Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  3

  I LEFT the house the next morning—well, it wasn’t lunchtime yet—without going to see the result of my night’s work in the studio. I didn’t want to depress myself. I was no longer riding the crest of that confidence wave: it had shattered and slithered scummily down the shingle of my hangover.

  I was in Oxford Street by one o’clock and I made my way to Osgood’s gallery. His name, in fact, did not appear on the sign; it was named after the road it was on. In the windows were a few nineteenth-century English watercolors (the sort of thing that every Victorian traveler did on his walking tours), an extremely boring Dutch landscape, and a more than usually lascivious Alma-Tadema.

  I entered, and the young lady behind the desk at the far end of the gallery gave me a mere flicker of a glance before returning to her work. She was either considerately refraining from being pushy or was just assuming that I was a mere looker.

  I approached her desk and asked, “Could I speak to Mr. Osgood?”

  She looked up. She was a Burne-Jonesian heroine with a diaphanous hair-drifting beauty and Laura Ashley clothes. “Well, actually, sir,” she said, in a breathy voice with syllables as long and languorous as her eyelashes, “he is just about to leave for luncheon.”

  “Luncheon?” I repeated. I couldn’t help it, I swear. Well, I suppose any meal that contributed to Osgood’s considerable girth deserved the dignity of the unabbreviated word. I said, “He wouldn’t have time for even a quick word?”

  “Well,” she said (and this one word took her almost as long as my whole sentence), “I could go and ask him.” Her brow was furrowed with the effort of thinking this possibility out.

  “Could you really?” I said.

  “Yes, if you would wait just one moment. What name must I give?”

  “Martin Phipps.” It wouldn’t bring him running, but it might just make him curious.

  She rose and floated to a door in the corner of the room. I think she opened it before passing through, but it hardly seemed necessary.

  I looked at what she was working on: the Guardian crossword. I heard her fairy voice in a distant room being answered by an ogrelike rumbling and then footsteps approached. His, of course, not hers.

  Osgood appeared at the doorway. He was larger than ever and I wondered whether he always hesitated before passing through a doorway. He was all generous curves, like the hills around Totnes, and tall with it. His face, with its Orson Welles graying beard and its great Boreas-puffing cheeks, radiated joviality and bonhomie. The pale blond girl hovered behind him, and together they seemed to make a rather too obvious Wattsian allegory of the flesh and the spirit.

  “Martin,” Osgood said, extending his two sausage-balloon arms to me.

  We’d never been on first-name terms before. Indeed, I’d only met him once, at one of my flashier private views—before the Fall. Maybe he was showing that he was no snob. Or just accepting me as a partner in crime. “Harry,” I said, taking him up on it.

  “To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this visit?” His voice was as large and rotund as his figure and his jowls jumped jollily at each roly-poly syllable. “You’re not looking for inspiration?”

  I said, “No, no. I was just curious. I’d heard on the, er, grapevine that you might have a rather interesting Cima, or at least might know something about where one could be found.”

  “A Cima?” Extra lines of puzzlement appeared amid the creases and rolls of his face.

  “Da Conegliano. With a swan, so they said.”

  “Good Lord, you’re not talking about the Madonna del cigno?”

  This came rather too quickly, I felt. And although his face was still generally jovial, there was a watchful expression in his eyes. I said, “Could be. Cigno means swan, does it? That must be the one. You don’t know anything about it then?”

  “Wish I did,” he said. “Wish I did.” He chuckled at the idea of possessing such delicious knowledge. “Just where did you get this curious information?”

  “Bloke at a party. Oh, well, Harry, mustn’t keep you from luncheon.”

  “Bloke at a party.” He glanced at the Lady of Shalott, still hovering there with an expression of sweet incomprehension. She, I suppose, helped the image: how could a business with anybody so ethereal in its front room have anything to hide? He said to her, “Melinda, would you just go and tell His Grace that I’ll be along in two ticks.”

  “Yes, Mr. Osgood.” She melted away to confront His Grace with hers.

  “Now, Martin,” he said, wheezing conspiratorially now, “I’m sure you’re aware that the Madonna del cigno by Cima is a stolen painting. Eh? Yes, of course you are. So you do see that an allegation that I know anything of its whereabouts is slanderous. No joke for a fellow like me. So, well, I really have to ask you to tell me who said such a thing.”

  “Honestly, Harry,” I said, smiling fatuously, “I just got talking to a bloke at a party. Never met him before.”

  For the first time a frown appeared, and he lifted a pudgy hand to his beard. “You’re being rather foolish, if you don’t mind my saying so. I really have to take this very seriously.” I knew the words that were coming next: “My reputation, you know. Very important in my line of business.”

  Here I suppose I could have put a finger to my nose and said, “Oh, come off it, Harry,” and dug him in the ribs—or thereabouts. Instead I said, “All right, I understand, you’ve got nothing to do with it. I’m sorry. I’ll have to be more careful who I speak to at parties.”

  He tut-tutted. “So you’re not going to tell.” He took out a packet of fruit gums and popped one into his mouth, without offering them to me. He smiled and said, “I understand you’re to have a little exhibition very soon.” He stressed the word little with genial indulgence.

  “Yes, please come along.”

  “You won’t want any trouble, I suppose.” Still smiling.

  “You’re going to send the boys around?” I said.

  He lifted his hands in a gesture of mock horror at this crudity. “Dear me, dear me. Your recent experiences must have taken you into another world from mine. The boys indeed. I simply mean that you no doubt hope that your exhibition will put you back on a—how shall I put it?—respectable footing.” He liked this phrase and said it again, sucking on his fruit gum with relish: “A respectable footing. Once more the bright young artist and not the drug-running forger.”

  “I never had anything to do with drugs,” I said, probably too quickly.

  “Perhaps not, if we’re being pedantically accurate about details, but whoever is about such things?” This seemed very comical to him; his eyes were squeezed tight in a little wheezy chuckling fit. “But anyway, you’re hoping that all this will be forgotten and Martin Phipps will be judged for his works and not for his scandals. Well, just remember there are many other ways for a man of influence to act, besides sending in the boys, as you call it. And I am a man of influence. Still, all the best. If you’re not going to tell me the source of this slander, you’re not going to tell me. Let me just say that I don’t want to hear any more of the same nonsense.” He patted me on the shoulder, which had me flinching. Then, with a little snorting and wheezing, like an ocean liner maneuvering out of port, he turned and left me.

  So as not to seem too browbeaten, I hung around in the gallery for a while, looking at the watercolors. Melinda came back into the room and stood looking at me, with her head on one side so that her hair poured down Rapunzel-like. Maybe I was supposed to grab my sketchbook.

  “His Grace okay?” I said after a pause.

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Phipps, you may not remember me.”

  I’m senile enough to know the only thing in these cases is to look frank and say, “No.”

  “I was on a course you taught at in Venice. Two years ago.”

  “Ah.” Another reminder of my halcyon days before the Fall. One of the little perks that had come with fame and fortune had been an invitation to teach on an art history course in Venice for two
weeks every year. The teaching was an hour a day, and the expenses—flight and hotel—were all paid, together with a fairly generous wage for the ten hours’ work. Well, very generous, considering the improvised impressionistic impudence I passed off as lectures. I had been invited by the organizer of this course, a certain Mr. Robin, to talk on contemporary art but had straightaway declared my inability to give anything like a fair assessment of the scene and had chosen as the title for my lecture series, “A Painter and His Predecessors,” which gave me license to talk on just about anything. Which, with the help of slides, I did. The students wouldn’t have noticed if I’d talked each lesson about the previous day’s slides: they were in a land of cheap wine, without school discipline, and that was all they cared about. Just so long as I stuck a nude in every so often and made a vaguely blue joke they were happy, and this meant that Mr. Robin invited me back year after year—until, that is, my accommodation arrangements c/o H.M. Government made it impossible. The course was defined as pre-university, and the students were all fresh-faced lads and lasses straight out of public school, whose parents obviously didn’t care much for the novel idea of having them full-time at home and so willingly paid the exorbitant fees Mr. Robin charged for keeping them in Venice from January to April. The parents were happy, the students were happy, I, and the other teachers, were happy, and Mr. Robin was happiest of all. (Those fees must have been really exorbitant.)

  “Melinda. Ye-es,” I said. Well, there had been about fifty of them every year for five years, all with names like Melinda and Camilla and Charlotte—or Piers and Nigel and Charles. I could recall very few of them individually—generally the Melindas and Camillas rather than the Pierses and Nigels. And only one really well.

  “I was on the course with Lucy Althwaite,” Melinda said.

  “Oh yes.” Lucy Althwaite was that one. “You didn’t have your hair like that then, did you?” I said. I’d surely have remembered her if she had.

  “No. I had it short then. How clever of you to remember. I must confess I didn’t recognize you when you came in. Not until you gave your name, and then it only clicked when I was out in the corridor.”

  “The new haggard look, I suppose.”

  “Oh, no,” she said with the same breathy earnestness. “You look exactly the same really. It’s just been such a long time. Two years. Do you still see Lucy?”

  “I haven’t done for nearly a year.”

  I expected her to look embarrassed and say, “No, of course not,” or something like that, but instead she said, “Oh, what a pity. Why not?”

  “Don’t you read your newspaper?” I said, glancing at the Guardian.

  “Well, only the women’s page and the crossword,” she said with a smile of sweet candor. “Oh, and that cartoon thing—Doonesbury.” And with an even candier smile, “And I never understand that. Why, has Lucy been in the news?”

  “No. I have.”

  “Oh, really?” she said. “How exciting.”

  I took a decision. “Would you be free for a drink?”

  “That would be nice. In fifteen minutes. I usually have lunch at the pub on the corner.”

  It was difficult to think of her doing anything so fleshly as eating. I said, “Are we likely to meet your boss there?”

  “Old Ozzers? Oh, no. He always goes to a restaurant.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you there then.”

  I left the place, had another lecherous look at the Victorian pinup in the window, and then strolled along to the pub. It was already fairly full, so I stood by the door drinking bitter and thinking bitter. Bitter, bitter thoughts about Lucy.

  Yet again I mused over the background to our last few days together. Yet again I indulged in the bitter bitter pleasure of feeling like Humphrey Bogart as he tossed the rain-streaked note from Ingrid Bergman onto the departing Paris platform. Yet again I imagined to myself the scenes at the Althwaite household: Daddy Althwaite must have put his foot down and Lucy had said meekly, “No, of course we don’t want a jailbird in the family, how right you are, Daddy.” And I hadn’t tried to win her back. Not a single plaintive word. If that was the way she wanted it.

  Still, she could have at least sent a letter, or even just a postcard. But no, nothing. Oh, well, water under the bridge, I said to myself—and this cliché instantly summoned up a scene from our past: our first kiss on the bridge by the Arsenale in Venice. Complete with moonlight on water. Just like the ice-cream advertisements.

  I had fallen for her simply because she had been a few years older than all the other students on the course and so had been the only one capable of talking about other things than memories of hockey matches or midnight dormitory feasts. And she for me for the same reason. There had been nothing more serious or deeper than that in the whole thing. A mere shipboard romance.

  I wondered idly how Melinda had got to know of the affair; at the time, Lucy and I had been discreet about the whole thing, which had meant many sudden dives into back alleys and sottoportici, and avoidance of the more popular bars and trattorie.

  Melinda arrived. “A lager and lime, please. Oh, and could you get a pork pie and some crisps too?”

  I was more taken aback by the earthiness of her appetite than by her assumption that I was buying her lunch as well as a drink. I smiled, however, and pushed my way through the masses to order these dainties. A half or a pint of lager? I was asked. Well, maybe it would be a male-chauvinist assumption on my part to order a half, so I bought her a pint, which caused her eyes to open to Bambi extremes when I made it back. She had found two seats at the end of a table—probably by fluttering her eyelashes and looking likely to swoon picturesquely.

  “So why were you in the news?” she said after an eager sip at the lager and a finger-fluttering nibble at a crisp.

  I satisfied her curiosity on this business and then forcibly changed the subject. “How do you get on with Osgood?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s not too bad, so long as you know which way to rub him.”

  I decided not to contemplate the gruesome vision this conjured up. I said, “But presumably you know something about his reputation.”

  “Oh, yes. He’s always talking about it.”

  “Well, I mean what other people say about it. About him.”

  “That he’s a crook?” she said, her blue eyes as large and untroubled as ever.

  I looked around myself instinctively. “Well, that he—that he has sometimes been said to be involved in some rather, er, shady um…”

  “Flogging hot paintings. Oh, yes, I’ve heard all about that. It doesn’t bother me really.”

  “No?”

  “No. The art market’s all such a dirty business anyway. Lots of people really don’t deserve to own their paintings. I mean, it’s absolutely wicked to keep works of art as investments.”

  “But you can’t just—”

  “Anyway, that’s what you said on the course. I’ve always remembered it.”

  “Oh, I see, so I’ve corrupted you, have I?” I said, looking at her serene countenance. “I didn’t actually mean you all to set up as thieves.”

  “Well, I’m a bit of an anarchist actually. You see, I don’t believe in private property.”

  “Osgood doesn’t believe in other people’s private property,” I said, “but I think his belief in his own is pretty fervent.”

  “Anyway, I don’t have anything to do with any of that side of Osgood’s dealings. I’m really just a secretary.”

  “So you’ve never seen or heard anything of a painting by Cima da Conegliano called The Madonna of the Swan?”

  “Cima? Wait a moment: he was the one with that Baptism of Christ with the little ducks in the background. I remember you pointing out the ducks. But a swan—no, I’ve never heard of anything with a swan.”

  I was rather touched by her memory of one of my more enthusiastic but less “relevant” lectures. “Oh, well, I just wondered. How about a Vivarini Crucifixion or a Palma il Giovane Annunciation?” The two pai
ntings that had been stolen at the same time as the Cima.

  “Oh, gosh, yes, the Palma il Giovane.” (She pronounced it “Giovanni” in fact.) “There was quite a to-do over that.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember when that gang boss got killed—what was his name? Mike La Rocca. About a year ago. And the police found lots of paintings in his house. It seemed he collected Annunciations.”

  “How very devotional.”

  “Most of them he’d bought regularly but this Palma il Giovanni was one of the hot ones. And Ozzers actually got questioned by the police about it. They’d found some evidence of his having had dealings with Mike La Rocca some years beforehand—about the time La Rocca had acquired the painting.”

  “I see.” I didn’t remember any of this. “How many years beforehand?”

  “I remember exactly because I had to go through Ozzers’s records for the police. It was in 1979.”

  “Ah.” Almost immediately after the theft—if it was the painting in question. And this was by no means certain. Palma il Giovane was one of the most prolific painters of all times; there’s hardly a church in the Veneto without a couple of his works—and usually not just miniatures or sketches: huge altarpieces or wall paintings; he probably turned out Annunciations as Barbara Cartland does novels. “You can’t remember any details about the painting?”

  “Why?” she said—not suspiciously or even curiously. Just said it.

  I was thrown for a little. “You don’t need to worry on account of your anarchist principles,” I said. “I’m nothing to do with the police. I’m just curious. I heard something about a Cima and got interested. For Cima’s sake. So can you tell me anything about the Palma?”

  She accepted my far from exhaustive reply. “Well, it came from somewhere near Venice.”

  “Yes.” A Palma il Giovane was pretty well bound to. “Not a place called Fregazze by any chance?”

  “Yes, yes, that was the name, I’m sure. And it showed the Virgin Mary and, um…”

  “Don’t tell me—the Angel Gabriel.”