Free Money from Holme by Michael Innes Page A

chocolate boxes?’
    ‘Small pointillist abstracts.’ Cheel now hardly noticed Holme’s continued offensiveness. His instinct told him that the moment of crisis had come. ‘In the main, of course, I’m just a critic – a sterile intellectual. But the fact that I do a little myself–’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ Holme’s impatience was suddenly of a new sort. ‘Get on, can’t you?’
    ‘A man with your gift owes a duty to it. That’s the plain fact of the matter, Holme. It’s your business to paint. So why aren’t you painting?’
    There was a silence. Holme – and it was for the first time – seemed to have decided that Cheel had advanced something worth thinking about.
    ‘That’s interesting,’ Holme said. ‘It’s interesting because there’s no creditable answer. No honest answer I wouldn’t be a bit ashamed to give. And yet I haven’t quite seen it that way. Thanks.’
    ‘You’ve got some money, I suppose?’
    ‘Damned little. But I’ve got some.’
    ‘You could hire an attic, buy a canvas or two, and get down to work? And you don’t feel you’ve exhausted your inspiration?’
    ‘Inspiration my foot. I’m a painter and that’s that.’ Holme was now looking bewildered. ‘It’s true I could do these things. And true that I don’t seem to want to. It must be connected with this change of identity. I was the painter – not Gregory.’
    ‘I think you’re on to something there.’ Cheel nodded approvingly, as at an apt pupil’s first steps to comprehension. ‘You have to get back to free artistic expression in your own essential character.’ Cheel had made this sound quite impressive, and for a moment he paused on it weightily. ‘Or at least,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘almost free artistic expression.’
    ‘You think something can be done?’ Holme’s voice had become frankly appealing. At the same time he looked round apprehensively. ‘It was damned silly of me to take off the beard. Anybody might come along.’
    ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
    ‘Or Hedda might. She’s a perfectly awful woman, you know. She might do absolutely anything. She might call a policeman.’
    ‘We certainly don’t want anything like that.’ Holme, Cheel saw, was a reformed character. At least he was that for the moment – for he seemed to be a young man subject to somewhat rapid changes of mood. Doubtless he might turn sulky again – and in consequence thoroughly rude – at any moment. It would be prudent in Cheel to press hard upon the initiative he now held. ‘And we need privacy in any case. There’s much to get clear. I must have the full facts, you know. That’s only fair.’
    ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Holme sounded reluctant. ‘But it’s such a horrid story. There are parts of it I just don’t like remembering at all.’
    ‘You must get it off your chest.’ Cheel said this in a manly and encouraging way, like a schoolmaster keeping eventual disciplinary intentions out of sight. ‘We’ll go to my rooms. It’s about time for a cup of tea. Come along, my dear chap.’
    ‘I’m not your–’ Quite pathetically, Sebastian Holme checked himself. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’

 
     
10
    ‘Of course these aren’t my regular quarters,’ Cheel said twenty minutes later. ‘The fact is my flat’s being decorated, and I’ve moved in here to be out of the mess.’
    ‘What rot!’ Holme, who was prowling round the room, spoke contemptuously. He appeared to have gone into opposition again. ‘It’s clear enough that you’re in pretty low water. A sleazy character in seedy circumstances. That’s you. You needn’t be ashamed of it. At any rate, not of the circumstances.’ He moved to the window and inspected it. ‘You’ve got a damned good north light. A man could paint ten hours a day here, if he wanted to. I don’t expect you last out as long as that. But let me see some of the pointillist things you were talking about.’
    ‘It’s the application