Under the Hammer Read online

  ‘That’s how he died?’ Ben moved away from the paint table and looked at the pictures. There was no self-portrait.

  ‘There’s a hell of a current out there,’ Liz explained. ‘Ted was carried off, God knows where. They showed me a body that’d been washed up, months later. Unrecognizable. The sea does strange things. I grieved for Ted and that object seemed ... irrelevant somehow. Is that all you want to know?’

  ‘Thank you. I can’t think of anything else.’ He sat down by the fire again, but said reluctantly, ‘Well, I suppose I ought to get back on the infernal machine.’

  ‘Do you have to? Come on. It’s too late for work. I thought I might lure you down to the pub.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ben looked at her, feeling, for some reason, that they had known each other a long time.

  The Sailors’ Rest was a small, cluttered pub with a bar decorated with nets, lobster pots, ships in bottles and brass lanterns. There was a piano, but no Space Invaders. The clientele seemed to consist of boat people whose discussions of accidents and near death by drowning were punctuated by much happy laughter. Ben and Liz sat on a high-backed bench in a corner, faced with two pints of best bitter.

  ‘I used to come in here with Ted,’ Liz remembered. ‘He liked to hear me play that dreadful, tinny old piano.’

  ‘You were happy?’ Ben looked at her and thought it was a silly question. There was something about Liz that encouraged happiness.

  ‘Oh, yes. We were very happy. Before he went off to Canada.’

  ‘Canada?’ Had Hardcastle left her, and why?

  ‘He had a visiting fellowship at the Ryerson Institute in Toronto. When he got back he seemed, well, worried. He stopped painting, for months.’

  ‘That was unusual.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling – he didn’t say much – but I got the distinct feeling something had gone wrong in Canada. Whatever happened, he didn’t lift a brush in the six months before he ... well, before he died.’

  There was a silent, a peaceful, not unhappy tribute to a dead husband.

  ‘You used to play the piano for him. What sort of music?’

  ‘Oh, the old ones. Gershwin, Cole Porter, Julie Styne.’

  ‘My sort of music.’ Ben was delighted. ‘Songs where the words mattered.’

  A large, baldheaded man, who Ben suspected was another yachtsman, came up to them and asked if they could steal Liz to put a bit of music in their souls. She went to the piano then and Ben put her pint on top of it. Then she started to play and he noticed how quickly the bar became silent when she sang, a little huskily:

  ‘Our romance won’t end on a sorrowful note, Though by tomorrow you’re gone;

  The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,

  “The melody lingers on”.

  They may take you from me,

  I’ll miss your fond caress.

  But though they take you from me,

  I’ll still possess: ...’

  Liz at the piano was obviously one of the regular attractions. The audience, who’d frequently heard her sing this before, joined in raggedly, knowing only some of the words.

  Ben helped them out with:

  ‘The way you wear your hat,

  The way you sip your tea,

  The mem’ry of all that –

  No, no! They can’t take that away from me!’

  Two hours and several pints of best bitter later, Ben and Liz arrived, a little unsteadily, in front of the cottage, singing in fairly loose harmony:

  ‘We may never, never meet again

  On the bumpy road to love,

  Still I’ll always, always keep

  The mem’ry of –’

  ‘Good-night.’ Ben raised his hand in a sort of salute.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going now?’ Liz wanted to know.

  ‘Back home, I suppose. Back to the smoke.’

  ‘On that killer vehicle? Full to the gills with Shenstone’s best bitter? Do you think I want another sudden death? Why don’t you come in and sleep it off?’ into your delightful cottage?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘If I can find the way.’ He fumbled with the gate.

  ‘Hang on to me.’

  ‘Delighted. “The way you hold your knife”,’ he sang as they wandered arm in arm up the garden path. ‘“The way we danced till three”.’

  ‘ “The way you changed my life ...”’

  Liz didn’t change his life. There was only one great change he wanted, and he would still be wanting it as much the next morning. But he got between the cool, linen sheets under the patchwork quilt in her bedroom. He felt her body, still firm and slender beside him, and was sober enough to wonder why Edward Hardcastle hadn’t been happy when he came back to this woman from Canada.

  The next day, the wind had dropped and the sun was shining. Ben felt the country air getting to his chest. He wasn’t used to bacon and eggs and so much loving attention in the mornings. He thought he’d better get back to his lonely life in the city. He had time, however, to look at the garden and at the pansies growing at the side of the path, unusual pansies with orange and purple petals. ‘That’s an interesting pansy,’ he asked her. ‘Isn’t it the “Jolly Joker”?’

  ‘Do you know absolutely everything?’

  ‘Most things, yes. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Shenstone Garden Centre, I think. I’d no idea what its name was. Ted loved flowers.’

  ‘He must have.’ They kissed goodbye and he roared his bike engine, feeling younger than he had the day before.

  The pictures chosen for the auction were being hung in the big gallery. Ben and Maggie were taking another look at the ‘Woman with a Bowl of Flowers’. They talked quietly and there was no one about except a couple of porters chatting up a secretary who was listing the pictures at the far end of the room.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Ben was saying, ‘Mrs Hardcastle was extremely nice.’

  ‘You mean, she was an extremely nice faker.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Thousands of people might have the “Jolly Joker” in their gardens. That’s not conclusive. Anyway, she loved her husband. It was very touching the way she talked about him. I don’t think she’s been a party to anything. Well, not to a forgery.’

  ‘She obviously charmed the pants off you.’ Maggie looked at him with deep disapproval.

  ‘She sang the sort of songs I like.’

  ‘She sang to you?’ Maggie was incredulous.

  ‘We sang to each other.’

  ‘You go off to catch a thief, to trick a trickster, to expose a forger, and there you are, singing together!’

  ‘We had to go through quite a quantity of best bitter.’

  ‘It’s a miracle you didn’t break your neck. Biking home in the dark.’

  ‘She was very considerate about that,’ he said quietly and Maggie looked at him with a wild surmise. ‘Ben! Where did you spend the night?’ It was a question he didn’t answer.

  ‘Not in the late, great Edward Hardcastle’s bed?’ He still didn’t answer and she turned away from him, only half joking. ‘God, I’m furious! I thought you were yearning for me.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of future in yearning for someone who yearns for Hooray Henrys and con artists,’ he tried to explain. But Maggie didn’t intend to dwell on the subject of Nick’s character, or what, in a strange moment, seemed to her Ben’s infidelity. She simply told him that his precious Mrs Hardcastle was clearly the number one suspect.

  ‘She can’t paint.’ He thought that concluded the matter.

  ‘She must know painters. She could find someone who’d do it for her. She has a connection with Deracott. We’ve got to find out if she brought him that picture.’

  ‘Or whoever did. There’s one other thought.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We might try and get hold of someone who was at the Ryerson Institute in Toronto about ten years ago. What are you doing this evening?’

  ‘I’m afraid exactly what you
are.’ For Ben had also been rash enough to agree to swell the audience at Lucy Starr’s first night in the Baptist’s Head, Dalston.

  The room over the Baptist’s Head was cold and bleak in the day time, with a few black drapes, a dusty central space and a bank of mercilessly hard benches for the spectators. At night it was only a little more cheerful. Lights created a pool of interest and the sound of canned music, pinging machines and shouted orders floated up from the pub below. Ben, sitting next to Maggie on one of the benches, with a stout girl reclining against his knees, thought it a pity that actors were so dedicated to the idea that ‘the show must go on’. The present show, for instance, could have stopped at any moment without any damage to its entertainment value. He sighed, tried to shift his knees, gave up the attempt, and looked at Maggie giving an excellent impression of enthralled delight. Then he turned his attention, reluctantly, to the actors. There were only two of them, and they wore identical black T-shirts and jeans, accentuating their pallor. One was Lucy Starr, who sat mute in a chair; another was a young man who berated her. Around them large plastic bricks of various colours were built into a wall.

  ‘Chatterbox! That’s all you are!’ the actor told the silent Lucy. ‘A natural chatterbox! Questions and answers. All day and most of the night. What’re you doing with those bricks? What’s the point of building? Robbing me of my confidence, that’s what you’re doing. Washing it away, on a flood of questions. Words. Drip. Drip. Drip. Like a Chinese water torture. I tell you. I build because I have to. I don’t build with words. I build with bricks.’ He stood very close to Lucy and shouted, ‘Bricks are words. Do you understand? Stop challenging me. Stop undermining me. Stop talking!’

  Looking round the room, Ben was surprised to see the bearded painter who’d brought an abstract into Klinsky’s with a dark-haired girl. They were sitting forward, listening intently as the actor continued his tirade.

  ‘All right, I’ll ignore it. It’s just a noise off. Like the sound of the distant motorway traffic. Or the wind. Is it meaningless? Is it a siren in the night? A police siren? Does it mean an accident? Or a murder? I won’t listen, I won’t!’ He put his hands over his ears. ‘Your voice. Eternal chattering. I can’t get away from it. No escape. Nowhere.’ And then, after what seemed to Ben like an endless pause, he shouted, ‘All right. I surrender! You can stop it now. You’ve won. Understand that. You won the argument! Nothing means anything! Anymore!’ At which he kicked over the wall of bricks, the house lights came up and Lucy and the actor bowed to a smattering of applause. When Maggie asked Ben what he thought, he said he thought they needed a drink.

  In the pub downstairs, Ned Nunnelly recognized the man from Klinsky’s and introduced himself and his partner Patti. ‘You hated my painting done by the wind,’ he shouted over the music. ‘You were all over that glossy bit of kitsch done by the horrible Hardcastle.’

  ‘You seem to have a particular hatred of Hardcastle?’ Ben was restoring his circulation with a large brandy.

  ‘God, what a bore! I was at the Academy Schools with him.’

  ‘Really? I don’t remember you?’ Ben was puzzled.

  ‘As a matter of fact I avoided your lectures on dead painters. I had enough of them watching Hardcastle produce his ghastly little imitations.’

  ‘Did you see much of him?’

  ‘Little as I could. He was always asking me to go boating with him. Can you believe it? Christ! With all the girls there were to chase at art school. Can you imagine why I’d want to go out boating with Hardcastle?’ Before the question could be answered, Lucy appeared with the actor. Ben, his spirits now recovered, bought them all drinks, while Lucy made up for her long stage silence. ‘You were a super audience! Weren’t they an absolutely super audience, Lester? Lester played my husband. These are all the top people from Klinsky’s. Ben Glazier and Maggie Perowne and ... ‘Ned Nunnelly,’ he told them, ‘I’m not from Klinsky’s. God forbid. I’m an artist like you. This is Patti.’

  ‘Patti Duprey. Say, you guys, what a great piece of theatre!’

  ‘We love it. We think it says everything there is to say about male impotence,’ Lester told them. ‘Of course, Lucy had a terrific responsibility. No lines.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Lucy. You were great!’ Patti congratulated her. ‘It must be so difficult not saying anything.’

  ‘That’s what Lester says.’ Lucy told them. ‘Anyone can say lines. But if you can do it without them, well, it’s like swinging on a trapeze without a safety net.’

  ‘Or riding a motor bike without an engine,’ Ben murmured.

  ‘Don’t you pay any attention to him, Lucy.’ Patti gave Ben a look of deep disapproval. ‘You were just great. You know where I’d like to see that piece of theatre? I’d like to see it off Broadway. That’s what I’d like to see.’

  ‘That’s really terribly kind of you. I don’t know what to say, really. Are you an actress?’

  ‘No. I’m, well, I’m a painter’s friend.’

  ‘I just thought you might be an actress. I mean, you’re so beautiful and ...’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Lucy couldn’t think of what to add. Then she looked at Patti and had an inspiration. ‘I mean, what terribly pretty earrings!’

  And Patti smiled and said thank you, and held back her hair. Ben and Maggie joined in the admiration of the earrings, two glittering goldfishes with ruby eyes.

  A week later more facts emerged about the sadly shortened life of Edward Hardcastle. Ben remembered another lecturer he’d met at the Academy Schools, a Canadian called Gary Fanner whom he’d seen off and on over the years, and who had gone to teach for a spell at the Ryerson in Toronto. He called a number he’d kept in his book for years, found Fanner was back in England and would be delighted to meet Ben and Maggie Perowne for lunch in the Caprice. There he told them he remembered Hardcastle teaching in Canada and having, it seemed, a fairly unhappy time. ‘Well. Students, ten years ago. Their ideas came from New York, I suppose. They just began to find Hardcastle’s paintings so old fashioned, so it was a big mistake to bring him over. Some people began to laugh at his work, quite openly. Girl students laughed and that was what hurt him most of all. My then girlfriend and I, we took him out a few times. We got the idea he was very much married in England. He lived in some quiet little village by the sea somewhere.’

  ‘Shenstone,’ Ben told him.

  ‘Wherever it was. I suppose he thought visiting English teachers were jumped on by beautiful, ravenous North American girls. He was going to live like a student.’

  ‘Like the sort of student he never was?’ Maggie was kind.

  ‘Anyway, he was going to lay them end to end. That was his dream. But when he got there, well, they just laughed at him, and he never got a glimpse of a pair of student panties. I believe he went back to England an unhappy man.

  And never touched a paintbrush again, Ben thought, and six months later he was drowned in a boating accident.

  Back at Klinsky’s Ben met the tall African, who had brought the polished carving of a pregnant woman into the sale, waiting for him by Lucy’s desk. Winston McKenzie had taken a careful note of Mr Glazier’s name and, as he was clearly a person of authority, he had much to tell him about the politics in Neranga and the work of Feeding the Multitude. He had been, he said, a journalist on the Sentinel of Neranga, and would speak nothing but the truth. Ben took Mr McKenzie into an empty office and listened to him carefully, and for a long time.

  Maggie walked through the long gallery on her way back to Old Masters, and took another look at the ‘Woman with a Bowl of Flowers’. It was then she noticed something that Ben and she had missed. The woman with her back towards her had her hair held by a comb. One ear was visible, and from it dangled a goldfish with a ruby eye.

  ‘Visitors from Klinsky’s? You’ve had second thoughts and you want to buy Pandora? I can’t let her go.’ Indeed the lady was neatly framed on to an easel, as Ned Nunnelly let Maggie and Ben into his studio. �
��Deracott’s giving me an exhibition.’

  ‘Is he now? I wouldn’t have thought you were Roy Deracott’s type of artist,’ Ben suggested.

  Maggie, looking at Pandora, said, ‘Perhaps he owes you a favour.’

  ‘A favour. Whatever for?’

  ‘Perhaps because you’ve been supplying him with Edward Hardcastles, ever since that unfortunate boating accident?’ Ben spoke quietly and Ned Nunnelly laughed.

  ‘You think I’d waste my talent painting Hardcastles? Whatever for?’

  ‘Money,’ Maggie gave him the answer. ‘You haven’t made much out of your own work in the last ten years.’

  ‘What’s Roy Deracott been telling you?’ Ned looked anxious.

  ‘He’s told us nothing,’ Ben admitted. ‘He’s very protective of his sources of income.’

  ‘All right then, you’ve no bloody evidence!’

  Ben put the photograph of ‘Woman with a Bowl of Flowers’ on the paint table. ‘You remember doing this one, I’m sure. Only you were getting careless. You painted a plant that didn’t exist when Hardcastle was alive – a brand-new pansy called the “Jolly Joker”. The joke, you hoped, was going to be on Klinsky’s.’

  Ned moved to look at the picture. ‘I don’t know anything about plants,’ he said.

  ‘But you know about earrings.’ Maggie was sure of that. ‘Or did you forget you were painting the back of Patti’s head? Couldn’t you resist doing the earring? Are you such a careful, academic painter? Little goldfish with ruby eyes? Lucy admired them that night at the theatre.’

  ‘Hardcastle always painted his wife.’ Ned was defensive.

  ‘Do you know that much about him?’ Ben affected surprise.

  ‘Perhaps she had those earrings?’ Ned looked at the photograph again.

  ‘We’ve asked her. She never wore earrings.’ Ben had made the telephone call and had been pleased to.