The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  She had met Robert five weeks earlier at an ‘Art of Love’ singles night at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. It was her first foray into dating since she was a teenager and she went with low expectations of meeting anyone but hoped at least to learn something about art. The flyer promised ‘ice-breaking lectures’ and ‘world-class experts’ on hand to discuss particular paintings. Robert caught her eye during a talk on ‘Passion in the Court of Louis XIV’. His glance was awkward and only half-hopeful – instinctively she recognised someone else with a pulverised heart. He was nice-looking but uncared for – his hair was too long, his shirt poorly ironed and his demeanour a little battered. He was attractive in an unthreatening way. A few hours later, they kissed in a passageway behind Marylebone High Street. He had taken her number (Annie assumed out of politeness only). The following day he texted: ‘Dear Annie, my grandmother used to say that after a bad fall, it’s important to get back into the saddle. Do you fancy a drink?’ After that, Annie met Robert once or twice a week for energetic sex and desultory conversation. When Robert admitted that he was spending his birthday alone, Annie offered to cook him dinner. Against her better judgement, she struggled to keep hope at bay. Her longing to love and be loved was so strong that she overlooked her and Robert’s incompatibility. At least, she thought, good solid dependable Robert, the solicitor from Crouch End whose wife had done the unforgivable and run off with his best friend, would never behave unkindly or unchivalrously.

  Annie pushed the door of the shop and it opened with a reluctant shudder. In the corner there was a man, though it was hard to distinguish between his body and the armchair he was slumped in. Both were baggy and encased in brown velour. He was watching television with the sound off and Annie saw the reflection of horses racing in his spectacles.

  ‘Are you open?’ she asked.

  The man waved her in, never taking his eyes from the screen. ‘Hurry up, close the door.’

  Annie shut the door gently behind her.

  A telephone rang. The man snatched it up.

  ‘Bernoff’s Antiques, Reclamation and Salvage,’ he said in a flat south-London accent. ‘Ralph Bernoff speaking.’ His voice was surprisingly high-pitched and young. He looked fifty but was probably only thirty.

  ‘Gaz, my old friend, you watching Channel 4? Have you seen The Ninnifer has gone out to thirty to one?’ Ralph said. ‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

  He paused to listen to the answer.

  ‘Course I don’t fancy that other pile of shite. It ran backwards at Haydock last week. Lend us a few quid. I know that Ninnifer is going to storm it. Please, mate.’

  Pause.

  ‘What do you mean, I owe you?’ Ralph said plaintively.

  Pause.

  ‘So put that on the tab. Those cunts said they’d break my legs if I didn’t pay them tonight. Please, Gaz. Help me out.’

  Pause.

  Annie edged along the back wall of the shop past the rows of oddly matched china, paperbacks with embossed covers, chipped teacups, cracked bowls, piles of plastic beads, a reproduction Victorian doll and a nest of Toby jugs. She looked nervously from the man to the door, wondering if his creditors were about to burst in.

  ‘No one is going to buy anything,’ he whined into the telephone. ‘No one ever does. Just a load of bored Saturday-morning time-wasters,’ he lamented, casting a look in Annie’s direction.

  Picking up a Victorian brass mould shaped like a comet, Annie wondered if she could use it. Robert had been born in 1972 and she was intending to cook him a seventies-inspired dinner. Perhaps an elaborate jelly would be better than the intended rum baba? She turned the mould over – it cost £3. Rather a lot for one dinner and, besides, there was not enough time for the jelly to set. She put it back next to a china doll.

  ‘If you’re not going to lend us a monkey, make it a pony. I’ll give it back with interest when I win,’ Ralph said.

  Pause.

  Gaz gave the wrong answer; Ralph slammed the phone down.

  Annie walked to another table and thumbed a hardback edition of Stalingrad – would Robert like that? Brilliant but too depressing. She examined a box inlaid with mother of pearl. Pretty but too feminine. A few paces on she caught sight of a picture propped against the wall behind the rubber plant.

  ‘Can I?’ she mouthed to the man.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ He didn’t even glance up but sat slumped, staring at the television. Annie slid the picture off the filing cabinet; carrying it over to the window, she took a closer look.

  ‘What do you know about this?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a picture.’

  She looked at him, trying to decide if he was stupid or rude, or both.

  ‘Do you know the date, or who painted it?’

  ‘No idea, it’s been here for years.’

  ‘I’m looking for a present for a friend . . .’ Annie hesitated. ‘This might amuse him.’

  Ralph Bernoff didn’t do conversation; he was used to lonely old ladies rabbiting on about this or that. This one was a few years younger than most of his regular customers but he knew the signs; sad, single and the wrong side of twenty-five. He looked her up and down – quite nice legs but too flat on top. If she got some highlights and a short skirt, she might stand a chance.

  ‘We share a certain interest in painting.’ Annie flushed, feeling his eyes on her body. ‘My friend,’ she said firmly, ‘might like this. It reminds me of something we saw at the Wallace Collection.’

  ‘Right.’ Ralph kept checking his watch and digging around in his pockets as if some change might miraculously appear.

  ‘Do you know where it came from?’

  ‘No idea – it came with the shop. Bought the whole place and most of this rubbish with it. Worst decision my dad ever made.’ Ralph waved his hand around.

  ‘How much is it?’ Annie pulled the sleeve of her coat down and gently wiped away at the dust on the painting’s surface.

  ‘No idea. Come back Monday and my dad will tell you.’

  ‘That’s too late,’ Annie said. ‘What a pity – I really like it.’

  Ralph snorted rudely. ‘There’s a whole load of clobber here. Pick anything else. I’ll give you a discount, being a Saturday and all that.’ Ralph put his little finger deep into one ear and wiggled it about with all the concentration of a violinist aiming for a high C. Annie looked away and carefully placed the painting back on the filing cabinet. Ralph looked up at the grandfather clock; it was nearly three.

  ‘What! The Ninnifer’s gone out to fifty to one, bloody hell.’ Ralph jumped up from his chair and stabbed a finger at the screen.

  ‘There’s nothing else quite right,’ Annie said. She had had enough of this rude man and his claustrophobic den.

  ‘Bloody time-waster,’ Ralph muttered under his breath.

  Belting her coat tightly and pulling a woollen hat down over her ears, Annie opened the door. A cold gust of air blasted into the shop and dust swirled around her face in luminous eddies. Annie took one last look at the painting. It was, even through the dust and the gloom, rather pretty. She would tell Robert about it later; it would be something to talk about in their sparsely populated conversational world. She had stepped out on to the pavement and bent down to unlock the chain on her bicycle when Ralph came bursting out of the shop, waving the painting. ‘Hang on. How much money do you have?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Fifty pounds,’ Annie smiled apologetically.

  ‘Five hundred quid and it’s yours,’ Ralph said, holding out the painting.

  ‘I haven’t got anything like that kind of money,’ Annie said.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I’ve got a hundred pounds out of the cashpoint but it has to cover dinner.’ She blushed slightly and moved from foot to foot.

  ‘Give us two fifty in cash.’

  ‘I said I haven’t got that.’ Annie was annoyed now. She put the chain in the bike’s basket and started to push it down the road.

  ‘Yo
u’ve got four minutes to decide, love, or the deal’s off.’

  ‘I’ll give you seventy-five – that’s my last offer,’ Annie heard herself say.

  Ralph hesitated and, holding out his hand, said, ‘Seventy-five. Give it over. Quick.’

  Chapter 2

  I knew I’d be rescued but never thought it would take fifty years. There should have been search parties, battalions and legions. Why? Because I am priceless and I am also the masterpiece that launched a whole artistic genre. And if that weren’t enough, I am considered to be the greatest, the most moving, and the most thrilling representation of love.

  I was inspired by feelings of deep joy, hope and gaiety but my decorative composition masks a twisted soul drunk on the mysterious poison of despair. Unfortunately, and inadvertently, I command a wayward, erratic power over men and women – sometimes inspirational and affirming, sometimes the opposite. I am both the offspring and parent of tragedy.

  Back to the present. Imagine being stuffed away in a bric-a-brac shop in the company of a lot of rattan furniture, cheap china and reproduction pictures. I would not call myself a snob but there are limits. I will not converse with pisspots or faux-pearl necklaces. Non! I am used to magnificence, the rustle of taffeta and le mouffle du damask, the flicker of candlelight, sheen of mahogany, the delicate smell of rosewater and beeswax, the crunch of gravel and the whispering of courtiers. Not a poky little room lit by bare bulbs and a greenish light straining through grime-encrusted glass. The shop’s atmosphere is most damaging to my delicate canvas: fungus and mildew. Not to mention the layers of cigarette smoke and human effluvium hanging like slices of mille-feuille in the stale air.

  It’s not the first time I’ve been neglected. Human beings are a capricious lot, slaves to fancy and fashion. They are destined to be perpetual amateurs – they don’t live long enough to be anything more. What can one do in a mere seventy or eighty years? During the first part of their lives, it’s all haste and fornication. Thenceforward most of their efforts go into staying alive.

  I am three hundred years old. As man’s first paintings were made some forty thousand years ago I am a spring chicken in the panoply of art history but I like to consider myself a marinated goose in terms of experience. I’ve hung in pride of place in the grandest palaces and salons of Europe, Russia, Scandinavia and even America as the beloved possession of royalty and connoisseurs. Occasionally, and most unhappily, the whim of some new mistress or the latest critical pronouncement has led to relegation, the red card, and I have been marched off to the servants’ quarters or the storage rooms.

  This time was different. I was well and truly lost.

  I sat at Bernoff’s getting lonelier and lonelier. It is arrogant to assume human beings have the monopoly on communication – we pictures converse with like-minded objects. You try maintaining a relationship with a cake tin or a Toby jug. The latter was made in the East End of London, common as muck – it was all football, muggings and shagging. It rubs off, you know. I catch myself coming out with terribly lewd and vulgar phrases. My first language is pre-revolutionary French but I have lived in Spain, England, Russia, Germany and Italy. My once courtly vocabulary has become a frightful bastardised Franglais suspended between several centuries.

  Still, a masterpiece develops a certain sang-froid born from a belief in the triumph of excellence. After all, what are a few decades when there are centuries ahead in which to inspire, please, and inform? It was a question of patience: sooner or later someone would walk through that door and recognise my true worth. Then it happened; twice in one day. The first sighting was eerie. I never thought I would see him again. Those pale-blue eyes – that darting sideways look and that huge frame hardly careworn or bent by time. I loathed him then; I loathe him now. I knew he had been looking for me for many years. For some reason he didn’t buy me there and then but tucked me out of sight behind a rubber plant and a cachepot. That mistake would be his undoing.

  Only a few hours passed and a woman arrived, a mere scrap of a girl, obviously poor and largely ignorant. I sensed trouble. I have developed that antenna. Fat lot of good intuition does when one can’t walk or scream out loud.

  It was a typical Saturday morning in Bernoff’s. The old man had taken the day off and the lamentable son Ralph was tending the shop. The heinous one (a complimentary term, I can assure you) was studying the form. Apart from the odd, blousy, cheap-knickered blonde who he’d have quickly, sweatily and noisily on the filing cabinet, horse-racing was the only thing that excited him. That day a meeting at Cheltenham emanated from a small colour TV on the desk. The phone rang every few minutes. It was his ‘mate’ Gaz. Did he fancy this one? What about the Jock? Bad run at Haydock. This went on every Saturday. Gaz got him all excited about a bay in the 3.30, name of The Ninnifer. Only problem was that Ralph had already spent his weekly at the pub. He did his normal trick, going through all the drawers, his father’s coat pockets, and the petty cash box. The old man wasn’t stupid; he’d cleared the lot out. Ninnifer was a dead cert, apparently. Ralph was effing and blinding. It was 2.30. He started to ring around his friends, asking if he could borrow a tenner. They knew his tricks.

  There was a ding and a rattle as the front door opened. ‘Fucking hell,’ Ralph grumbled down the phone to Gaz, ‘another bloody time-waster.’ Pause. ‘How should I know, probably an old lady looking for a cushion for her cat.’ Pause. ‘Saturday punters never buy anything.’

  I watched the young woman walk between the tables, each groaning with unwanted knick-knacks. She picked up an older-looking hardback before going to another table and examining a box, quite a pretty inlaid thing. She caught sight of me, approached and moved the rubber plant slightly to one side.

  ‘Can I?’ she said to Ralph.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ He didn’t even look up. Very gently, the young woman slid me off the filing cabinet, away from the potted plants, and walked me over towards the window. I can’t see too well these days: two layers of varnish and chain-smoking have left my surface more than a little murky. She looked at me hard, really hard. It’s a long time since I’ve been admired properly. I must admit I enjoyed it. I looked over at her fingers. No ring. I might have known. Either a slattern or some desperate ‘jeune fille à marier’; it was odds on that she was broke so I was not too worried at that moment.

  I was placed back next to the pot plant and gave a tiny shiver of relief. She left the shop. Suddenly Ralph jumped up, snatched me off the shelf and ran out into the road towards the girl. She didn’t really want me. I willed her not to buy me. There was some cursory haggling and then she fished around in her bag: out came an old compact, a notebook, two sets of keys, some lip salve, a mobile phone, a lidless pen, a half-eaten chocolate bar and scraps of paper. Finally she produced a tatty leather wallet bulging with receipts and photographs. She counted out the money, a paltry pittance: the utter shame.

  What was I thinking? You may well ask. I was not jumping for joy, that’s for sure. There was no love lost between Ralph Bernoff and me. I was fed up with the fag smoke, the company, the television, but I had got used to it and it was safe. I knew nothing about this scrappy girl. Or the birthday boy. Who knows what they were like? What they might be into.

  I had a little dream. One day the door would open, the bell would tinkle tinkle and an earnest-looking man would enter. He’d be dressed in a soft tweed suit and sport those half-moon gold glasses. His eyes would fix on my surface and he would know. Within days other men, handlers, would appear with dainty white gloves and carefully lift me on to a red velvet cushion. Taken by armed guard to a special place, a gallery, all mahogany walls and plush carpets, I would sit in state, receiving experts while they pronounced and exclaimed. I would be gently cleaned and put in a decent frame. Best of all, I would be reunited with some of my master’s other works.

  As usual I had no say over what happened next, for ever the victim of human whimsy.

  Ralph stuffed me into a polythene bag, handed me to the girl, and
hot-footed it in the direction of the local bookie’s. I could hear the girl’s teeth chattering slightly as she put me into the front-loaded wicker basket of her bicycle. It was raining gently. Cold splats landed on clear plastic, making it even harder to see. The chain on her bicycle was released, she mounted and off we went, riding against an icy wind. It was a new experience being among these growling, grinding, and screeching flat-sided monsters. They roared past, sucking us into a damp slipstream towards vast black wheels. She rode the bike as Peter the Great liked to gallop his horse, no thought for anyone else, fast, arrogantly, without fear. I have survived many situations but have not been so jiggled and jostled since that journey across the Pyrenees when Philip and Isabella were sacked from the Escorial and their greatest works were loaded on to the backs of mules and sent to safety.

  After ten minutes of weaving through traffic, bumping into watery holes, horns bleating, men shouting, dogs barking, an endless cacophony, we arrived at a market set in a lane about thirty feet long lined with wooden tables covered with stripy awnings, glittering in the damp air and piled high with produce. Some stalls still had the remnants of Christmas lights and decorations. The air of fake cheer hung over the place like a cheap perfume.

  ‘Nice Christmas, darling?’ one asked. ‘Did you go to the Caribbean?’

  ‘I stayed here and cooked a turkey for a friend,’ the girl answered, choosing some tomatoes carefully.

  ‘Want to keep me warm tonight?’ Another called out.

  The girl did not answer.

  ‘There’s an Arctic wind coming – you might regret it.’

  ‘These tomatoes are a little wintry,’ she said, trying to deflect their banter.

  ‘It’s January, my angel, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ The man guffawed.

  She was known and liked in the market. Two traders asked her out. One gave her a free bag of oranges. Most called her Annie. The lack of a moniker or title was inauspicious. One has rarely been owned by a person of no class or standing. I am not a snob; my master was hardly well-born, but a title suggests reassuring things like wealth, breeding and security. I have yet to meet a queen named Annie.