Death of a Salesperson (21 page)

Meanwhile the sale price of Atkinson Grimshaws began steadily yet appreciably to rise. Little ladies in crumbling Leeds terraces found that the picture that had hung over the fireplace for as long as
they
could remember was by the same artist as the picture that Lord Whatsit was always
photographed in front of. A good specimen—and Grimshaw at his best was an extremely competent painter—might before all the fuss began fetch anything up to five thousand. As Grimshaws emerged from cellars and attics they failed to sate the demand for him: it grew. Seven thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand became commonplace. ‘He has been
much
underrated,' the art historians claimed, as prices soared (a case of art imitating commerce). Working behind the scenes, the Countess ensured that the Tate bought one, the Manchester Gallery another. All her visitors were sent off back south with unjunctions that they
must
stop at Leeds on the way down and see all the Grimshaws in the Leeds Gallery. And if they
could
get into the Grand Hall of the Leeds Grand Theatre, they really should seize the chance.

‘It's daylight robbery,' a fellow saleroom correspondent unknowingly whispered to her, when a Grimshaw was knocked down for seventeen thousand. The Countess shrugged.

‘So is a Turner for eight million, great artist though he is.'

The crucial thing, of course, was to recognize when the fad had reached its peak. She understood that some American interest had to be created in Grimshaw, but she also understood the limits of her talents, and Grimshaw's, well enough to realize that there was never going to be a Grimshaw craze in the States: he was from an unfashionable period in British art, and he seemed unadventurous and provincial beside his contemporaries the French Impressionists whom the Americans so besottedly admire. Grimshaw was never going to be bought by the Metropolitan, nor even by that snapper-up of everybody else's trifles, the Getty. Still, there were specialist galleries, dealers with whom she had contacts . . . She had a couple of little house-parties for such people, took them to Leeds and Hardacre, showed them Burtlesham's own Grimshaws. It all created a little ripple of interest among cognoscenti in the States.

It was when she was entertaining her third party of American experts that the Countess began to feel that the time was ripe for a quick kill. To leave it much longer might mean the brief revival had passed its peak. One of the Americans, the director of a gallery in the mid-West with a sizeable and intensely boring collection of late nineteenth-century American and British paintings, had begun putting out delicate feelers, in a way the Countess recognized very well. Grimshaw would add a touch of near-distinction to his undistinguished collection. He wanted to buy.

She took them over to Hardacre, of course.

‘There's the most divine Grimshaw there.
Wooffy
won't sell, of course. It's about the only thing the poor darling
has
got.'

She timed it so they were just in time for the four o'clock tour.

‘You have to do the tour. It's the combination of Wooffy's
price
less performance with the reactions of people to it.'

The Americans loved the tour, loved Wooffy. All of them watched him intently, treasuring up details of the performance to retail to family and friends back home. When the gallery director from the mid-West lingered in front of the Atkinson Grimshaw, Lord Woolmington shoved him forward.

‘Come along, come along! I want you to see this genuine Witherspoon!'

After the tour, the Americans sampled a new departure for Hardacre: tea and horrible floury currant scones made in the mornings before the house opened by Cissie Woolmington herself, and served in the kitchen by a mentally retarded girl from the village. The Countess knew better than to sample these delights. She stayed behind to talk to Wooffy, and on an impulse of generosity said to him:

‘You know, Wooffy, in three or four months' time, you ought to sell that Grimshaw. You'll get five or six times what you would have got twelve months ago, and I don't know that he might not start sliding soon.'

Then the Americans came up from the kitchen, belching bicarbonate, and they set off home. He'll bring it up on the journey home, thought the Countess, and she didn't mean Lady Woolmington's scones.

And he did. He didn't want to be pushy, or out of line, he said, but
was
there a chance that Earl Carbury might consider . . .

‘You know, darling, I think he
might.
We're not really in the business of
selling
paintings, you know, but those are hardly part of the artistic treasury of the house. He'd have to be per
suad
ed. I don't know what sort of sum you were thinking of offering . . . ?'

‘Say sixty thousand for the three.'

‘Pounds
, I take it. With the dollar the way it is, you've got to mean pounds . . . I think you ought to be prepared to up it by five, even ten, don't you, depending on his reaction? Sixty-five thousand? Even seventy? Because I do know he'll need to be persuaded. Best all round if I don't appear in all this, don't you think? You make the offer, and I'll do what I can behind the scenes. George is a dear soul, but just a trifle stick-in-the-mud, and he has this thing about the family heritage . . .'

They had driven past the public car park, and round the drive to the front of the house. The Countess was so taken up with the conversation that she had drawn to a halt before she realized that also pulled up there were three white police cars, and that a constable was standing in the great doorway.

‘My God! What's happened? Don't tell me there's been an accident in the Adventure Playground!'

She had jumped out and shouted, ‘What is it? What's happened?' to the constable at the door when the figure of the Earl, red-faced but solicitous, appeared through it.

‘Don't worry, darling. Don't panic. Somehow the security seems to have broken down. There's been a theft. Must have been one of the visitors.'

‘Oh my God!'

‘Calm down. It sounds worse than it is. They couldn't get at any of the good stuff. They've only taken the Atkinson Grimshaws, thank heavens. And I've got them insured for six thousand.'

• • •

‘Y'know, I'm not at all sure I won't accept that Yank's offer,' said Wooffy Woolmington the next evening, over a final glass of Glenmuckitt malt whisky in the Hardacre sitting-room.

‘I thought you would,' said Cissie, knitting peacefully, ‘when you didn't say no at once.'

‘Feel a bit guilty. Seems a damned shame, and damned hard on that nice little Edwina Carbury. Those damned thieves knew they'd never get away with the Van Dyke, and wouldn't be able to sell it if they did. There's been all this talk about Grimshaw recently, so they took him instead. Damned nonsense all this talk, what? Feller's been dead nigh on a hundred years—why should he suddenly have people talking about him, and jump in value? Some sillyarse in Bond Street got it up, I suppose. Still . . .'

‘Thirty thousand, he said, didn't he?'

‘That's what I got him to. I think we should. Apparently the fad is getting to its peak at the moment, so Edwina said. We'd feel damned fools if we refused thirty for it now, then in a year's time it's only worth five again.'

‘I can see that, Wooffy,' said his wife. ‘Still, I'm not so sure. You've got to remember how well the house is doing. And the Grimshaw is one of the attractions. If that goes, there isn't anything very interesting in the picture line.'

Wooffy looked at her, affronted.

‘Good heavens, woman,' he spluttered, touched to the quick. ‘What arrant nonsense! There's Bootle's picture of m'grandmother! And what about the genuine Witherspoon?'

‘S
hall I freeze the rest of the stew, dear?' asked Herbert Greenaway, gazing almost amorously at the remains of dinner.

‘Of course,' snapped Mabel Greenaway. ‘You don't think I want to eat it again tomorrow, do you?' She did not bother to look up from her knitting. Knitting for Mabel Greenaway was a kind of tribal violence, with spears. It demanded concentration.

So Herbert Greenaway got from the kitchen cupboard one of the little tinfoil containers, and began spooning into it the remains of the evening's casserole. Good, domesticated Herbert.

In fact, good, domesticated Herbert did more than that. He added to the mixture one little mushroom before he finally placed the box neatly in the deep-freeze compartment which sat on top of the refrigerator. Quite an innocent-looking mushroom, especially after he had cut it up and disguised its odder features. But it was this mushroom that extensive reading, and his naturalist friend Fred Prior, had taught him was the most deadly growing in the British Isles.

Herbert came back into the sitting-room.

‘I think I've got everything packed, dear,' he said.

Mabel sighed, gave one more venemous jab to the dead body of her knitting, and put it aside.

‘You won't have. You're a perfect fool when it comes to packing. I'll have to go through it as usual. It's bad enough being left for two weeks, without having to nursemaid you before you go. But there, it's always the same . . .'

For Herbert was off to the Continent, on a business trip for the firm. Or so Mabel thought. So his firm thought.

In fact—Herbert smiled in voracious anticipation as he heard Mabel's heavy form heaving itself up the stairs
(Herbert had always liked big women, but enough had been enough many years ago as far as Mabel was concerned)—he was running away. With a secretary. Not with
his
secretary. That would have been vulgar. And inconsiderate to the Firm, to have one whole department disappear overnight. Actually he was running away with George Mason (of Business Accounts)'s secretary. With large-busted, wide-hipped, five foot nine Marcia Lemon—blonde, mascaraed, pneumatic Marcia. Herbert Greenaway flicked his tongue round his lips like a lecherous lizard, in anticipation.

She had arranged most of it. The false passports, the new identities, the money . . . all that money . . . the Firm's money (always a
mean
firm, Herbert felt, so it really served them right). He and Marcia would disappear without trace. Leaving behind . . . Herbert regarded the mushroom, gratuitous as it was, as the last deed of self-assertion of a disappearing persona; one final paying-off of scores before he became, in resurrection, a New Man.

And it would sit there, in the freezer, waiting until Mabel's salivary juices were tickled by the thought of a nice stew, with none of the bother of preparation.

• • •

‘You'll want sandwiches,' said Mabel next morning. When he whimpered in protest she snapped: ‘Of course you will. You're not paying the prices they charge for meals on those Channel ferries.'

She might have spoken more pleasantly. She felt quite friendlily disposed towards him. But she thought so sudden a change of demeanour might arouse suspicion in the man she intended to murder.

She cut, skilfully, thin slices of brown bread, and took from the refrigerator the tin of crab paste she had so carefully doctored the day before to simulate food poisoning in those so unfortunate as to eat it. For Mabel had worked all her life in a hospital dispensary, and had learned all there was to know about poisons. She had a sharp, inquiring mind
that had hardly been stretched at all by her home life, and the marital companionship of Herbert Greenaway.

That'll teach him to go off on trips with his fancy woman! she thought. For she had found various tell-tale marks and odours on his clothes, had put two and two together, and made three and a half.

She buttered the bread and spread the crab paste thickly, thickly, between the slices. Considerate, thoughtful Mabel Greenaway!

• • •

‘Well!' said Herbert Greenaway, as the hire-car driven by him sped out of Dieppe. ‘That all went well! A piece of cake! Couldn't have gone better!'

Beside him Marcia Lemon puffed out her bosom. ‘I told you there was nothing to worry about,' she said.

Herbert's eyes strayed from the road, sideways and down at the bosom. It was indeed a superb bosom—mountainous, firm and rounded. Others, others in the office, said that it was a cold bosom. In fact the Firm joke about Miss Lemon was that her best assets were frozen. But Herbert didn't feel that way. His experience of sexual abandon had not been so extensive since his marriage that he was inclined to quarrel with his good fortune.

‘Golly, I'm a lucky man!' he now said.

‘And I'm a lucky girl,' said Marcia, with a sort of simper. But she said it not altogether convincingly. Because after all what was Herbert Greenaway but five foot six and a half of middle-aged nothing-very-much? Balding, pasty, with a moustache that would have been Crippenesque if it had grown more luxuriantly. Whereas she, Marcia . . . well, she was a girl who knew her own value, as well as the value of pretty much everything else.

‘You organized things a treat,' said Herbert. ‘The false passports, the car, the transfer of the money.'

‘Did you sign the cheque?' asked Marcia.

Herbert patted his pocket.

‘All ready here. Just waiting for one of us to go and collect. Seventy-five thousand. We'll be in Brussels tomorrow,' he sniggered. ‘Seems funny to think we're going in the wrong direction.'

‘I told you,' said Marcia, ‘I want us to be completely untraceable. After Newhaven we didn't exist.'

‘You're marvellous,' said Herbert fondly, lecherously. ‘Feeling better? Tummy OK?'

For Marcia Lemon, who loved travel, was a bad traveller, suffering agonies of fear on planes and agonies of sickness on boats. The great motive behind her plan of escape, her new identity, was to find herself safely on that land mass which is the Continent with no reason ever to leave it to return to sea-girt Britain. With every reason, in fact, not to. So as she had heaved and vomited in the Ladies on the Channel ferry, as she had emptied herself, it seemed, of everything she had ever eaten, she had said to herself, over and over, as if telling a rosary, the words: ‘Last time, last time, last time . . .'