The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Vlad still had no idea what the ageing Elvis was talking about but decided to nod simply to keep him quiet.

  Taking Vlad’s enormous hands in his own tiny, beautifully manicured fingers, Barty looked up into the Russian’s face. ‘We are going to have such fun. I will pick you up at six tomorrow.’

  Barty let go of the Russian, spun around and slipped out of the door. He was going to miss the first act of Der Rosenkavalier. Lady Montague would be frightfully cross – lots of extra white roses tomorrow – still Barty didn’t mind: this Russian was going to be one of his greatest transformations.

  Chapter 6

  Let me guess what you are thinking. Girl finds picture; picture turns out to be worth a fortune. Girl (finally) finds boy with a heart. Girl sells picture, makes millions, marries boy, all live happily ever after.

  Piss off. Yes, you heard, piss off, as the cake tin at Bernoff ’s used to say (it was decorated with Renoir’s Les Parapluies, which explains quite a lot).

  Life is not that simple.

  For a start, am I a masterpiece? Are you taking my word for it? What is the definition of a masterpiece? Ultimately it is just a painting that a lot of people like. If no one can see me, how can a consensus be reached?

  Perhaps I am having a good old tease. Maybe I am just an old fake. Pulling your leg, as the bootjack used to say (it was his only joke).

  So it doesn’t matter if I am what I say I am or not. What matters is that you want me. You might not know you want me yet but once I have told my story, once you understand, you will all want me.

  My future depends on people believing that I am worth something and need protecting. Art only survives by striking a chord in someone’s heart and offering solace and reassurance. A great picture is the distillation of emotion, offering an empathetic hand across time and circumstance. A wonderful composition inspires sympathy and harmony. No wonder mortals fight to possess us.

  Right now, I am worth less than £100, my absolute nadir. The sum total of admirers is two. And one of them, the old drunk, smeared my foliage in butter and animal fats.

  Even so, the young guide gave me a second look. Maybe if Annie had not turned his head, he might have looked even more carefully at moi.

  I am not ratifying this union. Look at his crumpled suit. Second-hand, I guess. The guide is not moneyed. I need prosperity; my best chance of seeing out another century is wealth. The less I get sold on, the better the roof, the longer I’ll survive. We are not encouraging old corduroy. Non.

  Let’s return to the day of the museum visit. The sheer ignominy of being stuffed into a bag with three sandwiches. Thank God it was dull old Edam rather than pungent melting Cheddar or Stilton. Shocking, really. Imagine how it felt when I was produced in front of all those old acquaintances, including lesser paintings by Pater and Lancret; mere imitators of my master.

  There were whispers of recognition, a gasp of collective horror when I was whipped out from the bag: if it could happen to moi then it could certainly happen to any of them.

  I had hung with some of those pictures in a former life, including that clutch of Canalettos bought by the first Marquess of Hertford. Canaletto, as we all know, knocked out those Venetian landscapes with alarming frequency. He was a painter bedevilled by his own success – those endless canals were so prized that poor old Giovanni could never sell anything else. Imagine how boring it was painting and repainting those smelly old waterways.

  I digress. It is a bad habit of mine. It comes with age and loneliness. The coffee pot at Bernoff ’s used to call me Pontificating Peter. I ignored the barb. I would ask you to read on or you might miss some vital plot details. You might even learn something.

  Back to the Wallace. Most works of art and the furniture in that venerable institution were bought to demonstrate the wealth and superior taste of the owner. The original Hertfords didn’t know about art. They didn’t have to: they had wives and advisors who told them what to buy and when. Behind every great collector is an army of dealers, consultants and critics. This did not lessen my humiliation when produced like a lapin out of a chapeau and manhandled by a drunken floozy, nearly arrested, shoved back in plastique and bundled back out into the cold. Outside, the mother concocted a premiseless fight with the daughter and stormed off. She didn’t need an excuse – the desire to drink always wins. Annie warned that this time she wouldn’t get her out of the cells. We all know she will, though. Annie’s urge to care and protect her mother is as strong as Evie’s need to self-obliterate.

  Evie took me on a tour of various public houses where I was nearly left in the plastic bag on the bar not once but twice. Many hours later we arrived at the ‘home’ and I was slung in the corner. One was almost nostalgic for Bernoff ’s. I never thought I would say that.

  By the time Annie got home, the mother had passed out. Taking me carefully out of the plastic bag, she gently wiped the butter off my foliage and stared at me for a long time. One was not sure if she was thinking of a long-lost love or moi.

  Rummaging in her bag, she brought out the Wallace postcard and held it up next to moi. It is a drawing rather than a painting and though it was not a study for moi, it was of a similar scene: delicate foliage, clothing, hairstyle and mood.

  My master drew constantly and all for the love of it. In drawing he stands unsurpassed by the great masters. Ask a Rubens or a Raphael who is the most brilliant and original draftsman. Go on, check with a Rembrandt or a Titian while you’re at it. Antoine is right up there. Indeed, I would say he’s never been equalled when it comes to piquancy of pencilling. He had an unrivalled freedom of hand and lightness of touch. With a few flicks of red, black and white chalk, usually on grey paper, he captured the fineness of a person’s profile and made their cheeks sing with purple blushes and their eyes vivid with a radiant gloss. Another incandescently brilliant effect was to run white along the side of black, adding charming radiations and illuminations. He was especially fond of drawing the backs of figures so that he might capture the coiffures of the period. There wasn’t a lot of money to pay sitters so models had to be caught unawares, at salons, in the parks.

  The sketches of the landscapes were done in red chalk – pensées à la sanguine. (This is not a national dish.) The studies of foliage and tree bark exhibit minute care and exactitude. His lightness of touch was as delicate as the brush of the petals of a flower or an alighting butterfly. An almost Impressionist manner separates blades of grass on a flower-decked bank. From these extraordinary sketches, my master introduced dabs of paint in the lightest way, as if fragments of colour had just blown in. He painted in gold and honey and every stroke was tuned to the mood of the moment – l’heure exquise. His landscapes were effulgent with the brilliance of high noon, his figures represented sartorial lighthouses; his ladies shook glittering rays from their silken skirts while the slashed sleeves of cavaliers were like gleaming lanterns. His beauties had a sort of désinvolture (get a dictionary). My master was the poet painter of ideal daydreams; his work was as sweet and as free as breaths sent from heaven.

  I like to think Annie heard or intuited all this; and my master’s genius shone through the grime and varnish. For ten minutes at least her eyes flicked from the postcard to my surface, darting from the figures to the trees to the fountain.

  Then she turned the postcard over and saw a number scrawled on the back, with a name, Jesse. She smiled. I was quite overcome. She is extremely pretty. Of course she won’t ever call him; it simply isn’t done.

  Chapter 7

  In her imagination, and according to the recipe (admittedly written four hundred years earlier), Annie could see and taste the tart: a perfect confection of pistachio and pears floating in a pomegranate-and-geranium-scented custard. Though she followed the instructions down to the last grain of sugar, the pudding refused to set. It was three o’clock in the morning, less than seventeen hours to go before the first guests sat down at the Winklemans’ table. Annie’s tears dripped freely into the mixing bowl; she was
not crying for getting it wrong; she was weeping because she so desperately wanted to get it right.

  In the last six days, she had not slept more than a few hours a night: fear and excitement had kept her awake. The dinner presented the perfect opportunity to create a memorable and delicious feast and also the arena to test out a secret theory. Annie believed taste and aromas had the power to transport people from the present to other places. Sometimes this was a journey to a different mood, but it was also a form of time travel. For Annie, the subtlest whiff of freshly cut grass, or the essence of pine needles, a freshly risen cheese soufflé, the scent of a dog rose or a rain shower on autumn leaves, conjured up past summers. For the Winklemans’ dinner, she wanted to spirit the guests back to a world Caravaggio would have recognised; to leave the twenty-first century behind, if only for a few hours, and to feel their spirits and beings immersed in the late sixteenth century.

  Standing in her kitchen at home, surrounded by a meagre array of china bowls and saucepans, Annie felt enveloped by despair. She was in danger of losing her job and her fantasy at the same time. Turning off the gas ring, she went to the bedroom and lay down fully clothed on her bed next to her mother and immediately fell asleep. Not long afterwards she was woken by the grinding gears of the rubbish truck in the street below and lay for a few moments, listening to the scraping of bins. Perhaps, she thought, I should tell Rebecca to find someone else or scramble to secure a proven temporary chef – London must be full of cooks for hire. After a couple more seconds, she sat bolt upright; she was not going to give in so easily.

  Leaving the bedroom, she went over to the kitchen table, covered with library books and print-outs of recipes from Caravaggio’s time. She had decided on the first two courses: boned baby quails poached in wine served with gnocchi in a ricotta and watercress sauce followed by roast veal adorned with beads of onions, beetroot and grapes. Pudding, Annie reasoned, needed to be light and fruity and palate-cleansing. Perhaps, she thought, thumbing through the different options, I am making this too complicated. She switched from Roman and Sicilian recipes to Naples. She considered and discounted marzipan tartlets, pastries of prunes and soured cherries, a flower salad, slices of bread soaked in milk and fried with sugar and cinnamon. In a tattered old book, she found the perfect pudding – thin slices of quince and pear poached in honey and rosewater. These fruits would not be too hard to find. Annie decided to add ruby-coloured pomegranate seeds and tiny green leaves of scented rose geranium as decoration. Looking at the clock, she saw it was already 8 a.m. Exactly twelve hours to go till the first guest sat down. Taking out her computer, she emailed the final menu to the caligraphers who would create cards for each guest’s place setting.

  Septimus Ward-Thomas had a problem and as far as he could see, it was unsolvable. His institution, the National Gallery, was being asked to accept another significant reduction in their government grant while increasing both programmes and opening hours. His staff were already underpaid and overworked.

  ‘This country is facing an unprecedented economic crisis and we have to evaluate the relative merits of food banks versus museums,’ said Curtis Wheeler, special advisor to the minister at the Department of Culture. ‘My minister is sympathetic, but without something meaty and persuasive at next week’s spending review, then dot, dot, dot.’

  ‘Dot, dot, dot,’ Ward-Thomas said faintly.

  ‘You’re up against health and education,’ the special advisor said.

  ‘Grants to the arts represent a minute proportion of overall spending.’

  ‘It’s a matter of perception.’

  ‘Our visitor numbers are at an all-time high,’ Ward-Thomas protested.

  ‘You are failing to reach the minority sections of the population.’

  ‘Seven million people is a big percentage.’

  ‘But is it the right percentage? Or are there too many A/Bs, foreigners and old duffers?’

  The director guessed that Wheeler was about twenty-eight years old and a perfect example of the breed of ambitious young political advisors who had come straight from university to parliament, passing from quadrangle to quadrangle without a sniff at the real world.

  ‘The problem is,’ Ward-Thomas said sadly, ‘how to justify something that is by its very nature unquantifiable. There is no machine to measure the transformative effect of beauty, or the importance of contemplation, or even the amount of happiness inspired by coming here.’

  As he spoke, Ward-Thomas caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the advisor’s head. He looked exhausted: he was exhausted. Feted as the one of the youngest stars of his generation when he became director of the National Gallery fifteen years ago, Ward-Thomas now looked nearer seventy-five rather than his actual age of fifty-five. His once jaunty step had become leaden and his eyes were permanently bloodshot through lack of sleep. As a young curator he had been a heartthrob, with his thick thatch of blond hair, quizzical expression and his trademark red scarf thrown raffishly around his neck. Now the scarf had gone, along with most of his hair, and only a few of the bluestockings bothered to flirt with him any more.

  ‘Your problem is that all your stuff is passé,’ Wheeler said, running his fingers through his modish haircut.

  ‘Passé?’ Ward-Thomas asked incredulously. How could anyone describe beautiful paintings as past it? Surely age was a cause for celebration and their survival proved that these paintings were too powerful and meaningful to disappear into obsolescence?

  ‘I would think there is great comfort that the themes of suffering and joy recur from one generation to another,’ he said, wringing his hands.

  ‘Passé is old hat,’ Wheeler said firmly.

  ‘Old hat?’ Ward-Thomas said, fighting back tears of frustration.

  Mistaking the cause of Ward-Thomas’s watery eyes, Wheeler laid a reassuring hand on the older man’s arm. ‘You must long to be running Tate Modern. They have living artists who can explain what they are doing and why.’

  Ward-Thomas looked down at the pale white hand on his arm and then, raising his head, he said in a low serious voice, ‘We must kill modern art.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Wheeler, removing his hand quickly.

  ‘It was something Picasso said,’ explained Ward-Thomas. ‘He meant that once something exists it is no longer truly modern.’

  ‘I did Picasso at school,’ Wheeler said and laughed nervously.

  ‘If only we still lived in the eighteenth century,’ Ward-Thomas lamented. ‘Then most of our paintings would seem frightfully modern. After all, age is just a matter of perception.’

  ‘The other thing is,’ said Wheeler, ‘the Tate’s artists can be relied on to behave badly, whip up publicity, get people talking.’

  ‘I can assure you that no one behaved worse than Caravaggio,’ Ward-Thomas said. ‘He didn’t just get drunk, he murdered people.’

  ‘What were his dates?’ Wheeler asked, suddenly interested.

  ‘1571 to 1610, or thereabouts.’

  ‘So the tabloids won’t feature him breaking up a nightclub?’ Wheeler said, letting out a shout of laughter at his own joke.

  ‘People do talk about Old Masters,’ Ward-Thomas protested.

  ‘I’m not hearing it.’

  ‘Not necessarily the people you know.’

  ‘Movers and shakers, I presume?’ Wheeler said with unnecessary irony.

  Ward-Thomas sat back in his chair and looked out of the window into Trafalgar Square at Nelson standing high on his column surveying London. Noises from street performers and tourists almost drowned out the traffic and a busker sang a well-known folk song with the aid of a distorted amplifier.

  He wanted to tell Wheeler about the lady who had been coming to the National Gallery for over sixty years to look at one Canaletto because it reminded her of her lover, felled but not forgotten, in the Second World War. Or about the children’s looks of awe when they stared up at Whistlejacket, the life-size painting of a horse by Stubbs. He wondered if Wheeler wo
uld believe that some visitors came simply to find a quiet contemplative space away from the tedium and stress of their everyday lives, or that others looked to these paintings as beacons of hope because they showed that the human struggle is endless and universal.

  Wheeler had taken out a red notebook and pencil and looked expectantly at the director.

  ‘When I was a young man starting out in this world, it was enough to love and know about art,’ Ward-Thomas said wistfully.

  ‘You can still know and love it,’ Wheeler said. ‘But if you are expecting government funding, there are a few other boxes to tick. The minister is on your side but he needs something substantive to present, something to catch the Treasury’s attention.’

  Ward-Thomas cast his mind back to the staff meeting and to Ayesha Sen, one of his younger colleagues, who was always proposing ‘trendy’ ways of promoting art.

  ‘We have an interesting programme for unmarried mothers,’ Ward-Thomas said, feeling slightly ashamed, as he had tried, on many occasions, to block this idea of Sen’s. ‘We bring them in and show them lots of Madonna and Child paintings; it helps to remove the stigma.’

  ‘How do they react?’

  ‘Fine, as long as they get free tea and biscuits at the end.’

  ‘I will put that on your form,’ said Wheeler, writing in his notebook.

  ‘There is also the young offenders’ club – they get shipped in from Feltham and shown some of our tougher works, things by Caravaggio or Rubens. It makes them feel less stigmatised.’ Ward-Thomas did not add that this was yet another one of Sen’s ideas.

  ‘I’m liking this,’ Wheeler said. Finally a story was emerging, something he could tell his minister, who found describing the merits of art or museums nearly impossible: for him they were places to hide from the rain; like big bus shelters.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ Wheeler said jumping up and striding around the room. ‘Why don’t you install free Wi-Fi and then every student in London will flock here: your numbers will go through the roof.’