Money from Holme Read Free

a doubt of it. The man next to him was Sebastian Holme.

 
     
2
    As was not unnatural in such an exigency, Mervyn Cheel fell for some seconds into considerable confusion of mind. It is quite usual (he found himself reassuring himself) for artists to attend their own private views. Yes (he found himself replying), but dressed in their best clothes, standing before their best picture, and assuming whatever pitiful simulacrum of the manners of a gentleman they think may soften up the boobs and suckers who are being introduced to them. And alive . Not dead .
    At this point a cold shiver ran down Cheel’s spine. He turned to his left, with the blind intention of making some desperate appeal to Sir William Coldstream. But Sir William had disappeared. So – he saw, glancing wildly round – had Lord Crawford, Sir Herbert Read, and the Directors of the Metropolitan and the Brera. Perhaps he had imagined all these distinguished persons. Perhaps he had imagined – He turned cautiously to his right again. Sebastian Holme was still there.
    With a staggering gait, and all oblivious of the pleasures of letting a hand or thigh brush those so-enticingly-circumjacent female posteriors, Cheel made his way to one of the Da Vinci’s over-stuffed and moth-eaten plush settees, sank down on it, and endeavoured to collect his thoughts. He positively could not believe, he found, that he was in the grip of simple hallucination. The idea was too utterly repugnant to his just intellectual pride. Only stupid and besotted people see things in that vulgar sense. He remembered having read a book called Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death , and in the light of this recollection he took a cautious glance across the room. But the figure before the jungle painting failed at all convincingly to suggest a Veridical Phantasm of the Dead. It suggested nothing at all except plain Sebastian Holme.
    There remained only one explanation on this side of sanity: the very obvious one of mistaken identity. It was something that was constantly happening, after all. Why, only a few minutes ago the corpulent man had been taking him for somebody with whom he had once painted jolly old St Tropez red. So here was somebody like the late Sebastian Holme. The thing was as simple as that.
    Unfortunately – and this seemed the really terrifying fact – the figure was not all that like Sebastian Holme. It couldn’t be, since it was heavily bearded, whereas he had never known Holme other than clean-shaven – or at least in some slovenly approximation to that state. What had happened was that, quite contrary to at least superficial appearance, he had received a convinced impression that this was Holme. And surely this wasn’t how simple mistakings of identity worked.
    But there was something more. For this something more Cheel found that his mind had to grope. His first conviction had been powerfully confirmed, but he had already forgotten how. He was in contact – his high intelligence immediately helped him to realize – with some element within himself of psychological trauma . Something else had come under his observation, and it was something the recollection of which was painful to him.
    That! Suddenly be had remembered. But, even as he did so, he doubted as well. There was therefore nothing for it: a confirmatory examination must be made. Almost fearfully, he took a further glance around the room. His first observation was disturbing in itself. It was of the young woman at whose deliciously plump derrière he had so lately taken that carefree pinch. The young woman was looking angrily about her. It appeared likely that the Director of the Brera had got away unaspersed.
    The bearded man had moved on. He was now standing before – and seemed to be rather furtively, or at least uneasily, examining – a portrait of a bearded man! Cheel, although he felt his head fairly swimming before this further bizarrerie , managed to get to his feet and wriggle once