A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [37]
There was something strangely familiar about these words. He was grey-haired and hatless, carrying a fairly bulky parcel of newspapers, or so they appeared, under his left arm. His voice bore with it memories of time long past. Its tone was, indeed, laden with forgotten associations of childhood; those curious, rather fearful responses weighted with a sense of restriction and misgiving. Even so, there was also something about the stranger that seemed to belong to the immediate present; something that made me feel that a matter which had to do with him, even on that very evening, had already been brought to my notice. Yet his presence conveyed, too, an instant and vertiginous sense of being “abroad,” this last impression suddenly taking shape as that of a far-off visit to Paris. The same scattered records of sight and sound that Boyhood of Cyrus had suggested when first seen at the Walpole-Wilsons’. I had another look at the whitening hairs, and saw that they were Mr. Deacon’s, last surveyed, years before, on that day in the Louvre among the Peruginos.
He looked much the same, except that there was now something wilder—even a trifle sinister—in his aspect; a representation of Lear on the heath, or Peter the Hermit, in some nineteenth-century historical picture, preaching a crusade. Sandals worn over black socks gave an authentically medieval air to his extremities. The former role was additionally suggested by the undeniably boyish exterior of his companion, whose hair was cut short: barbered, in fact, in a most rough-and-ready fashion in the style then known as an “Eton crop.” This young woman might, so far as outward appearances were concerned, have passed easily on the stage for the aged king’s retainer, for, although her manner was more actively combative than the Fool’s, the shortness of her skirt, and bare knees, made her seem to be clad in a smock, or tunic, of the kind in which the part is sometimes played.
When I think of that encounter in Grosvenor Place, my attempt to reintroduce myself to Mr. Deacon in such circumstances seems to me strange, foolhardy even, and the fact still more extraordinary that he should almost immediately have succeeded in grasping my own identity. It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised. For example, to find a white-haired gentleman wandering about the streets in the small hours in the company of a young woman wearing an ample smear of lipstick across her face, and with stockings rolled to the knee, might easily prove a juncture when former meetings in irreproachable surroundings could, without offence, have been tactfully disregarded; although, as it turned out, there was not the smallest breath of scandal at that moment encompassing either of them.
“I had dinner at a house where one of your pictures hangs,” I told him, when inquiries about my family had been made and answered.
“Good gracious,” said Mr. Deacon. “Which one?”
“Boyhood of Cyrus.”
“Was that Aberavon’s? I thought he was dead these twenty years.”
“One of his daughters became Lady Walpole-Wilson. The picture is at her house in Eaton Square.”
“Well, I’m glad to know its whereabouts,” said Mr. Deacon. “I always make bold to consider it rather a successful achievement of mine, within the limits of the size of the canvas. It is unusual for people of that sort to have much taste in art. Aberavon was the exception. He was a man with vision. I expect his descendants have hung it in some quite incongruous place.”
I thought it wiser to supply no further details on the subject of the hanging of Boyhood of Cyrus. “Skyed” in the hall was a position even the most modest of painters could hardly regard as complimentary;