Angelica's Grotto

41 Really Perky

On the day of the viewing for the auction Klein took the Piccadilly Line to Green Park, walked up Piccadilly to St James’s Street and down St James’s Street to King Street and Christie’s. The afternoon was hot, the sunlight lay on it like a lid of heavy glass, the buildings leant and loomed threateningly.

Christie’s looked august, impassive, authoritarian; it was hard to imagine the artists, some of them undoubtedly less than respectable, who had produced by the labour of hand and eye the works that would be sold here. Melissa was waiting for him in the lobby where the carpet seemed to belong to a hotel in somebody else’s life. ‘If this is what this is,’ Klein whispered into his hand, ‘and she is who she is, who am I?’

‘Hello, Harold,’ she said. She was very smart in a black trouser suit. Klein was wearing jeans, a tired-looking blue shirt, and some sort of safari jacket. Muttering under his breath, he was at the same time proud to be seen with Melissa and resentful of her presence; he would have preferred to be alone among these strangers with the winged horse that had for so many years been the tutelary god of his workroom. Seeing the painting in the catalogue that Christie’s had sent him had already made it no longer his. The catalogue cost £25 and weighed about a kilo; he gave it to Melissa to carry as they went up the stairs to the Main Room.

The daylight through the skylight was reflected in the parquet floor on which the viewers’ footsteps echoed implacably, saying flatly that anything can be bought and sold. The prospective buyers, singly and in groups, catalogues in hand, made their slow circuit, bypassing a TV cameraman focusing on an expert-looking man who held a sheaf of documents. Klein was usually able to spot Americans by the hang of their faces and he saw quite a few, some of them patently heavy hitters and others probably tourists making a culture stop among the serious punters who spoke three or four languages and had eyes like basilisks.

The fifty-three lots on view included French, German, Dutch, and English Romanticists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Pre-Raphaelites. There were major Monets, minor Courbets, middle Corots, an early Renoir, a late Degas, a stray Ensor, a Moreau Salome watercolour sketch, and a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza charcoal drawing by Daumier with what Klein considered an insulting under-estimate of £40,000-60,000.

‘What are you whispering about now?’ said Melissa.

‘Market forces and mental flab.’

Pegase Noir, Lot 37, was between a Puvis de Chavannes Regret and a Despair by Watts. Look at me, said the winged horse to Klein. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy now?

‘Those two set him off quite well, I think,’ said Melissa. ‘He really looks perky next to them.’

Klein whispered something into his hand but she didn’t ask what it was.

A tall heavyset big-money sort of American with a big-money-sort-of-American’s-blonde paused in front of the Redon. ‘Look out, Odilon,’ whispered Klein, ‘Las Vegas has arrived.’

The man consulted his catalogue. ‘Four to six hundred thousand,’ he said.

‘You into Symbolists now?’ said the woman.

‘I’m getting a feeling.’

‘The last time you had a feeling it was a horse too.’

‘That one couldn’t run but I think this one’s going to fly. It’s strange, it’s mystical.’

‘The question is, how much do you want to put on a mystical horse?’

‘Well, it’s that kind of a time — lots of interest in UFOs, alien abductions, X-files, that kind of thing.’

‘Would you call a flying horse a UFO?’

‘Mystics are in these days. Glenn Hoddle even hired a faith healer for the England team.’

‘Did they win whatever they were playing?’

‘That’s beside the point.’ They drifted away, the man’s gestures indicating that the feeling was getting stronger.

‘He’s right,’ said Klein. ‘That horse is going to fly.’

‘Here I am and Hannelore’s dead,’ he whispered into his hand.

‘What do you think of Moreau?’ said Melissa. She was standing in front of the Salome watercolour, over estimated, in Klein’s opinion, at £300,000–350,000.

‘Some of his sketches are pretty good,’ he said, ‘but his finishes tend to be a little obvious.’

‘You don’t think he’s as good as Redon?’

‘For me he’s not in the same class.’

‘Why not?’

‘Even when he’s at his very best, you can see how Moreau reasoned out his pictures, how he put the elements together; with Redon you can’t: his ideas and images came from unknown places far away — they came looking for him and they made him visualise strange worlds. His kind of genius is very rare.’

‘You like strangeness, don’t you, Harold.’

‘Yes, I do. Reality is so strange that it can never be completely grasped; it takes a strange artist to get past the front of it and Redon is the strangest artist I know, miles ahead of the surrealists. He didn’t try to be clever — he just did it the way it showed itself to him.’

‘Harold, are you unhappy about selling the painting?’

‘Do you care whether I am or not?’

‘Of course I care. Maybe I’m not the kind of person you’d like me to be and maybe you’re not getting all you want from me but we have got a relationship; I’m something to you and you’re something to me.’

‘The question is, what?’

‘Surely you know by now, Harold, that you can’t always define things clearly and if you try too hard you can make them go away altogether. It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: you can determine the position of a moving particle or its momentum, but not both at the same time.’

‘OK, so what’s the position with us?’

She looked at him sidewise and laughed. ‘We’ve tried one or two, haven’t we. They contribute to the momentum, don’t you think? We’ve got a good little mysterious something going between us, Prof, something strange — don’t spoil it.’

‘I’m not in love with her,’ Klein whispered into his hand. ‘That would be too pathetic.’

‘What are you whispering?’

‘I’m not in love with you, Melissa.’

‘That’s perfectly all right, Harold, but if you want to be in love with me, that’s all right too. An experience can be life-enriching even when it’s emotionally frustrating.’ She said this tenderly, with her hand on his arm and her blue eyes full on him. Klein kissed her and she kissed him back.

‘This is my life now,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘The past doesn’t go away but the present steps in front of it.’ There swam into his mind the fish in the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital lobby, observing with perpetually open eyes the ichthyocentric world on the other side of the glass. He sighed.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Melissa.

‘I’m being attacked by random metaphors.’

‘Try to avoid eye contact, maybe they’ll go away.’

They continued their viewing, with Klein lingering longest at nudes and marine paintings. As they stood in front of a deliciously seductive Nu allonge dans le studio by Paul-Cesar Helleu she said, ‘Tell me, Prof, how is this different from pornography?’

‘That’s a tough one, and I have lain awake many nights pondering that very question.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘You’ll have to ask Boots.’

‘Boots the Chemists?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How’s that?’

‘If I were to photograph this painting and take my film to Boots, they would process it and give me prints of Mademoiselle Allonge with no questions asked. If it were pornography they wouldn’t.’

‘Thanks. It’s good that I have you to explain these things to me.’

‘That’s the advantage of hanging out with an art historian — you get these professional insights for free.’

‘And what is it with all these sailing vessels in calm and heavy weather?’ They had by then moved on to Shipping in Choppy Waters by the Dutch painter Abraham Hulk.

‘Well, first of all life is a sometimes calm, sometimes stormy sea, OK?’

‘Right.’

‘So you’ve got a good solid metaphor to begin with; then there’s the rigging.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look at the vessel in the foreground, with this diagonal spar that goes from the lower left to the upper-right corner of the sail — do you know what it’s called?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘It’s a sprit: not a boom, not a gaff, but a sprit. Every rope and spar has its proper name so that nothing gets mixed up with anything else, and these seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century painters got their rigging right; they believed in it. Take a painter like Caspar David Friedrich — he was heavily into metaphysics but when he drew a boat it was a boat that worked, both physically and metaphysically. That kind of thing is life-affirming for me.’

‘Jesus, Harold — how did I get along without you all these years!’

‘With difficulty, I fear. Come look at the Daumier.’

A tall silver-haired patrician couple had got there first and were examining it thoughtfully. ‘That’s the sort of horse the picadors used to ride in Barcelona,’ said the man. ‘They were expendable.’

‘Don Quixote was a tall thin man,’ said his wife, ‘so it was natural for Daumier to give him a tall thin horse.’

‘I realise that. All the same, I prefer Munnings for horses.’

‘I’m glad he didn’t like it,’ said Klein when the couple had moved on. ‘I’d have felt bad if he had.’

‘Maybe you just don’t like tall people.’

‘I like Don Quixote — he was tall.’

‘I like this Daumier a lot,’ said Melissa. ‘Please don’t explain it to me.’

‘I won’t; I’ll say only that the last time I was in Paris I left a thank-you note on Daumier’s tomb in Père Lachaise.’

Mr Duclos found them back at the Redon. Klein introduced Melissa and Duclos gave them news of Pegase Noir’s tour. ‘There was a great deal of interest in Paris and Zurich and New York,’ he said. ‘Quite a buzz, really — I expect a lot of excitement at the sale.’

When they’d had enough viewing Klein and Melissa went back to Piccadilly and the Royal Academy for coffee. The Summer Exhibition was on; the statue of Joshua Reynolds, garlanded with flowers, looked towards the entrance arch where a black iron cast of Anthony Gormley hung by its ankles from a rope. Forty-five other effigies of the sculptor, occupying the courtyard in a variety of positions, were being infiltrated by tourists young and old who photographed each other interacting with them.

The restaurant was dark and cool with cryptlike arches, its globe-lamps cosy, its murals comfortably dated; time seemed in no hurry. ‘Why here?’ said Melissa.

‘I like to be overcharged in a good cause,’ said Klein, ‘and I like to be with you in a place where I’ve often been alone.’

Melissa put her hand on his. ‘That’s a really sweet thing to say, Harold.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go now, I’ve got a class to prepare.’

The sky grew dark as they went down Piccadilly towards Green Park Station, Klein whispering, ‘A winged horse can’t do my flying for me, I have to do it on my own. We are something to each other. You don’t always know what’s happening when it’s happening. “This can’t be love because I feel so well …”’ Suddenly there was rain beating down, urgent and shining and steaming on street and pavement. ‘You go ahead,’ he said, ‘I can’t run.’

‘A little rain won’t hurt me,’ she said, and pressed his arm closer to her. Drenched and smiling, he felt almost middle-aged again.