Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

  ‘Basically, Lord Chairman,’ Shrimsley was delighted to say, ‘and, at the end of the day, it is.’

  ‘So all jobs here are on trial, in a manner of speaking.’ On which note the Chairman decided to close the meeting. ‘Thank you both for coming, no doubt we’ve all got work to do.’

  Ben got up with relief. He wanted to look at something real, like a picture, but at the door he turned to ask in all innocence, ‘By the way, are you sure the Kylie Minogue item has been properly authenticated? Anyone can run up a pair of hot pants, you know. The point is, was Kylie ever in them?’

  After her escape from the Lord Chairman’s office, Maggie Perowne went for comfort to the wine department of Klinsky’s to be cheered up by the man she had to admit, often with a sigh of despair, she loved. Or was it love? Did she only lust after Nick Roper whom Ben called a Hooray Henry, a public school playboy, an old Etonian champagne lout? Nick Roper was younger than Maggie, much taller, broader, a young man who was good at shooting things and wore outrageous braces to keep up his Savile Row trousers. Had the sexes been reversed he would have been, she thought, despite his size, her dolly bird, her little bit of fluff, her piece of crumpet, something to boast about to the chaps in the golf club.

  She shuddered when she thought like that and was grateful she belonged to a more grown-up, a discreeter, sex. And yet she wondered why it was that she loved Ben Glazier, in her way, and had never been to bed with him. She wasn’t sure she loved Nick, but often went to bed with him. As soon as she saw him, dark-haired, darkeyed, standing in his shirt-sleeves sniffing a glass of the wine someone wanted to sell by auction, she knew exactly why that was.

  ‘It’s not been exactly the best morning of my life, Nick,’ she told him. He smiled, looking at her with his head tilted back, as always.

  ‘It’s those pictures of yours. Bloody unreliable things. I don’t honestly know what you see in them. Now, with a decent bottle of Latour ’62, you know exactly where you are. This is a nose no one could possibly fake. You lose your job, Maggie, and you can come and help out in the wine department.’

  ‘Take me to lunch, Nick.’ She laid her hand flat on the chest of his striped shirt, looking up at the stiff white collar and his face smiling down at her. ‘Can’t do it!’ he said.

  ‘Somewhere quiet. You can cheer me up.’

  ‘Sorry, darling. Lunch with Andrew at Brummel’s. He’s heard of some ’48 clarets.’ Nick put a small quantity of wine in his mouth and swirled it around.

  ‘Couldn’t I come?’

  He moved away from her, spat out his taste of wine and said patiently, as though repeating some truth she should have learnt long ago, ‘Not to Brummel’s, darling. Girls not allowed.’

  ‘I’m not a girl, for God’s sake. I’m a woman!’

  ‘We don’t have them in Brummel’s either,’ Nick assured her and went to take the phone his secretary was holding out to him, among the bottle racks and maps of wine districts.

  ‘Have a marvellously romantic lunch with Andrew in your club.’

  ‘I’ll try. Oh, and I do hope you solve your problems.’

  ‘I’ll never solve the biggest one.’ Maggie picked up the bottle and poured herself a full glass of vintage Latour.

  ‘What’s that?’ Without waiting for her answer, he started to talk into the telephone. All the same, she told him quietly, ‘Fancying you. Cheers!’

  She drained the glass at a gulp and moved to the door and left him, although he called after her in distress, ‘Maggie ...! You’ve drunk the ’62!’

  Next door to Peter Pomfret’s picture restorer’s in the narrow street off the Portobello Road were unclean windows behind which piles of chairs, tables, birdcages, chipped jugs, damaged busts and grimy chandeliers with a few drops missing were piled unsteadily under a sign which read O.W.L. JOHNSON, HIGH-CLASS ANTIQUES AND BRIC-A-BRAC. COME AND TAKE A LOOK. BROWSERS WELCOME. In the doorway stood Owly Johnson in person, peering anxiously at the world through bottle-thick glasses and complaining in a worried whine to anyone who would bother to stop and listen. Around lunchtime he saw Sarah Napper push her bicycle out of Pomfret’s and noticed that on the carrier she had tied a flat object, wrapped in brown paper. He didn’t ask her what it was, being concerned with his own troubles.

  ‘Had them in again last night, Sarah. Another break-in!’

  Sarah reacted to this news not at all. She was busy bumping her bicycle off the pavement and mounting.

  ‘Got my cow creamer and a couple of lovely decanters.’ Owly’s whine was lowered in volume. ‘You hear anything in the night, did you?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ she called over her shoulder as she bicycled away, as fast as she could, in the direction of Ladbroke Grove. From there she turned up to Notting Hill Gate, along Bayswater Road, and came down Park Lane with her trainers and ankle socks circling wildly. She sped through the lights to find Piccadilly and a part of London where the bric-a-brac was cleaner, a great deal costlier, but not necessarily more valuable than it was round at Owly’s.

  Lucy Starr was once more reading the Stage when she looked up to see a flushed woman, out of breath, with wisps of hair straying from the comb at the back of her head, holding up a battered portfolio and saying, ‘I brought these in because there’s been a death in the family.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Lucy left the Stage reluctantly. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I got left all these various bits and pieces in somebody’s will.’ Sarah was giggling nervously as she undid the bows on the portfolio. ‘I just wondered if there was anything which might be of the slightest interest to Klinsky’s?’

  Ben Glazier came down the big staircase with his hackles still risen over an encounter with Shrimsley. He had been sitting in his office making notes on a possible Pontormo and listening to an Ella Fitzgerald tape. He was singing along with ‘Every time we say goodbye, I seem to die a little’, when Shrimsley burst in on him to remind him that his ‘contraption’ had reappeared, despite numerous warnings, in the Chairman’s parking place, which, in Ben’s view, was about the size of Fulham football ground and had ample room for a genuine Old Master motor bike as well as his Lordship’s ostentatious white Roller. When the office manager said it must be removed immediately, Ben told him that was quite impossible as he was going out to lunch.

  He was crossing the hallway and Lucy, who had been unable to find anyone in Old Master Paintings, was filling in time by telling Sarah Napper about the part she was up for at the Baptist’s Head pub in Dalston. ‘Interesting new writer. I play a social worker driven to madness by sexual harassment.’ She spotted Ben and asked him to have a glance at the portfolio the lady had just brought in on her bike.

  ‘How many strokes?’ Ben showed an immediate interest. Sarah was puzzled and silent. ‘Your bike?’ Ben had the portfolio open and was leafing through pale representations of wild flowers, grazing sheep and sunsets. ‘What stroke engine?’

  ‘On my bike?’ Sarah laughed in case he might have been joking. ‘No, only pedals, I’m afraid. These little Victorian flower paintings are rather pretty, aren’t they? Would they be of any interest to you?’

  ‘I suppose they might be. If we happened to run a tea-shop. Go well with the scones and Dundee cake. Good grief!’ He had just turned over a particularly unpleasant watercolour featuring a malevolent child, a kitten and a baby lamb, and there she was: Venus naked and kneeling with an old man’s hand on her breast, and the sands of time running out.

  ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘A very dear relative who died,’ she answered. ‘Do you like it at all? I’ve always found it rather creepy.’

  ‘Would you let us keep it for a day or two? There are some other people I’d like to see it. Would you mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind? You might find someone who likes it, I suppose. I mean it’s not worth anything, is it?’

  This was a question Ben wasn’t prepared, at the moment, to answer. He asked Lucy Starr to get Sarah’s address, give her a receipt and, entirely
forgetting lunch, he picked up the unframed panel and felt the weight of it. The picture had been painted on slate, only one of the many unusual facts about it he would have to consider. Now, as he carried it carefully, almost reverently up to the main office of Old Master Paintings, he tried to suppress his excitement.

  Maggie Perowne, Camilla Mounsey her personal assistant, and the secretaries were out at lunch. Ben was alone with Sarah Napper’s offering. He leant it against a table leg with its back towards him. Then he ran his finger along a shelf of art books and pulled one out. It didn’t take him long to find the colour reproduction he was looking for among the works of Agnolo di Cosimo known as Bronzino, the sixteenth-century Tuscan Mannerist. It was a picture Ben had admired almost as long as that of the goddess with exhausted Mars. It hangs in the National Gallery and is known simply but mysteriously as an allegory. The work seemed to be the same in both pictures: what the book called ‘a cold, smooth quality in the painting of the flesh that makes it appear to have been carved from some precious stone’ was also noticeable in Sarah Napper’s offering. But there were important differences. In the National Gallery picture it was a curly redhead, an adolescent cupid, who caressed Venus’s small and perfect breast. She had his arrow poised to stab his wing and so, perhaps, prevent his flight. Envy tore at his own hair, infuriated by the sight of young love. Pleasure had a honeycomb in one hand and the stinging end of its long tail in the other. Folly was a laughing child with a thorn in its foot, about to throw rose petals. Time’s part in the proceedings was to hold back the dark cloak of night so Venus, Cupid and Folly could enjoy their brief hour in the sunlight. There were two masks in the corner of the National Gallery picture, but no hour-glass and no praying monk.

  Ben was busy re-reading all he could find about Bronzino when Maggie, not in the best of tempers, came back from the lunch she hadn’t enjoyed, alone with the Evening Standard, in the Italian café round the corner. ‘What’ve you got there?’ she asked when she saw the back of the picture propped up against the table leg. ‘Not another of your great discoveries?’

  ‘Or it could be something the Lord Chairman’s auntie painted by numbers during a wet weekend in Weston-super-Mare,’ Ben suggested and discovered how quickly Maggie’s beguiling looks could become withering.

  ‘To be honest I’ve had it up to here with your jokes.’ she said. ‘All that chatter about faked orgasms in the Chairman’s office. Charming, that was!’

  ‘The whole conversation was entirely pointless. What does my Lord Come-Into-The-Garden-Foods know about art?’

  ‘He knows a good deal about paying our salaries.’

  ‘He probably thinks Tintoretto is a colourful brand of Italian ice-cream.’

  ‘He doesn’t pretend to know much about art. He’s a business man.’

  ‘Botticelli biscuits. Michelangelo cupcakes. Chocolate-filled Leonardos. Slices of honey-cured Rembrandt. Masaccio with Come-Into-The-Garden Bolognese.’ Ben was enjoying himself before he sprung the great surprise. ‘Camilla thinks he’s rather sexy.’

  ‘Good grief! You don’t, do you?’

  ‘I can’t see it myself.’

  ‘I thought you might. You have such obscure objects of desire. That Hooray Henry in the booze department, for instance. How can you possibly explain that?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder.’ That was an answer for which he felt unreasonably grateful. He put the book of reproductions open on the table in front of her. ‘Now here’s a girl with an older man in the background.’

  ‘The Bronzino Allegory, “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time”. It’s in the National Gallery.’

  ‘“A work of rebarbatively frigid eroticism”,’ Ben quoted the disapproving text. ‘I’ve always liked it.’

  ‘It’s bloody marvellous. What about it?’

  Ben picked up Sarah Napper’s picture and put it on the table beside the book. ‘Another version.’

  Maggie couldn’t help a quick intake of breath, but she was sceptical. ‘The one Bronzino never painted?’

  ‘I can’t be quite sure he didn’t.’

  ‘We’ve got to be careful.’ She picked up the picture and felt its weight. She seemed half afraid as she took it to the window, looking at it more closely. ‘We can’t take any more risks.’

  ‘Of course not. Anyway, I know I was right about Raphael. Nothing wrong with it.’

  Camilla Mounsey came back from lunch at that point, but they were too busy to notice her as she sat at her desk and summoned artistic information on to her screen. ‘When did this come in?’

  ‘Just now. It was brought to reception by a woman on a bicycle. I happened to be passing.’

  ‘And you think you picked up a Bronzino?’

  ‘What do you think? You see, Time’s moved even nearer to Venus.’ He looked at her, but couldn’t be sure of her reaction.

  ‘Did this woman on the bike make any claims for it?’

  ‘None at all. She thought her tea-shop flower pieces far more attractive.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell her what you felt?’

  ‘Astonishment, actually. Painted on slate, but the painting seems right. Flesh that looks as though it were carved out of jewels. No hesitation. Nothing fumbled. I felt astonished, also a bit alarmed.’

  ‘Alarmed?’

  ‘Yes, the fear of falling in love with something that might turn out to be a fake.’

  ‘Falling in love?’ Maggie frowned.

  ‘With the picture, I mean,’ he hastened to assure her.

  ‘If it’s right, it’s enormously important. The Lord Chairman’s going to be worried to death!’

  ‘That’s always a plus.’

  ‘We’ll have to tell this woman ... I suppose she had a name?’

  ‘And an address. She left it with Lucy.’

  ‘Tell her we’ll have to investigate everything. Extremely carefully.’

  ‘Including her,’ Ben agreed.

  Some days after an unexpected and doubtful version of the Bronzino allegory was brought into Klinsky’s by Sarah Napper, a very elderly and rich Japanese buyer was helped out of his car and into a wheelchair to be transported into Deracott’s Fine Art and upstairs into Roy Deracott’s office. There he was pushed slowly and reverently up to a young man with a soft beard, a velvet cap on the back of his head, who was looking hopeful against a blue Italian sky. He also met an elegant Nigerian who smiled complacently. ‘Let me introduce you to your Raphael, sir,’ the gravel voice of Roy Deracott came from behind his chair. ‘I’m afraid we had to pay a fair old price for it, but it’s the genuine article. You have my word for it.’

  The man who had felt most keenly the loss of the Raphael for what he regarded as a snip, the Lord Chairman, was watching anxiously as his chauffeur manoeuvred the milk-white Rolls out from the danger threatened by an antique Harley-Davidson, negligently parked. Beside him sat Camilla Mounsey, Maggie Perowne’s PA, or Number Two as she liked to call herself, the product of Wycombe Abbey School and the British Institute in Florence, with a mummy who had studied graphic design and worked briefly in an advertising agency, and a daddy who was a name at Lloyd’s. Camilla was determined to rise in the business, not least because, since the disasters at Lloyd’s, the family had gone about in grim despair and her allowance had shrunk to mere pocket-money. In these times of difficulty she had become a close and, she fondly imagined, a secret personal friend of Bernard Holloway. She had the sort of fondness for him she had felt for an aged and permanently worried sheepdog of her father’s which, as a child, she frequently embraced.

  Embracing Bernard Holloway, she had decided some time ago, would have the added advantage of furthering her career at Klinsky’s. She did this, thinking of the old family pet who smelled quite bearable when brought in from the rain.

  ‘I’ve told Shrimsley to give Glazier a final warning. I shall not tolerate his arrogant parking habits much longer,’ the Chairman said when his car had been extricated from the courtyard.

  ‘That’s the trouble with Ben and Ma
ggie. You can tell they’ve been brought up without a good nanny to teach them manners,’ Camilla told him.

  ‘Is that right?’ Holloway looked at her, deeply impressed, imagining the infant Camilla having her blonde hair brushed by a devoted woman in uniform.

  ‘You can tell by the way Maggie behaves, she wasn’t brought up with beautiful things. Her father was a commercial traveller, you know. He travelled in toiletries.’ Camilla said the last word in an assumed cockney accent and between inverted commas.

  ‘I never knew that.’ Holloway, who had started life in food-packaging, managed to look shocked.

  ‘Did her art history at Manchester,’ Camilla went on remorselessly. ‘You can say what you like about Manchester, but it certainly isn’t Florence.’

  ‘Of course not, Camilla. No one could say it was,’ Bernard Holloway agreed. ‘They both made a bad mistake over the Raphael affair.’

  ‘Now they reckon they’ve got hold of a Bronzino,’ Camilla told him, wide-eyed with astonishment. ‘Some strange woman brought it on a bicycle. Of course, it’s not for me to voice an opinion.’

  ‘I’m always glad of your opinion, Camilla. You’re my eyes and ears at Klinsky’s.’

  ‘So glad that we’re going to lunch at the Ritz?’ She was delighted. ‘Oh, Bernard. Thank you!’

  ‘Well, perhaps not the Ritz.’ The Chairman looked nervous.

  ‘All the years we’ve known each other, Bernard, and you’ve never sat me down to lunch at the Ritz. You’ve even given up promising!’

  ‘I thought it might be more fun to go somewhere where they know us well.’

  ‘And keep their mouths shut?’ she was unkind enough to add.

  ‘Exactly!’ He was pleased that she had showed such delicate understanding of the situation. ‘Somewhere discreet.’

  ‘Like that poky little restaurant behind Victoria Station?’ Camilla pursed her lips in distaste.

  ‘It’s good home-cooking. And we don’t want a lot of people eyeing us up, do we?’

  ‘Don’t we? I know you don’t.’