He gave up after a while and wandered back out into the street, walked down Piccadilly then turned up into Bond Street. A few hundred yards up was his destination. He shivered. Moving from Rome to England in July can be something of a shock to the system: the skies were dark grey and leaden, he was under-dressed and had forgotten to bring an umbrella. He had a feeling already that he was merely wasting time and money for no other reason than to sidestep decision-making for a few days.
“Jonathan, dear boy. Good trip?” Edward Byrnes said as Argyll walked into the empty gallery and found his former employer carrying what looked like a painting by Pannini from one side of the room to another.
“No,” he said.
“Oh.” Byrnes put the painting down, looked at it for a few seconds, then called an assistant from the back and told him to hang it just there while he was out. “No matter,” he went on when this was done. “Let’s go straight out for lunch. That might restore your flagging spirits a bit.”
There was that to be said about the trip. Byrnes had always been something of a bon viveur, and liked a good lunch. At the very least, Argyll was going to spend the rest of the day feeling well fed. Byrnes led the way out of the gallery door, leaving his minion in charge of the Pannini and with strict instructions about what to do in the unlikely event of a client coming in, then walked at a brisk pace into increasingly narrow streets then, finally, down a set of shabby steps into a basement.
“Nice, don’t you think?” Byrnes said complacently as they emerged into what was presumably a restaurant at the bottom.
“Where are we?”
“Ah, it’s a dining club. Set up by a group of art dealers who were getting fed up with the vastly inflated prices that all restaurants charge round here. The sort of place you can bring the more potentially lucrative client without having to double the price of their purchase to pay for their entertainment. Marvellous idea. We get good food and wine, partly own a new business and have somewhere civilized to sit. Splendid, eh?”
For his part, Argyll preferred not to have to associate too closely with colleagues all the time; the idea of having to eat with them, as well as attend auctions with them, didn’t strike him as such a good idea. On the other hand, he could see the attractions for an incorrigible gossip like Byrnes. The idea of having a large chunk of the art market under his eye at the same time as a plate of food lay on his table was, probably, as close to paradise as he could envisage.
“Come, dear boy,” he said with mounting enthusiasm as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, “I’m starving.”
They sat down, ordered drinks and Byrnes beamed at him for a few seconds before curiosity got the better of him and his gaze wandered off to survey the surrounding tables.
“Hmm,” he said meditatively as he spotted a smooth, moon-faced young man attentively pouring a glass of wine for an elderly lady with an elongated nose.
“Ah,” he continued, moving on to a group of three men, their heads conspiratorially close together.
“Well, well,” he mused thoughtfully at the sight of another pair, one wearing a fine piece of Italian tailoring for the well-to-do male, the other in slacks and sports jacket.
“Are you going to fill me in on any of this? Or just keep it to yourself?” Argyll asked in a tone that just avoided a slight touch of pique.
“I am sorry, I thought you didn’t approve of gossip.”
“I don’t,” Argyll replied. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like to hear it, though. Come on. A few names and faces. That foppish character over there? The one talking to the old witch in the corner?”
“Ah, that’s young Wilson. Keen as mustard and the IQ of a sunflower seed. Thinks that charm will get him anywhere. If that is his latest client, I imagine he will shortly be learning the lesson of his life.”
“What about the three musketeers in the corner?”
“I know two of them,” Byrnes said, treasuring the sight with all the appreciation of a true connoisseur. “One is Sebastian Bradley, a man of high ambition and limited morals who has worked hard in the last few years to relieve Eastern Europe of its most precious treasures.”
“Legally?”
“Shouldn’t think so for a minute. The person next to him is called Dimitri. I don’t know his other name but he supplies Sebastian with works of art—paintings, furniture, statuary, just about anything as long as it’s fallen off the back of a lorry. His ethereal friend I don’t know.”
“Nor do I.”
Byrnes sighed. “You really don’t pull your weight, you know.”
“Sorry. What about the other pair? The smoothy talking to the shaven-headed gent by the pillar?”
“Jonathan, really. I sometimes despair of you. The smoothy—I admire your perception, by the way—is the appalling Winterton, who, as he would be the first to tell you, is the most famous and distinguished dealer in the world. If not the known universe.”
“Oh,” said Argyll humbly. He had heard of Winterton: Byrnes’s only serious rival for the title of the best-connected dealer in London. Naturally, they disliked each other intensely.
“And the other one is Andrew Wallace, chief buyer for…”
“Oh, yes. I know. I wonder if he wants a Guido Reni sketch I bought six months back…”
“Oh, I don’t think you’d want to sell anything to him, you know. It’s really not worth it. Just kill yourself; it’s pleasanter and cheaper in the long run.”
Conversation ceased awhile as they studied the menu and Byrnes got over the shock of having to dine in the same room as Winterton. Then he recovered himself and beamed at Argyll once more. “Now then, how’s business?” he asked.
Argyll shrugged. “All right, I suppose,” he said grudgingly. “The Moresby Museum still sends my monthly retainer for services I rarely provide, and that pays the bills. And I’ve sold some drawings recently for a reasonable amount. But that’s it. The rest of the time I hang around listening to the clock tick. I’m getting really sick of it.”
They sighed in sympathetic unison. “I know. I know,” Byrnes said nostalgically. “Ah, the glory days of the 1980s. When greed, selfishness and vulgar ostentation swept all before them. The Holy Trinity of the Fine Arts. When will these underrated virtues ever return, eh?”
They mournfully considered the sudden outbreak of frugality in the world and tutted over the retrograde and inconsiderate desire of people to live within their incomes. A lengthy complaint by Byrnes about his virtual bankruptcy ended with his recommending the foie gras with truffles to start. Quite acceptable, he said. For the time of year.
“So,” Byrnes went on, when he noticed that Argyll’s glumness was more than his habitual tendency to professional pessimism. “What can I do for you?”
“You can give me advice, if you want. I’m not selling anything, and I’ve got this job offer. If you were me, what would you do? I can’t sit around for the rest of my life hoping something will turn up.”
“Ah, no. Indeed not,” the older man said. “It can be very depressing if you hit a slow patch. I speak from experience. Especially if you don’t have much in the way of reserves. What you need is a backer, of course. Either that or a magnificent discovery of unparalleled importance. A hundred thousand or so would set you up nicely.”
Argyll snorted. “Both discoveries and backers are even rarer than customers at the moment. Besides, I don’t have much of a track record. Why would anyone think that investing in me would be a good bet?”
“Now, now,” Byrnes said reassuringly. “Gloom is one thing, despair another. You’ve sold one or two very nice things.”
“One or two, yes,” said the unrepentantly pessimistic Argyll. For some reason, talking to the vastly successful Byrnes was not yet making him feel much better. “One or two is not a career, though.”