6
It was dark under the trees on the far side of the meadow, though spots of distant light showed through between them, and a late glow coloured the dull green wall of leaves above. In the foreground three pale saplings made a line. The early evening flared before it darkened into deeper mystery. Behind the right-hand sapling, covered by its grey trunk, ran a knotty thread. It was a rough canvas ‘laid down’ on a piece of hard-board, and damaged later by water down the left-hand edge. The delicate detachment and re-sticking of the damaged portion had been done by Cyril, but the cleaning and retouching, with a fine brush whose every sleek and graded hair showed distinctly through the magnifying visor, was Johnny’s own work.
Never before had he paid such minute attention to a painting, certainly not to one of his own – he saw it decompose itself under the lens, he had a view of it not even the artist had had, although elements in the design, which the artist must have understood, refused to give up their secrets. Evening in Kensington Gardens had been nearly night when the picture came in and was taken from its wrapping, the brittle layers of a twelve-year-old Daily Mail. The lifting of old brown varnish had brought out a low fence, a row of mere transparent dashes, across the foreground, and an unsuspected hurrying figure half-seen at the right-hand edge. And in the mid-distance, almost under the trees, was another small vertical presence, that might have been a person, a man in a jacket and hat or a woman in a short cape, but was so slender it could have been a statue, a bust on a plinth. Were there statues like that in Kensington Gardens? The vertical mark, a few quick brushstrokes, was a riddle. Over the week that he worked on the picture (itself painted surely in an hour or two), the image, the finite information of the brushstrokes and the indefinitely large suggestion they made, became somehow secret knowledge, and the presence beneath the trees took on an occult significance, like a figure of London life he was yet to meet. When he raised the goggles there was a second of giddy confusion that the picture he’d come from was only eight inches by five. Johnny had never heard of the artist, Paul Maitland, before last week, but now he felt an eerie involvement in his work. The buyer would see the scratched ‘PM’ in the dark impasto of the foreground, and never know that a half-inch of grey-gold grass, cut hay perhaps, in the middle distance, and other minute touchings-in among the dim green foliage, were the work of the invisible JS, some eighty years on.
‘I’m going out,’ said Cyril, ‘which means you’ll be in charge,’ pursing his lips as he looked (which he rarely did) directly at Johnny.
‘Oh, all right’ – Johnny wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Where will you be?’
‘I’m going to have a look at something,’ said Cyril. He sounded both stern and slightly shifty. ‘Try not to sell anything, and for God’s sake don’t buy anything.’
‘I’ll just take it in, shall I.’
‘Just take it in and give them a ticket,’ said Cyril. ‘They can reserve things, if they look serious. And of course don’t let them in here. Never let anyone in here.’ But just as he was putting his coat on the bell jingled and he looked through the door into the shop to see who it was. ‘Ah . . . good morning!’
‘You’re going out,’ said a man’s voice from the shop.
‘It’s not at all urgent,’ said Cyril.
‘I’ve not been in for a while.’
‘No, I’m pleased to see you,’ said Cyril, with a drop to another register, guardedly flattering. He slipped off his coat and hung it on the back of the door, which he pulled half-to as he went to talk to the customer. It was a thin-voiced man, with the uncommon vowels, some plumped, some pinched, and the scurrying, dawdling manner that still flourished in the London art world. The tone of the conversation was almost abrupt, and neither he nor Cyril addressed each other by name. In the workshop the radio, on at medium volume, engrossed by the events that had followed the election, muddied the conversation. Johnny went to the bench where the cut-down frame for the Maitland was waiting.
Late Summer, Dusk was very much a Cyril picture. Cyril liked paintings small, and it was one of his hang-ups that subjects were spoiled by being treated on too large a scale – his ideal was the ‘big small picture’, in which a lot of life was conveyed in a tiny space. To Johnny, who at college had been encouraged to splosh paint over areas of canvas as tall as himself, this took a bit of getting used to. He felt its charm and its constraints. The Maitland also owed a great deal to Whistler, who was Cyril’s god: it had the quality of a sketch, the rapid lifelike movement he lacked so completely in himself, but had an eye for in a picture. Cyril didn’t deal in prints, and Johnny was told no painting by Whistler had passed through the shop in ten years; so the ‘school’ of Whistler was the thing to focus on. Once you’d gone for the school, obscurity became a lure, almost a virtue. It seemed Maitland himself was an artist only experts knew of, no one had written about, and no member of the public was likely to find in a museum.
Johnny freed the frame from its clamps and laid it over the painting lying on the workbench. Frame-making, at Hoole, was neglected – they showed their freaky portraits and gigantic abstracts unadorned on their stretchers and boards, or at best with a thin rim of untreated plywood tacked round, no gallery pretensions. Cyril was teaching him the further art of the wooden oblong – this little green and brown canvas now, on its first loose try in its ‘Whistler’ frame (really one gilt frame inside another), became suddenly focused and desirable, more present and also more covetably remote. It still looked too small – a further narrow slip would have to be cut and gilded in just the right shade to enclose it and hold it exactly in its shrine.
‘Perhaps he’d care to bring it through,’ said the voice from the shop, with its note of scant patience under perfect politeness.
Cyril looked round the door. ‘I’ve got Sir George Skipton here,’ he said, ‘he wants to see the Maitland.’
‘Oh . . . shall I bring it just as it is?’
Cyril stared and nodded confidentially. For a moment there was a clear understanding between them.
The customer wasn’t how Johnny had pictured him. He had a lean hawkish face, his long sideburns a gesture at fashion resisted entirely by his camel overcoat, red scarf and trilby hat, which he’d kept on. He seemed carefully wrapped up against any of Cyril’s inveiglements about a rare new picture; his thin smile made it clear that his listening to you did not in any way imply that he agreed with you. It was the smile of someone proud of his own judgement – hence surely the cleverly deferential tone that Cyril adopted with him.
Johnny laid the picture on the table, and said, ‘The frame’s not quite finished . . .’ Sir George moved his head up and down as if surveying a far larger canvas, and made two barely audible noises, the first, with head raised, a momentary high-pitched whine, in which surprise and reserve were both implied, the other, with head lowered, a warm but regretful grunt. Johnny looked from one face to the other, unsure if he was being praised or condemned. Then Skipton’s smile slid upwards from the painting to him.
‘How do you find it here?’ he said.
‘How do I find it . . .’ – Johnny gasped and glanced at Cyril. ‘Working here, you mean. Oh, it’s very interesting, sir.’