The Murder Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

the variety and richness of those turbulent years. The poetry section had a case of its own which contained first editions of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden and Louis MacNeice. There were also, he saw, the war poets published in the 1920s: Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon. He wished that he had hours at his disposal in which the books could be handled and read. But even had there been time, the presence of that silent working woman, her cramped mittened hands moving laboriously, would have inhibited him. He liked to be alone when he was reading.
    He moved to the end of the central table where half a dozen copies of
The Strand Magazine
were fanned out, their covers, differently coloured, all showing pictures of the Strand, the scene slightly varying with each copy. Dalgliesh picked up the magazine for May 1922. The cover advertised stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Gilbert Frankau and E. Phillips Oppenheim and a special article by Arnold Bennett. But it was in the preliminary pages of advertisements that the early 1920s most came alive. The cigarettes at five shillings and sixpence per hundred, the bedroom that could be furnished for £36 and the concerned husband, worried about what was obviously his wife’s lack of libido, restoring her to her usual good spirits with a surreptitious pinch of liver salts in the early morning tea.
    And now he went down to the picture gallery. It was at once apparent that it had been designed for the serious student. Each picture had beside it a framed card which listed the main galleries where other examples of the artist’s work could be seen and display cabinets on each side of the fireplace contained letters, manuscripts and catalogues. They drew Dalgliesh’s mind back to the library. It was on those shelves, surely, that the 1920s and ’30s were better represented. It was the writers—Joyce, Waugh, Huxley—not the artists who had most forcibly interpreted and influenced those confused inter-war years. Moving slowly past the landscapes of Paul and John Nash, it seemed to him that the 1914 through 1918 cataclysm of blood and death had bred a nostalgic yearning for an England of rural peace. Here was a prelapsarian landscape re-created in tranquillity and painted in a style which, for all its diversity and originality, was strongly traditional. It was a landscape without figures; the neatly piled logs against farmhouse walls, the tilled fields under unthreatening skies, the empty stretch of beach, were all poignant reminders of the dead generation. He could believe that they had done their day’s work, hung up their tools and gently taken their leave of life. Yet surely no landscape was so precise, so perfectly ordered. These fields had been tilled, not for posterity, but for a barren changelessness. In Flanders nature had been riven apart, violated and corrupted. Here all had been restored to an imaginary and eternal placidity. He had not expected to find traditional landscape painting so unsettling.
    It was with a sense of relief that he moved to the religious anomalies of Stanley Spencer, the idiosyncratic portraits of Percy Wyndham Lewis and the more tremulous, casually painted portraits of Duncan Grant. Most of the painters were familiar to Dalgliesh. Nearly all gave pleasure, although he felt that these were artists strongly influenced by Continental and far greater painters. Max Dupayne had not been able to acquire the most notably impressive of each artist’s work but he had succeeded in putting together a collection which, in its diversity, was representative of the art of the inter-war years, and this, after all, had been his aim.
    When he entered the gallery, there was one other visitor already there: a thin young man wearing jeans, worn trainers and a thick anorak. Beneath its bulky weight, his legs looked as thin as sticks. Moving closer to him, Dalgliesh saw a pale, delicate face. His hair was obscured by a woollen cap drawn over the ears.