The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  ‘How much for?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that. I managed to beat them down.’

  ‘Roger Banbury won’t be pleased.’

  ‘Actually, he’s fallen out with the WPL for some reason. That’s how I managed to get the copyright so easily. If he kicks up a fuss it won’t be bad for our publicity.’

  This conversation increased Sally’s admiration for Tina. At the same time a ruthless streak had been revealed. Sally tried to dignify it in her mind with the phrase ‘the single-minded dedication of the artist’, but it still made her uneasy. She pressed Tina for more details about her installation, but got no more out of her. ‘Wait and see,’ said Tina.

  Murder Rooms was the title of Tina Lukas’s show at the Sally Cochrane Gallery, and it was subtitled Violent Image and Violent Reality. Sally was not alone in thinking that it was Tina’s best work to date. The main part of the first room of the gallery was occupied by a replica of the room in which Jean Miller had stabbed her husband to death. Tina had taken the proportions of the room and reproduced them in plywood and plaster at about eighty percent of their actual size. The furniture consisted of exact copies of those in the original room, and the fact that they were disproportionately large by comparison with the room’s overall dimensions created an eerie, claustrophobic effect. The stains on the carpet and sofa were bright red and freshly painted each day so as to remain sticky and glutinous. The back wall was entirely covered with a crudely coloured reproduction of Tiger in the Snow. From this single installation, which resembled some bizarre stage set, emanated two serpentine lines of objects ranged along the floor which flowed into the second room of the gallery. These objects were items connected with other famous domestic murders of the past all neatly and voluminously labelled in Tina’s exquisite copperplate hand. There was a plaster cast of William Corder’s death mask; Dr Buck Ruxton’s actual stethoscope; an arsenical flypaper of the kind used by Florence Maybrick to kill her husband (believed by some to be Jack the Ripper); a little miniature model of the trunk into which Patrick Mahon put the dismembered remains of his mistress, and so on. All these grisly relics and pseudo relics, together with their elegantly hand-written labels, were for sale. In the second room the two lines of objects snaked across the floor, crossing each other several times and finally wound up in opposite corners of the room where two further installations stood. One was a life size replica of a bath in which George Joseph Smith had drowned one of his victims. It was filled to the brim with what looked like blood, on which floated a female tailor’s dummy in full Victorian walking costume. The effect was bizarre and disturbing.

  Even more alarming was the installation in the opposite corner of the room. It was a quarter size model of the cellar beneath which Dr Crippen had buried the body of his wife Cora. Taken from photographs and executed with minute and scrupulous accuracy, it seemed as if every patch of grime on its dingy walls, every smear of dirt on its dusty floor had been faithfully reproduced. The little model was lit by a tiny naked bulb which swung to and fro from the ceiling, throwing strange shadows about the enclosed space which could be observed from two vantage points: at eye level through three glass panels cut in the wainscot, and down the cellar steps from a raised platform.

  At deliberately calculated irregular intervals an event occurred which many visitors described as quite unusually sinister. One of the flagstones of the cellar would flip up and through it, like an old Jack-in-the-box, would come a doll in the ample shape of the murdered Cora Crippen. Its mouth would open and through it, seemingly, would come the ancient, scratchy recording of a contralto voice singing ‘The Lost Chord’. (No recording of Cora Crippen survives so the voice used was that of Dame Clara Butt, but this in no way diminished the peculiar horror of it.)

  It was an extraordinary feat. Tina Lukas had done it all in little more than two months. She had used assistants, but much of the handiwork and all of the ideas had been hers.

  The private view was a huge success. Nicholas Serota put in an offer for the ‘Bride in the Bath’ for the Tate Modern and Charles Saatchi had snapped up the Crippen Cellar even before he heard Cora Crippen’s rendition of ‘The Lost Chord’. Many of the smaller items sold, despite their exorbitant prices and the critics were enthusiastic. They nearly all claimed to have been deeply disturbed by it which is a very high accolade indeed in the modern critical lexicon. Ladbrokes made Tina Lukas odds on favourite for the Turner Prize.

  Only one event marred this triumphant opening: Jake turned up, drunk and uninvited. Fortunately Sally had installed a large doorman at the entrance of the gallery in anticipation of his arrival. Nevertheless there was an ugly scene. Several celebrities and a cabinet minister were jostled. A critic who had his glasses knocked off in the affray assumed that the whole business had been staged as a first night stunt for his benefit and pronounced it ‘frighteningly realistic’, as indeed it was.

  Two other people intimately connected with the exhibition took violent exception to the show. One was Roger Banbury, original begetter of Tiger in the Snow, who was outraged to discover that his copyright now belonged to Tina. The other was Jean Miller, the convicted murderess whose front room was the focus and starting point of the whole exhibition. From her prison cell she sent out letters to anyone who might conceivably be interested in her plight. A few tabloid newspapers registered her hurt, but the more serious periodicals failed to see that this woman’s feelings had any relevance to anything. Mrs Miller’s solicitor put up a rather half-hearted protest that the exhibition might prejudice the outcome of her appeal, but this was rightly disregarded. Public sympathy towards Mrs Miller had begun to wane in the light of various revelations about her private life. Whether her husband Ken beat her up or not remained disputed, but she herself had been found to be drunken, promiscuous and unpopular with her neighbours. ‘She has lowered the tone of the area,’ they said.

  One morning, a week after the exhibition had opened, Sally read a small paragraph in her Guardian to the effect that Mrs Miller had hanged herself in her cell. Disturbed by the news she rang up Tina who, although she had not heard, still registered no great interest. She was beginning to develop a series of works for her Turner Prize exhibits in the Tate. They were all to be based around Roger Banbury’s Tiger in the Snow.

  ‘I’m trying to see how far you can develop one banal image so that it stops being banal and becomes significant. In the same way that the Renaissance artists did it with the Madonna and Child. That’s just as banal in its way. But I’m saying you can do it with any image. Even one with no cultural or religious significance at all. Just as the sublime can become ridiculous in one short step, so there’s also one short step from the ridiculous to the sublime.’

  ‘Samuel Butler.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t Samuel Butler say roughly the same thing?’

  ‘Did he? Well, I said it first.’

  **

  A few days after Mrs Miller’s suicide one of Sally’s assistants at the gallery asked to be relieved immediately from her duties. Sally was not greatly disturbed, as she was being inundated with requests from young art students to ‘help out’ at the gallery, but she was surprised. She asked the girl, called Ingrid, why she was leaving and received a rather incoherent answer.

  ‘It’s only recently,’ said Ingrid, ‘but it’s the crowds. They get to me.’

  ‘Well, it’s a very popular exhibition,’ said Sally.

  ‘I know, but they sort of . . . they like . . . mess with my head.’

  ‘Mess with your head? What do you mean “mess with your head”?’ Sally heard herself adopting the tones of her old headmistress. It must be the onset of middle age, she thought. Ingrid looked pained as she had expected sympathy.

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s funny. It’s like the place is always full but I haven’t seen them come in. And there aren’t many signing the visitors book. And they dress funny.’

  ‘In what way “funny”?’ Visitors to modern art g
alleries are not known for their sartorial conformity.

  ‘Old fashioned. Like stiff collars and that. Really weird. And they never say anything to me. Thank me and that.’

  Sally let Ingrid go more in sorrow than in anger and rang up an eager art student who wanted to take over the following day, but Sally put her off. Sally had not been into the gallery for some days and decided to investigate Ingrid’s nebulous complaint for herself the following morning.

  Sally arrived at the gallery half an hour before its ten o’clock opening with no particular sense of foreboding. As she walked up the stairs to the third floor she felt, if anything, eager to re-experience the show alone, and see if its admittedly macabre atmosphere would ‘get to her’ in the same way that it had obviously done to Ingrid.

  She stopped on the landing just before the final flight of stairs to the gallery for no reason other than a slight feeling of weariness. This was unusual enough—Sally was known for her unflagging energy—but what was odder was the sensation she then had that there were whispering voices coming from the gallery. She could not say exactly that she could hear them, as they came to her in a muffled way, more like a tinnitus inside the ear than a normal auditory sensation. She crept up the final steps to the gallery hoping to gain a clearer impression of what she thought she heard, but the ‘sound’ remained muffled and stopped altogether the moment she touched the gallery’s door.

  Sally shrugged off the sensation as a mere physical aberration, unlocked the door and entered the gallery. She found nothing unusual other than a peculiarly stuffy atmosphere. She opened some windows and switched on a fan in the inner gallery where the Crippen Cellar and the Bride in the Bath were installed. Silly Ingrid, thought Sally, she wasn’t getting enough air; that was what had been ‘messing with her head’. Sally hated the phrase, but it kept re-entering her mind, like an annoyingly insistent tune.

  Soon after ten the first visitors of the day arrived, an enthusiastic, art-loving couple called the Kramers from New York. They were not there to buy, but had read the reviews and gave the impression that almost their sole reason for coming to London, England was to visit Sally’s gallery. ‘Of course, we went to the Tate Modern, as well,’ they said, almost in parenthesis. While Mrs Kramer engaged Sally in a serious discussion about whether she thought Jeff Koons was radical enough these days, her husband wandered through into the inner gallery. When he emerged Sally was still talking to Mrs Kramer.

  ‘Hey,’ said Mr Kramer. ‘That guy in there. Is he part of the installation too?’

  ‘No,’ said Sally. ‘What guy?’ She was sure that the Kramers were the only people who had come into the gallery so far.

  ‘This weird guy. Like he’s wearing these weird heavy clothes, you know.’ The upward inflection at the end of the sentence gave it a hint of interrogation. ‘Like he’s got this strange hard collar, and a droopy mustache, and these weird glasses with kind of no handles on a string?’

  The word ‘pince-nez’ entered Sally’s mind and then she dismissed it. No-one wore pince-nez these days. ‘No,’ she said politely to Mr Kramer. ‘I haven’t seen anyone like that, I’m afraid.’ She got up from behind her desk to look for herself, but just then a group of art students came in and she was distracted.

  ‘This is some crazy gallery,’ she heard Mr Kramer say. ‘That guy really bugged me. Like I’d come in on his party and he didn’t want me there.’

  The rest of the morning passed without incident. There was a steady stream of visitors, but Sally reluctantly had to agree with Ingrid over one issue: she also had the impression on several occasions that there seemed to be more people in the gallery than she had observed coming in. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of little groups of people, huddled together, apparently discussing the exhibits; but when she looked fully in their direction they were not so many as she thought, and they dispersed quickly. Perhaps more tantalisingly, when she was attending to the needs of one of her less elusive visitors she would overhear above an almost constant murmur of conversation, strange little fragments of talk, of the kind one does not usually hear in an art gallery.

  ‘Marshall Hall was splendid . . .’ ‘Scales of justice . . .’ ‘The hyoscin was not intended . . .’ ‘Getting rid of it was the problem . . .’ ‘Nearer My God to Thee on the harmonium . . .’ All these were spoken in hushed tones but were quite clearly heard by Sally. One remark in particular stuck in her mind, partly for its strangeness, partly because it recalled something that she had heard recently, she could not quite remember what. It was a male voice speaking, a very charming voice, with a lilting Irish accent. It was saying: ‘Her head was staring at me out of the fire.’

  In the afternoon Beth, Sally’s part-time secretary who handled the money side of the gallery, called in; then the art student came to be instructed in her duties as an invigilator. Both were welcome company, but neither stayed as long as Sally would have liked. They seemed strangely anxious to leave as soon as possible, especially the art student whose initial enthusiasm about working for Sally was not so evident by the end of their interview. Sally had wanted to close the gallery with the student, but the student said she had to be somewhere else urgently.

  So when the gallery officially closed at five, Sally once more found herself alone. After the bustle of the day, everything had now fallen silent. Sally went round the gallery doing her usual checks. It was then that something very disturbing happened.

  She was in the far gallery turning off the mechanism which sprang the Cora Crippen Jack-in-the-box when she distinctly heard a female voice in the main room say:

  ‘That bloody tiger! Ken loved it, but I always hated it.’

  Sally ran into the next room but no-one was there. For the first time she felt fear. Being naturally strong-willed and brave she hated herself for being afraid so she deliberately took her time to leave the gallery. Having locked the door behind her and walked down to the first landing she stopped to listen for a long time. Nothing. Then, as soon as she had put her foot on the next step down, the whispering started, just as she had heard it before, coming from her gallery. Sally ran down the stairs and did not stop running until she was out in New Bond Street with the dear sweet traffic.

  That evening Sally met her sister and some friends and went out to dinner. When she got back to her flat she went straight to bed and fell asleep. Three hours later, at four in the morning, she woke up suddenly. She was not particularly alarmed, but she knew she had woken up because she had thought of something. A connection had been made in her brain during the hours of sleep which she must now recall. It had to do with that odd remark she had overheard: ‘Her head was staring at me out of the fire.’ Then suddenly she remembered.

  When Tina was constructing the installation, she had told Sally all kinds of stories about the murderers whose relics she was placing in little trails across the gallery floor. One story concerning the trunk murderer Patrick Mahon was particularly memorable. When Mahon finally confessed after being sentenced to death, he recalled how he had dismembered his mistress to put her in the trunk. He did this in the living room of a small seaside bungalow. When he cut off the head he threw it on the fire to see if it would burn. The heat of the fire caused the eyes of the corpse to open and it seemed to him that they had looked straight at him. That was the story. Sally did not sleep again that night. Towards morning her turning, troubled mind did find some tranquillity out of sheer exhaustion, but not for long. At eight o’clock the telephone rang and it was the police.

  The office below Sally’s gallery employed overnight cleaners. At about four in the morning one of these had heard a sudden commotion from the floor above. He can’t have been very courageous because it was some time before he and a fellow cleaner had ventured upstairs to see what had happened. They found that the door of the gallery had been broken open. They entered and looked round. It was some time before they realised (or were willing to realise) that the figure sprawled across the bloodstained sofa in the main installation was n
ot a sculpture but the real corpse of a man.

  Who was it? The police said that they didn’t know, but the body had been removed to the police mortuary and would she try to identify it and make a statement? A car would be calling for her shortly. She asked how had the man died. The police said enigmatically that there were no obvious signs of a violent death.

  Sally did not recognise the body at first, the features were so distorted; it was the signet ring that did it. One of Jake’s affectations—and he had had many—was that he was the scion of an ancient and immensely aristocratic Polish family. The family crest, an eagle devouring a hare, was engraved on a gold ring which he wore on the little finger of the left hand. Once she had recognised the ring Sally was able to identify the face as Jake’s. The mouth was agape and the eyes stared: it was like a statue of Fear personified. After explaining who he was Sally asked again how had he died? The police would go no further than to say that it appeared to be some kind of heart seizure and that ‘foul play was not suspected’. Sally had difficulty in preventing herself from laughing hysterically: the words ‘foul play’ seemed so hideously inappropriate.

  Later that morning Sally gave the news to Tina who broke down and wept convulsively. Whether it was grief or remorse, the reaction was terrible. Apparently, that very morning Tina had been told in confidence that she had won the Turner Prize. How she wished Jake could have been there to share it with her, she wailed. Sally took advantage of this moment to say that in view of all the circumstances she would like to close the exhibition early, in fact as soon as possible, in fact that very day. Most of the art objects for sale had, after all, been bought. Tina impulsively agreed.

  Sally had the exhibition dismantled the same afternoon. When she had seen to the despatch of the artefacts to their various buyers, she closed the gallery and went to stay with her godmother in the Dordogne.