The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘I was just struck by a woman with a man’s name. A mugging, was it? What happened?’

  ‘I wouldn’t let go of my handbag and got myself stabbed.’

  ‘You’re not lucky, are you? You’ll have to watch out. They say these things come in threes.’

  ‘Did you say you were the owner of the flat opposite, madam, or the tenant?’ The bulldog got back to work.

  ‘I’m the owner.’ Julian’s voice was firm and business-like.

  You’ve lived here long?’

  ‘About four years now.’

  ‘And you live alone?’

  ‘I do.’

  The bulldog had been slapping his next question on to her reply, like a child playing snap. Now he stopped, as if to allow her to elaborate.

  Silence.

  The bulldog closed his pad. ‘I’ll have to ask you not to disturb things. Your insurance assessor may want to have a look. Destruction like that is unusual, to say the least. We’ll go and have a word with the porter now.’

  I saw them out and returned to the drawing room. Julian was still sitting on the sofa, nursing her glass. She did not turn around as I came in.

  ‘I’ll have to beg a toothbrush from you, Nicholas.’

  ‘That’s no problem. I’m sure I’ve a spare one.’

  ‘And a bed to go with it.’

  8

  The following day the police and the representatives of the insurance company continued to sift through the wreckage. Julian refused to pay attention to what was happening next door, so I remained at home to take the burden off her. I wandered into her apartment from time to time with offers of tea and coffee, hoping to glean some information for myself. It was an opportunity to see things that were normally inaccessible to my curiosity and I decided to take it.

  Miraculously, the ceiling of the drawing room had not crashed under the weight of water from Julian’s bathroom. Only isolated lumps of plaster had flaked, like scurf, onto the general debris below. I moved from room to room, searching for something I would recognise only when I saw it. I was rewarded by a gleam of gold in the corner of the bedroom. I bent down to pick up a single cuff link. I walked to the window to look at it in the light. AO was inscribed on it. I held it in my hand, warming it, before tossing it back into the melee.

  I learned that Victor had heard and seen nothing. Nobody unaccounted for had entered the building. There was only one exit to the street, past the porter’s desk. The fire escape, which zigzagged down through the central well of the block, led to a small Italianate courtyard, tiled in marble with a lion’s head wall fountain, thence into the entrance hall. On one of my coffee-bearing expeditions I met a scene-of-crime officer returning to the kitchen from the fire escape. He was a lanky, bearded man, red-haired and Celtic, with long arms and bony, prehensile fingers.

  ‘Very funny, this,’ he remarked. ‘It looks as though the window might have been cut from the inside.’ He held up the bag in his supple jointed hands.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of the damage was done from the outside. We can tell by the remains inside the kitchen from which direction the force came. But they might have wanted to make it appear so. And this glass on the fire escape could have been from the first cut they made, with glass cutters, to let them out there.’

  ‘So how did they get in, if they went out there by the window?’

  ‘Ah, you tell me. There’s our problem. There may be a little question of keys and access here.’

  I thought guiltily of the key I had never returned, which lay in the drawer in my hall. Then of the naked man on her bed. If the police knew about either they would suspect him, or me. I quickly asked about the alarm which had not gone off, which he dismissed as irrelevant.

  ‘Decoration,’ he said. ‘A skilled professional can disable one of those in seconds. They’re deterrents to the casual thief, but they don’t worry the serious criminal for a second. And whatever else, these guys were serious.’

  They were?’

  ‘Knife-men, razors. You see how everything’s been slashed.’

  ‘And fingerprints?’ I asked. ‘Are they going to help?’

  He laughed. ‘Give us a break. I just said, didn’t I? These were professionals. There aren’t none. They aren’t giving any help at all. We’ll do you and her and that’ll account for anything we find.’

  * * *

  We lived together now, but there was none of the intimacy of marriage nor the slovenliness of flat-sharing. Julian maintained her independence of life, areas that I was never to reach, zones of radio silence from which no signals were ever emitted. She never permitted me to make assumptions about her, living alongside rather than with me. My flat was transformed by her presence. Previously it had been a bleak and temporary space. She changed things at once. Furniture moved; some objects disappeared altogether; others took up new stations. Her cat-like presence, made up of a combination of indolence and intensity, filled the apartment. When I returned home in the evening, which was earlier and earlier, I would find the lamps on, the fire lit, music, which she played constantly, filling the air, and Julian herself lying on the sofa, propping a magazine on her crooked knees. Her moving in was unplanned by either of us, and so I could have no expectations of how long she would stay. There was always a half-formed fear in my mind, as I unlocked my door each evening, that she would have vanished.

  She made no attempt to analyse what had happened and why. She referred to the wrecking of her flat as ‘the burglary’, although what, if anything, had been stolen was unclear. It was obvious to me, as it was to the police, that the mugging and the burglary were directed against her personally, but since she refused to accept this interpretation and would accuse nobody, it was impossible to guess from where the threat came and what motivated it.

  I had abandoned any attempt to find out about her and added to what I knew when, very occasionally, she let slip something about herself. I could guess that she had been brought up in a provincial lower-middle-class home. I imagined a strict upbringing, an authoritarian father, an only child, who had rebelled and escaped, recreating herself. Then, unexpectedly, I had my first glimpse of her past, from an unsolicited source. It was as if I were walking in the street and, glancing down, I had seen through a lifted drain cover the stream of sewage that flows incessantly beneath the city.

  I was at a reception held in the Oxford and Cambridge Club for a friend from Cambridge who had just been awarded a prize for his research in physics. I did not recognise many people when I entered the room and I had just taken a drink and was looking round when I was greeted by a pink-faced, silver-haired man whom, after a second, I recognised as a friend of my father-in-law, a powerful figure in the City. We talked for a while until, loosening up, he said that he had seen me the other day dining with a beautiful girl who was not my wife. I explained that Emily and I were separated, and found myself reiterating, though with some reluctance, my usual piece about its not being my choice and that I hoped we would be together again soon.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, dismissively. ‘I knew about that already. No, it was the girl. I’d seen her before somewhere, but I couldn’t for the life of me think where. I’d’ve come to say hello to you both, but I was with my wife and thought it was more discreet not to.’ He paused, apparently for congratulation on his tact. ‘Then, in the middle of the night, three o’clock in the morning, it came to me where I’d met her.’

  This time I was forced to show interest before he would continue. ‘Where was it?’ I asked. I knew from the pleasure he was taking in telling his story that I was not going to enjoy hearing it.

  ‘It was years ago, in the ’eighties. I had a big deal on with some Arabs at the time and I gave a dinner for the prince involved and some of his entourage. I’d heard that it was sometimes necessary to provide, how shall I say, extra services for them when they were in London. But I really didn’t want to get into that game. There’s quite enough going on with private bank accounts with
out that. In the event, we didn’t have to because they’d made their own arrangements, as we realised when they asked if they could bring along a few extra people to the dinner.’ He had an irritating laugh, which he interjected here. ‘And that’s where I saw her.’

  I had known that this was to be the denouement when he had begun the story. I didn’t want to listen to him, but I wanted to know. His childishly pink lips had a little gathering of mucus in each corner, as if he was salivating more than necessary for his whisky and canapes.

  ‘There were about five or six of them, the Arabs, and not quite as many girls. God, they were stunning. The head girl was Lebanese or Egyptian and loaded with stones. I remember I noticed your girl right away.’ He was enjoying himself, spinning out his story with sips of his whisky. ‘It was quite funny.’ He laughed, while I looked on with a social smile I wished I had refused to concede. ‘My wife was there and she didn’t have a clue what was going on. She told me afterwards that the Princess had been charming and that one of the wives had had an English education, because she had studied architecture in London. Where they found them I have no idea and, I must say, we’d probably have lost the contract if it had depended on us to provide them. I can’t imagine where you go to get that sort of service…’

  I let him maunder on, hoping for, fearing another view of Julian. It could have been a mistake. He had only seen her once before, several years ago. But I knew it wasn’t. As Victor had said, if you saw her once you were unlikely to forget her. And the story immediately filled in the blank of her previous life, which was so noticeably lacking the husband or boyfriend or career that should have taken up those years. I stood passively, my drink untouched in my hand, allowing him to talk about himself, until he had forgotten Julian and why he had spoken to me in the first place.

  I set off home, on foot, because I needed time to absorb what I had been told. I had said to Prisca that I would not have minded if Emily had had a lover, if she had stayed with me. And what I felt now was not jealousy of the men of Julian’s past, the Arab prince, the Russian Anatoli, it was curiosity, I told myself. I wanted to know. To know her, to comprehend, was to hold her, in some sense. I would then possess her in a way that I did not have her now.

  Why was she living with me? The acceptable explanation was that, finding ourselves thrown together by chance, we had been permitted to succumb to a strong sexual attraction by the absence of wife and partner, an attraction that I found ever more bindingly powerful. But was it really the same for her? Was it likely? Sexual attraction is an odd, random and immensely powerful force. It is not necessary to seek rational explanations for it. The rational explanation came back to me, nevertheless, pat this time, provided by the spittle-edged mouth of my father-in-law’s friend.

  Because she needs you. She’s moved in with you to evade the pursuers who mugged her and wrecked her apartment. She planned everything from the start and allowed you to become her lover for no other reason than to prepare for the moment which she knew might come, when she was forced out of her flat. She’s faking it and has been all along.

  But, if she’d really wished to go into hiding, she’d have done better to leave the area entirely.

  She needs to be close. For whatever reason, she can’t go far: that’s why living with you is convenient for her.

  But she didn’t have to do it this way. She didn’t have to live with me. She didn’t have to sleep with me.

  The level of internal argument was not very high. I scrutinised the memory of every meeting, from the beginning, examining the stages of our short relationship, each day marked in my mind by some advance towards her that I had engineered. Or had she been in charge? Had she simply seen a fool and an opportunity and seized them adventitiously? And sex? Could she fake it to that extent? Was I being tricked, as men throughout the ages have been tricked, by her claims, which I had thought involuntary? The cherubic face of my father-in-law’s friend seemed to look pityingly at me.

  Come on, man. She’s a woman who battens on men. And as for faking it, with the experience she’s had, she’d have no problem in fooling you.

  The house was warm, the lamps lit when I entered. There was an enormous bunch of narcissi on the table behind the sofa and the sharp medicinal smell pierced my nostrils, overpowering her scent. She was out. Immediately I felt the fear of her loss, and realised I could not confront her. I wanted her and I wanted her to stay. I would accept the fake for the real.

  Part 2

  Fake

  9

  ‘I want you to take me to see your Girl in a Fur,’ Julian said.

  Although I knew so little about her life, she entered completely into mine. She was always interested in my work, the seminars I was giving for my visiting professorship, the Coulounieix lectures, my book, the conference in Moscow, now scheduled for March. She had been following my row with Minna as if it were a spectator sport.

  ‘You can see it any time. Have you never been to the Litvak?’

  ‘I must have, years ago. But I want to go with you.’

  I was avoiding the Foundation and any meeting with its director. I offered Julian postcards and art books. She rejected my suggestions.

  ‘I want the real thing, or the real fake, and I want to see it with you.’

  ‘I suppose Minna is unlikely to be there at the weekend,’ I said, doubtfully.

  ‘Why are you afraid of her?’ Julian asked. ‘Why stop going there? It’s a public gallery, after all.’

  ‘I don’t like personal confrontations. If I have a disagreement, I prefer to keep it to scholarly journals.’

  ‘I want a personal confrontation with the Girl in a Fur, and I want you to explain it to me.’

  So we went, walking to the Foundation through the park. It was a clear blue winter afternoon. The sun shone coldly, glossing her sable coat and her hair with the same metallic sheen.

  ‘Victor’s daughter’s left home,’ she told me as we crossed the peaty surface of Rotten Row.

  ‘That’ll give him some peace at last, won’t it?’ I tried to remember what happened last.

  ‘Not really, because she’s left Rose, her little girl, with Mary. There’s still plenty of opportunity for them to quarrel about her.’

  ‘I thought she hated Mary.’

  ‘She does, but her new boyfriend doesn’t want the child. Or there’s no room for her where they’re living. I’m not sure which. Anyway, Victor’s very relieved. He didn’t want her to be taken away.’

  Julian added enormously to my life. She made me experience things so intensely that I realised that for twelve years I had been living in a dream, drugged by the comfort of marriage. As we walked that day, she said, ‘Have you ever noticed how the world is full of missing halves?’

  The single cuff link, marked AФ. Emily. I no longer wanted her back, just yet at any rate. My lawyer was stalling on everything. We were still arguing about Sholto’s schooling, and I had gained a slight advantage, since Emily and Sholto liked different schools.

  What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Look,’ she said triumphantly, as if she had proved her thesis, and pointed to a woman approaching us pushing a double buggy. On one side sat a fat child of about two, plucking discontentedly at the webbing straps that confined it. Its companion seat was empty.

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘There’s an explanation for it. The other child is at a party, is sick, is having a day with its grandmother.’

  ‘You don’t understand. Of course there’s always a reason for it. I see it everywhere, the missing half.’

  I could not understand what she was talking about at the time, but her words like her presence, had an evocative power. Just as Julian herself reappeared so vividly in my mind when she was absent, so her odd ideas took hold of me.

  When we reached the Foundation, I let her buy our entrance tickets while I skulked in the hall, halfway between the ticket office and the postcard stand.

  ‘You look so guilty,’ she said as she joined me at the foot
of the staircase. ‘Like a caricature of a spy about to meet his controller, or a hit and run thief about to make off with one of the paintings.’

  ‘It’s the effect that Minna has on me. I feel that I’m entering enemy territory and that every one of her fluffy old ladies is a secret agent watching and reporting on me.’

  The old ladies of the Foundation were a standing joke. The security officers who patrolled other galleries had not yet taken over here. Instead, in every room sat a stout middle-aged woman. The one in the Vermeer room was knitting. Julian looked at her out of the corner of her eye and said, ‘If you try anything here, she’ll stab you with her needle. It must be worse than a knife. She’s probably trained in marksmanship and can throw it like a javelin at the backs of retreating thieves.’

  The west-facing windows were screened with translucent cream blinds and to obtain the best view of the painting it was necessary to stand a little on one side and look at it obliquely.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ she said. Not it, but she. It was the person, not the thing she had seen.

  I looked again and saw that she was right. She was beautiful and mysterious. Her eyes met mine with an aching sensuousness. The jacket was not the gold silk and ermine one used in many of Vermeer’s other canvases. The fur was dark brown, forming the lining of a golden brown quilted silk robe, only revealing itself at the edge and the neck, ideal for the damp north European winter, the pelt enclosing the body, trapping the warmth.

  That’s not the point,’ I said. I was seeing more of the little signs that had made me uneasy in the first place: the awkward hand, the odd perspective of the back of the chair.