‘Campaigns?’ Annie blinked. I could see she felt uncomfortable trapped in these strange circumstances. I could sympathise.
‘It’s the term given to the different times that a painting has been worked on or altered. Ultraviolet light is adjacent to visible light but it has a shorter wavelength. It helps me see gradations in surface and texture.’
She passed the beam over my surface, moving the light backwards and forwards.
‘Can you see there are tiny fluorescent dabs and flecks around the woman’s face and again in this back corner?’ she asked.
‘How odd, why is it just on her face and not on his?’ Annie asked, peering into my midst.
What they did not know yet was that my master had painted another face over her face at a later date. It was his way of managing rejection. He could not bear to part with her; he could not cope with seeing her. Like a thorn buried in his psyche, her memory was never expunged but it was, at least, hidden. The face on top belonged to a prostitute; it was as near to a joke as my master got.
‘What is even odder is that the overpaint is barely discernible – it must have been done shortly after the original painting,’ said Agatha. ‘There have been occasions when people have altered faces to make the picture more commercial. The dealer Duveen made pictures more Hollywood-friendly by asking his restorer to make the Hoppners more like Joan Crawford, and Romneys like Douglas Fairbanks.’
She moved to the top left-hand corner. ‘This campaign is clearer – you can see that someone retouched this part – a rather heavy restorer’s hand – see how the paint sits here in a great clump – quite unlike the quality of painting in other areas. This is an absolutely fascinating case.’
I could not agree more.
‘Jesse, can you put the lights back on, please.’ Agatha flicked off her torch and led us back to the main studio.
‘What do you think?’ Annie asked her.
Agatha leaned back in her chair. ‘The main problem is the overpaint and old varnish. Removing it is highly perilous. Sometimes chipping and scraping at the topcoat takes off the underneath with it. But,’ Agatha said gently, ‘you have found something interesting. I don’t know what, but I can confirm that it is old, that beneath these layers of grime and varnish, I think there is something fine, very fine. Would you let me keep it for a little while? I can work on it during the evenings.’
My canvas shrank in horror. Work on it? What the hell does that mean? My mistress can’t leave me here with all these bottles of acetone and other noxious chemicals.
‘What will you do to it?’ Annie asked.
‘I would like to do a test on a small piece of the canvas, probably the top left corner. Working very slowly and gently, I’ll take the grime and dirt off and see what’s underneath it.’
‘I haven’t got any money to pay you,’ Annie said.
‘I would refuse payment. The painting has brought Jesse back into my life – I am very grateful for that.’ Agatha leant over and hugged him.
I am almost touched but most of all, I am scared – one slip and it is ruination.
I try and calm my feelings – vibrations are bad for my canvas. At least I will be kept in a museum. Might even get some decent conversation. Across the room there’s a great big Veronese – all stripped down – looking jolly dejected, if you ask me. Placed on an easel is a rather exquisite Grossart and most excitingly of all, I think I caught sight of a Giorgione lying on a table. My master adored Giorgione, utterly adored him.
‘I will almost miss it,’ Annie said, holding me up.
‘You won’t have time to. This has to be a joint effort. I need information about who painted this painting and when. The more I know about the artist, the more accurate I can be. Different centuries and countries produce different types of paint and materials. It would help hugely to have an idea of when and where it was painted.’
‘Delores Ryan said it was a cheap copy,’ said Annie.
‘You never told me that.’ Jesse looked at her, surprised.
‘I forgot.’
‘Experts are not always right,’ said Agatha. ‘It is such fun proving them wrong,’ Agatha said firmly. ‘Jesse will make you a sketch. My hunch is this picture is approximately two hundred and fifty to three hundred years old. You’ve already taken it to the Wallace and seen similarities with those paintings, so it’s likely to be French or Flemish.’ Agatha walked around the table in the centre of the room, talking out loud. ‘It could be a clever forgery,’ she said pensively. ‘But, I’ve yet to see a forger go to quite so much trouble with relining a canvas or quite so brilliantly coat it in layers of soot and smoke.’
‘We will take it to the British Museum together,’ Jesse said.
‘Why?’ Annie asked.
‘You can go alone, of course,’ Jesse said, reddening.
‘I didn’t mean that – you talked about the British Museum before – why there?’
‘They hold the British collection of drawings and etchings – you should start with the catalogue raisonné,’ Agatha said. ‘Those are inventories of someone’s work normally captured around the time of their life in etchings. The British Museum also has an almost unrivalled collection of drawings and etchings dating back from the early Renaissance.’
Annie sat down heavily on the chair. ‘This still seems like searching for a miracle in a haystack,’ she said.
‘We don’t have to go an inch further,’ Agatha said gently. ‘I have lots of other work to get on with,’ she said, waving her hand around her studio. ‘It’s your choice, your picture.’ Taking a piece of paper from a drawer, she started to write some names down. ‘Start with Watteau, then Lancret, Pater, Boucher and Fragonard. If they don’t yield results, I will think of others.’
I could see what Annie was thinking – part of her was aghast at this wild goose chase into an impenetrable world of arcane practices and highfalutin language. At the same time though, her interest was piqued; she wanted to find out how it worked. Most of all she wanted me to be ‘good’. Somehow my value and her self-esteem had become entangled. If she discovered a lost masterpiece she would become a person of taste and judgement.
In spite of myself I suddenly wanted this Agatha woman to work on me. I wanted to be restored to the pantheon of the greats, to take my rightful place with my friends, hang on a damask wall, be talked about in hushed reverent tones, be loved and admired and studied for who I really am. I also wanted Annie to bathe in my glory and for her to be happy. It is bizarre that after three hundred years I was getting properly fond of an owner. Age was making me daft.
I watched her looking from me to Jesse to Agatha. There was a short but intense silence until her face suddenly cracked into a huge smile.
‘Why not? Why on earth not!’
One must admit, one was quite pleased.
Chapter 14
For the third time in a week, Rebecca cancelled lunch and told Annie to leave her kitchen until further notice: she was to keep her phone on and not stray more than one hour from Winkleman Fine Art. Over the last fortnight, for reasons that none understood, Rebecca had become increasingly suspicious and untrusting of all her staff. Extra CCTV cameras were placed in the offices, access to the company’s database was restricted and security guards were stationed in corridors and by the vaults. Rebecca was the first in and last out every day; all her routine meetings were cancelled and a permanent ‘do not disturb’ sign was fixed to her door. Wanting to offer support, Annie knocked and offered to make her employer a cup of tea. ‘If you have time to make tea, you are not doing your job properly,’ Rebecca snapped. It never occurred to Annie that any of these measures were connected to her, let alone to her painting; after all, she was just a temporary chef, a woman of no importance.
Walking at a brisk pace, it took Annie ten minutes to get from her office to the London Library. Winkleman Fine Art had a corporate membership and for Annie, this was the best perk of her new job. Hurrying down Berkeley Street, crossing Piccadilly and cutt
ing through an arcade, Annie dodged the tourists and slipped down a side street into St James’s Square. The library was an oasis of calm and contemplation. Annie hung up her coat and made her way up the grand staircase, through a side door and climbed up the metal stairs and right along a long row of books until she came to the section marked Miscellaneous/Food. It was her fourth visit in the last ten days.
At the start of her research for Delores’s dinner, Annie concentrated mainly on menus and how to prepare them, but the food was only part of the story. French courtly life revolved around protocol, intrigue, written and unwritten laws, and the state banquet was simply another battlefield, the scene of deadly strategies, mines and booby-traps, presided over by the King. Careers were made and lost during a single course. The more she found out, the greater the detail Annie wanted to present. Though she could not reconstruct the nuances and even the dangers inherent in courtly dining at Versailles and its ilk, she longed to re-create the mood and sense of occasion.
At Versailles there had been over two thousand workers in the royal kitchens; Delores would have one, untrained. In the Royal Courts, banquets divided into several services of between two and eight courses: hors d’oeuvres, soups, main dishes, puddings and fruit. How many should she prepare? By the time Louis retired at 11.30 p.m., he would have eaten some twenty to thirty platters, after which he would pocket the candied fruit and nibble on a boiled egg as he made his way to bed. Could she replicate this aura of opulence and grandiosity? One great china service, used daily at court, was often worth as much as a house in Mayfair. Annie knew that she could not simply present similar dishes; an air of pomp and ceremony mixed with anticipation were essential ingredients. For the royal courtiers these evenings were fraught; up to five hundred people attended and where you were placed indicated where you were in the king’s hierarchy of favourites. Being placed in the wrong seat was a form of public humiliation. Those placed below the salt were not worth knowing. As she walked on, Annie wondered how to create an evening that was not simply a clever pastiche.
During Louis’s reign there were cast-iron instructions accompanying every meal. These rules were part of the display of power and wealth. Turning to another tome, Annie saw that the king sat in the middle of a long rectangular table. Some guests and even members of the public assembled on the edges of the room, watching but not necessarily eating. A few would be asked to sit at the short sides of the king’s table where they would not interrupt the King’s sightline or the waiters. Annie smiled, imagining that Delores would enjoy this power play.
The most dangerous part of eating was not the danger of a faux pas, but the sheer quantity of food. Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, Princess Palatine, recorded, ‘He could eat four plates of soup, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, two slices of ham, mutton au jus with garlic, a plate of pastry, all followed by fruit and hard-boiled eggs.’ The ingredients were sourced from the corners of Louis’s kingdom; oysters from St Malo and Cancale, lobsters from Normandy; vegetables from the royal gardens at Versailles; truffles from Italy; game from the hills and forests all over France. Astonishingly, Louis lived till the age of seventy-seven.
Annie began to worry how to afford the food. At the outset, Delores’s budget of £6,000 seemed overly generous, but that was before she learned about recipes involving foie gras, wild salmon, oysters, salads sprinkled with gold leaf, fresh langoustine, puréed chestnut soup sprinkled with truffles; bisque of shellfish. A meal fit for a king was an investment rather than a luxury. She also knew that she would have to buy ingredients for the practice runs; she had £6,000 left from the sale of the house in Devon but was loath to break into her emergency fund.
Looking at her telephone, Annie saw that two hours had passed. There was no message yet from Rebecca, no instructions about dinner. There was enough food in the fridge for four people and providing the Winklemans were not expecting any guests, Annie only needed an hour to poach the fish and steam the vegetables. Needing to stretch her legs, she left the library and wandered away from St James’s Square, direction unknown. A sharp breeze whipped around the corner. Shivering, Annie pulled her hat further down over her hair. A girl jogged past, personal stereo in one hand, water bottle in the other. A middle-aged woman and her child came past on micro scooters, the mother breathing hard, a tight skirt restricting her movements. It started to rain, pendulous drops at first and then, without warning, a steady downpour. People ran for cover into doorways, shaking water from coats, wiping wet faces, cheerful despite sudden meteorological adversity. A young man dabbed at a raindrop halfway up his lit cigarette. Two ladies, up from the country, took out plastic headscarves from gold-clasped, shiny black handbags. A group of schoolgirls using schoolbooks as umbrellas, ran laughing towards a bus stop. The scene was pure twenty-first century but Annie was still lost in the court of Louis XIV and preparations for Delores’s dinner. She walked quickly, her thoughts flitting from recipes to table settings. Were geese a poor substitute for a recipe that called for six white swans? How high could she build a pyramid of profiteroles?
A cyclist speeding recklessly along the pavement towards her snapped Annie back into the present. Jumping to one side, she stumbled and a glint of silver caught her eye. It was a Greek drachma, a collector’s piece now, surely. Wasn’t it good luck to find a single penny, like being shat on by a bird? Annie’s spirits rose slightly. Pocketing the drachma, she walked on through bouncing droplets of rain. The deluge cleared the pavements. She had London to herself while pigeons and pedestrians sheltered from the storm. Water seeped through the hole in her shoe; her sock squelched. If Delores’s dinner was on the first of April, less than six weeks away, what was in season at that time? Annie rued her ignorance, her lack of formal training. Should she serve things that were out of season, flown from distant parts of the world? In Louis’s time, with no means of refrigeration and limited systems of transport, this would have been out of the question. But then, if Annie was to cook authentically, she should let some meat and fowl go off slightly and drown the rotting taste with pepper, nutmeg and available spices.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the streets as dark and shiny as patent leather. People stepped out of doorways and bus shelters, checking the sky apprehensively. Annie had wandered into an unfamiliar part of town and she was suddenly hungry and cold. Feeling around in the bottom of her pocket she pulled out three pound coins and the drachma. What was that going to buy? How long would a café owner let her sit nursing a single cup of coffee? She caught sight of herself in shop window: dark hair plastered to her pale face, her eyes heavily ringed.
Memories of the previous night’s encounter flooded back and she smarted with shame and self-disgust. Annie had sworn not to attend any more singles nights, but with Evie still at home, she needed to get out. She’d met the man by Holbein’s Ambassadors at the National Gallery’s ‘Meet and Mingle’. They had both been trying to find the hidden skull in the painting’s lower ground; their heads knocked together by accident. He thought they were the same age, twenty-five. Annie was secretly, pathetically grateful for his mistake.
He was German and handsome, kind of, amusing, sort of, with a heavy sense of humour and a two-day growth of stubble. She’d agreed to go back to his flat, telling herself that it was for one glass of wine only. But the truth was that she felt desperately lonely. She hoped making love might exorcise memories, even though she knew that strange bodies and casual encounters offered only fleeting comfort. Rising from the German’s bed at six that morning, she had gone straight to the office. Rebecca was already at work and, meeting her in the corridor, looked her up and down. She knows, Annie thought, blushing deeply and hurrying to the washrooms.
Annie found herself in Coptic Street. One of her mother’s lovers, an expert on Ethiopian Coptic churches, had promised to take them to Lalibela to see monasteries cut out of rock; the first of many broken promises. At the end of the road there was a small coffee shop with steamy windows and d
esultory Valentine’s Day decorations – a couple of strings of tinsel and a curling paper heart. Peering in, seeing that all the seats were taken, she walked on. She turned the corner and came face to face with an imposing façade in a courtyard bound by iron railings. Though more than twenty years had passed since her last visit as a schoolgirl, Annie recognised the British Museum’s portico.
When Agatha and Jesse had suggested searching the British Museum’s drawing collection, Annie had not seen the point. If you had no idea what you were looking for, how could you find anything? Three weeks ago she would have jumped at any kind of distraction; now her life was full with Rebecca and Carlo, her mother and Delores’s dinner. Even sorrow had been confined to a smaller space. I don’t have time to go to museums on mad hunts, she thought. She checked her watch. It was 2.15 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. Empty hours stretched ahead. I am like the old lady in the nursery rhyme, she thought – swallowing the spider to catch the fly, swallowing the bird to catch the spider – perhaps displacement activity will kill me too.
Walking up the sweeping stone steps, past the information desk, through the grey lobby and into a huge inner courtyard, she realised her younger self would not have recognised the British Museum. In its centre was a circular building made from honey-coloured stone with a wrap-around staircase; floors were made of white marble slabs and the vast domed ceiling was made of thousands of latticed panels of opaque glass, reminiscent of a giant fly’s eye. At the café in the corner she bought a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread and sat on the floor above a heating grill, watching the passers-by. This was, she decided, the place to bring uncertainty and not feel out of place. Most clutched guidebooks, printed maps and looked overwhelmed as they walked through the vast space or clustered near the ticket booths or outside souvenir shops.
Warmed by soup and blasts of central heating, Annie walked up the stairs and through the Egyptian department past bandaged mummies lying in open caskets. Schoolchildren pressed their faces against the protective glass cases. Assyrians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, living two or three thousand years earlier. How many generations ago? How many great-grandfathers? How many begetters? Annie felt strangely comforted by the feeling of being so utterly insignificant, so dwarfed by time.
The Improbability of Love Page 19