He took advantage of the half hour or so before `Henry' was awakened to have a look at the art downstairs. Occasionally he glanced out of windows behind the house. The lawn remained empty, the silence of the house as when he had come. Inside the long room there was only one example of Breasley's own work, but plenty else to admire. The landscape was indeed a Derain, as David had guessed. Three very fine Permeke drawings. The Ensor and the Marquet. An early Bonnard. A characteristically febrile pencil sketch, unsigned, but unmistakably Dufy. Then a splendid Jawlensky (how on earth had he got his hands on that?), an Otto Dix signed proof nicely juxtaposed with a Nevinson drawing. Two Matthew Smiths, a Picabia, a little flower painting that must be an early Matisse, though it didn't look quite right... There were those, and they were outnumbered by the paintings and drawings David couldn't assign. If one accepted the absence of the more extreme movements, one had a room of early twentieth-century art many smaller museums would have cut throats to lay their hands on. Breasley had collected pre-war, of course, and he had apparently always had a private income of sorts. An only child, he must have inherited quite a substantial sum when his mother died in 1925. His father, one of those Victorian gentlemen who appear to have lived comfortably on doing nothing, had died in a hotel fire in 1907. According to Myra Levey, he too had dabbled with art collecting in a dilettante way.
Breasley had granted himself pride of place - and space - over the old stone fireplace in the centre of the room. There hung the huge Moon-hunt, perhaps the best-known of the Coëtminais oeuvre, a painting David was going to discuss at some length and that he badly wanted to study at leisure again... perhaps not least to confirm to himself that he wasn't overrating his subject. He felt faintly relieved that the picture stood up well to renewed acquaintance - he hadn't seen it in the flesh since the Tate exhibition of four years previously - and even announced itself as better than memory and reproductions had rated it. As with so much of Breasley's work there was an obvious previous iconography in this case, Uccello's Night Hunt - and its spawn down through the centuries; which was in turn a challenged comparison, a deliberate risk ... just as the Spanish drawings had defied the great shadow of Goya by accepting its presence, even using and parodying it, so the memory of the Ashmolean Uccello somehow deepened and buttressed the painting before which David sat. It gave an essential tension, in fact: behind the mysteriousness and the ambiguity (no hounds, no horses, no prey ... nocturnal figures among trees, but the title was needed), behind the modernity of so many of the surface elements there stood both a homage and a kind of thumbed nose to a very old tradition. One couldn't be quite sure it was a masterpiece, there was a clotted quality in some passages, a distinctly brusque use of impasto on closer examination; something faintly too static in the whole, a lack of tonal relief (but that again was perhaps just the memory of the Uccello). Yet it remained safely considerable, had presence - could stand very nicely, thank you, up against anything else in British painting since the war. Perhaps its most real mystery, as with the whole series, was that it could have been done at all by a man of Breasley's age. The Moon-hunt had been painted in 1965, in his sixty-ninth year. And that was eight years ago now.
Then suddenly, as if to solve the enigma, the living painter himself appeared from the garden door and came down toward David.
`Williams, my dear fellow.'
He advanced, hand outstretched, in pale blue trousers and a dark blue shirt, an unexpected flash of Oxford and Cambridge, a red silk square. He was white-haired, though the eyebrows were still faintly grey; the bulbous nose, the misleadingly fastidious mouth, the pouched grey-blue eyes in a hale face. He moved almost briskly, as if aware that he had been remiss in some way; smaller and trimmer than David had visualized from the photographs.
`It's a great honour to be here, sir.'
`Nonsense. Nonsense.' And David's elbow was chucked, the smile and the quiz under the eyebrows and white relic of a forelock both searching and dismissive. `You've been looked after?'
`Yes. Splendid.'
`Don't be put off by the Mouse. She's slightly gaga.' The old man stood with his hands on his hips, an impression of someone trying to seem young, alert, David's age. `Thinks she's Lizzie Siddal. Which makes me that ghastly little Italian fudger ... damn' insulting, what?'
David laughed. `I did notice a certain ...'.
Breasley raised his eyes to the ceiling.
`My dear man. You've no idea. Still. Gels that age. Well, how about some tea? Yes? We're out in the garden.'