The Water Room

43. OIL AND WATER

‘Blimey, a rare sighting of the lesser-fancied detective, Homunculus Senex Investigatorus,’ said Peregrine Summerfield, scratching his face through his wild ginger beard. ‘Come in before the neighbours see you. Excuse the pyjamas, I prefer to paint in them because of the mess.’ He waved Bryant in with a flick of his paintbrush, dabbing the wall turquoise. Bryant noticed that there was vermilion paint on the ceiling. ‘How the devil did you find me?’

‘Lilian told me you were living up here now,’ Bryant explained. ‘I bumped into her a few weeks ago.’

‘I hope you were driving a bulldozer. She’s been a proper cow since she walked out. I only own one painting, a small and rather sickly Wols that looks like a regurgitated prawn biriani, but Bauhaus stock is higher than ever and now she’s demanding it in the divorce settlement.’

‘I had no idea you liked German abstract art. I don’t suppose there are any clean cups.’ Bryant wandered into the kitchen and ran a kettle under the tap. Every piece of crockery on the draining board was covered with brushes and half-dried blobs of acrylic paint.

‘I use plastic ones now, saves on the washing up. Well, you can look upon me and despair. How the once mighty art lecturer has fallen, Ozymandias in Stoke Newington. I haven’t seen you since that business of the vandalized Pre-Raphaelite at the National. You only bloody call on me when you want something.’ Summerfield wiped a brush out on his striped pyjama shirt. ‘What is it this time?’

‘I need some information on an artist. At least you’ve started painting again.’

‘Well, after Countess Dracula left I packed up the classes and stopped going out for a while, until my pupils came around one day and accused me of giving up on them. What could I do? I couldn’t mope about for ever. Besides, there’s good light in here. I can sit around all day in my underpants flicking paint at the walls if I want to. It feels like a proper home. I still teach art two days a week, but I’m selling my paintings down the Bayswater Road at weekends. Frightful rubbish, sunsets and puppies for tourists with no taste, but I’m making a living wage for once. Who are you after?’

‘Did you ever hear of an artist called Gilbert Kingdom?’ asked Bryant.

Summerfield fondled his beard ruminatively. ‘Not for a very long time,’ he said finally.

‘So you do know of him?’

‘Of course. A great enigma, something of a bête noir. He was a disciple of Stanley Spencer, perhaps a more formidable talent.’

‘Then why have I never heard of him?’

‘Because he never fulfilled his potential. But he’s known to most fine-art historians worth their salt. Kingdom suffered the fate of so many geniuses. Showed great promise as a student at the Slade-Spencer went there, of course-then he underwent some kind of epiphany in much the same way as Spencer had done. Kingdom took a more pagan approach to understanding the world, dividing it into elemental spirits of fire and water. He wasn’t interested in knocking out gilt-framed portraits for punters, he was preoccupied with linking pagan rituals directly to the land. All the talent in the world can’t save a man born out of fashion. Eventually he went barking mad and died in poverty. There are hardly any books on him.’

‘I have one.’ Bryant removed the volume from a scuffed leather briefcase. ‘Unfortunately, the section on his work has been removed.’

‘Ah, I’ve got that book,’ said Summerfield with obvious pleasure. ‘I think it’s pretty much the only place where I’ve ever seen his work reprinted. Let me see if I can find it for you.’

Bryant drank his tea and listened while the art master rooted about in his lounge.

‘I’m afraid the cover’s torn off, but it’s the same edition.’ His rough, paint-stained fingers ploughed through the volume until he came to the pages missing from Tate’s copy. He passed it to Bryant.

‘All we have is a tantalizing glimpse of the man’s brilliance, two paintings now both in California, a few studies and sketches. Just as Spencer painted Cookham, Kingdom painted London. He broke the city down into four distinct colour palettes, densities and timescales.’

‘How did he do that?’

‘Well, there’s London of the Great Fire, and later, during the industrial revolution, a city of steely flame, a man-made inferno of pumping pistons and belching boilers. Then there’s the city of swirling unhealthy fogs, mists and windswept hills, a place of mystery, disease and danger. Then the city of water, crossed by a great meandering river and a hundred tributaries, a landscape of waterwheels and mills, of rain and floods. And finally, the city of rich clay earth, wherein one could find the bones of plague victims, the soul and soil in which its residents take root like the Hydra’s teeth.’

‘The four elements, in fact.’

‘Exactly so. Such thinking was unfashionable at a time when postwar modernism was gaining so much ground. He failed to find a patron, and was eventually kicked to death in the gutter by children, somewhere around your neck of the woods.’

Bryant examined the paintings, the half-finished outpourings of an extraordinary mind, ragged deities commanding the earth and sky while cowering acolytes toiled in tiny brick houses. The colours and detailing were extraordinary. Bryant was reminded of Victorian faerie paintings, reproduced on an epic canvas.

‘And this is all he painted?’

‘Ah, there’s the paradox. Those whose abilities set them ahead of their time are often rewarded posthumously, but failure hides them from sight. The more they forge ahead beyond the spirit of the age, the more the world is intent on burying them. It was said that Kingdom created other pieces, but all of them were destroyed. Nobody knows for sure.’

‘Who would do such a terrible thing as destroying a work of art?’

‘Dear naive fellow, every decade has its self-appointed censors. The only mercy is that time forgets them and remembers the artist. In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect. There were those who objected to Kingdom’s choice of subject matter. For some, his style was too close to that associated with fascist art. Nazism was on the rise, the times were uncertain, and no one wanted to see depictions of a future free from Christianity. At the Slade, it was said that Kingdom was the one artist capable of depicting the missing episodes of England’s pagan past.’

‘Do you think he could have destroyed his own work?’

‘Difficult question. One doesn’t want to believe such things, of course, but what other explanation could there be? He died a pauper, homeless and friendless, unloved and unremembered. Not for him the eager wake of adoring students. There’s so little to go on, you see. He didn’t die at a youthful age like Firbank or Beardsley. They both produced fair bodies of work in their short young lives.’

‘How old was Kingdom when these boys attacked him?’

‘I believe he was in his forties, not quite so young in those days as it is now. He drank, he starved, and looked much older. Here.’ Summerfield turned the page and pointed out a monochrome photograph depicting a gaunt, sickly man in a ragged tweed jacket. The figure standing beside him was clean-shaven and crop-headed, but as Bryant had suspected, was clearly Tate as a young man. ‘And that’s his son,’ confirmed Summerfield.

‘What do you know of this boy?’ asked Bryant.

‘His name was Emmanuel Kingdom. He was said to be devastated by the old man’s death, swore to take revenge on those who killed his father-but that was probably just a romantic notion circulated by art teachers. Of course, such a boy had no way of doing so, and I imagine the obsession eventually sent him along the same path as his father.’

‘Do you have any idea what happened to him?’

‘I believe he worked for a time as a guard at the Tate Gallery, in order to be near one of his father’s paintings. Must have devastated him when they flogged it to the Yanks. Never heard anything about him after that.’

‘I think I know where he is.’

‘You do?’ Summerfield fairly inflated with excitement. ‘If we could locate him, he may be able to throw light on his father’s life. Do you know how important this could be? Information is money, Arthur.’

‘I have to find him more quickly than you can imagine,’ Bryant agreed. ‘But for an entirely different reason. I fear he’s connected with terrible events.’

‘At any rate, it’s good to see you again,’ smiled Summerfield. ‘Did you ever catch the vandal who ruined the picture in the National Gallery?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Bryant replied distractedly, pulling on his coat.

‘I hope they managed to repair the painting. The Waterhouse.’

Bryant was caught with his arm in one sleeve. ‘Remind me?’

‘The painting was by Waterhouse, wasn’t it? The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, if memory serves. One forgets he’d churned out all of those ghastly witchcraft paintings like The Sorceress and The Magic Circle. He’s got an occult following, would you believe.’

‘Waterhouse,’ Bryant repeated, dumbstruck. ‘My goodness, thank you, Peregrine.’ It was only after he had gone that Summerfield found the elderly detective’s trilby, stuck over a brush-pot on the hall table.