Snatched

  They dressed and hurried down to it. The keys were on the dashboard. Simberdy saw a large, stiff-edged parcel on the back seat, done up in several sheets of fancy wrapping paper, and tied with blue ribbon, knotted at the centre into a bold, ornamental bow.

  ‘Oh, Wayne Passow’s undoubtedly a swine,’ Olive said, ‘but he’s always had a streak of niceness. This is his way of apologizing for the other night – the car pinched, but then returned to the doorstep this morning, with a big pressie.’

  ‘Don’t open it yet,’ Simberdy hissed. ‘Let’s get inside.’ He garaged the car and brought the parcel to the living room. They removed some of the paper.

  ‘The El Grecos!’ Olive said. ‘You see what I mean, Vince. There’s an element of decency in him, always liable to shine through. He knows he’s done something out of his league.’

  ‘So where’s the fucking Monet?’ Simberdy replied.

  They went back to the car and searched it, but did not find L’Isolement.

  In the living room again, they took off the rest of the wrapping from the paintings. ‘There’s a note,’ Olive said. She handed it to him.

  He read aloud: ‘This is your cut, oh, Fatman. Till the next caper.’ It was not signed.

  ‘Well, this is crazy, obviously, Vince, but thoughtful.’

  ‘He’s heard the “El Grecos” are probably shit,’ he said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘I don’t want the bloody things here. The police. All that mad “Fatman” stuff, for God’s sake. I could be on their list already. Both of us. In their book we might be a black-garbed, big-time team.’

  Olive arranged the pictures on their sideboard, then stood back and viewed them. ‘Who says they’re rubbish, anyway? I love this one. What’s it called?’ She bent down and read the plate: The Stricken Fig Tree. ‘It reaches out to one, don’t you think, Vince? Isn’t that the mark of truly great art?’

  ‘Ol, how would I know? I’m Asiatics.’

  ‘The title even – spot-on. I can feel real empathy with that fig tree, although it’s so long ago and in a different country. As a matter of fact, I see it as a fig tree for all ages, an environmental emblem, in a way. Like for the Green Movement? In those days, too, they might have had pollution. I mean, when was El Greco? Not pre-soot?’

  ‘I told you, I’m Asiatics.’

  ‘Stricken by a plague, or a curse. It might be a Bible fig tree. Didn’t God take it out on trees sometimes in the OT when He was having a wrath?’

  ‘Anyway, this “El Greco” could be 1986.’

  ‘Does it matter? Does it really matter, if the message is there? It’s a stricken fig tree, just as stricken, I mean, whenever. How many ways are there for a fig tree to look stricken, after all? Does that change through the ages?’ She looked at the other captions. ‘Vision of Malachi. Ochre, black, livid white. Something like this – supernatural, other-worldly, fears of hell, maybe: isn’t that the same for all of us, everywhere, no matter what the period? You see what I’m getting at, Vincent? Actually, I feel it really thrilling, deep down. I wouldn’t mind going back to bed.’

  She did look warm and eager and very beautiful, more beautiful than anything in the Vision of sodding Malachi, though with its clutch of barmy and wino faces that wasn’t saying much. Might it be a characteristic of art that it turned women on, even phoney art? Or could Olive be turned on by almost anything? At one time, an old 78 of Peter Dawson singing ‘Shipmates o’ Mine’ used to get her unbelievably juicy and urgent, and it was a record he’d never heard the end of without a hard-on. Confusing, really, because it could seem as though the shipmates of his had got the desire going.

  Briefly, they did return to bed, and she was wonderfully sweet and tender. His heart would just have to put up with it.

  Downstairs again, he’d concede that with the morning sun on them the pictures did add something to the sideboard. Ol had set them out exactly right. She could give Quent Youde lessons in display. Most people could give Quent lessons in some aspects of art. Even breakfast assumed a special quality because the pictures stood in the way of the cheap crockery they generally used, and Olive took the real china. ‘Well, obviously, you’ll have to return them at once,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Think of the questions that will be asked.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just dump them where they’ll be discovered?’

  He drank some coffee and thought he felt a slab of toenail tear at his tonsils as it went down, reminding him of the JASS exhibition. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure the Hulliborn wants them back.’

  ‘Don’t get it, Vince.’

  ‘As long as they’re missing they could be genuine. Robbers don’t bother with duds.’

  ‘Oh that again,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d decided it didn’t really matter whether they were so-called genuine, or not. Isn’t it … well … isn’t it the inherent worth that matters – what it does to the viewer?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as inherent worth where art’s concerned. It’s fixed by the opinions of a gang of influential people. Value is belief in value. So, all that shit about provenance and attribution might not signify to you and me, but it signifies to the museums board in London, and to its inspectorate. And it signifies to the insurers: as things stand, they owe the Hulliborn many millions because the “El Grecos” are in the policy as genuine, and authenticity can’t be effectively queried if they are unavailable for re-scrutiny. Above all, the status of the pictures matters to the Japanese. At the moment, they have an equation in their tidy, systematic minds: it says that if the Monet is real and precious, then the “El Grecos” must be, too, because the famous Fatman does not make mistakes. You’ve heard of guilt by association? This is worth by association. The Hulliborn enjoys some of that worth, even though the paintings have been stolen. This is a museum distinguished enough for their exhibition. But, if the triptych goes back on the wall, and half a dozen El Greco experts fly for a gaze and pronounce Quentin Youde a fool for buying them, then all of us at the Hulliborn – every department, including Asian Antiquities – partake of that foolishness. We’ve failed the pay-your-way test, and this is the only one that counts these days.’

  Ten

  Through the massed blades of plastic straw, Kate Avis commanded in his ear with lovely warmth, ‘Give it to me now, Modern-Man. Give it me now, now, now, Now-Man.’

  ‘Is it what you needed?’ Lepage grunted solicitously.

  ‘What I needed? What I need, for God’s sake. Present tense. Future, too.’

  ‘I mean, a total therapy.’

  ‘Everything. You’re bringing me back from limbo to the living. But not too quick, George, OK? Twentieth-century pace is frantic, but, please. Please.’

  Quite a few times tonight he had thought of Julia, though admittedly not at this moment. Obviously, it wasn’t wholly right to be here on the floor of the Hulliborn’s medieval breakfast tableau room with Kate Avis, he naked except for socks, passably comfortable, thanks to the mock straw, and stirred to the marrow, while Julia, in her Bray Square kiosk, struggled to convince half the piss-artists and ragtag boulevardiers of the city that their revelry fell quaintly short if they didn’t buy a scooped-out potato stuffed with Zappy-Tang sauces.

  Kate seemed to get this crude word from him by telepathy: ‘Yes, stuff me, stuff me until there’s no room for pain or dread or poisoned recollections,’ she told him.

  ‘I love the things you say, Kate, but can you do it quieter, darling?’ he whispered. ‘Additional security since the break-in.’ They had given Keith Jervis and others some extra night duties to go with their part-time portering.

  This was not the first occasion in his museum career that Lepage had noticed the way the words ‘stuff’, ‘stuffed’ could take on very opposed meanings: one so bristling with life and extremely coarse vigour; the other to do only with death and sad imitation. Hadn’t Julia used this distinction the other day when talking about the platypus? Julia could be very harsh, and if Lepage carefully listed all the matters for
which she might refuse to show tolerance, having it off with Kate Avis in front of old wax peasants and their brood might come out near the top. She would be unable to accept that what was happening here amounted to no more than essential, philanthropic repairs to Kate’s psyche: just a kind of in situ cure. Wouldn’t it have been monstrously cruel and untypically callous of Lepage to reject Kate’s tacit appeal for comforting? He thought so. But Julia would never see it like this, whatever the mysteries of her own private life.

  She was unlikely to be impressed by the argument that, as Director, he always had an unavoidable, if occasionally tiresome, responsibility to compensate for deep offence given by the museum, and in the most simple, suitable and effective method to hand. Sometimes, Lepage thought he spent too much time wondering how other people might view a situation – for instance, what would Julia think; what would Flounce do? It was weak. It was pitiable. Didn’t he have a self?

  ‘Do you feel it, too?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. What, exactly?’

  ‘Just how wonderful it is to have the patriarch watching us, a kind of blessing, a union of past and present.’ For a second she glanced up at the glossy-cheeked, ever empty-eyed father of the model family; all his face craters and lumps smoothed out now, after that rough treatment in the Birds cupboard. ‘This assertion of living love in a dead place, or a place where love was mocked, abused.’

  After a while, Kate’s movements under him became exceptionally strong and telling, and she flung out her arms on each side, fingers clutching and unclutching, mangling some of the indestructible straw, which Lepage had commandeered from the tableau’s cottage floor. Her body squirmed appreciatively. He felt proud to have helped in her recovery. She was making a noise, but only a small, blissful, gentle, fairly safe mixture of humming and speaking in which gibberish words featured now and then, utterly unintelligible, but almost definitely to do with fulfilment, not angst or any of those other dark matters she’d mentioned.

  Yes, Lepage could assure himself that something worthwhile was being achieved here: nothing less than restoration of a lovely woman’s faith in one of life’s core celebrations. In a few months there might be changes and this room filled with the primordial Japanese equipment, and this was fine by Lepage. He would certainly never disparage the splendid, thrilling distinction of the exhibition, even though he might seem to think and speak lightly of it now and then. One could recognize its qualities and still enjoy the sound of Kate Avis’s buttocks bouncing sweetly and regularly on the Hulliborn boards and mock straw, and to feel her thrusting tirelessly back at him, in glorious proof of brave progress towards a complete mental rehabilitation. Scholarship and heritage were not everything. Neither Time, nor the two of them here now, could stay still. No, he certainly could not.

  Kate’s eyes were closed and her head turned to one side, as she softly half sang and mumbled and savouringly gasped, so she did not seem to notice when a third figure joined them on the floor. Her feet, thrashing out as an adjunct of her joy, must have caught the patriarch, causing him to tumble sideways and finish up alongside them, the sound of his fall muted by the straw. His face lay near Kate’s, and one of his legs rested on Lepage’s right. The patriarch’s arm, which was stretched out in the tableau to point invitingly at the excellent, full old-English breakfast, now reached across Lepage’s shoulders, in a sort of comradely embrace, as with bonding soccer players.

  Although Lepage recognized at once what had happened, he decided to ignore it. In fact, he was quite swiftly, so swiftly – he was quite swiftly approaching a point when ignoring almost everything would become easy. He did try to shove the effigy away before Kate saw it, afraid that the intrusion might wipe out all the improvements in her state, but they had little space around them and the patriarch kept rolling back, nudged by a wall or one of the other models, like a piece of flotsam carried gently in and out and in again by the tide. To Lepage, dazingly preoccupied, the peasant’s face looked terribly hurt, as if conscious of rejection but determined to fight it. Maybe troilism was quite a thing in his times. During difficult and, yes, painful early days with Julia, Lepage had sometimes seen that look of rejection on his own face in the shaving mirror. He found it not very pleasant to be gazing down at Kate, so obviously enclosed in contentment, and at the same time have this whiskery, reproachful set of features next to her.

  ‘Darling,’ she whispered, ‘now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes.’ Her responses grew even more powerful, and the humming more intense and happy, like a slice from one of the least unbearable operas. But then, suddenly, she asked: ‘What’s wrong?’

  He did not know how she had detected a snag. Perhaps he sounded tense, or her flailing hands had touched some part of the patriarch. Anyway, she opened her eyes and saw the model, snuggled sweetly against Lepage, moving up and down with him, and seeming to hold Lepage fondly with one arm. ‘I’ll put him back,’ he said.

  ‘No, George.’

  Lepage was surprised to see her smile grow larger, happier still. ‘He’s joined us. Perfect. How it should be.’ She reached up and languorously ran her hand over the wax face and gross, manufactured hair. Under Lepage, her body still responded with magnificent strength and concentration. ‘The past and present together,’ she muttered. ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes.’ She brought her own arms into play and squeezed the two of them hard to her, Lepage and the pushy yokel, hugging both around the neck, chanting softly to each, and moving her face and mouth rhythmically, gently, democratically, between one of Lepage’s ears and the vile, token blobs that were supposed to be the peasant-in-chief’s. Christ, but what did it mean? To her, did he and the puppet rate equally? She had decided, had she, that as long as she knew this model was only a model, and not a present day dick-swinger, she could give it affection? If symbolism of some sort was being enacted, what sodding sort was it? Behaviour like Kate’s could cause deep wilt.

  And then Lepage’s worries soared even higher. Although one of his ears was against the figure’s sacking smock, and the other being crooned into on rota at this point, he thought he heard the door of the tableau room pushed open behind them, then, some time afterwards, quietly re-closed. In terror for a moment, Lepage wanted to turn and look, but Kate held him too firmly. Maybe it was better like this, anyway – not to show his face: an intruder would have trouble identifying him from a rear view only. The socks, after all, were Marks and Spencer, plain navy, two of a million. He recalled, as a comforting example from years ago – long before the Birds cupboard girl – that Neville Falldew had surprised someone, almost certainly Flounce, stripped on the floor of the religious icons room with one of the secretaries. Although Nev could identify the woman because she was face-up, he could never be sure about the man: Nev had only the bare back and so on to judge from.

  In any case, for Lepage now, every one of these anxieties disappeared: fear, worry, guilt, confusion, each gloriously relegated, each gloriously displaced. Her odd reactions had not knocked the power out of him, after all, thank God, and the standard machinery did its gorgeous, agonizingly short-lived, age-old, ever-fresh, supreme job for both of them.

  ‘Oh, yes, such sweet therapy,’ Kate said, chortling, ‘worth every minute on the motorway from Kidderminster.’

  ‘It will always be like this, I promise,’ Lepage said, trying to free his leg from under Wax-Man’s.

  ‘Nobody can promise anything about life,’ she said. ‘Life is change, and change is life.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. To his disappointment, Lepage had never heard Julia attempt an epigram. She could be terse – very often was – but did not really go for style. Lepage realized that since meeting Kate, he had found himself thinking about Julia with rather more detachment, rather less affection, than before. It was something that confused and troubled him, as those lousy, traditional post-love blues took hold. Where had it gone, that previous unswerving devotion to her? But, as Kate so effortlessly put it, ‘life is change and change is life’. People and
their thinking and ways did shift, he’d admit: he didn’t much object to her correcting him about promises. Constancy was for museums; for the exhibits in museums.

  Eleven

  Lady Butler-Minton spoke to her late husband. ‘Well, Lip,’ she began, ‘how say you now? Still think what you had was only a touch of hay fever?’ Working on weights in the gym that he had designed for the old barn on their grounds, she wore red, knee-length shorts, like footballers in the 1950s, a red string vest, red suede desert boots, and a red and blue check sweatband around her bouffant grey hair. At the moment she was lying on her back, pushing the bar up above her face in sequences of four and, as she’d told Lepage, addressing Flounce aloud during rest spells. Understandably, she, herself, never liked that nickname but had devised one or two others for him. ‘Lip’ was the most humane, a jolly testament to his rudeness. He had tended to call her ‘Incisor’, commemorating a frenzied and bloody incident years ago when she bit him near the eye during a rough squabble in the street over how to rate Woody Allen films, or it might have been something to do with the cat. On the whole, Flounce had been very good about that bite, telling the people who mentioned the open wound – or, later, its rather vast, complex scar – a number of yarns, one being that he was attacked by a seagull while foraging on the local tip. Nobody could gainsay there had been quite a few decent aspects to Eric, and now and then, or even oftener, she did half miss him.

  ‘But you went at a good time, darling,’ she said. ‘The Hulliborn chaos and that gut you were getting, almost Vince Simberdy class. Well, aren’t we all? Never send to know for whom the belt holes won’t do any more, they won’t do for thee.’ She spread a hand over her own slightly spreading stomach and resumed the exercises, her normally square, comfortable face twisted gravely with effort. ‘I know of several people who were upset when you died, Lip. Certainly several. Or something like that. I wouldn’t exaggerate. I’ve got one calling here today. Yes. Remember that little postgrad – the bird in the Bird cupboard? Due in an hour.’