The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Vlad’s opinion of the art world was plummeting. In recent weeks he had looked at several highly prized, ludicrously priced and utterly baffling exhibitions. One artist had filled bookcases with hundreds of tiny pots barely visible behind heavily frosted glass, while another, a German, painted deformed upside-down figures in a sea of squiggles. Vlad had been offered a patch of graffiti by a dead street artist for more than the value of his new house, or the work of a wunderkind who lacquered flock wallpaper and sold it for hundreds of thousands. What made the whole sales process even more bewildering was that to buy one of these works, Vlad would have to join an exclusive waiting list, clearing time unknown. No wonder people preferred the cash-and-carry system of the auction house. The week before he had bought an Elvis and a Chairman Mao by Andy Warhol at Monachorum’s evening sale, hoping that the Leader would gratefully receive the King and the Potentate.

  To his surprise, the Office of Central Control liked Hirst’s fly-and-diamond paintings but rejected Chairman Mao with a note saying, ‘The Leader doesn’t want any reminder of slit eyes.’ This was as near to a joke as the regime got and Vlad had almost laughed. Barty put the Chinaman in Vlad’s new kitchen in Chester Square saying it was ‘chic’ to have $30 million hanging above the cooker.

  Vlad’s car turned through the vast ornate gates of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. The façade was floodlit and the stone steps were lined with semi-naked dwarfs dressed in gold togas and holding flares. An elephant stood disconsolately to one side, ridden by a young mahout wearing an oversized turban, who was almost blue with cold. The elephant swayed slightly from left to right.

  ‘That poor beast is everywhere this week,’ Barty said dismissively. ‘I saw him at Doris’s, then at the Credit Russe bash and again at the Astors’.’

  Vlad followed Barty through revolving doors to the foot of a grand staircase.

  ‘Make way, make way,’ Barty announced to anyone who might listen. ‘Meet Vlad.’

  A few turned curiously, but most were interested only in the business of seeing and being seen. ‘He’s frightfully, stinky rich,’ Barty said in a stage whisper. ‘Makes Croesus look like,’ – he hesitated, struggling for a suitable metaphor – ‘like a pound store . . . yes, he makes Croesus look . . .’ But, distracted by the sight of a wall of photographers, Barty instantly forgot his train of thought.

  Looking around, Vlad realised that his red T-shirt offered a rare dash of colour in a sea of black and white, punctuated by an occasional yellow or pink handbag and a turquoise glove peeking from a breast pocket. The men wore unstructured suits and white T-shirts. Most of the women sported dresses cut in angular patterns, their hair was often erratically cropped and many preferred identical heavy-rimmed spectacles.

  Barty’s outfit delighted the paparazzi and he twirled before them in a blizzard of flashbulbs. Vlad went up the grand carpeted staircase lined with young girls holding trays of champagne. Vlad wondered why the waitresses were so often better-looking than the guests.

  Worried that the Russian would tire quickly of the crowd and the paintings with their delicate courtly scenes set in ornamental glades, Barty left the photographers and, mindful of his tight seams, carefully made his way upstairs. Looking around the first room he was delighted to see many old friends and potential conquests. Barty had a strict ratio of chat to status: only the very important got more than a few minutes; the rest got an air kiss and a few sentences.

  The first person he saw was a harassed-looking Septimus Ward-Thomas of the National Gallery.

  ‘Barty, hello,’ Septimus said wanly.

  ‘You look tired, Septimus,’ Barty observed.

  ‘Exhausted, actually. The department is insisting on a restructure – whatever that means.’

  ‘Bloody bureaucrats,’ Barty said cheerfully.

  ‘Do you know, I am head of a major gallery but have no time to look at art? My diary is jam-packed with civil servants, union leaders, plutocrats and potential donors.’

  ‘I suspect it was ever thus, dear Septimus – van Dyck and Titian had to spend most of their lives kowtowing to their respective Charleses? Poor old Donatello could hardly pick up a chisel without Cosimo de’ Medici bursting into his studio. Stiffen your upper lip.’

  Barty moved off in the direction of Earl Beachendon on the other side of the room. Nimbly avoiding the plump and dull daughter of a client, he greeted the auctioneer warmly.

  ‘Barty, you look marvellous.’ Beachendon looked at his old friend with amused eyes.

  ‘One tries, one tries,’ Barty said, smiling. ‘So you know I have this nice big Russian who wants to buy art.’

  ‘The whole of London is talking about nothing else,’ Beachendon replied truthfully. ‘I’m longing to meet him.’

  ‘I will let you have him next Thursday. Can you throw together a little lunch party? Pretty girls and lots of shopping opportunities.’

  ‘You could be my knight in shining armour,’ Beachendon said.

  ‘There’s serious competition,’ Barty said. Both men understood the code.

  ‘Five per cent?’ Beachendon offered.

  ‘Call it six and we will see you next week.’ Barty smiled happily.

  ‘That leaves me with next to nothing.’

  ‘OK – five and a half if he spends less than three million, rising to six per cent after that.’

  ‘Four if it’s over ten million,’ Beachendon countered.

  Barty put his hands on his hips. ‘You are a hard taskmaster.’

  Beachendon smiled, ‘See you on Thursday.’

  Spotting Delores in a far corner, Barty headed in her direction. ‘Why are you standing here? It’s right out of the action.’

  Delores jerked her thumb behind her. ‘The canapés come out of that door. It means I am first in line.’

  ‘What am I going to do with you? If you get any fatter, I will be able to bounce you out of these doors, down Piccadilly and around St James’s Park.’

  ‘Your breeches are far too tight. I dare you to eat one crudité – I don’t think those seams will hold.’

  ‘Yours will burst before mine,’ Barty quipped back. Spotting Mrs Appledore across the room, he sprinted away from Delores.

  ‘Darling, your hair. I adore the pink rinse.’

  ‘My hairdresser said it was fetching’, Mrs Appledore replied, gently tapping her curls in place.

  ‘Can I copy you?’ Barty squealed excitedly.

  ‘Always,’ said Mrs Appledore, looking rather pleased; imitation was the best form of flattery.

  ‘You haven’t noticed,’ Barty said, turning his chin to the left and right.

  ‘You saw Frederick!’ Mrs Appledore clapped her hands together. ‘I can always spot his work. I love the way that he leaves a tiny dimple as his trademark.’

  Both Mrs Appledore and Barty had recently visited the Parisian plastic surgeon Frederick Lavalle. They also loved Patrick Brown for tummies but disagreed about who did the best knee tucks. Mrs Appledore preferred Wain Swanson in Kentucky (famous for working on thoroughbreds’ tendons in his spare time), while Barty had recently discovered a ‘darling man’ in Bangkok.

  ‘I am looking for the last trophy painting,’ she said. ‘Do you know of any?’

  ‘Masterpieces are so hard to find these days,’ Barty said.

  ‘It’s those Russians – they buy anything,’ said Mrs Appledore.

  ‘Don’t forget the Qataris,’ Barty reminded her. ‘They hold the record.’

  ‘When I was a young girl, it was a buyers’ market – you could have your pick of ten Titians. Now one is lucky to be offered a minor Canaletto.’ Mrs Appledore had rewritten her own history so many times that even she had forgotten her youth was spent on a farm thirty miles south of Warsaw and then in nunnery outside of Krakow.

  ‘Thank goodness for the three Ds: Debt, Death and Divorce. Eventually good pieces will come up,’ Barty said.

  ‘The museums spoil everything by buying things. It’s so hard to get works of art out of
national institutions,’ Mrs Appledore lamented.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, they are all so cash-strapped that it’s only a matter of time before they start de-acquisitioning.’

  Looking over Mrs A’s shoulder, Barty watched the Sheikha of Alwabbi walk up the stairs flanked by four ladies-in-waiting and seven security officers. She was dressed in a magnificent white cashmere couture dress and kid-leather shoes with diamond-encrusted heels.

  ‘Do you know that she has a room the size of a tennis court just for her jewels?’ Barty said.

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’ Mrs Appledore turned to follow Barty’s gaze. ‘Oh my God. Look at that rock. It’s the Dar a Leila – it used to belong to Shah Jahan. Don’t you love the way she’s had it set?’

  The diamond as big as a pigeon’s egg hung on a rope of black pearls.

  ‘Too chic,’ Barty agreed. ‘I’m going to introduce myself.’

  Moments later, bending from the waist to the floor, Barty did a deep bow before Her Highness. It was graceful but too much for the seams of his yellow breeches. Those standing behind Barty had a sudden glimpse of his scarlet silk underwear. Barty squealed. Her Highness assumed that this strange man’s sudden yelp was a protestation of allegiance, not unlike the ululations that her subjects let out when a member of the Alwabbi family passed by.

  Turning into the courtyard of the Royal Academy and seeing a large, living Indian elephant, Annie wondered if she had gone mad. It stood forlornly in front of the doorway, ridden by a frozen-looking boy wearing a turban.

  Why the hell did I come? Annie thought, taking a glass of wine in each hand and heading up the large staircase. The email from the lonely hearts club had arrived that afternoon. ‘Last-minute call-up for all you lonely hearts. Come to the opening of the fête galante exhibition at london’s royal Academy tonight, 6.30 to 8 p.m.’ Not knowing how to kill the hour between finishing Memling’s dinner and meeting Jesse at the National Gallery, Annie decided to attend. Perhaps an exhibition called ‘Music, Madness and Mayhem in Eighteenth-Century France’ would provide inspiration for Delores’s dinner.

  Vlad, keen to escape from Barty, found himself looking idly at the paintings. Most were whimsical pastoral scenes: people dressed much like Barty, frolicking in glades. The subject matter and atmosphere were in total contrast to Vlad’s former life in Siberia, and for that reason alone he quite liked the pictures.

  At the end of the main room there was a single canvas of a nearly life-size clown dressed in white with the saddest expression that Vlad had ever seen. Vlad looked into the man’s eyes and was shocked to realise that this inanimate Pierrot, painted nearly three hundred years before Vlad’s birth, understood exactly what he was feeling. The clown radiated a feeling of loss, of being isolated in a strange country, of a life lived without purpose or meaning; above all, the clown knew how it felt to be rejected. Vlad knew this strange painted man had, like him, loved a woman who was unobtainable and was also an exile from his homeland. Vlad began to cry; great fat salty tears coursed down his face followed by involuntary sobs pressing the wind out of his ribcage. Patting his pockets, he hoped that someone, one of his many servants perhaps, had thought to put a handkerchief there. There were none, of course, and he raised his jacket towards his nose.

  ‘Here, have this.’

  Through tear-filled eyes Vlad looked down and saw a delicate hand holding out a large piece of material.

  ‘It makes me want to cry too. I know exactly how he is feeling,’ Annie said, handing the dishcloth that she had forgotten to take out of her work trousers to the weeping man.

  Vlad wiped his eyes with the stripy material and looked at the woman dressed in black trousers, a duffle coat and Doc Martens standing beside him. She had a mane of curly auburn-coloured hair and a dusting of freckles on her nose.

  ‘You an art advisor?’ he asked, thinking of Lyudmila.

  ‘I’m a cook,’ Annie said.

  Though she was not blonde and was rather small, Vlad thought there was something attractive and wonderfully tender about her.

  ‘Do paintings always reduce you to tears?’ Annie asked.

  Vlad shook his head – he was beginning to feel embarrassed.

  ‘Shall we walk round together?’ Annie asked. ‘I don’t know anyone here.’

  Vlad nodded and followed her into the next room. Few had strayed away from the central party and Vlad and Annie were able to look at the pictures unimpeded.

  ‘I am beginning to really like Watteau’s works,’ Annie said. ‘His characters are so real, his colours so vibrant and the compositions crackle with life.’

  Vlad nodded but he was looking at Annie. Could she be the one to help stave off his loneliness?

  ‘You can almost overhear their conversations. In fact, I wonder if, viewed together, these pictures are an early version of sitcoms? Look,’ she said glancing from one canvas to another, ‘the same people appear in different pictures.’ Annie pointed out a flat-faced man and a woman with an upturned nose who seemed to pop up in one painting and then in another. ‘Oh do look – here is the clown again, looking even more downcast.’

  Though his English had improved, Vlad had trouble following the conversation.

  ‘Dinner tonight, you?’ Vlad asked Annie, assuming that Barty would know the best place.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Please,’ Vlad said. Suddenly, he really wanted this woman to talk to him, and to share an evening with him.

  ‘I have an appointment,’ said Annie. A few weeks ago she might have said yes. She liked the Russian’s sad face, his battered demeanour and even the hideous oversized leather jacket. She was also amused that in this sea of wealthy, connected people, the only other poor and lonely person had asked her out.

  Twenty minutes later, Annie was standing with Jesse and Agatha in the National Gallery’s conservation studio considering the painting. It was just after 7.45 p.m., the sky outside had turned an inky black and the room was lit by one harsh tungsten bulb. Jesse tried to appear nonchalant and not look too frequently at Annie. Since their last meeting, she had, he decided, become more beautiful. Her hair settled like an auburn halo around her face and her white skin seemed to glow in the dark. Everything about her was fragile yet strong, energetic yet wistful. In the unflattering glare of the overhead light, he marvelled at her black lashes, the bluish hue of her eyelids, the pink curves of her earlobes and a tiny smattering of freckles, shaped like a crescent moon, on the back of her left hand.

  ‘Though it is far too soon to make pronouncements,’ Agatha told Annie, ‘there is good evidence to suggest that your painting is from the early eighteenth century and is not a copy.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Annie tried to swallow her excitement.

  ‘There are several technical tricks we use. The first is a cleaning patch.’ She pointed to a piece of sky and the treetops in the top left-hand corner. Compared to the dull yellows in the rest of the painting, this little area, about the size of a matchbox, had sprung into life; the foliage shimmered.

  ‘Why didn’t you go further?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Even that little patch test took about fifteen hours of painstaking work,’ Jesse explained. ‘It has to be done at a snail’s pace to avoid accidental damage.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to sound presumptuous.’ Annie blushed, feeling brash and ungrateful. This woman was working for free and in her spare time.

  Agatha smiled. ‘As I said, this picture has brought Jesse back into my life, so it’s a fair exchange.’

  Jesse smiled gratefully at Agatha.

  ‘The main problem is that the original paint had been covered with successive coats of thick brown varnish. Going forward, we will have to make a decision whether to take it all off or thin it out. Although the first is easier to achieve, it can remove off the old patina. Thankfully the last few people to slap on a coat or two of varnish used a mastic resin base, which is the most reversible.’

  Ta
king her torch, she beckoned for Annie to come close to the painting and, with her finger hovering over the surface, she pointed to the cleaned patch.

  ‘Whoever did this was an extraordinarily skilled painter: just look at this foliage. Although it has all the depth and movement of a deep glade on a hot summer’s day, though you can almost hear the bird song and smell the sun’s warmth on the leaves, he has made the whole thing with just a few dabs of brown and reddish brown.’

  ‘But the effect is green and gold,’ Annie said, staring in wonder.

  ‘He prepared a blue and white ground and then flicked the colours over,’ Agatha said, shining the torch over the area. ‘It’s also possible that he used a green or brown glaze of his own. If we take off too much varnish, we could wipe away his work.’

  Putting down the torch, she went over to her worktable and returned with three large black-and-white photographs. Annie looked at one but could not really understand it – it was grainy and smudged but there was a ghost of a figure and a few highlights in white, visible in one corner. Looking more closely, she recognised the outline of a clown. In the next photograph, she detected the woman and her admirer. The last photograph was unreadable, to her untrained eye; a series of squares and numerals.

  ‘You are right to look nonplussed by this one,’ Agatha said, smiling. ‘Two of the X-rays are obvious but this one is of the back of the canvas. Those odd shapes hint at significant and revealing stamps hidden under different linings.’

  ‘A bit like pass the parcel – you never know what you will find when you take off the wrapping,’ Jesse said, and he and Agatha laughed.

  ‘Stamps?’ Annie asked, baffled by the conversation and failing to get the joke.

  ‘In much the same way as a farmer stamps his cows, owners like to leave a proprietary mark,’ Agatha explained before bringing out two photocopies of similar crests taken from a book and placing these next to the large photograph.