The sale opened with a section of jewellery: old pins, brooches, necklaces, the bidding sometimes dragging on unconscionably for items of no interest. Or so it seemed to Johnny, taking in the auctioneer, the same bow-tied whimsical gent as before, the small solid gavel in his left hand, the right used to brace himself on the desk or to summon rival bids from the corners of the room and sometimes, it seemed, to pluck them from the air. He was smilingly both enemy and friend. Johnny watched for a bit, and his anxiety had a saving touch of smugness to it, that he wasn’t remotely covetous of these trinkets, triple strands of pearls shown on velvet charm pads, pre-war ruby rings with damaged but mendable settings. The weathered old dealers, barely raising their chins or lifting their biros from the catalogue to indicate a bid, and showing no joy in success or gloom at defeat, were welcome to them. Already his heart was beating noticeably as the picture section of the sale approached; his impatience for that was mixed with a nervous longing for delay. Now there was a silver and diamond brooch in the shape of a pug, very nearly like the one his father gave June for their fifth anniversary, and Johnny watched the bidding rise till it topped a good eight times its estimate, £420, and didn’t know if he was more impressed or indignant.
He strolled off for a minute or two through the crammed alley of pictures, hung three deep on the whitewashed brick wall of the old garage – a dark unframed canvas with a tear in it, several naked men dancing, warily titled Mythological scene, other po-faced descriptions, ‘Interior with the artist’s wife and a chest of drawers (£5–8)’, ‘Portrait of a middle-aged man (no reserve)’. He was oddly involved as he stared at the bottom left-hand corner of the portrait by the thought that the unknown painter had worked for several hours on it, at an unspecified date in an untraceable place with a sitter perhaps now dead – it wasn’t very good but it recorded a serious effort to be so; and it was somehow sad, like the whole place. In the background, with ponderous flourishes and remorseless speed, the lot numbers were called out, climbing up, and the moment of drama in which he was destined to act moved stiflingly closer. He came back past the frames, which had a look now of having been ravished and jumbled, the batches muddled and the Dutch frame propped up on top, for everyone to see. He crossed and stood, which felt more careless and confident, at the back of the room, by the poised foot of the one-handed Mercury.
‘And now,’ said the auctioneer, ‘the first of our lots of frames, lot 93,’ looking vaguely but fondly towards them. A perfect indifference, as if he had said nothing at all, hung over the room; then a couple of the men who’d been bidding for jewellery got up and walked across in front of the rostrum on their way to the exit. Johnny’s pulse was thumping, and a giddy sense that he alone had heard what the auctioneer said made him focus on his face in urgent embarrassment. ‘Who’ll start me at eighty pounds?’
There was something brutal in that amiable first naming of a figure. Johnny looked confusedly from side to side, his hand fixed halfway up, open-palmed, as if calming someone, and saw the man in the red anorak go out of the room, pulling a cap from his pocket.
‘Seventy, then? A good Watts frame in this lot, a nice lot, four frames in total . . .’
Was no one going to bid? Would he get it, if he bid now? Or would he wait, paralysed, till the lot was passed? He saw a quite unsuspected person, a mere bald patch in the second row, lift an unconcerned forefinger.
‘Thank you, sir. Seventy I have; seventy-five?’
Johnny’s undecided hand seemed to catch the auctioneer’s eye, and amuse him. Found out, he raised it further, and no sooner was his gesture accepted, ‘Seventy-five, thank you very much, sir,’ than he heard ‘Eighty . . . eighty-five . . . ninety, thank you, sir . . . ninety-five,’ in quick appalling sequence, his own attempted intervention swept over in the rapid chase of nods and barely lifted hands around the room, men all of them, sitting or standing, now revealed as the dealers. He felt they knew each other, they were against each other, but more than that, without thought or effort, they were against him, absurd pink-faced boy with shoulder-length hair and trembling hand. His secret strength was being Cyril’s agent; but Cyril’s limit for the lot was £90. Johnny glanced for a moment at the burly old man beside him, the man in the lead, with his thuggish illusionless head and look as if he’d rather be anywhere else. ‘I’m selling . . .’ said the auctioneer, ‘for ninety-five pounds,’ and it was obvious this man knew what he was doing, it was worth it, and Johnny raised his hand at the last moment, couldn’t look at the man but from the corner of his eye saw him shake his head, and found he had won. One hundred pounds. There was a noise like the noise between songs at a concert, of the audience turning the page, as he called out his number, they didn’t hear him and he called it again, and it was written down, his surge of success undermined in an instant by the knowledge he had transgressed.
‘Lot 94,’ no let-up – but Johnny wasn’t bidding for this one. He studied the catalogue and bit his lip, and sensed without looking the sneering curiosity of the crowd about this new buyer. Then the bidding got going and he glanced up and no one was paying him the slightest attention. At once it was lot 95, Johnny double-checked, words and figures in momentary mutiny on the page, but he’d marked it, and it was right. Estimate £70–80, but he could go to a giddy one hundred and twenty, if he was sure of the Dutch frame. It had begun already, a man who had bid before made a shrugging first offer of sixty pounds, Johnny sensing the value of coming in late stood by, there was a bid of sixty-five, as if on the off-chance, and the first man dropped out; and no one else moved a finger, so that almost laughing Johnny lifted his hand, the auctioneer smiled back at him, courteously and to show he’d got him, glanced at the previous bidder, who dropped out too, and repeated ‘Seventy pounds . . .’ into the unexpectant silence. ‘Any advance on seventy pounds? I’m selling . . .’ the gavel lifted as he peered, with a knitted brow of humorous disappointment, from row to row, Johnny willing them to keep silent while an awful void, as unexpected as the crush of interest in the earlier lot, seemed to open around him and under him, in cold doubt of the clearly wrong decision he was making. These sour-faced men had been coming to sales like this all their lives, they knew a pukka Dutch ebonized frame from a fake when they saw one. ‘Sold! for seventy pounds – thank you, sir,’ and they made him call out his number again.
He waited, growing slowly less conspicuous, through a few further lots, and it was half an hour later he came out into the car park, clutching the heavy spoils of less than two minutes’ unrememberable bidding: with a Watts frame he’d disobeyed Cyril to capture, and whose losses, out on the street now, seemed starker than indoors, and a Dutch frame that was a weirdly good bargain, but which might, to Cyril’s eye, be an obvious fake. And how absurd it was, he had to get all the way back to Chelsea with the bloody things, paraphernalia he would never, on his own account, have had anything to do with. Somehow he managed it, on the train, the small frames tied together on the rack, the bigger ones between his knees as he sat and hoped at the half-dozen stops that no one else got in before Victoria. He angled them out, when they got there, very carefully. People looked at him and some of them smiled. He set the frames down, in the rush of the concourse, to sort himself out, and get them in the easiest order for carrying; it would have to be a taxi, and Cyril would pay. He put back his shoulders, lifted the frames up. He hadn’t thought of it, which made it the more uncanny when he saw him, the man in the donkey jacket, head turning as if in its own light against the vast iron pillar, looking with a lazy intent past Johnny and then straight at him for a second through the fast-moving crowd, before walking off, with a work-weary tread, towards the entrance of the Gents. Johnny followed with his eyes, then a short way, hopelessly, on foot, and stood, breathless, unable to adjust or conceal his excitement, the seven frames slung like a punishment round his arms and his neck.