In the Frame (11 page)

Mr and Mrs Petrovitch looked resigned. ‘He told us, exactly the same.’

‘He seemed such a nice young man,’ Mrs Petrovitch added sadly. ‘So interested in our trip. Asked us what we’d be betting on in the Cup.’

‘He asked where we would be going after Melbourne,’ Mr Petrovitch nodded. ‘We told him Adelaide and Alice Springs, and he said Alice Springs was a Mecca for artists and to be sure to visit the Yarra River gallery there. The same firm, he said. Always had good pictures.’

Mr Petrovitch would have misunderstood if I had leaned across and hugged him. I concentrated on my fancy coffee and kept my excitement to myself.

‘We’re going on to Sydney,’ pronounced Wyatt L. ‘He didn’t offer any suggestions for Sydney.’

The tall glasses were nearly empty. Wyatt looked at his watch and swallowed the last of his plain black.

‘You didn’t tell us,’ Mrs Petrovitch said, looking puzzled, ‘why your friend called the young man a criminal. I mean… I can see why the young man attacked your friend and ran away if he
was
a criminal, but why did your friend
think
he was?’

‘Just what I was about to ask,’ said Wyatt, nodding away heavily. Pompous liar, I thought.

‘My friend Jik,’ I said, ‘is an artist himself. He didn’t think much of the young man’s effort. He called it criminal. He might just as well have said lousy.’

‘Is that all?’ said Mrs Petrovitch, looking disappointed.

‘Well… the young man was painting with paints which won’t really mix. Jik’s a perfectionist. He can’t stand seeing paint misused.’

‘What do you mean, won’t mix?’

‘Paints are chemicals,’ I said apologetically. ‘Most of them don’t have any effect on each other, but you have to be careful.’

‘What happens if you aren’t?’ demanded Ruthie Minchless.

‘Um… nothing explodes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It’s just that… well, if you mix flake white, which is lead, with cadmium yellow, with contains sulphur, like the young man was doing, you get a nice pale colour to start with but the two minerals react against each other and in time darken and alter the picture.’

‘And your friend called this criminal?’ Wyatt said in disbelief. ‘It couldn’t possibly make that much difference.’

‘Er…’ I said. ‘Well, Van Gogh used a light bright new yellow made of chrome when he painted a picture of sunflowers. Cadmium yellow hadn’t been developed then. But chrome yellow has shown that over a couple of hundred years it decomposes and in the end turns greenish black, and the sunflowers are already an odd colour, and I don’t think anyone has found a way of stopping it.’

‘But the young man wasn’t painting for posterity,’ said Ruthie with irritation. ‘Unless he’s another Van Gogh, surely it doesn’t matter.’

I didn’t think they’d want to hear that Jik hoped for recognition in the twenty-third century. The permanence of colours had always been an obsession with him, and
he’d dragged me along once to a course on their chemistry.

The Americans got up to go.

‘All very interesting,’ Wyatt said with a dismissive smile. ‘I guess I’ll keep my money in regular stocks.’

Jik had gone from the gents, gone from the whole Arts Centre. I found him back with Sarah in their hotel room, being attended by the Hilton’s attractive resident nurse. The door to the corridor stood open, ready for her to leave.

‘Try not to rub them, Mr Cassavetes,’ she was saying. ‘If you have any trouble, call the reception desk, and I’ll come back.’

She gave me a professional half-smile in the open doorway and walked briskly away, leaving me to go in.

‘How are the eyes?’ I said, advancing tentatively.

‘Ruddy awful.’ They were bright pink, but dry. Getting better.

Sarah said with tight lips, ‘This has all gone far enough. I know that this time Jik will be all right again in a day or two, but we are not taking any more risks.’

Jik said nothing and didn’t look at me.

It wasn’t exactly unexpected. I said, ‘O.K.… Well, have a nice week-end, and thanks anyway.’

‘Todd…’Jik said.

Sarah leapt in fast. ‘No, Jik. It’s not our responsibility. Todd can think what he likes, but his cousin’s troubles are nothing to do with us. We are not getting involved any further. I’ve been against all this silly poking around all along, and this is where it stops.’

‘Todd will go on with it,’ Jik said.

‘Then he’s a fool.’ She was angry, scornful, biting.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anyone who tries to right a wrong these days is a fool. Much better not to meddle, not to get involved, not to think it’s your responsibility. I really ought to be painting away safely in my attic at Heathrow, minding my own business and letting Donald rot. Much more sensible, I agree. The trouble is that I simply can’t do it. I see the hell he’s in. How can I just turn my back? Not when there’s a chance of getting him out. True enough, I may not manage it, but what I can’t face is not having tried.’

I came to a halt.

A blank pause.

‘Well,’ I said, raising a smile. ‘Here endeth the lesson according to the world’s foremost nit. Have fun at the races. I might go too, you never know.’

I sketched a farewell and eased myself out. Neither of them said a word. I shut the door quietly and took the lift up to my own room.

A pity about Sarah, I thought. She would have Jik in cottonwool and slippers if he didn’t look out; and he’d never paint those magnificent brooding pictures any more, because they sprang from a torment he would no longer be allowed. Security, to him, would be a sort of abdication; a sort of death.

I looked at my watch and decided the
Yarra River Fine Arts
set-up might still have its doors open. Worth trying.

I wondered, as I walked along Wellington Parade and up Swanston Street, whether the young turps-flinger would be there, and if he was, whether he would know me. I’d seen only glimpses of his face, as I’d mostly been standing behind him. All one could swear to was light-brown hair, acne on the chin, a round jaw-line and a full-lipped mouth. Under twenty. Perhaps not more than seventeen. Dressed in blue jeans, white tee-shirt, and tennis shoes. About five-foot-eight, a hundred and thirty
pounds. Quick on his feet, and liable to panic. And no artist.

The gallery was open, brightly lit, with a horse painting on a gilt display easel in the centre of the window. Not a Munnings. A portrait picture of an Australian horse and jockey, every detail sharp-edged, emphatic, and, to my taste, overpainted. Beside it a notice, gold embossed on black, announced a special display of distinguished equine art; and beside that, less well-produced but with larger letters, stood a display card saying ‘Welcome to the Melbourne Cup’.

The gallery looked typical of hundreds of others round the world; narrow frontage, with premises stretching back a good way from the street. Two or three people were wandering about inside, looking at the merchandise on the well-lit neutral grey walls.

I had gone there intending to go in. To go in was still what I intended, but I hesitated outside in the street feeling as if I were at the top of a ski jump. Stupid, I thought. Nothing venture, nothing gain, and all that. If you don’t look, you won’t see.

I took a ruefully deep breath and stepped over the welcoming threshold.

Greeny-grey carpet within, and an antique desk strategically placed near the door, with a youngish woman handing out small catalogues and large smiles.

‘Feel free to look around,’ she said. ‘More pictures downstairs.’

She handed me a catalogue, a folded glazed white card with several typed sheets clipped into it. I flipped them over. One hundred and sixty-three items, numbered consecutively, with titles, artists’ names, and asking price. A painting already sold, it said, would have a red spot on the frame.

I thanked her. ‘Just passing by,’ I said.

She nodded and smiled professionally, eyes sliding in a rapid summing up over my denim clothes and general air of not belonging to the jet set. She herself wore the latest trendy fashion with careless ease and radiated tycoon-catching sincerity. Australian, assured, too big a personality to be simply a receptionist.

‘You’re welcome anyway,’ she said.

I walked slowly down the long room, checking the pictures against their notes. Most were by Australian artists, and I could see what Jik had meant about the hot competition. The field was just as crowded as at home, if not more so, and the standard in some respects better. As usual when faced with other people’s flourishing talents I began to have doubts of my own.

At the far end of the ground-floor display there was a staircase leading downwards, adorned with a large arrow and a notice repeating ‘More Pictures Downstairs’.

I went down. Same carpet, same lighting, but no scatter of customers looking from pictures to catalogues and back again.

Below stairs, the gallery was not one straight room but a series of small rooms off a long corridor, apparently the result of not being able to knock down all the dividing and load-bearing walls. A room to the rear of the stairs was an office, furnished with another distinguished desk, two or three comfortable chairs for prospective clients, and a civilised row of teak-faced filing cabinets. Heavily framed pictures adorned the walls, and an equally substantial man was writing in a ledger at the desk.

He raised his head, conscious of my presence outside his door.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Just looking.’

He gave me an uninterested nod and went back to his work. He, like the whole place, had an air of permanence
and respectability quite unlike the fly-by-night suburban affair in Sydney. This reputable business, I thought, could not be what I was looking for. I had got the whole thing wrong. I would have to wait until I could get Hudson Taylor to look up Donald’s cheque and point me in a new direction.

Sighing, I continued down the line of rooms, thinking I might as well finish taking stock of the opposition. A few of the frames were adorned with red spots, but the prices on everything good were a mile from a bargain and a deterrent to all but the rich.

In the end room, which was larger than the others, I came across the Munnings. Three of them. All with horses; one racing scene, one hunting, one of gypsies.

They were not in the catalogue.

They hung without ballyhoo in a row of similar subjects, and to my eyes stuck out like thoroughbreds among hacks.

Prickles began up my spine. It wasn’t just the workmanship, but one of the pictures itself. Horses going down to the start. A long line of jockeys, bright against a dark sky. The silks of the nearest rider, purple with a green cap.

Maisie’s chatty voice reverberated in my inner ear, describing what I saw. ‘… I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it… because Archie and I decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one already had that…’

Munnings had always used a good deal of purple and green in shadows and distances. All the same… This picture, size, subject, and colouring, was exactly like Maisie’s, which had been hidden behind a radiator, and, presumably, burned.

The picture in front of me looked authentic. The right sort of patina for the time since Munnings’ death, the right excellence of draughtsmanship, the right indefinable something which separated the great from the good. I
put out a gentle finger to feel the surface of canvas and paint. Nothing there that shouldn’t be.

An English voice from behind me said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘Isn’t that a Munnings?’ I said casually, turning round.

He was standing in the doorway, looking in, his expression full of the guarded helpfulness of one whose best piece of stock is being appraised by someone apparently too poor to buy it.

I knew him instantly. Brown receding hair combed back, grey eyes, down-drooping moustache, suntanned skin: all last on view thirteen days ago beside the sea in Sussex, England, prodding around in a smoky ruin.

Mr Greene. With an ‘e’.

It took him only a fraction longer. Puzzlement as he glanced from me to the picture and back, then the shocking realisation of where he’d seen me. He took a sharp step backwards and raised his hand to the wall outside.

I was on my way to the door, but I wasn’t quick enough. A steel mesh gate slid down very fast in the doorway and clicked into some sort of bolt in the floor. Mr Greene stood on the outside, disbelief still stamped on every feature and his mouth hanging open. I revised all my easy theories about danger being good for the soul and felt as frightened as I’d ever been in my life.

‘What’s the matter?’ called a deeper voice from up the corridor.

Mr Greene’s tongue was stuck. The man from the office appeared at his shoulder and looked at me through the imprisoning steel.

‘A thief?’ he asked with irritation.

Mr Greene shook his head. A third person arrived outside, his young face bright with curiosity, and his acne showing like measles.

‘Hey,’ he said in loud Australian surprise. ‘He was the one at the Art Centre. The one who chased me. I swear he didn’t follow me. I swear it.’

‘Shut up,’ said the man from the office briefly. He stared at me steadily. I stared back.

I was standing in the centre of a brightly lit room of about fifteen feet square. No windows. No way out except through the guarded door. Nowhere to hide, no weapons to hand. A long way down the ski jump and no promise of a soft landing.

‘I say,’ I said plaintively. ‘Just what is all this about?’ I walked up to the steel gate and tapped on it. ‘Open this up, I want to get out.’

‘What are you doing here?’ the office man said. He was bigger than Greene and obviously more senior in the gallery. Heavy dark spectacle frames over unfriendly eyes, and a blue bow tie with polka dots under a double chin. Small mouth with a full lower lip. Thinning hair.

‘Looking,’ I said, trying to sound bewildered. ‘Just looking at pictures.’ An innocent at large, I thought, and a bit dim.

‘He chased me in the Art Centre,’ the boy repeated.

‘You threw some stuff in that man’s eyes,’ I said indignantly. ‘You might have blinded him.’

‘Friend of yours, was he?’ the office man said.