Under the Hammer Read online

‘So you’re doing pretty well in your new job at Klinsky’s?’ the man from the Telegraph was asking.

  ‘It’s been hard work, of course. But I’ve never been afraid of hard work. And then I have one great advantage, haven’t I? The security of a happy family life and the constant support of my wife.’

  ‘Stop talking about yourself, Bernard,’ Lady Holloway, Muriel to the Lord Chairman, a large and fearless woman in a fur cape, gripped her husband’s arm. ‘These people have come to see the pictures and not to listen to you.’ So, protesting not at all, his Lordship allowed himself to be led away.

  ‘If it goes over ten million, I’ll give you a treat,’ Ben told Maggie as she was waiting, as usual in terror, to mount the pulpit.

  ‘What sort of treat?’

  ‘Have you ever been to a tea dance at the Galactica Hotel, Bayswater?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Neither have I. It seems they play my kind of music.’

  It wasn’t, Maggie thought, the most tempting offer she’d ever had. But like practically everything else in the world, she forgot it as the bidding rose rapidly from five million, one hundred thousand to five million, six. The telephone girls raised their pencils and the dollar, franc, mark, lire and yen sign above Maggie’s head translated the rising bids. Roy Deracott, sitting next to Elsie Campanile, an Italian agent with a face like a parrot, who was waving scarlet-framed spectacles to increase her bid, whispered that the picture was, in fact, done by some old restorer’s girlfriend. ‘Be quiet,’ Roy said. ‘Haven’t you read the Pater report?’ At long last, Maggie sold the Bronzino to an unnamed client at fifteen million pounds, and Lord Saltery, sitting in the audience, planned to install ten bathrooms and no longer offer teas to the public.

  The Galactica Hotel tea dance wasn’t, perhaps, in the top ten of such events. The room smelt faintly of antiseptic and the décor, sparkling no doubt in the thirties, was in some need of repair and renovation. The enthusiastic female singer was shaky on the top notes and the trio provided a plodding backing. But Ben was holding Maggie in his arms, he was dancing with her, he was singing in her ear, he was enjoying a rare moment of total happiness because she had, she just told him, ditched the Hooray Henry from the wine department.

  ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

  When he said the world was round;

  They all laughed when Edison discovered sound.’

  The singer told them.

  ‘Recorded sound,’ Ben corrected her, fairly loudly, and then sang along with the band:

  ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother When they said that man could fly;

  They told Marconi Wireless was a phoney –

  It’s the same old cry!

  They laughed at me wanting you,

  Said I was reaching for the moon;

  But you came through –

  Now they’ll have to change their tune’

  And then, in a moment of doubt, Ben asked his partner, ‘You really have given Master Nick the order of the Imperial Elbow?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Given him his cards?’

  ‘I said he was a beautiful fake.’

  ‘Beautiful? Did you say that?’

  ‘But a fake. It’s all over. Let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘No. No, why should we? If it’s all over.’

  He looked at her then. There were tears in her eyes as she danced. She lowered her head against his arm. ‘Let’s sit down,’ he said, resigned. ‘The tea may be better than the singer.’

  But the singer was singing, very cheerfully:

  ‘Ho, ho, ho –

  Who’s got the last laugh –

  He, he, he –

  Let’s at the past laugh –

  Ha, ha, ha –

  Who’s got the last laugh now?’

  The Jolly Joker

  I am not I: thou art not her or she:

  They are not they.

  Evelyn Waugh, Author’s Note, Brideshead Revisited

  In the large and comfortable office of Lord Holloway, Chairman of Klinsky’s auction house, a curious exhibition had been arranged. They were a number of grainy, blown-up photographs of a small, distant and chaotic African country of which few people had heard until similarly harrowing pictures turned up on television. Between each image of human suffering – huge-headed, swollen-bellied children with matchstick limbs, covered in flies, and hopeless mothers with flat, empty breasts – there was a work of affluent European art, an Italian statuette of a nude goddess some way after Canova, a gilt French eighteenth-century clock, a Dutch still life of hares and pheasants on a kitchen table, a painting of aristocratic, bewigged, nymphs and shepherds in a pastoral landscape. Somewhere, among these treasures, there was an accurate, academic and almost disturbingly realist painting by the English artist Edward Hardcastle. The picture showed the back view of a woman, seated, looking out of a window. Beside her, on a table, were a half-peeled lemon, a glass, a knife, and a bowl in which orange and purple pansies were planted.

  Lord Holloway, standing in front of his desk, was introducing a tall, eager young man with ginger hair and strangely hawklike features who had a stoop, a smart Italian suit and, Ben thought, the pale and deeply serious look of a religious maniac, a young Savonarola dressed by Armani.

  ‘I’ve arranged this little gathering’ – the Chairman opened the proceedings – ‘so you can meet Piers Frobisher who has tremendous fundraising experience. Am I right, Frobisher?’

  ‘In all modesty, Lord Chairman,’ the young hawk said, quite seriously, ‘I must admit you are.’

  ‘Klinsky’s should play its part in the common good,’ the Chairman went on, encouraged. ‘And Frobisher tells me that a charity auction will do no harm at all to our image.’ They had assembled obediently: Maggie Perowne, head of Old Masters, and Camilla Mounsey, promoted to Modern British Paintings, a department Ben Glazier now referred to as Old Mistresses. Other heads of departments were there, including Nick Roper from Wines who tried several smiles across a crowded room at Maggie and got no reaction from her whatsoever.

  ‘Are we going to save the starving on Dutch paintings of dead game-birds and French clocks?’ Ben asked from the back of the room as Maggie whispered to him to shut up. ‘Or shall we drop old English watercolours on them by parachute?’

  ‘We are going to save them,’ the Chairman answered with dignity, ‘on the proceeds of art, which is a perfectly saleable commodity. Now Piers Frobisher runs Feeding the Multitude, the registered charity working very closely with us on this one.’ He then started to introduce the staff to the charity gatherer who stopped him after the first dozen names to say, ‘I think I’ve met everyone else at the Sheridan Club at one time or another. The Sheridan’s a great place for making contacts.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ben in spite of Maggie’s mutterings, ‘charity suffereth long and hath to make contacts.’

  ‘It’s not what you know. It’s always who you know,’ Frobisher said with great solemnity, as though it were an article of faith.

  ‘Charity doth pretty well now, doth it?’ Ben could be heard to ask, but Lord Holloway decided to sum up firmly, ‘I’m sure we’re all grateful to Piers Frobisher, who has agreed to give his help and advice for a very reasonable remuneration. I hope we’re all going to work together on what Frobisher agrees we call the great Klinsky’s Cash and Carry. In all modesty, I may say that I was able to suggest the title from my long experience of the catering trade.’ Lord Holloway stopped then, as though expecting a laugh. There was a polite giggle from Harry Lomax in Antique Herbals and Garden Books, but the rest was silence. ‘We shall, of course,’ the Chairman went on, ‘be able to provide substantial and, I’m sure, welcome aid for the people of . . .’ Here he looked to Camilla for help, which she readily supplied, ‘Neranga.’ ‘Yes, indeed. Now, if there are no questions ...’

  But Ben had one. ‘We’ve always found the trouble with these charity dos has been people dumping the most ghastly objects on the poor
and starving. Things they’ve kept in the attic and couldn’t stand the sight of anyway. Dubious family portraits, reproduction Chippendale, schools after the schools of imitators of forgotten painters. How can we avoid getting the most terrible rubbish?’

  ‘That’ll be your job, Glazier,’ the Lord Chairman told him firmly. ‘And the heads of all departments. Check all the entries with the greatest care. We’re not having any rubbish in our charity event! Now, as we are launching a new initiative, I’m inviting you all to take wine.’

  The girls who cooked the directors’ lunches, closely related, some of them, to those who helped write the catalogues and took telephone bids, handed out glasses of a modestly priced Rioja. Piers Frobisher was admiring the painting of the woman seated by a bowl of pansies and Camilla agreed that the work was, indeed, exquisite. She also told the Chairman, who was at her side, that it was by Edward Hardcastle, and Holloway wanted to know more about this painter. Ben, uninvited, provided the information. ‘I remember Hardcastle. He went to the Royal Academy Schools. Pestered me with questions when I went to lecture there. Boring little man who painted boring little pictures. I mean, those lemons look far too like lemons to be in the least convincing.’

  ‘He was a wonderful artist, with a great following.’ Camilla was pained. ‘That’ll go for at least thirty thousand at a charity auction.’

  ‘He’s always been strangely fashionable,’ Ben agreed ‘with people who think they ought to have pictures but don’t really like them very much.’

  ‘It appeals to me, at any rate,’ the Lord Chairman said, taking the picture from Frobisher. ‘Did you say he was a wonderful artist, Camilla?’

  ‘Tragic. He died about ten years ago. I don’t think he was much over forty.’

  ‘Tell you what’ – Holloway was prepared to plunge – ‘I’ll buy it. Personally. Just before the sale. I’ll pay the owner a fair price and I’ll put it in our Cash and Carry, all profits to feed the starving. What do you think of that, Camilla?’

  ‘I think it’s extraordinarily generous and quite typical of you, Bernard.’

  ‘That’s your first PR job, Piers: KLINSKY’S CHAIRMAN PLANS CONTRIBUTION TO CHARITY BY BUYING AN ENGLISH MASTERPIECE WITH HIS OWN MONEY.’

  Holloway put the painting reverently back, beside the photographs of the starving. ‘Get reproductions of this in the supplements. Work out how much porridge it’s going to pay for, or whatever they eat out there in Neranga.’

  ‘Charity,’ Ben said, not quite under his breath, ‘raiseth the company’s image.’

  Paint. Paint of different colours. Ordinary house paint, diluted, was poured, apparently at random, on an end of a large canvas lying flat on the floor of Ned Nunnelly’s chaotic studio somewhere near the World’s End. Then Ned lifted an end of the canvas, slowly, gently, and the paint dribbled downhill. As it dribbled, he blew at it with an electric hair-dryer, causing it to splatter widely and at random.

  Ned Nunnelly was in his fifties, going fat, and balding on the top of his head. Otherwise he was a hirsute man with long hair at the sides and a generous, nearly black beard and moustache. He wore paint-stained jeans and a lumberjack shirt, together with steel-rimmed, tinted spectacles. He seemed entirely happy in his work and even happier when a young American girl, dark-haired and pale-faced, came out of the bathroom in a white towelling dressing-gown to inspect his achievement. ‘Mm,’ she said, ‘yes,’ crossing her arms and standing in front of the paint that had now finished dribbling. Her name was Patti Duprey and she had been an art student in New York.

  ‘You really think so?’ Ned was gratified, it’s a great image, Ned! One of your most significant images, I’d say. That was a great technique you discovered.’

  ‘At least it feels free. To me, at any rate.’

  ‘Putting the air in it, the way you did, kind of freed it,’ Patti agreed.

  ‘I watched you drying your hair. I watched the way it moved when you dried it. That’s how the idea came.’

  ‘So I participated?’ Patti was extremely proud of herself. ‘Very good.’

  Not long after the creation of this image, which he named Pandora, Ned Nunnelly saw the heart-breaking pictures of Neranga once again on the television, and read that Klinsky’s was inviting great and valuable works of art for an auction to relieve the famine.

  In a moment of generosity he decided to sacrifice Pandora to this cause, a move which Patti said only proved he was the genuine and caring person she had always known him to be. Accordingly he fitted the canvas into a taxi and took it to the auction house, outside which hung a huge banner bearing the legend:

  CASH AND CARRY

  KLINSKY’S GREAT CHARITY SALE APRIL 10TH AND 11TH

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH FEEDING THE MULTITUDE

  ‘The greatest of these is Charity’ I Corinthians

  Admission by ticket only £50.00

  Ned paid off the taxi and lugged Pandora past a sympathetic Lucy Starr to the big gallery on the first floor where the staff of various departments were sorting out what Ben had unkindly called the rubbish. He was put in touch with the head of Modern British Paintings and stood before her, holding what he was inclined to think was one of his finest works.

  ‘It’s rather large.’ Camilla looked at the work doubtfully.

  ‘I found a new way of working,’ Ned began to explain with mounting excitement. ‘Pandora, that’s what I call this image. She kept the winds in a box. With air.

  Remember? I mean, do you realize what’s the biggest creative power in the universe? What carved out mountains? What puts up those great sculptures, sand dunes in the desert? The winds, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Terribly interesting, of course.’

  ‘Interesting? You think it’s as bad as that?’ Ned was easily deflated.

  ‘Of course it’s not bad.’ Camilla always tried to be polite, it’s probably terribly good. Of its kind. It just might not be exactly what the big givers are looking for when we ask them to dig deep into their pockets. Besides which, people have such small walls nowadays.’

  ‘I thought you lot all had Georgian mansions.’ Ned was starting to get angry, a process which put fresh wind in his sails.

  ‘But would it quite go in a Georgian mansion?’ Camilla asked.

  ‘Listen. I want to do something for those kids I saw on television. Bloody hell!’

  ‘I’m sure we’d welcome a donation on your way out.’

  ‘Thanks very much! Come on, Pandora, out of this frigging mausoleum. Into the fresh air where you belong.’ By now, a furious Ned started to drag Pandora, the first mortal woman painted with a hair-dryer, down the gallery and out of Camilla’s unsympathetic presence.

  The charitable gifts were piled on tables. Harry Lomax, a small, tweedy, rabbit-faced man, was looking at the Edward Hardcastle painting with an interest which surprised Ben Glazier, standing beside him.

  ‘There is something extraordinary about that picture,’ Lomax said.

  ‘The dead hand of art history.’ Ned, having travelled so far, decided to put Pandora down, give her a rest and join in the conversation.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Ben looked at him with some sympathy.

  ‘Royal Academy chocolate box. Needs to be flushed down the toilet, together with all the bloody Gainsboroughs and Canalettos taking up space on your walls.’

  ‘You’d have a bit of a job flushing a Canaletto down the toilet,’ Ben warned him. ‘I don’t know if it’s ever been tried.’

  ‘Look at it, though. Just look at it! A dead picture, painted by a dead hand.’

  ‘Well, that makes sense. The artist’s dead.’

  ‘Bit of luck, that,’ Ned thought. ‘He won’t be doing any more of those. Well, I’d better get Pandora home.’

  ‘Pandora?’ Ben looked at the paint-strewn canvas.

  ‘Of course. The girl who had a box full of winds. Too much fresh air in her, for you lot.’

  So Ned left them and Ben, looking after him thoughtfully, recited a poem he often r
emembered when he saw pictures like Ned Nunnelly’s. It went:

  ‘The artist and the artist’s wife,

  they led a horrid, haunted life,

  surrounded by the things he’d made

  which are not wanted by the trade.’

  And then he asked Harry Lomax, ‘Just why did you find that picture so interesting, Harry?’

  ‘Didn’t Camilla say the artist died about ten years ago?’

  ‘So far as I can remember.’

  ‘Then, you see, it’s the “Jolly Joker”.’ it doesn’t look a load of laughs to me.’ Ben wondered if Harry had gone slightly insane, all alone up in old Herbals.

  ‘No, the “Jolly Joker”,’ Harry explained patiently, ‘that’s the name of the pansy growing in the pot. One of the order of the violaceae, but a new one. You see, it’s got two lower petals and three upper petals.’

  ‘What’s so hilarious about that?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s just like all other pansies.’

  ‘So it’s normal?’

  ‘Not really. The bottom petals are bright orange and the upper three bright purple. I suppose this makes it look like a jester. Wonderful things they do with plants nowadays.’

  ‘Nowadays?’

  ‘Well, I know I deal in Antique Herbals and Garden Books, but I do keep up with the times. They only bred the “Jolly Joker” about four years ago.’

  ‘It didn’t exist before then? You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Quite sure!’ Harry Lomax was never in any doubt when it came to flowers.

  Camilla, when Ben found her, was engaged with a youngish black African who was carrying a carving of a pregnant woman. She was looking at this smooth, swollen-bellied, ebony goddess with no more enthusiasm than she’d shown for Pandora. ‘The primitive stuff goes on the table at the other end, Mr McKenzie,’ she said and got an angry answer, ‘This is not primitive!’

  ‘No.’ Ben took the small wood-carving and admired it. ‘I’d say it was very beautiful. And quite sophisticated.’

  ‘Good. You understand. You a person in charge?’

  ‘One of many.’

  ‘I am Winston McKenzie. Your name, please.’