‘No, he’s dead, I checked. His name’s Vernon Hooker. He died in 1997.’
‘Did he paint a lot of boats?’
‘Hundreds. If you google him, you’ll see.’
Rozie waited while Sir Simon duly typed in the artist’s name to Google Images on his computer and instinctively recoiled.
‘By God! Did the man ever sail?’
Rozie was no expert on maritime paintings, but Sir Simon’s reaction didn’t surprise her. Vernon Hooker liked to depict his subjects in bright colours, with exuberant disregard for light and shade. The images featured more emerald green, electric blue and lilac than you might expect for scenes that were largely sea and sky. But then, one of the Queen’s favourite artists was Terence Cuneo, whose paintings of trains and battle scenes were hardly monochrome. And to Rozie’s surprise, when she looked up Hooker online yesterday, it turned out that his work generally sold for thousands. He was quite collectable.
‘They’re probably right, aren’t they?’ Sir Simon concluded, peering back at his screen. ‘The Ministry, I mean. There are dozens of the bloody things. I bet this Hooker would get more money for a Day-Glo royal yacht than a bog-standard seascape. He probably did loads of them.’
‘She’s adamant. And actually, he didn’t do any others of Britannia that I could find.’
‘As I say, talk to Neil Hudson at the RCT. See if we loaned it. Twenty years is long enough for the MOD to hang onto it.’
‘OK.’ Rozie changed the subject. ‘Why did Sir James look so uncomfortable just now? I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything.’
‘Only existential despair. It’s the bloody Reservicing Programme. His secretary’s leaving, and they’ve discovered vulcanisation or something. Dodgy electrics, anyway. The Palace is a deathtrap, apparently.’
‘Good to know,’ she remarked breezily, heading for the door. ‘It sounds expensive.’
‘It will be. The budget has sailed past three hundred and fifty million already. We need Parliament to sign it off in November, and they can’t even give themselves a pay rise.’
She paused at the threshold. ‘Yeah, but this is the second most famous house in the world.’
‘But . . . three hundred and fifty million.’ Sir Simon folded his shirtsleeved arms and stared despondently at his computer. ‘When it was only three hundred it didn’t sound so bad, somehow.’
‘Over ten years,’ she reminded him. ‘And it’ll come in ahead of time and under budget, like Windsor Castle did. And the bill for the Houses of Parliament refit was four billion, the last I heard.’
The Private Secretary brightened slightly. ‘You’re absolutely right, Rozie. Ignore me, I need a holiday. How d’you stay so chipper?’
‘Fresh air and exercise,’ she said decisively. ‘You should try it some time.’
‘Do not cheek your elders, young lady. I’m very fit for my age.’
Rozie, who was very fit regardless of age – hers happened to be thirty – threw him a friendly grin before heading back to her office next door.
He tried not to show it, but her remark rankled with Sir Simon. She was a tall, attractive young woman, with a short, precision-cut Afro, an athletic physique and a fitness level that had hardly dropped since she left the Royal Horse Artillery. He, meanwhile, was a quarter-century older, and his knees were not what they were. Nor was his back. As a young helicopter pilot and then a diplomat at the Foreign Office, he had been reasonably athletic: an ex-college rower who was handy on the rugby pitch and a demon at the wicket. But over the years, his consumption of good claret had increased in inverse proportion to the time spent wielding an oar, a ball or a cricket bat. He really ought to do something about it.
Chapter 3
B
ack at her desk, Rosie clicked on a series of images stored on her laptop. She had asked the facilities manager at the naval base in Portsmouth to send her a photo of the Britannia painting, so she would have some idea of what she was talking about. The image he’d sent showed the royal yacht, flags fluttering, surrounded by smaller boats with a flat blob of land in the background. She wondered briefly why the Boss was so attached to it. This was a woman who owned Leonardos and Turners, and a small, very lovely Rembrandt at Windsor Castle that Rozie would have cheerfully sold her Mini for.
The facilities manager had been quite firm. The Second Sea Lord – a vice admiral in charge of all ‘people’ matters in the navy – had a variety of paintings in his office, all legitimately sourced from the Ministry of Defence. Any loans from other places were quite clearly recorded and always returned shipshape and Bristol fashion. This wasn’t one of them. There must simply be two paintings.
And yet the Boss was equally certain there were not.
Rozie made a phone call. The artist’s dealer in Mayfair wasn’t aware of any other paintings of Britannia by his late client, but suggested she talk to the son.
‘Don’s the expert on his father’s stuff. He’s in his late sixties, sharp as a tack. He lives in Tasmania. It’ll be evening there now, of course, but I’m sure he won’t mind talking to you.’
Rozie considered what a generous offer that was, then remembered on whose behalf she was calling. No – the artist’s son probably wouldn’t mind talking to her about the Queen’s little problem. People were usually fine with it.
Don Hooker was everything the dealer had promised.
‘The royal yacht in Hobart, for the regatta? Oh yeah, I know the one. It was 1962 or ’63 – something like that, and Her Majesty was on one of her tours. I remember Dad telling me the story. He was so proud of that painting! He was a big monarchist, was Dad, and there she was, this beautiful lady, travelling the world on her boat. He followed her on all the news broadcasts and made us listen too – even though, to be perfectly honest with you, Rozie, I was a callow youth at the time and I didn’t really care. But Dad loved the whole thing. He had a map on the wall and he marked off where she went with little green pins. Collected postcards, mugs, the lot. He said she looked so happy on that trip, and he wanted her to have something to remember it by. “A piece of that joy”, that’s what he said. He copied the picture from a newspaper photo, added the colours, you know . . . And he got a proper Pommie thank you on Palace notepaper, with a big red crest. It said the Queen had never seen Britannia look so colourful. It was the only one he did. We’ve probably still got that letter in Dad’s archive somewhere. I can look it out if you want . . .?’
When Rozie rang him back, the facilities man from the Ministry of Defence was much less confident about his multiple-paintings theory.
‘Perhaps ours is a copy?’ he suggested. ‘I agree it’s very unusual, but I can absolutely assure you it’s not a loan from the Palace.’
Sir Simon was due to see the Queen next and, at Rozie’s request, he updated the Boss while he was there.
‘She says it’s not a copy, it’s her original,’ he informed Rozie on his return. ‘Find out how they got it and tell them to stop stalling. She’s pretty pissed off.’
‘How can she tell it’s the original?’ Rozie wanted to know. After all, the Queen had only seen the painting for a couple of minutes in bad light in a makeshift exhibition at a naval headquarters building on a visit about something else.
‘No idea. But she’s certain.’
If she was certain, Rozie would get the job done.
*
‘Just a little closer towards the light.’
The Queen adjusted the tilt of her neck, which was getting stiff.
‘Like this?’
‘Lovely, ma’am. Perfect.’
She closed her eyes, briefly. It was nice and peaceful in the Yellow Drawing Room. Beyond the heavy net curtains, sunrays gleamed off the golden statue of Winged Victory on the Victoria Memorial – or the Birthday Cake, as the guardsmen called it. Warm shafts of light fell on her left cheek. If only one didn’t have to maintain this wretched pose, one could quite easily fall asleep . . .
But she did have to maintain i
t. The Queen opened her eyes sharply and rested her gaze on a Chinese pagoda in the corner, which was nine tiers high, reaching almost to the ceiling. Her third-great-grand-uncle, George IV, did not do things by halves.
‘Are you getting what you need?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely. Won’t be long. You can roll your shoulders in a couple of minutes.’
Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood, who stood at an easel making preparatory sketches of her, was a considerate artist. She knew what her sitters went through and tried to minimise the trouble. It was one of the reasons the Queen liked to work with her. This wasn’t their first rodeo, as Harry would say. (What a marvellous expression. The Queen was delighted by rodeos. She had always thought that, under different circumstances, she might have been rather good at them.)
‘Which bit are you working on now?’
‘The eyes, ma’am. Always the trickiest.’
‘I see.’ Through the window, she watched several people posing for photographs outside the Palace gates. One seemed to be doing dance moves. Was this for one of those social media crazes Eugenie had told her about? The Queen craned slightly forward to get a better view.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, ma’am . . .’
‘What?’ The Queen was jolted out of her thoughts and realised she had changed position. Lavinia had stopped drawing. ‘I’m so sorry. Is that better?’
‘Thanks. Just another minute or so and . . . there. That one’s done. Phew! Would you like a glass of water?’
‘A sip of tea would help.’
A porcelain cup and saucer appeared at the Queen’s elbow, proffered by Sandy Robertson, her page. After a welcome hit of Darjeeling, she stretched discreetly and rubbed her stiff knee, while the artist reviewed her sketches.
Nearby, two video cameras on tripods and a boom microphone on a stand recorded the session. A small team of three, dressed in practical T-shirts and trousers, moved softly between these and their assigned chairs against the far wall. A lanky young man in the red and navy-blue Royal Household uniform stood by to help or corral them, as appropriate. A documentary was in progress: The Queen’s Art, or something like that – they hadn’t finalised the title. Not just what one owned, but also what one contributed to.
Today they were filming the making of the latest artwork she had agreed to sit for: a bronze bust. There really should be someone recording the filming, the Queen mused, just to round the whole thing off. Or someone to write about the recording of the filming of the sketching . . . ad infinitum. She was used to being watched and used, by now; to being such a source of fascination that her watchers were watched too.
‘Is it going to be life-size, the bust?’ she asked Lavinia.
She knew the answer to this question, but also knew the need to make small talk for the cameras, and the need for that small talk not to be about Lavinia’s recent, horrendous divorce, or her son’s arrest for drug dealing at boarding school. The poor woman was entitled to some privacy.
‘Yes,’ Lavinia said, peering at a group of sketches spread out on a table near her easel. ‘Actually, slightly larger. They want you to stand out at the Royal Society.’
‘Mmm. Was the last one larger too?’
‘I think it was, ma’am, from memory. Did you like it?’
‘Oh, yes. I thought it was rather good. You managed to avoid making me look . . .’ She puffed out her cheeks and made Lavinia laugh. ‘Too much like my great-great-grandmother.’ Heavy. Jowly. Old.
Lavinia went back to her easel. ‘My aim is to make you shimmer. Even in bronze. Right, are you ready, ma’am? If you can turn your head to look at my hand, here. Just a bit more. That’s lovely . . .’
The artist kept up a gentle patter of conversation while she worked. She got more from her subjects when they talked than when they stayed silent. The Queen’s face, in particular, lit up when she was animated. At rest, it could look grimly forbidding, which gave quite the wrong impression of her.
‘Have you been to any good exhibitions recently?’ Lavinia asked, and then regretted it. She should have asked about racing.
But the Queen didn’t seem to mind.
‘We’re opening one next year that I’m looking forward to,’ she said. ‘“Canaletto in Venice”. We have rather a lot of Canaletto.’ By which she meant the largest collection in the world. ‘Bought in bulk by George III from Joseph Smith. He was the consul to Venice at the time. A dull name for a rather interesting man, I’ve always thought.’
Lavinia gulped. ‘Goodness.’
The Queen smiled to herself. She’d had a lively chat on the subject with her Surveyor of Pictures recently. After several decades of living with them, she knew her Canalettos very well, although she preferred her own impressions of the place. Sailing from Ancona to Venice on board Britannia in 1960 – or was it ’61? – visiting the ancient little island of Torcello with Philip, and taking a moonlit gondola ride . . .
She thought back to those early tours on the royal yacht. Italy, Canada, the Pacific Islands . . . Britannia had been fitted out after the war, in another time of austerity, and its interior was practical, rather than extravagant. It suited the Queen’s temperament better than the gilt and grandeur that surrounded her now. How happy they had been, she and Philip and the ‘yotties’, visiting the furthest corners of the globe together. So many marvellous memories. The ‘ghastly little painting’ uniquely conjured some of them in particular.
‘I saw one of my personal paintings at an exhibition by the Royal Navy recently,’ she said aloud. It still rankled.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ the artist said absently.
‘It wasn’t really. I hadn’t lent it to them. The last time I saw it, it was hanging opposite my bedroom door.’
Lavinia’s head jerked up in shock. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh dear precisely,’ the Queen agreed.
‘How did it get there?’
‘That’s a very interesting question.’ A minute later she added, ‘There. I think we’re done.’
Her tone was friendly but firm. The artist looked up, then glanced at her watch. The hour was up, precisely, and her subject was already removing the diamond tiara she had kindly agreed to wear for the sculpture, which had looked delightfully over the top above her shirt and cardigan. The documentary team took charge of their cameras, watched over by the eagle eye of the lanky young man from the Household. The Queen’s equerry was already hovering in the doorway, ready to accompany Her Majesty to her next appointment.
‘Thank you very much, ma’am,’ Lavinia said.
The Queen nodded. ‘I look forward to seeing the shimmer.’ Her tone was dry, but there was a twinkle in her eye.
Chapter 4
W
ith her usual efficiency, Rozie took the opportunity of a cancelled meeting to visit the Royal Collection Trust, as Sir Simon had suggested. The sun was shining and it would be nice to stretch her legs and tick the problem of the Queen’s little painting off her list.
She strode briskly across the dusty pink tarmac from the side gate near her office, dodging between a black cab and a couple of tourists on Boris bikes. The air was warm, the bright sky brushed with pale clouds. Nipping across the edge of Green Park, she passed Clarence House on the corner, tall and white, where Prince Charles lived when he was in London. Behind it was her destination, St James’s Palace.
This collection of buildings was quite a different proposition. Tudor, squat and red-brick, they were much older than the rest. Sir Simon was a history buff who enjoyed telling her endless anecdotes about the place. Rozie’s favourite was about Prince James, the younger son of Charles I, who had been imprisoned there by Oliver Cromwell. He’d escaped by playing games of hide-and-seek with his jailers. Each time, the young prince would make himself a little bit harder to find, until one day he let himself out of the garden gate with a stolen key, and was halfway across Westminster before they realised he was gone. He made it all the way to France. According to Sir Simon, who was an old
romantic, Charles I had been led from here to the scaffold in Whitehall wearing three shirts so he wouldn’t shiver and seem to be afraid.
Rozie walked round to the staff entrance at Stable Yard, musing on the fact that all ambassadors were still appointed ‘to the Court of St James’, for reasons she failed to understand. At the gate, a guardsman in a scarlet tunic and a bearskin stood impassively as she showed her pass to a security officer. She was escorted down miles of corridors to an office on the first floor. Here Neil Hudson, the current Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, welcomed her in with a puzzled smile.
‘What on earth brings you here, Captain Oshodi? I do visit, you know. No need to beard me in my den.’
Rozie looked around. It wasn’t bad, as dens went. A pair of windows overlooked the wide street that led up to Piccadilly, a stone’s throw from Fortnum’s and the Ritz. One panelled wall was lined from floor to ceiling with small but priceless works of art; the others were lined with books. The Surveyor’s walnut desk – so huge it looked like two abnormally large ones pushed together, was a riot of papers, paperweights, bronze statuettes and photographs in silver frames. There was no sign of a computer. Rozie assumed Neil Hudson hid it in a drawer when he had visitors. Surely he didn’t work with a quill? His yellow waistcoat and chin-length wavy hair gave the impression of a man who would love you to believe that he did.
‘I’m here to trace a painting,’ she explained. ‘One of Her Majesty’s. We know where it is, but not how it got there. It went missing a while ago.’
‘Stop!’ Hudson raised his hand. ‘Stop right there. I can assure you it didn’t. We don’t lose things in the Royal Collection.’
‘I think you do,’ Rozie said firmly, meeting his eye. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Very occasionally. Hardly ever. I resent the implication that we did.’
‘Well, that’s great. You’ll know what happened then.’
She explained as much as she knew, and the Surveyor nodded non-committally.
‘The nineties? Should be fine. The records are pretty good. But if it was . . . mislaid, shall we say, much earlier, we were still working in a fairly ad hoc way, especially for Her Majesty’s private paintings. I can’t really imagine her lending it, though. We lend Crown stuff all the time, if it’s in a fit state to travel. But something small and private like that . . .’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Apart from anything else, who would’ve seen it to ask? However, you’re welcome to check.’
A Three Dog Problem Page 2
