In the Frame (10 page)

We flew south to Melbourne the following morning, looking down on the Snowy Mountains en route and thinking our own chilly thoughts. Sarah’s disapproval from the seat behind froze the back of my head, but she had refused to stay in Sydney. Jik’s natural bent and enthusiasm for dicey adventure looked like being curbed by love, and his reaction to danger might not henceforth be uncomplicatedly practical. That was, if I could find any dangers for him to react to. The Sydney trail was
dead and cold, and maybe Melbourne too would yield an un-looked-at public Munnings and a gone-away private gallery. And if it did, what then? For Donald the outlook would be bleaker than the strange puckered ranges sliding away underneath.

If I could take home enough to show beyond doubt that the plundering of his house had its roots in the sale of a painting in Australia, it should get the police off his neck, the life back to his spirit, and Regina into a decent grave.

If.

And I would have to be quick, or it would be too late to matter. Donald, staring hour after hour at a portrait in an empty house… Donald, on the brink.

Melbourne was cold and wet and blowing a gale. We checked gratefully into the warm plushy bosom of the Hilton, souls cossetted from the door onwards by rich reds and purples and blues, velvety fabrics, copper and gilt and glass. The staff smiled. The lifts worked. There was polite shock when I carried my own suitcase. A long way from the bare boards of home.

I unpacked, which is to say, hung up my one suit, slightly crumpled from the squashy satchel, and then went to work again on the telephone.

The Melbourne office of the Monga Vineyards Proprietary Limited cheerfully told me that the person who dealt with Mr Donald Stuart from England was the managing director, Mr Hudson Taylor, and he could be found at present in his office at the vineyard itself, which was north of Adelaide. Would I like the number?

Thanks very much.

‘No sweat,’ they said, which I gathered was Australian shorthand for ‘It’s no trouble, and you’re welcome.’

I pulled out the map of Australia I’d acquired on the
flight from England. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, lay right down in the south-east corner. Adelaide, capital of South Australia, lay about four hundred and fifty miles north west. Correction, seven hundred and thirty kilometres: the Australians had already gone metric, to the confusion of my mental arithmetic.

Hudson Taylor was not in his vineyard office. An equally cheerful voice there told me he’d left for Melbourne to go to the races. He had a runner in the Cup. Reverence, the voice implied, was due.

Could I reach him anywhere, then?

Sure, if it was important. He would be staying with friends. Number supplied. Ring at nine o’clock.

Sighing a little I went two floors down and found Jik and Sarah bouncing around their room with gleeful satisfaction.

‘We’ve got tickets for the races tomorrow and Tuesday,’ he said, ‘And a car pass, and a car. And the West Indies play Victoria at cricket on Sunday opposite the hotel and we’ve tickets for that too.’

‘Miracles courtesy of the Hilton,’ Sarah said, looking much happier at this programme. ‘The whole package was on offer with the cancelled rooms.’

‘So what do you want us to do this afternoon?’ finished Jik expansively.

‘Could you bear the Arts Centre?’

It appeared they could. Even Sarah came without forecasting universal doom, my lack of success so far having cheered her. We went in a taxi to keep her curled hair dry.

The Victoria Arts Centre was huge, modern, inventive and endowed with the largest stained-glass roof in the world. Jik took deep breaths as if drawing the living spirit of the place into his lungs and declaimed at the top of his voice that Australia was the greatest, the greatest,
the only adventurous country left in the corrupt, stagnating, militant, greedy, freedom-hating, mean-minded, strait-jacketed, rotting, polluted world. Passers-by stared in amazement and Sarah showed no surprise at all.

We ran the Munnings to earth, eventually, deep in the labyrinth of galleries. It glowed in the remarkable light which suffused the whole building; the
Departure of the Hop Pickers
, with its great wide sky and the dignified gypsies with their ponies, caravans and children.

A young man was sitting at an easel slightly to one side, painstakingly working on a copy. On a table beside him stood large pots of linseed oil and turps, and a jar with brushes in cleaning fluid. A comprehensive box of paints lay open to hand. Two or three people stood about, watching him and pretending not to, in the manner of gallery-goers the world over.

Jik and I went round behind him to take a look. The young man glanced at Jik’s face, but saw nothing there except raised eyebrows and blandness. We watched him squeeze flake white and cadmium yellow from tubes on to his palette and mix them together into a nice pale colour with a hogshair brush.

On the easel stood his study, barely started. The outlines were there, as precise as tracings, and a small amount of blue had been laid on the sky.

Jik and I watched in interest while he applied the pale yellow to the shirt of the nearest figure.

‘Hey,’ Jik said loudly, suddenly slapping him on the shoulder and shattering the reverent gallery hush into kaleidoscopic fragments, ‘You’re a fraud. If you’re an artist I’m a gas-fitter’s mate.’

Hardly polite, but not a hanging matter. The faces of the scattered onlookers registered embarrassment, not affront.

On the young man, though, the effect was galvanic.
He leapt to his feet, overturning the easel and staring at Jik with wild eyes: and Jik, with huge enjoyment put in the clincher.

‘What you’re doing is
criminal
,’ he said.

The young man reacted to that with ruthless reptilian speed, snatching up the pots of linseed and turps and flinging the liquids at Jik’s eyes.

I grabbed his left arm. He scooped up the paint-laden palette in his right and swung round fiercely, aiming at my face. I ducked instinctively. The palette missed me and struck Jik, who had his hands to his eyes and was yelling very loudly.

Sarah rushed towards him, knocking into me hard in her anxiety and loosening my grip on the young man. He tore his arm free, ran precipitously for the exit, dodged round behind two open-mouthed middle-aged spectators who were on their way in, and pushed them violently into my chasing path. By the time I’d disentangled myself, he had vanished from sight. I ran through several halls and passages, but couldn’t find him. He knew his way, and I did not: and it took me long enough, when I finally gave up the hunt, to work out the route back to Jik.

A fair-sized crowd had surrounded him, and Sarah was in a roaring fury based on fear, which she unleashed on me as soon as she saw me return.

‘Do something,’ she screamed. ‘Do something, he’s going blind… He’s going
blind
… I knew we should never have listened to you…’

I caught her wrists as she advanced in near hysteria to do at least some damage to my face in payment for Jik’s. Her strength was no joke.

‘Sarah,’ I said fiercely. ‘Jik is
not
going blind.’

‘He is. He is,’ she insisted, kicking my shins.

‘Do you
want
him to?’ I shouted.

She gasped sharply in outrage. What I’d said was at
least as good as a slap in the face. Sense reasserted itself suddenly like a drench of cold water, and the manic power receded back to normal angry girl proportions.

‘Linseed oil will do no harm at all,’ I said positively. ‘The turps is painful, but that’s all. It absolutely will not affect his eyesight.’

She glared at me, pulled her wrists out of my grasp, and turned back to Jik, who was rocking around in agony and cupping his fingers over his eyes with rigid knuckles. Also, being Jik, he was exercising his tongue.

‘The slimy little bugger… wait till I catch him… Jesus Christ Almighty I can’t bloody see… Sarah… where’s that bloody Todd… I’ll strangle him… get an ambulance… my eyes are burning out… bloody buggering hell…’

I spoke loudly in his ear. ‘Your eyes are O.K.’

‘They’re my bloody eyes and if I say they’re not O.K. they’re bloody not.’

‘You know damn well you’re not going blind, so stop hamming it up.’

‘They’re not your eyes, you sod.’

‘And you’re frightening Sarah,’ I said.

That message got through. He took his hands away and stopped rolling about.

At the sight of his face a murmur of pleasant horror rippled through the riveted audience. Blobs of bright paint from the young man’s palette had streaked one side of his jaw yellow and blue: and his eyes were red with inflammation and pouring with tears, and looked very sore indeed.

‘Jesus, Sarah,’ he said blinking painfully. ‘Sorry, love. The bastard’s right. Turps never blinded anybody.’

‘Not permanently,’ I said, because to do him justice he obviously couldn’t see anything but tears at the moment.

Sarah’s animosity was unabated. ‘Get him an ambulance, then.’

I shook my head. ‘All he needs is water and time.’

‘You’re a stupid heartless
pig
. He obviously needs a doctor, and hospital care.’

Jik, having abandoned histrionics, produced a handkerchief and gently mopped his streaming eyes.

‘He’s right, love. Lots of water, as the man said. Washes the sting away. Lead me to the nearest gents.’

With Sarah unconvinced but holding one arm, and a sympathetic male spectator the other, he was solicitously helped away like an amateur production of Samson. The chorus in the shape of the audience bent reproachful looks on me, and cheerfully awaited the next act.

I looked at the overturned mess of paints and easel which the young man had left. The onlookers looked at them too.

‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘that no one here was talking to the young artist before any of this happened?’

‘We were,’ said one woman, surprised at the question.

‘So were we,’ said another.

‘What about?’

‘Munnings,’ said one, and ‘Munnings,’ said the other, both looking immediately at the painting on the wall.

‘Not about his own work?’ I said, bending down to pick it up. A slash of yellow lay wildly across the careful outlines, result of Jik’s slap on the back.

Both of the ladies, and also their accompanying husbands, shook their heads and said they had talked with him about the pleasure of hanging a Munnings on their own walls, back home.

I smiled slowly.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘That he didn’t happen to know where you could get one?’

‘Well, yeah,’ they said. ‘As a matter of fact, he sure did.’

‘Where?’

‘Well, look here, young fellow…’ The elder of the husbands, a seventyish American with the unmistakable stamp of wealth, began shushing the others to silence with a practised damping movement of his right hand. Don’t give information away, it said, you may lose by it. ‘… You’re asking a lot of questions.’

‘I’ll explain,’ I said. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

They all looked at their watches and said doubtfully they possibly would.

‘There’s a coffee shop just down the hall,’ I said. ‘I saw it when I was trying to catch that young man… to make him tell why he flung turps in my friend’s eyes.’

Curiosity sharpened in their faces. They were hooked.

The rest of the spectators drifted away, and I, asking the others to wait a moment, started moving the jumbled painting stuff off the centre of the floor to a tidier wall-side heap.

None of it was marked with its owner’s name. All regulation kit, obtainable from art shops. Artists’ quality, not students’ cheaper equivalents. None of it new, but not old, either. The picture itself was on a standard sized piece of commercially prepared hardboard, not on stretched canvas. I stacked everything together, added the empty jars which had held linseed and turps, and wiped my hands on a piece of rag.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’

They were all Americans, all rich, retired, and fond of racing. Mr and Mrs Howard K. Petrovitch of Ridgeville, New Jersey, and Mr and Mrs Wyatt L. Minchless from Carter, Illinois.

Wyatt Minchless, the one who had shushed the others, called the meeting to order over four richly creamed iced
coffees and one plain black. The black was for himself. Heart condition, he murmured, patting the relevant area of suiting. A white-haired man, black-framed specs, pale indoor complexion, pompous manner.

‘Now, young fellow, let’s hear it from the top.’

‘Um,’ I said. Where exactly was the top? ‘The artist boy attacked my friend Jik because Jik called him a criminal.’

‘Yuh,’ Mrs Petrovitch nodded, ‘I heard him. Just as we were leaving the gallery. Now why would he do that?’

‘It isn’t criminal to copy good painting,’ Mrs Minchless said knowledgeably. ‘In the Louvre in Paris, France, you can’t get near the Mona Lisa for those irritating students.’

She had blue-rinsed puffed-up hair, uncreasable navy and green clothes, and enough diamonds to attract a top-rank thief. Deep lines of automatic disapproval ran downwards from the corner of her mouth. Thin body. Thick mind.

‘It depends what you are copying
for
,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to try to pass your copy off as an original, then that definitely is a fraud.’

Mrs Petrovitch began to say, ‘Do you think the young man was
forging
…’ but was interrupted by Wyatt Minchless, who smothered her question both by the damping hand and his louder voice.

‘Are you saying that this young artist boy was painting a Munnings he later intended to sell as the real thing?’

‘Er…’ I said.

Wyatt Minchless swept on. ‘Are you saying that the Munnings picture he told us we might be able to buy is itself a forgery?’

The others looked both horrified at the possibility and admiring of Wyatt L. for his perspicacity.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d like to see it.’

‘You don’t want to buy a Munnings yourself? You are not acting as an agent for anyone else?’ Wyatt’s questions sounded severe and inquisitorial.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

‘Well, then.’ Wyatt looked round the other three, collected silent assents. ‘He told Ruthie and me there was a good Munnings racing picture at a very reasonable price in a little gallery not far away…’ He fished with forefinger and thumb into his outer breast pocket. ‘Yes, here we are.
Yarra River Fine Arts
. Third turning off Swanston Street, about twenty yards along.’