The Walking Stick (5 page)

Six swans came round, and he handed me a piece of the loaf and we fed them in turns. They paddled and gobbled and manoeuvred and came for more. The air was fresh and tangy and smelled of the
sea. A flag fluttered from Tower Bridge. I felt good.

It’s not easy for me to crouch down for long because all the weight has to be taken by one leg. I moved to get up and he helped me.

‘I envy you this!’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Robinson Crusoe on a desert island surrounded by commerce. It’s hell when they’re unloading. But this view’s here day and night, winter and summer the same.
Son et lumière
without an entrance fee . . . Like a drink?’

We went in, and he mixed two gin and tonics. The room really was in a mess. It smelled of resin and varnish and glue, and there were bits of paint-stained cloth on the floor, and stretching
wedges and canvas pliers. I deliberately didn’t look at any of his pictures, which were stacked in heaps.

‘The air’s lovely here,’ I said. ‘Where I work in Whittington’s, when I’m cataloguing, that is, I’m in a sort of basement cellar, which gets oppressive
after a while.’

‘Tell me about your work.’

I told him, and he listened intently, as if he were really interested, not, as some people do, with too many nods and grunts so that you know they’re waiting for you to finish.

‘D’you get well paid?’

‘A thousand a year.’

‘How d’you mean, you work in a cellar?’

‘Well, Whittington’s is like a rabbit warren. The office where I catalogue actually is under the pavement of Grafton Street. If you look as you pass you’ll see the heavy opaque
glass squares that let in the light.’

‘I’ll remember to stamp next time. Three bangs means, I’m waiting to take you to lunch.’

I laughed and he said: ‘Can you find somewhere to sit? In my life chairs aren’t for sitting on.’

We sat by the bigger window watching the scene changing in the early evening light.

‘Do they
teach
you anything about painting in your job?’

‘They don’t
teach
me anything. One picks up a bit about values.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say I wasn’t interested in that!’

‘I talked about pictures to Smith-Williams the other day, and he did rather confirm what I thought.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Oh, I mean that our business – Whittington’s business – is not to sell new things but to sell things that have become old and acquired a value. You see, if a new
painting
had
a value, it would be much more likely to fetch it in a gallery, in an exhibition, than in the sale room.’

‘Yeh.’ He swallowed a gulp of his drink. ‘But who says your painting has a value, and where do you get your exhibition? That’s the crunch.’

‘I thought you’d recently had an exhibition. I thought David Hambro said you’d had one.’

‘Oh, that. In a flea-bitten hall in Southwark.’ He breathed through his thin nose and rubbed a smear of paint off a finger. ‘D’you know, Deborah, how artists live –
outside a little circle in Bond Street and St James’s? Eh, do you? Well, the answer is they don’t! They paint – and then what? If they’re lucky they get a few hung in the
local pub, in the hope someone may come along and take a fancy to one of them – then it’s not likely they’ll want to pay more than a fiver. Or, if they know the right guys on the
local council they may get put up to do a mural or a water-colour for the civic centre or the new secondary modern. And that’s your lot. After that they can hawk ’em round the art
stationers and the fancy shops or they can stack ’em away like I do, one against the other till there’s too many of ’em, and then I have a bonfire, or if it’s good canvas I
start painting over the top!’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see a painting of a river scene.

‘I suppose that’s so. People, quite a lot of people, buy paintings nowadays, but I suppose—’

‘The paintings buyer is a special breed,’ he said vigorously, and finished his drink. ‘Another?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Or two breeds. The paintings buyer is two special separate breeds really, you know. Quite separate, see. There’s the one kind – the With-it, Art-conscious,
glossy-magazine-buying, Demi-semi-avant-garde junior executive. You know. Him and his wife go off to Spain and buy an antique tile and stick it up on the wall and consider it “terrible
fun”. And every now and then maybe they’ve a bit of money to spare for a painting for their flat; but it has to be so with-it that they can never afford a genuine one, so they get a
reproduction of a Braque or a Dubuffet.’

‘Yes, I know the type,’ I said uncomfortably.

‘The other breed . . . the other breed is all money and no taste. They buy paintings like they buy stocks and shares, spotting a winner or selling a loser. They fill up their houses with
paintings they only really enjoy for their money value. They couldn’t bear having a painting on their walls that wasn’t
worth
anything, however beautiful it was. Well, what good
are people like them? For the
average
artist – not the lucky one or two – for the
average
artist, what bloody good is either breed to him!’

‘None,’ I said. ‘I know.’

There was silence while a barge stage-managed a pile of timber slowly past the window. Then suddenly Leigh laughed. ‘Well, God bless Aunt Nellie. Her little nest egg will keep me for a
while yet. Let’s go out and eat somewhere.’

‘May I see one or two paintings first?’

I felt he must have expected me to ask, but in fact he seemed genuinely to hesitate. Then he said: ‘OK. But the light’s bad now. There’s half a dozen here that’ll
do.’

They were all river scenes. They had a factualness and a fidelity that appealed – you could put one on a wall and think that’s how it would be if I had a window on the Thames. But
their very fidelity would, I could see, be a disadvantage today. I remembered his remark at Sarah’s party when we first met. ‘I’m a good draftsman but that isn’t
enough.’

This time he said: ‘OK, OK, that’ll do for a first dose. I don’t want to make you gag. Sure you won’t have another drink?’

‘Sure, thanks.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ he said, ‘you got a spot of paint on your frock. Stay still.’

He’d pointed to a spot on my shoulder I could only just see by twisting my neck. It didn’t look much.

‘Stay still,’ he said again and took out his handkerchief. ‘Next thing we know you’ll be getting it in your hair.’

He spat on the handkerchief a couple of times and rubbed and then stopped. ‘I think it’s come out. You look when you get your frock off, but I don’t think it’ll show.
This bloody place needs a spring cleaning. Sorry.’

‘It’s all right. It’s nothing.’

He was very close. ‘Sorry,’ he said again. Eyes weighted with some purpose. Should have known the purpose. At twenty-six should have known the purpose very well; but that’s the
trouble: learner driver, everybody’s got to learn, even late in life.

He kissed me. Anyway, he tried but I turned my mouth away. Kissed my cheek. Fumbling a bit with his hands about my body. Then he gripped my arms. I put my hands on his chest. He hugged me,
suddenly, convulsively, like a bear. Didn’t have a chance then. His cheek was against mine. Then we were separate. ‘Sorry,’ he said for the third time. ‘I reckon this
isn’t in the auctioneer’s handbook. Never try to claim goods before the hammer’s down.’

I was choked with anger and contempt and embarrassment, so because of the last of these I said nothing at all. He picked up the pictures and began to stack them. I went across and picked up my
summer coat, put it on, looked for my stick but couldn’t find it.

There was a knock on the door. Leigh swore under his breath and stopped to comb his hair. Then he went and opened the door. There was some muttering and a man came in.

‘. . . Well, he said to bring it now. I just dropped in, like. It didn’t make no difference to me. Oh, sorry.’

Leigh said: ‘This is Ted Sandymount, friend of mine. Miss Dainton.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Dainton. How are you? Muggy weather, isn’t it? I just dropped in, Leigh, with this packet. It didn’t make no difference to me. Jack said to come, and
I was passing near.’

About forty, well-dressed by Carnaby Street standards; brown wavy hair, very thin and brushed back like the grain in wood, a smooth tanned face, a nervous twitch to the nose and eye that was
half a wink and half a sniff. He padded across on flat feet and shook my hand and eyed me knowledgeably, as if he’d seen me before, or heard about me. But perhaps it was just that he was used
to finding girls here.

Leigh said: ‘We were just going out to eat, Ted. Otherwise I’d say stop and have a drink.’

‘No, no, I’m on my way. I just dropped in.’ Ted Sandymount winked at me. ‘This is a bit of old London Londoners don’t often see. Where the work’s done, mind,
where the work’s done. West End couldn’t live without the East End, that’s what I always say. There’s the back door and the front door to every city. Can’t get away
from it.’

‘Who wants to?’ Leigh said.

Ted laughed at nothing. ‘Who wants to? Some of those duchesses you see in Fortnum’s. They don’t know how the work’s done and don’t care: what d’you say, Miss
Dainton?’ He looked at me with bloodshot, selfish little eyes, and you could tell that what he was saying had nothing whatever to do with what he was thinking. What he was wondering was what
I would be like in bed. I seemed to be striking it rich all of a sudden.

‘Yes, well, maybe,’ said Leigh impatiently. ‘I’m hungry; so thank Jack will you, if you see him before I do. I wasn’t in all that hurry for the paints. So long
now.’

‘Bye bye,’ said Ted Sandymount, twitching. ‘Bye bye for now, Miss Dainton. See you again sometime. Bye, Leigh. You’ll be in tomorrow?’

‘Sure, sure: I’m always in.’

I found my stick. ‘We can all go at the same time,’ I said.

‘Miss Dainton,’ said the girl at the desk, ‘there’s a lady here with a couple of little bottles that look as if they would interest you. A Mrs
Stevenson. She hasn’t been in before.’

‘All right. I’ll come up.’

I left the office and made my way through the dusty cellar where the pictures were stacked before cataloguing, skirted the accounts department, climbed the steps, along the corridor by the
auction rooms and reached the counter where Janet Browne was talking to an old woman in a torn raincoat.

He’d torn the lining of his coat last night on the brake lever as he got out of the car at the little café where we ate. It had been a silent sort of meal that I would have been
glad to escape from, but I didn’t want him to think I was a Victorian heroine shrinking from a first kiss. A little pub-cum-café off Jamaica Road, where there was an odd assortment of
seamen, tarts, shopgirls, lorry drivers; interesting if in the mood. I thought once of borrowing a needle and cotton from the waitress to stitch the tear, but thought it might give him the idea I
was feeling domestic. ‘Ted Sandymount’s an electrician,’ he said after a long silence. ‘Does work for ships and river men. Small way of business but I reckon he does quite
nicely. Any form of trade is in his line really. Good chap, you know, under his smoothie looks. Would do anything for me. Generous to a fault.’

Mrs Stevenson said: ‘I brought these little things in. I really couldn’t say if they’re of any value, but I think they must be, as my dear mother kept them in her cabinet.
Trinkets really. Pretty trinkets.’ She had a voice like an old 78 gramophone record of Caruso played too often and nearly worn out. I unwrapped the rough brown paper expecting the usual junk:
Toby jug or sham Rockingham. I found a shepherdess guarding a lamb, not bigger than four inches; an even smaller group of three birds.

‘My husband,’ said Mrs Stevenson, ‘my husband often urged me to give them away to his favourite niece, Emma, but somehow . . .’ The needle stuck, and for a moment there
was nothing but hissing and grating. Then she coughed it into its groove again. ‘Sentimental value. My dear mother prized them, and now – ’

The head of the shepherdess came off, beautifully fashioned, with a little cork inside.
All three
birds had detachable heads. ‘Why,’ he had said last night, ‘did you not
let me kiss your mouth? It looks nice. Isn’t it for use? Or have you taken a vow?’ This suddenly in the car on the way home. ‘You don’t realize,’ I said.
‘Realize what?’ he asked.

‘These are scent bottles,’ I said to Mrs Stevenson. ‘About 1750. Oh, yes, they’re valuable. You want us to dispose of them for you? We haven’t a porcelain sale
until June the twentieth. But we could include them in that if you wanted. The catalogue is just going to press.’

‘Yes . . . Well, yes.’ Old eyes wrinkled like leaves, suddenly speculative, cautious. ‘Valuable? How valuable?’

‘I could only give an estimate. But they’re Chelsea and the best period. They’ll probably realize between £300 and £400 each.’

‘Realize what?’ Leigh had asked again.

‘Realize,’ I said in livid anger, ‘that I don’t
want
to get involved with
anyone
! Apart – absolutely
apart
– from whether I want to get
involved with
you
! Are you a complete fool? Do I have to spell it out all over again? Now leave me alone! For God’s sake leave me alone!’

Mrs Stevenson picked up the shepherdess, and her hand shook as if she were using it as a pepper pot. ‘My – er – my dear young lady . . .’ I took the scent bottle gently
from her and put it in safety on the counter. ‘My, oh my, oh my! . . . Are you sure? You look very young . . .’

‘Yes, I’m sure. But I can get it confirmed if you care to wait.’

‘I can hardly believe it. My dear mother would, I’m certain, be quite surprised. You know’ – her Adam’s apple moved up and down – ‘you know, I’d
thought about – about £20. I’m a little short of – of money, you know. I thought about £20. I thought to myself . . .’ She went on talking, like the long-faded
Caruso in a recitative. There was a smell of Wincarnis on her breath. The gramophone would soon need rewinding.

‘Let me give you a receipt,’ I said. ‘It’ll be the twentieth in the morning, Mrs Stevenson. Your address is? . . . Yes, of course you can come to the auction if you want
to. No, just come to the front door in Grafton Street at about 9:40 and explain to the Commissionaire.’