PAINTING IN THE DARK

At the start of Chapter Two we meet a character from some of my earlier stories - Gottfleisch. Rather than tell you who he is, why not read on?

Gottfleisch took a third croissant and dipped it in his blue Delft mug of drinking chocolate. The corpulent, silk-shirted man had lingered so long over breakfast that his drink had cooled, and when he raised the croissant to his fleshy lips a shroud of chocolate skin hung from the sticky pastry like the folded wings of a desiccated bat. When he bit into the croissant the brown skein came unstuck and drooped across his mouth. He slurped at it, sucking the sweet fragments from his lips while keeping his eye on the conservatory door in case Turmold should return. The man was taking an unconscionable time in the lavatory. Perhaps he had been distracted by one of the porno books.

In his white cast-iron two-seater settee, Gottfleisch shifted his massive bulk forward to pick up the newspaper, its front pages dominated by the announcement of the 1997 General Election in six weeks time. John Major claimed to be 'confident' of turning round his party's huge deficit but the press, it seemed, had written him off. He was yesterday's man. Bright tomorrow lay with Tony Blair.

Gottfleisch scrunched the pages impatiently, looking for the short piece which had earlier caught his eye. Though buried deep inside, the story had been illustrated by a familiar painting. The article itself was captioned Death Of A Keene Agent. Five paragraphs.

Gottfleisch hadn't realised that Murdo Fyffe was the Keene family's agent. He hadn't realised Fyffe knew the Keenes at all, though with hindsight perhaps he should have guessed. Miss Keene herself - what was her name? Sidonie - had approached Gottfleisch once directly in his role as art dealer, and had asked if he might be interested in a watercolour - one of Naomi's, naturally - which for some reason Sidonie wanted to sell. A straightforward, legitimate transaction - which made a pleasant change for Gottfliesch. Since Naomi's paintings were valuable and rare he had asked if there were any more, but the old lady had replied vaguely. There might be one or two somewhere, she had said, playing dumb.

And now Murdo had stiffened his brush in the old lady's backyard. The newspaper didn't give her address - 'a secluded cottage in rural Surrey' was all it said. But because of the painting he had sold for them, Gottfleisch knew he must have her address recorded in his files.

It was odd, really, that he had not followed up.

Having finished his croissant he lifted the Delft mug and shook it to gauge the viscosity of the remaining chocolate. Still quite fluid. No wrinkly skin. He took a sip. Littered across the white iron table before him were the remains of his continental breakfast: rye bread and skofa, several more croissants, one last brioche, an untouched plate of crispbread biscuits, a bowl of butter, three kinds of jam, a little muesli, a compote of fruit, some cheese and an empty carton of Greek yoghurt. In summer Gottfleisch preferred to breakfast lightly. He did not eat sausages till winter.

He leant back in his chair, belched, twisted round, and peered into the house for any sight of the absent Turmold. Bladder problem or constipation? The latter, at a guess. The man was so thin that every muscle in his puny body seemed permanently clenched.

So, Gottfleisch mused, Murdo Fyffe had croaked. When they had last met, Fyffe had seemed fit enough for his - what, three score and ten? Yet he had checked out, according to this article, half way through a pleasant afternoon having tea with Miss Sidonie Keene. Fancy that.

___________________________

Gottfleisch is an art fence, and is assisted, from time to time, by another character from an earlier book (Count Me Out) - Little Ticky:


Although morning sunlight warmed the pavement outside the amusement arcade, it had little impact inside, being confined to a rectangle at the entrance. The street outside looked bleached and faded as if on a distant cinema screen, while the throbbing machines inside blazed in bold primary colours - rich blues and gold and clashing reds. Video images competed with each other. Electronic jingles blended with the background music beat.

At this early hour, customers were few. The only players were a Chinese man of indeterminate age, two white men in their early twenties and little Ticky, somewhere near the back. As he scuttled furtively through the video cavern the lurid coloured lights flickered across his maimed face until it resembled a troll from one of the games. It was a year now since he had been badly burned in a fairground side-show, and although plastic surgeons had done their best he would be scarred for life. Not that little Ticky had been handsome before: barely five feet tall with thinning hair and no looks at all, people had quipped at the time that plastic surgery could only improve him. People who made these jokes never visited him in hospital. Only when he came out did they realise that the fierce fire had melted his pathetic face. After surgery it seemed covered with a film of wax.

One thing Ticky soon discovered was that not everybody averted their gaze from his changed appearance. Some people - well, some strangers - realised his face had been rebuilt and they felt sympathy for him. Because Ticky seemed small and harmless one or two strangers actually reached out to pat him. Except they couldn't bring themselves to pat his head. Their hand would hover in the air, then fall lightly on his shoulder. Ticky didn't mind. Not really. He appreciated any attempt at human contact. In fact, if he was honest with himself, Ticky would admit that he had more contact with people now than he had ever had before. Before the accident, people had shunned him, kept away. Maybe it had been due to his halitosis - in the old days he had suffered mightily from that. Not that he could ever smell it, but people had ribbed him, which was how he knew. But since the accident they didn't sneer at him any more. Maybe being in hospital all that time, the regular diet that they served, had flushed out whatever had previously fouled his gut. Maybe regular eating was a good thing. Or maybe it had been the shock. Whatever brought about the cure - and Ticky was convinced that something had - when eventually he came out of hospital he resolved to stick to a healthy diet. He made a decent stab at it, though some of the mush they had fed him there - white custard, poached fish, several new kinds of veg - did not fit easily into a single life. No single man cooked custard. Or poached fish.

But Ticky tried his best.

Occasionally, he began to question whether the halitosis really had gone away. It was hard to tell: since reappearing on the streets with his remodelled face, people did not insult him casually as they had before. No one called him Shorty, Runt-face, or Human Dustbin any more. So in some ways his life had become easier. There were compensations.

For instance: before the disfiguring accident, this arcade near Piccadilly Circus could have been dangerous for him, a No Go Area. Now he found it possible - not easy, but possible - to hang about the bright machines looking for a new young friend. The Piccadilly Arcade had always been a place where kids fresh from the provinces first met streetwise brats and older men. For Ticky to approach a kid in here before the accident would have been impossible - one look and they'd think, 'pervert' - but now he was so disfigured they assumed that he could surely do no harm. A face like his aroused their sympathy.

The point about kids who gravitated to Piccadilly Circus, if they weren't already on the game, was that they spent half their time looking over their shoulders - partly dodging the Law, partly dodging men like him. They weren't ignorant, they had heard about his kind. In Ticky's opinion, this was part of the reason they ended up in the wicked city - curiosity and fear, mixed with hope and confused desire. Will I like it or will it hurt? The great adventure.

In the dark corner where Ticky loitered, a house spider had begun its web. From an electric cable to a metal pipe it lay a sticky line. The spider wandered backwards and forwards along that line, laying down additional thread to strengthen it. Then it began a second line, allowing it to droop loosely below the first. From this slacker line the spider descended on a thread which it anchored to a lower point on the pipe. Then it pulled the slack line down to form a V. The base of this V would become the centre of its web. Once established, the web might remain undisturbed for months. In the dust and grime of that dark corner the web would hang unnoticed, apart from once in a while when a solitary fly might drift in from outside to circle the dark interior: all the while coming nearer to the hanging snare.

The two white men wandered out to the street, leaving only Ticky and the Chinaman. It was early in the day and Ticky was only here on the off chance that some kid exhausted from dossing in a doorway might have nowhere else to go. But it seemed that this was not to be this morning, though the place would get busier later on.

When Ticky finally left the corner, he caused a tremor in the web.

*

Murdo's house looked much as always, Sidonie thought, though in some curious way she had expected to find it transformed by his death. Yet here it was, the same old furniture, the same familiar pictures on the walls, the same Afghan carpet. And that same drop-out son of his, the wretched Angus, floppy hair still dangling in the nerveless non-style of the Seventies around his podgy Seventies face. He had grown slacker in the cheek and needed a shave. He would be approaching forty soon, she realised. She had not seen Angus for over a year. From time to time he reappeared to convalesce between 'relationships' or ill-fated business ventures, to hang around his father a few aimless weeks, and then to slither back to the great Who Knows Where. Murdo had always indulged Angus, almost encouraging him to live a shiftless life. Though today, to do Angus credit, he did look distressed at his father's death. He seemed lost in the empty house.

"We'll have to sell it."

"We?" Sidonie thought Angus might be referring to one of the washed-out women he was entangled with.

"I will. I'll have to sell it."

Sidonie nodded. At least that meant that Angus would not be moving in. He couldn't live in this semi-rural setting - with or without a washed-out woman. Nor would the well-ordered villagers want him here.

"You can think about that after the funeral."

"Oh yes." He coughed. "I suppose when we've done the service and that, people might just as well come back here. No need to hire somewhere."

"This was his home. It would be best."

"There won't be many people."

Sidonie ran a finger across Murdo's walnut side table. He used to place it at her side when they had tea.

"What d'you think, a dozen?" Angus asked.

"Hm?"

"Friends. There won't be many."

"No?"

"Dad was always complaining they were dying off. Did you know he used to read the obituary pages? Said it was like a roll call for his generation."

"Everybody dies eventually."

"Yeah, well, all the old fuddy-duddies are dying off." He hesitated as he realised her age, but then blathered on regardless. "It's time for a new generation."

She raised an eyebrow at the less-than-young hippy, but he didn't notice.

"This election will sweep all the stuffy old crap away. New Labour, right? A brand new start."

Sidonie wandered across to the captain's chair where Murdo had liked to sit.

Angus said, "Not many people, then. We could knock up some sandwiches and a spot of drink."

The wooden chair was gently sculpted as if to cradle the occupant in its arms. The polished seat had a soft deep sheen.

"A few sandwiches. And maybe we ought to buy some cake."

Angus was watching her. Perhaps he expected her to do the catering? A man in his late thirties, helpless as a schoolboy. She said, "There's a woman in the village. She won't charge you much."

"I hope not."

He was such a wet rag. She said, "Or you could buy it all from M&S. People won't expect a slap-up meal."

"Right. Nothing fancy."

She could no longer look at the captain's chair. She had to get away. As she moved to the door she said, "Murdo had a lot of friends."

"They're mostly dead by now. Are you leaving?"

"Yes."

"Wanted to talk to you."

She closed her eyes. "About whom to invite?"

"No, not that. Though I suppose... Well, this is hardly the time, is it?"

Sidonie hesitated in the doorway. She didn't want to stay in the house with Angus, yet to leave him there was like leaving a workman in one's bedroom.

He said, "Leave it a few days, maybe, after he's been buried."

Sidonie wasn't listening. Everything about the cottage was painfully familiar and she didn't know why Angus had asked her to call, unless it really had been to persuade her to prepare the food. He was like a stranger in his father's house - no, it was his house now, with his father dead. Fortunately he would never live here. Angus stood gaunt and dishevelled on the sitting room floor like an auctioneer's clerk come to price it up. She glanced again at her old friend's things. Her oldest friend.

Already the room had developed a slight smell of mould, as if it too had died. It was almost as if a mist had drifted across his furniture and paintings. There were none of Naomi's here, only a few pleasant, inexpensive things - and the one red chalk sketch of a young girl which Sidonie had given Murdo years ago.

"That picture," she said. "It's mine. I gave it him."

"Gave it?"

"Lent it, really."

"Well, if you gave it ... " Angus grinned awkwardly. "Oh, I don't know."

"I'd better take it back."

Angus frowned. "Shouldn't we wait? I mean, it's like part of the estate."

"Estate?"

"You know ... inheritance tax. Won't you have to prove you lent it to him?"

Sidonie came back inside the room and marched straight to the chalk drawing. "Look at it," she said. "Who do you think that is?"

"Huh?"

Sidonie took the picture from the wall. "That's me," she said. "It was drawn by my friend Imre Goth. Can't you see that?"

"Imre who? Look, I'm not sure - "

"I'm taking it home."

*


Throughout the book, there are passages in which Sidonie talks to us directly. It is from these passages, innocuous at first, that we begin to learn just how complex - and controversial - was her past. Initially, she seems little more than an old lady, rambling pleasantly on:




We were a cosmopolitan crowd, back in the Thirties. Our native British stock had been invigorated with exciting new blood from middle Europe, countries that don't exist any more - Silesia, East Prussia, Saar - little states squashed between the borders of larger ones. The map of Europe at that time looked like a chart of sand puddles drying in the sun. Hungary, for example, had lost two thirds of its homeland, and Austria and Germany had shrunk as well.

Throughout the continent, displaced people ran like ants. Imre Goth moved from Hungary into Germany - and initially he did well. By the early Thirties he was moving among the exalted of the land - he painted Präsident Goering's portrait several times - and yet he had to leave everything behind and flee to London. Perhaps he was Jewish. Or perhaps being Hungarian was enough. But Imre's life was a succession of highs and lows - which he embellished at every telling with more than a dash of verbal paprika. I remember Imre holding court at the Hambone and the Gargoyle, spinning anecdote after anecdote of catastrophe and success: how he had been acclaimed in Transylvania but had had to flee King Carol ("My father, you understand, was an Austro-Hungarian count"); how he had arrived with nothing in Wiemahr Germany ("Not even my paint brushes - and if I'd had charcoal I would have eaten it"); how he had been discovered penniless by the art patron Goering ("My portrait of his beloved Karin hung above the bed of his second wife"); how he had fled the Nazis to start again in London ("And I shall never leave this beautiful country").

He was an outrageously charming - and talented - man, to whom painting came quite effortlessly. Where Naomi was painstaking and slow, Imre was carelessly slapdash. In less than a minute he could scribble a portrait on the back of a menu card - a good one too - and offer it in payment for his meal. The waiters seldom accepted them at the time, though any still in existence would be worth hundreds now. He continued to behave like this even when well off, laughing and saying that at one time it was the only way he had survived.

Those wonderful evenings in fashionable clubs. Evenings? Nights would be more accurate. After the theatre we would go for late supper, then champagne at midnight, then dancing in the small hours with a correctly dressed young man. Perhaps we'd take in the latest revue and meet the cast afterwards at the Gargoyle - Coward, Baddeley, Hulbert and his little Cicely.

If Daddy was with us he'd insist on making introductions - me to obscure pianists and Naomi to uninterested artists. She was a mere amateur, they thought, one of those society girls who liked to dabble in watercolours. She felt belittled by the whole performance. Once, when Daddy put her through this degrading introduction business, she picked a public argument with Walter Sickert - Sir Walter, the foremost portraitist in the land. She tried to tell Sickert about the use of light, insisting that the changing qualities of natural light added reality to a painting, and that its luminescence gave new depth. Sickert disagreed. He was obsessed with light, he grandly informed her - which artist is not? - but he claimed that it was for the artist to control the light, using light to immortalise the subject. Light was too important, Sickert said, to leave to the erratic whims of nature, and so he no longer painted in natural light. In his studio the blinds were always drawn. The result, he said, was that he could paint at any hour, and the quality of his colours remained unchanged. Painted light was not daylight, he said, and a true perfectionist might take a week to pin down a moonbeam - so to blazes with Naomi's fickle natural light. Sunlight begone!

I can see her now - the young Naomi I remember - the lithe quick body, long blonde hair and sweet furrowed brow. I see her lecturing the elderly one-time rebel, standing perhaps as he himself had stood twenty five years before when he decried the standards of the Royal Academy: feet aside on the night club floor, long finger pointing, defiant eyes - confident and fearless as only youth can be. He let her rant at him because she was young. But he forecast that when she matured she would come to learn that art did not benefit from reality and daylight. In time Naomi too would paint in the dark.

*

Clearly, Sidonie Keene and Gottfleisch will be brought together - though at first, Gottfleisch is content to sit back in his enormous armchair and have Little Ticky do the dirty work:


"But at her age, what's the old biddy want with stupid paintings?" asked Ticky cheerfully. "She's probably bored of 'em."

Gottfleisch sighed. "She may have had them sixty years."

"There you are then. Sixty years. Mind, she must be old."

Ticky nodded inanely across the desk. It was an early nineteenth century partners' desk, a massive double-sided piece chosen by Gottfleisch to suit his bulk. Ticky stood at the other side like an errant schoolboy.

Gottfleisch announced, "I have invited myself to a funeral."

Ticky brightened up. "Anyone I know?"

"A friend of Miss Keene."

Ticky cocked his head: there must be more to come.

"While we are at the funeral, Miss Keene's house will be left empty."

Ticky smiled. In his rebuilt face, that smile was as if a scarecrow had been jolted into life. "Has she far to go, sir, to the funeral? I mean, will she be out long?"

"Most of the afternoon, I should imagine. First there's the funeral, then a small reception."

"Ah yes, cakes and ale. You need a drink. I went to a funeral once - "

"Not now. Now remember, Ticky, I don't want you to take anything. I don't want any sign that you've been there."

Ticky inhaled. "Just suss it out."

"Exactly." Gottfleisch gazed severely from beneath his eyebrows. "Miss Keene comes from a wealthy family - "

Ticky clapped his hands and seemed about to speak. But Gottfleisch cut him short: "She has always lived in a cultured world, so there will be valuables."

"Excellent. Might as well knock 'em off while I'm there, sir."

"I am particularly interested in some watercolours by her sister Naomi. These paintings may not be on display, so I want you to scout about for a locked room or hidden safe."

Ticky raised his eyebrow. He would have raised both eyebrows but after the accident only one had regrown.

Gottfleisch continued: "It's possible the old lady may have hidden them away." Ticky nodded knowledgeably. "Hidden what, sir?"

"Pictures, idiot! Her sister's paintings. Do listen, Ticky. In recent years, several Keenes have surfaced - often through a friend of hers. Now he's dead."

"Oh, dear."

"It's his funeral."

"I'll say. - Oh, the one you're going to?"

Gottfleisch eyed him bleakly. "I hope you're paying attention, Ticky?"

"Yes, sir. The bloke's died what was letting out the pictures, and you think the old lady might have some left."

"Well done."

"Not just a pretty face, sir." Ticky caught himself. He and Gottfleisch stared at each other blankly until Ticky cleared his throat. "These paintings, then, of her sister's - they do belong to the old lady?"

"Yes."

"Right. And she's flogged a few, but she ain't flogged all of them?"

Gottfleisch had begun flicking a cake crumb across the empty expanse of his polished desk. "I dare say, being her sister's, they had sentimental value."

"She still flogged 'em, though, unless this friend you mentioned was nicking 'em behind her back."

"I don't think he was."

Gottfleisch had flicked the crumb off the edge, and he now gave Ticky his undivided attention: "For some years after her sister's death, the paintings seemed of little value. Then gradually their value began to climb. Naomi Keene's pictures, you see, have always appealed to a specialist taste."

Ticky gave a knowing grin which Gottfleisch ignored.

"What you must do, dear boy, while we're at the funeral, is scour the house for locked doors or immovable objects. Take a camera with you. Make a record. Don't forget to photograph every decent painting. I want a thorough search so we'll know exactly what is there when we go back. You're to take an inventory, in effect."

Ticky inhaled doubtfully, and then shrugged. "Just as you say, sir. But since I'll be in the house anyway it'd be a shame to come away empty-handed."


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