Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  The smaller man must have seen my lips moving. “What?”

  “Nothing. I—I—”

  “You see, you are frightened. It is natural. Nobody likes pain. I don’t like to see pain myself. As I said, this is not our usual method. It is a question of efficiency. We require the information you have and this seems the quickest way of obtaining it. We have little time, you understand. Alfredo, another hit so he doesn’t forget how it is.”

  The hit came and I hadn’t forgotten. I burst out with a torrent of the foulest language I knew: against them, against myself, against the pain. It was either that or tears. Or shitting myself.

  “It is not pleasant,” the smaller man said. “But please don’t make too much noise. Or we will have to silence you.”

  “And then how will you get the information?”

  “It will take more time, it’s true. But it will be even less pleasant for you, so I don’t think it is in your interest.”

  “Does he do everything you tell him?” I said, nodding toward Alfredo. These questions were all a way of keeping myself calm—from fouling myself.

  Alfredo made a menacing step forward, saying, “Stronzo,” and the little man said, “We have no hierarchy. But he is obviously more suited to the muscular work than I am. Again a question of efficiency. True, Alfredo?”

  He replied as usual in Italian, “True. But why explain things to this borghese shit? He doesn’t want to understand.”

  “We are wasting time, true. Where is Sambon? And where are the paintings?”

  “Paintings?”

  “Yes. Another hit unless you start to—no. Paintings. I have a better idea.” He went over to the stacks against the wall and picked up a small work. Chelsea Wharf: Homage to Whistler. He picked a corner of the canvas, pulling it away from the stretcher. Then he took out a cigarette lighter and flicked open a flame.

  “No!” I yelled in undisguised panic.

  “Ah. You get the point. Please speak.”

  “But look, I really don’t know anything.… I got talking to Toni at this gallery last night and then on the way home, and I just happened to see a photograph of this Cima painting in his bag, and I got curious.…”

  “You just happened to see. I require more truth.” His flame caught the corner of the painting, and spread as a tiny blue ripple across the Thames. He kept the cigarette lighter there, feeding it. I could only repeat, “No, no, no,” as I watched the flame curling up the canvas, catching the wooden stretcher as well. “You filthy bastard.”

  He trod on the last burning fragment, reduced it to ashes. “That was to convince you. I hope it was sufficient.”

  Alfredo laughed briefly, slipped the cosh into his pocket, and picked up a painting himself. Waste Ground in Wapping. He didn’t want to be out of the fun obviously. He took out his own lighter.

  “Look,” I said, and my voice was close to a sob, “you can surely see I’m telling the truth now, how could I not be? I don’t know anything. That photograph fell out of Toni’s bag in the street because we got involved in a fight, I happened to recognize the painting and got curious, today I went round to his house to ask him about it, they told me he’d gone. That is all I bloody know. All. Please put that painting down.”

  Alfredo wasn’t to be denied any bit of fun that his friend had had and fire swept across Wapping. I think I may have screamed at the same time, I don’t know. I was scrabbling in the chair as if I could feel the flames licking at my own body.

  Alfredo dropped the last bit of flaming canvas with a curse as he got scorched—and I didn’t even get any satisfaction out of that—and kicked it away from him.

  The smaller man said, “That’s enough. Let us hear this story again. You recognized the painting. It is of course so famous.”

  “No, of course it isn’t. But I like Cima de Conegliano. I once went to the church in Treganzi to see it there and—”

  “And perhaps it was then you decided it was a good painting to have.”

  “Look, I was a student at the time, a poor bloody student.”

  “Poor.” He didn’t snort. Just repeated the word. “You don’t know what it is, poverty. But this isn’t the point. We know Toni had a contact in London. Or that Toni’s Venice contact had one.”

  “What the hell do you know about what I know or don’t know,” I said. “What the hell do you know about my life.” I wasn’t clear why in the midst of all this savagery this point should have angered me so particularly: maybe because this cool assuming arrogance seemed to be the clue to his whole behavior—that and the fact that he was a bastard. While Alfredo was obviously just a bastard, e basta, as they say in Italian.

  With the same arrogance he ignored this question. “Toni obviously came to London to meet this contact. Someone in the art world.” He waved a hand around the studio. “This, I suppose, is the art world.”

  “Toni spoke to me for the first time in both our lives in that gallery last night. We were nearly all from the art world there: what do you expect—bloody footballers?”

  He picked up another painting, looked at it at arm’s length. A car scrap heap: one of my better works; beautifully played-down chaos of colors; I saw it through a haze of sudden tears—the colors swam, it became a piece of chromatic abstractionism. I said, “Please, I’m telling the truth—” I was about to say, “Not that one,” but stopped myself in time; it would hardly have helped.

  “Let us try another question,” he said. “Who is Toni’s agent in Venice?” The lighter was already on, the little flame a steady glowing menace.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know!” A crescendo to a scream.

  The car scrap heap became a furnace. Then ashes.

  “You see how stupid this reticence is.” He now strolled to the easel. “The agent’s name in Venice. Where is Toni? Where are the paintings? Three questions. Three answers. Then we go. We leave you to tidy up. Paint those little pictures again.” He bent to look at the swan—his sinister blank face next to the swan’s sinuous white shape. “Not bad. Cima must be an inspiration.”

  “What are you going to do with the Cima?”

  “We have a buyer. The source of the money is not clean, but the money is necessary.”

  “Necessary for what? Who are you?”

  Alfredo spoke quickly in Italian. “He’s asking too many questions. Don’t answer him.”

  The smaller man said, speaking in Italian too, “Don’t worry. He knows anyway. And he understands Italian too, I’m sure.” The eyes turned to me: it struck me that what was so disturbing about them was not that they were penetrating or shrewd but that they were as unmoving and expressionless as the mask; they suggested that the mask was his natural face.

  “Are you going to answer these three questions?” he said in English.

  Maybe I should invent answers. “The agent in Venice is called Scarpa,” I said slowly. Scarpa is one of the commonest surnames in the city. “Toni is now in Scarborough with the painting.” I had an aunt who lived in Scarborough.

  “Where?”

  “Scarborough, in Yorkshire.”

  “Why there?”

  Because my aunt lives there. Because of the fair. “I don’t bloody know.”

  He jerked his lighter at the corner of the painting.

  “No!” I screamed, struggling in the chair. The flame caught hold—a spreading blue and yellow wave. Suddenly the rope jerked open—he was obviously not a skilled knot tier—and I leaped toward the easel just as the swan became a phoenix—but a phoenix which, like the swan, wasn’t going to rise. Wasted Effort. Alfredo grabbed at my left shoulder and whirled me around. My fist flung out and connected with his mask. Then I was on the ground, on my back. Alfredo was standing over me with the cosh out. The mask had slipped, so his head looked sickeningly askew, but all I could see of his real face was a black beard. The easel was a flicker of light to one side. I made another squirm toward it, and the smaller man shoved the whole thing to one wall where it collapsed i
n a flaring heap.

  “Oh, my God—no—” I saw the flames catch the nearest stack of paintings.

  “Andiamo,” said the smaller man. And suddenly they were out of the room. This obviously looked like it was becoming too public an affair. The front door opened and closed, but I was hardly aware of it. I jumped up and ran to the curtains and tugged. They came down in a velvety slither. When I turned, the whole stack was ablaze. I took one step forward and trod on the end of the curtain and fell flat again. I found myself fighting with the curtains: the whole thing would have been a scene from a Laurel and Hardy film if it hadn’t been my future flaring up there. I struggled up again, saw that the other stack was alight too. I threw the curtains over the flames.

  Half a minute later it was clear I’d saved Jim’s house. And a minute later it was clear I’d saved one and a quarter of my paintings. Rain over Clapham Junction and a few stranded oil drums from Thames at Low Tide. Too damp to catch alight.

  5

  THE bell rang repeatedly and I suddenly realized who it was. “Oh, hell,” I said, and got into my dressing gown. “Coming,” I yelled.

  “Ah, up bright and early as usual, I see,” Adrian said facetiously when I opened the door. And then seconds later: “Martin, are you okay?”

  “No. Come in. Out of the rain.” It was pouring down. Even Adrian’s earnestness was a little bedraggled. He turned and waved to a taxi and the taxi drove off.

  “Told him to wait until I was sure you were in,” he explained.

  “I said I would be.”

  “Yes, I know but—Martin, what’s the matter? You look terrible.”

  “It’s not a hangover. At least not only.” Of course I’d got smashed. What else had there been to do?

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s have some coffee and then go—oh, bugger it, let’s go to the studio and then have some coffee. You’ll need it.”

  He took off his coat and hung it on the bottom of the banisters, looking at them anxiously as if suspecting them of being about to collapse. Then he followed me into the studio.

  I had cleared up nothing. The ashes, the charred curtains, charred canvases, the broken easel, the toy gun all lay exactly where I’d left them as soon as I’d ascertained the extent of the damage. Clapham Junction and Thames Mud lying against the wall did nothing to cheer the scene up. Even the coffee stain from the kicked cup of two nights before was still there.

  The only relief was to keep one’s eyes on the upper half of the wall and enjoy the colorful riot of Jim’s postcards. I wondered whether to suggest this to Adrian.

  “Martin, what have you done?”

  “I had a bit of a funny accident. Dropped a cigarette end and whoosh.…”

  “But you don’t smoke.”

  “I know. That’s what makes it so funny.”

  “What do you mean? Are you being funny—facetious, I mean?”

  “I’m being a riot. All right, it wasn’t just a cigarette, it was a joint. So I deserve all I got.”

  “Martin, Martin. What made you…?” He shook his head.

  “It was a bloody accident. I’ve just told you.” It had taken me only five minutes’ thinking the previous night to decide not to go to the police. After all they most likely wouldn’t believe a word of it. And if they did believe just half of it, they’d end up convinced for the other half that I’d wanted to get my hands on the Cima for my own nefarious purposes.

  That had been about the full extent of my logical thought; then I’d started on the whiskey—and at a later point the tears. Well, they’d diluted the whiskey.

  “So there’s going to be no exhibition?” he said.

  “Well, unless you think those two are enough,” I said, pointing to the one-and-a-quarter scenes of forlorn dampness. At about two A.M. I’d been thinking of putting a foot through Clapham Junction. Why hadn’t I? It had probably been too much like effort.

  “Martin, it was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  “Why should I do such a self-destructive thing deliberately?” As I said this I kicked the curtain so that it covered the toy gun, which he hadn’t spotted yet. I couldn’t think of any explanation for that.

  “Because it was self-destructive perhaps?”

  “Let’s have some coffee, Adrian.” When he just stayed there, staring at Clapham Junction and Thames Mud, I said, “Coffee, I promise you, not cocaine—or cyanide.”

  “It’s a nice picture,” he said, pointing to Clapham Junction.

  We went to the kitchen and I put the kettle on. After a long silence I said, “Well, at least nobody’ll be able to say I did it for the insurance.”

  “Because you weren’t insured.”

  “Correct.” The kettle boiled and I poured the water into the mugs. “So I suppose they’ll just say it was a publicity stunt.” I gave him his mug and he stared into it as unenthusiastically as if it were the mud of my painting. I began to elaborate on my accident story. I had at one point thought of telling him that local thugs had broken in just for the hell of it, but then thought that Adrian would probably insist on calling the police, so accident it had to be. “No, it wasn’t a joint. I don’t smoke anything, as you know, but you might as well use that as a story to tell other people; they’re bound to believe I was high on something. The truth is I was burning a little charcoal and a bit fell on a rag on the floor and I just didn’t notice. And I’d stacked all the paintings up against the wall and…”

  He didn’t pay much attention. At the end he said, “So you weren’t smoking a—a joint.”

  “No.”

  “But you see, you deliberately choose a self-destructive story to tell me.” Again he shook his head slowly. He finished his coffee and put the mug down with the look of one who has carried out an unpleasant duty. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Tidy up, get dressed…”

  “You know what I mean. Your future.”

  “Become a sculptor. Working with asbestos or something.”

  “Seriously Martin.”

  “Get down to bloody painting again. What else can I do? Though I might try for a teaching job as well.” I was inventing on the spur of the moment. “Either that or join a monastery.”

  “I’ll make you an offer.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you three thousand pounds for that painting in there—I’ll buy it myself. Now. If you promise to get down to work again. Get an exhibition ready for the end of the year.”

  I thought about this. “It’s very generous, but … I can’t accept it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, not quite like that. I’m going to get back to work, of course I am, but not straightaway. So it wouldn’t be right to take the three thousand on those exact terms.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but I might be going away for a little.” This was as much news to me as it was to him—but as soon as I’d said it I knew it was right.

  “Of course, take a breather. You haven’t been on holiday once yet. My offer still stands.”

  “And suppose for some reason I don’t manage to get a show together by next year?”

  “You must. But all right, let’s say that in that case, and if I still haven’t sold that painting for a sum superior to three thousand pounds, you’ll take the painting back and repay me.”

  “Okay.”

  And there, on the kitchen table, between an empty yogurt carton and a beer can, he wrote out a check. He then rang for a taxi and we went back to the studio.

  “And was that painting you rang me about really good?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it was.”

  “Oh, Martin.”

  “Oh, Adrian. Look, I appreciate the sympathy but do you think you could cut down on the slow sad headshakes?”

  “Sorry. Where will you be going?”

  “I’ll let you know with a postcard.”

  We made some rather artificial chat about other topics—the weather even—un
til the taxi came. I suggested he leave the picture until a sunnier day but he just glanced at the charred mess on the floor and said, “No, I think perhaps, er…”

  I thanked him again for his generosity and then I was left alone to my thoughts.

  I looked around the studio. Just Thames Mud left to console me now. I shook my head—but quickly, firmly—and walked out of the room. I’d break down again if I stayed staring at that mess any longer: I went to the kitchen and stared at the check instead.

  That lifted me slightly: pulled me out of the mud—the slough of despair. It wasn’t only the money, welcome though it was; it was the confidence that it showed Adrian had in me. I had to build on that, if I didn’t want to sink down into another miasma of misery and hopelessness—like last night.

  I had no chronological awareness of what I’d done or felt or thought after the thugs left. It was all a confused nightmare: I’d got drunk and I’d raged; I’d been haunted by visions of blank faces around me, over me, masked figures holding coshes, wearing judges’ wigs and jailers’ uniforms. I’d heard the clunk of my cell door over and over again; I’d groveled in the ashes, and then, after knocking the bottle over, wept into them—indeed, my only certain memory was that the whole nightmare had ended in deliquescence: myself unable to rise, weeping over Thames Mud, and a sludge of whiskey-soaked ashes, and listening to the rain outside. And all this with the curtains open—or rather, absent.

  I picked the check up. It crackled between my fingers with a reassuringly crisp, dry sound. I gazed out of the window but I wasn’t seeing the gray rain now but the sunlit meadow and pool of the Cima painting. Suddenly I found a new determination for the future: I was not going to give up on that painting; I was not going to let either Osgood or those two bloody thugs get their hands on it. I was going to be personally responsible for the return of the picture to its church. The previous day I’d let myself get involved in the mystery of the picture through a desire to do something for art that didn’t have the doubts attached to it that my own works did. Well, now all I had of my own works were the doubts, so there was all the more reason not to let the Cima matter drop. No, this would be one unwasted effort: this swan would take flight.