Free Stone's Fall by Iain Pears

that. They drop stories on a whim, or to do personal favours, or because of the owners. It happens all the time. But normally you can see why, even if you don’t approve. Why sit on a fairly straightforward story?
    “Wait a minute,” Hozwicki said. “What do I get in return for this?”
    “Nothing yet,” I said cheerfully. “Except my thanks.”
    He scowled.
    “And my promise that when I have something to give in return, you will have it. Think of it as an investment,” I said. “It may diminish to nothing; it may pay rich rewards in due course.”
    I saluted him, and left, walking up the fug-filled steps into the open air of Fleet Street, so fresh after that dingy basement it made me feel dizzy for a few moments.

CHAPTER 8
    I would have liked to have hopped onto an omnibus and gone straight to St. James’s Square to ask questions of Lady Ravenscliff. I had quite a few to put to her. But it was six o’clock and I had an appointment with Franklin. I was back in Chelsea by seven, and ready to go. Franklin, unfortunately, was a slow and methodical eater. Normally this did not bother me, but that evening the habit drove me to distraction.
    Our evening routine was invariable. At around seven-thirty all four of Mrs. Morrison’s boys would assemble in the little dining room, dark and gloomy, lit only by spluttering gaslight, and waited while the clank of pans rose to the climax that heralded the arrival of our evening feast. Conversation varied at these meals, sometimes animated, sometimes nonexistent. Occasionally we would dine en grand seigneur, and dally over our tea afterwards. I could always win an audience by describing the latest murder; Brock would compete for attention with an account of a meeting with the artists he didn’t really know. Mulready could clear the table by reciting some verse of an experimental hue. Only Franklin said little, for no one was really interested in the movements of the markets or the reception of a South American bond issue, even though the coupon might have been set substantially below par. He spoke a language far more foreign than criminals or artists or poets, one which few cared to learn.
    Dinner that evening was a mutton chop apiece, potatoes and (a particular treat) Brussels sprouts rather than cabbage, although it was difficult to tell the difference by the time they were served. Next there was tapioca pudding, which produced a chorus of applause from the artistic types, whose childish tastes were, perhaps, an essential part of their lives. The conversation was not animated. Brock wished to begin a discussion on whether there was going to be a war with Germany or not, and seemed to think that I, as a newspaper man, would have a special insight into the thinking of the Foreign Office on the subject.
    His was not an abstract concern in the fate of nations, although as it turned out he was right to be interested. For the war was the making of him when it came. He became a war artist, and what he saw so changed the way he painted that it thrust him to the forefront of the new generation which came to prominence when it ended. The bleakness which made him unpalatable in those sunny days before the conflict started was perfectly attuned to the mood that prevailed during it, and gave him a clarity that eluded him when he lived with us in Chelsea.
    No, he had come up with this project for a gigantic portrait of the crowned heads of Europe, a scheme for which he was so totally unsuited that I did not know whether to wonder at his impudence or at his lack of reality. He wished—he, John Praxiteles Brock—to summon every monarch, from Tsar Nicholas to the Kaiser, from King Edward to the Emperor of Austria, and every last kinglet of Scandinavia and the Balkans, to sit together to be painted by him. Presumably not in the dining room of 17 Paradise Walk, Chelsea.
    It was a scheme so lunatic in conception that, naturally, we all encouraged him enthusiastically and he spent days doing