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Professor Raven was not pleased to be asked to join a committee supervising a thesis in the Faculty of Music; she would be the only non-musician, and she knew that the odd man out in such an academic group was expected to be modest and keep out of what didn’t concern him, while lending scope and respectability to everything that was done. This looked like a job involving a great deal of work and very little satisfaction. She thought differently when she had lunched at the Faculty Club with her old friend Simon Darcourt, and had drunk her full share of a bottle of wine.
“I didn’t know you were in on this, Simon,” she said. “That makes a difference, of course.”
“I’m not in it academically, but I’ll have a good deal to say about what goes on,” said Simon. Then he told Pe
“The problem seems to be that the libretto is very scrappy,” he explained.
“How much have you got?” she asked.
“I’ve taken a quick look, and to be frank there’s virtually nothing,” he said. “What the chances are of digging anything up, I couldn’t even guess. It isn’t going to be easy, Pe
“With my flair for research, and the money you’ve got your hands on, much may be achieved,” said Pe
“Who was—?”
“None other than the redoubtable James Robinson Planché.”
“Yes, the Dean did mention that name. What was redoubtable about him?”
“Very popular nineteenth-century playwright and librettist. Just about forgotten, now. Though everybody uses a phrase of his: ‘It would have made a cat laugh’, he says in one of his i
“Shit?”
“Of the most rejectable and excrementitious order.”
“Then why—?”
“I can’t tell you why, and if you didn’t have all that lovely money to throw around I might never find out. But I can, and I will.”
“How?”
“The Cornish Foundation—I see it all now in a vision—is going to pay my expenses to go abroad and find out.”
“Where will you look?”
“Now Simon, you know the research game better than that. Where is for me to know, and for you and Schnak and the Cornish Foundation to find out when and if I get it. But if it’s to be gotten, I’m the girl to get it.”
With that Simon had to be content. He liked Pe
After lunch, in order to avoid going back to his rooms in Ploughwright, where he would have to face the heap of typescript of his life of the late Francis Cornish—the biography with that disastrous, abysmal gap in the very heart of it—he went to the Club library. He looked with distaste at the table on which were displayed a selection of the less obscure among the i
He did not read. He looked at the advertisements instead. There were young women displayed there, in various stages of undress, but in the fashion of the time they looked so angry, so crazed, so furious, that they gave him little comfort, aroused no pleasing fantasy. Their hair stood on end or was wildly tangled. Their eyes glared or were pinched in squints that hinted at lunacy. But then he came to a picture so sharply contrasted with its neighbours that he looked at it for several minutes, and as he looked something in the back of his mind stirred, moved, was aroused, until he could hardly believe what he saw.
It was not a photograph, but a drawing of the head of a girl, in silver-point, touched here and there with white and red chalk; it was delicately executed but not weak, without any modern flash or challenge. Indeed, it was drawn in the ma
Beneath were a few lines in a clear, beautiful type, but again it was not attenuated or falsely elegant. Darcourt, who knew something about types, recognized it as a modern version of the type-face reputedly based upon the handwriting of a poet, churchman, bibliophile, scholar, humanist, and, in some respects, rascal, Cardinal Pietro Bembo. The message was brief and clear:
Your make-up is not a matter of current fashion. It is the realization of what you are, of that period of history to which your individual style of beauty pertains. What Old Master might have painted you, and seen you truly? We can help you to discover that, and to learn to apply the only cosmetics made to realize the Old Master quality in you. We do not seek the most customers, only the best, and our services and our products are not cheap. That is why they are obtainable only at a few selected shops from our own maquilleuses. What Master are you? We can help you to achieve the distinction that is yours alone.
The advertisement was signed, in an elegant Italic hand, “Amalie”, and below were half a dozen addresses of suppliers.
Glancing around to be sure that nobody saw him doing what was academically unspeakable, Darcourt carefully tore the page out of the magazine and hurried back to his rooms, to write a most important letter.