Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

  UNDER THE HAMMER

  JOHN MORTIMER

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471302343

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1994

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  The words from ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ and ‘’S Wonderful’ from Funny Face, 1927, by Ira and George Gershwin; ‘They All Laughed’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ from Shall We Dance? 1937 by Ira and George Gershwin; ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’ from A Damsel in Distress, 1937, by Ira and George Gershwin; ‘Long Ago and Far Away’ from Cover Girl, 1944 by Ira and George Gershwin © Warner Chappell Music Ltd and Warner Chappell Music Inc. Reproduced by kind permission of International Music Publications Ltd and Warner Chappell Music Inc.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  About the Author

  John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels before turning to the theatre with such plays as The Dock Brief, The Wrong Side of the Park and A Voyage Round My Father. He has written many film scripts, radio and television plays, including six plays on the life of Shakespeare, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

  John Mortimer lives with his wife and their two daughters in what was once his father’s house in the Chilterns.

  For Jacquie Davis

  Contents

  The Fatal Attribution

  The Jolly Joker

  The Virgin of Vitebsk

  Wonders in the Deep

  After Titian

  The Spectre at the Feast

  The Fatal Attribution

  I could have painted pictures like that youth’s Ye praise so.

  Robert Browning, ‘Pictor Ignotus’

  ‘Time’s certainly kissed you, hasn’t it, Sarah? About the only kisses you get nowadays. The cold lips of an old man, eh?’

  The man who spoke was himself old, with a grey beard and a falling lock of grey hair. He might once have been handsome. He might have looked like everyone’s romantic idea of an artist, although Peter Pomfret was never anything but a moderately successful picture restorer, living above his shop in a turning off Portobello Road. Now his cheeks were sunk, his eyes feverish; the bones of his naked arms, as he lay in bed yellowing with age like an old newspaper, seemed in danger of pushing through and breaking the skin. His voice, once resonantly seductive, was high and querulous. The woman he was insulting was thirty years younger, but she seemed also touched with age. Her hair, once blonde, was greying; she wore a longish skirt of some ethnic material, pink ankle socks and trainers. She stared at Peter Pomfret without emotion through small, round glasses.

  Although he was speaking to her, he was looking at a picture propped up against the end of his bed, at an intricate pattern of white, marmoreal flesh against a rich blue background. In the centre of the composition a naked Venus knelt, a crown set back on her head, her delicate fingers holding an arrow. Behind her stood Father Time, also naked; one old hand was on her small, white breast, another held an hour-glass. There was also a weeping cherub and a monk praying, his eyes turned up to heaven. Peter Pomfret was looking at neither of these figures. He was staring at the figure of the beautiful young girl with the old man’s hand on her breast. Then he winced and gave a cry as he felt the pain in his own chest.

  ‘I thought you were dead, or at least fallen off that damn bicycle of yours!’ He spoke to Sarah again without looking at her. ‘It didn’t occur to me that you’d met a lover. There’s not too many men about with a thing about ankle socks worn with gym shoes. Well, where are they?’

  ‘Your pills? I didn’t get them.’ Sarah Napper was unperturbed. ‘It was closed. The chemist was closed.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Pomfret turned and stared at her, a look full of contempt. ‘There are hundreds of chemists.’

  ‘Dr Hanley told you to go into hospital when the attack started. You know he did.’ Sarah didn’t move.

  ‘Can’t stand that fellow Hanley,’ Pomfret grumbled. ‘He asked me to call him Kevin. Furthermore, he carries an umbrella while wearing jeans. Can’t be ordered around by that type of vulgarian.’

  ‘He told you to go into hospital,’ Sarah repeated.

  ‘To be called Honeychile and blanket-bathed by some huge nurse named Lillybelle. What the hell do you take me for?’

  ‘You’d be properly looked after.’

  ‘Why should I be humiliated? When I’ve got you to humiliate? But then he felt another stab of pain and called out, For God’s sake! The chemist in Portobello Road. Get on that bloody machine of yours and pedal for dear life.’ And then, more faintly, he was pleading, ‘Please, old girl. Shouldn’t have said all that to you. Words run away with me. Shouldn’t have said any of that. It was just my little joke.’ Sarah Napper left him then. She went down to the shop below, to the back room which smelled of paint and linseed oil. She didn’t look at the family portrait she had been cleaning. She went to a paint table and picked up the full bottle of pills she had collected from the chemist that morning. She put it carefully away, in the back of a drawer, and did her best to forget about it.

  ‘And I have laboured somewhat in my time, And not been paid profusely,’ says Andrea del Sarto, the contemporary of Michelangelo and Raphael, in Browning’s poem about him. Some artists not only laboured greatly but weren’t paid at all. At any rate, Van Gogh and Gauguin and del Sarto got no share of the huge prices eagerly given and taken for their works in Klinsky’s, that world-famous auction house, where not only paintings and sculpture go under the hammer, but manuscripts, vintage cars, the contents of stately homes and antique golf-clubs. The little shop in which the first Emmanuel Klinsky used to sell dubious Italian masterpieces to the aristocracy, in the days of that well-known connoisseur and rake King George IV, has grown into a handsome pillared building conveniently near the Ritz. Long banners hang outside it, as they hung from the walls of medieval castles, and the name of Klinsky’s, written in gold, flutters above the traffic. Similar banners, emblazoned with the same name, hang over buildings in New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. Art, created in poverty, is held in all these places to be a sign of wealth.

  On the morning when the picture restorer, Peter Pomfret, desperate for his pills, was humiliating Sarah Napper whom he had once loved, a figure in black leathers came thundering up to Klinsky’s on a Harley-Davidson and parked the machine in a small courtyard under a sign which read NO PUBLIC ACCESS, PARKING PLACE FOR THE CHAIRMAN OF KLINSKY’S ONLY. He parked broad side on, in a careless and daring manner. Then as his machine juddered to silence, he raised his helmet to reveal to the world the grizzled head and the usually sceptical features of Ben Glazier. Despite his casual parking he was not the Chairman; he was an expert who knew little about money but a great deal about painting. He was, as the Chairman often said with considerable irritation, ‘far too old to behave like a Hell’s Angel’. Such criticism didn’t concern Ben at all. He started to unzip his leather jacket and, carrying his helmet under his arm like an old warrior, walked into Klinsky’s auction house which, over the years, had become his home.

  Inside Klinsky’s marble entranc
e hall Lucy Starr, the young, resting actress who tended the reception counter, looked up from her copy of the Stage and said good morning. Ben smiled at her, as he did at young women, apart from the particular young woman for whom his feelings were too deep, and perhaps too complicated, to be frittered away in smiles. He didn’t smile at Keith Shrimsley, the office manager, who was on his way to Accounts and asked, in the flat tones of an Estuary man, if Klinsky’s was about to make a fortune out of the Raphael on sale that morning. ‘It’s a pity,’ Ben told him, ‘that old Raphael isn’t around to take his cut.’ Halfway up the stairs he stood, squashed against the wall, making way for another Venus, this time a statue modestly draped from the waist downwards, who was being carried by two sweating, blaspheming porters in green baize aprons. At the top of the stairs he turned towards a big doorway, from which he could hear chatter in various languages and the sounds of suppressed excitement, which meant that a sale was about to start. This was Ben’s world and he went in to give a casual welcome to it.

  It hadn’t always been his world. Ben wasn’t born into a house of great art; his mother liked pictures of weeping clowns and Asian beauties. Ben’s father lost his job in Glasgow and came down to London to join the Police. He used to take the small Ben and his mother out for a walk every Sunday afternoon, down from the Police House in North London to Trafalgar Square, so the boy could feed the pigeons. Then they’d have tea at Lyons Corner House. One Sunday there was a thunderstorm, so they dived into the National Gallery for shelter. So far as Ben knew, his mother and father had never been in there before; but there he was, aged twelve, face to face with a serene, secretive, shy goddess who’d just exhausted Mars with love-making. It was a vision he never forgot.

  It led him to get a job as an office boy in the National Gallery when he left school, to pick up knowledge whenever he could find it, until, more years ago than he cared to remember, he ended up at Klinsky’s. In his day Ben had found a number of girls who looked as though they might have been painted by Botticelli and loved them, but they were inclined to leave him for men with far sexier bank accounts. Perhaps, after all, he didn’t care enough for them. He certainly cared enough, probably too much for a man bumping his head against sixty to care for a woman only just thirty, for Maggie Perowne, head of Old Master Paintings, in charge of that day’s auction and, incidentally, his boss. He saw her and worked with her every day, but as he came into the sale room, and she stood in her pulpit ready to start, he looked at her with some of the wonder of a boy of twelve suddenly confronted with the post-coital calm of Mars and the Goddess of Love. Then he pulled himself together and went to make sure that the Raphael portrait had been brought down safely.

  Maggie Perowne may have looked calm but her mouth was dry and there was a gaping, breathless space where her stomach ought to have been. What if the punters sat in solemn silence, treating the treasures, as they were put on the easel, with complete contempt? It didn’t happen, of course. The bids came swiftly and business was brisk enough – until she got to the Raphael.

  It was a portrait of a young man, a wide-eyed, hopeful youth with a soft beard and a velvet cap. From the start, the bidding was sluggish. The line of glossy-haired, bright-eyed girls, the underpaid, flat-sharing daughters of well-off daddys in the City, who sat at the rank of telephones, tapping their white teeth with their pencils, found a strange lack of interest from Switzerland, Paris and Bonn. Roy Deracott, art dealer of Deracott’s in Bond Street, a square, gravelly-voiced man whose head looked as though it had been subjected to some sort of compression, so that his mouth was extra wide and his forehead surprisingly low, saw all this and gave a low growl of contentment. He had started certain rumours, had a few discreet words in certain ears. ‘Was the Raphael right?’ he had been asked and answered that it was a fine piece of work certainly, an excellent nineteenth-century imitation; he’d heard there were signs of Prussian blue in the shadows, a colour not yet invented when Raphael was alive. The picture had been expected to make five million. It climbed painfully to one. At that point it stuck and, although Maggie played desperately for time by repeating, ‘One million, I’m bid. One million pounds for it. One million pounds. Last warning,’ as often as possible, she had no option but to knock it down to an elegant Nigerian at the back of the room who was buying, if the truth be told, on behalf of Roy Deracott.

  At the end of that day Sarah Napper stood in the bedroom over the picture restorer’s shop with Dr Hanley, who did, in fact, wear jeans while carrying a rolled umbrella that contracted like a telescope. The bed was empty and stripped of sheets and blankets. Peter Pomfret wasn’t there, or indeed anywhere in this world; his soured, disappointed and cantankerous soul having been released from his body on the way to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Dr Hanley had found Sarah upstairs when he had called in to break the news to her. He saw that she had tidied the room, but there was still a half-empty bottle of whisky on the bedside table and an open bottle of pills which had spilled its contents on to the floor.

  ‘I left them by his bed, Doctor. He must have forgotten to take them,’ Sarah said, not for the first time.

  ‘You told me that before. He either forgot or decided to rely on the whisky instead.’

  ‘I was always afraid of this happening,’ Sarah told him again. ‘I shouldn’t have left him alone up here. He promised me he’d take the pills. Didn’t want me to fuss over him. You know what he was like.’

  Dr Hanley spoke from bitter experience. ‘I know very well. He was an old man who refused to be treated in hospital.’

  ‘He was difficult in so many ways, but I did love him I suppose.’

  ‘I’m sure you did all you could. You mustn’t blame yourself for anything.’ He spoke in the bright, matter-of-fact tones he always used to the bereaved, but Sarah didn’t seem to be listening. She was looking at the end of the bed. There was nothing there now, but she was thinking of what she had, carefully wrapped up, in a cupboard in her workroom, and she thought of the kneeling, naked woman in the cold embraces of old Father Time.

  ‘Only one million. For a Raphael? What did we do? Have it on special offer’ Lord Holloway, Chairman of Klinsky’s, still angry the day after the sale, presented an alarming colour scheme. His bald head turned a deeper shade of pink, his ginger moustache bristled, his blue eyes became watery, his voice rose plaintively so that he seemed more childish or much older than his middle age. He looked round his office, furnished with interesting antiques, at Ben Glazier, Maggie Perowne and Keith Shrimsley as though they were, jointly and severally, plotting against him. ‘When I was in supermarkets,’ he told them, ‘we prided ourselves on accurate pricing.’

  It was a time in the free market economy when it was the fashion to put great organizations into the hands of those who had succeeded in quite other fields. So the head of prisons had been put in charge of a chain of hotels, and a successful man from computer games was in charge of prisons. A former editor of women’s magazines administered the Health Service and Bernard Holloway, from Come Into The Garden Foods, had been thought to be the very chap to slim down Klinsky’s and make sure that the pictures sold like oven-ready lasagne dinners. He came, sacked a number of the older retainers, and caused a good deal of fear and unhappiness without having much effect on the company’s finances. However, he still boasted that he was going to drive Klinsky’s to increase its market share. The presence on the staff of so many young women who had been to the best girls’ schools seemed to cause him a mixture of confusion and delight, and compensation for his nagging anxiety in the treacherous and enigmatic world of high art.

  ‘It reached its reserve – just,’ Maggie said. ‘The owner asked us to put a low reserve on it. When we got there, the bidding died. Nobody’s fault.’

  ‘If we can’t sell a Raphael portrait properly, what can we sell?’ Holloway was not to be comforted.

  ‘Kylie Minogue’s sequinned hot pants, apparently.’ Ben diverted the Chairman’s outrage. ‘Aren’t they going under the hammer next
week?’

  ‘Don’t you knock that, Glazier. The pop department’s showing us some remarkable figures. Aren’t they, Shrimsley?’

  ‘Basically they certainly are, Lord Chairman.’ The toneless accountant’s voice was properly servile. His Lordship rewarded him with a tight little smile and turned on Maggie again.

  ‘Just remember in future, Klinsky’s is not in the business of selling fakes.’

  ‘Fakes?’ Ben repeated the word in a voice of surprise and wonder. ‘What’s a fake exactly?’

  ‘Your precious Raphael, perhaps?’ Holloway persisted. ‘In my opinion’ – Ben did his best to sound judicious – ‘it was either by Raphael or someone else with exactly the same name.’

  ‘I take an extremely serious view ...’

  ‘That picture gave me a great deal of pleasure.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Holloway feared that the grounds for his protest were shifting dangerously beneath his feet.

  ‘Pleasure’s not the point?’ Ben smiled tolerantly at the Chairman. ‘My dear old chap, have you never got pleasure from a girlfriend faking her delight? Until you found out, that is?’

  Lord Holloway considered this remark, decided his safest course was to ignore it and retreated to his old profession. ‘At Come Into The Garden Foods we had a reputation for quality!’

  ‘But you’ve got to understand’ – Ben’s patience was also wearing thin – ‘we’re not selling eggs. We’re dealing in dreams, legends, carnal knowledge and religious aspirations. The beauty of youth and the sadness of old age. You can’t price those things. The value of the work of art is just an idea in someone’s head. Some people got a different idea. That was what Maggie was trying to tell you.’

  ‘We’re under considerable pressure to reduce staff,’ Holloway said, doing his best to sound as though he regretted it. ‘Isn’t that the view of the accounts department, Shrimsley?’