by Morris West
She stared at him in surprise. ‘What a strange thing to say.’
‘I don’t know how else to put it. I seem to have lost the knack of polite communication.’
‘You’ve been living alone all this time?’
‘Alone? No. Solitary? Yes. I have a Filipino couple who keep house for me. I’m busy at the office during the day; I go to theatres, to concerts, to exhibitions. I pass the time of day with people, but I shy away from companionship. It’s something of a sleepwalker’s existence.’
‘By choice?’
‘Of course not!’ He was suddenly vehement. ‘You have to understand – a crime like this is a curse laid on the survivor. I stayed out of society because I felt like a leper with a bell around my neck, obliged to declare myself unclean.’
‘As you’ve just done with me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ve paid me a compliment. I thank you for it.’
‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’
‘There’s not much of it left. I’m open to suggestions.’
‘Come back to my place; I’ll show you my collection and Madeleine’s as well. We can discuss the question of the lease and have an early dinner at Le Cirque. What do you say?’
‘I’d like that very much.’
As they strolled down Madison, he asked the ritual question. ‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘Committed to anyone?’
‘No. I’m busy and happy. While I’m building a career, I prefer to stay mobile.’
He turned into an old but still fashionable apartment block, steered her through the foyer past the curious eyes of the doorman and into the penthouse elevator.
She had expected something heavy and old-fashioned: oak panelling perhaps, period certainly, a middle-aged clutter of expensive possessions, a bachelor fussiness. Instead there was light and uncluttered space and minimal furniture designed for casual comfort. All non-structural walls had been breached, so that one space flowed into another without losing its own particular contour, its own area of privacy. Books, pictures, sculptures were dispersed to match the rhythm of the space and the light, so that they could be enjoyed at will and contemplated at leisure. Anne-Marie made no secret of her surprise.
‘This is extraordinary – quite different from anything I expected. Who designed it?’
‘Madeleine. She had wonderful ideas about living space. She used to say, “Walls and doors don’t create privacy. Once you solve the problem of heating and cooling large areas – and you can – why break them up into cubbyholes?” I didn’t really believe her at the beginning, but I let her do what she wanted. This is the result. The only change I’ve made is to turn the dining room into a gallery for her pictures. It’s a huge room, as you’ll see – and I don’t give dinner parties anymore. I’m saving that viewing until last.’
For a moment Madeleine, twelve months dead, was a palpable presence in the room. Anne-Marie felt a sudden prickle of fear; the dead should stay buried and let the living be about their own lives. She asked with careful detachment, ‘Where did Madeleine exhibit?’
‘She never held an exhibition; she sold privately through Lebrun. However, I’ve often thought of arranging a posthumous show. There are about fifty works in all. I’ll be interested in your opinion after you’ve seen them.…Anyway, let’s do the five-dollar tour first.’
‘You lead, I follow.’
Feeling a sudden need to re-establish a physical contact that would exclude the ghost, she held out her hand so that he had to clasp it and lead her on a circuit of his domain.
‘Our joint collection starts here. This canvas is by Annibale Caracci, one of three brothers painting in Emilia in the last half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. As you probably know, a whole collection of Caracci works was sold for peanuts in London in 1947. I stumbled on this one in an antique dealer’s in Devon.…This next one is Madeleine’s find, an early version of Milton Avery’s “Seagrasses and Blue Sea”. All the American pieces are her choice. I’m responsible for the foreigners.’
‘How do you explain that? Did either of you reserve a right of comment on the other’s choice? Which had the final say on money?’
Bayard gave her a swift appraising glance and then smiled.
‘Now I know you’ll make a good dealer. First you have to know who makes the decisions on matters of taste, then who signs the cheques.’
‘It’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?’
‘Of course. And I’ll try to answer it for you. Madeleine’s whole vision as an artist was of urban America. No matter how much she travelled, Manhattan was still the home-place of her mind. She was interested in history, but only in so far as it embellished or explained the present. Nevertheless, she had great care for artists and craftsmen who were trying to express other aspects of the continent. She corresponded with them; she travelled the country to meet them; she bought their works and helped them to find markets. Above all, she had respect. It was a very special relationship into which I never wanted to intrude. I was, I am, a different animal.’
‘I’d be interested’ – Anne-Marie was deliberately provocative – ‘to know what kind of animal you really are.’
‘Why don’t you look at the pictures instead of at me?’ His chiding was only half a joke. ‘This is a Klimt which was knocked down to me on a slow day at Sotheby’s.’
‘It’s a beauty; I love that hectic seductive flush on his women.…You have an eye for quality.’
‘I know, but my pocket isn’t deep enough to afford this quality anymore. Look at this…a sketch for what later became Ingres’ portrait of Madame Rivière. I picked it up ten years ago for two thousand dollars. I was twenty-five when I first started buying pictures. I’m fifty now. The price of art has inflated far beyond even the most inflated currencies. So the cinquecento is out of my range, the Impressionists are as inaccessible as Mars.…’
‘It seems to me you’ve done very well. This is an important and very valuable collection. What started you off?’
He mused over the question a moment. ‘I guess it was because I realised early how vulnerable I was.’
‘Vulnerable? That’s an odd thing to say.’
‘Look, I’m a lawyer, a desk-bound man. I could easily become brain-bound too. So I’ve always had to find myself other regions to live in – a distant time, an exotic place, even an imaginary family.’
‘That sounds rather dangerous.’
‘It is, because it can lead to total divorcement from reality, which is what nearly happened to me this last twelvemonth. But my father had taught me another way of using imagination. He was a worshipper of ancestors, a believer in continuities. He taught me how to read history in an art gallery through costume and architecture and the details of daily life. He himself was a physician and he led me through the history of the healing arts from Aesculapius to the Arunta tribe of Australia. He used to say: “Yesterday, today and tomorrow are all one in the river of time. There and here are the same country, because they co-exist in the one mind.”’
‘Wise man. I would like to have known him.’
‘I loved him. It is my greatest regret that Madeleine and I were never successful in giving him a grandson before he died.’
It was as if a barrage had broken and all the memories dammed up behind it came flooding out in a foam and flurry of talk. The pictures on the walls took on a glow of new life as each one was invested with an aura of personal memory.
‘This is a pencil sketch of my French grandmother, done by Tissot while he was painting in London. She was a beautiful woman, much courted in her youth; though by the time I knew her she was a very formidable old lady and not at all proud of her gauche grandson. I think the truth was that she didn’t like children at all. They reminded her of her age. Tissot really knew how to paint women, didn’t he? Look at the lift of the head and the subtle curve of the lips. He had much more subtlety than the pundits gave him credit for. His pa
intings were always highly finished. One can linger over them for a long time.’
‘You admire that, don’t you? The finished look?’
‘It’s not the look.’ He was eager to explain himself. ‘It’s the talent, the craftsmanship to execute whatever one chooses – an instant of bravura or a painstaking texture that glows for centuries. Take a look at this little beauty. At first glance you’d swear it was a Monet. It’s actually by a Japanese, Seiki Kusoda, painted about 1912. It was given to me by a client in Kyoto for whom we’d just set up an American affiliate. The client was an interesting man in his own right; his father had been a maker of wood-blocks for children’s colour books and had passed on the craft to his son, who channelled it into one of the best offset printing houses in Japan. Actually he offered to do the illustrated catalogue if ever I set up an exhibition of Madeleine’s work.’
Suddenly a surge of unease took hold of her. The collection was making the same impression as the man – it was somehow diffuse, unresolved, a rag-bag of valuable items with no coherence. Abruptly she told him, ‘There’s too much here for me to take in at one viewing. I’d like to break off and look at Madeleine’s work.’
‘Of course. I’ve been very thoughtless; I’m afraid I’m a rather boring guide .’
‘You’re not boring. It’s just that you’re not aware of the emotional impact you create in the midst of a collection that reflects so much of your life. If I’m to enjoy your wife’s work, I need to concentrate my attention on that.’
‘We could leave it for another day if you wish.’
‘No. I’d prefer to do it now.’
‘Then would you indulge me? I want you to view the pictures alone.’
She was instantly uneasy. ‘Why?’
‘I can’t see Madeleine’s pictures any more – only a single brutal image of violence. I want you to look at her work with a critical eye, a dealer’s eye. Ask yourself whether you could honestly back it as an entrepreneur in the market. Give me your best judgment. Good or bad, I won’t mind – just so it be honest.’
Intuition told her that this was a dangerous moment upon which might hang the whole outcome of their business dealings. Consciously or unconsciously he was testing her, weighing her against some private scale of whose norms she knew nothing. She hesitated, groping for the right words, then asked him the flat question, ‘What hangs on my answer?’
Bayard’s response was curt and precise. ‘Each of us has revealed a private interest. Yours is to set up a dealership and a gallery. Mine is a posthumous exhibition of Madeleine’s work. I’m trying to determine whether those interests can be served together, or whether they should be kept apart.’
‘No.’ She was suddenly angry. ‘No, no, no! Already you’ve put me in an impossible position. You know I want the gallery. I know you can give or withhold the lease. If I say I don’t like the work, I offend you mortally. If I tell you I like it, I’m compromised by a self-serving decision…. I think we’d best call it a day.’
For a long moment he stared at her and there was no message she could read in his cold eyes or the stony mask in which they were set. Finally, he said, ‘Now that you’ve managed to insult us both, why not leave a tidy situation? Look at Madeleine’s pictures, but keep your opinion to yourself.’
‘You’re manipulating me.’
‘To what end?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel as though I’m opening that last fatal door in Bluebeard’s castle.’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘After you’ve discovered Bluebeard’s secret, he’ll be waiting to serve you a drink and buy you dinner.’
He opened the door, switched on the lights and stepped back to let her pass into the dining room.
The moment the door closed upon her, Anne-Marie was overcome with panic. She shut her eyes and leaned back against the panels, shouting silently to command her screaming nerves.
‘What the hell did you expect? You’re supposed to be negotiating a lease – instead you let yourself in for cocktails with a middle-aged widower who looks like Cary Grant, talks like a character out of Henry James, has a lurid family history and an emotional hang-up as well. He’s got at least six million dollars in assorted art hanging on his walls and he shoves you into this great white chamber because he wants – he says – an independent appraisal of his dead wife’s talent. Well, go on. Give it to him. The sooner it’s done, the sooner you’ll be out of this crazy cuckoo-land.…’
Finally she opened her eyes and tried to focus on the pictures that streamed along the walls like the banners of an ancient army.
Once again the sheer mass of the work daunted and confused her. It needed a long, slow promenade to give her any focus at all. First and foremost, Madeleine Bayard was a traditionalist, in style and education. Her draughtsmanship was impeccable. Her brush-strokes were totally controlled. The harmonies of her palette were in classic mode. At first sight, everything on the canvas was so sedulously executed that the viewer was unprepared for the shock of the dominant theme.
Every one of the pictures was a Manhattan interior: an uptown penthouse, a Harlem tenement, a store, a subway, a covered walkway, a shanty built of packing-cases, the cabin of a tug-boat on the river. At first glance each interior framed an episode of urban life, beautifully rendered but conveying in some fashion instability and unease. Then it became clear that all the characters were imprisoned in their own milieu and were thrusting desperately to break out of it. They were drawn – as the viewer was drawn – irresistibly towards a fragment of the outside world: a geranium in a window-box; a long perspective of city canyons, with only a hint of sky and water at the end; a solitary gull, wheeling over a seaway. There was one stunning piece that looked like a Dormition of the Virgin in which a bag-lady, frozen to death in the archway of a church, gazed placid and unseeing at a little girl walking down a snowbound street.
In spite of the sombre settings, the whole thrust of the painter’s emotion was outward and upward to the American dream: a hope still visible, a heaven still dreamed of, a liberty not yet beyond hand’s reach.
Madeleine Bayard must have felt herself imprisoned, otherwise she could never have painted so poignantly the frustration of the shut-in soul. But where or by what had she been bound? By marriage to Bayard? By the restriction of urban life, the concrete skyline, the light diluted by smog, the surging humans who clogged the streets of Manhattan? Whatever it was, a crazed assassin had released her from it. Now her husband was in bondage to her memory and, by some strange inverted logic, was using her life-work to set himself free. Which led to another mute self-inquisition for Anne-Marie.
‘What do you say when you walk out of this room? “Thanks for letting me see your wife’s work, Mr Bayard. Very impressive. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip dinner and go home and wash my hair.…” You know you can’t do that. It’s an insult to your own intelligence. You’re staring at the kind of talent that pops up once in a quarter of a century. It can’t, it mustn’t, be left to moulder in this mausoleum. And don’t overdo the altruism either, my girl. You smell money – big money – and a reputation to be made overnight. So you go out there like the daughter of a good auctioneer and hustle what you’ve got and even what you haven’t. If Edmund Justin Bayard wants to be hustled, you’ve got it made. If he doesn’t, at least you’ll know where a couple of caches of art treasures are buried – and that’s worth a hefty finder’s fee any day of the week.’
It was a scene easy to stage in solitude and dumb-show, but not half so easy to play with a very complex actor in the lead. So she lingered a while, contemplating the haunting image of the bag-lady wrapped in her frozen draperies under the Norman arch of a fashionable church. The longer she looked at it, the more it seemed like a master work, with the superb sculpture of the waxen features, the cast-off clothing subtly transmuted into cerecloth, the artful management of grey stone and winter light and the innocence of a solitary child.
Suddenly she felt another small shiver of fear.
The woman who had painted this picture was too formidable to have as an enemy, even in death. She had to be placated, praised, turned into a friend and ally. What better way than to become her posthumous patron, the knowing and compassionate soul who made her genius known to the world?
She took a deep breath, strode to the door and walked into the lounge to confront Edmund Bayard.
His greeting was studiously banal. ‘What will you drink?’
‘What are you having?’
‘A vodka martini.’
‘That will do fine, thank you.’
‘I’ve rung Le Cirque. They can’t fit us in for dinner until nine.’
‘That makes it very late. Why don’t we just enjoy our drinks?’
‘Just as you like.’ If he was displeased, he gave no sign of it. ‘Olive or twist?’
‘An olive, please. Let me say it straight and plain: I am bowled over by your wife’s pictures. She was, she remains, a big talent. The next question is what you want to do about it. In short, is it your intention to hold the collection intact or to break it up and sell it?’
‘To maintain it myself would make no sense. I’d have to find a home for it with an institution. The institution would have to create a posthumous reputation and then spend a lot of money to mount travelling exhibitions. If I were a trustee of such a body I’d decline gracefully in favour of better-known collections. No…’ – he was suddenly tense and emphatic – ‘I loved my wife. She’s dead, but her pictures keep her alive. I have to get them out of my house – and her ghost out of my bed.’
It was a cry of pure desperation, but Anne-Marie would not respond to it. She told him calmly, ‘So you pick the canvases you want to keep and put the rest up for sale. If you do that, I’d like first offer to mount the selling exhibition. Before you do anything, however, there’s another decision you have to make.’
‘Which is?’
‘Once those works go on show, the whole story of your wife’s murder will hit the headlines again. Can you face that?’