Picture You Dead

4

Sunday, 21 July 2019

Harry Kipling made every customer feel like they were his new best friend. With his twinkly eyes, cheeky grin and messy hair, and invariably wearing shorts on all but the coldest of winter days, the stocky forty-five-year-old was constantly bursting with boyish enthusiasm and energy. He gave each customer the impression he could not do enough for them, and he sure tried.

Call me Harry and I’ll hurry! was his catchphrase. Heck, when you inherited an identical surname to the brand of one of Britain’s most famous cake makers, you either had to make a joke of it or change it.

And not so easy to change your name when your family business, Harold Kipling & Sons, Brighton’s Premier Builders, had been established in 1892 and carried all that goodwill with it.

Besides, it was an icebreaker for a new customer, when discussing extensions to the rear of their house, invariably to tell Harry to make sure he brought some exceedingly good cakes with him, heh-heh.

Business was busy right now, the demand for extensions and for loft conversions better than ever, and a decent turnover was coming in. But he struggled to make a profit year on year. His business would be considerably more profitable, his wife Freya often chided him, if he wasn’t quite so obliging to his customers.

Freya, also forty-five and his childhood sweetheart, was deputy head of a local school. Still the beautiful former head girl, with her long blonde hair and trim figure, she was the organized one in the marriage, and in the rare free time she had after dealing with all the paperwork mountain from her school, and doing her workouts, she helped Harry out with the books of his business – something he was rubbish at. And sometimes what she saw worried her.

Because he always wanted to be helpful, and because he was a genuinely kind man, Harry constantly did his customers favours here and there at no extra charge – invariably eating into his all-too-thin profit margins.

It would be nice, Freya mentioned, and very pointedly, if just occasionally he would do them some favours, too. Such as fixing the floor tile in the downstairs loo of their house, which had been loose for months, or the damp patch in the ceiling of their fourteen-year-old son Tom’s room. Not to mention the wonky wall light in their lounge. And the kitchen cabinet door which had had a broken hinge for as long as she could remember. And everything else that was wrong with their small, attractive but increasingly cluttered 1950s corner house in Mackie Crescent in the leafy Brighton suburb of Patcham.

‘It’s on my list, darling,’ was his standard response. ‘I’ll do it at the weekend.’

But he never did, because most Saturdays, if he wasn’t going with Tom to football at the Amex, to cheer on the Seagulls, or taking him to play rugby or tennis – the two sports Tom was obsessed with playing, which he and Freya encouraged – he would be putting in extra hours at a customer’s house, trying to get a job finished.

And on the alternate Sundays when he didn’t play golf, and while Tom slept in until midday, Harry enjoyed indulging with Freya in their favourite pastime together: scouring car boot sales. And then, when they returned home, after examining and cleaning or polishing their booty, he would take command of the kitchen – or the barbecue on summer days – to cook a roast.

Tom was a Type-1 diabetic. Increasingly, due to him badgering his parents that it was better both for the planet and his sugar levels, Harry had been experimenting with vegetarian and vegan roasts – and discovered to his and Freya’s surprise that they enjoyed both of these, as well as his increasing repertoire of fish and seafood, as much as, if not even more than, meat.

Invariably, after lunch, any good intentions Harry might have had of putting in an hour or two of DIY on the house were nixed by the several large glasses of the red Rioja he and Freya favoured. It would be feet up in front of the television for pretty much the rest of the day and evening, while Tom, if there wasn’t a major sports game on to watch, disappeared up to his room, into his world – alien to them – of computer gaming.

One of the passions Harry and Freya shared was a love of bric-a-brac, and on this Sunday morning they were among the first in line for the 8 a.m. opening of the Sayers Common car boot sale, five miles north of Brighton.

Both were well aware, from long experience, that if you wanted to snap up bargains, you had to be there at doors opening to have any chance against the professional dealers. And they had a well-rehearsed and practised plan of splitting up the moment they entered, Freya going left and Harry going right, scouring the stalls for bargains.

Freya collected Toby jugs, teapots, art deco figurines and Brighton prints. Harry loved police memorabilia – in particular badges – old photographs, Victorian watercolours and, more recently, silver teaspoons.

As usual, the scavenging dealers ran ahead of him, scouring the tables and the unpacked boxes below them, putting item after item into their old carrier bags. The grass was damp underfoot and the early morning air had a slight chill.

Harry was glad of his waterproof work boots, gilet and baseball cap keeping the mist at bay. There was an appetizing smell of coffee, doughnuts and frying bacon in the air. He looked forward to their Sunday guilty treat – which they didn’t tell Tom about – of stopping at the stall serving all those, after they’d satisfied themselves they’d missed nothing, for their egg and bacon sarnie breakfast fix, with an Americano for him, latte for Freya.

He walked past a trestle table loaded with old clothes and soft toys. Another with horrible porcelain ornaments. But all the same, he stopped, checking them out carefully, and spotted a tarnished old Brighton Police badge. He negotiated it down from £7.50 to a fiver, slipped it into his pocket and moved on. The next stall was mostly Dinky and Corgi toys, with the occasional Matchbox car, but none of them looked particularly old. He scanned them for a police vehicle, but spotted none and moved on again.

On the next, he saw two hideous clowns and shuddered, wondering who on earth would want them – they looked like they would haunt you forever. But next to them were several Toby jugs, and he texted Freya to alert her. Then he noticed a large box containing pictures, on the grass beneath the stall. On the other side of the table sat a friendly-looking young couple, sharing a cigarette, the tantalizingly sweet smoke drifting his way.

Harry sniffed appreciatively. ‘That smells so good!’ he said.

‘Have one!’ the young man said, offering him an open pack.

‘I just quit. I’d kill for one, but my wife would kill me if I did,’ Harry replied. ‘Thanks all the same. Mind if I take a look in that box?’

‘Go ahead,’ the woman said. ‘We’ve just been clearing out my nan’s house – the stuff that was up in her loft. Some frames are OK, but the pictures aren’t that special.’

Harry pulled the box out and began to rummage through the contents, hoping for a Victorian watercolour or a Brighton print. She was right about the quality of the paintings, he thought; they were complete grot. A horrible vase full of flowers in an ugly cream frame; a Cornish harbour seascape with yachts looking like they were balanced on top of the water; a cheesy sunset over a flock of what he presumed were meant to be sheep.

Then he came to an ornate, gilded frame, which looked genuinely old. He lifted it out. The painting, in oil, was about ten by twelve inches. It was an ugly portrait, an elderly woman’s face so thin it resembled a skull with skin stretched over it, with strands of wispy white hair. Some bad amateur’s attempt at a portrait of their granny? he wondered.

But the gilded frame was beautiful. Real quality. He ran his hands around the edges, noticed some damage here and there, but he knew a chap in the nearby town of Lewes who specialized in repairing frames. He turned it over and looked at the rear. It was canvas, clearly old, with some markings too faded to read.

The frame alone, he figured, would be worth fifty quid, if not more, judging by the prices the restorer in Lewes charged for his. A few Sundays ago, he’d bought a watercolour of the old Brighton chain pier that was about this size. It would look stunning in this frame.

Standing up, holding the picture, he asked, ‘How much do you want for this?’

‘Twenty-five quid,’ the young man said after a few moments.

‘Would you take twenty?’

‘Go on then.’

As he peeled off a banknote from his wad, Harry asked, ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a bag for it?’

The young woman smiled. ‘Actually, I do. It’s your lucky day!’ She dug an arm down to the ground and produced a white plastic bag.

Twenty minutes later, munching on their egg and bacon baps, Freya and Harry triumphantly showed each other their purchases. Freya produced a flat-sided teapot painted with flowers. ‘This is similar to a Clarice Cliff, I really like it; it was nowhere near that kind of money but still worth something!’

He looked at it carefully, admiring it. ‘You could be right, well done you!’

‘What did you get, darling?’

‘A police badge, and this!’ He pulled the painting out of the bag.

‘Oh my God, she is horrible!’ Freya exclaimed. ‘Like, really creepy! Yech.’

‘Forget the picture, it’s the frame! Don’t you think it’s lovely?’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes, fine, but the picture, yech, it freaks me out.’

‘I agree, I don’t like the picture either, but the frame is a total bargain.’

‘As long as you get rid of that creepy head staring at me!’ She wrinkled her face.

‘I’ll cut it out and burn it as soon as we get home.’

But, like so many jobs Harry promised to do, he didn’t. When they got home, shortly after 11 a.m., Tom was still up in his room, no doubt asleep after spending half the night playing Fortnite or whatever the latest game he was now into. He leaned the picture against a glass wall in the conservatory annexe to the kitchen, which served as both family room and depository for their purchases, flopped on a sofa with another mug of coffee and watched golf on the television for half an hour, before jumping up to begin the lunch preparations.

As he did so, he saw their adored rescue cat, Jinx, was eyeing the painting suspiciously.

‘See,’ Freya said, walking in, ‘Jinx doesn’t like her either.’

‘Reminds you both of your mother, does she?’ he said, then ducked as, grinning, she threw a tangerine at him.