Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  This was postprison blues getting me, as any experienced con could have told me: you spend your last few weeks in the nick suffering from what they call gate fever—you lie in your cell, counting the days, and you play little mental videos of yourself running through daisied fields in slow motion, standing on sunlit mountaintops with the wind, invigorating and lung clearing, in your hair and face, or even just going for a walk down the High Street, drinking a pint in a pub, going to the loo with a book. The very thought lifts you like a lyric from Shelley or a 1960s rock opera. And for the first few days when you’re out, all these things really do feel good, and you really are able to block any onset of gloom by saying, “Just think, if I were in prison at this moment, I’d be…” And then … very soon you get your first funny looks from the neighbors—or from anyone who knows—and you realize, banally but inescapably, that freedom is a pretty relative thing. And all that comes to mind, day in, day out, is that simple child’s cry: “It’s not fair.”

  Tonight I’d embarrassed people by shouting it at the wrong place, on the wrong occasion.

  I heard running footsteps behind me. I turned and saw the somber Italian loping along. He was holding a briefcase in one hand and with the other was attempting to hold his flapping greatcoat closed. He drew to a halt beside me.

  “Hello,” I said. “So you want my story after all?”

  “I, er—” I suppose it was a difficult thing to say no to. He said, “Well, I was wondering … er, who are you?”

  “I’m Martin Phipps, the notorious forger and drug trafficker.”

  “Drug trafficker?”

  “So everybody believes. You might as well tell the Italian public so as well.”

  “But it is not true?” His English was precise and only lightly accented.

  “It is not true. I was arrested for doing forgeries—”

  “Of what?”

  “Oh, the usual things. Renoir, De Chirico. Modigliani; you know, the things everybody does. I had a good line in Dutch landscapes too.”

  “You must have been very clever.”

  “Not so clever. They found me out. Though not, mind you, till four years after I’d stopped doing them.” Four contented years of success, doing and selling my own paintings—my real work. Four years during which those forgeries had become in my mind nothing more than a juvenile prank—though a prank that had admittedly raised me a few bob here and there.

  “So where do the drugs come into this?”

  The Ancient Mariner compulsion was so strong in me at that moment that it hardly occurred to me to wonder what I was doing recounting all this in the back streets of Kensington on a cold January night to a young Italian I’d only just met.

  I went on: “Well, it turned out that the guy who’d started me off doing forgeries was a drug peddler. He was arrested for that and then they discovered paintings of mine in his house, and out it all came.” My defending counsel had continued to repeat that I was on trial for “obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception” (about £760 all told, but only I knew this) and for this crime only, but the message had never got through to the papers—or, it turned out, to the judge. “Things got a bit confused,” I said.

  “Ah.” He nodded seriously.

  “So you’re going to write this up?” I said. “At least put me right with the Italians?”

  “Well…”

  “You are a journalist?”

  “Yes, yes. And I want to find Mr. Osgood, as I said to you earlier, for a story.”

  “So, go to his gallery.”

  “This is the point. I cannot find it. He is not in the telephone book. He is not in the Yellow Pages. So I came to this show because I had heard he might come.”

  “You’re right. I remember now. He’s just changed premises.” I’d heard this from Adrian only a few days earlier in a gossipy lunchtime chat. “And of course he doesn’t generally need to advertise his whereabouts.”

  “Ah. So where is he now?”

  “You seem very anxious to see him. What is this story?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” He shifted his briefcase to his left hand and put his frozen right hand in his pocket. He still hadn’t done up his coat, and had to hold his arm across, Napoleon-fashion, to keep warm.

  I could have offered to hold his briefcase, I thought, but didn’t. Nor did I ask him for his press card, if only because I was sure he hadn’t got one. Instead I just told him the address Adrian had mentioned, north of Oxford Street, not, however, adding Adrian’s comment about the Wallace Collection now having to be a little more careful about locking up at nights. Then I said, “Are you selling or buying?”

  “I told you, I am interested in a story.”

  “Well, I’m not. I suppose you’re selling. For a friend, no doubt.”

  “Please, it doesn’t matter. Here I will leave you.” We’d reached a side road and he was preparing to turn down it. A little like a rabbit into a burrow. I doubted whether it really was his route home. I said, “Okay, ciao. Best of luck.”

  “Thank you, good-bye.” He walked quickly down the road, still hunched up in his coat. I stayed watching him for no particular reason. As he passed a pub two youths came out of it, and one of them, a big lad with even bigger boots, deliberately slammed his shoulder into the Italian. It was the kind of puerile loutishness which, if you’re the size and build the Italian was, it’s best simply to ignore. He, however, instantly retaliated by swinging his briefcase into the youth’s stomach. But this was obviously not meant as some kind of bravado challenge, because the next thing he did was run.

  The two youths seemed mesmerized by surprise for an instant, and then with no more than a vicious nod at each other they took off after him. I saw the Italian look around as he ran, and in the lamplight his face seemed all mouth—wide open and noiselessly moving. Seconds later one of his pursuers—a youth who seemed at this distance and in this light to be wearing a sculpted model of the Alps on his head—grabbed his shoulder. The Italian was now stammering, “ma—ma—” It meant “but,” but was only an m away from a whimper for his mother.

  It could still be mere horseplay, I thought wishfully, moving forward as if through treacle. After all, this was Kensington, not the Bronx.

  But the next moment the Italian was on the ground. I saw their boots drawing back and, well, I just had to run. Toward them. I give the wine all the credit for the direction of my run.

  2

  I SUPPOSE it was responsible too for the manic howling sound I came out with, which surprised them if nothing else. (It surprised me as well.) I saw their faces swing round.

  I too had my bag, a shoulder bag containing a sketchbook, three pencils, some loose change, and a library copy of an Iris Murdoch novel. I think it must have been this last that connected with the nearer one’s head as I whirled the bag by its strap in his direction. I’m sure the Dame had never been so lightning-quick in her effect before. He was on the ground a second later.

  The boy with the Alpine haircut was already moving in on me—and I saw his right hand drawing back with something metallic in it. I was still tottering from my mad swing and could only think, this was it, when my assailant staggered, his hands clutching and flailing at my coat, and the knife slipping from them. The Italian was clasped around his knees and I found myself saying, “Bite him.”

  I kicked the knife, so it scuttered across the pavement and dropped into the road—and then felt my own legs clutched. A second later we were all down there, among the cigarette stubs and sweet wrappers.

  Then there were voices farther down the road—a male voice saying, “Oh no” rather stupidly and a female voice saying, “My God.” The two thugs scrambled to their feet. The one whom the Italian had first hit with the briefcase gave the Italian a last savage kick in the ribs and then they both ran.

  “I think we won,” I said to the Italian. We were both still on the ground; I was more or less in a sitting position, while he was kneeling bent forward like a figure two
.

  “I say, you all right?” It was the stupid male voice I’d heard a moment before and I looked up to see that it came from a stupid male face. Stupid but solicitous: a short-haired young man with a frizzy blond girlfriend. They had presumably just come out of the pub. She said, “Did they take anything?” Their accents were more what one expected of the area than the thugs’ boots had been.

  “No, we’re okay,” I said. I looked at the Italian, still bent forward. “At least, I am.”

  “I say, are you all right?” the short-haired man repeated. He seemed rather pleased at having found the correct question.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the Italian said in three quick pants. He looked up now, first at our two succorers, then at me. “Thank you, thank you.” He was frighteningly pale. He looked around himself with sudden panic. “My case—”

  “Here it is,” the short-haired man said, stepping toward where it lay behind the Italian. Its catch must have given in the struggle because as he picked it up it jerked open and papers slitheringly cascaded to the ground.

  “No!” yelped the Italian, snapping out of helplessness and diving forward to arrest their flight, as the wind fluttered them.

  We all bent to help him, the young couple obviously relieved at having something definite to do. They were mostly typewritten pages, which I hardly glanced at; my attention was taken up with the large color photograph—about eight by ten inches—I found myself holding. In the lamplight the color had naturally attracted my eyes. I was just turning it the right way around when suddenly it was jerked out of my fingers. I looked up to see the Italian thrusting it fiercely into the black depths of the briefcase. He looked defiant for a second, and then turned away to accept the papers offered him by the couple.

  I rose to my feet and dusted myself off a little and the Italian did the same. The short-haired man said, “But I say, are you all right?” and the Italian nodded vehemently. “Yes, yes, yes. Thank you, thank you.” He backed away saying, “I’m—I’m fine now, good-bye, good-bye.” He turned and started walking quickly down the road, still busy fumbling with the lock of his case.

  I nodded to the couple and said, “I’ll go and see if he needs any help.” I followed him down the road. I heard the short-haired man say as they walked off in the opposite direction, “I say, I hope they’re all right.”

  “Listen,” I called to the Italian, “you’re obviously still shaken. Let me buy you a drink or something.”

  He turned around and shook his head. “No, no, I’m fine, fine. Thank you, thank you.” His mouth was twitching and his pallor seemed to have increased.

  “No, you’re not and you know you’re not. And suppose those two are still waiting farther down the road?”

  “You don’t think—”

  “Well, no, but let me buy you a drink anyway.”

  “I don’t drink,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll just walk with you until you feel calmer.”

  He looked at me with a sort of resigned despair and gave a shrug—or it might just have been another twitch.

  We walked on in silence in the direction of Earls Court. After a while I said, “What made you hit him back like that?”

  “But I—I didn’t know—”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “I thought—never mind.” He was far more shaken than I would have thought warranted. And even now, as we turned into a relatively busy road, he was looking nervously from side to side.

  “What did you think?” I said.

  “Please never mind. I didn’t know who they were.”

  This struck me as a rather odd thing to say. “Well, of course you didn’t.” Then a moment later I said, “Do you mean, you thought they might be someone else?” I saw that instant retaliatory swipe with the briefcase in my mind again, and it struck me that it must have been due to equally instant and overwhelming panic.

  “What?” He was caught off guard and looked quickly at me with frightened eyes. Then they jumped away again to look at the traffic. “No, of course not.”

  I was sure I’d guessed right—and equally sure that aggressive questioning was only going to shut him up. I changed tack. “So what are you doing in London?”

  He seemed to breathe slightly more easily. He said, “Research. I’m finishing a—a thesis.”

  “What on?”

  “On the ballad form and protest in the literature of the Industrial Revolution.”

  “Oh.” This was a bit of a conversation stopper for me, but I did my struggling best. “So shouldn’t you be in Manchester or somewhere?”

  “The documentation is all in London.”

  “Was that your thesis that nearly got scattered all down the road then?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would have been a pity.”

  “Yes.”

  “And, er, the photo? Was that part of your documentation?”

  “Yes,” he said for the third time—and it was the flattest one so far. I glanced sideways and saw him looking ahead—rigidly, as if he were having to fight to stop his head turning to see my reactions.

  “I see,” I said. My eyes had been on that photograph for less than a second, and it had been upside down; and yet, when it had been snatched from my fingers, a kind of subliminal afterimage had lingered in my mind: I saw a frameless painting apparently attached to the ceiling of a room. Logic told me that my impression of this unlikely position was due to my having seen the photo upside down, and presumably the painting had in fact been standing on the ground, propped up against a wall; as for the subject of the painting I could only recall the vague mass of a Madonna and Bambino, and I couldn’t make even the vaguest guess at the painter—nor even his nationality or century. There was just one niggling memory of something large and white and sinuous in a corner of the painting. Niggling, because it reminded me of something—or suggested something—that I had seen somewhere, sometime. Somewhere on the earth, and sometime in the thirty-four years I’d been on the earth. “I see,” I repeated, and indeed I was doing my damnedest to see that photo more clearly in my mind’s eye. Could I just try asking to see it again with my real eyes?

  “Well,” he said, “I’m all right now. You needn’t come farther with me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Good-bye, thank you very much, you’ve been—you’ve been kind. Good-bye.” We’d reached another side road and he was preparing once again to do his white-rabbit disappearing trick down it. I couldn’t think of any further excuse for continuing to force my company on him. He wasn’t, I imagined, likely to take up a hint for a cup of coffee and he didn’t seem in the right mood for a chat about his thesis or Venice or Italian cooking—or Italian art. So I said, “Well, so long. You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  “Yes, yes.” Rather unexpectedly he shook my hand; despite the cold it felt like a just-used tea bag. He gave me a last quick smile and then set off down the street.

  I watched as he scuttered along in front of the tattered terraced houses, his head twitching pigeonlike to left and right as if on the lookout for lurkers within the pillared porches and his right arm clutching his briefcase like a shield—or teddy bear. I could almost hear the words “Oh, my ears and whiskers…” Then he turned right around and saw me still standing there, and with a—well, a flounce of irritation, he started walking even more briskly.

  I turned and started back to the tube station—and then stopped again. I wanted to know where he was going—where he lived.

  Why? What the hell business was it of mine? Okay, so he was probably trying to flog a hot painting; but why should I stick my already burned nose in? I should be trying to keep my nose under the permanent cold cream of honesty—or indifference.

  But there was more to it than just a hot painting. There was his whole paranoid behavior, as if the Mafia were after him. And there was—there was something else.…

  I stood and scowled at the traffic and tried to think what the something else could be. And then I
knew: it was that white sinuous shape in the corner of the painting in the photograph. That was what was stimulating my curiosity.

  I knew—at least my determined striding legs seemed to know—that that shape meant something important, and I was going to have to find out what. I reached the side road just in time to see the Italian turning off it in the distance.

  I reached this next turning within seconds and, glancing down it, saw him mounting the steps of a house some twenty yards away. He was looking around himself as he did so, and his eyes again fell on me. Fortunately I was nowhere near a lamppost, and that fact, together with the distance, made me unrecognizable, I reckoned. I kept walking briskly across the road—and this in itself was a disguise, when compared with the drunken slouch he’d seen earlier. Seconds later I was out of sight.

  I waited a minute or so and then cautiously went along the road to note the number of the house he’d entered. There could be no hope of remembering it without the number the next day; the houses in the terrace were otherwise only to be distinguished by the peeling gaps in their stucco. Anonymous houses inhabited by anonymous people; bedsits and boardinghouses and cheap hotels; few people, I imagined, ever stayed in any of the houses long enough to receive a letter.

  The number was barely legible, as if it hadn’t been repainted since the terrace went up. I had to go right up the steps to read it. While I was there I looked at the doorbells. There were four bells and only one bore a name. I went back down the steps, and at the bottom just glanced up casually. Somebody was staring down at me from a window on the first floor; there was no light on. The figure at once stepped back into the darkness of the room.

  It could easily have been the Italian: it would match his paranoid behavior to tiptoe across to the window before turning the light on, for a last lookout. I wondered if he’d recognized me. Again there was no lamppost nearby. I hurried away, my head buried deep in my coat. I felt just a little foolish.

  * * *

  I reached home some forty minutes later. Well, home … not mine. It was a narrow two-story terraced house in Acton belonging to a friend who was in America for a year, as tame campus artist in a midwestern art college. I was there to keep vandals out and redirect his mail.