Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  Art documents itself, and all a good forger had to look out for was the space between things, the blank days in the diary where you could slip a print, a lithograph, or an undiscovered early work.

  “Sold,” Thurston told me. “Sold, sold, sold.”

  To begin with, Ernest said he did pencil drawings in the style of Augustus John and Piranesi and Poussin. Alexander Brown gave him pieces of rare antique paper and he copied on to them, working from catalogues, not originals. But later, he sat in galleries for hours, visiting and revisiting the same works over a period of time, until he understood how they were painted, until he thought he knew just what the artist had seen and felt. The canvases hypnotised him into seeing where they started and how they were begun.

  “And by the way, I was right,” Thurston told me. “There were artists he wouldn’t copy however many times Alexander Brown asked, however much money he might be offered for one.”

  “Rothko,” Thurston said. “According to Ernest, you can’t fake a Rothko, and you can’t fake an Yves Klein. You’d think they’d be easy, he told me, nothing to it, but they’ve got the artist all over them. They’re the hardest of all.”

  Ernest concentrated as much as anything on how a painting or drawing could make him feel. He memorised the first word that came into his head when he looked at the original, so that he could communicate the exact same thing in his copy. Technical accuracy and trails of documents was one thing. That split second, that decisive blink of an eye, was another.

  He and Alexander Brown met only once, with Margot, before she went to Mozambique. But they worked together for more than thirty years. Alexander faked records and documents to match most of Ernest’s own paintings, and allowed unsuspecting researchers and academics to find them and declare them genuine. Together, they put hundreds of forgeries on the walls of international galleries and private collectors. They exploited the art world’s obsession with authenticity to their advantage. The forgeries sold for six and seven figure sums, money Ernest spent on buying genuine paintings, things his mother would have loved, investments. The money he earned by cheating he ploughed straight back in. Maybe it made him feel less guilty, less of a thief.

  “Ernest?” I said, when Thurston had finished. “My Ernest? A forger? Why didn’t he tell me?”

  Thurston was still holding my hand. He hadn’t let go of me the whole time he was speaking.

  “He said he had to take it to the grave.”

  My father’s fakes were bragged about and shown off and kept under special conditions befitting priceless works by world-famous artists. But nobody had ever heard of Ernest Toby Jones because he never once got caught.

  “You know the thing they say about forgeries,” Thurston told me. “The good ones are still hanging on the walls.”

  We sat back to back in the woods, looking up at the tops of trees, dark against the sky. I didn’t want to move. Thurston looked at his watch. “We have to get back to the house. It’s nearly time.”

  “Time for what?”

  He smiled and stood up. “We saved the best till last.”

  “What best? What now?”

  “You’ll see.”

  There was no point asking him what was going on. The day had blown out of my hands like so much ash, like so much powdered paint, and all I could do was wait and see where it landed.

  “I do have a fire to light,” I said. “I wanted to burn one for him.”

  He pulled me to my feet. “I’ll help with the fire if you like. But let’s finish this first.”

  We walked along the empty road, on the grass verge.

  Thurston said, “So there’s one more thing. There’s something else you need to know. About a letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “A letter that was sent here, and opened and read.”

  He said I wasn’t supposed to see it. He said the letter came through the door as planned while Hannah was still here. It was addressed to Ernest, from Christie’s in New York and it was marked URGENT. She took it and read it, and after that, she tore it into tiny pieces and burned it.

  “I remember that,” I said, that sweet-sharp smell of paper, just burnt, on the stairs, and wondering for a minute who had done it. I remember being worried it was me.

  “Why did she do it?” I asked him. “What did it say?”

  Thurston smiled and held tightly to my hand. “Just wait.”

  Back at the house, Alexander Brown was talking to Hannah on the lawn. At Thurston’s signal, he came inside to meet us.

  He said, “Did your father ever say anything to you about a painting called Fire Colour One?”

  “He mentioned it, that it meant something. Nothing more than that.”

  Alexander Brown smiled. “It’s yours, a new acquisition.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Ernest owned Fire Colour One?”

  “Your friend Thurston here manned the telephone at Christie’s for Ernest the week before he died.”

  “You did?” I said, and Thurston nodded.

  “He flew me to New York before he flew me here.”

  Alexander Brown said, “That was the favour I mentioned. Thurston did well. He placed the winning bid. Do you want to know for how much?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I don’t think I do.”

  “In excess of forty million dollars, Iris,” he said. “Ernest’s entire worth.”

  “Forty million dollars?”

  “It’s yours.”

  I felt sick. The earth had tilted wildly on its axis and nobody was noticing it but me. That was Forbes List, unforgivable, impossible rich, just like Thurston and I had talked about. I think I reached for his hand. I think without it I might have spun away.

  “Can I just keep it?” I said. “The painting, I mean?”

  “You can do whatever you want with it,” Mr Brown said. “It belongs to you.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “Why the hell would Hannah want me to have it? She told Ernest to let me have the new one. I heard her. Why would she say that if it was worth so much money?”

  “Because of this.”

  He handed me a copy of the letter, the one Hannah had destroyed after reading.

  “Read it out loud,” he said. “I like the tone of it. Read it to me.”

  “We are very sorry to inform you,” I read, “that in the light of new documentation … the authenticity of the work entitled FIRE COLOUR ONE … can no longer be confirmed. If you have any concerns or queries … please do not hesitate to contact us. Yours …”

  “It’s a fake?” I said. “But you can’t fake an Yves Klein. Everyone says it can’t be done.”

  I waited for them both to stop smiling.

  “You can’t fake an Yves Klein,” Alexander Brown said. “You’re right. They’re too notorious, too well documented. But you can fake a letter. Or I can, anyway.”

  Hannah intercepted the letter and gave her blessing to my inheritance. In fact it was her suggestion.

  Thurston said, “Ernest gave your mother exactly what she asked for. She has no one to blame but herself.”

  I looked for where she was standing in the garden, a cluster of people around her, a good tall drink in her hand. She held herself like a coiled spring, triumph leaking through the gaps in her attempt at a sombre surface.

  “So we both win,” I said.

  “Not quite,” said Thurston.

  “Let’s get them in,” Alexander Brown said, and I didn’t know what he meant.

  “What’s happening?”

  “A moment,” Thurston said. “The best one I could think of.”

  “Where? Here? Now?”

  He nodded. “Alexander has persuaded your mother that everyone should have a tour of the paintings, before they get taken down and sold.”

  Before I could say anything, he put a heavy torch in my hand and said, “There’s going to be a power cut. It’s going to get very dark in those rooms with the curtains drawn. You’ll need this.”

 
The guests were already coming in. The room was filling up. Alexander Brown stayed with me and Thurston slipped behind a pillar as Hannah pushed her way through to the front.

  “This,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “is the Italian room.”

  When Ernest died, before he was even cold, my mother arranged for a crew from London to come and pack up the paintings, wrap each canvas carefully and separately in crates for collection, as soon as he was in the ground. She made appointments with auction houses and private dealers. She was all business and forward motion. She did all that before she even asked me if I was OK. She was looking forward to record-breaking sales, to a bidding war. She was counting her chickens again. She and Lowell must have thought of nothing else.

  She stood there, talking about the paintings, counting on her fingers the famous names that graced the walls. Hers now, you could see it written all over her face. All hers.

  Alexander Brown shifted a little beside me. He cleared his throat.

  “How could he have spent his entire fortune on one painting?” I asked him. “How could he have paid for it, with all these priceless canvasses still on the walls?”

  When he said it the first time, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. I asked him to say it again, so he did. He said it very quietly, so that nobody else would hear.

  “None of the paintings in this house are real.”

  And as he said it, the lights went out, and the place went black.

  “Oh God,” Hannah said. “What’s happened?”

  Not the Vermeer in Ernest’s bedroom, Alexander Brown whispered. Not the Miros and Picassos and Modiglianis. Not the Renoir or the Degas or the Van Gogh or the little Gauguins.

  “They are all fakes,” he said. “Copies of the real thing painted by Ernest in the years since you went missing.”

  It took my father twelve years to copy his collection. He sold the real works to private collectors on the contractual understanding that they didn’t exhibit until a year after his death.

  He played the long con.

  They were brilliant forgeries. They looked the same on the surface, to the naked eye. They might even have fooled the experts, but underneath they were all worthless.

  “Iris has a torch,” Thurston said, from somewhere at the back of the room and the crowd parted to let me make my way to the front.

  Hannah took it out of my hand. She grabbed it and switched it on, an unexpected warm blue light that made our teeth and the whites of our eyes glow like bulbs.

  “What is this, Iris?” she said, and she shone it at the wall.

  Ernest had laid traps and my mother stumbled right into them. There was something beneath the surface of every painting, written in zinc white, so it would show up under ultra-violet and stop my mother and Lowell dead in their tracks. Their world was about to end, and Thurston had made sure they had an audience. Better than my fire, better than any revenge I could ever have thought of, more than twelve years in the making, a message from Ernest for them and one for me too. Hannah checked every one, running from room to room by the end of it, followed by a stream of witnesses, hysterical, apocalyptic, catastrophic.

  The same word on each of the forty-seven canvasses that filled the house. Bigger and bigger each time until it took up the whole space, waiting patiently, screaming out beneath layers of paint.

  IRIS.

  Thanks Thanks Thanks to Veronique Baxter and Bob Ricard, Rachel Denwood, Alex, Molly and Ella.

  There were reasons why Violet Park should have meant nothing to me. She was old. She was dead. She was in a box on a shelf. But I met her one night, by accident, in the middle of the night and she changed everything.

  When sixteen-year-old Lucas Swain rescues Violet Park’s ashes from a mini-cab office, he sets out to discover who she was, and finally faces up to the question of his missing father …

  The mini cab office was up a cobbled mews with little flat houses either side. That’s where I first met Violet Park, what was left of her. There was a healing centre next door – a pretty smart name for a place with a battered brown door and no proper door handle and stuck on wooden numbers in the shape of clowns. The 3 of number 13 was the letter w stuck on sideways and I thought it was kind of sad and I liked it at the same time.

  I never normally take cabs but it was five o’clock in the morning and I was too tired to walk anywhere and I’d just found a tenner in my coat pocket. I went in for a lift home and strolled right into the weirdest encounter of my life.

  It turns out the ten pounds wasn’t mine at all. My sister Mercy had borrowed my coat the night before – without asking – even though boys’ clothes don’t suit her and it was at least two sizes too big. She was livid with me about the money. I said maybe she should consider it rent and wouldn’t the world be a better place if people stopped taking things that didn’t belong to them?

  It’s funny when you start thinking about pivotal moments like this in your life, chance happenings that end up meaning everything. Sometimes, when I’m deciding which route to take to, say, the cinema in Camden, I get this feeling like maybe if I choose the wrong route, bad stuff will happen to me in a place I never had to go if only I’d chosen wisely. This sort of thinking can make decisions really really difficult because I’m always wondering what happens to all the choices we decide not to make. Like Mum says, as soon as she married Dad she realised she’d done the wrong thing and as she was walking back down the aisle, she could practically see her single self through the arch of the church door, out in the sunlight, dancing around without a care in the world, and she could have spat. I like to picture Mum, dressed like a meringue with big sticky hair, hanging on to Dad’s arm and thinking about gobbing on the church carpet. It always makes me smile.

  Whatever, Mercy decided to borrow my coat and she forgot to decide to remove the money and I decided to spend the whole night with my friend Ed in his posh mum’s house (Miss Denmark 1979 with elocution lessons) and then I made the choice to take a cab.

  It was dark in the Mews, blue-black with a sheen of orange from the street lamps on the high street, almost dawn and sort of timeless. My shoes made such a ringing noise on the cobbles I started to imagine I was back in time, in some Victorian red light district. When I stepped into the minicab office it was modern and pretty ugly. One of the three strip lights on the ceiling was blinking on and off, but the other two were working perfectly and their over-brightness hurt my eyes and made everyone look sort of grey and pouchy and ill. There were no other punters, just bored sleepy drivers, waiting for the next fare, chain smoking or reading three-day-old papers. There was a framed map of Cyprus on one wall and one of those gas fires that they reckon are portable with a great big bottle you have to fit in the back. We had one like that in the hostel when we went on a school journey to the Brecon Beacons last year. Those things are not portable.

  The controller was in this little booth up a few stairs with a window looking down on the rest of them and you could tell he was the boss of the place as well. He had a cigar in his mouth and he was talking and the smoke was going in his eyes so he had to squint, and the cigar was bouncing up and down as he talked and you could see he thought he was Tony Soprano or someone.

  Everybody looked straight at me when I walked in because I was the something happening in their boring night shift and suddenly I felt very light headed and my insides were going hot and cold, hot and cold. I’m pretty tall for my age but them all staring up at me from their chairs made me feel like some kind of weird giant. The only person not staring at me was Tony Soprano so I kind of focused on him and I smiled so they’d all see I was friendly and hadn’t come in for trouble. He was chomping on that cigar, working it around with his teeth and puffing away on it so hard his little booth was filling up with cigar smoke. I thought that if I stood there long enough he might disappear from view like an accidental magic trick. The smoke forced its way through the cracks and joins of his mezzanine control tower and it was making me queasy so I searched around
, still smiling, for something else to look at.

  That’s when I first saw Violet. I say “Violet” but that’s stretching it because I didn’t even know her name then and what I actually saw was an urn with her inside it.

  The urn was the only thing in that place worth looking at. Maybe it was because I’d been up all night, maybe I needed to latch on to something in there to stop myself from passing out, I don’t know, I found an urn. Halfway up a wood panelled wall, log cabin style, there was a shelf with some magazines on and a cup and saucer, the sort you find in church halls and hospitals. Next to them was this urn that at the time I didn’t realise was an urn, just some kind of trophy or full of biscuits or something. It was wooden, grainy and with a rich gloss that caught the light and threw it back at me. I was staring at it, trying to figure out what it was exactly. I didn’t notice that anyone was talking to me until I got the smell of cigar really strongly and realised that the fat controller had opened his door because banging on his window hadn’t got my attention.

  “You haven’t come for her, have you?” he asked and I didn’t get it but everyone else did because they all started laughing at once.

  Then I laughed too because them all laughing was funny and I said, “Who?”

  The cigar bobbed down towards his chin with each syllable and he nodded towards the shelf. “The old lady in the box.”

  I didn’t stop laughing, but really I can’t remember if I thought it was funny or not. I shook my head and because I didn’t know what else to say I said, “No, I need a cab to Queens Crescent please,” and a driver called Ali got up and I followed him out to his car. I walked behind him down the mews and out into the wider space of the high street.

  I asked Ali what he knew about the dead woman on the shelf. He said she’d been around since before he started working there, which was eighteen months ago. Somebody had left her in a cab and never collected her and if I wanted to know the whole story I should speak to the boss whose name I instantly forgot because he was always Tony Soprano to me.