Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  19.

  ‘I thought we were going to study the monkey-man’s mating habits,’ the Mariner complained, turning to Einstein.

  ‘You have to be patient,’ the dog explained. ‘Monkey-men need time for their courtship. But trust me, once they’ve found their mate they go at it like sewing machines.’

  Charlie wiped his face and peered around him. These excursions into the past left him feeling sick and exhausted.

  ‘He closed my shop!’ an angry voice cried from the far side of the room. Charlie turned in alarm to find the ghost of his father treading his way through the wall. ‘That damned whippersnapper destroyed my business! He squandered a lifetime’s hard work and devotion!’

  ‘The business sank without trace. There weren’t any customers,’ Charlie said, no longer surprised to find himself talking to phantoms, but greatly relieved that the spook was no longer spouting smoke.

  ‘There were plenty of customers when I had the business,’ the ghost of the barber retorted. ‘Plenty of customers. Regulars. Most of them were my friends.’ He wagged his decrepit head and the dewdrop quivered and flew from the tip of his nose.

  ‘That was the problem,’ Charlie said gently. ‘The last time I saw your friends they were at your funeral.’

  ‘Did Dancing Perkins pay his respects?’ the barber asked. ‘Did you have beer and sandwiches? Was it a good affair?’

  ‘Perkins and Parsons,’ Charlie said, to please him. ‘And they hadn’t spoken for fifteen years.’

  ‘Did Stonker Wilson go to the service?’

  'Stonker Wilson, Trust Me Davis, Filthy Frank and Tony the Turk. Everyone came to say goodbye.’

  ‘So what happened to them?’ the barber demanded, sticking out his chest and scowling at Charlie. ‘Did the shock of my death make their hair fall out? You want me to believe that as soon as I’m gone nobody needs another haircut? You never wanted to make a success of your life. That’s the truth of it. You never had the application. I could tell by the way you held your scissors. You had too many nancy notions. I blame your poor mother. If she hadn’t met with her accident you would never have gone to that blasted school.’

  ‘It was my own idea to become a painter.’

  ‘And who gave you all these other ideas?’ the barber demanded. ‘Who said you were so special you had permission to throw away a lifetime’s hard work, turn against your own family, waste my savings and close the shop? Who told you? I’ll tell you who told you. It was that fat spiv in the fancy waistcoat.’

  ‘It was a business arrangement.’

  ‘Business arrangement my arse! It was vandalism. I worked all my life to leave something behind me. I slaved every hour the good Lord gave me to give you some security. And what happens? As soon as I’m in my grave you give it all away to the first fat spiv who walks through the door and spins you a hard luck story.’

  ‘It was an investment. Harry knew about the world. He gave me an opportunity to make something of my life.’

  ‘Hah! What did you know about him? Nothing. A jumped-up gippo with a few airs and graces. He could have slit your throat for sixpence,’ the poor barber raved, wagging his head so violently that his teeth began to rattle.

  ‘I don’t have the time to listen to all this nonsense!’ the Deep Time Mariner roared, making a lunge at the startled dog. Einstein yelped and scuttled for cover.

  ‘You keep out of it!’ the ghost snapped. He glared indignantly up at the giant and flared his nostrils in contempt. ‘Blasted foreigners! You come over here with your boogie-woogie, taking our jobs and stealing our women by teaching ’em your smutty dances and you think you own the place… ’ He stopped. His voice trailed away. He had started to disappear again. He raised one hand as if he were waving goodbye.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ the Mariner said, as Charlie reached out to his fading father. ‘Tell me the rest of your story.’

  So Charlie closed his eyes again and sank back into his dream.

  20.

  After the grand opening at which a few market traders, a lion tamer and a troupe of Russian acrobats consumed a huge quantity of cheese and wine, nothing seemed to happen for a long time.

  Charlie worked hard in the studio but whenever he ventured downstairs he found Fat Harry standing alone, staring at the gallery walls. He began to have doubts in his own talents as a painter and in Fat Harry’s skills as a salesman. The showman remained optimistic but Charlie was tempted to burn his paintings and search for work in one of the local hairdressing shops. The brave new enterprise seemed set for failure.

  And then, one evening, Fat Harry announced that he’d sold everything. Charlie was in the little kitchen chopping onions for soup when Harry broke the news.

  ‘Everything?’ he gasped as he chopped the end of his thumb into the pile of onion rings.

  ‘The entire collection,’ Harry grinned. ‘The works. Two hundred landscapes. Cash on delivery.’ He was dressed in a pink silk suit and a pair of crocodile shoes. He thought they made him look artistic.

  ‘Have we got two hundred paintings?’ Charlie said, sweating with pain and excitement.

  ‘No,’ Harry admitted. ‘We’re going to need another twenty landscapes by the end of the month.’

  ‘But I can’t…’ Charlie protested.

  'Nothing fancy,’ Fat Harry said helpfully. ‘Make ’em small ones with plenty of sky. That should do the trick.’

  ‘But who bought them?’ Charlie demanded, sucking blood and onion juice and peering nervously at the wound.

  Fat Harry closed one eye and stared at the ceiling. He whistled. He raised a finger and tapped his nose. ‘A very big collector,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A very influential man,’ Harry whispered, glancing around as if there were microphones everywhere. ‘You’ve got to laugh. He doesn’t want me to mention his name for reasons of security.’

  ‘And how much is he willing to pay?’ Charlie asked him.

  ‘£50 000,’ Harry said. He sounded almost apologetic. ‘I had to give him a discount.’

  This was more money than Charlie could imagine. It was a fortune. It was £250 a painting. He was rich beyond his wildest dreams. Who could afford to make such a purchase and who would take the risk with a young and unknown artist? He burned with curiosity. But whenever he asked about the mysterious benefactor, Fat Harry would only tap his nose and smile a secret smile.

  When Charlie eventually discovered the name of his patron he was very discouraged. It was not, as he had dared to hope, the curator of a big museum. He had not been discovered by an influential critic nor yet an eccentric foreign collector who wanted to hoard him in a cellar.

  His name was Joe Persil. He was the founder and chairman of The Haughty Hamburger Restaurant™ chain who’d been shopping for pictures to hang on his restaurant walls. Charlie’s paintings were bright, cheerful and appetising. They were also, as Fat Harry had carefully explained, original handcrafted works of art. Joe Persil didn’t know much about paintings but he liked the idea of owning two hundred works of art. It had style. It had class. Every Haughty Hamburger™ was an original work of art, according to the advertising. Joe Persil wrote the advertising. The Haughty Hamburger Hefty Half-Pounder™ was a beauty, a classic, a masterpiece. He owned forty restaurants in prime locations. He was going to hang five paintings in every one of them.

  ‘I’m an artist!’ Charlie raged, as he struggled to complete the order. ‘I’m not a machine, I can’t paint landscapes on demand.’ He glowered at a cornfield burning with poppies, scrubbed at the canvas with his brush, reducing the harvest to mud.

  ‘You’ve never painted anything but landscapes.’ Fat Harry argued. ‘That’s your gimmick. You always produce the same painting. People like that. It makes them feel secure.’

  ‘I don’t want them to feel secure!’ Charlie shouted.

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Harry said. He was baffled by Charlie’s reluctance to work at the easel. This was their big opportunity. This was everything th
ey wanted. What was wrong with him?

  ‘It’s not the sort of success I had planned,’ Charlie said.

  ‘It doesn’t come in fifty seven varieties!’ Harry shouted.

  ‘I don’t want to have my work hanging in hamburger joints,’ Charlie finally confessed.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Harry gasped. He looked amazed. He clapped his hands against his ears to shield himself against such nonsense. ‘You have to go to the people. And where are the people? They’re not storming the National Gallery, they’re fighting for cheeseburgers. You think Picasso was famous? He’s nothing compared to Ronald McDonald™. Nothing. I’m giving you the chance to have your work seen and admired by millions and millions of people.’

  ‘But they’re not interested in my paintings,’ Charlie said. ‘They’re interested in how much pickle do they get with their half-pounders and how thick is the milk shake and should they try the fried fruit pie.’

  ‘Give ’em a chance,’ Harry said.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Charlie complained. ‘I made a mistake. I thought it would be different.’

  ‘Think of the money,’ Harry said. ‘That should help stir your creative juices.’

  He couldn’t understand Charlie’s attitude. Fat Harry’s ambition was simple. He had reduced the meaning of life to a shopping list. A large house in St Johns Wood with a Spanish porch and security gates, a fancy German car with tinted glass and white leather seats, a gold Rolex with diamond strap, a glass of champagne and a Cuban cigar. He wanted to make money and spend it on rich living to show the world that he’d earned big money and knew how to spend it. People had always told him that money can’t buy happiness. But they were wrong. This was going to make Harry very, very happy. He meant no harm. He wanted Charlie to share the riches and taste the pleasures of life. It was a partnership. He was selling for both of them.

  The deal with Joe Persil was just the beginning. He had plans to build a business empire. He dreamed of owning factories where a thousand paintings a month could be turned out for the walls of restaurants and hotel chains, offices and shopping precincts. Soothing pictures of lakes, sunsets and fishing boats. The kind of picture you’d give your mother. Bright, cheerful canvases depicting lovely scenes from Nature. And every picture guaranteed a genuine, hand-painted work of art. Charlie, rewarded for his patience, would have students to work on the pictures while the master strolled from easel to easel, signing his name with a long sable brush.

  He was full of bright ideas.

  21.

  Charlie did his best to oblige Fat Harry, but after a series of fishing boats at sunset for the Salty Seadog Biscuit™ Company and the thirty views of poppyfields for a string of Popular Funeral™ Parlours, he’d had enough of fame and fortune. The money was good, he couldn’t deny it, but he wanted more from his work and his life. Fat Harry was away on a business trip with samples of Charlie’s most popular views. He was hawking his way across the country, hoping to persuade sausage kings and pork pie barons that Charlie should paint their factories.

  ‘Imagine! Your own factory, beautifully painted in oils by an international artist and presented in an elegant, gilded frame of tropical hardwood veneers, ready for you to hang with pride in your boardroom or management suite. In the tradition of the European aristocrats who commissioned the greatest artists of their day to commemorate their houses and gardens, now you can transform your factory into a sumptuous work of art that will be the envy of your colleagues and competitors!’

  Fat Harry was on the road for a month and Charlie was supposed to divide his time between the attic and the gallery. But he had no desire to work. He spent all day in the gallery, sitting at the corner desk, staring out of the window. A few visitors strayed through the door. They paced around the shop as if measuring the floor and then quickly returned to the street. They never spoke and they never stopped to study the paintings but merely glanced over them, like people searching a grocer’s shelves. Whatever it was they wanted, the Church Street Gallery didn’t stock it.

  And then, one morning, Baxter Pangloss swept through the door and into Charlie’s life. She was a tall girl, perfectly starved, with a pale and beautiful face hidden by curtains of coarse black hair. She was wearing a leopard skin coat, very old and faded, workman’s boots and a straw hat. The leopards had been shot a century before by a party of tourists in British India. The skins had been sent to a Bombay tailor. He hadn’t made a very good coat—there were bullet burns in the collar and sleeve. The boots had been borrowed from a building site near the Charing Cross Road. The hat had been made in the West Country Workshops for the Blind.

  Her name was Baxter because her father had wanted a son and he was a stubborn man who didn’t like to be contradicted. Baxter had managed to contradict him only twice in her life. 1. She had insisted on remaining a girl. 2. She had refused to pursue her education at a finishing school in Switzerland and enrolled, instead, at a dismal London college of art.

  Charlie watched her walk from canvas to canvas, frowning, snorting, wrinkling her nose. Fat Harry had hung a set of landscapes. French Vineyard in High Summer. Spanish Harbour at Dawn. Storm Clouds of Portugal. Picturesque views in lurid colours. Baxter Pangloss wasn’t impressed.

  When she had finished her tour of inspection she marched briskly towards the corner desk, her boots crunching on the polished pine floor. She clasped a portfolio under her arm.

  ‘This is good,’ she said, tugging savagely at the ribbons and pulling open the marbled boards to reveal a pile of drawings. There was something in her voice, Charlie thought, that suggested everything else in the room had just been condemned as bad.

  He took a peek at the first drawing. It was a meticulous examination of a decomposing haddock.

  ‘Why do you hang this rubbish?’ Baxter complained, glaring into a painfully bright Sun Sinking on an Alpine Meadow that flared like a firework on the wall, creating a halo above Charlie’s head.

  ‘It’s very popular,’ Charlie said, trying to absorb the insult without looking up from her drawings. He’d been told so often by Harry that he was a popular genius, the common man’s artist friend, he’d almost come to believe it was true.

  ‘I’m not surprised that it’s popular,’ Baxter snorted. ‘It’s dreadful!’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Charlie demanded impatiently, frowning as he glanced around the gallery.

  ‘It’s puerile,’ Baxter said, flicking the hair from her lovely face. ‘What are you advertising, the Greek islands or cheap flights to Spain? It looks like an exhibition of giant holiday postcards.’ She was certainly beautiful but, oh, she could be cruel!

  ‘They are giant postcards,’ Charlie said. That was the secret of his success. Whenever he’d tried to paint his surroundings Fat Harry had refused to hang the work. People wanted romance. They wanted to be carried away to exotic scenes in foreign lands. They wanted to look at a painting and dream. They wouldn’t buy pictures of London attics. So Charlie had been presented with a shoebox full of postcards and told to work his way around the world.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ Baxter said, shaking her head. ‘It’s crazy.’ She looked flummoxed.

  ‘It’s simple!’ Charlie growled, trying to smother his irritation but raising his voice to a shout. ‘Nobody is going to buy a pencil drawing of a decomposing trout!’

  ‘It’s a haddock.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s smoked wild salmon!’ Charlie said. He slammed shut the portfolio and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms against his chest as if locking himself away.

  ‘Are you going to look at the rest of my work?’ Baxter said, quite unmoved by his outburst.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you can’t sell it?’

  Charlie shrugged.

  ‘Are you the owner?’ she grinned. She looked as if she suspected the whole operation might be a hoax, an elaborate practical joke.

  ‘I’m the artist.’

  ‘Jesus!’ She spun on her heels and
swept at the gallery walls with her arms. ‘Why do you waste your time painting scenes from travel agents’ windows?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you paint from life?’

  ‘I don’t have a life,’ Charlie retorted. ‘I’m far too busy painting postcards.’ It was meant to sound like a smart remark but as he said it he knew it was true.

  ‘Don’t you ever do figure work?’ Baxter asked him.

  ‘What sort of figure work?’

  ‘Life studies. Nudes. How can you hope to understand form until you’ve mastered the nude?’

  Charlie said nothing. He’d made several brave attempts to copy figures from the best of Skirt Lifter magazine. But the copies had not been a great success—it was difficult to consider a nude wearing a wig and a Playtex™ girdle.

  Baxter retrieved the portfolio and rummaged through her drawings. She pulled out a pen and ink study of a naked woman with breasts as long as cucumbers. A page of clenched fists. A watercolour of several feet. A sheet of charcoal penises. She spread them over the gallery floor so that Charlie could admire them.

  ‘Look at the figure in that picture!’ she said, turning with contempt on Charlie’s Dutch Windmill in Tulip Fields and prodding at the canvas with a slender finger crusted with rings. ‘Is that a man or what?’ She frowned and wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘It looks like a carrot in clogs.’

  ‘l taught myself,’ Charlie said, stung by her criticism. He’d been rather pleased with his simple Dutch peasants. ‘I never went to life class.’

  ‘So what did you do at art school?’ Baxter said sarcastically. ‘Cake making and carpet weaving?’

  ‘I never went to art school,’ he said at last. He lunged forward, making the chair legs clack on the floor, spreading his hands on the desk, defeated. She had made him feel like a fraud.