Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  When I’d come out of prison I’d gone and stayed with my mother for a week or two in Totnes. She had looked after me as solicitously as ever, continually making me cream-teas and giving me hot-water bottles (the only two pleasures of the flesh she tolerates), but the recurrent theme of “I always knew it would end like this” (by “it” she meant not only my taking up the profession of artist but my going to live in London and, worse still, abroad) had me hankering for the big city and its freedom. So I’d been delighted to get Jim’s phone call offering me the flat at a minimum rent.

  The house had seemed just what I’d needed; Jim too was a painter, and the front room, spacious with large north windows, made a good studio—apart from a tiny kitchen, it was the only room on the ground floor. He was about as tidy and house-proud as Attila—or myself—and this made things much easier, of course. There would be no question of living for a year on tiptoes.

  But it was still Jim’s flat. Almost nothing in it was mine, in fact. There were still all his pictures, his photos, his books; there were his cooking stains, the springs in the chair he’d broken, the glasses he’d chipped, the loo chain he’d snapped, the cupboard door he’d wrenched off the hinges, the lampshade he’d allowed to burn.… My few belongings—my clothes, some art books, my painting equipment—hung about in odd corners of the rooms, like interlopers—like me, in fact.

  I made myself a cup of coffee in the kitchen; this had been a policy decision, my first instinct having been to open a can of beer. Plumping for coffee meant that I had decided to keep on thinking about the events of the evening, rather than keep on going down the road to carefree mindlessness and leglessness. I sat stirring the sugar and pondered another decision: whether to have the coffee there or in the studio. (The studio possessed the only armchair in the house and so served as a drawing room as well.) I decided on the studio, even if it did mean depressing myself by staring at my paintings.

  The phone rang. I took my coffee over to it. “Hello.”

  “Ah, Martin.”

  “Oh, hi, Mum. I’ve just got back.”

  “How did it go?”

  “What?”

  “Well, your show. You told me the other day you were going to a little party at the gallery.”

  “It wasn’t my show today.” My mother is incorrigibly vague on the details of my working life. As she hardly ever leaves Totnes to go farther than Exeter, she has never seen an exhibition of mine. This is a source of relief to me, in many ways—but, consequent on this, a source of guilt. These two feelings, unfortunately, are at the basis of all my doings with my family—my mother and my three elder sisters (my father, a part-time housepainter and part-time Baptist minister, died when I was three). I had never felt so relieved as when, at the age of nineteen, I left Totnes to go to art college in pagan London. Finally I had made that longed-for break with the family and the chapel and gameless, joyless, Bible-reading Sundays. I can still remember the thrill when I entered my first pub on a Sunday and downed my first pint of beer. It was a dreary little place in Kilburn and the beer had tasted horrible, but I’d nonetheless savored the experience as a glorious moment of defiantly hedonistic decadence. And then … well, then of course the guilt feelings had set in, and I’d felt duty bound to ring home and ask how the family all were and how their Sunday was being passed. Throughout my college career and beyond I made regular phone calls to let everybody know that I was enjoying the parks and museums and riverside walks of London, with never a mention of pubs or parties or nightclubs—or even cinemas.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, I’m sure it will be one day, Martin, don’t let it worry you.”

  “I wasn’t. My show’s in two weeks’ time. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “Yes, do. Everyone sends their love.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “You’re eating properly, are you?” she said. “And you’re being careful who you talk to at these parties?”

  “Yes, yes. Or they’re being careful about talking to me.”

  A few more reassurances on my part, a few questions about Totnes life, and we both hung up—both no doubt feeling relieved. And then both no doubt feeling guilty.

  I suppose if I were ever to try to offer some kind of excuse for my crime, it would have to be based on the classic and feeble lines of what a mixed-up kid I’d been at the time, what with the family background I’d had. Not that I’d been deprived or cruelly treated: it was just that it had been kept from me which century I was living in. When I’d gone up to art college I must have been the most out-of-place and out-of-date student that the place had ever seen, with ideas about la vie de bohème that were practically neolithic. A strict Baptist upbringing isn’t designed to keep one au fait with the latest fashions, and even rebellion against it therefore is likely to take an antiquated form. So as far as I was concerned, the artist was nothing if not a romantic rebel, intent on shocking the bourgeosie. (It’s only to be wondered at that I asked for beer and not absinthe on that first visit to the pub.) Some of this anachronistic and shallow “defiance” got knocked out of me of course during art college, but obviously not enough. So when one of the restorers for whom I worked after college put it to me casually one day that as I was so good at imitating the styles of painters when “retouching” them, maybe for a few extra pounds I’d like to have a go at doing a De Chirico all of my own—“just for the fun of it”—I don’t remember having more than the vaguest of moral qualms about it. If any at all. After all, the people who were going to be fooled (and it wouldn’t be me telling them that it was a De Chirico—I’d merely painted the thing) were the enemies of all that true art stood for, weren’t they? People who put paintings into bank safes or treated them like investments in a company. And I had to live.

  Of course none of this gets around the fact that I was making money by deceiving people, however far I was from the actual handover of the finished painting. (And I was far enough away to be satisfied with the peanuts that the restorer gave me for my cut—but that was stupidity on my part, not restraint.) However much I argued with myself about the whole business when in jail, I couldn’t get away from that fact—and that therefore I deserved punishment.

  I don’t know whether I deserved the Scrubs. But then I don’t know whether anyone deserves that.

  I went along to the studio where I was confronted by the usual chaos. The easel in the center bore the work in progress—a view of tower blocks in Stepney. The paintings chosen for the exhibition were propped against the walls all around the room, so that I couldn’t help seeing them, whichever way I turned. Views of Thames mud, of rubble-strewn waste ground, of uncompleted motorway bridges in the rain, of railway sidings, of car scrap heaps.… All with my usual predominance of browns and grays, with just here and there a vandalized phone box or workman’s DANGER sign to add a splash of brightness. And then above these, tacked to the wall, Jim’s postcards: almost every square inch of the plastered surface was covered with minuscule reproductions of paintings he liked; a riot of clashing colors to rebuke the drab tones below. They were put up with defiant lack of order and logic and taste: Manet next to Vermeer next to Duccio next to Hockney next to Masaccio next to Stubbs.… Daunting company.

  I sipped the coffee and stared at my paintings and found I wasn’t as depressed by them as I had suspected I might be. No, tonight I was just indifferent. I knew them so well by now that I found it almost impossible to judge them. Sometimes a wave of confidence would go through me and I’d think they were really good: technically excellent and imbued with the “spirit” of the city. Other times I’d think they were all surface cleverness and gimmicks. As the opening day of the exhibition approached, the latter feeling had begun to predominate, and I just hoped that the buyers would like my cleverness and gimmicks.

  Five years earlier, while I was still working for the restorers, I’d caught a little of the world’s attention—a fluttering thread of its sleeve—with my cityscapes. After months of traipsing from dealer to
dealer with portfolios of my work I had finally got a phone call from one of the few who had agreed to look through a selection of slides of my work—a selection I’d prepared after being told for the tenth time by a dealer, “We don’t see artists”—as if artists were some particularly repellent kind of beggar. The dealer had a gallery in Knightsbridge that specialized in rather romantic landscapes, and I think he felt that my scenes of mud and misery would give him something to point to whenever anybody accused him of dealing exclusively in chocolate-box prettiness. Or perhaps he just wanted his other pictures to look so much the brighter by contrast. Anyway, for whatever reason, he offered me a two-week personal exhibition. My pictures must have caught a particular mood of the time because I suddenly got noticed. Even a reviewer from a posh Sunday paper dropped by and gave me a pat on the head. Not all my paintings were cityscapes; I’d included a few portraits and even an abstract or two to show the full range of my genius, but the only ones that got the attention were the London scenes in London rain: comparisons were made with Doré and with George Scharf (whom I’d never heard of), and dinky things were said about my tonal values and color harmonies (I’d never heard of them either). And during the week all the cityscapes got sold. When I was offered the chance of another show a year later by the same gallery, I took the line of least resistance and exhibited only cityscapes, with just a couple of pictures of Dartmoor to break the monotony. They all sold except the ones of Dartmoor. And the most depressing cityscapes (rubbish tips, sewage works) sold the quickest. I became briefly fashionable: I was invited to parties, I met pop stars, I was asked to describe my room to the Observer magazine. (I often thought of that “room of my own” when bedding down with my two cellmates and their chamber-pots.) This kind of spotlit attention didn’t last of course; the thread was twitched from my fingers as the world passed on to other painters, other sculptors. This didn’t mean I starved, of course; I no longer held cocktailing court to packed “private views,” but my paintings still sold in a fairly steady, unflashy way: so long, that is, as I went on painting the kind of works I’d been granted my fifteen minutes’ fame for: my pictures of high-rise misery and industrial squalor obviously still came to mind when people found a few spare wall inches in their Knightsbridge flats and Richmond villas; but that was all. The pictures of Dartmoor I sent to my sisters—one of my periodic and guilt-ridden attempts to keep in touch with the family.

  And then those foolish forgeries came to light—and what light, a throbbing glare of flashbulbs outside the courts each day, thanks to the scandalous trimmings of the case, and I was sent to darkness: the inspissated gloom of Wormwood Scrubs.

  When I came out and found myself turned down by my old dealer, Adrian had at once seen his chance. He was hoping that “Martin Phipps, the Return of” was going to get as much coverage as “Martin Phipps, the Removal of” had in its time. So, I suppose, was I.

  When Adrian had approached me I’d thought that this could be a turning point; I’d no longer paddle in picturesque squalor, I would truly plumb the depths. I’d make pictures of prison life that would match Doré’s drawings of Newdigate—the boredom of cell life, the oppression of metal corridors and doors, the degradation of “slopping out”… every humiliating detail.

  But it seemed I was no plumber. Whenever I actually tried any of these subjects, the result never reflected what I felt. It remained surface cleverness, no matter how deep the chasms inside me. I remembered too some of the more scornful experts at the trial (“How anybody could have been taken in…”), and I saw them all waiting to pounce again at the exhibition, with retrospectively wise cries of words like imitative, derivative, thirdhand, third-rate. So I decided to stick to what was definitely my own territory, where nobody could accuse me of trespassing or pilfering, and where I couldn’t accuse myself of high-wire trickery over the abyss: and if anybody wanted to see developments, well, they could note postprison Dostoyevskian depths in the extra dogshit and piss puddles in the paintings.

  You could call it a sage acceptance of my limitations—or you could call it playing safe.

  That evening, as I sat slumped staring at the easel and recalling my youthful ambitions, I called it yellow-bellied chickenhearted jelly-legged flabbiness.

  But the painting should still sell, I thought. It was okay. Clever stuff. I wondered whether to add a few sea gulls to the rubbish tip in the foreground. Something that people would pick out against the grayness and be able to comment on: “Note, Camilla, how those few spots of white give life and movement.…” Another little gimmick.

  “Hey!”

  I shouted this out loud, spluttering coffee all over the floor. And I found I’d stood up. My hand miraculously still held the coffee cup in a more or less horizontal position.

  I couldn’t have done other than get up. It was only surprising that I hadn’t tried to fly. Because even as I thought of the sea gulls another white bird had suddenly reared up before my mind’s eye—vivid, unmistakable. And I saw the painting in the Italian’s photograph clearly, as if it were hanging on my wall. A Madonna and Bambino, seated in a meadow with gentle hills and a castle behind them, and in the foreground a swan.

  La Madonna del cigno. A painting by Cima da Conegliano that I’d seen in a village in the Veneto on one of my first visits to Italy.

  I sat back down on the arm of the chair, closed my eyes, and thought back to the day I’d gone to see that painting: the village was some miles from Treviso, a few straggling houses around a church rebuilt in the dullest eighteenth-century style, in the middle of the flat Veneto countryside. I’d hitched and walked, in the steamy July weather, the sun an oppressive yellow smudge in a soapy sky. The coolness of the church had been particularly welcome; just a few old ladies muttering the Rosary and the Cima there on the side wall—the simple peasant Madonna, the sunlit landscape under a blue sky—cool cool blue—and the swan floating in the most deliciously rippling water of any painting I’d ever seen. I had almost felt like stripping off there and then. Instead I had gazed for some minutes while my shirt dried, then I’d gone for a beer in a bar opposite the church, and then returned to gaze some more.

  I got up off the chair and went upstairs to the bedroom where a bookcase held the flat’s library—art books and thrillers. Jim’s books were to the left; he went for books with plenty of reproductions and minimum text (“Most of what people write about pictures is such balls”); my few filled the empty space on the right and were mostly on minor artists—bought on the principle, patently false, that I knew the major artists so well that there was no point spending money on books about them. (And the minor names looked more impressive too on the bookshelves.) So I had studies on such people as Garofalo, Tibaldi, Thomas Girtin … and Cima da Conegliano.

  I sat on the unmade bed and flipped through the book until I found a black-and-white reproduction of the painting. My memory of it was pretty well perfect. The only thing I’d forgotten was the convincing babylike way in which the Bambino twisted around to stare up at the Madonna. And there, preserved next to the text, was a folded yellow cutting from a newspaper, with the penciled date of June 1978.

  “In the past week there have been three separate art thefts from churches in the Veneto (the province around Venice in the northeast of Italy). In all three cases the churches were in small villages, and the thieves broke in at night. Only one painting was taken from each church, but in each case it was the church’s greatest treasure.” There followed a list of the three villages and the paintings: The Madonna of the Swan by Cima da Conegliano, The Crucifixion by Alvise Vivarini, and The Annunciation by Palma il Giovane. “The police are convinced that the thefts are the work of a skilled team, probably acting on commission.”

  That was all. I remembered cutting the piece out; it had caught my eye only a few days after I’d bought the book on Cima. Three weeks’ beer money it had cost me and this made Cima a personal concern: anything touching him touched me. And in particular, the theft of a painting that I’d sweated
miles under the sun to go and see—a painting that probably only the parishioners of the church, the author of the book, and I knew about—well, I’d felt almost a proprietory pang at its loss. Cima was mine.

  I suppose at the time I’d cut the article out, I’d intended to follow up the developments of the case, but if there had ever been any, I’d never heard of them. Until tonight.

  I put the book away. Could I be sure that that was the painting I’d seen in the photo? Yes, I could. It was the only explanation for the way that white shape had niggled at the corner of my mind. And even as I thought about this question the photograph leaped into limpid blue and green and white detail.

  I went down to the studio, and as I entered my foot kicked something. I looked down to see my coffee mug, its contents spreading rapidly over the paint-flecked lino. Well, that decided things. I went to the kitchen and opened a can of beer. I was about to return to the studio bearing this, but then on reflection took another two cans from the fridge as well. Might as well save myself another journey.

  I went back to the studio and settled myself in front of the easel. I was going to add those sea gulls. For some reason I felt myself surfing on a surge of sudden confidence. The painting was going to be damned good. And I was going to save that Cima.

  For the moment the beer would help me bring about the first prophesy (or at least make me feel it to be true). As to the second, well, the morning would show. I’d go and call on Osgood.

  I picked up the palette. And what if instead of sea gulls I put in a swan?

  * * *

  In bed that night I woke with a throbbing head and fur-lined mouth and a nagging question. Who had the Italian thought might be trying to attack him? And why had he been so wildly terrified of whoever it was?