In the Frame (9 page)

I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.

He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.

‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’

He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreen
wiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’

‘But you like it?’

‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’

‘And how’s business?’

‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’

‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’

‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.

‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’

‘To your brain? As in the old days?’

‘Those were pastimes.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’

‘Arson and murder, to date.’

‘Jesus.’

The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.

‘I live right out on the other side,’ Jik said. ‘God, that sounds banal. Suburban. What has become of me?’

‘Contentment oozing from every pore,’ I said smiling.

‘Yes. So O.K., for the first time in my life I’ve been actually happy. I dare say you’ll soon put that right.’

The car nosed on to the expressway, pointing towards the bridge.

‘If you look over your right shoulder,’ Jik said, ‘You’ll see the triumph of imagination over economics. Like the Concorde. Long live madness, it’s the only thing that gets us anywhere.’

I looked. It was the opera house, glimpsed, grey with rain.

‘Dead in the day,’ Jik said. ‘It’s a night bird. Fantastic’.

The great arch of the bridge rose above us, intricate
as steel lace. ‘This is the only flat bit of road in Sydney,’ Jik said. We climbed again on the other side.

To our left, half-seen at first behind other familiar-looking high-rise blocks, but then revealed in its full glory, stood a huge shiny red-orange building, all its sides set with regular rows of large curve-cornered square windows of bronze-coloured glass.

Jik grinned. ‘The shape of the twenty-first century. Imagination and courage. I love this country.’

‘Where’s your natural pessimism?’

‘When the sun sets, those windows glow like gold.’ We left the gleaming monster behind. ‘It’s the water-board offices,’ Jik said sardonically. ‘The guy at the top moors his boat near mine.’

The road went up and down out of the city through close-packed rows of one-storey houses, whose roofs, from the air, had looked like a great red-squared carpet.

‘There’s one snag,’ Jik said. ‘Three weeks ago, I got married.’

The snag was living with him aboard his boat, which was moored among a colony of others near a headland he called The Spit: and you could see why, temporarily at least, the glooms of the world could take care of themselves.

She was not plain, but not beautiful. Oval-shaped face, mid-brown hair, so-so figure and a practical line in clothes. None of the style or instant vital butterfly quality of Regina. I found myself the critically inspected target of bright brown eyes which looked out with impact-making intelligence.

‘Sarah,’ Jik said. ‘Todd. Todd, Sarah.’

We said hi and did I have a good flight and yes I did. I gathered she would have preferred me to stay at home.

Jik’s thirty-foot ketch, which had set out from England as a cross between a studio and a chandler’s warehouse,
now sported curtains, cushions, and a flowering plant. When Jik opened the champagne he poured it into shining tulip glasses, not plastic mugs.

‘By God,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Sarah toasted my advent politely, not sure that she agreed. I apologised for gatecrashing the honeymoon.

‘Nuts to that,’ Jik said, obviously meaning it. ‘Too much domestic bliss is bad for the soul.’

‘It depends,’ said Sarah neutrally, ‘on whether you need love or loneliness to get you going.’

For Jik, before, it had always been loneliness. I wondered what he had painted recently: but there was no sign, in the now comfortable cabin, of so much as a brush.

‘I walk on air,’ Jik said. ‘I could bound up Everest and do a handspring on the summit.’

‘As far as the galley will do,’ Sarah said, ‘if you remembered to buy the crayfish.’

Jik, in our shared days, had been the cook; and times, it seemed, had not changed. It was he, not Sarah, who with speed and efficiency chopped open the crayfish, covered them with cheese and mustard, and set them under the grill. He who washed the crisp lettuce and assembled crusty bread and butter. We ate the feast round the cabin table with rain pattering on portholes and roof and the sea water slapping against the sides in the freshening wind. Over coffee, at Jik’s insistence, I told them why I had come to Australia.

They heard me out in concentrated silence. Then Jik, whose politics had not changed much since student pink, muttered darkly about ‘pigs’, and Sarah looked nakedly apprehensive.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’m not asking for Jik’s help, now that I know he’s married.’

‘You have it. You have it,’ he said explosively.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Sarah said, ‘What precisely do you plan to do first?’

‘Find out where the two Munnings came from.’

‘And after?’

‘If I knew what I was looking for I wouldn’t need to look.’

‘That doesn’t follow,’ she said absently.

‘Melbourne,’ Jik said suddenly. ‘You said one of the pictures came from Melbourne. Well, that settles it. Of course we’ll help. We’ll go there at once. It couldn’t be better. Do you know what next Tuesday is?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘The day of the Melbourne Cup!’

His voice was triumphant. Sarah stared at me darkly across the table.

‘I wish you hadn’t come,’ she said.

I slept that night in the converted boathouse which constituted Jik’s postal address. Apart from a bed alcove, new-looking bathroom, and rudimentary kitchen, he was using the whole space as studio.

A huge old easel stood in the centre, with a table to each side holding neat arrays of paints, brushes, knives, pots of linseed and turpentine and cleaning fluid: all the usual paraphernalia.

No work in progress. Everything shut and tidy. Like its counterpart in England, the large rush mat in front of the easel was black with oily dirt, owing to Jik’s habit of rubbing his roughly rinsed brushes on it between colours. The tubes of paint were characteristically squeezed flat in the middles, impatience forbidding an orderly progress from the bottom. The palette was a small oblong, not needed any larger because he used most colours straight from the tube and got his effects by overpainting. A huge box of rags stood under one table, ready to wipe clean everything used to apply paint to picture, not just brushes and knives, but fingers, palms, nails, wrists, anything which took his fancy. I smiled to myself. Jik’s studio was as identifiable as his pictures.

Along one wall a two-tiered rack held rows of canvasses, which I pulled out one by one. Dark, strong, dramatic colours, leaping to the eye. Still the troubled vision, the perception of doom. Decay and crucifixions, obscurely horrific landscapes, flowers wilting, fish dying, everything to be guessed, nothing explicit.

Jik hated to sell his paintings and seldom did, which I thought was just as well, as they made uncomfortable roommates, enough to cause depression in a skylark. They had a vigour, though, that couldn’t be denied. Everyone who saw his assembled work remembered it, and had their thoughts modified, and perhaps even their basic attitudes changed. He was a major artist in a way I would never be, and he would have looked upon easy popular acclaim as personal failure.

In the morning I walked down to the boat and found Sarah there alone.

‘Jik’s gone for milk and newspapers,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you some breakfast.’

‘I came to say goodbye.’

She looked at me levelly. ‘The damage is done.’

‘Not if I go.’

‘Back to England?’

I shook my head.

‘I thought not.’ A dim smile appeared briefly in her eyes. ‘Jik told me last night that you were the only person he knew who had a head cool enough to calculate a ship’s position for a Mayday call by dead reckoning at night after tossing around violently for four hours in a force ten gale with a hole in the hull and the pumps packed up, and get it right.’

I grinned. ‘But he patched the hull and mended the pump, and we cancelled the Mayday when it got light.’

‘You were both stupid.’

‘Better to stay safely at home?’ I said.

She turned away. ‘
Men
,’ she said. ‘Never happy unless they’re risking their necks.’

She was right, to some extent. A little healthy danger wasn’t a bad feeling, especially in retrospect. It was only the nerve-breakers which gave you the shakes and put you off repetition.

‘Some women, too,’ I said.

‘Not me.’

‘I won’t take Jik with me.’

Her back was still turned. ‘You’ll get him killed,’ she said.

Nothing looked less dangerous than the small suburban gallery from which Maisie had bought her picture. It was shut for good. The bare premises could be seen nakedly through the shop-front window, and a succinct and unnecessary card hanging inside the glass door said ‘Closed’.

The little shops on each side shrugged their shoulders.

‘They were only open for a month or so. Never seemed to do much business. No surprise they folded.’

Did they, I asked, know which estate agent was handling the letting? No, they didn’t.

‘End of enquiry,’ Jik said.

I shook my head. ‘Let’s try the local agents.’

We split up and spent a fruitless hour. None of the firms on any of the ‘For Sale’ boards in the district admitted to having the gallery on its books.

We met again outside the uninformative door.

‘Where now?’

‘Art Gallery?’

‘In the Domain,’ Jik said, which turned out to be a chunk of park in the city centre. The Art Gallery had a suitable façade of six pillars outside and the Munnings, when we ran it to earth, inside.

No one else was looking at it. No one approached to fall into chat and advise us we could buy another one cheap in a little gallery in an outer suburb.

We stood there for a while with me admiring the absolute mastery which set the two grey ponies in the shaft of pre-storm light at the head of the darker herd, and
Jik grudgingly admitting that at least the man knew how to handle paint.

Absolutely nothing else happened. We drove back to the boat in the M.G., and lunch was an anti-climax.

‘What now?’ Jik said.

‘A spot of work with the telephone, if I could borrow the one in the boathouse.’

It took nearly all afternoon, but alphabetically systematic calls to every estate agent as far as Holloway and Son in the classified directory produced the goods in the end. The premises in question, said Holloway and Son, had been let to ‘North Sydney Fine Arts’ on a short lease.

How short?

Three months, dating from September first.

No, Holloway and Son did not know the premises were now empty. They could not re-let them until December first, because North Sydney Fine Arts had paid all the rent in advance; and they did not feel able to part with the name of any individual concerned. I blarneyed a bit, giving a delicate impression of being in the trade myself, with a client for the empty shop. Holloway and Son mentioned a Mr John Grey, with a post-office box number for an address. I thanked them. Mr Grey, they said, warming up a little, had said he wanted the gallery for a short private exhibition, and they were not really surprised he had already gone.

How could I recognise Mr Grey if I met him? They really couldn’t say: all the negotiations had been done by telephone and post. I could write to him myself, if my client wanted the gallery before December first.

Ta ever so, I thought.

All the same, it couldn’t do much harm. I unearthed a suitable sheet of paper, and in twee and twirly lettering in black ink told Mr Grey I had been given his name and box number by Holloway and Son, and asked him if he
would sell me the last two weeks of his lease so that I could mount an exhibition of a young friend’s
utterly meaningful
watercolours. Name his own price, I said, within reason. Yours sincerely, I said; Peregrine Smith.

I walked down to the boat to ask if Jik or Sarah would mind me putting their own box number as a return address.

‘He won’t answer,’ Sarah said, reading the letter. ‘If he’s a crook. I wouldn’t.’

‘The first principle of fishing,’ Jik said, ‘is to dangle a bait.’

‘This wouldn’t attract a starving pirhana.’

I posted it anyway, with Sarah’s grudging consent. None of us expected it to bring forth any result.

Jik’s own session on the telephone proved more rewarding. Melbourne, it seemed, was crammed to the rooftops for the richest race meeting of the year, but he had been offered last-minute cancellations. Very lucky indeed, he insisted, looking amused.

‘Where?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘In the Hilton,’ he said.

I couldn’t afford it, but we went anyway. Jik in his student days had lived on cautious hand-outs from a family trust, and it appeared that the source of bread was still flowing. The boat, the boathouse, the M.G. and the wife were none of them supported by paint.