by Peter Watson
They sat for a while, letting the noises of the restaurant swirl around them. There was brass band music on the television, bored complaints from children who were still up well past their respectable Anglo-Saxon bed-time. Gina brought the porcini and a bottle of Rubesco. Elizabeth Lisle tasted it and nodded approvingly. She turned back to David. ‘The food’s so good there, and so cheap, I hardly ever eat at home.’
‘Do you live alone?’
‘Oh yes, just down the street here. Fourth floor. You have to walk up.’
David smiled. ‘No wonder you look so slim.’
She shook her head. ‘I eat like a lion. It must be my genes which stop me spreading.’
‘What other genes do you have? Are you extrovert? Introvert? Optimistic? Depressive? Forgetful? Credit card crazy? I can’t tell from here.’
She was smiling. ‘Not the last one, certainly. And not depressive or forgetful, either. Optimistic? – yes, but with Massoni around, less and less so.’
‘Lonely?’
Now she wasn’t smiling. Her face was serious but gentle. ‘Mr Colwyn, only a man who was lonely himself would ask a question like that.’
For a moment he was silenced. Then, recovering, he said, ‘That’s not an answer.’
She tossed back her hair in a gesture he hadn’t seen before. It made her look years younger and he felt as if, with that simple twist of her neck, he had been admitted to her inner self. ‘Lonely? Or do you mean solitary? I can never be sure which I am. Maybe I’m both.’
But she gave no more, and before he could press her further she changed the subject. ‘Do you like fairs?’
‘Fairs?’ He was flummoxed.
‘Carousels . . . dodgem cars . . . there’s one on here in Rome this week, over by the Janiculum. I love fairs but it’s difficult for a woman to go by herself. Life in Louisiana was full of fairs and festivals. Everybody’s heard of Mardi Gras – Fat Tuesday – in New Orleans. But we also had the rice festival, the sugar cane festival, a frog festival, would you believe? My favourite was Contraband Day, rowing and boating races commemorating the famous pirates and smugglers of the seventeenth century. Their descendants are, of course, a bit snooty now.’ She smiled. ‘I was a bit of tomboy as a girl – I loved all that stuff. If you’d take me to the fair, it would be a kindness.’
‘It’ll have to be tonight. I’m flying home tomorrow.’
She nodded.
David savoured the last of his porcini. ‘On one condition. I can’t go to a fair with someone who refers to me by my last name. If we go, and I’d like to, I’m David. And you . . .? Whatever you are, but not Miss Lisle.’
She considered this. ‘Yes, OK. But I’m not Elizabeth. That’s what my grandmother’s called, and my mother is Liz. In the family I’m Bess.’
He loved it. A simple name, brave and unassuming. A tomboyish name. At a stroke it put her into context.
She watched him react. ‘Boney, bossy and boyish, my Pa used to say.’
‘That must have been some time ago.’
She was getting to her feet so David couldn’t be certain whether she blushed. But either way he was sure some barrier between them had been crossed. He paid the bill and they walked towards the Lungotevere where they took a taxi.
The rest of the evening was a great success. In the first place it was obvious that Elizabeth Lisle – Bess – really did adore fairs. For once the restraints of her Vatican life were forgotten. She had to try her hand at everything. She gave David a trouncing in the dodgems, frightened him into silence on the big dipper and laughed helpless at him in the hall of mirrors. He retrieved some dignity by acquitting himself well on the shooting range, so much so that he wasn’t allowed a second go. That impressed her. But the evening’s success went deeper than that. The mass of people, the crush, the bright lights under the dark sky, the tacky food and the fizzy drinks they had at midnight, it all created a sense of intimacy between them, privacy even, that could have occurred almost nowhere else. They found they could be at ease with each other.
David could also tell, from the earnest enthusiasm with which Bess embraced the fair, that his instincts had been sound: she was lonely. Solitary was her word for it, a kinder word perhaps but in this case it amounted to the same thing. Maybe the man who had answered the phone was no longer in her life. But he couldn’t ask about that tonight.
They stayed late. It was gone two when they collapsed into a taxi and Bess fell asleep on the short ride back to the Via dei Banchi Vecchi. Her hair fell across David’s shoulder. It smelled of lavender. Her flat was in an old building, set back beyond a courtyard. As the taxi drew to a halt, she jerked awake.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s late.’
They got out and he paid.
‘Aren’t you going to keep the cab?’
‘No, it’s not far to the hotel. Just across the river. I’d like to walk.’
Now came the awkwardness. He’d asked her out, he’d agreed to accompany her to the fair. It was her place to round off the evening.
She held out her hand. ‘Thank you, David,’ she said softly. ‘You were kind to take me. It finishes tomorrow. I would have missed it, but for you.’
‘I enjoyed it, too,’ said David. ‘Thank you for thinking of it.’ He felt as awkward as he sounded. Suddenly he wanted her to say something, to move their relationship forward. He was amazed at how much he wanted that. But she turned without speaking again and disappeared across the courtyard.
*
Back in London, the auction season was getting under way. With competition between the salerooms now so fierce, senior executives in each firm spent a lot of time thinking up new schemes to make their house attractive to potential sellers of art. A favourite ploy was to guarantee sellers a certain amount of money from a sale, come what may. Exactly as had happened over the Argyll Estate and with the Vatican pictures. But it was risky and each case had to be treated on its merits. At Hamilton’s next board meeting, the week after David got back from Rome, the issue cropped up again. This time it was raised by Peter McBride, the director in charge of French painting.
‘The situation is this,’ he told the board. ‘George Kinney has decided to sell his collection of Watteaus and Bouchers. For those of you who don’t know him, Kinney owns large forests in North Carolina, Canada and Alaska; he supplies hundreds of newspapers in North America with newsprint and he, his father and his grandfather before him have been collecting French painting for over eighty years.’
‘So why is he selling?’ someone asked.
‘He won’t say but the best guess is that he’s strapped for cash and wants to buy more forests which have just come on the market in Canada. Anyway, what we’re talking about is seven Watteaus, five Bouchers, five Fragonards and twenty-three other paintings by smaller names – Greuze, Vigée-Lebrun, Vien. There’s been a lot of toing and froing, but the nitty-gritty is that Steele’s have guaranteed Kinney fifteen million pounds. That’s way over my budget without board approval, hence this item on today’s agenda.’
‘And what are these pictures worth?’ It was Afton speaking.
‘We’ve done a careful estimate and our view is that the top price would be thirteen point five million pounds.’
‘How come Steele’s say it’s worth more?’ Averne sat directly across from McBride.
‘We think they’re taking a chance. They want the business.’
‘How good is our judgement?’ It was Averne again.
McBride said: ‘I did the calculation myself.’
‘But you’ve been wrong before. Didn’t that David go for nearly twice the figure you put on it?’
‘It’s tricky trying to put a figure on a painting weeks before it comes up for auction, and there were special circumstances in that case –’
‘But you were nearly 100 per cent out – yes or no?’
‘Yes.’
Afton spoke. ‘Sam, by the tone of your voice you think we should guarantee Kinney more than Steel
e’s have?’
‘Sure I do,’ said Averne. ‘These are great names, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard. If we offer, say, sixteen million pounds and they fetch nineteen, or twenty, it’s good business.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘So we own some French Old Masters for a while. So what? The market will catch up sooner or later.’
Afton turned to his left. ‘David?’
‘I’m against it. We are auctioneers, not bankers. Our whole business depends on the close link between value and quality. Let that go and the whole art world falls to pieces. Also, if we follow Sam’s reasoning we could end up owning more paintings than we sell. And third, if it gets out that the big auction houses act like bankers just to get business, then sellers will be playing one house off against the others in no time and we’ll all be the losers. If we have to offer money up front, then that money should always be tied to what we think the art is worth. Of course we make mistakes but in-house surveys show that on average our estimates are within fifteen per cent of the actual prices fetched. If I know Peter McBride, he’s done his homework and that figure of his – thirteen point five million pounds – included that margin for error.’
McBride nodded.
Afton looked across to Averne. ‘Want to come back, Sam?’
‘Just this. We won’t always have these Vatican sales to rely on. We’ve got to be aggressive, go out and get the business. Steele’s see that; I’m not sure we do. The Kinney sale is worth a punt.’
Afton put it to a vote. Averne lost, but it was close: 9 to 7. As David went back to his office after the meeting, he reflected that, as ever in a large company, there were jealousies to contend with. Averne needed watching.
Ned needed watching too, if for very different reasons. David hadn’t heard from him since term started – he hadn’t even sent back his latest chess move (they played by post during every term). David didn’t want to appear a fussing parent and Ned was probably in touch with his mother anyway. So he would leave it another week or so before calling the housemaster. But no longer.
As the Caravaggio sale drew near David had one or two conversations on the phone with Bess, but they were strictly professional. After the way she had just turned away at the end of their evening together, he could not bring himself to be at all familiar – not when there were a thousand miles separating them. Once he was back in Rome, though, things might be different. He’d make them different.
Before that, however, David made headlines again. Working in the National Fine Art Library in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and consulting some documents relating to seventeenth-century Rome, he came across a commission to Salvator Rosa that exactly fitted the Argyll painting. Excited, he sent a photograph of the painting, and a photocopy of the library document, to Sir Charles Senior, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and an authority on Rosa. Senior confirmed by return that the Argyll painting was a Rosa and almost certainly the one referred to in the documents. Delighted, David checked back through the records in the basement of Hamilton’s. He worked late for two nights comparing the prices of similar pictures in the past. At the end of that time, he felt justified in changing the estimate on the Rosa – to £750,000. Next day, Pringle had no problem interesting the press in an object that had been lying forgotten in a Scottish manse for many years, and which was now found to be worth three quarters of a million pounds. David left for the Caravaggio sale in Rome feeling better than he had for weeks.
*
The Vatican technicians had done a superb job with the lights. The Caravaggio looked sensational, its reds and browns as deep and dark as the night outside the open window. The octagonal gallery was much cosier than any normal auction house, an impressive backdrop of Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Guercino. The visitors’ black ties and dark silk evening dresses made a perfect contrast, with the colour of the evening provided by a handful of cardinals in vivid, official scarlet, there because, as one of them put it, they ‘wanted to see the action’.
The temporary rostrum for the sale was to one side, rather than directly ahead of the bidders, who faced the painting. This was David’s idea; he felt it suggested that the priorities of the evening were not entirely commercial.
He had been in Rome two days, checking that his staff had done their jobs. One or two last-minute hitches had been ironed out – for example, he had to smooth out the ruffled feathers of two museum directors who had inadvertently not been invited to the previous evening’s reception given by His Holiness. Thomas was out of Rome for the sale tonight, but the reception had gone very well, with the Holy Father deep in interested conversation with several museum directors, Smallbone from the Getty especially. David had tried to catch Bess’s eye but, to his disappointment, had failed. It didn’t seem as though she was avoiding him, though. She was truly busy and had agreed to a quick supper right after the auction. At Gina’s again. He was therefore in a fairly relaxed mood – which was just as well, given the job he had to do.
David tapped the microphone to check that it was working. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said quickly in English. ‘Welcome to Hamilton’s new auction room.’ Everyone, including the cardinals, laughed. ‘We have only one painting in the auction tonight, “The Deposition”, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Before we come to the sale itself, however, His Holiness has asked me to screen a short film – just a few minutes – which will show you how the money advanced on the picture to be sold tonight is already being used.’
Almost immediately the lights of the gallery dimmed and, to the left of the Caravaggio where there was a screen, the film started to roll. It was neatly done. A few minutes only, as David had said, juxtaposing newsreel film of the Mussomeli massacre with more recent footage of the projects in Sicily and even one or two grimmer shots of Mafia suspects being rounded up. Finally, a shot of the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo from where, in 1969, Caravaggio’s ‘Nativity’ had been stolen by the Mafia and never returned, showing that Caravaggio too, like Fr Vizzini, like the children near the priest that day, had been a victim of the mob.
The film faded and the lights of the TV crews went on again. David waited until everyone had settled down. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, “The Deposition”. Painted for the Chiesa Nuova here in Rome, this picture was taken to Paris in 1797 for the Musée Napoleon, but returned and installed in the Vatican around 1815. The painting is dated 1602/3.’ He paused, looked around the room, then carried on. ‘I have two bids in the book and so shall start tonight at forty billion lire. Approximately twenty million dollars. Forty billion lire . . . any more?’
Later, in his report of the sale, David would tell his board there must have been twenty people in the room that night who wanted to buy the picture. After an initial, inevitable hesitation, the bids crowded in. At sixty billion lire there were still six hands urgently raised. At seventy-six only two remained – the Met and Sydney. At seventy-eight Sydney dropped out but then, having sat immobile until now, Sol Smallbone from the Getty flicked his catalogue. So that left the Met v. the Getty, a classic fight.
The bidding was soon at eighty-two billion, but at eighty-three Jakobson of the Met was obviously worried. He wanted the picture, he seemed determined to have it, but he was clearly near, if not already over, his limit. Though the next bid should have gone to eighty-four, he called out, ‘Eighty-three and a half!’
David accepted the bid and looked at Smallbone. With a wonderful sense of theatre, the Getty man removed his glasses, took a handkerchief from his pocket, polished his glasses, put them back on, looked long at the Caravaggio. Then he said calmly but loudly, ‘Eighty-five.’
A gasp came from several places in the room. To jump a bid, especially at this level, was unheard of. Smallbone was signalling to Jakobson and anyone else with a fancy for ‘The Deposition’ that he was going to get it, even it took all of his $110 million budget for that year.
Jakobson, looking as though his world was about to end, shook his head. The sound of David’s ga
vel falling was drowned by the cheers and applause. Eighty-five billion lire was over forty-two million dollars. Over twenty-six million pounds. Recovering his composure, Jakobson went over to congratulate Smallbone. The pair were photographed shaking hands and then Smallbone was ushered forward to stand in front of the painting as it was taken down. David’s men took no more than ten minutes to unscrew the frame and lift the picture off the wall. The gesture was genuinely moving. As the picture went, accompanied by Smallbone, a pale and dirty patch was left on the now very empty gallery wall.
The newspaper reporters and television crews were milling around, soliciting comments. It was some time before David could get away to meet Bess – he had to arrange delivery of ‘The Deposition’ and make sure the Getty’s cheque went through smoothly. He caught up with Smallbone in the Vatican gallery’s framing room, where the carpenters worked. A packing case had already been half-constructed for the Caravaggio and the Getty man was examining it.
‘Well done, Sol,’ said David, holding out his hand.
Smallbone smiled and grasped his hand firmly. ‘What a painting! These people are as alive tonight as the day Caravaggio had them pose for him. I could go on looking at it forever.’
Together they stood in silence for a moment, gazing at the creams and reds, the rich skin tones of the faces, the mysterious burnt browns in the shadows.
‘Are you dashing back to Malibu, Sol?’
‘As a matter of fact, no. Funny thing . . . at the reception yesterday the Holy Father asked me to stay on for a couple of days. At Vatican expense, too. Said he wanted to pick my brains.’ Smallbone laughed and tapped his temple. ‘He’s welcome to what’s left. Can’t imagine what he has in mind. Still, I shall be around, yes. Why?’
David glanced up at the clock. ‘I thought we could tie up all the details tomorrow rather than now. I’m sure you’ll be wanting your dinner. And you have some celebrating to do.’
Smallbone grinned. ‘You bet. Sure, David. If you can wait, so can I. The difficult bit is over. If you’re happy to wait twenty-four hours before receiving the cheque, that’s fine by me. A day’s interest on forty-two million dollars is more than eleven thousand, two hundred bucks. I know these things. Come to the hotel at noon tomorrow. I’m at the Eden – couldn’t get into the Hassler. We’ll settle everything and then have lunch. OK?’