass book?’
He stared at her, astonished. She was angry. He had never seen her angry before.
‘I had no idea you