The Stargazey (15 page)

That about covered the whole shebang, thought Melrose. Art dealers were like horoscopes—excepting, of course, Diane's—something nice for everyone.

“The
critics
seem to like Brick's work,” added Nicholas, bolstering the gallery's position.

Critics? Melrose merely nodded. It was obvious he wasn't going to get a sensible answer: possibly, Fabricant didn't know himself; he wasn't,
after all, responsible for public taste. Melrose had got so caught up in the two gray-garbed women, he had forgotten why he was here. He didn't think he wanted to ask about Ralph Rees; that would make it appear he'd come deliberately to see his work, and he wanted his coming here to seem accidental and spontaneous. “I'd like to keep looking round, if you don't mind.”

“Mind? I should think not.” Fabricant laughed. “Take your time. I'll just get this ready for you. You'd like to have me deliver it somewhere?”

“No, no. I'll take it with me.”

Nicholas took the painting down, carefully, and started off. “I wonder if you'd be interested . . . we're still doing a show here, a number of paintings by Ralph Rees. I wonder if you'd like to see them?”

Touchdown. Goal. Or whatever you say
. “I'm afraid I don't know his work.”

“He's just breaking out. The show's got some rave reviews. It's back there”—Nicholas gestured with his head—“in the other room. We had it out in this room, the front room, when it opened two weeks ago. We've just moved it.”

“Yes, of course, I'd enjoy seeing it.”

“Fine. Follow me.”

Melrose followed him down the short hall where the desk and computer were located. Nicholas turned, still holding Bea Slocum's painting. “In here. I would like to know what you think.”

“All right. Thanks.”

When he walked into the room and took a quick look round, his stomach sank and every last drop of adrenaline went with it. On three walls were hung five paintings. And, except for a variance in size, they were all the same. Literally.

Again, Nicholas came up behind him, having divested himself of
The Storm.
Apparently, he just had to be in on Melrose's reaction.

Too bad for him. “These paintings,” said Melrose, “are white. All of them.”

Nicholas did not pick up on the reproachful tone, he being so eager to show the work off. “Yes, remarkable, isn't it? The most original collection we've had in some time.”

Melrose was a pretty good liar (he did have to agree with Jury on this score), but he wondered if he'd be able to do it in this case. How in hell was he going to work up the enthusiasm he'd need to buy one of these white rectangles? The only thing different about them was their size. Except, he saw in the last one (No. 5, it was labeled), a thin black line down in a corner and barely visible. It looked more as if Bub or Sally had defaced it, in giggling enthusiasm, than it did the artist's attempt to—to what? What on earth was the asking price? He was afraid to look.

Nicholas misinterpreted Melrose's slack-mouthed look as one that Balboa, perhaps, might have given upon finding the Pacific. Wonder. Delight. Discovery.

Horror. Hands behind his back, Melrose was moving from one to another, not trying to see what the gallery folk saw in all of this (for there was nothing to see) but trying to work out what he could say. He was right to have been fearful of the prices, too. Not one of them under a thousand pounds, and one he had passed had been three thousand. How had they arrived at these variations? Who was kidding bloody whom?

Nicholas mistook Melrose's stunned look for appreciation, for one struck speechless in the face of brilliance.

Well, he was half right: Melrose was struck speechless. He could not in any way, shape, or form imagine anyone's admiring this lot, could not imagine a painter seriously turning it out or a gallery who would hang it on its walls. On each identifying card was written a name and a number. The numbers varied; the name didn't:
Siberian Snow: Five Ways of Seeing.

Nicholas Fabricant said, “It's possible we've found another Ryman or even Rothko.”

It was worse than Agatha. Blind Auntie he could forgive, but not this gallery owner, this art maven. Melrose squeezed his eyes shut, appalled at this coupling. Although he had never understood Rothko, right now he felt like making a pilgrimage to the Museum of Modern Art to bow down before his paintings in return for hearing him thus maligned. But he had to swallow the various ripostes clamoring for expression; he had, after all, been given the charge of buying one of old Ralph's paintings, so he would have to muster his courage. Jury had never seen them; otherwise, Melrose would never have forgiven him.

Nicholas, standing by his elbow, said, “
Siberian Snow.
That's the series.”

It was true he was good at dissembling, but—

He had a small epiphany. Diane Demorney was a champion of all things white. Her house was white, her living room was completely white—furniture, objets d'art, cushions—her cat was white, her car was white: all white. Indeed, Diane had a white painting above her white marble mantel: it was a painting as white as the whitest of Ralph's; hell, maybe it
was
Ralph's.

For as he'd been looking at them, Melrose had noticed, besides that damned twig thing, a slight gradation of pigment emerge in the narrow border of the fifth. He could just see the white becoming cream, becoming bone. Meaningless nuances, he decided.

Diane, at least, knew white when she saw it.

“I have a friend—” Melrose stopped to savor this announcement. It had, predictably, the effect upon Nicholas Fabricant of making him breathless with expectation.

“Yes?” Nicholas prompted.

“—who would
adore
this work. But, I wonder. . . . ”

Again, Nicholas prompted. “Yes?”

“What would be the effect, if it's a series, of the removal of one? I mean, wouldn't it spoil utterly the effect of the whole? By the same token, wouldn't one painting by itself misconstrue the meaning of the whole?” He should shoot himself for playing along. But he loved the way Fabricant was running his thumb back and forth across his brow in puzzlement, as if this hadn't occurred to him.

Melrose went on. “Perhaps one should simply take the entire series.”
And pigs might fly!
Ah, well, he should not be cruel to the poor fellow.

Nicholas was saved from answering by the appearance of a second man gliding across the carpet. You couldn't hear a person bearing down on you in this place.

The young man eagerly introduced his brother. It was clear that Sebastian Fabricant was delighted (and as expectant as his younger brother) to hear the “Lord Ardry” part of the introduction.

“Lord Ardry wonders about removing a painting from the series.” Nicholas repeated what Melrose had said.

“Ah,” said Sebastian, unruffled. “No, for each one is self-contained. Each has its own integrity. Each one—”

Is bloody
white,
Melrose wanted to scream.

“—speaks separately.”

What Melrose couldn't decide, though, was whether they themselves believed in what they were saying or whether the whole thing was a hoax or something. He came down on the side of their believing it; no one could say what Sebastian had said without laughing.

“Well, then, I'll have one,” said Melrose, as if he were standing with a fruit vendor choosing a banana. He'd sooner have been.

“Which one, Lord Ardry?” asked Nicholas.

The question was redundant as far as Lord Ardry was concerned. He was about to say, Number five, but there was that twig. It was beginning to obsess him. He decided to let price be his guide and chose the mid-priced two-thousand-pound one: Number four.

“Excellent choice,” said Sebastian.

How did Melrose know he'd say just that? “But a difficult choice, Mr. Fabricant. Difficult.” That was true enough.

“It's an interesting technique Rees uses. He uses a thin sort of sandpaper to overlay the canvas. Gives it that rough texture. I see you also are taking the Slocum.”

But what a relief to express true enthusiasm. “She's remarkable.”

“We're trying her out.”

Melrose wanted to say
white of you
but refrained. “I hope you've another to put in its place.”

Sebastian laughed. “He didn't paint several of the same kind.”

He didn't? You could have fooled me! Melrose said, “I don't mean him, I mean her. I mean Beatrice Slocum.”

Nicholas said, as he stood now with the big white painting, “Yes, we've two or three more of hers in the back. Would you want this delivered to—?”

Melrose gave him Boring's address. “It's a gift for a friend.” (Diane's lucky day.) What Melrose couldn't understand was, having bought the
Beatrice Slocum and having shown further interest, the brothers Fabricant didn't immediately go and trot out every painting they had of hers. If Ralph had any more white ones lying around, he bet they'd be off in a flash to get those. They were clustered round the desk in the short hallway now, and Melrose had his checkbook out. “Do you suppose I could see the other Slocum paintings? If they're handy?”

Sebastian Fabricant frowned slightly, as if he couldn't understand the request. “Well, yes, I expect so. Nicholas?” Just then, the telephone bleated its effete gallery tone, and Sebastian answered it and Nick went off towards the rear.

Nick, it appeared, was general dogsbody. Was that his punishment for being younger brother? Melrose wondered how the spoils here were divided up. There had been no more custom since he'd come in over an hour ago, but, of course, this wasn't Marks & Spencer. To shop in this place would require serious money. And how was he to endear himself to them to the extent he would be taken to the family bosom? What would it take to get on the matey side of these two, the why-don't-you-come-for-dinner side? Then Melrose remembered Ralph. While he was in the middle of this fresh idea, Sebastian was putting down the receiver and Nicholas was coming towards them, carrying Bea's other paintings.

Melrose knew, even before they were set in front of him, that he'd buy them. If anyone deserved a leg up, it was Bea Slocum. Yet buying both would leave that blank space on the wall, so he decided on one. And as soon as he saw the smaller of the two, he knew which one that would be. It was a scene of a London street, a North London street, and Melrose recognized it even before Nicholas read from the card taped to the back:

“This one's called
Catchcoach Street.
Nice, no?” Nicholas was peering over the top as if he could view it upside-down.

Melrose smiled. How much better could it get? “Nice,” was all he said. Although she hadn't particularized this little bank of row houses, she had painted the pub at the end of them, the Anodyne Necklace, and he would swear those kiddies with their hoops and balls—or were they rocks and hatchets?—were of the family Cripps. Whatever one might call the ambience of Catchcoach Street, Bea had nailed it: run-down houses behind gardens one tried to tend but which still withered. The
amiable squalor, the Dickensian lucklessness of Catchcoach Street. He smiled. “This one I'll take with me, I think. Perhaps you could send the other round to my club with the—ah,
Siberian Snow
.” Bea's was only three hundred, and it could have gone ten rounds with any other painting in the place—except for the other Slocum.

He made out his check, and it was a considerable sum to have change hands. Despite the waste of two thousand on the Rees painting, Melrose was only too happy to spend it. It was worth it just to see that Bea Slocum was succeeding. He felt she would have been succeeding more if more of her pictures had been hanging there. Why was this? he wondered again.

Melrose tore off his check and handed it to Sebastian, as Nicholas placed a square of cardboard on top of Bea's painting and then wrapped it up in brown paper.

“Look,” said Sebastian, “it's getting on for lunchtime. Why don't we find a bite to eat?”

“Thanks, I'd be delighted! Do you have your favorite place?”

“We'll go to the Running Footman. Just up there a ways.”

The Running Footman! Memories, memories. With
Catchcoach Street
under his arm, Melrose felt comforted; he had no idea why he should feel so. Perhaps it was so seldom demonstrated that justice was abroad in the world; that the deserving did get rewarded. He patted his brown-paper-wrapped painting and thought that whatever ills he might have to suffer at the hands of the Fabricants, it would have been worth it.

L
eaning against the bar, ordering up a half pint of lager, Jury was beginning to feel like a regular. How many times had he been here at this point? A half dozen, surely. The clock on the wall in the Stargazey said four-thirty. He wondered how Plant was getting along in the gallery. He was not very hopeful; as everyone was fond of telling him, there wasn't much to go on. Kitty, who'd been out for a couple of days, still hadn't returned. Jury shoved his glass towards the bartender.

Behind the bar was a long mirror, and when he looked in it he saw a blond woman in a black coat making her way through the crowd towards the door. He wondered if he was drunk on only a pint of lager, for he had a queer feeling of seasickness, watching her walk, as if the pub had turned into the Fulham Road and she was once again walking the pavement and he was on the bus, following her. Her transit through the room was only a matter of seconds, with Jury holding his fresh lager up, transfixed. Then he pulled himself together, dropped some coins on the bar, and moved quickly to the street.

Out in the waning light and a gauzy rain that felt like cobwebs on his face, Jury looked up and down the Fulham Road, saw nothing, went to the corner: still no sign of her. But there was no sign of a departing bus, either, so she must be somewhere; either that or she'd jumped into a cab.