Carson's Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

being on the look out for small social things he hadn’t got the hang of. But this thought detained his mind only for a moment. It was the painting itself that he continued to feel uneasy about. There wasn’t much sense in that. It had, of course, been idle chat about the painting which had triggered off the great thought. But there was nothing at all important about that; nothing about Lely’s daub was anywhere near the centre of his design; his sense of discomfort before the thing lay in some other area.
    â€˜Just what would you say you’re up to?’ Carson was startled to hear himself ask an almost philosophical question, which wasn’t his style at all. But he persisted with it. ‘I mean to say, just what do you aim at?’
    â€˜Bread and cheese. Shoes for the kids.’
    â€˜There’s going to be that, I suppose. And fillet steak for quite some time as well.’ Carson had to make an effort to capture this lightness of air. ‘But it’s not what I mean, Lely. A young fellow of mine, looking at the thing lately, asked if you were going after an icon. It seems an icon is something you find in Russian churches, and lurking in Russian homes and hovels. So it didn’t make sense.’
    â€˜I’m not so sure about that. When a painter made that sort of icon – probably of the Blessed Virgin – he was out to produce something evoking reverence. And there’s always been plenty of that all over the place. Think of a Rigaud of Louis Quatorze.’ Lely paused, but Carson, being unable to achieve this think, remained silent. ‘Plenty of it in this country, too,’ Lely went on. ‘Both in pigment and marble. Newton with his prism and silent face. Or Watts doing Tennyson or Browning. Icons, decidedly.’
    â€˜You’re not after that ,’ Carson said, getting his bearings at last.
    â€˜Well, no. Then there’s the likeness. There must have been a time when the ability to get a likeness out of some blobs of paint on a palette seemed downright miraculous. Most of the affairs you see at the Academy every year are likenesses – or likenesses cosmeticized. Over the past hundred years or so, the likeness has been taking some hard knocks from the photograph. On Tennyson, for instance, Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron were already neck and neck. Well, that leaves the portrait. By and large, the thing we’re now looking at aims to be a portrait.’
    â€˜The portrait adds something to the likeness?’ Carson, so little a fool, was now right on the ball. ‘It’s more informative?’
    â€˜So they assert.’ Lely was cautious. ‘But, you know, a lot of nonsense is talked about it all. Shakespeare was sceptical, wouldn’t you say? There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. It’s only the real swells that manage it. Raphael, painting a pope. Or Rembrandt, late on.’
    Carson was able to reflect that the chance of Humphry Lely being a Raphael or Rembrandt was insubstantial. He continued to be uncomfortable, nevertheless. And something of this Lely perhaps discerned, and was thereby prompted to his next remark.
    â€˜But it seems to me there continue to be vestigial magic associations surrounding the whole thing. Have you noticed there are people who hate even being included in a snapshot? They slope off on any excuse that comes into their head. And in primitive societies it can be very marked – or even in some not so primitive. Arabs, now. They invented mathematics, and heaven knows what. But aim a camera at one, and he’ll knock it out of your hand. Probably give you a bloody nose as well. And it isn’t our sort of western nonsense about the invasion of privacy – although that may have the same roots, I suppose. It’s a superstitious belief that if I possess your likeness I thereby hold some supernatural power over