Free There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes

clock, brilliantly cached her papers in the coal-scuttle and preceded me from the room.
    We found the painters, father and son, in a large attic on the north side of the house – and with them Cecil, uneasily islanded amid much inexplicable professional activity. Geoffrey Roper was on top of a step-ladder, tacking a large sheet of some gauze-like material across a skylight. Hubert was abstractedly setting up a surprisingly large canvas on an easel; every now and then he would break off from this and wander off to a table which was already littered with sketches. He would study these for a time and then look sombrely at Cecil; to the entrance of Lucy and myself he gave not the slightest attention.
    ‘Of course,’ Hubert was saying, ‘Cecil is not uninteresting in himself.’ He accorded his nephew a perfunctory smile which was meant, I supposed, to be the essence of tact.
    ‘Oh, quite.’ Geoffrey on his perch spoke in the tones of a man who inwardly does not at all agree. ‘I say nothing against Cousin Cecil. There is some good bony structure here and there. Still, it’s not a commission, is it? It seems a chance.’
    Cecil, I inferred, being a relation and not a fashionable client, could be dealt with in a spirit of light-hearted – or perhaps of absorbed – experiment. And this supposition was presently confirmed by a succession of bumping noises outside and the entrance of Basil’s butler, chauffeur, and gardener’s boy staggering under the weight of a vast gilt-framed mirror. This was placed against the wall under Hubert’s direction and the men went away. Some minutes later the butler and the chauffeur returned carrying between them a cheval-glass; behind them came a housemaid with one of those circular, concave mirrors which are still a common adornment of drawing-rooms.
    Hubert looked about the bare attic. ‘Later I shall have to work in some sort of décor . A bedroom, I think – lavish, overfurnished, feminine.’
    ‘A big bed,’ interrupted Cecil – envisaging himself, I think, as depicted in bed with some monstrous pet.
    Geoffrey nodded. ‘A sort of woman’s slipper, that is. And viridian, I should say, to tone up the whole composition.’
    ‘All the movement,’ said Hubert, ‘might start from the mule.’
    ‘What about Cecil holding the mule?’ demanded Geoffrey, as if suddenly inspired. ‘The viridian mule and his rather pasty hand: now just what would one get from that? Some rather interesting values, I should say.’
    Cecil shifted uneasily on the single hard chair with which the attic was provided. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I hardly think it appropriate to represent an unmarried man–’
    ‘But at the moment’ – Hubert was quite unheeding – ‘the interesting thing is the edges. In the big glass there will be the reflection of Cecil reflected in the cheval-glass. One should get some odd edges out of that.’
    Geoffrey shook his head. ‘I think, Dad, it should be the other way round. Use the big glass as a powerful diagonal…’
    Suddenly father and son were arguing fiercely. The servants, still standing about to shift the mirrors, stared; Cecil continued to wriggle; Lucy and I endeavoured to follow with the air of artists in a line of our own. And presently Hubert was flourishing his sketches in Geoffrey’s face. ‘You opinionated young puppy,’ he cried, ‘do you realize that I’ve been hard at work on the sort of thing for months – slaving at it till I’ve felt like Alice and the looking-glass? And then you come walking in from your flat geometrical pap and lay down the law! Get out of it!’ He turned round with a sweeping gesture. ‘And the rest of you too. You make the whole room a mess.’
    We went – Lucy, Geoffrey, and myself down one staircase and the servants down another. There is nothing sinister in what is called an exhibition of artistic temperament, and the little performance put up by Hubert and Geoffrey was, if anything, mildly exhilarating. This