‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ said the man, Thomas, formally. ‘But please do not allow me to force you to stay. But there are bedrooms and bathrooms galore, every etcetera and, as you can see, the nature of my interest is professional. I got your name from Annie Macalpine. Do convince her, Butler.’
The dog ambled across the rug, stood massively by her chair and gazed into her eyes, his rear end wagged by the tail, a persuasion with all the ponderous charm of the master.
‘We are much above the world here,’ he continued. ‘Four tall floors. I always loved these vast mansion flats, they were built with a kind of solid elegance. And even in a street lined with a hundred such, it’s so quiet, so private. Westminster not far, the heart of London, overpopulated, but not in any way you notice. They might as well not be there, all those millions of others. Safe as houses.’
He laughed at his own poor joke. Discreet, safe, undisturbed: these were descriptions which took on a new meaning, as if they had had only half a meaning before. It made her feel like a celebrity granted the accolade of protection. This Thomas was as safe as his own fabulous abode, as courteous and old-fashioned as his messages.
‘You could start in the morning if you liked,’ Thomas added diffidently. ‘As I told you, all the equipment is here. Less your own foibles, of course, I know you all have them, you restorers, but everything can be arranged, as and when. I love to shop, for anything: I can fetch in anything you want, provided I can carry it. Your predecessor in the task was a wretched, irresponsible man. Left everything undone and buggered off. Debts or love, I gather, both equally pernicious. I’ve no time for either. I do hope I didn’t leave too many messages on your phone machine. One worries so about importuning a woman, in particular, for her valuable time.’
‘Oh no, not at all.’
She thought of the rain outside, the leering car abandoned to nothing but more expense, the footsteps which would never sound inside such a carpeted citadel as this, the warmth of her feet, the coldness of Francis, her alienation from the world. Of being guarded and treasured, encouraged to work in private, of being valued beyond rubies. Thought of the pictures to be placed in her hands, the two she had seen, the third, promised. Something brilliant, she had said to Annie: this was better.
‘If you’re sure you don’t mind …’
The firelight glinted on his heavily tinted glasses, such a strange affectation for such a small, plain, afflicted man.
‘I keep saying it, I’m sure I know you from somewhere.’
‘Oh, very likely. Exhibitions, galleries, you know the sort of thing. Might have been with Miss Macalpine. I’ve been around, you see, for ever. I’m even on the board of a couple of art schools. Maybe from that, you never know. Small place, this city.’ Elisabeth thought otherwise: out there it seemed very large.
‘We should have discussed payment, you know. I’m told you’re far too deferential on that subject. A most unmodern woman, but I shall, of course, be generous.’
She had the face of an unmodern woman, more like the face of a sensuous saint, beatified by events, a madonna praying to heaven, he thought humbly.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she was saying. ‘It really doesn’t matter at all. You’ll really relinquish that wonderful room for a studio? And you just want these three pictures you’ve shown me done for a start, particularly the first?’
‘There are many, many more. I’ll show you another time. If you like. Not yet. Too rich for the eye, is it not? You stop looking, don’t you, if you see too many pictures at the same time. Do you like my house, by the way?’
‘Like it? Of course I like it.’
She had known that as soon as she turned into this street, an avenue of cream and red walls, late Victorian splendour, built for size and privacy. An avenue of trees hiding the lower façades of these huge, austere, mansion blocks, reminiscent of Parisian living, made in the days when whole families lived thus, without ever longing for the freedom or the ground of a house, as she did not. Space in layers, a slice of the sky as the block rose over her head. She knew that inside the rooms would be huge, but until, eschewing the lift, she had climbed those innumerable steps to the fourth and last floor, she had no idea how light, how vast, how impenetrable. The door to this apartment would have admitted a carriage: she had been shown the public part, which meant she had seen the north-facing room, where they sat now, and the room opposite used by her predecessor to restore paintings. She had seen the space and the light, that south-facing light which would continue to pour through the high windows when the other light had ceased to penetrate the sash windows which looked down into the road and across to the livings beyond. She had seen the vast carpeted hallway which hid the sound even of her own steps. She had seen a small, ugly, intensely courteous, unthreatening little man and she smelt safety like a deer at the end of flight. It would do for a while, while she licked her wounds and practised her skills: it made her giddy with relief. Something she recognized as soon as she saw it, like a dress in a window which suddenly incorporated everything she might have wanted to be, an understated sense of all the freedom and privacy money might buy. The only things which Elisabeth did not like were the icons hanging in the hall: they were dark and disturbing, she turned instead to another detail which somehow captivated. The high windows in the south-facing living room were manoeuvred open and shut by means of long, plaited cords made of silk, red interwoven with dull gold, culminating in a tassel like an upside-down thistle with a short fringe, fitting the hand and cool to the touch. The tassels with their ropes were an oriental taste. Summoning the air by these extravagant ropes was like summoning the spirits. Thomas watched her touch these details, his face wearing the mask of tired amusement, delighted in her delight. She likes my house, he thought. She really likes it. The cue, therefore, to introduce Maria, carefully. He chose to present Maria in the wide spaces of the corridor between the north- and south-facing rooms, that endless corridor which had the kitchen on the north side too, a bedroom next to the turret room, another bedroom and two more minor rooms at the far end. There was a bathroom en suite with each bedroom.
You could; Elisabeth thought, camp a small army in here. I have never seen such space, or such a natural studio, I love it, I love it. I love it so much I want to shout. As I love – no, that is wrong – as I adore this painting on the easel in this room. The first, the best.
His voice came from a distance.
‘Oh, and by the way, this is Maria. Maria loves art. She’s very much at home here on that account. Also, she house-keeps, after her fashion. A chaperone! As if it were needed.’ His ungainly shout of laughter echoed down the corridor, smothered by the icons and other paintings on the walls and the thick carpet beneath their feet. The mirth produced a shower of spit from his mouth which he smothered with a handkerchief. He was revolting in a quiet kind of way. The relative darkness of the hall seemed a strange place to meet the household, but all that was accidental.
Maria grinned, the smile taking her creases from the chin to the hair, a slightly delinquent grin which poured heart and soul into its shy self, and her great feet seemed to tap welcome in tune with the puzzled forehead and big mouth, shut now but stretched to express itself. She had a twisted upper lip, harelip perhaps, certainly rabbitlike, twitching, a chin covered with a fine fuzz which heightened the impression, so soft it was, skin the texture of orange peel and eyes which disappeared into buttons between heavy lids and equally heavy bags below. She was a benign kind of gnome, a hamster of a woman, quite beyond self-defence or the simple meaning of animosity, grinning and eagerly shaking hands, deliciously excited by this stranger. She stared at Elisabeth’s head, mumbled, grinned in an orgy of delight. Elisabeth smiled back, distracted: put Maria into the realm of speechless scenery, with the dog and the chair on which she had sat, not treating her with derision, but with all the indifference of someone with more important things to occupy her mind.
‘Maria is not loquacious,’ Thomas said kindly, as if the point
were not made by all those speechless smiles and her sudden shuffling out of sight. ‘She comes in each day. She cannot speak well, untreated cleft palate, something like that… Neither she nor I can bear the sound of door bells: we have a system.’ He pointed to a tiny fixture in the wall, next to a light switch. ‘Door lights, so that when Maria comes in and out, which she does all the time – she walks Butler, for instance – she presses the buzzer thing, but it doesn’t buzz, it lights up here and there instead, a little red light, like a Christmas tree. Oh dear, how ridiculous you must find us …’
The same laugh again, the same shower of spittle. What Elisabeth registered was the other woman backing out of sight, not obsequiously but with dignified servitude all the same. It seemed impertinent to question who she was, but since Maria wore an apron round the shapeless form supported in turn by thickly encased legs and shoes which looked distinctly second hand, Elisabeth labelled her as the lady who does. Her eyes went back to the pictures on the corridor wall, where Maria had been lingering. Icons: shady faces of saintly ladies, gilded, ancient, magnificent.
Distracted, she missed the wave Maria gave in her direction, almost in front of her glazed eyes, transfixed as they were by some golden effigy of a virgin. A Greek icon. So said a small notice as if describing the thing for a gallery. ‘Central panel of a triptych painted with the mother of God of the Rose’, whoever she was. Perhaps Maria’s parting wave was some farewell signal to Thomas, a creature clearly regarded not only as employer, but also as some medieval seigneur.
‘Excuse me, I’ll let her out.’ Apologetically, Thomas followed her to the door. There was a combination lock, a battery of buttons which he pressed in quick succession like someone making a hurried telephone call, his back to her. On the last button, a red light came on above the door and the door clicked opened by a fraction. There were murmured words in the hall, goodbye, thank you, see you tomorrow, diffused in Elisabeth’s head as she moved away into what might become her studio room. The voices were no more than the sound of buzzing insects on a summer’s day, The front door clunked shut.
It took him a while to walk back to the room. She could sense his movements were slow and awkward: he had told her about his stroke, and she supposed him older than he was. She suspected that before he returned, he might well have detoured in the maze of this magnificent place. She did not really notice. Excitement gripped her in a soft vice. Butler the dog had risen and followed master and servant down the hall, came back with master. Elisabeth found the devotion touching.
She turned to the face on the easel in the south-facing room, dark now, clapped her hands in excitement, her face flushed with such exquisite beauty it made Thomas wince. There it was: perfection. Unsullied by life, unimpaired by that strong, Northern voice and colourful clothes chosen less for dignity than for the eye; he would have known her anywhere. Perfection, for once. He had to capture that moment, the first of so many instances he would capture again. For a second, he realized that the beauty was not only in the face and the texture of the face, but in that split-second expression worn with pleasure. You would have to go on, pleasing her with things. In the next moment, with a mixture of sadness, triumph, uncertainty, Thomas knew his trap was sprung.
‘Listen,’ he said, with a feigned awkwardness which sounded completely explicable. ‘Listen, I do feel awful. I mean inviting you to stay. Your bathroom has toothbrushes, all those things, of course, but anything else you need, I do assure you, we can find tomorrow … I love shopping, did I say that? Do I repeat myself?’
‘You can shop all you want for me. I hate it,’ she said, turning on him with a smile which shook his solid body to the marrow of an uncooperative frame.
‘That’s all right, then,’ said Thomas. ‘I mean that’s perfectly fine.’
Serve you right, Beauty, who has chosen the Beast, saint who has chosen Mammon. Serve you right. You have accepted everything. And that means me.
CHAPTER FIVE
She was aware, and was not ashamed, of being faintly in love. With this smudged and shadowed face, the first of the paintings he had shown. Not a sentimental love, but an intense affection quite removed from sex, more like the proud love of a parent for a sweetly enquiring child, an awesome ownership more poignant for the transience of their acquaintance. Elisabeth knew that certain paintings have life, a force which spills from them and envelops the watcher in a strong embrace, the image remaining imprinted on the mind for ever. The face on the canvas had become her ally in a moment of mutual understanding: each recognized the other without criticism. She knew, too, what words she would resort to if asked to describe what she saw. She would do what others did, critics, buyers, collectors: she would describe the qualities of the thing, the tones, the glazes, the subtlety of palette, the brushstrokes, the depth, the perspective, wax lyrical on all of these while carefully missing the point. Which was love, of a sort, a spurt of pure affinity given to the perfect as well as the imperfect, a strange subliminal link with another time and place, but always more particularly, a face, which had, in the mind’s eye, been there all the time.
You are mine, with respect and without demand, for the moment. We have a pact of mutual respect.
So did Elisabeth address this face, not in so many words, more with a clucking and a cooing which did not even seem silly. She apologized to it for the washing and undressing which might have to follow, the removal of warts and uncomfortable treatment she might have to afflict. She should not invest these faces with such life: she knew she should not, but she did. Especially this anonymous, beautiful face, with the angle of the head so bizarre, so unportraitlike. Portraits had been her first love, still were, but not an exclusive attachment. Rembrandt wrote his autobiography in self-portraits, and quite a brute he was. Gainsborough described his clients as the continual hurry of one fool upon the back of another, captured their vapidness but delivered them to posterity (she did not applaud Gainsborough for this cynicism), while what she had always liked in principle were those sixteenth-century portrait painters who were paid to enhance the glorious detail of their sitter’s clothes, to celebrate riches, status, lace and gold, but never to sign what they made. The artist’s identity rarely acknowledged; a feature of those days when he was no more esteemed than any other craftsman, a distressing humility in his anonymity. And anonymity was an attribute of this painting, along with all Thomas’s other paintings, a feature which delighted her beyond words.
‘Oh no,’ he had explained in the hypnotic light of the fire. ‘I did not collect any of the work there. I am the curator. My parents were rich and left me richer.’ This was said with a quiet acknowledgement of undeserved good fortune, a humble little pixie, reassuring in self-denigration. ‘They were the patrons. Of whom? No one knows. They would not be aligned to anyone or anything, and nor shall I be when I follow suit. They would not flatter any individual or any nationality and, such purists they were, they would not collect for investment. You see, they didn’t want either the reputation of connoisseurs or a cache of wealth, there was plenty of that. And they could not bear paying a premium for a name when it was simply a painting they wanted. So they amassed, with two criteria, I think; we never discussed it. One, they should like what they saw, and two, there would be no name. The result was, as you see, varied.’
‘How strange. Not the first criterion, the other.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’ Thomas stood, weight to the left, head on one side like a bespectacled bird, inquisitively harmless. ‘Personally, I don’t. They were very self-contained people,’ he added, as if that explained much. ‘They weren’t collecting for an audience. Anyway, they died.’
‘Here?’ she enquired shyly. People’s parents, dead or alive, were often the fault line in their lives, the cue for explosions of sentiment, history, fury or weeping. She knew that, remained silent on the subject, allowed no sound of their footsteps, subdued all hauntings from the past.
‘No,’ he said, spitting again. ‘In an aeroplane. They went to Lourd
es, with my … Whilst I was away from home.’
‘What was their living?’
‘Oh, my father, he printed missals, holy pictures, religious books. Things like that. Mostly pictures. He acquired, erhmm, an eclectic taste.’
The history was brief, she noticed, not to be expanded for now, and she took it with a hint of disbelief. So Thomas had inherited, humbly, whatever he had inherited: he was whatever charming casualty he was and that was all. Elisabeth had little need to know. There were three hundred paintings in this large apartment. Stored, he said. What she could see was a mere sample. She had agreed to stay because of them, without regard to her clothes or her flat or her commitments, for a day or two. Because of the paintings themselves and because she had become so desperately afraid of the footsteps outside, because it was warm in here and this man respected privacy; he was discretion incarnate. Because some of these three hundred acquisitions might be exquisitely bad, others the vibrant work of unsung masters, the whole collection bearing witness to taste both vulgar and sublime. The only uniformity lay in the fact that none, not one, of the paintings was signed. What she saw was the clue to a humble collection of brilliance, and to treat it was a privilege beyond the purest dreams. The proximity of so many paintings simply made her happy.
It was fitting, oddly appropriate, that she should stand in a room full of light, like a woman blessed, wearing another person’s clothes. A stiff cotton overall, not her own folded back at the wrist, made for the longer arms of the previous incumbent who had left for reasons which might have included the lack of kudos in devoting weeks of his life to such glorious anonymity. ‘I hoped you would be different,’ Thomas said, a hope gravely confirmed. The dog, Butler, stood by, warm and close, affection deepset in his brown-ringed eyes. Among them all she was cocooned. She did not know where she had left her coat, had washed her yesterday’s underwear, found within reach all the rudimentary tools of her trade, and was ready to begin. Thomas left her alone in the room with the fine armchairs, the scrubbed wood floor, the perfect light from the low windows and the high. No one listened for her presence: the telephone was silent; there were no footsteps, no step step click, one two click, making their sinister dancing sound, nothing but light, peace, safety, privacy. The face in the painting smiled. Beyond it, in a kind of unfocused sepia haze swam the face of Thomas, closed behind spectacles, still faintly, unconvincingly familiar.
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