The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Jesse felt a wave of disappointment: she wasn’t interested. He turned back to his group.

  ‘This lovely jacket is embroidered with motifs, hidden signs which at the time were symbolic of the pains and pleasures of love, including arrows, flaming cornucopias and lovers’ knots and so forth,’ he told them. Annie pretended to look at another painting but could not resist listening to him.

  ‘Cornucopia?’ a Japanese man asked.

  ‘It means lots of things, many symbols, much going on.’ The guide waved his arms about. ‘This painting has become one of the most famous and instantly recognised pictures in Western art. It is our male Mona Lisa.’

  His audience still looked confused.

  ‘Mona Lisa?’ one lady questioned.

  The guide clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. What a dolt. You probably haven’t been to Paris. It’s a painting in the Louvre? By Leonardo da Vinci.’ The guide looked back at Annie slightly desperately. She smiled back – there was something attractive about him. He held her glance for a moment. She noticed that he had tawny coloured eyes deepset in a wide face, with high cheekbones. His hair was thick, dark and unbiddable; some falling over his face, other bits springing in the air. Annie noticed that the collar of his shirt was worn down and that the cuffs were held together by paperclips. Unused to the scrutiny of strangers, she turned away – where was Evie when she needed distraction?

  She didn’t have to look far. Evie had taken the painting out of the plastic bag and was comparing it to others on walls. A room attendant watched her warily as she pushed through the crowd of Japanese tourists, past the guide and held it beside the Laughing Cavalier. Next to the Frans Hals it looked completely out of place, the figures too whimsical and lightly painted compared to the solid cavalier. Annie saw the guide glance from Evie to the painting. At first he seemed to dismiss the canvas, but he took a second, harder look and was about to say something when Evie whipped the picture away and headed for a painting of a woman in a heavily flounced dress with one delicate silk shoe peeking out of the hem.

  Annie walked over to join her mother. The plaque said Madame de Pompadour by Boucher. Annie and Evie looked between the two paintings. There were definite similarities in the way that the paint had been lightly applied, and the foliage and composition seemed similar. Both had figures in the foreground in an Elysian setting overlooked by a statue, but the use of paint, one feathery and vibrant, and the other muted and stagey, convinced Annie that they were by different hands.

  They moved on, holding their picture up to endless scenes of half-naked shepherdesses, impudent putti, and lascivious male onlookers. To Annie, these women were stripped not just of clothes but also of their dignity: they were bent into supplicant, cloying states of come-hitherness. The colours that the artist used were like the fillings of cheap chocolates: pale blues and yellows for the skies, pinks for the flesh, a riot of pastels. The two women stopped by The Ball by Jean-Baptiste Pater.

  ‘I’m sure this is the painting that Carlo used as inspiration for the sets of The Sun King,’ mused Annie.

  ‘Do they ever do anything original in film?’ Evie, like many, considered film a very poor relation to the other arts.

  ‘Bad artists copy; good artists steal,’ Annie said.

  ‘Who said that?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘A filmmaker is working in many dimensions but getting the backdrop right is crucial. It is no different to preparing the canvas if you’re an artist or learning grammar if you’re a writer. You are creating a mood, a world for the viewer to step into.’

  ‘So is this a pastiche?’

  ‘I’m quite sure that Pater learned by copying the stuff that came before him and that his teacher was copying his master. We’re all copycats,’ Annie said, thinking of Platina’s book of recipes.

  Over on the other side of the room the guide was telling his tourists about another painter, Antoine Watteau. ‘Here is the painter who started this whole genre known as the fête galante, depicting elegant figures in theatrical, historical and contemporary dress in park landscape settings,’ she heard him say. ‘Today it’s known better as Rococo.’

  Evie marched across the room and barged through their midst carrying the picture. ‘Come here, Annie, and look at this!’ she called out.

  Annie, mortified by her mother’s behaviour, edged quietly away hoping that the guide would not associate them.

  ‘Annie, Annie!’ Evie shouted. ‘Come here and look at this bloke’s face. It’s just like the man in your painting!’ Evie leant over the red rope and held Annie’s picture up against the painting by Watteau.

  A gallery attendant sprang out of his chair and ran towards Evie. Annie prayed silently for Evie to calm down and move on.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s a striking similarity?’ Evie asked the guide.

  The guide looked at both paintings closely. ‘I can see definite similarities. He’s a much-copied artist. Rightly so,’ he added tactfully.

  ‘You academics are frightened of your own shadows,’ said Evie rudely and turned to the Japanese tourists. ‘What do you think? Come on, use your eyes, not your theories, like this chump.’

  ‘Madam, can I ask you to keep a respectful distance from the paintings or we will have to ask you to leave,’ the attendant said.

  ‘You have eyes, can’t you see?’ Evie shoved the picture under his nose.

  ‘I am here to protect the art works.’

  Evie stepped over the rope and leant in towards the painting.

  ‘Both have the same doleful expression. And it’s the same statue in the background.’

  Evie’s observations were drowned out by the noise of an alarm and the sound of running feet. Within moments guards surrounded Evie and, pulling aside the rope, took her firmly by the arms and marched her away from the paintings.

  ‘Don’t you manhandle me,’ she squawked. ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I am an art lover. Unlike you barbarians. Leave me alone. I’ll write to my MP.’

  Annie saw her mother frogmarched out of the other door.

  The Japanese were talking excitedly among themselves. Annie caught the guide’s apologetic glance. I’m sorry, he mouthed. Annie grimaced and left the gallery with as much dignity as she could muster.

  Outside the museum Evie, with the picture tucked under her arm, was entreating other visitors to change their plans. ‘Don’t go in there – it’s full of heathens. If you so much as look at a painting they try and chuck you out.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ Annie asked, catching up with her. ‘You are very lucky they didn’t arrest you and press charges.’

  ‘Who are they to say, just because something hangs on their walls, that anything else is crap?’ Holding the picture up in front of her, Evie proclaimed, ‘I believe in you.’

  Annie sat down on the wall. Evie was following an all-too-familiar pattern. She must have had a drink just before she got to the office. The walk and fresh air rushed the alcohol through her system and the high set in near the Laughing Cavalier. Soon Evie would start to come down. She would cry, find another drink, get happy, withdraw and on and on, round and round.

  Annie, longing for the relative calm of the Winkleman kitchen, walked away from Evie. Her mother could find her own way back to the flat.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a man’s voice called her. Pulling her coat around her, Annie hurried on. Surely the gallery wouldn’t need to take a statement about a lone batty woman. Surely she would be able to walk away from this incident without further embarrassment.

  ‘Miss. Please wait.’ The guide caught up and walked besides Annie. ‘I’m sorry about in there.’

  Annie said nothing. Her face burned with shame.

  ‘I bought you a postcard of something that looks a lot like your painting. It’s only a drawing but I think you can see the similarities,’ he said, holding it out for her. Annie stopped and took it but still didn’t look at the guide.

  ‘That lady had a point. The two pictures do look
alike. The figures are very similar – and so is the background. If you wanted to explore it further.’

  Annie interrupted him before he could continue, ‘I’m really not interested. That thing has brought nothing but bad luck.’

  ‘If you change your mind,’ the guide called after her.

  Annie did not look back.

  Chapter 5

  Barthomley Chesterfield Fitzroy St George liked what he saw in the full-length mirror. He was sixty-nine years old but had kept his flesh taut with surgery and his figure lithe with daily calisthenics and a sniff of cocaine before mealtimes. His eyes had turned a rather watery blue but his teeth were Hollywood perfect. His hair, thick and luxuriant, was mostly his own and every part of his body was exquisitely groomed and polished by a team of manicurists, facialists and masseuses. Though he could no longer be described as elfin, Barty (as most knew him) was in, as he liked to say, ‘frightfully good nick’.

  ‘That darling man has done a good job, don’t you think?’ Barty said, appraising his newly tightened jawline.

  The Lady Emeline Smythe, his twenty-two-year-old social secretary, nodded.

  ‘You look, like, really buff.’

  Barty smiled graciously; he had to agree.

  ‘The sign of successful surgery,’ Barty continued, ‘is not to be told one looks young; it’s to be congratulated on looking well. And it was frightfully reasonable,’ he added. ‘Less than a new car or a weekend at the Cap. Perhaps I’ll get a brow lift next summer. Botox is so deadening.’

  ‘Mummy is really jealous,’ said Emeline. ‘Daddy says she has to choose between a new face or a new horse.’

  Em’s father was sitting on an estate of ten thousand prime Lincolnshire acres. ‘Can’t he just sell a few fields and give her both?’ Barty did not understand the aristocracy’s priorities.

  ‘Daddy says all the land is in trust for my brother,’ Emeline replied wistfully. ‘He says I’d better hurry up and get married while I still have a face or I will be on the shelf without a dusting.’

  Silently Barty agreed with her father. Em looked adorable now – full-lipped, peachy complexion, a tiny ski-jump nose and cascading blonde hair – but those kind of looks never outlasted the first blush of youth.

  ‘Your aunt Joanna has let herself go,’ Barty said. ‘I saw her at the Devonshires’ the other night. She sat down and her bottom spread over the sofa like a ripe Brie.’

  ‘Poor Aunty Jo,’ Emeline said with feeling. ‘She never got over losing Topper.’

  ‘I thought her husband was called Charles?’

  ‘He was – Topper was her Pekinese.’

  Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Frances, Barty’s PA, brandishing a pen and a handful of stiff invitations. Frances, as broad and sturdy as a Highland pony, dressed like a matron from a public school. Her eyes swivelled in different directions but she never missed a trick and everyone, including Barty, was a little bit scared of her.

  ‘You have four invitations for the weekend of the seventh of June – the Sheikha of Alwabbi, the Duke and Duchess of Midlothian, Elliot Slicer and the Brommages,’ said Frances.

  ‘They all sound rather tiring,’ said Barty, sitting down on a pale pink sofa. ‘Who has the best garden? I am desperate to see a dash of colour. This winter has been so miserable, even the hellebores are late.’

  Frances loomed over him, waving the invitations. Barty closed his eyes.

  ‘One does love roses in June. What do you think, Em?’ Barty opened one eye and looked at Emeline, whom he employed partly because her father was the most handsome Marquess in England but also for her supposed knowledge of the social scene.

  ‘There’s probably not many roses in Arabia or Texas in June. The Brommages are on their boat so I’d suggest the Midlothians – Daddy says they have a beautiful estate.’

  Barty groaned loudly, ‘Darling! Their castle is in northern Scotland and everything there blooms at least a month later. Didn’t your parents teach you anything?’

  Emeline was mortified, ‘Sorry, Barty. I hate Scotland, I try not to go there.’

  ‘Don’t we all, darling, don’t we all,’ Barty agreed.

  Frances pursed her lips. ‘You’d better accept the Alwabbis – with all that gas they are getting richer by the second and we are trying to run a business.’

  ‘Don’t use the word “business” darling. It’s common,’ Barty said plaintively.

  ‘Is it common to have food on our plates and a roof over our heads?’ Frances said in her sharpest tone.

  ‘Whatever Frances wants,’ Barty said meekly.

  ‘I will accept their Royal Highnesses on your behalf.’ Frances smiled curtly and left the room.

  Barty’s main indulgence (though he saw it as a calling) was his cottage orné in Regent’s Park. Built for a duke’s mistress in the late eighteenth century, the White House was a perfect minature neoclassical palace built by the architect James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, set in a glade in the middle of the park. When the descendants of the Duke of Plantagenet tried to sell their heirloom to developers, Barty fought an impassioned campaign to save it and persuaded the judge to let him purchase and restore it for the nation and, for ninety days a year, keep the staterooms open to the public. The White House gobbled money – if it wasn’t the roof it was the plumbing, the boiler, the windows, the gutters or the wiring. Barty loved it with an unbridled passion and every penny of his large fees went into his pet project.

  A tremendous rustling of plastic and polythene heralded the arrival of Barty’s valet, Bennie. Barty adopted a different persona for each major social occasion. The more outlandish the look, the more likely he was to be ‘papped’, and press, he claimed, was good for business. Mainly, press was good for Barty’s mood; he adored being in print. Even the worst photograph, the cattiest aside, gave him pleasure. He kept large scrapbooks full of his clippings and on dark winter’s nights would spend contented hours reviewing past looks and parties.

  Every Monday morning, he and Bennie discussed forthcoming social engagements and inappropriate outfits. Barthomley insisted that every detail should be perfectly nuanced. ‘Thank goodness for eBay,’ he’d often remark. Today, in honour of the anniversary of Elvis’s first number one, they had settled on a Teddy-boy look; Bennie scoured vintage shops to find an original 1950s suit, crepe-soled shoes and a wig with a duck’s-arse quiff.

  ‘What do you think of these?’ asked Bennie, holding up a maroon-coloured jacket and preposterous black wig.

  ‘Love, love, love. The pink lapel is simply divine.’ Barty said, clapping his hands together, slipping into the coat, and looking at himself in the three-way mirror.

  ‘I literally am Elvis,’ said Barty with no apparent irony. ‘Darlings – I’m worried that it’s too convincing. What happens if no one guesses that it’s me?’ he said, spinning around in front of the mirror.

  ‘Do you think the audience at the first night of Der Rosenkavalier will think that the King decided to be reincarnated at the Royal Opera House?’ Bennie reasoned.

  ‘But do I look handsome?’ Barthomley worried that the combination of a shiny black wig and his pale sixty-nine-year-old skin was unflattering.

  ‘I’d have you!’ Bennie laughed.

  ‘Careful. I might take you up on that!’ They both knew he wouldn’t; Barthomley thought sex was frightfully common and best left to the young.

  Even after fifty years of Barthomley being in the public eye, of being photographed with every famous person in and out of town, no one from his home of Keddlesmere had ever recognised him or got in touch. His younger self, born Reg Dunn on 14 March 1945, had left home on 14 March 1960, and never gone back. At the age of fifteen, he knew that there was no future for ‘queers’ in Keddlesmere. Shedding his old persona like an unwanted skin, he created a new identity by stringing together the names of the villages he passed through while hitchhiking to London. Reg Dunn was dead: long live Barthomley Chesterfield Fitzroy St George.

  On his first
night in the city, Barthomley was picked up by a Tory minister in Piccadilly Circus tube station, who recommended the young man to his colleagues and from there, young Barty graduated from ‘The House’ to the stately homes of England. ‘I learned at the feet of the greats,’ he was fond of saying. ‘I was on my knees; they were standing.’ Within five years, Barty went from rent boy to best man. It was not only that Barthomley came of age in an era where the differences between classes blurred, when it was chic to have friends from different backgrounds, but the main reason for Barty’s social success was based on a simple fact: he was a life-enhancer. Whether you were stuck in a shooting butt on a Scottish moor, on a royal train in Rajasthan, or at a dowager duchess’s tea party, being with Barty made everything much more fun. His unquenchable thirst for life, his ability to see the ridiculous (particularly in himself) and his genuine love of people was compulsively endearing. Barthomley Chesterfield Fitzroy St George became known as ‘darling Barty’ and Society’s fixtures and fittings were planned around his availability. The rough edges of his accent fell away, and within a decade he was such an integral part of upper-class life that most assumed his people were titled.

  But unlike his new set, Barty had no trust fund, no indulgent spinster aunts and no education to rely on, and rotating around the house parties of England, being the life and soul of every county, was exhausting. Barty longed for some independence, a pied-à-terre to escape to and a nest egg for his retirement. His career started by accident: in 1979, with the fall of the Shah of Iran, London was suddenly awash with wealthy displaced Persians with money to burn but no idea how to spend it. For a fee, he found them apartments, decorators, personal assistants and tailors. He showed them which bars and clubs to frequent and educated them in the nuances of British life. He helped his protégés throw monumentally extravagant parties. He soon found out that the higher his fee, the happier his client. The more he charged, the more secure they felt.