Read Online What Happened at Hazelwood? by Michael Innes - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Innes
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the night following would not have taken place. The little business now to be related was, in fact, cardinal in the whole affair. So sharpen your perceptions and cease reading with that hurrying eye.
If George was no fool he certainly was no student either, and there seemed small reason why he should have a study any more than a smithy or a laboratory or a consulting room. Tradition of course, decrees something of the sort. A baronet must have a library, a study and a gun-room just as certainly as his wife must have a drawing-room and a boudoir. These necessities are mysterious – a boudoir means, it appears, a room to be sulky in, and why should the over-privileged have particular need of that? – but there seems to be no harm in them. Only there was, a little – in George’s case.
George’s study is not in the least traditional; in fact it is one of his rather offensive jokes. A long, dusky, ill-lit room on the first floor, it is furnished with nothing more than a refectory table accommodating writing materials and scattered magazines, half a dozen hard chairs, and a few statuettes on short marble pillars. This is all the furnishing, that is to say, if one doesn’t count the pictures.
Originally there were only family portraits: to be precise, the ten Simney baronets ending with George himself. I do not know that an inspection of them would have been well calculated to support any simple faith in the blessings of pedigree; from the original Sir Hippias onwards they were, I should have judged, a thoroughly dissipated lot. Still, the effect must have been respectable enough: Sir Hippias (although in fact a superior peddler who had done well out of profit-inflations under James I) was represented by Mytens as a blue-blooded person casting a casual eye over the deeds of his Trojan ancestors in a large folio of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum ! the first Sir Denzell, who had been a bishop as well as a baronet, had elected to be painted by Kneller in full canonicals, surrounded by his favourite hounds; Sir Bevis, who had not only, like George, married an actress, but strangled her as well, appeared in a canvas of Wilkie’s deeply absorbed in the ground-plan of an orphanage. Perhaps it was the fact that despite the disguisements of art, they nearly all suggest in mouth or eye that loose-fish quality discerned by Grace: perhaps it was this that gave George his notion.
The Simneys have quite a collection of Old Masters, brought together for the most part in the eighteenth century and, despite rising values, obstinately retained since. George had gone round these, picked out the most effective nudes, and dispersed them among his ancestors by way of female companionship. Thus over the fireplace, her lurking quality amid a heavy chiaroscuro emphasized by the elaborately carved Grinling Gibbons pillars between which she is recessed, stands a long-thighed Venus by Caravaggio, her allurements emphasized by the ghost of a lawn smock. And on each side of her stand fully – indeed elaborately – clothed Simney gentlemen, so that the total effect is not unlike that ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ with which the painter Manet contrived to shock Paris in 1863. Opposite this, and on either side of the room’s only window, are a Danae by Tintoretto and a Pasiphae by Bordone respectively. The Danae is flanked by Sir Guy Simney, depicted by Cornelius Janssen in his counting-house amid little piles of golden coin; and the Pasiphae stands next to the second Sir Bevis, a Victorian gentleman who is shown by Stanhope Forbes as leaning over a fence to examine a prize bull. These little jokes (and the ability to contrive them was probably about all that remained to George of a classical education) the reigning baronet had contrived to crown by having himself painted in a pink hunting coat which exactly toned with the flesh of a post-Matisse lady sprawled on a sofa. All this being achieved, George had added two large mirrors at each
If George was no fool he certainly was no student either, and there seemed small reason why he should have a study any more than a smithy or a laboratory or a consulting room. Tradition of course, decrees something of the sort. A baronet must have a library, a study and a gun-room just as certainly as his wife must have a drawing-room and a boudoir. These necessities are mysterious – a boudoir means, it appears, a room to be sulky in, and why should the over-privileged have particular need of that? – but there seems to be no harm in them. Only there was, a little – in George’s case.
George’s study is not in the least traditional; in fact it is one of his rather offensive jokes. A long, dusky, ill-lit room on the first floor, it is furnished with nothing more than a refectory table accommodating writing materials and scattered magazines, half a dozen hard chairs, and a few statuettes on short marble pillars. This is all the furnishing, that is to say, if one doesn’t count the pictures.
Originally there were only family portraits: to be precise, the ten Simney baronets ending with George himself. I do not know that an inspection of them would have been well calculated to support any simple faith in the blessings of pedigree; from the original Sir Hippias onwards they were, I should have judged, a thoroughly dissipated lot. Still, the effect must have been respectable enough: Sir Hippias (although in fact a superior peddler who had done well out of profit-inflations under James I) was represented by Mytens as a blue-blooded person casting a casual eye over the deeds of his Trojan ancestors in a large folio of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum ! the first Sir Denzell, who had been a bishop as well as a baronet, had elected to be painted by Kneller in full canonicals, surrounded by his favourite hounds; Sir Bevis, who had not only, like George, married an actress, but strangled her as well, appeared in a canvas of Wilkie’s deeply absorbed in the ground-plan of an orphanage. Perhaps it was the fact that despite the disguisements of art, they nearly all suggest in mouth or eye that loose-fish quality discerned by Grace: perhaps it was this that gave George his notion.
The Simneys have quite a collection of Old Masters, brought together for the most part in the eighteenth century and, despite rising values, obstinately retained since. George had gone round these, picked out the most effective nudes, and dispersed them among his ancestors by way of female companionship. Thus over the fireplace, her lurking quality amid a heavy chiaroscuro emphasized by the elaborately carved Grinling Gibbons pillars between which she is recessed, stands a long-thighed Venus by Caravaggio, her allurements emphasized by the ghost of a lawn smock. And on each side of her stand fully – indeed elaborately – clothed Simney gentlemen, so that the total effect is not unlike that ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ with which the painter Manet contrived to shock Paris in 1863. Opposite this, and on either side of the room’s only window, are a Danae by Tintoretto and a Pasiphae by Bordone respectively. The Danae is flanked by Sir Guy Simney, depicted by Cornelius Janssen in his counting-house amid little piles of golden coin; and the Pasiphae stands next to the second Sir Bevis, a Victorian gentleman who is shown by Stanhope Forbes as leaning over a fence to examine a prize bull. These little jokes (and the ability to contrive them was probably about all that remained to George of a classical education) the reigning baronet had contrived to crown by having himself painted in a pink hunting coat which exactly toned with the flesh of a post-Matisse lady sprawled on a sofa. All this being achieved, George had added two large mirrors at each
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