In the Frame

6

I slept that night in the converted boathouse which constituted Jik’s postal address. Apart from a bed alcove, new-looking bathroom, and rudimentary kitchen, he was using the whole space as studio.

A huge old easel stood in the centre, with a table to each side holding neat arrays of paints, brushes, knives, pots of linseed and turpentine and cleaning fluid: all the usual paraphernalia.

No work in progress. Everything shut and tidy. Like its counterpart in England, the large rush mat in front of the easel was black with oily dirt, owing to Jik’s habit of rubbing his roughly rinsed brushes on it between colours. The tubes of paint were characteristically squeezed flat in the middles, impatience forbidding an orderly progress from the bottom. The palette was a small oblong, not needed any larger because he used most colours straight from the tube and got his effects by overpainting. A huge box of rags stood under one table, ready to wipe clean everything used to apply paint to picture, not just brushes and knives, but fingers, palms, nails, wrists, anything which took his fancy. I smiled to myself. Jik’s studio was as identifiable as his pictures.

Along one wall a two-tiered rack held rows of canvasses, which I pulled out one by one. Dark, strong, dramatic colours, leaping to the eye. Still the troubled vision, the perception of doom. Decay and crucifixions, obscurely horrific landscapes, flowers wilting, fish dying, everything to be guessed, nothing explicit.

Jik hated to sell his paintings and seldom did, which I thought was just as well, as they made uncomfortable roommates, enough to cause depression in a skylark. They had a vigour, though, that couldn’t be denied. Everyone who saw his assembled work remembered it, and had their thoughts modified, and perhaps even their basic attitudes changed. He was a major artist in a way I would never be, and he would have looked upon easy popular acclaim as personal failure.

In the morning I walked down to the boat and found Sarah there alone.

‘Jik’s gone for milk and newspapers,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you some breakfast.’

‘I came to say goodbye.’

She looked at me levelly. ‘The damage is done.’

‘Not if I go.’

‘Back to England?’

I shook my head.

‘I thought not.’ A dim smile appeared briefly in her eyes. ‘Jik told me last night that you were the only person he knew who had a head cool enough to calculate a ship’s position for a Mayday call by dead reckoning at night after tossing around violently for four hours in a force ten gale with a hole in the hull and the pumps packed up, and get it right.’

I grinned. ‘But he patched the hull and mended the pump, and we cancelled the Mayday when it got light.’

‘You were both stupid.’

‘Better to stay safely at home?’ I said.

She turned away. ‘Men,’ she said. ‘Never happy unless they’re risking their necks.’

She was right, to some extent. A little healthy danger wasn’t a bad feeling, especially in retrospect. It was only the nerve-breakers which gave you the shakes and put you off repetition.

‘Some women, too,’ I said.

‘Not me.’

‘I won’t take Jik with me.’

Her back was still turned. ‘You’ll get him killed,’ she said.

Nothing looked less dangerous than the small suburban gallery from which Maisie had bought her picture. It was shut for good. The bare premises could be seen nakedly through the shop-front window, and a succinct and unnecessary card hanging inside the glass door said ‘Closed’.

The little shops on each side shrugged their shoulders.

‘They were only open for a month or so. Never seemed to do much business. No surprise they folded.’

Did they, I asked, know which estate agent was handling the letting? No, they didn’t.

‘End of enquiry,’ Jik said.

I shook my head. ‘Let’s try the local agents.’

We split up and spent a fruitless hour. None of the firms on any of the ‘For Sale’ boards in the district admitted to having the gallery on its books.

We met again outside the uninformative door.

‘Where now?’

‘Art Gallery?’

‘In the Domain,’ Jik said, which turned out to be a chunk of park in the city centre. The Art Gallery had a suitable façade of six pillars outside and the Munnings, when we ran it to earth, inside.

No one else was looking at it. No one approached to fall into chat and advise us we could buy another one cheap in a little gallery in an outer suburb.

We stood there for a while with me admiring the absolute mastery which set the two grey ponies in the shaft of pre-storm light at the head of the darker herd, and Jik grudgingly admitting that at least the man knew how to handle paint.

Absolutely nothing else happened. We drove back to the boat in the M.G., and lunch was an anti-climax.

‘What now?’ Jik said.

‘A spot of work with the telephone, if I could borrow the one in the boathouse.’

It took nearly all afternoon, but alphabetically systematic calls to every estate agent as far as Holloway and Son in the classified directory produced the goods in the end. The premises in question, said Holloway and Son, had been let to ‘North Sydney Fine Arts’ on a short lease.

How short?

Three months, dating from September first.

No, Holloway and Son did not know the premises were now empty. They could not re-let them until December first, because North Sydney Fine Arts had paid all the rent in advance; and they did not feel able to part with the name of any individual concerned. I blarneyed a bit, giving a delicate impression of being in the trade myself, with a client for the empty shop. Holloway and Son mentioned a Mr John Grey, with a post-office box number for an address. I thanked them. Mr Grey, they said, warming up a little, had said he wanted the gallery for a short private exhibition, and they were not really surprised he had already gone.

How could I recognise Mr Grey if I met him? They really couldn’t say: all the negotiations had been done by telephone and post. I could write to him myself, if my client wanted the gallery before December first.

Ta ever so, I thought.

All the same, it couldn’t do much harm. I unearthed a suitable sheet of paper, and in twee and twirly lettering in black ink told Mr Grey I had been given his name and box number by Holloway and Son, and asked him if he would sell me the last two weeks of his lease so that I could mount an exhibition of a young friend’s utterly meaningful watercolours. Name his own price, I said, within reason. Yours sincerely, I said; Peregrine Smith.

I walked down to the boat to ask if Jik or Sarah would mind me putting their own box number as a return address.

‘He won’t answer,’ Sarah said, reading the letter. ‘If he’s a crook. I wouldn’t.’

‘The first principle of fishing,’ Jik said, ‘is to dangle a bait.’

‘This wouldn’t attract a starving pirhana.’

I posted it anyway, with Sarah’s grudging consent. None of us expected it to bring forth any result.

Jik’s own session on the telephone proved more rewarding. Melbourne, it seemed, was crammed to the rooftops for the richest race meeting of the year, but he had been offered last-minute cancellations. Very lucky indeed, he insisted, looking amused.

‘Where?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘In the Hilton,’ he said.

I couldn’t afford it, but we went anyway. Jik in his student days had lived on cautious hand-outs from a family trust, and it appeared that the source of bread was still flowing. The boat, the boathouse, the M.G. and the wife were none of them supported by paint.

We flew south to Melbourne the following morning, looking down on the Snowy Mountains en route and thinking our own chilly thoughts. Sarah’s disapproval from the seat behind froze the back of my head, but she had refused to stay in Sydney. Jik’s natural bent and enthusiasm for dicey adventure looked like being curbed by love, and his reaction to danger might not henceforth be uncomplicatedly practical. That was, if I could find any dangers for him to react to. The Sydney trail was dead and cold, and maybe Melbourne too would yield an un-looked-at public Munnings and a gone-away private gallery. And if it did, what then? For Donald the outlook would be bleaker than the strange puckered ranges sliding away underneath.

If I could take home enough to show beyond doubt that the plundering of his house had its roots in the sale of a painting in Australia, it should get the police off his neck, the life back to his spirit, and Regina into a decent grave.

If.

And I would have to be quick, or it would be too late to matter. Donald, staring hour after hour at a portrait in an empty house... Donald, on the brink.

Melbourne was cold and wet and blowing a gale. We checked gratefully into the warm plushy bosom of the Hilton, souls cossetted from the door onwards by rich reds and purples and blues, velvety fabrics, copper and gilt and glass. The staff smiled. The lifts worked. There was polite shock when I carried my own suitcase. A long way from the bare boards of home.

I unpacked, which is to say, hung up my one suit, slightly crumpled from the squashy satchel, and then went to work again on the telephone.

The Melbourne office of the Monga Vineyards Proprietary Limited cheerfully told me that the person who dealt with Mr Donald Stuart from England was the managing director, Mr Hudson Taylor, and he could be found at present in his office at the vineyard itself, which was north of Adelaide. Would I like the number?

Thanks very much.

‘No sweat,’ they said, which I gathered was Australian shorthand for ‘It’s no trouble, and you’re welcome.’

I pulled out the map of Australia I’d acquired on the flight from England. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, lay right down in the south-east corner. Adelaide, capital of South Australia, lay about four hundred and fifty miles north west. Correction, seven hundred and thirty kilometres: the Australians had already gone metric, to the confusion of my mental arithmetic.

Hudson Taylor was not in his vineyard office. An equally cheerful voice there told me he’d left for Melbourne to go to the races. He had a runner in the Cup. Reverence, the voice implied, was due.

Could I reach him anywhere, then?

Sure, if it was important. He would be staying with friends. Number supplied. Ring at nine o’clock.

Sighing a little I went two floors down and found Jik and Sarah bouncing around their room with gleeful satisfaction.

‘We’ve got tickets for the races tomorrow and Tuesday,’ he said, ‘And a car pass, and a car. And the West Indies play Victoria at cricket on Sunday opposite the hotel and we’ve tickets for that too.’

‘Miracles courtesy of the Hilton,’ Sarah said, looking much happier at this programme. ‘The whole package was on offer with the cancelled rooms.’

‘So what do you want us to do this afternoon?’ finished Jik expansively.

‘Could you bear the Arts Centre?’

It appeared they could. Even Sarah came without forecasting universal doom, my lack of success so far having cheered her. We went in a taxi to keep her curled hair dry.

The Victoria Arts Centre was huge, modern, inventive and endowed with the largest stained-glass roof in the world. Jik took deep breaths as if drawing the living spirit of the place into his lungs and declaimed at the top of his voice that Australia was the greatest, the greatest, the only adventurous country left in the corrupt, stagnating, militant, greedy, freedom-hating, mean-minded, strait-jacketed, rotting, polluted world. Passers-by stared in amazement and Sarah showed no surprise at all.

We ran the Munnings to earth, eventually, deep in the labyrinth of galleries. It glowed in the remarkable light which suffused the whole building; the Departure of the Hop Pickers, with its great wide sky and the dignified gypsies with their ponies, caravans and children.

A young man was sitting at an easel slightly to one side, painstakingly working on a copy. On a table beside him stood large pots of linseed oil and turps, and a jar with brushes in cleaning fluid. A comprehensive box of paints lay open to hand. Two or three people stood about, watching him and pretending not to, in the manner of gallery-goers the world over.

Jik and I went round behind him to take a look. The young man glanced at Jik’s face, but saw nothing there except raised eyebrows and blandness. We watched him squeeze flake white and cadmium yellow from tubes on to his palette and mix them together into a nice pale colour with a hogshair brush.

On the easel stood his study, barely started. The outlines were there, as precise as tracings, and a small amount of blue had been laid on the sky.

Jik and I watched in interest while he applied the pale yellow to the shirt of the nearest figure.

‘Hey,’ Jik said loudly, suddenly slapping him on the shoulder and shattering the reverent gallery hush into kaleidoscopic fragments, ‘You’re a fraud. If you’re an artist I’m a gas-fitter’s mate.’

Hardly polite, but not a hanging matter. The faces of the scattered onlookers registered embarrassment, not affront.

On the young man, though, the effect was galvanic. He leapt to his feet, overturning the easel and staring at Jik with wild eyes: and Jik, with huge enjoyment put in the clincher.

‘What you’re doing is criminal,’ he said.

The young man reacted to that with ruthless reptilian speed, snatching up the pots of linseed and turps and flinging the liquids at Jik’s eyes.

I grabbed his left arm. He scooped up the paint-laden palette in his right and swung round fiercely, aiming at my face. I ducked instinctively. The palette missed me and struck Jik, who had his hands to his eyes and was yelling very loudly.

Sarah rushed towards him, knocking into me hard in her anxiety and loosening my grip on the young man. He tore his arm free, ran precipitously for the exit, dodged round behind two open-mouthed middle-aged spectators who were on their way in, and pushed them violently into my chasing path. By the time I’d disentangled myself, he had vanished from sight. I ran through several halls and passages, but couldn’t find him. He knew his way, and I did not: and it took me long enough, when I finally gave up the hunt, to work out the route back to Jik.

A fair-sized crowd had surrounded him, and Sarah was in a roaring fury based on fear, which she unleashed on me as soon as she saw me return.

‘Do something,’ she screamed. ‘Do something, he’s going blind... He’s going blind... I knew we should never have listened to you...’

I caught her wrists as she advanced in near hysteria to do at least some damage to my face in payment for Jik’s. Her strength was no joke.

‘Sarah,’ I said fiercely. ‘Jik is not going blind.’

‘He is. He is,’ she insisted, kicking my shins.

‘Do you want him to?’ I shouted.

She gasped sharply in outrage. What I’d said was at least as good as a slap in the face. Sense reasserted itself suddenly like a drench of cold water, and the manic power receded back to normal angry girl proportions.

‘Linseed oil will do no harm at all,’ I said positively. ‘The turps is painful, but that’s all. It absolutely will not affect his eyesight.’

She glared at me, pulled her wrists out of my grasp, and turned back to Jik, who was rocking around in agony and cupping his fingers over his eyes with rigid knuckles. Also, being Jik, he was exercising his tongue.

‘The slimy little bugger... wait till I catch him... Jesus Christ Almighty I can’t bloody see... Sarah... where’s that bloody Todd... I’ll strangle him... get an ambulance... my eyes are burning out... bloody buggering hell...’

I spoke loudly in his ear. ‘Your eyes are O.K.’

‘They’re my bloody eyes and if I say they’re not O.K. they’re bloody not.’

‘You know damn well you’re not going blind, so stop hamming it up.’

‘They’re not your eyes, you sod.’

‘And you’re frightening Sarah,’ I said.

That message got through. He took his hands away and stopped rolling about.

At the sight of his face a murmur of pleasant horror rippled through the riveted audience. Blobs of bright paint from the young man’s palette had streaked one side of his jaw yellow and blue: and his eyes were red with inflammation and pouring with tears, and looked very sore indeed.

‘Jesus, Sarah,’ he said blinking painfully. ‘Sorry, love. The bastard’s right. Turps never blinded anybody.’

‘Not permanently,’ I said, because to do him justice he obviously couldn’t see anything but tears at the moment.

Sarah’s animosity was unabated. ‘Get him an ambulance, then.’

I shook my head. ‘All he needs is water and time.’

‘You’re a stupid heartless pig. He obviously needs a doctor, and hospital care.’

Jik, having abandoned histrionics, produced a handkerchief and gently mopped his streaming eyes.

‘He’s right, love. Lots of water, as the man said. Washes the sting away. Lead me to the nearest gents.’

With Sarah unconvinced but holding one arm, and a sympathetic male spectator the other, he was solicitously helped away like an amateur production of Samson. The chorus in the shape of the audience bent reproachful looks on me, and cheerfully awaited the next act.

I looked at the overturned mess of paints and easel which the young man had left. The onlookers looked at them too.

‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘that no one here was talking to the young artist before any of this happened?’

‘We were,’ said one woman, surprised at the question.

‘So were we,’ said another.

‘What about?’

‘Munnings,’ said one, and ‘Munnings,’ said the other, both looking immediately at the painting on the wall.

‘Not about his own work?’ I said, bending down to pick it up. A slash of yellow lay wildly across the careful outlines, result of Jik’s slap on the back.

Both of the ladies, and also their accompanying husbands, shook their heads and said they had talked with him about the pleasure of hanging a Munnings on their own walls, back home.

I smiled slowly.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘That he didn’t happen to know where you could get one?’

‘Well, yeah,’ they said. ‘As a matter of fact, he sure did.’

‘Where?’

‘Well, look here, young fellow...’ The elder of the husbands, a seventyish American with the unmistakable stamp of wealth, began shushing the others to silence with a practised damping movement of his right hand. Don’t give information away, it said, you may lose by it. ‘... You’re asking a lot of questions.’

‘I’ll explain,’ I said. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

They all looked at their watches and said doubtfully they possibly would.

‘There’s a coffee shop just down the hall,’ I said. ‘I saw it when I was trying to catch that young man... to make him tell why he flung turps in my friend’s eyes.’

Curiosity sharpened in their faces. They were hooked.

The rest of the spectators drifted away, and I, asking the others to wait a moment, started moving the jumbled painting stuff off the centre of the floor to a tidier wall-side heap.

None of it was marked with its owner’s name. All regulation kit, obtainable from art shops. Artists’ quality, not students’ cheaper equivalents. None of it new, but not old, either. The picture itself was on a standard sized piece of commercially prepared hardboard, not on stretched canvas. I stacked everything together, added the empty jars which had held linseed and turps, and wiped my hands on a piece of rag.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’

They were all Americans, all rich, retired, and fond of racing. Mr and Mrs Howard K. Petrovitch of Ridgeville, New Jersey, and Mr and Mrs Wyatt L. Minchless from Carter, Illinois.

Wyatt Minchless, the one who had shushed the others, called the meeting to order over four richly creamed iced coffees and one plain black. The black was for himself. Heart condition, he murmured, patting the relevant area of suiting. A white-haired man, black-framed specs, pale indoor complexion, pompous manner.

‘Now, young fellow, let’s hear it from the top.’

‘Um,’ I said. Where exactly was the top? ‘The artist boy attacked my friend Jik because Jik called him a criminal.’

‘Yuh,’ Mrs Petrovitch nodded, ‘I heard him. Just as we were leaving the gallery. Now why would he do that?’

‘It isn’t criminal to copy good painting,’ Mrs Minchless said knowledgeably. ‘In the Louvre in Paris, France, you can’t get near the Mona Lisa for those irritating students.’

She had blue-rinsed puffed-up hair, uncreasable navy and green clothes, and enough diamonds to attract a top-rank thief. Deep lines of automatic disapproval ran downwards from the corner of her mouth. Thin body. Thick mind.

‘It depends what you are copying for,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to try to pass your copy off as an original, then that definitely is a fraud.’

Mrs Petrovitch began to say, ‘Do you think the young man was forging...’ but was interrupted by Wyatt Minchless, who smothered her question both by the damping hand and his louder voice.

‘Are you saying that this young artist boy was painting a Munnings he later intended to sell as the real thing?’

‘Er...’ I said.

Wyatt Minchless swept on. ‘Are you saying that the Munnings picture he told us we might be able to buy is itself a forgery?’

The others looked both horrified at the possibility and admiring of Wyatt L. for his perspicacity.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d like to see it.’

‘You don’t want to buy a Munnings yourself? You are not acting as an agent for anyone else?’ Wyatt’s questions sounded severe and inquisitorial.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

‘Well, then.’ Wyatt looked round the other three, collected silent assents. ‘He told Ruthie and me there was a good Munnings racing picture at a very reasonable price in a little gallery not far away...’ He fished with forefinger and thumb into his outer breast pocket. ‘Yes, here we are. Yarra River Fine Arts. Third turning off Swanston Street, about twenty yards along.’

Mr and Mrs Petrovitch looked resigned. ‘He told us, exactly the same.’

‘He seemed such a nice young man,’ Mrs Petrovitch added sadly. ‘So interested in our trip. Asked us what we’d be betting on in the Cup.’

‘He asked where we would be going after Melbourne,’ Mr Petrovitch nodded. ‘We told him Adelaide and Alice Springs, and he said Alice Springs was a Mecca for artists and to be sure to visit the Yarra River gallery there. The same firm, he said. Always had good pictures.’

Mr Petrovitch would have misunderstood if I had leaned across and hugged him. I concentrated on my fancy coffee and kept my excitement to myself.

‘We’re going on to Sydney,’ pronounced Wyatt L. ‘He didn’t offer any suggestions for Sydney.’

The tall glasses were nearly empty. Wyatt looked at his watch and swallowed the last of his plain black.

‘You didn’t tell us,’ Mrs Petrovitch said, looking puzzled, ‘why your friend called the young man a criminal. I mean... I can see why the young man attacked your friend and ran away if he was a criminal, but why did your friend think he was?’

‘Just what I was about to ask,’ said Wyatt, nodding away heavily. Pompous liar, I thought.

‘My friend Jik,’ I said, ‘is an artist himself. He didn’t think much of the young man’s effort. He called it criminal. He might just as well have said lousy.’

‘Is that all?’ said Mrs Petrovitch, looking disappointed.

‘Well... the young man was painting with paints which won’t really mix. Jik’s a perfectionist. He can’t stand seeing paint misused.’

‘What do you mean, won’t mix?’

‘Paints are chemicals,’ I said apologetically. ‘Most of them don’t have any effect on each other, but you have to be careful.’

‘What happens if you aren’t?’ demanded Ruthie Minchless.

‘Um... nothing explodes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It’s just that... well, if you mix flake white, which is lead, with cadmium yellow, with contains sulphur, like the young man was doing, you get a nice pale colour to start with but the two minerals react against each other and in time darken and alter the picture.’

‘And your friend called this criminal?’ Wyatt said in disbelief. ‘It couldn’t possibly make that much difference.’

‘Er...’ I said. ‘Well, Van Gogh used a light bright new yellow made of chrome when he painted a picture of sunflowers. Cadmium yellow hadn’t been developed then. But chrome yellow has shown that over a couple of hundred years it decomposes and in the end turns greenish black, and the sunflowers are already an odd colour, and I don’t think anyone has found a way of stopping it.’

‘But the young man wasn’t painting for posterity,’ said Ruthie with irritation. ‘Unless he’s another Van Gogh, surely it doesn’t matter.’

I didn’t think they’d want to hear that Jik hoped for recognition in the twenty-third century. The permanence of colours had always been an obsession with him, and he’d dragged me along once to a course on their chemistry.

The Americans got up to go.

‘All very interesting,’ Wyatt said with a dismissive smile. ‘I guess I’ll keep my money in regular stocks.’