In the Frame

5

We went to Shropshire in Maisie’s Jaguar, sharing the driving.

Donald on the telephone had sounded unenthusiastic at my suggested return, but also too lethargic to raise objections. When he opened his front door to us, I was shocked.

It was two weeks since I’d left him to go to Yorkshire. In that time he had shed at least fourteen pounds and aged ten years. His skin was tinged with blue-ish shadows, the bones in his face showed starkly, and even his hair seemed speckled with grey.

The ghost of the old Donald put an obvious effort into receiving us with good manners.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m in the diningroom now. I expect you’d like a drink.’

‘That would be very nice, dear,’ Maisie said.

He looked at her with dull eyes, seeing, as I saw, a large good-natured lady with glossy hair and expensive clothes, her smart appearance walking a tightrope between vulgarity and elegance and just making it to the safer side.

He waved to me to pour the drinks, as if it would be too much for him, and invited Maisie to sit down. The diningroom had been roughly refurnished, containing now a large rug, all the sunroom armchairs, and a couple of small tables from the bedrooms. We sat in a fairly close group round one of the tables, because I had come to ask questions, and I wanted to write down the answers. My cousin watched the production of notebook and ballpoint with no show of interest.

‘Don,’ I said, ‘I want you to listen to a story.’

‘All right.’

Maisie, for once, kept it short. When she came to the bit about buying a Munnings in Australia, Donald’s head lifted a couple of inches and he looked from her to me with the first stirring of attention. When she stopped, there was a small silence.

‘So,’ I said finally, ‘you both went to Australia, you both bought a Munnings, and soon after your return you both had your houses burgled.’

‘Extraordinary coincidence,’ Donald said: but he meant simply that, nothing more. ‘Did you come all this way just to tell me that?’

‘I wanted to see how you were.’

‘Oh. I’m all right. Kind of you, Charles, but I’m all right.’

Even Maisie, who hadn’t known him before, could see that he wasn’t.

‘Where did you buy your picture, Don? Where exactly, I mean.’

‘I suppose... Melbourne. In the Hilton Hotel. Opposite the cricket ground.’

I looked doubtful. Although hotels quite often sold pictures by local artists, they seldom sold Munnings.

‘Fellow met us there,’ Don added. ‘Brought it up to our room. From the gallery where we saw it first.’

‘Which gallery?’

He made a slight attempt to remember. ‘Might have been something like Fine Arts.’

‘Would you have it on a cheque stub, or anything?’

He shook his head. ‘The wine firm I was dealing with paid for it for me, and I sent a cheque to their British office when I got back.’

‘Which wine firm?’

‘Monga Vineyards Proprietary Limited of Adelaide and Melbourne.’

I wrote it all down.

‘And what was the picture like? I mean, could you describe it?’

Donald looked tired. ‘One of those “Going Down to the Start” things. Typical Munnings.’

‘So was mine,’ said Maisie, surprised. ‘A nice long row of jockeys in their colours against a darker sort of sky.’

‘Mine had only three horses,’ Donald said.

‘The biggest, I suppose you might say the nearest jockey in my picture had a purple shirt and green cap,’ Maisie said, ‘and I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it, because when Archie and I were thinking what fun it would be to buy a horse and go to the races as owners, we decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one else already had that, of course.’

‘Don?’ I said.

‘Mm? Oh... three bay horses cantering... in profile... one in front, two slightly overlapping behind. Bright colours on the jockeys. I don’t remember exactly. White racetrack rails and a lot of sunny sky.’

‘What size?’

He frowned slightly. ‘Not very big. About twenty-four inches by eighteen, inside the frame.’

‘And yours, Maisie?’

‘A bit smaller, dear, I should think.’

‘Look,’ Donald said. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Trying to make sure that there are no more coincidences.’

He stared, but without any particular feeling.

‘On the way up here,’ I said, ‘Maisie told me everything’ (but everything) ‘of the way she came to buy her picture. So could you possibly tell us how you came to buy yours. Did you, for example, deliberately go looking for a Munnings?’

Donald passed a weary hand over his face, obviously not wanting the bother of answering.

‘Please, Don,’ I said.

‘Oh...’ A long sigh. ‘No. I wasn’t especially wanting to buy anything at all. We just went into the Melbourne Art Gallery for a stroll round. We came to the Munnings they have there... and while we were looking at it we just drifted into conversation with a woman near us, as one does in art galleries. She said there was another Munnings, not far away, for sale in a small commercial gallery, and it was worth seeing even if one didn’t intend to buy it. We had time to spare, so we went.’

Maisie’s mouth had fallen open. ‘But, dear,’ she said, recovering, ‘that was just the same as us, my sister-in-law and me, though it was Sydney Art Gallery, not Melbourne. They have this marvellous picture there, “The Coming Storm”, and we were admiring it when this man sort of drifted up to us and joined in...’

Donald suddenly looked a great deal more exhausted, like a sick person overdone by healthy visitors.

‘Look... Charles... you aren’t going to the police with all this? Because I... I don’t think... I could stand... a whole new lot... of questions.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said.

‘Then what... does it matter?’

Maisie finished her gin and tonic and smiled a little too brightly.

‘Which way to the little girls’ room, dear?’ she asked, and disappeared to the cloakroom.

Donald said faintly, ‘I can’t concentrate... I’m sorry, Charles, but I can’t seem to do anything... while they still have Regina... unburied... just stored...’

Time, far from dulling the agony, seemed to have preserved it, as if the keeping of Regina in a refrigerated drawer had stopped dead the natural progression of mourning. I had been told that the bodies of murdered people could be held in that way for six months or more in unsolved cases. I doubted whether Donald would last that long.

He stood suddenly and walked away out of the door to the hall. I followed. He crossed the hall, opened the door of the sittingroom, and went in.

Hesitantly, I went after him.

The sittingroom still contained only the chintz-covered sofas and chairs, now ranged over-tidily round the walls. The floor where Regina had lain was clean and polished. The air was cold.

Donald stood in front of the empty fireplace looking at my picture of Regina, which was propped on the mantelpiece.

‘I stay in here with her, most of the time,’ he said. ‘It’s the only place I can bear to be.’

He walked to one of the armchairs and sat down, directly facing the portrait.

‘You wouldn’t mind seeing yourselves out, would you, Charles?’ he said. ‘I’m really awfully tired.’

‘Take care of yourself.’ Useless advice. One could see he wouldn’t.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Quite all right. Don’t you worry.’

I looked back from the door. He was sitting immobile, looking at Regina. I didn’t know whether it would have been better or worse if I hadn’t painted her.

Maisie was quiet for the whole of the first hour of the return journey, a record in itself.

From Donald’s house we had driven first to one of the neighbours who had originally offered refuge, because he clearly needed help more now than ever.

Mrs. Neighbour had listened with sympathy, but had shaken her head.

‘Yes, I know he should have company and get away from the house, but he won’t. I’ve tried several times. Called. So have lots of people round here. He just tells us he’s all right. He won’t let anyone help him.’

Maisie drove soberly, mile after mile. Eventually she said, ‘We shouldn’t have bothered him. Not so soon after...’

Three weeks, I thought. Only three weeks. To Donald it must have seemed like three months, stretched out in slow motion. You could live a lifetime in three weeks’ pain.

‘I’m going to Australia,’ I said.

‘You’re very fond of him, dear, aren’t you?’ Maisie said.

Fond? I wouldn’t have used that word, I thought: but perhaps after all it was accurate.

‘He’s eight years older than me, but we’ve always got on well together.’ I looked back, remembering. ‘We were both only children. His mother and mine were sisters. They used to visit each other, with me and Donald in tow. He was always pretty patient about having a young kid under his feet.’

‘He looks very ill, dear.’

‘Yes.’

She drove another ten miles in silence. Then she said, ‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to tell the police? About the paintings, I mean? Because you do think they had something to do with the burglaries, don’t you, dear, and the police might find out things more easily than you.’

I agreed. ‘I’m sure they would, Maisie. But how can I tell them? You heard what Donald said, that he couldn’t stand a new lot of questions. Seeing him today, do you think he could? And as for you, it wouldn’t just be confessing to a bit of smuggling and paying a fine, but of having a conviction against your name for always, and having the customs search your baggage every time you travelled, and all sorts of other complications and humiliations. Once you get on any blacklist nowadays it is just about impossible to get off.’

‘I didn’t know you cared, dear.’ She tried a giggle, but it didn’t sound right.

We stopped after a while to exchange places. I liked driving her car, particularly as for the last three years, since I’d given up a steady income, I’d owned no wheels myself. The power purred elegantly under the pale blue bonnet and ate up the southward miles.

‘Can you afford the fare, dear?’ Maisie said. ‘And hotels, and things?’

‘I’ve a friend out there. Another painter. I’ll stay with him.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘You can’t get there by hitch-hiking, though.’

I smiled. ‘I’ll manage.’

‘Yes, well, dear, I dare say you can, but all the same, and I don’t want any silly arguments, I’ve got a great deal of this world’s goods thanks to Archie, and you haven’t, and as because it’s partly because of me having gone in for smuggling that you’re going yourself at all, I am insisting that you let me buy your ticket.’

‘No, Maisie.’

‘Yes, dear. Now be a good boy, dear, and do as I say.’

You could see, I thought, why she’d been a good nurse. Swallow the medicine, dear, there’s a good boy. I didn’t like accepting her offer but the truth was that I would have had to borrow anyway.

‘Shall I paint your picture, Maisie, when I get back?’

‘That will do very nicely, dear.’

I pulled up outside the house near Heathrow whose attic was my home, and from where Maisie had picked me up that morning.

‘How do you stand all this noise, dear?’ she said, wincing as a huge jet climbed steeply overhead.

‘I concentrate on the cheap rent.’

She smiled, opening the crocodile handbag and producing her chequebook. She wrote out and gave me the slip of paper which was far more than enough for my journey.

‘If you’re so fussed, dear,’ she said across my protests, ‘you can give me back what you don’t spend.’ She gazed at me earnestly with grey-blue eyes. ‘You will be careful dear, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Maisie.’

‘Because of course, dear, you might turn out to be a nuisance to some really nasty people.’

I landed at Mascot airport at noon five days later, wheeling in over Sydney and seeing the harbour bridge and the opera house down below, looking like postcards.

Jik met me on the other side of Customs with a huge grin and a waving bottle of champagne.

‘Todd the sod,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ His voice soared easily over the din. ‘Come to paint Australia red!’

He slapped me on the back with an enthusiastic horny hand, not knowing his own strength. Jik Cassavetes, longtime friend, my opposite in almost everything.

Bearded, which I was not. Exuberant, noisy, extravagant, unpredictable; qualities I envied. Blue eyes and sun-blond hair. Muscles which left mine gasping. An outrageous way with girls. An abrasive tongue; and a wholehearted contempt for the things I painted.

We had met at Art School, drawn together by mutual truancy on racetrains. Jik compulsively went racing, but strictly to gamble, never to admire the contestants, and certainly not to paint them. Horse-painters, to him, were the lower orders. No serious artist, he frequently said, would be seen dead painting horses.

Jik’s paintings, mostly abstract, were the dark reverse of the bright mind: fruits of depression, full of despair at the hatred and pollution destroying the fair world.

Living with Jik was like a toboggan run, downhill, dangerous, and exhilarating. We’d spent the last two years at Art School sharing a studio flat and kicking each other out for passing girls. They would have chucked him out of school except for his prodigious talent, because he’d missed weeks in the summer for his other love, which was sailing.

I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.

He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.

‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’

He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreen wiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’

‘But you like it?’

‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’

‘And how’s business?’

‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’

‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’

‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.

‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’

‘To your brain? As in the old days?’

‘Those were pastimes.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’

‘Arson and murder, to date.’

‘Jesus.’

The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.

‘I live right out on the other side,’ Jik said. ‘God, that sounds banal. Suburban. What has become of me?’

‘Contentment oozing from every pore,’ I said smiling.

‘Yes. So O.K., for the first time in my life I’ve been actually happy. I dare say you’ll soon put that right.’

The car nosed on to the expressway, pointing towards the bridge.

‘If you look over your right shoulder,’ Jik said, ‘You’ll see the triumph of imagination over economics. Like the Concorde. Long live madness, it’s the only thing that gets us anywhere.’

I looked. It was the opera house, glimpsed, grey with rain.

‘Dead in the day,’ Jik said. ‘It’s a night bird. Fantastic’.

The great arch of the bridge rose above us, intricate as steel lace. ‘This is the only flat bit of road in Sydney,’ Jik said. We climbed again on the other side.

To our left, half-seen at first behind other familiar-looking high-rise blocks, but then revealed in its full glory, stood a huge shiny red-orange building, all its sides set with regular rows of large curve-cornered square windows of bronze-coloured glass.

Jik grinned. ‘The shape of the twenty-first century. Imagination and courage. I love this country.’

‘Where’s your natural pessimism?’

‘When the sun sets, those windows glow like gold.’ We left the gleaming monster behind. ‘It’s the water-board offices,’ Jik said sardonically. ‘The guy at the top moors his boat near mine.’

The road went up and down out of the city through close-packed rows of one-storey houses, whose roofs, from the air, had looked like a great red-squared carpet.

‘There’s one snag,’ Jik said. ‘Three weeks ago, I got married.’

The snag was living with him aboard his boat, which was moored among a colony of others near a headland he called The Spit: and you could see why, temporarily at least, the glooms of the world could take care of themselves.

She was not plain, but not beautiful. Oval-shaped face, mid-brown hair, so-so figure and a practical line in clothes. None of the style or instant vital butterfly quality of Regina. I found myself the critically inspected target of bright brown eyes which looked out with impact-making intelligence.

‘Sarah,’ Jik said. ‘Todd. Todd, Sarah.’

We said hi and did I have a good flight and yes I did. I gathered she would have preferred me to stay at home.

Jik’s thirty-foot ketch, which had set out from England as a cross between a studio and a chandler’s warehouse, now sported curtains, cushions, and a flowering plant. When Jik opened the champagne he poured it into shining tulip glasses, not plastic mugs.

‘By God,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Sarah toasted my advent politely, not sure that she agreed. I apologised for gatecrashing the honeymoon.

‘Nuts to that,’ Jik said, obviously meaning it. ‘Too much domestic bliss is bad for the soul.’

‘It depends,’ said Sarah neutrally, ‘on whether you need love or loneliness to get you going.’

For Jik, before, it had always been loneliness. I wondered what he had painted recently: but there was no sign, in the now comfortable cabin, of so much as a brush.

‘I walk on air,’ Jik said. ‘I could bound up Everest and do a handspring on the summit.’

‘As far as the galley will do,’ Sarah said, ‘if you remembered to buy the crayfish.’

Jik, in our shared days, had been the cook; and times, it seemed, had not changed. It was he, not Sarah, who with speed and efficiency chopped open the crayfish, covered them with cheese and mustard, and set them under the grill. He who washed the crisp lettuce and assembled crusty bread and butter. We ate the feast round the cabin table with rain pattering on portholes and roof and the sea water slapping against the sides in the freshening wind. Over coffee, at Jik’s insistence, I told them why I had come to Australia.

They heard me out in concentrated silence. Then Jik, whose politics had not changed much since student pink, muttered darkly about ‘pigs’, and Sarah looked nakedly apprehensive.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’m not asking for Jik’s help, now that I know he’s married.’

‘You have it. You have it,’ he said explosively.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Sarah said, ‘What precisely do you plan to do first?’

‘Find out where the two Munnings came from.’

‘And after?’

‘If I knew what I was looking for I wouldn’t need to look.’

‘That doesn’t follow,’ she said absently.

‘Melbourne,’ Jik said suddenly. ‘You said one of the pictures came from Melbourne. Well, that settles it. Of course we’ll help. We’ll go there at once. It couldn’t be better. Do you know what next Tuesday is?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘The day of the Melbourne Cup!’

His voice was triumphant. Sarah stared at me darkly across the table.

‘I wish you hadn’t come,’ she said.