by L. S. Hilton
‘Done. We can do a transfer upstairs?’
Di Matteo looked confused. ‘But I didn’t realise – that is . . .’ He was tongue tied by his own rules, that we were to make no verbal reference to what was taking place.
‘This is for me. I can give you the address of where I want it sent.’ I still had that storage box in the depository at Vincennes.
‘And then I’ll need the photocopies of the mortgage agreement and repossession order. Are we ready?’
13
Li began Woman with a Fan II the day after we returned from Palermo. Da Silva vanished up to Rome soon after. He was gone three weeks. He called every afternoon, but I knew he was also calling Fish-Breath, to check up on me. Aside from brief shopping trips, Salvatore had effectively moved in, setting up camp without apparent discomfort on a blow-up mattress in the garage. Outbuildings were maybe his thing. I hadn’t investigated where or if he washed. In the mornings I ran and worked on the provenances, in the afternoons Fish-Breath drove me to the studio. We were polite to one another, but it was mostly nods and greetings. I wondered if he ever slept – no matter how late I stayed up reading and thinking and sipping wine he was there in the courtyard with the gun, and he was still in position no matter how early I woke. At least he didn’t attempt to follow me when I went running.
I wasn’t bored, or lonely. There’s only one kind of group fun I go in for and there wasn’t much chance of that with Fish-Breath about. As Li worked painstakingly on the panel, I was deep in its backstory, the characters I had dreamed up becoming so vivid I almost believed in them. I was going to have to believe in them, when I presented at the House.
And then one morning I opened the shutters to find the countryside had exploded. The Italian spring had come overnight, as though someone had shaken confetti over the landscape. I dragged on a sweater and ran outside in my knickers. Fish-Breath watched me silently as I climbed over the fence at the back of the farmhouse into the patch of meadow that sloped uphill to where the woods began. The grass was full of pink campions and blue borage flowers, the hedgerows alight in yellow and orange; I could smell almond and peach blossom from along the valley towards the town. Fish-Breath came up to the fence and watched me capering about in the wet grass.
‘Ti piace?’ Do you like it?
‘Bellissimo!’ I beamed. It was the longest conversation we’d had. He obviously thought I was mental, or maybe just English. The grape hyacinth around the farmhouse door had come into bud. Later I picked a little bunch and put it in a water glass next to his mattress.
I found myself telling da Silva about the flowers when he called that day.
‘It is beautiful, isn’t it, the spring down there?’ he agreed. I could hear a smile in his voice. ‘How come you know all those names?’
‘Oh, just art stuff.’
A particularly dreary week at the House making slides for a sale of Victorian watercolours. I find being able to tell hawthorn from blackberry blossom such a relevant skill. Fond as I was of a bloom, William ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt was never going to make my list of fantasy painters.
‘Listen, how soon can you get back? I need you to let the bank know we’re ready to take the varnish off, and you’ll want to be there.’
‘Why did you put the varnish on if you’re going to just take it off again?’
‘Madre di Dio. Why can’t you stop asking me questions?’
‘Friday. I’ll be home on Friday.’
After we hung up, I stood gazing at the meadow with what I imagine was a pretty dopey smile on my face. And then I experienced an overpowering urge to find a hairdresser in Siderno. Home. He’d said ‘home’.
*
Mariangela Lucchini, the restorer in Reggio, had been delighted to receive my call. Much of her work had been for the Ministry of Culture, restoring artworks for the south’s innumerable churches, and she said she’d be thrilled to have the chance to clean up something exciting.
‘Mostly, it’s varnish they want. And all the decent stuff gets sent north, anyway. Like the oranges.’
The Società Mutuale was sending a guard to witness the restoration; Li, da Silva and I met him at the port before driving to the studio in the basement of Mariangela’s apartment block. Li was agitated, anxious about the effects of the de-varnishing on his work, especially since he couldn’t be in the room as the process was begun. I tried to reassure him by promising to send a photo every five minutes to the bar where he would wait. Mariangela was about forty, in canvas dungarees with a bushy topknot of hennaed hair. A baby was crying as she let us in.
‘I’m really sorry, the babysitter called in sick. Would you hold him for a second?’ She thrust the baby into my arms. The shrieks grew louder as I jogged it nervously.
‘Here,’ offered da Silva, ‘give him to me. Ciao, piccolino, ciao.’ He was practised, tender; I had a sudden image of him with his own children. Giulia and Giovanni. I’d never thought about them much. The baby stopped crying and reached out a questing hand for da Silva’s face, tiny fingers uncurling like the fronds of an anemone.
‘He’ll go down in a minute,’ said Mariangela, ‘he’s used to me working. There was a crib with a mobile of yellow rabbits above it in a corner of the low-ceilinged windowless room. The rest of the space was given over to a long formica-topped workbench and a large easel positioned between an array of different lights, similar to the viewing benches at the House. Da Silva set the baby down and offered to go out for coffees.
‘Right,’ said Mariangela, putting on her glasses, ‘let’s have a look at her.’
I helped the guard, who had introduced himself as Giuliano, to unwrap Woman with a Fan II. Mariangela gave it a long, appraising stare.
‘Well,’ was all she said. ‘Well.’
She knew what she was doing. I asked her if she objected to my filming the first passes at the varnish and she shook her head, pulling on her latex gloves, already absorbed in her work.
‘Right. I’m going to get the gloss off with a three per cent dilute of Relgarez 1094. Shell D38. It’s a non-aromatic mineral spirit,’ she explained for Giuliano’s benefit. He nodded gravely as though he had a clue what she was on about. The baby chuckled.
‘Just pick him up if he starts off again. Now, I’m going to use a badger-hair brush’ – she held it up for the camera – ‘to take off the fluid after I’ve applied it with a sponge. Like this.’ She began dabbing at a small patch in the bottom left corner of the panel. I could practically feel Li’s tension through my phone as I sent the first screenshot. As Mariangela brushed, the colour laid in over the Prussian blue, a deep magenta brown, seemed to deepen.
‘OK. OK. You see, the varnish had blanched it out. We can see the saturation level much better now.’
‘What about varnish residue remaining on the surface?’ I asked.
‘The spirit will take care of that. Anything stronger will soften the matte.’
I moved around her as she worked, shooting the process from every angle. An hour later, the baby was asleep and we had cleaned about ten square centimetres of the panel. Giuliano spent the time playing Candy Crush.
‘What’s this?’ asked Mariangela suddenly.
‘I think it might be sugo. The painting was hung in a family home for some time. I didn’t like to try to get it off myself.’
Mariangela took a little wallet which looked like a nail kit from a drawer and removed a tiny palette knife with a filed blade.
‘This should do it. Do you want it on a slide.’
‘Yes, please.’
Getting the sauce off took another thirty minutes, Mariangela delicately scraping the residue onto a glass slide. Another little piece of the jigsaw.
*
‘I still don’t see why we had to bother with all that,’ Da Silva bitched after we had finally seen Giuliano off on the ferry.
‘Do you really want me to explain?’
‘Sure.’
‘The thing is, Gauguin loathed varnish. It stood for ever
ything he wanted to set his art against – rich, smooth, glossy, a veneer between the painter and the viewer. So he shortened his paint.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. He drained it, through blotting paper, and then he diluted it with turpentine. He wanted it to look like the Italian Primitives – pictures that were five hundred years old. Sort of chalky, caked on. And it might not sound like much of a revolution, but when he chose not to varnish his pictures, Gauguin was rejecting a whole tradition, replacing polished veneer with rawness. He wanted people to look at paintings again, to see beyond the surface of a lazy sophistication. He didn’t care if people found his work ugly, or mad. He wanted them to see. Do you get it?’
I trailed off, aware that I had been speaking too long. I sounded like a total geek.
‘Not exactly. So who’s supposed to have varnished it?’
‘Could have been any one of the supposed owners. People like shiny pictures. More classy. The point is, removing the varnish to see if the pigments stand up makes it look more authentic. A real Gauguin wouldn’t rely on varnish to smooth out the light. So naturally I’d check.’
‘You really care about this stuff, don’t you?’ Da Silva didn’t sound bored.
‘Yes. I do. I mean, I have to, don’t I? Sorry for droning on.’
‘Don’t be.’
*
That evening, I began to assemble the file to send to the House. An overview of how I had come across the picture, my recognition of Gauguin’s technique, my research into its background, the months of work. The receipts were prepared, the sale book from the railway station in Rome, the story I had constructed carefully outlined. Photographs of every stage, the paint samples and the slide, the papers from the Società Mutuale. I had to admit, it all looked pretty convincing. But the papers, the provenances, the picture itself, could only be as convincing as I was. And sure, it wasn’t the first time I’d had to lie because my life depended on it. In a way, my whole life, the life I had constructed, had always depended on my capacity to lie, to make myself into what I was not, to observe and imitate and pretend, until whatever mask circumstance made necessary adhered so seamlessly that it became my face. I had often relished that, been proud of it even. Mostly, though, I didn’t even notice. Whatever self I had was only ever a case of good or bad performances. Yet this time, if the mask slipped by so much as a millimetre, I was looking at the endgame, and it just didn’t feel like a game any more.
14
Rupert emailed on 19 March. It was eleven a.m., ten in London. Things had obviously changed at the House if he was actually in the office. Leaning out of my bedroom window to get the best signal I called the front desk, asking to be put through to Rupert.
‘European Paintings.’
I repeated my request.
‘I’m afraid Rupert’s just in a meeting,’ answered the girl automatically.
‘Please tell him this is Elisabeth Teerlinc speaking.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t disturb him.’
‘Just tell him.’
It was a cheap thrill, but it thrilled me anyway when I heard Rupert bounding to the phone. Well, lumbering. After delighted noises from both parties, we agreed that I would bring the picture in as soon as I could secure its passage, to remain in the safekeeping of the House until they had completed their evaluation.
I bounced down the stairs to tell da Silva.
‘He’s dancing!’
‘What?’
‘I mean, he wants to see the picture. You’d better get on to Raznatovic, call him or send a carrier pigeon or whatever spooky shit you two do and tell him he can put the pliers away. And we’ll need two tickets to London, business class.’
‘We?’
‘Me and the picture, you idiot.’
The slightest ripple of disappointment crossed that blandly handsome face, followed by an ugly twist of childish spite.
‘You must be pretty excited, getting to play art dealer again. You’ll be wanting your passport, then? The Teerlinc one?’
‘For sure.’
He left the room and returned a moment later with his precious brown envelope, shoving it at me sulkily.
Was he actually jealous that he wasn’t coming with me?
‘Thanks,’ I answered briskly, ignoring his reaction. ‘So . . . I have to send a condition report before I take the picture, and you’ll have to let the airline know. Bulkhead seats and permission for me to go through with it on the forklift. Li’s blokes have done us a t-frame already.’
‘T-frame?’
‘Transit frame. It keeps the painting at the right angle in the air. We have to soft-package it, rough-frame it and crate it, so you’ll have to deal with airport security on that too. It’s all got to look super-official. The more we treat it as though it’s priceless the more chance there is the House will. I’ll keep the passport for now, then. Will you take me down to the workshop?’
‘What am I, your bloody chauffeur?’
‘That’s about right.’
Fish-Breath was lurking about in the courtyard as usual. He raised a paper bag at da Silva.
‘San Giuseppe. Ho portato le zeppole.’
Da Silva translated – I could still barely make out a word of what Fish-Breath said.
‘It’s St Joseph’s day. He’s brought cakes.’
‘We should celebrate!’
‘San Giuseppe?’
‘No, you idiot! The picture. Let’s buy some champagne for later, make dinner. We should ask Li.’
‘Li? Il cinese?’
‘You know, this casual racism thing is really unappealing. Yes, the Chinese guy who might just have saved your life. I thought we’d buy him a present.’
*
An hour later, Li and I stood in front of Woman with a Fan II. I closed my eyes and opened them, trying to trick myself into seeing the panel for the first time. Li had taken the pose from the version we had viewed in Essen, but altered the line of the head to echo the uptilted, more knowing gaze of And the Gold of Their Bodies. Our model was nude to the waist, but her wrap was a radiant scarlet, flowing into a darker, plum-grey ground that melded into magenta and dark greens at the edge of the panel. Her skin and hair were darker than those of the Essen picture and instead of the circular emblem of the tricolore, her white feather fan was embossed with a curling silver snake. Throughout his career, Gauguin had reworked stories from the Bible – even his Tahitian women could be seen as a series of exotic Eves or Madonnas. Instead of the carved chair, we had given her a wooden stool set with a black and white mosaic pattern, and above her shoulder, where the patch of blue in the Essen picture suggested a captured fragment of sky, floated a cloud-coloured asphodel, the petals faintly tinged with pink. Another symbol, the flowers of the meadows of Hades. I was quite proud of that suggestion. Gauguin was never interested in realism – the likes of MacKenzie Pratt, who thought they were clever to point out the ‘inaccuracies’ of his depictions of Polynesia, entirely missed his point. All of Gauguin’s painted objects are deformed and reformed by the gaze of the subject, hence the incongruity of the flower was entirely correct for a man who disdained the duty to reproduce nature as a ‘shackle’ to his vision. At least, that was what I hoped the House was going to explain in the catalogue.
We watched the colours for a long time, letting our eyes melt into the panel.
‘Are you pleased?’ I asked Li eventually.
‘I think she is the most beautiful thing I have ever made.’
There was no need to say anything else, because I thought so too.
*
Moët was the best Siderno’s supermarket could offer, but Fish-Breath enjoyed it. We made an odd company at dinner that evening, but with the help of the three bottles of what Fish-Breath called ‘monsciando’ it was quite jolly. He even left his shotgun outside. Li appeared in a dark suit with white shirt and beautifully knotted tie and a bunch of creamy narcissi, which he presented to me. I gave him a return ticket to Amsterdam that I’d bought i
n the travel agent’s that afternoon. It was about time he saw the Rijksmuseum. Da Silva had raised an eyebrow at that, but I told him I was sure Li would be back.
‘We might even go into business if this one works out! I wouldn’t mind moving the gallery down here. He’s amazing.’
Da Silva had given me a blank look.
‘Afterwards, I mean. When you go back to Rome.’
‘Sure. Yes. Great idea.’
He was very polite to Li at dinner. We ate chickpea pasta and the zeppole, ridged fried doughnuts dusted with sugar to celebrate St Joseph’s day, though he’d never struck me as being a saint who had much to celebrate. Fish-Breath didn’t say much, except to repeat his name for the champagne every time he took a sip, but that only made the conversation easier. Mostly we talked about food, the Italian conversational catch-all, but I learned a little more about Li. He had been in Italy thirty years, but aside from our trip to Essen, he had never left the country, though he had travelled all over, seeing every artwork he could. Later, when Li had left and Fish-Breath had resumed his usual place in the yard, da Silva opened a bottle of Barolo and we smoked at the kitchen table.
‘Thanks for this. I can’t stand Moët.’
‘Snob.’
‘I’m not a snob. I just like things to be good of their kind.’
‘Yes. I saw your flat in Venice. It was . . . elegant.’
I could have said that I was touched that he’d taken time off from arranging Alvin Spencer’s skeleton to notice the décor, but the wisecracks were getting to feel a bit old, so I just thanked him.
‘Do you like it? Having money?’
‘Yes. It means I can do what I want. Most of the time, anyway.’
‘I’d like to know what that feels like.’
‘What, money? I’d have thought you were taking off any minute for your luxury retirement in Venezuela. You and Franci.’