Angelica's Grotto (21 page)

‘What about it?’

‘Look at the vessel in the foreground, with this diagonal spar that goes from the lower left to the upper-right corner of the sail – do you know what it’s called?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘It’s a sprit: not a boom, not a gaff, but a sprit. Every rope and spar has its proper name so that nothing gets mixed up with anything else, and these seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century painters got their rigging right; they believed in it. Take a painter like Caspar David Friedrich – he was heavily into metaphysics but when he drew a boat it was a boat that worked, both physically and metaphysically. That kind of thing is life-affirming for me.’

‘Jesus, Harold – how did I get along without you all these years!’

‘With difficulty, I fear. Come look at the Daumier.’

A tall silver-haired patrician couple had got there first and were examining it thoughtfully. ‘That’s the sort of horse the picadors used to ride in Barcelona,’ said the man. ‘They were expendable.’

‘Don Quixote was a tall thin man,’ said his wife, ‘so it was natural for Daumier to give him a tall thin horse.’

‘I realise that. All the same, I prefer Munnings for horses.’

‘I’m glad he didn’t like it,’ said Klein when the couple had moved on. ‘I’d have felt bad if he had.’

‘Maybe you just don’t like tall people.’

‘I like Don Quixote – he was tall.’

‘I like this Daumier a lot,’ said Melissa. ‘Please don’t explain it to me.’

‘I won’t; I’ll say only that the last time I was in Paris I left a thank-you note on Daumier’s tomb in Père Lachaise.’

Mr Duclos found them back at the Redon. Klein introduced Melissa and Duclos gave them news of
Pegase Noir’s
tour. ‘There was a great deal of interest in Paris and Zurich and New York,’ he said. ‘Quite a buzz, really – I expect a lot of excitement at the sale.’

When they’d had enough viewing Klein and Melissa went back to Piccadilly and the Royal Academy for coffee. The Summer Exhibition was on; the statue of Joshua Reynolds, garlanded with flowers, looked towards the entrance arch where a black iron cast of Anthony Gormley hung by its ankles from a rope. Forty-five other effigies of the sculptor, occupying the courtyard in a variety of positions, were being infiltrated by tourists young and old who photographed each other interacting with them.

The restaurant was dark and cool with cryptlike arches, its globe-lamps cosy, its murals comfortably dated; time seemed in no hurry. ‘Why here?’ said Melissa.

‘I like to be overcharged in a good cause,’ said Klein, ‘and I like to be with you in a place where I’ve often been alone.’

Melissa put her hand on his. ‘That’s a really sweet thing to say, Harold.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go now, I’ve got a class to prepare.’

The sky grew dark as they went down Piccadilly towards Green Park Station, Klein whispering, ‘A winged horse can’t do my flying for me, I have to do it on my own. We
are
something to each other. You don’t always know what’s happening when it’s happening. “This can’t be love because I feel so well …”’ Suddenly there was rain beating down, urgent and shining and steaming on street and pavement. ‘You go ahead,’ he said, ‘I can’t run.’

‘A little rain won’t hurt me,’ she said, and pressed his arm closer to her. Drenched and smiling, he felt almost middle-aged again.

Surrounded by crimson walls, Klein whispered to himself,

‘He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.’

‘Really,’ said Melissa, ‘aren’t you over-reacting? All you’re doing is selling a painting.’

‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Klein.

There were breaks in the crimson: the auctioneer’s podium was in front of an eight-foot-wide white panel that went up to the ceiling; the enclosures for the telephone staff were also white. Above the auctioneer’s head on the white panel an electronic conversion board waited to show the current lot number and the accumulating sales total in sterling, US dollars, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, French francs, and Japanese yen.

Mr Duclos had left passes for Klein and Melissa at Reception and Melissa had also registered and received
a numbered paddle. ‘Are you expecting to bid?’ said Klein.

‘Who knows? I like to be part of the action.’ Klein wanted to see the whole room so they stood by the back wall. Mr Duclos came over to them as the room filled up.

‘There’s very strong interest,’ he said. ‘We have the curator of an American museum here who came especially for the Redon; we’ve got a private collector who saw it in New York and wants to buy it and we’ve got two or three Europeans. Now it’s time for me to take up my phone station.’ He left them to join the other staff at the telephones as the auctioneer stepped up to the podium.

‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Welcome to this sale of French Impressionist and Nineteenth-Century paintings. Please note that Lots Seventeen, Twenty-one, and Forty-six have been withdrawn. Lot One is a river view by Boudin, 1889. Let’s begin at £35,000.’

Someone bald raised his paddle. ‘I have thirty-five thousand,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Thirty-five thousand …’

The auctioneer was young, well-groomed, inexorable. He went smoothly through his litany of lot numbers, titles, and attributions, appealing for ever larger numbers as the bidders variably responded and his hammer rose and fell. The sale moved swiftly from landscape to seascape, from summer to winter, calm to storm, exterior to interior, portrait to still life to floral to nude. Painting after painting leapt on to the viewing stand and back into the hands of the crimson-aproned, crimson-necktied porter as the conversion board flickered its digits and the room sloped like a slide towards the moment when the Redon’s number would be called.

When
Pegase Noir
was put up in front of all those people Klein was shocked. There came to mind
The Slave Market,
the Gerome painting in which a naked girl is displayed by her vendor to a prospective buyer who puts two fingers into her mouth, examining her teeth.

‘Lot Thirty-seven!’ said the auctioneer.
‘Pegase Noir, Black Pegasus
by Odilon Redon, 1910, unique. Shall we start the bidding at four hundred thousand pounds?’

Someone had evidently nodded or raised a finger. ‘I have four hundred thousand,’ said the auctioneer. ‘
It’s like our marriage,’
said Hannelore as Klein whispered her words,
‘full of darkness but it flies.’
He closed his eyes and tried to see her face but recalled only the gesture of her hand as she spoke.

‘I have four twenty,’ said the auctioneer in response to another unseen signal. Klein spotted Mr Las Vegas and his wife or consort; they seemed reluctant to show early foot. ‘Four thirty,’ said the apparently telepathic auctioneer. The air in the room was stretched taut, filling the available space precisely. Klein breathed in the scent of Melissa, heard the faint rustling of her skirt and stockings as she changed position. ‘This is exciting,’ she whispered, and squeezed his hand.

‘Four fifty,’ said the auctioneer. The winged horse in the painting seemed very far away, seemed to be moving ever more into the distance, soaring into the oranges, the reds, the crimson walls and the roses of time past and love long gone.

‘What is it?’ Klein whispered into his hand.

‘What’s what?’ whispered Melissa, her lips brushing his ear, her breath warm.

‘Everything. We come into the world, we do our little dance, then we’re gone, and what did it all matter?’

‘Six hundred thousand,’ said Melissa, and raised her paddle.

‘What are you doing?’ said Klein as Mr Duclos, looking in their direction, raised his eyebrows.

‘It’s going to go a lot higher,’ said Melissa, ‘I can feel it – I’m just speeding things up a bit.’ Her face was flushed, her eyes bright.

‘Six hundred fifty,’ said the auctioneer as Mr Las Vegas nodded. ‘Seven hundred thousand on the telephone. And fifty, seven hundred and fifty,’ as Las Vegas responded. ‘Eight,’ as a paddle went up from a Japanese not yet heard from.

Klein was paying such close attention that by now he felt that he alone was holding the reality of the whole thing together; if he relaxed his grip it might tear loose and blow away like a sail in a storm.

The telephones sprang to life as the distant bidders, sensing the end of the chase, moved in for the kill. ‘Eight fifty,’ said the auctioneer. The bidding was now between two telephones, Las Vegas, and the Japanese.

‘This horse is really taking off,’ said Melissa as one of the telephones bid £950,000. ‘Nine hundred and fifty thousand,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on nine hundred and fifty thousand?’

Up went Melissa’s paddle. ‘One million!’ she said as Mr Duclos frowned at his telephone.

‘“Où
sont les neiges d’antan?”’
said Klein as his left arm went leaden and an ache declared itself at the back of his throat. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Melissa, ‘I’ll just pop into Casualty and see you later.’

‘I have one million,’ said the auctioneer.

‘Harold, what’s the matter?’ said Melissa.

‘It’s only the usual thing – I’ll be fine. You stay with it.’

‘One million,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on one million?’

‘Casualty where?’ said Melissa.

‘Chelsea & Westminster, they’re my local.’ He made his way past the others standing between him and the doorway, reached the stairs, descended without collapsing, achieved the Reception desk, and said quietly to the handsome young woman there, smiling and attentive, ‘Please call an ambulance.’

‘If you have to reef you shouldn’t sail,’ said Francine as Klein reefed the sail of his hospital dream. They were far out at sea in his little boat, it was a night without stars, the wind was moaning, the waves were huge.

‘If I could see a star,’ he said, ‘I’d know which way is up.’ He opened his eyes. It was still the day of the auction; the Coronary Care Unit was full of visitors and that hospital-afternoon daylight that is not the same as free-range daylight. Tubes were feeding heparin and insulin into his left arm.

‘Just pop this under your tongue for me,’ said Staff Nurse Francesca as she gave him a disposable thermometer and put the blood-pressure sleeve on his right arm. Klein had mentally undressed her several times; her skeleton was the perkiest of the day staff. ‘Whuzzu lasname, Fruzzhezza?’ he said.

‘Miller.’ She brought her bosom and name badge closer. ‘You’re losing the thermometer.’

‘Schubert wrote a song cycle about a beautiful miller girl,’ he said when he was able. ‘What’s my blood pressure?’

‘One-ten over fifty. My boyfriend gave me a recording of it with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.’

‘That’s a bit low for me,’ said Klein. ‘Does he know about wine?’

‘Funny you should say that. He’s just bought a book about it. Finger.’

He gave her a finger and she pricked it for a drop of blood which she caught on a B-M stick. ‘We go to wine-tastings sometimes. Fourteen point five.’

‘That’s a little excessive,’ said Klein.

‘It’s fun though,’ said Francesca. She put the glucose monitor back in its box and breezed off in a zephyr of pheromones.

Klein was still shaking his head appreciatively at her going-away view when a queenly Yoruba woman with cheek tattoos put menu forms on his table. ‘What’s good?’ he said.

She gave him a sphinx-like smile. ‘Everything.’

Torn between cottage pie and lasagne, he was whispering his options into his hand when the phlebotomist appeared, a Chinese woman with a serious face. ‘Harold Klein?’ she said. ‘Date of birth: four, two, twenty-five?’

‘That’s me.’ He offered his arm and made a fist as she applied the tourniquet. ‘The blood is the life,’ he said.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘if you knew how tired I am of Dracula jokes …’

‘Sorry.’ He read her name badge as the needle went in: Pearl Epstein. ‘Ever use the
I Ching?’

‘No, and don’t ask me what my star sign is, OK?’ She filled both vials and put a wad of absorbent cotton on the site. ‘Press on this.’

Klein pressed. She labelled the vials, then secured the cotton with a strip of tape. ‘Taurus,’ he said.

Epstein registered surprise. ‘What made you say that?’

‘My first wife was a Taurus.’

She gave him a hard look, gathered up her tray and was gone.

‘These inscrutable Epsteins,’ Klein whispered.

There were six beds in his bay, arranged in two rows of three. At four of them platoons of family and friends clustered with grapes, oranges, apples, bananas, pears, plums, chocolates, biscuits, Lucozade, orange squash, Coca-Cola, Ribena, and mineral water. Some went down to the shop for further supplies while others of them chatted, read, knitted, and gave comfort in cockney and one or two other languages.

Klein had the bed nearest the door in his row. His opposite was a man in his early sixties who, like Klein, was without visitors. He was sitting, fully dressed, in the chair by his bed. At his feet was a blue holdall from which he took a map. He unfolded the map and perused it hurriedly, tracing some route with his finger; then he refolded it, stuffed it back in the holdall, stood up, and hurried anxiously from bed to bed on his side of the room, murmuring, ‘Where is it?’ He then came back down the line on Klein’s side, returned to his chair, looked at the holdall, said, ‘Here it is,’ sat down again, took out the map, and ran his finger over it once more.

‘I know the feeling,’ said Klein.

‘Where’s Ealing?’ said the man. He had an Australian accent.

‘That’s west London – you can get to it on the Underground.’

‘But I’m not,’ said the man.

‘Not what?’

‘Going to Ealing.’

‘I never said you were.’

‘You said, “Why go to Ealing?”’

‘No, I said, “I know the feeling.”’

‘Of what?’

‘Not going to Ealing, if you like.’

‘With or without a bike, I’m not going.’

‘Righty-oh,’ said Klein, giving him a smile and a thumbs-up sign as Melissa appeared, elegant in her little black frock. Beds Three and Five reached for their inhalers as she aimed herself at him.