Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  Toba’s flat was at the end of the walkway. The canary-yellow front door sprang open as we approached. She’d buzzed us in and had apparently accurately estimated just how long it would take us to walk up here. She probably had experience in this area. She stood in the doorway, looking a little nervous.

  She had disquieting amber eyes and jet-black hair in a short, helmet-style cut. I didn’t need Nevada to tell me that the black had to be a dye job for a woman born in 1937. Toba was wearing drainpipe jeans, espadrilles, and a boldly striped blue and white sweater with a red batik scarf at her throat. The entire ensemble was strictly bohemian and rather chic.

  She had a deeply and intricately seamed face. Another smoker, I thought. But apparently she had given up long ago, because when we went inside there was no sight and, more importantly, no lingering smell of cigarettes anywhere.

  She closed the front door and showed us to the tiny galley kitchen where she offered us coffee. Nevada lifted the brown paper bag she’d been carrying, “What a coincidence,” she said. “We’ve brought some. We got one for you.”

  Toba politely declined and proceeded to make a cup of instant for herself while we took the lid off ours and sipped.

  The subtext of this exchange was that, at this stage at least, nobody trusted each other enough to accept any hospitality. Nevada and I, at least, had a sound basis in our personal experience to be skittish.

  So we drank our own coffee while she drank her own. Which, ironically, verified that we each would have been fine drinking the other’s. Paranoia is a terrible thing, but we hadn’t exactly started this relationship under the most relaxed of auspices.

  The little flat was crammed with paintings. Every wall, even in the kitchen, was literally covered with framed illustrations of all different sizes and media. They were hung from near the ceiling to almost floor level. Oddly enough, the effect of all these images was neither oppressive nor claustrophobic. Some clever discrimination had gone into positioning each picture and there was a sense of balance, proportion and harmony that made it all acceptable.

  Not just acceptable, in fact, but rather pleasant.

  As I began to get a feel for her aesthetic, I realised the yellow tint of the front door was no accident. The colour scheme had continued within. Underneath its layer of framed pictures, the front hall was painted a slightly more pale shade of yellow, and the further into the flat you went—as we found out later—the more pale the colour became, shading to cream in the kitchen and snow white in the three tiny rooms lying beyond.

  Each of these was theoretically a bedroom but two of them had been converted, apparently permanently, into studies or work rooms. There were tables, desks, bookshelves and filing cabinets. Art materials were everywhere, and on an easel in a corner of the room where we sat was a half-finished pastel of a pastoral landscape. In its simple bold colours and forms it looked like late Hockney. It was an accomplished piece of work.

  “You’re an artist,” I said.

  “An illustrator,” she corrected.

  “Are all these yours?” said Nevada, indicating a wall full of framed pictures.

  “Most of them. Many of them. A few are by friends.”

  The framed pictures, which included everything from large watercolours and oils to the tiniest pencil drawing, had apparently been grouped by period or mood, so that each piece seemed a close relative to those nearby. The ones in this room had an almost childish boldness of colour and form. And there was something oddly familiar about them.

  I found myself wondering where I could possibly have seen her work before. Then I caught sight of a volume I recognised on one of her bookshelves and I put two and two together. I said, “You did the illustrations, didn’t you? For Honeyland’s book.”

  She gave me an ironic smile. “Lucky’s book, you mean. Yes. That was me.”

  “Do you mind?” I said. I went to the bookshelf and took down the copy of Farmer Henry Versus the Locusts and showed it to Nevada. We flipped through the brightly coloured pages. None of the pictures from the book were actually present on the walls, but the stylistic similarity was unmistakeable. Toba Possner watched us closely, and nodded. Perhaps with approval.

  She nodded at the wall. “The work in here is from the same period. Mid to late 1950s.”

  “It’s marvellous,” said Nevada politely. I finished flipping through the book and returned to the title page, which declared that the book was written by ‘Lucky’ but gave no clue as to who might have done the pictures that were such an important part of it. I turned to examine the fine print on the page with the publishing information and found a small legend: ‘Illustrations specially commissioned from the Royal College of Art.’

  I showed it to Nevada. Toba Possner came over to see what we were looking at. I said, “You didn’t get credit for your work?”

  “No.”

  “That was a shame.”

  She shook her head. “That was the least of it. The real shame was getting paid fifteen guineas and not a penny more. Never a penny more, after all these years.”

  “You didn’t receive any royalties?”

  “Of course not. But I’m hardly alone in that. Did E. H. Shepard benefit from the Winnie the Pooh millions? I think not. And, you know, the really gutting thing is that he got to keep the paintings. Lucky did. He kept my original artwork.” She looked at us, dry-eyed and steady and ironic. “Do you have any idea what those paintings would be worth today?”

  I said, “Considering the popularity of that book… a great deal.”

  “I could have a house in the country, a flat in London, and a little place in France too. If I owned my own paintings and I could sell them.”

  Nevada glanced at me. If anything, the woman sounded mildly amused at her own predicament. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was some volcanic anger lurking somewhere beneath the surface. She was certainly entitled to feel that way. But I elected to keep things neutral.

  “Did you get to know Honeyland?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. I couldn’t simply be commissioned to do the illustrations and go off and do them on my own. Oh, no. I had to meet the great man and be vetted by him in person. And he had to discuss his ideas with me in detail, giving me the benefit of his insights. And once I won the commission, he insisted on visiting me in my studio on an almost daily basis to consider and analyse the work in progress. He interfered constantly.”

  “How did he come to choose you?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t choose me per se. He was looking for a starving student who would work cheap, so he put up a notice at the Royal College of Art.” She smiled crookedly. “And I was the lucky girl.”

  “And you didn’t even get credit for what you did,” said Nevada.

  “No.” Toba came over and picked up the book. “And note the plural. ‘Illustrations specially commissioned from the Royal College of Art.’” She glanced at us. “It cleverly sows a subtle little seed of doubt in the reader’s mind.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Perhaps the illustrations come from different illustrators. Perhaps it was a team effort. Perhaps dozens of people were involved. You see? Anything to dilute my contribution. The way it’s phrased casts doubt on whether these pictures were even all executed by the same hand.”

  I said, “They obviously were. They’re clearly all the work of the same person.”

  “And they’re brilliant,” said Nevada. “I think the pictures are the best part. Of the book, I mean.”

  “Thank you,” said Toba Possner, who sat there quietly soaking up all this praise. “But unfortunately, because they were allowed to remain anonymous, over the years people, other illustrators, have been able to claim that Farmer Henry Versus the Locusts was their own work.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes, it is. But anyone who was at the Royal College—at roughly the same time I was—could potentially claim credit for them.”

  As she said this, something crossed my mind
and also, apparently, my face. Because she looked directly at me with her odd, pale brown eyes, and said, “You’re thinking if other people could pretend to be the illustrator, perhaps I’m pretending too.”

  “No,” I said, gesturing at the pictures hanging on the wall, the samples of her work that were so clearly related to the Farmer Henry illustrations. “There are all these…”

  But she wasn’t listening to me. She went over to a filing cabinet and slid open a well-oiled drawer. There was the brisk flapping of paper from inside as she looked for something, then she murmured with satisfaction and turned to us, holding a manila folder. She took out a scrap of vividly coloured paper and handed it to me. “I have this.”

  It was about the size of the palm of my hand and had been neatly clipped from the brightly coloured cover of what appeared to be a magazine, though on closer inspection it looked too crude to be a professional magazine. Perhaps more like a pamphlet of some kind. It depicted a cartoon of a locust with an enlarged head and vaguely human features. In particular the face featured a jutting, uncompromising Roman nose sprouting with unsightly hairs. It was primitive and coarse but it had a certain impact. I wondered if it was a caricature of a real person.

  What was for certain was that it was a rudimentary version of the locusts that featured in Farmer Henry. “Mr Honeyland gave me this before I started work,” said Toba, taking the clipping back and carefully replacing it in the folder. “You can see that my locusts in the book are based on this. He insisted that I use it as my model. He was very particular about how they should look.”

  I said, “Where did he get it?”

  “I have no idea. He wouldn’t tell me. But he was adamant that I had to work from this picture. This rubbish.” She sighed. “In the end, I think I managed to make something decent of it.” She flipped the folder shut. “Anyway, it’s one more piece of evidence, isn’t it, to prove my case?” She went back to the filing cabinet, put the folder in and slid the drawer shut. Then she turned and smiled at us. “Ironic isn’t it, citing a naked example of someone else’s stylistic influence to stake the claim that the illustrations are solely mine.” She turned back to the filing cabinet and opened another drawer.

  “Anyway, and perhaps more to the point, I also have this.”

  She took something from the drawer and handed it to me. It was a 78rpm record. As promised, one side was ‘Fringe Merchant’ and the other was ‘Creep Back’. Both had a composer credit of J. Thomas.

  I slid the heavy old record out of its cardboard sleeve and walked over to the window to inspect it in the daylight.

  It was in remarkably good shape.

  I turned back to see Nevada watching me expectantly. Toba Possner was smiling calmly. “It’s very good,” I said. “In fact, it looks fine. Where did you get it?”

  “He used to play it during our so-called creative discussions. To get me in the mood, apparently. I had an old record player in my studio and he left it—the record—here. When the book was finished he said I could keep it.” She looked at us. “Of course, I can’t prove that. She could make the argument that the record is his, not mine, just as she insists that the paintings don’t belong to me. My paintings.”

  “This is Joan Honeyland?” I said.

  She nodded. “I approached her some years ago, making initial enquiries in an attempt to retrieve my original art. I asserted my moral right to ownership. But failing that, I thought we could at least have equal shares in the exploitation of the images.” She looked at us. “Pictures from the book have appeared on posters, t-shirts, towels, kitchenware, god knows what. Even a tiny fraction of the revenue from that would have made enough to keep me in comfort for the rest of my days.”

  She looked away from us, out of the window. “In response I received a letter from her lawyer, threatening to sue me for everything I’m worth if I tried to make any such claim.” She glanced around at the tiny flat, where she lived at the discretion of a charity. “Everything I’m worth,” she said. She smiled, but I could hear the bitterness in her voice.

  “So that’s why you want to remain anonymous? Because you don’t want Joan Honeyland to know it’s you?”

  She nodded.

  “Let sleeping bitches lie,” she said.

  13. LOCAL HISTORY

  The next morning over breakfast, Nevada and I sat discussing Toba Possner. The cats sprawled on the floor nearby, keeping us company and praying some silent cat prayers that a piece of bacon would fall on the floor. I said, “I was really thrown by her attitude to Miss Honeyland.”

  Nevada buttered a piece of toast. “I know. I noticed.”

  “I mean, in all our dealings with her, Miss Honeyland’s been really decent. Generous and…”

  “Nice?”

  “Yes. Nice. But the way Toba Possner talks about her…”

  Nevada crunched her toast. “Assuming she’s telling the truth.”

  I looked at her. “You think she was lying?”

  “No. Not especially. Do you?”

  “No.”

  Nevada shook her head. “The thing is, you can’t help siding with the exploited artist. I understand that. Neither can I. But look at it from Miss Honeyland’s point of view. She wants at all costs to protect and preserve her father’s work. Any attempt to dilute his claim to total authorship—”

  “Any claim to sharing his money, you mean.”

  “If you want to be cynical about it,” said Nevada. “But she must see herself as protecting her father and his work. His heritage, in fact.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “I managed to get a lot of money from her for Toba, for the record she had.”

  “Good. Toba deserves it. How much?”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps enough for her to live on for a year, or maybe even longer. She doesn’t look like the extravagant type.”

  “No, she certainly doesn’t. I imagine all her money goes on art supplies and a bit of food.”

  “What about clothes?” I said. I thought she’d been pretty sharply dressed, for an old lady.

  “That’s the thing about reaching that age,” said Nevada. “You’ve already bought all your clothes.”

  “And own an extensive wardrobe. Of fine vintage clothing.”

  “Exactly. Which I would be only too happy to ransack when she kicks the bucket. Not that I want that to be any time soon, you understand. I really liked her. So much so that when we successfully complete this job and collect our bonus from the generous Miss Honeyland—”

  “If we successfully complete this job and collect our bonus.”

  “Think positive. So much so that, when we do that, I want to spend some of the money on commissioning a picture from Toba. A portrait, in fact.”

  “A portrait?” I said. “Of you?”

  “No.”

  “Of me?”

  “No.”

  The penny dropped. “Of the cats?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll see. When we get the money, we’ll see.”

  “I love it when you lay down the law,” said Nevada. “How did Miss Honeyland react when you told her the seller wishes to remain anonymous?”

  “She was fine with it.”

  In fact, she’d been delighted and affectingly excited that we’d managed to find another record by her father’s band. “You are doing splendidly,” she’d said. And I’d found myself absurdly glowing with pride.

  I remembered Gerry Wuggins’s request for a copy of ‘Fringe Merchant’ and ‘Creep Back’. I told her that someone else had asked me for a digital copy of one of the records we’d found.

  “Would this be another person who has some useful reminiscences about my father?” she had asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “You see? As I said, you are doing splendidly.”

  “You don’t mind providing a copy for him?”

  “Of course not. But first we’ll have to get our man in south London to finish doing his work at the recording studio.”
r />   I was starting to get irritated with this guy and his so far purely notional recording studio. “He certainly seems to be taking his time,” I said.

  “He certainly does. I must make a note to call him and chase him. In any case, regarding this new disc that you’ve so cleverly found for me, I shall have Albert scoot around and collect it.”

  As promised, the chauffeur turned up shortly after breakfast. He took the 78, which I had swathed in bubble wrap, and handled it with every appearance of due, sober care. Nevada watched him through the kitchen window as he left. She said, “I wonder if Miss Honeyland really is shagging the chauffeur.”

  “Has Tinkler been talking to you?”

  “He spews his filth everywhere.”

  I tried to keep any such thoughts from my mind when I spoke to Joan Honeyland on the phone again, later that day. She had followed up with the guy in the recording studio about the progress of his digital transfers. This clown, apparently based in Camberwell, now had the latest 78 too, Toba Possner’s contribution, relayed to him by Albert the chauffeur. I was increasingly concerned about how long it was taking him to knock off a few simple digital copies.

  So, by now, was Miss Honeyland. “It seems to have baffled him,” she said. “Despite confidently promising that this was an area of his special expertise, it seems to have completely eluded him that at some point in the process he was going to need a 78rpm turntable to play the records in question. He has to play them if he’s going to re-record them.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “This seems to have taken him entirely by surprise.”

  I said, “He probably thought he could just plug it into his computer.” My mental picture of this chinless incompetent was gaining detail and resolution by the minute.