Rogue's Gallery

by Robert Barnard

  Because talk was getting around. The ridiculous words ‘evil eye’ were gaining currency. In the wake of talk about deaths and near-deaths there came talk about the picture: nonsense about people who had seen it bathed in a hellish red light, about terrible eyes that seemed to spew sparks, more tales about disaster occurring to those who had gazed too long or commented too scathingly on the subject. Some such as Silvio, who saw the painting often in the course of their duty, felt that some process of internal heat was burning away the dirt of centuries, to reveal the blazing eyes as more terrible each day. The talk even got into the popular press. ‘It is as if the evil spirit of the painting, dampened by centuries, gathering dust in a cellar, has gradually reawakened, has flexed its diabolical muscles, and is now wreaking vengeance on the unfortunate visitors to the Gallery Cenci-Corombona,’ said one daily paper too low to be taken at the Palazzo, but seen by Silvio.

  That piece alone was enough to scare the tour operators. Americans are the most timorous tribe on earth and, after the Italians, the most superstitious. The numbers on the pre-booked tours dwindled, as many chose to go shopping on the Via Veneto instead. Then tours were cancelled altogether, with no reason given. Casual Italian visitors now passed the doorway of the palace with a boding shake of the head. Silvio, anguished by self-blame, joined his master in watching the daily comings and goings in the gallery, and listening to the comments. So few were coming that it would soon cease to be a viable concern. Those that did come viewed the dim and dusty body of the collection, but when they came to the Van Dyck Room they sped by it. ‘You wouldn’t catch me going in there,’ they heard one English visitor say. Another claimed to have seen a terrible light penetrating even the thick velvet curtains, and had heard supernatural music.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ Silvio said sotto voce one day to his master, as they stood in the long gallery that ended in the Van Dyck Room, ‘that the experiment is running into difficulties.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the prince, though the heartiness in his voice rang false. ‘It’s just that the novelty has worn off for the moment. The numbers will pick up again.’

  ‘It’s the recent publicity,’ insisted Silvio. ‘People don’t forget that kind of thing. I don’t see the numbers ever recovering from the stories of people dying after coming here.’

  ‘Pooh, pooh! It will take more than the nonsense in the Rome scandal sheets to destroy this gallery. Their sensations are five-day ones. They will soon be forgotten and people will start streaming back.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I wonder whether we should continue to show the Van Dyck.’

  ‘But the collection is nothing without that – at least not specially remarkable,’ amended the prince hurriedly. ‘Showing the Pope Julius was a brilliant suggestion on your part.’

  It was the first time Silvio had heard his own part in the creation of the gallery acknowledged – when failure was staring them in the face. It irked him.

  ‘Nevertheless, I notice that you don’t go and view the picture, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Why would I? That ugly old scamp means less than nothing to me. Why should I ruin my digestion looking at him?’ Silvio remained silent. The prince, rightly, thought he was being challenged. ‘Oh well, if you think it would restore confidence.’

  Squaring his shoulders, without so much as a glance at his fairly loyal butler, Prince Paolo set his long, tweed-clad legs in motion and, watched by the little knots of visitors to the gallery, strode past his Teniers and his Sustermanns, further, further down the long room until, unlucky gambler to the last, he pulled aside the heavy curtain and entered the brightly-lit alcove.

  THE NEW SLAVERY

  It had all started so innocently.

  ‘Dad, could you do me a favour?’

  Terence Munday regarded his daughter-in-law. Her plump, squat body always reminded him of an over-full plastic shopping bag.

  ‘Of course, Gloria, if I can.’

  ‘It’s the next two weeks. My boss is away, and all his work is landed on me. I’ll have to go in one hour early, just to keep my head above water.’

  ‘You want me to take the children to school and collect them in the afternoon.’

  ‘That’s right, Dad. You can drive them straight home and leave them there. They quite like being their own bosses, and Victoria is very good at sorting out any problems.’

  Terence kept shtum on whether he would leave the children to their own devices at their home or bring them there to his own semi in one of the western suburbs of Leeds.

  ‘I can manage quite well for a fortnight,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll enjoy it.’

  And enjoy it he did. He had always liked the three children and he wished that Gloria and his son Martin showed more evidence of loving them, or of having wanted them in the first place. Having them in his own house without their parents to shout do’s and don’t’s at them was a little fountain of pleasures and satisfactions. He resurrected old games that Martin and his sister Joy had played as children, he dusted down jigsaws, tried to digest the rules of Cluedo and Totopoly and bought drinks, biscuits and cakes he knew they liked.

  ‘Bags I sit beside grandad,’ said Victoria, aged eight, and conscious that she was a favourite. ‘He finds it difficult to master the rules.’

  ‘Cheeky brat,’ said Terence, loving it.

  Larry was seven: he had been born to complete the family, and he was almost as bright and on the ball as Victoria. Marcus was four, was always announced as an accident, but had never managed to sort out in his mind traffic, air or railway train, the only things he had ever heard paired with the word accident. Terence loved him with a trace of pity for the weakest branch. The children were good friends with each other, but Terence never took them home and left them there. He knew that if he got there at six-thirty Gloria would arrive back within a few minutes, and he stayed there until she did. She made no comment on this, and certainly did not regard it as a criticism of her own lower standards. Terence had to admit that his son Martin was a policeman whose hours of work were horribly irregular – a fact which did not make things easy for the household.

  When the two weeks were up, nothing was said. After he had been going through the routine of collecting them from home at eight-thirty, driving them to school, then meeting them out of school at three-twenty, driving them to his home, feeding them and playing with them, then driving them to their own home, Gloria did say the odd words of thanks such as ‘You’re a brick,’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ but she never put any warmth into the words, and she never suggested payment for his services, though he knew she earned many times his pension from the local authority which had employed him as a gardener. The assumption seemed to be that these services were given with love and paid with the same coinage. Terence did once hear, through an open kitchen window, Gloria say to a neighbour ‘I wouldn’t insult him by suggesting it.’ He decided he wouldn’t have accepted any offer, but he wouldn’t have been insulted by it either.

  Though Terence did not measure his services to his family in monetary terms it was inevitable that now and then the question of money would come up. When Victoria complained that her school blouse was getting tight and there were holes in her school socks, Terence took her after school to the shops in Pudsey that stocked them and bought a blouse and two pairs of socks. When Gloria came home that evening he said:

  ‘Oh, Victoria needed a new blouse and one or two things. I’ve kept the receipt.’

  He handed the scrap of paper over, and Gloria grabbed it on her way to the kitchen. She crumpled it up, and Terence suspected that she threw it straight into the bin under the sink. He never brought the subject up again, but from then on he had to force himself to speak respectfully to his daughter-in-law, or even keep up a friendly tone.

  Some nights when he was not too tired he tried to put together a summary of how much being au pair to the little family cost him. He took all his supermarket checkout slips and noted down all the food items bought for the fam
ily or shared by them. He noted down petrol, then roughly how much their share in any little treats cost him. Then he found a figure for the heating of the house, and made a guess at their share in the water rate.

  He never even thought of handing Gloria a bill. In fact he never completed the complicated sum. He worked off something by trying to come to an estimate, but it made him feel too mean. He couldn’t calculate how much looking after the grandchildren cost him because he could never cost the other side of the equation – the joy that having the children with him brought to him, the pride that he took in their successes in exams and in games and PT at school.

  He soon had an addition to his little family. His daughter Joy was married to a teacher, and though his hours made this a convenience there were times when his job took him out for an evening, and Joy as well. There was between Joy and Gloria an edgy state of near-open warfare, and Joy told her husband she didn’t see why she should pay for babysitters on social occasions when she knew Gloria and Martin got their father’s services for free. She brought it up with Terence, and he told her he could well manage little William for a few hours after school, but he needed the later hours in the evening to recuperate after looking after the children for three or four hours a day.

  ‘I’m not as young as I was,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, Dad,’ said Joy. ‘I meant after school.’

  So William joined his cousins now and then, and Terence welcomed the chance to get to know him better. Quite soon Joy forgot about his need to have his evenings to himself, and Terence didn’t like to mention it, because, as he told his friends in the King’s Arms, it was only now and then. There never was a slave who cooperated more willingly in his enslavement.

  The children of course talked. All children talk, except the seriously abused.

  ‘Mummy slapped Marcus last night,’ said Larry.

  ‘I expect he richly deserved it,’ said Terence.

  Terence was always careful never to let a word of criticism of Gloria cross his lips. He was of a generation that did not regard a slap as ‘violence’. He never mentioned it to her, or treated such an event as anything other than normal behaviour in families.

  ‘Daddy didn’t come home last night,’ said Victoria, as they were getting ready to go home one evening.

  ‘Policemen’s hours are cruel,’ said Terence. ‘They do an awful lot of overtime if they’ve got a difficult case on. It’s rotten for the families.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ began Victoria.

  ‘Well, my darling?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’

  It was three days later that Terence, making sure his voice was casual, entirely non-inquisitorial, asked: ‘Is your Daddy still very busy?’ The children looked at one another.

  ‘Yes,’ said Victoria. Then, after a long silence, she said: ‘Mummy says she doesn’t know when he’ll be back.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Terence found he did not know what line to take, so it just came out as: ‘You know you’ve always got me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Larry. ‘And we could always come and live here, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Of course you could,’ said Terence.

  He was conscious of Victoria wanting to say something and feared it was some comment on his age. So he said: ‘Let’s not say anything about this now. And please all of you, don’t say anything about it at home. So far as we’re concerned, I know nothing about it. Much better that way. It’s probably that your Dad is just having a brief fling, and he’ll come to his senses.’

  ‘What is a fling?’ asked Marcus. As so often he was ignored.

  As it turned out Terence was underestimating Gloria, as one often does people one doesn’t like. Gloria realised perfectly well that the children would have talked to their grandfather about the disappearance of his son. She arrived one afternoon with a couple of suitcases of clothing.

  ‘Dad – you’re going to have to have the children for a few days. I can’t let this business with Martin go on any longer. I’ve got to find something to do about it. Either he’s the father of this family, and comes home to them in the few hours a day he can call his own, or he has gone off permanently with this floozie he’s taken up with.’

  Terence led her off to the kitchen. ‘So he’s not come back. Has he written? Phoned?’

  ‘Not a thing. Of course I’ve known about the floozie for months.’

  ‘You managed not to reveal it. I had no idea before I talked about it with the children.’

  ‘Well, you know I never want to upset you. There’s plenty of changes of clothes in the suitcases, and most of the things don’t need to be ironed. It’s best there are as few changes as possible. The children don’t like being talked about at school, and I’d certainly prefer it that way. Bye Dad.’

  So from then on Terence was on his own. He already had the key to the children’s home, so he could go there for any clothing, game or toy that one or other of the children might want. When they went round, the children looked at the rooms as if they found it odd that nothing had changed from visit to visit. Their relief at closing the door on the place was obvious.

  Terence tried to keep a balance in all things. If he brought home a bright pair of socks for one of them, he was careful to provide a comparable treat for the other two. The children at school never noticed any change in the Munday children, so there were no explanations to upset them.

  When Marcus reached five, a five-pound note came in the post with a postcard from the bottom drawer with ‘Love, your Mum’ scrawled on the back and a cosy kitten on the front. Marcus was at this time into animals.

  ‘You’re like me,’ said Terence. ‘I used to love animals, though it was wartime, and there weren’t many toys to be bought.’

  ‘What did you like best?’ demanded Marcus.

  ‘My kangaroo. He was called Kanga, or Jackie. I loved him, and I cried blue murder if he went missing.’

  ‘What is blue murder?’

  ‘A big fuss,’ said Terence, who made a mental resolution to avoid such words in future.

  ‘Can I have a kangaroo too?’

  ‘If we searched around in the attic we could probably find old Jackie. Then we could get you something else.’

  ‘Yes! He’ll need a lot of loving if he’s been up in the attic for ages and ages.’

  So they found the brown knitted kangaroo, and the five-pound note went towards a panda, who was loved but not as Jackie was loved. Terence decided Jackie got the residue of love that Marcus found it difficult or confusing to express to his grandfather.

  The next birthday was Victoria’s. Nothing came on the day, or for more than a week afterwards, but then a real birthday card came, with a ten-pound note and ‘Thanks for all you’re doing Dad’ on the inside. ‘It’s really for you, grandad,’ said Victoria, quite without grievance or rancour. The last card to come had coincidentally a kangaroo on it. It came from Gloria who was in Australia, but she was a month out for Terence’s birthday.

  By now the children were entirely settled with their grandfather. So confident and happy were they that Terence wished his wife was still alive, so she could see. She had loved Martin and Joy, but she had sometimes shook her head and said: ‘They’re all for number one, both of them.’ Terence would have liked to have introduced her to their grandchildren and proved that a rather dubious inheritance from the parents need not signify an unhappy and self-obsessed future. He loved the way the quartet (because William came round more and more, having no companions at home) absorbed all his teachings (because Terence was a born teacher, skilled in disguising what was taught with a spoonful of sugar). When they were all out together they often met friends and very kindly involved him in conversation and activities. ‘This is our grandad,’ one of them would say. Later it was ‘This is our grandad – he is looking after us’, and later still it was ‘This is our grandad – he looks after us’ and he knew that if they had mapped out a future in their minds, it put him always in the position of parent. It warmed him, but still he worri
ed a bit about it too.

  One day when they were all at school he decided he ought to do something about the children’s father. He had heard nothing at all from him for the eight months he had been looking after them. He decided to ring up Martin’s last permanent police station.

  ‘Could I speak to Martin Munday please?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Martin Munday. He was attached to you last year I know.’

  ‘Oh, Munday. Yes, of course. I’ll put you through to Inspector Platt.’ Inspector Platt was audibly embarrassed. He asked Terence to come round to the station.

  ‘Look,’ said Terence. ‘I don’t need to be handled with kid gloves. Martin’s my son, and I know he’s not perfect. I’m seventy-two but I’m perfectly healthy, and I have three children to look after. My day is pretty busy, and I’d be obliged if you would do this on the phone.’

  ‘Yes … right … well – Martin is currently under suspension. He first came to our attention at the time of his separation from his wife.’

  ‘Is that what it was?’

  ‘At that time. And the detective squad at Halifax where he was stationed was investigating a crime gang in that town that had links with a really big and nasty Manchester gang. We think your son took over the leader’s mistress when she was becoming more trouble than she was worth to the gang. We think he leaked police plans and information, then began to forge links with other gangs. That’s when we moved in and suspended him. It got into the Manchester papers, but nowhere else. I’m sorry you had to hear it like this.’

  ‘So am I.’