Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  All that concerned her was how she should present herself when she rang the bell of No. 26, as she was about to do.

  *

  Claudette Verlon was not expecting anyone on that Monday afternoon and very nearly ignored the persistent ringing of the doorbell. There were so many annoying callers these days, people wanting sponsorship, people representing charities (or so they said) selling useless articles, and, lately, beggars, refugees, asking quite openly for money. She had had an intercom fitted and a chain put on the door, and practised extreme caution.

  She had never felt like this in Paris. Her husband vowed that the situation in Paris was exactly the same, that there were no areas in any major European city which could be guaranteed absolutely safe, but Claudette did not believe him. He only told her this to persuade her that there was no point in moving back to Paris, which she had wanted to do for a long time. Her children were all living there now, and she wanted to be near them. But Jacques was adamant: next year, he would retire and then she could live wherever she wanted in Paris. He did not fail to remind her, either, that she was the one who had chosen this Chelsea house when he had been moved to London. He himself would have preferred Regent’s Park, and had said so.

  The house had charmed her then, as had its very beautiful owner, the tragic widow Mortimer. Claudette had convinced herself that the atmosphere in the place was congenial and that it ‘spoke’ to her. In spite of the comparatively recent death of Mr Mortimer, the house had seemed a happy place, bright and warm and full of evidence of a surely contented family life. She had been won over, and enthusiastic enough about the purchase to rush her husband into it. And for the last twenty years the house had proved comfortable and they had been happy there. As an investment, it could not have been bettered, and so, from being annoyed with her, Jacques had become proud of his wife’s acumen and boasted about it to his friends and colleagues. It was he who was now reluctant to sell, when the time came, and move back to Paris, but Claudette was determined. They were going to make a huge profit and she intended to take advantage of the money which would be theirs to buy some exquisite apartment in, possibly, the Ile St Louis area. She did not want another house. With the children gone, she and Jacques needed only a few rooms, elegant and spacious rooms of course, but only, say, four or five of them, preferably conveniently arranged on one floor. They had started married life in two rooms in Montparnasse, and Claudette found herself these days remembering them with more and more affection, though at the time she had yearned for more space.

  This nostalgia was part of the reason why all those years ago she had bought what she hoped was a Gwen John painting. Not the most important reason, not by any means, but part of it. The excitement of a true ‘find’, if the painting were to be authentic, and therefore extremely valuable, justified her buying it, but the sentimental element was there too. She had a strong suspicion that she had paid far less for it than it was worth. A quick call to Christie’s and Sotheby’s art departments told her that no oil by Gwen John had come on the market in the last fifteen years and that it would be difficult to estimate how much such a picture might fetch. It was not signed, and its provenance was unconvincing, but she was sure that the so-called ‘expert’ called in by the Mortimer family’s solicitor had not known what he was looking at. His verdict had been ‘could be … is in the style of … matches an existing painting of the same interior’, but he hesitated to confirm it as a Gwen John. He had wanted to call in other experts – Cecily Langdale had been mentioned – but the family was impatient, and very satisfied with Mme Verlon’s cash offer. The deal was done, and she carried home the little picture and hung it back on the wall of the room where she had first seen it. It looked far better than it had done against Mrs Mortimer’s décor. Claudette had stripped the walls of their wallpaper and had them painted a distressed pale yellow, the colour of the primroses. She had the carpet lifted and a blond wooden floor laid down, and the furniture in the room was all old pine – good quality, nothing glossy, and all of it almost bleached in colour. No drapes, but a lace curtain in front of the window. No wickerwork chairs, but a comfortable button-backed easy chair upholstered in pink – again, picking up the touch of pink in the flowers in the painting.

  Nobody else used the room. It was Claudette’s ‘boudoir’, but she was rarely in it for long, and she liked to think of it quiet and empty, graced by the picture. She walked through it from her bedroom, on the way to the landing, and imagined she felt a soothing breeze as she did so, though there was no window. Jacques used the other door of their bedroom, never trespassing on what he knew was her territory. If she wanted to give a whole room to one tiny painting, then let her: there were enough other rooms in the house for this not to be outrageous. Sometimes, he would find his wife standing looking at the painting, an odd smile on her face, and he would wonder at the power it had over her. Occasionally, when they were quarrelling (which was not often) he would shout at her to calm down and go and worship her wretched painting. She went. The effect was magical.

  When the door-bell rang that Monday afternoon, Claudette was on the top floor of the house, looking for a certificate her daughter had asked her to find and send to her. So, when the noise continued and became irritating, it was easy for her to open the window and peer down to see who was standing on the doorstep, without their being aware of being spied upon. All she could see was the top of a head, but it was clearly a woman’s head. Claudette waited. She guessed that this caller would eventually descend two or three of the stone steps – there were eight of them – when she gave up ringing the bell, and she would get a better view. The woman, a young woman, neatly dressed, definitely not a refugee, slowly backed away from the front door and then hesitated halfway down the steps. She was wearing a rather chic jacket, of a subtle shade of green, and she had a matching green ribbon tying back her long, black hair. This decided Claudette.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘Hello?’

  The woman looked up and smiled. ‘Hello!’ she shouted back. ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but my family used to live here and I wondered if I might possibly come in for a moment and ask you something. My name is Gillian Mortimer. Are you Mrs, er, Verlon?’

  ‘Wait,’ Claudette shouted back, and closed the window. All the way down the many stairs, she was thinking about the widow who had sold the house to her. This young woman looked like her – she had had no need to give her name. It was safe to let her in.

  *

  The house was quite different from how Gillian had imagined it. Her father had described it as ‘a spacious family house’ but it seemed grander than that. The staircase alone was impressive, so wide that surely four people could walk abreast up the stairs. She decided immediately that she would not have liked to live here. Mme Verlon was not the sort of woman she had envisaged either. She did not look French in the least, if to be a Frenchwoman of a certain age was to be chic and elegant, impeccably groomed and dressed – Gillian had seen her in her mind’s eye, small and slight, wearing a Chanel suit and expensive pearls. But the woman who opened the door was rather stout and a little masculine in appearance. She had short, cropped grey hair, wore no make-up, and was dressed in black, baggy trousers and a loose cream sweater. She was not unattractive but seemed more powerful than sophisticated. Her gaze was very direct, even haughty, and she spoke English with only a trace of accent. She made Gillian nervous.

  Mme Verlon took her into a formal drawing room. ‘Do sit,’ she said, and sat herself, on the very edge of one of the sofas. She had her hands clasped on her knees and a polite, enquiring expression on her face.

  Gillian cleared her throat, feeling suddenly embarrassed. It seemed ridiculous to have come at all. ‘My father, Cameron Mortimer, lived here, he was born here, it was his home until he was twenty-two.’ Mme Verlon inclined her head, encouragingly. ‘When my grandmother was widowed and sold the house she took very little of what had been in it – all the furniture and possessions were sold. But she took one of
the pictures to the flat she’d bought and later, after she was killed in a car accident, there was a … a fight over it, between my father and his brother.’

  ‘A fight?’ Mme Verlon looked astonished.

  ‘Yes. I know it sounds weird. My father won’t talk about it. But it seems that my uncle was going to take this little painting and my father objected and it was sold and … well … you bought it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mme Verlon said, ‘the Gwen John?’

  ‘Was it really a Gwen John?’ Gillian could hardly keep the excitement out of her voice.

  There was a pause. For a moment Mme Verlon’s face still wore its enquiring expression, but then a frown took its place. Ever since the retrospective of Gwen John’s work at the Barbican in 1985, she’d been faintly worried that the Mortimer family would realise that they had surely let a treasure go. She’d thought about them as she looked at the paintings and became more convinced than ever that what she had in her possession was indeed a variant of The Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris. Her painting must by now be worth at least twenty times what she had paid for it. She had been astonished, in 1988, to read that a Gwen John oil, The Precious Book, had been sold for £160,000, and this had made her feel nervous about what she possessed. She’d thought about taking it to be authenticated by the organisers of the exhibition but then there would have been questions as to its provenance and she did not want to mention the Mortimers. The painting was hers, and she loved it, and that was enough – she did not need that stamp of authority. She was almost fearful to show the painting to anyone who might recognise it, and last year, after she had visited the latest Gwen and Augustus John exhibition at the Tate Britain, this apprehension had grown. It was beyond doubt that the painting she possessed was also by Gwen John and she felt guilty, as though she had cheated the Mortimers deliberately.

  But nevertheless, she nodded, and told the young woman that yes, she was almost certain it was a painting by Gwen John, a variant of the well-known painting of her room in Paris. ‘You know her work?’ she asked.

  ‘My art teacher took us to the exhibition at the Tate,’ Gillian said. ‘I loved her paintings. They are so quiet, very simple and pretty.’

  ‘Quiet, simple, perhaps, in effect at least, but pretty? No, I don’t think so. It seems the wrong word, if I may say so, a little insulting.’

  ‘Do you still have it? The painting?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘I was wondering if you might allow me to look at it?’

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor where Gillian was led through a large bedroom into a smaller room, and there on the wall was the painting, looking exactly the same (except for its frame) as the one she had seen in the Tate exhibition. She couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘It amuses you?’ Mme Verlon asked, seeming surprised.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Gillian said. ‘It’s that it is such a modest little painting to have caused so much trouble – I can’t quite believe my father could have got so angry about James wanting it.’

  ‘Ah, but it would not be the painting itself which caused the disagreement, I’m sure. In these cases, it is nearly always to do with the significance of what is fought over.’

  ‘Yes, of course, that’s right, that’s the point. But all the same, it’s hard to guess what the significance was. My father doesn’t care about art. I wouldn’t have thought this painting would have made any impression.’

  ‘It is a beautiful painting,’ Mme Verlon sounded offended. ‘Even if it were not a Gwen John, though I believe it is.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I haven’t had it examined by an expert.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘On the contrary, why? I love it. It means a great deal to me. I would never sell it. I don’t need to know, I trust my own judgement.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Gillian said, after another few minutes. ‘I’m glad to have seen it. I like to think of my grandmother loving it.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Love it?’

  ‘I assume so, if it was the only picture she took when she left this house.’

  ‘She did not seem to me exactly to love it. She knew nothing about art. The painting had some history for her which was not, I think, entirely happy.’

  ‘Really?’ Gillian couldn’t keep the curiosity, the eagerness to know, out of her voice, but Mme Verlon was already leading the way down the stairs and straight to the front door. Clearly, her patience had been exhausted.

  Coming level with her, Gillian attempted delaying tactics. ‘You were saying you suspected that the painting had an unhappy history for my grandmother?’

  Mme Verlon shrugged, her hand on the catch of the door, about to open it. ‘It is a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I was only with Mrs Mortimer once, for an hour. I cannot remember why I had that impression. You must ask your father.’

  ‘Oh, he knows nothing, or if he did he won’t tell me.’

  ‘It is private, perhaps, too painful.’

  ‘But she’s been dead ages.’

  ‘Family matters can still be painful.’ The door had been opened.

  ‘Thank you for letting me see the painting, and the house,’ Gillian said.

  ‘You were lucky to come now. Soon this house will be sold and we will move back to Paris.’

  ‘Will the Gwen John go too?’

  ‘But of course.’

  Gillian hesitated. She had her camera with her. ‘I hardly dare ask,’ she said, ‘but could I take a picture of the painting?’

  Mme Verlon looked annoyed. ‘Why did you not make this request when you were looking at the painting?’

  ‘I didn’t like to.’

  ‘And now you’d like to?’

  ‘It was hearing that you’ll be taking it to Paris.’ She blushed, knowing this hardly made sense. ‘I’ll be very quick. Please?’

  Abruptly, Mme Verlon shut the door and pointed up the stairs. ‘Two minutes,’ she said. ‘I am busy, I am going out.’

  Gillian raced up the stairs and through the bedroom into the small room where the painting hung. Her hands trembled as she took her camera out of her bag. The light was good and she didn’t need a flash. Quickly, she took a dozen shots, one after the other, and then rushed back to the hall, camera still in her hands. Mme Verlon had the door wide open. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, and got a brief smile in return.

  All the way back home, she was thinking of the painting. What had been its power? Why did it have such a hold over her grandmother? How could any single painting have been so significant to her family?

  *

  The photographs came out well. Gillian had the best one enlarged and then she framed it. The choice of frame was tricky. At first, she’d thought a simple, plain, narrow wooden frame would suit it best, but the simplicity of the frame somehow worked against the subtlety of the painting. She tried a broader frame, still of plain wood, with the same result, then decided on a darker wood. This worked better, though it was not perfect. But it looked convincing, especially from a distance, and it was from a distance that her father was going to see it.

  She planned it well. There was a small spare room on the ground floor at the back of their house. A sofa-bed, a small table, and a bookcase – that was all it held. It had a sash-window overlooking the garden, which faced south and let in plenty of light. It was an innocuous room, uncluttered, without personality, and would do very well.

  Gillian hung the photograph not on the larger wall opposite the window but on the wall to the right of it. It looked as if it had been there for ever. She stood in the doorway and imagined her father walking in and seeing it – his shock would surely be impossible to hide. Then she would pounce, when he was still reeling, and ask him why his mother had cared so much about this painting. What was the unhappy history Mme Verlon had alluded to? She could hardly wait.

  *

  Cameron Mortimer had never been entirely happy about his daughter study
ing art. She was a clever girl, why did she have to do something so lightweight? He didn’t see anything to do with art as being a proper career. Nonsense, his wife had said, there were plenty of ‘proper’ careers following on from studying art. But his disappointment in Gillian’s choice was intense. Perhaps if he had had a son, or even another daughter, he would not have cared so much, could have brought himself to look on an art education more indulgently, but Gillian was his only child and bore the brunt of his disappointment.

  He loved her, though. There was no doubt about that. He adored her, and not just for her beauty and talents. Everyone else’s daughter seemed to him dull and dreary beside Gillian whose vitality sparkled wherever she went. He could remember picking her up from school one day, soon after she’d started, and feeling such an overwhelming sense of joy when he saw her running towards him across the playground, ahead of the other children, making them all look somehow slow and dull. Everything about her seemed so bright – how she looked, the way she spoke. And other parents were aware of it. He saw them admiring her, and he worried that this admiration might turn into resentment. But it didn’t. Gillian wasn’t a show-off. She rather inclined the other way, adopting a self-deprecating manner quite early in her school life, and Cameron was glad to see it. He didn’t want her to be too aware of her own talents.

  It had taken him a while to realise how good she was at drawing. ‘Look at this,’ his wife had said, when Gillian was only six. He’d looked, and seen a picture of a man and a woman, wearing brilliantly coloured clothes, standing in a garden. Their heads were a bit large, he thought, and all their features exaggerated. Beth had been exasperated. She told him that children of six are mostly still drawing stick figures and can’t do proper bodies or faces. He’d accepted her word, without thinking his daughter’s ability special. But by the time she was ten, even he had realised that she had talent. He watched her draw their cat jumping from the window sill and had been amazed at how she’d caught the swift movement.