Masterclass

by Morris West

  That night at dinner, Mather slipped the ring on Gisela’s finger and said quietly, ‘I’d like you know, my love, that you’re the most expensive woman I’ve ever bought. Today you cost me ten million dollars!’

  To which, in her staunch country fashion, she answered, ‘I’m sure you’ll find me worth every cent of it – and I’m damn sure I’ll last longer than the others did.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The moment he arrived at Kennedy, Mather telephoned Henri Berchmans and arranged to call at his gallery on the way downtown. Their talk was brisk and businesslike.

  ‘Palombini now has clear title to the Raphael items, subject to a payment to me,’ Max began. ‘So I still have control of the situation. The provenance is clean and documented, though we’d rather not have it published.’

  ‘And all the documents are kosher?’

  ‘Absolutely: a holograph will, gift notes, deed of sale.…’

  ‘And my position?’

  ‘Palombini is flying in for the Bayard exhibition, but principally to see you. I have already put him in touch with your Swiss colleagues, because I hope to do business with them later as well as with you. My suggestions have been either a co-operative effort over the three works or a division of the works between you. Your conference with Palombini may produce other solutions. I have done as I promised. It’s over to you.’

  ‘I appreciate what you have done. You’ve been very precise.’

  ‘There’s more. Palombini is bringing with him the original Donna Delfina. He’ll have his own guards on the plane but he’ll need your security people at this end, safe storage in your vaults and extra protection at the showing. You may care to use the occasion to interest a buyer – especially with Tolentino there. We’re agreed on the procedures at the exhibition?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Mention will be made of your generous loan of early Bayard works.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll blush prettily,’ Berchmans responded.

  ‘Harmon Seldes will do the honours when I introduce Tolentino upstairs?’

  ‘He was highly reluctant at first – he’s still very upset with you – but now that he smells money he’ll become a pussycat again. By the way, for a pair of novices you and Miss Loredon didn’t score too badly with the press; and the television shots of “The Bag-Lady” were splendid. I’ve already reserved that for myself.’

  ‘Then I think that’s about as tidy as we can get for now.’

  ‘How tidy is the rest of it, Max? The police, the Danziger girl, Bayard himself?’

  ‘There are still a lot of land-mines lying around. I hope none of them goes off before the exhibition. Oh, I almost forgot. These are photostats of the sections in Madeleine’s diaries that refer to you – and these are a couple of sketches that might be useful for advertising!’

  Berchmans scanned them quickly, then gave his harsh braying laugh. ‘At least she gives me full credit for potency. My God, what testimonials!’

  ‘I’m glad they make you happier.’

  ‘Put it this way, Max: I won’t have to spend any hush money on them.’

  ‘There’s Palombini’s flight number and ETA. If you’ll send the limo and the bodyguards we’ll stop off here first, then you can deliver him to the Pierre. Now I must be going. À bientôt!

  ‘À bientôt…and again my compliments. Very precise, a very tidy mind.’

  ‘A reminder, Henri.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Palombini is now out of the woods. So don’t try to squeeze him too hard.’

  ‘You are wise beyond your years.’ Berchmans waved him on his way. ‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs!’

  Anne-Marie was busy, tousled and happier than he had seen her for some time. She now had an assistant in the office, a fresh-faced junior with a pleasant smile and outgoing manner. She showed him the first press clippings, which spread over eight pages of a scrap-book. Most were good-humoured, a few were quite flattering and all made mention of the sudden theatrical effect of unveiling ‘The Bag-Lady’.

  ‘We couldn’t really have expected better, Max…and already we’ve sold five pieces. Your Swiss people came in for three. Berchmans wants “The Bag-Lady” and one of the people at the press conference was an art editor who is also a collector. He bought one of the smaller canvases, “The Boy at the Pigeon-loft”. It seems our luck is starting to run.’

  ‘I’m sure it is. What do you hear from Ed Bayard?’

  ‘Not too much. He’s sent me a list of his dinner guests. They’re all from the big collecting institutions – the MOMA, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim – and a few of the big dealers. I notice he hasn’t asked Berchmans. I wonder why?’

  ‘Don’t ask. Has there been any more talk of marriage?’

  ‘Not directly. He keeps talking about having discussions, seeing where we stand – after the exhibition, of course. He desperately wants your approval, Max. Now that he knows you’re engaged to someone else, he seems to be making you into a kind of elder brother or father figure for me. Also, he tells me the police have been round to talk to him again; I feel dreadful, knowing what I do…’

  ‘Don’t think. Don’t feel.’ Mather was imperative. ‘You promised to keep your mouth shut. Now do it and get on with the job.’

  ‘Why are you so brutal about him, Max?’

  ‘It’s not about him. It’s about you. Pity can be as deadly as hemlock for Anne-Marie Loredon. Now come upstairs while I unpack and I tell you some good news. We are going to have the best opening night New York has seen for years: a double feature.…’

  ‘No, Max, please.’

  ‘Please me no pleases, woman. Wait till you hear what I have to tell you.’

  She listened, she protested; he argued; she finally agreed. There would be a double-headed evening. When the invited guests had made their ritual circuits of the exhibition and it seemed there were no more red stickers being requested, everyone would proceed to the conference space on the second floor to meet Niccoló Tolentino and hear him introduce his seminar programme.

  This was a risk. Not only would the audience be drowsy with champagne, canapés and critical diarrhoea, but Manhattan art buffs were never noted for their tolerance or their good manners. Still, as Anne-Marie said after a couple of drinks, ‘What the hell, we’re riding our luck. Let’s ride it till we take a fall!’

  And then, as a wry little afterthought, she raised her glass in a toast. ‘So my Max is finally hooked. I hate your Gisela in advance. But I wish you both the very best, Max. Truly I do.’

  Edmund Justin Bayard’s dinner party was a metaphor for the man himself: formal, punctilious, rich with professional talent, redolent of money, old and new. The talk was clubbish and cliquey; the focus of interest always somewhere over the shoulder of one’s partner. In the case of Mrs Lois Heilbronner this was a mercy, because she was concentrating on a new young dealer from 57th Street rather than upon Max Mather, whom she relegated to the honour roll of ‘dear friends and clever people’.

  And yet the gathering was shrewdly put together. There were four major dealers. The rest were the heads of collecting institutions and their womenfolk, the ones who headed fund-raising committees and groups of volunteer guides and drives to canvass new members. These were the arbiters of taste, if not always of fashion. What they bought today would be blue chips in the art market tomorrow, though what were durables and what time would consume only time itself would tell.

  The ritual of the evening was a fair copy of diplomatic procedure. Bayard and Anne-Marie received the guests, the waiters presented them with champagne and canapés and ushered them discreetly into the salon where Bayard’s own collection was hung. This was sufficiently large and varied to break up the crowd and provide them with conversation pieces and pegs on which to hang a malicious comment or two. Nothing so vulgar as a name-tag was in evidence. This was the true family of elders to whom Max Mather addressed himself with assiduous courtesy. ‘We haven’t met. My name is Max Mather;
I work with Anne-Marie.’ If he was lucky it produced a trickle of talk; if he was unlucky, all he got was a polite murmur which left him free to retreat into obscurity with a fresh glass of champagne.

  Dinner was served in the big dining hall where Madeleine Bayard’s pictures were being displayed for the last time – a stroke of theatre which brought gasps of approval from even the most case-hardened cognoscenti. Attention was constantly divided between the plates and the pictures and there was a genuine warmth in the compliments that were passed to Bayard at one end of the table and Anne-Marie at the other. Clearly a speech – if not an oration – was called for; and between the dessert and the cheese, Ed Bayard delivered it.

  ‘My dear friends, thank you for sharing this evening with me, the last evening which I shall spend in this room with Madeleine’s canvases. Tomorrow they will be moved to Miss Loredon’s gallery, to be placed on public exhibition and offered for sale. For me this marks the end of one life, but I trust it may be the beginning of a better one. We are all friends here. It is no secret that Madeleine and I never succeeded in making a happy marriage; but, strange as it may seem, it was a stable one and out of it grew, like poppies on a battlefield, the wonderful, truly wonderful works which surround you now. This toast which I now give you combines my salute to the woman who painted them and my thanks to the courageous young woman who has risked all that she has to exhibit them in her new gallery. I join them both in this toast because the artist cannot live without a patron to present her and, without the artist, the patron is left – as I shall be – with an empty room. To Madeleine, hail and farewell! To Anne-Marie, welcome!’

  Even to Max Mather, who knew so many secrets, it was a moving performance. Several of the women wept openly, while the men blew their noses and echoed the toast a shade too loudly. Mather stole a glance at Anne-Marie. She was ashen-faced, hands clasped on the table, staring down at her bleached knuckles. There was a long pause when he was tempted to rise and make a short speech of thanks for her, but he thought better of it. This was Bayard’s personal convention; let him handle it in his own fashion. Finally the man from the Whitney got to his feet, made a short but adequate and tactful response and sat down to a round of well-bred applause.

  The rest, it seemed, was epilogue. Coffee was served, liqueurs were offered. Nobody wanted to smoke. The party declined to a decorous close. To Mather’s surprise, Anne-Marie was one of the first to leave, driven home by Bayard’s manservant. She did not offer him a lift but said in a quick whisper, ‘Call me when you get home’ before hurrying out.

  When Mather came to take his leave, Bayard held him back. ‘Don’t go yet, please. I need to talk to you. Go through to my study – there’s coffee and brandy.’

  There was no good reason to refuse. He did as he was asked. When Bayard came in a few minutes later, he seemed sober enough but he was frayed and tense.

  ‘Anne-Marie was upset by my speech: angry and embarrassed, was how she put it. She told me she needed to be alone for a while. Did I say anything offensive?’

  ‘Offensive, no; I thought it was a very appropriate and dignified speech. But it was a little tactless to join the two women in one toast.’

  ‘Oh, God, I hadn’t thought of it that way – I meant what I said.’

  ‘That was evident.’

  ‘Especially about the new beginning…is that possible, do you think?’

  ‘In general, it’s always possible.’

  ‘But for me in particular?’

  ‘Ed, that’s an unfair question. What do I know? How can I tell what your needs are, what would make a new start for you?’

  ‘You know one thing – marriage to Anne-Marie.’

  ‘I know you want to marry her – but that’s not quite the point, is it? Come on, Ed. It’s late.…’ He tried to make a joke of it. ‘I’m not in the marriage market. After all, I’m bespoken now and I’ve just bought a very expensive ring for my Gisela, whom you’ll meet at the opening.’

  ‘I hope she’s not an artist.’

  ‘No, she’s a lawyer, like you. She teaches jurisprudence in Zurich.’

  ‘Then you have a chance.’ Bayard’s self-control began to break down. There was a manic intensity in his look and in his speech. ‘Madi and I didn’t…not a snowflake’s chance in hell. You see, Max, artists are different from us. They belong to another plane of being. They’re sacred, magical – like temple prostitutes or the vestal virgins. That doesn’t mean they’re good or bad – they’re different. They don’t need us. When they’re sad or glad or frightened, they don’t turn to us; they climb up to their tower of silence and look out on landscapes we’ll never know, and when they come down they’re purged and refreshed and they bring their works like a talisman of comfort. But not for us, Max. We’re still grieving for them and for our own loss. With Madi it wasn’t the infidelities, the perversities. I could wear those…I did. But I could never endure the separateness, the difference, the never, never sharing. Do you know anything about mythology, Max?’

  ‘A little. Why?’

  ‘Nemesis, Max. Nemesis was woman. She was the Daughter of Night, the avenger of those who were insolent to the gods, who failed to understand and respect the order of things. Madi was my nemesis. I thought I could change what was graven into the granite on the first day of creation. I tried to turn the sacred into the ordinary, the magical into the banal. Tonight I was trying to reverse the act, put back the magic, lift up the sacred signs again. But it didn’t work. So the Daughter of the Night stalks me to exact retribution.’

  ‘Ed, my friend, it’s late. We’re full of food and wine and this is very heady stuff. Let’s call it a night, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry. We will. We must. But I need one answer from you, Max, just one.’

  ‘Let’s hear the question.’

  ‘If I ask Anne-Marie to marry me, will she say yes or no?’

  ‘I can’t answer that, Ed. Ask the lady.’

  ‘I tried to, tonight. She broke up and demanded to be taken home.’

  ‘You can hardly blame her. That was a very emotional speech you made and it broke up a lot of people. Imagine what it did to her.’

  ‘Can’t you imagine what this is doing to me? I’m on my knees, Max, I’m begging. Is it too much to ask to be spared any more humiliation? You know her mind, Max. She’s told me that: “Max understands. With Max, I don’t have to make long explanations. Max accepts…” So tell me, Max, do I have a chance? Is it worth waiting?’

  There was a sudden chill silence in the room. The only thing Mather could see clearly was Anne-Marie, white-faced and distraught, sitting in Madeleine’s place at the dinner table. His mouth was dry, it was an effort to shape the words.

  ‘No, Ed, you don’t have a chance. She’ll never marry you.’

  ‘Has she said why?’

  ‘You and I know why, Ed.’

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly Bayard was calm. The transformation was eerie. ‘Yes, I suppose we do.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Thank you for coming, Max. Thank you for being honest with me. You can tell Anne-Marie she won’t be bothered any more. I’ll see you at the exhibition – you can introduce me to your Swiss lady.’

  ‘You’re not going to supervise the hanging of the pictures?’

  ‘No, that would be inappropriate. They’re out of my hands now…everything’s out of my hands. Would you like my man to drive you home?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll walk a while and pick up a cab. Thanks again for the evening.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Good night, Max.’

  Mather did not go straight home, but walked round to Anne-Marie’s apartment. She was in dressing-gown and slippers, sitting in front of the television with a drink beside her. She offered him a brandy. He refused and asked: ‘What happened tonight? Why did you run off like that?’

  ‘It was the speech, Max. It was weird. It was as if, with all those people, he was walking me into a web and I knew that once I was trapped I would never get out. Then, while everyone was mill
ing around after coffee, he called me into his study and offered me what he called a good-luck gift for the opening. It was Madi’s engagement ring…that was the last straw. I had to leave or have screaming hysterics. I’m dreading the next few days.’

  ‘You needn’t. I spoke for you…I told him you’d never marry him.’

  ‘How did he take it? Was he angry? Hurt?’

  ‘He’d been fairly manic when we started, but by then he was very calm. It’s done, girl. Don’t go back trying to trim the hedge and make it all look neat and tidy. It isn’t, it’s a ragged mess; but you’re out of it. Now stay out. Are you hearing me?’

  ‘I’m hearing you. Do you want to stay the night? It’s a long hike downtown.’

  ‘I’d better push along; but thanks, anyway.’

  ‘Does this mean you’re a reformed character, Max?’

  ‘It means I’m trying to be. I’ve been lucky and scraped home by the skin of my teeth. If I foul this up, I may not get another chance. Sogni d’oro, bambina; golden dreams!’

  Niccoló Tolentino arrived the next day and was lodged in the guest bedroom of Mather’s apartment. They spent a couple of hours going over the protocols of opening night and discussing the content of the seminar lectures, then Mather handed him over to Anne-Marie to lend a critical eye at the hanging of the Bayard pictures. The old man nodded approval of what he saw, then launched into eloquent praise of a talent cut off so early.

  Mather went uptown to sit in on the first meeting with Palombini and Henri Berchmans who, freebooters both, fenced carefully and respectfully until the Donna Delfina was unpacked and displayed under the lights. Then they both fell silent. Palombini crossed himself. Berchmans breathed what sounded very like a prayer: ‘Mon Dieu! Quelle merveille!’ When they began to talk again, it was no longer a fencing match but an almost reverent assessment of how this miraculous survival should be exposed to buyers. His task completed, Mather left them to it and walked over to the Belvedere offices to make his peace with Harmon Seldes.