He did not buy it because it was well known or well presented. It was covered in dust and almost hidden at the back of the shop. He just bought it because he liked it.
For thirty years, as he became British Vice-Consul to Florence and Sir Bryan, KBE, it hung in his library and for thirty years, each evening, he smoked his after-dinner cigar beneath it.
In 1900 a cholera epidemic swept Florence. It carried away Lady Frobisher, and after the funeral the sixty-year-old businessman decided to return to the land of his fathers. He sold up and came back to England, buying a handsome manor in Surrey and employing a staff of nine. The most junior was a local village girl, one Millicent Gore, who was engaged as a parlourmaid.
Sir Bryan never remarried and died at the age of ninety in 1930. He had brought almost a hundred packing crates back from Italy and one of them contained a small and by now discoloured oil painting in a gilt frame.
Because it had been his first gift to Lady Lucia and she had always loved it, he hung it again in the library where the patina of smoke and grime dulled the once-bright colours until the images of the figures became harder and harder to discern.
The First World War came and went, and in passing changed the world. Sir Bryan’s fortune became much depleted as his investments in the Imperial Russian railway stock vanished in 1917. After 1918 Britain had a new social landscape.
The staff diminished, but Millicent Gore stayed. She rose from parlourmaid to under-housekeeper, and from 1921 onwards the housekeeper and only member of inside staff. In the last seven years of his life she looked after the frail Sir Bryan like a nurse and on his death in 1930 he remembered her.
He left her a cottage tenancy for life and a capital sum in trust to provide an income on which she could live modestly. While the rest of his estate was realized at auction, there was one item not included: a small oil painting. She was very proud of this; it came from a strange place called Abroad, so she hung it in the tiny sitting room of her tied cottage, not far from the open wood-burning range. There it became dirtier and dirtier.
Miss Gore never married. She busied herself with village and parish works and died in 1965 at the age of five and eighty. Her brother had married and produced a son and he in turn had sired a boy, the old lady’s only great-nephew.
When she died she had little to leave, for the cottage and the capital fund reverted to the estate of her benefactor. But she left the painting to her great-nephew. Thirty-five more years went by until the dirty, stained, crusted old artefact saw the light of day again when it was unwrapped in a musty bedsitter in a back street off Shepherd’s Bush.
On the following morning its owner presented himself at the front desk of the prestigious House of Darcy, fine arts auctioneers and valuers. He clasped a hessian-wrapped package to his chest.
‘I understand that you offer a service of valuation to members of the public who may have an item of merit,’ he said to the young woman behind the desk. She too took in the frayed shirt and grubby mackintosh. She waved him towards a door marked Valuations. The interior was less lush than the front lobby. There was a desk and another girl. The actor repeated his query. She reached for a form.
‘Name, sir?’
‘My name is Mr Trumpington Gore. Now, this painting—’
‘Address?’
He gave it.
‘Phone number?’
‘Er, no phone.’
She gave him a glance as if he had said that he lacked a head.
‘And what is the item, sir?’
‘An oil painting.’
Slowly the details, or lack of them, were teased out of him as her expression became more and more weary. Age unknown, school unknown, period unknown, artist unknown, country – presumed Italy.
The woman in Valuations had a huge crush on a young blade in Classic Wines and she knew it was the hour of mid-morning coffee in the Caffé Uno just round the corner. If this boring little man with his awful little daub would go away, she could slip out with a girlfriend and coincidentally bag the table next to Adonis.
‘And finally, sir, what value would you put on it?’
‘I don’t know. That was why I brought it in.’
‘We must have a valuation from the customer, sir. For insurance purposes. Shall I say a hundred pounds?’
‘Very well. Do you know when I may expect to hear?’
‘In due course, sir. There is a large number of pieces already in the storeroom waiting to be studied. It takes time.’
It was plain her personal view was that a glance would be enough. God, the junk some people passed over her desk, thinking they had discovered a Ming dish in the lavvy.
Five minutes later Mr Trumpington Gore had signed the form, taken his copy, left the hessian package and was back on the streets of Knightsbridge. Still stony broke. He walked home.
The hessian-wrapped painting was consigned to the basement store area, where it was given an identification tag: D 1601.
DECEMBER
Twenty days went by and still D 1601 stood against the wall in a basement store in its hessian wrappings, and still Trumpington Gore waited for an answer. There was a simple explanation: backlog.
As with all the great art auction houses, well over 90 per cent of the paintings, porcelain, jewellery, fine wines, sporting guns and furniture that the House of Darcy offered for sale was from sources known to them and easily verified. A hint of source or ‘provenance’ often appeared in the pre-sale catalogue. ‘The property of a gentleman’ was a frequent introduction to a fine item. ‘Offered by the estate of the late . . .’ was not uncommon.
There were some who disapproved of the practice of offering the general public a free valuation service on the grounds that it brought in too much time-consuming dross and too few items Darcy would even wish to offer for sale. But the service had been devised by the founder, Sir George Darcy, and the tradition survived. Just occasionally some lucky hopeful from nowhere discovered that Grandpa’s old silver snuff box really was a rare Georgian treasure, but not often.
In Old Masters there was a fortnightly session of the Viewing Committee, chaired by the department director, the fastidious and bow-tied Sebastian Mortlake, assisted by two deputies. In the ten-day run-up to Christmas he decided to clear the entire backlog.
This housekeeping turned out to cost five days of almost continuous session until he and his colleagues were tired of it.
Mr Mortlake relied on the fat sheaf of forms filled at the moment of deposit of the picture. Top of his preferences were those where the artist was clearly identifiable. That at least would give the eventual catalogue-writers a name, something close to a date and the subject matter was of course obvious at a glance.
Those he selected as possible for sale were set aside. A secretary would write to the owner to ask if he wished to sell, bearing in mind the suggested valuation. If the answer was ‘yes’ then a condition on the original form specified that the painting could not be taken elsewhere.
If the answer was ‘no’ the owner would be asked to collect the work without delay. Storage costs money. Once the selection was made and authority from the owner received to proceed with sale, Mortlake could select the forthcoming auction for the picture’s inclusion and the catalogue could be prepared.
For minor works by minor artists that had just scraped past Sebastian Mortlake’s watery gaze, the blurb would include phrases like ‘charming’, meaning ‘if you like that sort of thing’, or ‘unusual’, meaning ‘he must have done this after a very heavy lunch’.
After viewing almost 300 canvases Mortlake and his two fellow assessors had broken the back of the ‘off the street’ offerings. He had selected only ten, one of them a surprising piece from the Dutch van Ostade school, but alas not by Adriaen himself. A pupil, but acceptable.
Sebastian Mortlake never liked to choose for the House of Darcy anything with a valuation at sale of less than £5,000. Large premises in Knightsbridge do not come cheap, and the seller’s commission on less th
an that would not make much of a dent in the overheads. Lesser houses might handle canvases offered at £1,000, but not the House of Darcy. Besides, his forthcoming late-January sale would already be a big one.
As the hour of lunch approached on the fifth day, Sebastian Mortlake stretched and rubbed his eyes. He had examined 290 examples of pictorial dross, looking in vain for that hint of undiscovered gold. But ten ‘acceptables’ seemed to be the limit. As he told his junior staff, ‘We must delight in our work, but we are not a charity.’
‘How many more, Benny?’ he called over his shoulder to the young under-valuer behind him.
‘Just forty-four, Seb,’ replied the young man. He used the familiar first name that Mortlake insisted on to create the friendly spirit he valued in his ‘team’. Even secretaries used first names; only porters, though addressed by their first names, called him ‘guv’.
‘Anything of interest?’
‘Not really. None with attribution, period, age, school or provenance.’
‘In other words, family amateurs. Are you coming in tomorrow?’
‘Aye, Seb, I thought I would. Tidy up a bit.’
‘Good lad, Benny. Well, I’m off to the Directors’ Lunch and then down to my place in the country. Just handle them for me, would you? You know the score. A nice polite letter, a token valuation, have Deirdre knock them out on the processor and they can all go in the last batch of mail.’
And with a cheery ‘Happy Christmas boys and girls’ he was off. Minutes later his two assistants at the viewing sessions had done the same. Benny saw to it that the last batch of paintings just viewed (and rejected) were taken back to the store and the last forty-four brought up to the much better lit viewing room. He would look at some that afternoon and the final batch the next day before departing for Christmas. Then he fished some lunch vouchers from his pocket and headed for the staff canteen.
He managed thirty of the remaining ‘off the street’ hand-ins that afternoon and then went home to his flat in the northern, that is, cheaper, end of Ladbroke Grove.
The presence of Benny Evans, aged twenty-five, at the House of Darcy was in itself a triumph of tenacity over prospects. The front-office staff, those who actually met the public and sashayed through the viewing galleries, were beautifully suited and languid-voiced exquisites. The distaff side was made up of young and very presentable female equivalents.
Among them moved the uniformed commissionaires and ushers, and the overalled porters, they who lifted and carried, hefted and trolleyed, brought and removed.
Behind the arras were the experts, and the aristocracy of these were the valuers, without whose forensic skills the whole edifice would collapse. Theirs were the sharp eyes and retentive memories that could tell at a glance the good from the ordinary, the real from the phoney, the worthless from the mother lode.
Among the senior hierarchs the Sebastian Mortlakes were minor monarchs and were permitted their several eccentricities because of all that knowledge gained by thirty years in the business. Benny Evans was different and the deceptively shrewd Mortlake had spotted why, and this explained Benny’s presence.
He did not look the part, and playing the part is integral and indispensable in the London art world. He had no degree, he had no polish. His hair emerged from his head in untidy tufts that no Jermyn Street stylist could have done much to improve even if he had ever been to one.
When he arrived in Knightsbridge the broken nosepiece of his plastic National Health spectacles had been mended with Elastoplast. He did not need to dress down on Fridays; that was the way he always dressed. He spoke with a broad Lancashire accent. At the interview Sebastian Mortlake had gazed in fascination. It was only when he tested the lad on his knowledge of Renaissance art that he took him on, despite appearances and the rib-digs of his colleagues.
Benny Evans came from a small terraced house in a back street of Bootle, the son of a mill-worker. He did not shine at primary school, achieved some modest GCSEs and never took advanced level at all. But at the age of seven something happened that made it all unnecessary. His art teacher showed him a book.
It had coloured pictures and for some reason the child gazed at them in wonderment. There were pictures of young women, each holding a small baby, with winged angels hovering behind. The little boy from Bootle had just seen his first Madonna and Child by a Florentine Master. After that his appetite became insatiable.
He spent days in the public library staring at the works of Giotto, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. The works of the giants Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci he consumed as his mates devoured cheap hamburgers.
In his teens he washed cars, delivered papers and walked dogs, and with the savings hitch-hiked across Europe to see the Uffizi and the Pitti. After the Italians he studied the Spaniards, hitching to Toledo to spend two days in the cathedral and the church of Santo Tomé staring at El Greco. Then he soaked up the German, Dutch and Flemish schools. By twenty-two he was still broke, but a walking encyclopedia of classical art. That was what Sebastian Mortlake had seen as he led the young applicant for a job through the galleries off the main hall. But even the foppish and clever Mortlake had missed something. Gut instinct: you either have it, or you do not. The scruffy boy from the back streets of Bootle had it, and no-one knew, not even he.
With fourteen hand-ins left to examine, he came in to work the next day in an almost empty building. Technically it was still open; the commissionaire was at the door but he had few to greet.
Benny Evans went back to the viewing room and began to look at the last of the hand-ins. They came in various sizes and an assortment of wrappings. Third from last was one wrapped in hessian sacking. He noted idly that it was D 1601. When he saw it he was shocked at its condition, the layers of grime that covered the original images beneath. It was hard to make out what they had once been.
He turned it over. Wood, a panel. Odd. Even odder, it was not oak. The Northern Europeans, if they painted on wood, used mainly oak. The Italian landscape had no oak. Could this be poplar?
He took the small painting to a lectern and trained a bright light on it, straining to see through the gloom of the patina caused by over a century of cigar and coal smoke. There was a seated woman, but no child. A man was bending over her, and she was looking up at him. A small, even tiny, rosebud of a mouth, and the man had a round, bombé forehead.
His eyes hurt from the light. He altered the angle of its beam and studied the figure of the man. Something jogged a faint chord of memory: the posture, the body language . . . The man was saying something, gesturing with his hands, and the woman was transfixed, listening with rapt attention.
Something about the way the fingers curled. Had he not seen fingers curl like that before? But the clincher was the face. Another small pursed mouth, and three tiny vertical crease lines above the eyes. Where had he seen small vertical, not horizontal, lines on a forehead before? He was sure he had, but could not recall where or when. He glanced at the hand-in sheet. A Mr T. Gore. No phone. Damn. He dismissed the last two pictures as worthless rubbish, took the sheaf of forms and went to see Deirdre, the last remaining secretary in the department. He dictated a general letter of regret and gave her the forms. On each was the valuation price of the submitted but rejected picture, as was also the name and address of the owner.
Although there were forty-three of them, the word processor would get every name and valuation different, yet the rest of the text identical. Benny watched for a while in admiration. He had the sketchiest knowledge of computers. He could just about set one up and peck at the keys but the finer points eluded him. After ten minutes Deirdre was doing the envelopes, fingers flying. Benny wished her a merry Christmas and left. As usual he took the bus to the top end of Ladbroke Grove. There was a hint of sleet in the air.
The clock by his bedside told him it was two in the morning when he woke. He could feel the sexy warmth of Suzie beside him. They had made love before sleeping and that usually guaranteed
a dreamless night. And yet he was awake, mind spinning as if some deep-buried thought process had kicked him out of slumber. He tried to think what had been on his mind, apart from Suzie, as he drifted into sleep three hours earlier. The image of the hessian-wrapped picture came into his thoughts.
His head shot off the pillow. Suzie grunted in sleepy annoyance. He sat up and delivered three words into the surrounding blackness.
‘Bloody, fooking ’ell.’
He went back to the House of Darcy the next morning, 23 December, and this time it really was closed. He let himself in by a service entrance.
The Old Masters library was what he needed. The access was by an electronic keypad and he knew the number. He was an hour in there, and emerged with three reference books. These he took to the viewing room. The hessian-wrapped package was still on the high shelf where he had left it.
He borrowed the powerful spotlight again, and a magnifying glass from Sebastian Mortlake’s private drawer. With the books and the glass he compared the face of the stooping man with others known to have come from the brush of the artist in the reference books. In one of these was a monk or saint: brown robe, tonsured head, a round bombé forehead and three tiny vertical lines of worry or deep thought, just above and between the eyes.
When he was done he sat in a world of his own as one who has tripped on a stone and may have discovered King Solomon’s Mines. He wondered what to do. Nothing was proved. He could be wrong. The grime on the picture was appalling. But at least he should alert the top brass.
He replaced the picture in its wrapping and left it on Mortlake’s desk. Then he entered the typing pool, switched on Deirdre’s word processor and tried to work out how it functioned. Within an hour he had begun, finger by finger, to type a letter.
When he had finished he asked the computer, very politely, to run off two copies and this it did. He found envelopes in a drawer and hand-addressed one to Sebastian Mortlake and the other to the Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, the Hon. Peregrine Slade. The first he left with the picture on his departmental chief’s private desk, the second he pushed under the door of Mr Slade’s locked office. Then he went home.