‘Like I said, the picture itself doesn’t seem to be damaged.’ I smoothed at it uselessly, trying to be helpful. ‘A few staples…’
She smacked my hand away. ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ she said. ‘There’s quite a lot of work needed here.’
‘Um,’ I said, moving my shoulders from side to side and shuffling from foot to foot. ‘The thing is…’ I looked at my watch.
‘How long have I got?’ she said, not looking up from probing the debris.
‘Half an hour.’ I winced sheepishly.
‘You have got to be kidding.’ But she was already gathering up the ends of the towel.
Through the arch at the back of the shop was a narrow workroom dominated by a long tool-strewn table. Racks of moulded framing occupied one wall. In the other was a window overlooking the side fence. Stairs ran to an upper floor. Clearing away a half-cut cardboard mount, Claire laid the battered picture face-down and snipped away the tangled hanging wire with a pair of pliers.
‘You don’t know how much I appreciate this,’ I said, Mr Sincere.
‘Let’s just say it’s a long time since I’ve had the chance to work with an artist of this stature.’ She removed the stretched canvas from its frame and held it upright. Squeezing the opposing corners gingerly together, she forced the canvas to bulge a little. ‘Particularly when he’s been hit by a bus.’
Out of its frame, the stretched canvas looked pathetically small, hardly much bigger than a couple of record covers. The edges, long concealed by the boxing of the frame, were a stark white contrast to the murky grey of the rest of the fabric. Claire wrinkled her nose. ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Had this long?’
I looked at my watch. ‘About seventeen and a half minutes.’
‘Your friends, how long have they had this?’
‘Six months or so, I think. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’ She turned the painting face down and began rummaging through the racks of framing material.
‘Hello, Red’s dad.’ A child’s voice came from somewhere behind me. It took me a moment to locate its source. Claire’s little girl Grace was peering out shyly from behind the door of a cupboard built under the stairs. Delighted to have surprised me, she opened the cupboard door to reveal a tiny table spread with scrap paper and coloured pencils. ‘This is my play school,’ she said. ‘Mummy made it for me.’ Her eyes tracked me across the room as I accepted her invitation to take a closer look.
‘Your mummy’s very clever,’ I said, meaning every word of it. Taking this as a personal compliment, Gracie plumped herself down at the table and began drawing exuberantly with a felt-tipped pen.
‘That’s the sort of encouragement I like to hear when I’m working,’ said Claire. ‘Keep it up.’
She withdrew a length of moulded framing from the rack on the wall and matched it with a section of the broken frame, holding the two together so I could compare them. Apart from a slightly deeper gilding on the old frame, they were nearly identical. ‘It’ll be quicker to build a new frame than repair the damaged one. This moulding is a fairly common style, so it’s highly unlikely your friends will ever notice the difference.’ I couldn’t see Bob Allroy spotting the switch.
‘But first I’ll need to take the canvas off the stretcher, replace the broken struts, then re-attach the canvas.’ With a definitive smash, she tossed the broken frame into a metal rubbish bin full of off-cut shards of glass.
‘Is all that possible in half an hour?’ I was getting toey, nervously glancing at my watch, as useful as a scrub nurse at a triple by-pass.
Claire shrugged casually. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ She was enjoying this. Not just the professional challenge, either. She began extracting the tacks that held the canvas on the stretcher.
I paced. A compressor sat on the floor, its hose leading to a pneumatic guillotine on a side bench. Pricy items. Staple guns. Sheets of glass. Tools. Racks of unframed prints. Two metal folio cabinets, not cheap. Cardboard mounts. A whole wall of shaped timber. Add the rent, the rates, utility bills.
Claire, pulling tacks, read my mind. ‘Not exactly what I imagined when I left the National Gallery. I saw myself sitting in a trendy little gallery offering the works of interesting young contemporary printmakers to a discerning clientele. The trouble is, ten other places within half a mile had exactly the same idea.’
‘Is that why you left the National Gallery, to start this shop?’
‘Other way round,’ she said.
Gracie tugged at my sleeve and handed me a piece of paper. Two blobby circles in felt-tipped pen, one circle with a hat and currant eyes.
‘That’s me, isn’t it?’ The child nodded. Who else? ‘Why, thank you. It’s lovely.’
Claire looked up, the table between us. ‘Sleazebag,’ she muttered. In the nicest possible way. It was all I could do to stop myself vaulting the table and giving her a demonstration.
‘Other way round?’
‘I’d been at the gallery six years, ever since I graduated. That’s where I met’-she flicked her eyes towards Gracie, back at her drawing-‘Gracie’s father, Graham. He was an administrator. We were together for a couple of years and when Gracie was on the way I applied for maternity leave. No-one had ever done that before. Women who got pregnant were expected to quietly fade away. They said there was no provision, knocked me back.’
‘That’s discrimination,’ I said. Reviewing the National Gallery’s employment practices would, I resolved, be my number one priority when I got back to the office. If changes hadn’t already been made, they would be damned soon, if I had any influence on the proceedings. We’d see how soon they smartened up if their conduit was squeezed a little.
‘I wanted to make an issue of it, but Graham didn’t like the idea. He thought it might adversely affect his career. He encouraged me to set up this business, put some money into it. After Grace was born, he got a job offer from overseas. Now he’s Director of Human Resources at the Hong Kong Museum of Oriental Antiquities and I’m sticking nonreflecting glass over chimpanzees and framing other people’s holiday photos.’
She wasn’t bitter, just telling a story. She dropped her voice a register, whether for my benefit or the child’s I couldn’t tell. ‘We don’t see him any more.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Great progress you’re making.’ She only had about half the tacks out. Now that she was handling the painting proper, her technique was meticulous, painstakingly slow. The time was 12.58. My feet were inscribing an ever-decreasing circle on the workroom floor.
‘For Chrissake,’ she said, moving around to my side of the table for no apparent other reason than to accidentally brush her rump against me. ‘Stop prowling around like a caged animal. You’re making me nervous.’
Jesus, what did she have to be nervous about? I was the one with the crisis on my plate. Maybe, I thought, I should temporarily remove my twitchiness elsewhere. Make more efficient use of my time by taking Red and Tarquin around to Leo while Claire got on with the job, unencumbered by my stalking presence. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘You’re no use to me in your current state.’
‘The heat’s off,’ I told the boys, bustling them and their dripping stumps of half-sucked carob-chip ice-confectionery into the car.
The Curnows’ place was less than a kilometre away through the backstreets of Fitzroy. Even though I knew it would take me scarcely ten minutes to deliver the boys and return to Artemis, I still had to fight the urge to speed. This painting demolition rigmarole had certainly shot the shit out of my quality time with Red. The one o’clock news came on the radio and I leaned across and hiked up the volume.
Prince Sihanouk had walked out on the Cambodian peace talks. Again. F. W. de Klerk had been elected head of the South African government. Fat lot of difference that would make. Emperor Hirohito had died. Not before time, the old war criminal. Police had refused to rule out suspicious circumstances in relation to the death of the man whose body had been found in the moat of the National Gallery. The weather bureau had amended the forecast top upwards to thirty and the All Ordinaries was steady at 1539.4.