Goodbye Again (4 page)

FOUR

‘Very fine. Very fine indeed,’ Dermot O’Higgins added judiciously, inspecting the Burges toilet cabinet upstairs in my father’s bedroom. A rotund, dapper little man in his forties, neatly dressed in an old-fashioned English manner, a light-beige summer suit, a vaguely regimental tie, red hanky in his breast pocket, brown brogues. Surprising, since his accent was pure Dublin. His face was pudgy and reddish, with a mole, like a beauty spot, on his cheek. He might have been a drinker, or queer. Or both. And he reeked of some lime-smelling aftershave lotion.

‘I’ve only seen one other like it,’ he continued. ‘A wash-hand stand, belonged to Evelyn Waugh. Exhibited at the V&A some years ago. This is finer, more delicate.’ Having opened the main doors, he fiddled with the various brass-handled drawers and cupboards, lovingly inspecting the flower-patterned chamber pot, the wash bowl and ewer. ‘Superb, Mr Contini. Quite superb.’ He sighed.

I was pleased with the way things were going.

‘Of course,’ he turned to me diffidently, ‘I know something
of Burges’s work. He sometimes included a secret recess or little drawer in such creations, for hiding jewellery or small valuables.’

‘Did he indeed? In this, do you think?’

‘Very possibly. May I?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Yes, you see here …’ He started to run his fingers over the wood inside. ‘One can sometimes find the key to such drawers in the strips of inset wood which Burges used decoratively, but which also act as a release mechanism into these hiding places. These rosewood strips here …’

There were a dozen such inset strips of rosewood, an inch wide, six inches long, beneath the twelve pigeonholes for storing toilet knick-knacks inside. He pushed the end of each strip in turn, until one of them responded, the tip of his index finger pushing into a gap, as a small hinged drawer swivelled out in the shape of a half-circle.

Inside was a folded yellowing sheet of paper.

We both looked at it, saying nothing. I picked it out and opened it. There were two columns of writing, with numbers after the words, in Italian, my father’s hand. ‘It’s some sort of inventory of my father’s. Various paintings, objets d’art.’

‘Paintings? Objets d’art? May I look at it?’ I handed him the paper. ‘Yes, indeed, great Renaissance paintings and antique
ecclesiastical
objects. Altar furniture, triptychs, chalices, reliquaries,
illuminated
manuscripts. That sort of thing,’ he added easily, as if they were of little importance.

‘Great Renaissance paintings?’

‘Yes, here – this one.’ He showed me the paper, pointing to a line halfway down the first column. “Czartoryski:
Portrait of a Young Man
” – that’s by Raphael.’

‘Raphael?’ I was surprised. ‘But that would be one of his great portraits.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘So, why would my father … it can’t be an inventory of his things. He would never have had such a painting.’  

‘Well, not an inventory of works he owned, but perhaps a list of things, in museums, art galleries or churches that he saw, or wanted to see in Europe. In churches particularly, it seems. You see here, lower down? This group of objects, “the Wroclaw Chalice, the Poznan Bible, the Lubin Reliquary” – all from churches in Poland, it seems.’  

‘Valuable I suppose?’  

‘Oh, yes, very.’  

‘But those towns are all in Poland – not Italy.’  

‘Yes, but your father was a cultured man, I’m sure. He would have travelled about Europe.’  

I looked at O’Higgins. His face was bland. ‘No, my father wasn’t a cultured man. He was a civil engineer and marble-quarry owner, and he wouldn’t have travelled to Poland to look at a chalices and reliquaries.’ I knew at once who had done this: Elsa’s father, Joseph Bergen, with his religious antiques shop in Vienna selling just such churchy things, and the same sort of objects from a private room in Dublin after the war.  

‘No, well I couldn’t say then. Just some list your father made.’ O’Higgins looked bored. ‘Though there is one interesting thing here, at the bottom.’ He showed me the paper. ‘This item – the only one, so far as I can see, which isn’t medieval or Renaissance, indeed it’s almost contemporary. Here,’ he set his finger on the line, ‘“Modigliani Nude?” Your father must have had an interest in modern art.’  

I didn’t say anything for a moment, I was so surprised. ‘Well, possibly,’ I said at last, making nothing of it, folding up the paper and putting it in my pocket. ‘Anyway, shall we take a look round the other rooms?’ We moved out of my father’s bedroom and along the landing.

‘I wonder if you knew …’ I was going to ask O’Higgins if he knew Joseph Bergen and his back room in his antiques shop in Dublin. I stopped. Why would Bergen sell such things from a back room, by appointment only? Had he something to hide? At least one thing was obvious: here was a clear connection between my father and Joseph Bergen. Bergen had sold these things and my father had made a list of them, but why had my father made the list, and why had both men been so eager to keep the whole business hidden?  

Was this a list of things that my father had somehow obtained illegally long ago, and which Bergen had sold in his Baggot Street shop? I would say no more to O’Higgins about it all. Instead I showed him some more furniture about the house, before returning to the drawing room. I offered him a drink.  

‘Thank you. Just a small one. I’m driving.’  

I poured him a large one. ‘Tonic, lemon, ice?’  

‘Thank you.’ He eyed the glass approvingly, went over to the big window, looking out on the terrace, the rose garden, the bay beyond, sparkling blue in the sunlight. ‘An amazing place you have here, Mr Contini. The view – superb!’ He gazed at the view of Killiney bay with sad longing, like a picture at auction he couldn’t afford. ‘They say it’s like the bay of Naples.’  

‘Yes, they do, and they’re wrong. The colours would be quite different as well as the climate. And they’d speak Italian, with pasta and wine and fat waiters singing “Come Back to Sorrento”. And pickpockets.’  

‘Well.’ O’Higgins turned back and sat down, ‘You’re a painter yourself, of course.’  

‘Yes.’  

‘I don’t know your work, I’m afraid.’  

‘No. I don’t exhibit now.’  

There was silence, until he leant forward confidingly, tumbler
clasped in both hands between his knees. ‘Forgive me for mentioning it, Mr Contini, but a friend in the trade … he knows
something
of your situation here, about your family. How you have, as it were, only habitation rights in the house here, can’t sell it, or perhaps even things in it?’  

‘He knows that, does he?’ I was genuinely surprised.  

‘Well, yes, he does. These things tend to get around, small place like Dublin.’  

‘I suppose so.’  

‘The point is, I can understand your need for discretion in the selling of any of this furniture.’  

‘Yes,’ I agreed. I knew what he was getting at. ‘Of course I can rely on your discretion as well so far as your buying the furniture from me,’ I added sagely.  

‘Of course.’  

I drank again, drew on my roll-up and looked at the man. A genial rogue. Of course they all were, these antique dealers.  

Later, for some fine items of original William Morris
Gothic-revival
furniture, Mr O’Higgins handed me £4000 in crisp British £50 notes. After he’d left, with the furniture inside and on top of his Volvo estate, I poured myself another gin and tonic, then picked up the money, letting the wad of notes flick from my thumb. ‘That’s better,’ I said, looking up at the wishy-washy portrait of my mother in her eau-de-Nil tea gown over the mantelpiece, with her permed hair and faint smile, her charitable smile. ‘That’s much better.’ I raised my glass to her.  

‘What a day!’ The June sun continued to beat down, a happy
heatwave
, and I was speaking to Elsa on the phone, two days later, after her father’s funeral. ‘Would you like to come out with me in my father’s old motor cruiser? It’s good fun,’ I rushed on. ‘Take your mind off things. We could go down the coast a bit, have a picnic
lunch beyond Wicklow Head or somewhere. There’s still some good titbits left from that reception, olives and cheese and things. Would you like to?’ I paused, out of breath.  

Silence at the other end. I was sure she was going to say no, but after a long pause she agreed to come, and I felt a surge of real happiness for the first time in many months.  

The
Sorrento
was a fine old sixty-foot motor cruiser, pitch pine on oak, with a teak deck, built by Osbourne’s in Southampton in the early 1950s. Four two-berth cabins, fore and aft, dining saloon, wheelhouse amidships, big twin GM diesels, capable of driving her at over twenty knots, sleek lines, a square stern, long rising
foredeck
where the bows angled away sharply, radar and all the rest – she was a beautiful boat.  

Billy Mullins, the gardener and odd-job man who had helped crew the boat in the old days had kept her in good trim since my father’s death the year before. After a bit of tinkering about in the bowels that morning, both engines had fired, the exhausts uttering a throaty, burbling roar.  

Elsa came aboard and ten minutes later the twin propellers bit into the water, leaving a trail of frothy foam behind us and we roared away, making out to sea into the glittering morning.  

‘No, I didn’t know what to make of you.’ Elsa spread the coarse pâté on a chunk of baguette, then took some salami and a wedge of Pont-L’Evêque. I poured us both a glass of iced Perrier water.  

‘You didn’t know quite what to make of me? You didn’t like me one bit. I was on the bottle.’  

We’d anchored in a small inlet south of Wicklow Head. A steep cliff ran down to a small cove of jagged rocks where the
green-blue
swell lapped against jagged stone, swaying the boat gently, the water so clear that from the foredeck where we were eating we could see right down, fifteen feet or so, to the shingly barnacled stones, where fronds of dark seaweed moved.

I took some salami in my fingers, squeezed lemon on it, then paused. ‘I like the taste of wine, and sometimes I can’t stop.’  

‘And the effects?’  

‘The usual. Good and bad. One gets insights as well as headaches with a hangover.’ I ate the salami. ‘Doesn’t everyone have an addiction? Not drink or drugs, but an addiction to being in control for example. Many people get a kick out of that.’  

She ate an olive, silent, then nodded. ‘I suppose so.’  

‘What’s your addiction?’  

‘I knew you’d ask.’ Her lips moved in the beginnings of a smile. ‘I’d prepared an answer. Chocolate, I was going to say. In fact, I’ve so many addictions – the ones that don’t usually show – I’ve lost count of them.’  

‘That’s honest, at least. And that’s the best and rarest addiction.’  

‘Is it?’  

‘It must be, because it scares the hell out of people more than any other addiction. You become a real pariah if you get a reputation for honesty with people. The thing is,’ I leant forward, ‘most people float on the quicksands by kidding themselves, and other people, that they’re honest. Like hell they are. Just the opposite. They keep afloat on lies and smugness. Their hypocrisy!’ I ended vehemently.  

‘It worries you, doesn’t it? Honesty.’  

‘Yes.’  

‘You talk as if someone had been very dishonest with you.’  

‘My wife, among others.’ I picked at the salami, gazing at it, without eating it. ‘Sometimes I’d like to be just a very ordinary person, comfortably kept afloat by all sorts of lies and nonsense. If I’d been just an ordinary chap, with a spot of humility, I’d have gotten on better with people, been a bit more serene – though that usually means just suiting the other person. Instead I took to old cord suits, bright red scarves and wide black hats and became a bloody painter. Though I’ve more or less lost the knack.’

‘Why? What happened?’  

I wasn’t going to tell her about Katie. ‘Things sometimes just die on you.’  

‘I’m sorry.’ She was genuinely sympathetic. ‘So what do you want to do with your life now?’  

‘Oh, just a few simple things really. Get a bit of money together and my old Bentley and take off down the Rhône Valley – Dijon, Burgundy, High Provence. Never seen any of those places. There are many very ordinary things I’d like to do now. And be.’  

She had relaxed as she listened to all this, dropping her shoulders, the drawn, wary look in her face disappearing, as if some burden had been lifted from her. Shading her eyes against the sun, she looked at me carefully.  

‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Your honesty addiction … mine as well.’ Now she didn’t mind talking about the personal, she wanted to. ‘I can be outspoken and tyrannical sometimes. Most of all, like you, I can’t stick the hypocrites, the people who lie to themselves and to me, and then make out they’re in step, and you’re not … the ones who won’t risk admitting mistakes. They can’t afford to be wrong, their sanity depends on it.’  

I frowned. In what she’d just said, Elsa might have been describing Katie’s characteristics and how she had promoted these with me.