Masterclass

by Morris West

The gesture had an immediate effect – not unaided by the fact that Seldes was now a sharer in a very profitable Berchmans deal. He was flattered also by the invitation to present Tolentino – and even more interested in Mather’s suggestion that Belvedere should sponsor the seminars as an ongoing project. The conjunction of this proposal and the discovery of the Raphaels gave him instant access to top management and he promised an early answer which, if it were favourable, would be announced on opening night. As for Max himself, obviously in view of all that had happened some upward review of his arrangements could be contemplated if he were willing to continue on the magazine.

  Max was willing. His luck was running. He had no alternative but to run with it. The only negative – large enough, in all conscience – was George Munsel’s report on his first conference with the prosecution.

  ‘So far, they’re holding firm; they swear they’ve got a good case and are prepared to fight it to a finish. They’re willing to let us plead to a lesser charge, but that’s as far as they’ll go at this moment. However, it’s early days yet. Have you done any more work on the analysis of the diaries?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ve had a lot on my plate.’

  ‘I’ve got a woman’s life and liberty on mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry, George. As soon as the exhibition’s launched you’ll have my total attention. Which reminds me…I’m bringing Gisela across for the opening. Could you pick up Danny Danziger and escort her? It’s probably an appropriate pairing – counsel and client.’

  ‘Very appropriate,’ Munsel agreed. ‘Now tell me about your dinner party with Bayard.’

  He listened intently as Mather talked him through the evening’s events and then asked for a replay on both the speech and their final dialogue in the study. His comment was anxious.

  ‘Problem with Bayard is that he’s a sentimentalist.’

  ‘Come again, George?’

  ‘It’s a phrase that’s stuck in my mind for twenty years. George Meredith…does anyone read him nowadays, I wonder?’

  ‘What the hell’s he got to do with Bayard?’

  ‘Somewhere, I think it was in Sandra Belloni, he wrote: “Despair is a wilful business…native to the sentimentalist of the better order.” ’

  ‘That’s a very snobbish piece of phrase-making!’

  ‘I wonder if it is.’ Munsel was thoughtful. However you define it, despair is a terminal event. The old divines used to call it the sin against the Holy Spirit. Anyway, we’ll see. I’d better telephone Danny Danziger and arrange to do my Prince Charming act.’

  ‘You’d have more hope as a princess, George.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t have the build for it.’

  So far it was all rehearsal time, lighting and walkthrough, with nerves frayed and people snapping at each other for no reason at all. Niccoló Tolentino absented himself with sketchbook and paint-box to set down his first impressions of Little Italy. Guido Valente called from Washington to say he would be arriving late, but would most certainly be present. A temporary foul-up in the track lighting was soon fixed and the pictures looked great against the neutral panels. Mather drove out to Kennedy to pick up Gisela, who was as excited as a schoolgirl at her first sight of Manhattan. Anne-Marie gave her a more generous welcome than he had expected and whispered in passing, ‘Nice work, Max. Congratulations!’

  Three hours later the overture began when a Brinks van pulled up outside the gallery. After a small army of security men had positioned themselves around the approaches and on each floor of the building, two of Berchmans’ minions carried two carefully wrapped packages inside, unwrapped them on the second floor, laid them on twin easels and covered them with linen sheets. In Mather’s apartment Anne-Marie and Gisela dressed in one bedroom, while in the other Mather knotted Tolentino’s bow-tie and fumbled with the pearl studs in his old-fashioned starched shirt-front. By six-thirty the guards were in position, armed and watchful; the caterers were standing by with drink trays and canapés. The visitors’ book was laid open with a gold pen on a little gold safety-chain. A clerk sat ready to record purchases. Anne-Marie, Ed Bayard and Max Mather took their places in the receiving line, while Niccoló Tolentino took Gisela on his arm and led her to a safe distance from the entrance, proud as an Italian uncle. As if they had appeared out of the woodwork Hartog and Bechstein arrived – Hartog dapper as a fashion plate, Bechstein crumpled and uncomfortable in a stiff wing collar. Then suddenly it was curtain time and the tragi-comedy of a new Manhattan opening began.

  Anne-Marie had been afraid of a freeze. Instead they had a near riot. Every name on the guest list showed up. The street was jammed with gawkers and would-be gate-crashers, drawn by the unusual spectacle of a black-tie affair south of Houston, with enough hired muscle to police a prize-fight. The ceremonial opening was set down for seven o’clock, but it was seven-fifteen before the doors were closed and Mather made his way to the microphone to begin proceedings.

  ‘Miss Loredon has asked me to speak for her tonight and to welcome you all to this first show at the Liberation Gallery. There are reasons for her choice: I work here, so I have to sing for my supper; I’m taller than she is and my voice is bigger – though I’m not nearly as good looking; finally, she doesn’t want to talk about this exhibition, she believes it speaks for itself. However, both Miss Loredon and Mr Bayard felt that it would be appropriate to have the exhibition formally opened by the man who was the first, the very first in New York to buy a Madeleine Bayard canvas – Mr André Lebrun!’

  However, before he brought Mr Lebrun to the microphone he wanted to call everyone’s attention to a singular event on the programme. At eight o’clock, after everyone had had time to enjoy the Bayard canvases, a bell would sound and they would be asked to proceed upstairs in an orderly fashion, to witness a unique and historic event in the art world. This event had been arranged by courtesy of the Palombini family and of Mr Henri Berchmans, who had kindly lent his own Madeleine Bayards to grace the exhibition. It would be introduced by Mr Harmon Seldes, editor of Belvedere magazine, the sponsors of the forthcoming Tolentino seminars. Now, without more ado, he would call upon Mr André Lebrun to open the exhibition.…

  Lebrun was a mistake but a long way short of a disaster. He was excited. He was prolix. His accent was distorted by the microphone. But there was no doubting the sincerity of his praise and the underlying pathos of the story he could not tell. The audience gave him a solid round of applause before dispersing to continue their rounds of the exhibits.

  Henri Berchmans tapped Mather on the shoulder and growled his approval.

  ‘That was good – brief and to the point. You look at pictures. You don’t audition them. See you upstairs.’

  Anne-Marie gave him news on the wing. ‘Fifteen red stickers already and they’re busy at the desk. Keep your fingers crossed.’

  ‘How’s Ed Bayard?’

  ‘Fine, I think. We’ve exchanged a couple of words, that’s all.’

  ‘Berchmans approves.’

  ‘I know. He’s signed firm for “The Bag-Lady”.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I’m having good comments all round.’

  ‘I too. You’re launched, my love.’

  ‘God bless this ship…’

  ‘…And all who sail in her.’

  They touched glasses and drank just as Edmund Bayard approached, smiling and relaxed.

  ‘Can we have that toast again? I’d like to drink it with you.’

  They drank again. Bayard said, ‘My compliments, my thanks to you both. This is a splendid night. I never expected anything half so good.’

  ‘It’s Madi’s material, Ed.’

  ‘Plus a lot of loving care. The sales appear to be going well.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘You won’t mind if I slip away before the ceremony upstairs? I could use a little quiet time after this – I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Of course. Do you need transport?’

  ‘No. My man’s waiting.’

>   He detached himself from them and slipped away through the crowd. Then George Munsel came over with Danny Danziger and Carol. He was smiling and in good spirits but Danny was tense and restless.

  ‘Carol is taking me home now. I’m finding it all too much – Madi’s pictures first and then the stares and whispers as I pass.’

  ‘You wouldn’t stay for the Raphaels? After all, you had a big hand in that. ’

  ‘I’d like to, Max, but truly…’

  ‘She’s had enough,’ put in Carol brusquely. ‘I’ll get her home. Congratulations on the show, it’s great. Maybe I can talk to you some time about my own stuff?’

  ‘Any time,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘Drive safely.’

  Mather looked at his watch. ‘Time to get ’em upstairs. I’ll go and give the signal.’

  It took nearly ten minutes to get them all to the second floor, free of glasses and eatables, and assemble them in the rows of seats facing the pair of easels under the watchful eyes of the security men. Berchmans and Palombini stood at the back, chatting amiably. Mather collected Gisela and went to join them. Palombini was delighted to see her again and Berchmans’ dark eyes brightened with approval. At a nod from Mather, Harmon Seldes mounted the rostrum and in his slightly pompous style related the history of his first meeting with Mather and the decision to publish his material in Belvedere. He did a brief song and dance about the power of the press and the surprising outreach of even an eclectic publication like Belvedere – which, he was happy to announce, would be sponsoring the seminars.

  Then, before he unveiled the pictures, he said, ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, all of us here are educated in the fine arts – some more, some less; but all of us are capable of making up our minds about the authenticity and basic value of a work. I am going to show you two portraits – portraits of the same subject: a sixteenth-century Florentine matron. One is an authenticated original by Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino…it is one of the lost Palombini pieces to which I have just referred. The other is a copy by one of the acknowledged modem masters of this craft, Maestro Niccoló Tolentino who is here tonight. I shall invite your opinion by a show of hands as to which is the original and which the copy. You may come up and inspect them both, but you will please refrain from touching the surfaces. Are you ready? Voilà!’

  He lifted the sheets and there was a gasp of surprise as the two panels were revealed. It was a mass reaction, a theatrical response to an essentially theatrical moment. Then, marshalled by the guards, the audience filed slowly past the portraits studying them in silence. When they were all seated again, Seldes called for a show of hands to indicate the original. The votes were six to four in favour of the copy.

  Then Niccoló Tolentino took the stage and with a very Florentine flourish acknowledged the vote as a tribute to his own skill – but regretfully passed the honour to the Maestro Raffaello from Urbino. They liked his style. They applauded. They listened in dead silence as he explained the history of the commission, the technical demands upon his skill as a painter, the search for traditional pigments and media, the preparation of the panels, the differences between one timber and another…the difference between a copy and a forgery.

  As a Conférencier he was an instant success. His small crooked figure radiated strength and authority while his heavy accent lent charm to a lively and exotic discourse, but his final peroration held them spellbound.

  ‘What is the difference between me and the long-dead Master who painted this panel? Brush-stroke for brush-stroke, line for line – nothing. I know as much as he did – in fact, I know more. I have a wider range of supports, of pigments, of media, of solvents than he ever had. I have at my fingertips a far wider range of instruments and techniques. But still, when I stand beside the Master, I am a pygmy beside a giant. I am primal clay before God breathed into it the breath of life. I watched you all tonight in the gallery below, reading your catalogues, talking prices and auctions and who sold what for how much. Who cares? What does it matter? What matters is that you were moved as I was by the living spirit of a woman dead too soon to reach the full flowering of her genius. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she had said all she needed to say – and who will be bold enough to claim that the full-blown rose is more perfect than the opening bud? I presume, I know. I come to this great city in your new world and I presume to make sermons to you. But there is a reason. I stand every day before the works of great masters: a small crooked man who cannot remember when he did not have a brush in his hand and yet, infidel though I am, I make a cry to God. “Why, oh Lord…why to them and not to me? Just once, just once before I die, give me light!” ’

  After which, as George Munsel remarked in his dry fashion, all else was postscript – and dispensable. The guests filed out slowly, pausing to make another circuit of the Bayards before leaving. The security men marched back to the van with the Raphaels, true and false, carried like precious relics in the centre of the phalanx. The caterers packed away their plates and glassware. The two night-watchmen came on duty. Anne-Marie Loredon’s staff and the small temporary family which had grown up around her – with Hartog and Bechstein roped in as a goodwill gesture – gathered for one last drink.

  After all the excitement it was hard to believe it was still only nine-thirty, harder yet to believe that in three short hours they had sold twenty canvases and put four more on reserve for public galleries. What was even more notable – but not even mentioned – was that Berchmans and Palombini had settled on a guarantee of forty million for the Donna Delfina, which a little Japanese in the audience, moved by Tolentino’s eloquence, had already bought for fifty because his company had an embarrassing number of devalued dollars to be spent in a hurry.

  Palombini, flush and footloose in New York and happy to find that Anne-Marie spoke fluent Italian, proposed a celebration supper in Little Italy where a distant relative owned a restaurant called La Cenerentola. So, leaving the address with the night-watchmen against the unlikely event that anyone should call to reserve a canvas, they trooped out into the street where the last of the limousines were waiting to transport the new plutocracy to their watering-place.

  Edmund Justin Bayard stood in the dining room of his apartment and looked about him. Stripped of the pictures, the wallpaper was a patchwork of light and dark rectangles created by uneven exposure to light and to the dust motes from the air-conditioning system. The whole place looked intolerably shabby. It would have to be redecorated, he decided. And then what? A new collection? Commission a suite of frescoes like some Renaissance prince? Not impossible. An agreeable fantasy for a wealthy bachelor. Only one problem: who would share the fantasy, who would even take the time or the trouble to understand it?

  One good thing: there was nothing left of Madeleine now. It was as if her ashes had at last been scattered to the cleansing winds. Not without honour, mind you. Not without piety and respect. Tonight had been a worthy occasion, like the old translations of sacred relics from secret places to great basilicas, for public veneration. And, by God, there had been veneration and respect. That crowd tonight was a real college of surgeons, eager to declare the body clinically dead so that they could begin to dismember it. But there, in that place where she had died, Madeleine was alive – dominating the spectators as once she had dominated him.

  That was the problem, of course. To dominate, you had to be indifferent…to the infliction of pain, to the deprivation of pleasure, the diminution of rights. He had thought himself tolerant. In her rages Madeleine had screamed that he was a tyrant. In fact he was neither; he was an intelligent man, but made of a clay too fragile to be fired in the kilns of passion. So he had emerged, cracked and flawed, while Madeleine, with all the dross burned away, was like a perfect Sung vase, pai Ting with teardrops in the glaze.

  He had no tears left to shed. He was conscious only of calm…the calm of a great desert, cold and windless under a white moon. All sense of guilt was gone. Nemesis, the Daughter of Night, had accepted his amends knowing that the mulct would be paid in
full.

  As for Anne-Marie, she was a might-have-been for whom, even in the windless calm, he could still feel a small chill of regret. May and September? Well, it might just have worked. Beauty and the Beast? Sometimes, more rarely, that worked too.

  Max Mather? Now there was a strange one. A tightrope walker, teetering on the high-wire without a net, making it in one last skittering run to safety. A man to envy, perhaps, but not emulate.

  So, as he undressed and put on his best silk dressing-gown, the accounts seemed to tally at last. The Daughter of Night beckoned. It was time for the final tribute. He went to the bathroom and took from the medicine cabinet a plastic bottle full of sleeping pills. Then he went to his study, poured himself a whisky and put on the tape of Mahler’s Ninth. From the bookshelves he took down a volume which had belonged to his father – La très joyeuse, plaisante et récréative histoire du bon Chevalier de Bayard – and as he began to read, picking his way through the archaic phrases, he sipped the whisky and swallowed the tablets.

  The last words that registered on his fading consciousness were those of an old proverb: ‘Whenever a man dies, somewhere another is grateful.…’ It was a proposition he found perfectly acceptable.

  ‘Your client’s still on the hook.’ Bechstein was contesting every inch of ground. ‘She had motive…sexual humiliation by Madeleine and her playmates, jealousy, all that tangle of emotions. She had opportunity. She was alone with Madeleine at the relevant time – about which she is lying, because we have a witness who puts her arrival an hour later. Then we have the written testimony of the late Hugh Loredon who says the following: Danny called him. He told her to leave immediately. Later he came and found Madeleine dead, took the weapon and cleaned out her papers. You’ve got a copy of the letter in your hands.’

  ‘Question.’ This from George Munsel. ‘Why would he bother to write that letter at all? He knew he was going to die. It wasn’t a confession; it was an accusation against Danny Danziger.’

  ‘Our view is that he did it for exactly the reason he expressed to Mr Mather here. He didn’t want his own daughter to think her father was a killer.’