Gold Digger (5 page)

‘I planned what I would like to eat at a party if I was a grandchild. Stick to short sentences, you said, so I put: Lots.’

That was when Thomas laughed, as if it was funny, Saul thought a little sourly, subsumed with a kind of envy. There were two doors to the room, just as there was to almost every room in this house. He entered, stage left, behind them, always relying on that little element of surprise that was his stock in trade. He carried the pictures he had brought with him.

‘Hello,’ he drawled.

They were not touching, although they sprang apart as if they were, the two of them at the desk on either side, sharing a screen as if taking bites at the same fruit. Thomas leapt to his feet.

‘Saul, you old bugger. How many days late this time? Di, this is Saul; Saul this is Ms Diana Quigly. I’ve spoken about you to one another.’

He had. She smiled at him, uncertainly. What a little mess she was, looking like a mongrel dog fresh from rescue and all in mangy black and smelling of bleach, in contrast to Thomas who was pressed and trimmed. Saul looked round, suppressed a gasp. The room was subtly transformed – the same as it was, but different. Light gleamed off dull polish: the colours of the oak floor, the carpets seemed to be enhanced, somehow, like the skin of the paintings on the wall, no longer as crooked or as haphazard as they were, but not entirely aligned either, simply shown to better advantage.

‘’Allo, Saul,’ she said, wiping her hands on the back of her trousers. ‘I’ll leave you to it, shall I? Would you like a drink?’

Then she was gone.

‘W
hat has she done to you?’ Saul murmured, sinking into a chair, gesturing to the room at large. They never did much by way of small talk.

‘Ah, that,’ Thomas said, without a shred of guilt or embarrassment in his voice, smiling at him affectionately. ‘I fear she’s reinforced my mission in life. I was always a teacher, and now I’m a pupil, too. I know the names of all the birds in the bay.’

‘She’s a thief, Thomas.’

‘There’s little to choose between thief and collector, Saul. Similar instincts, perhaps, so somebody said, and you should know. A reconstructed thief, let’s say. To whom I owe a great debt.’

‘What debt?’

‘Never mind, and anyway it was you who always encouraged me to follow instinct, and that’s what I’m doing. And condemning someone for being a thief, as if theft was a permanent vocation, is less than kind, coming from you. You’re a born burglar, and you were trying to cheat me the first time you met me.’

Saul grinned, ruefully. Trying to sell an inferior painting to Mr Thomas Porteous on the naïve assumption that he was a nouveau riche, middle-aged idiot trying to buy himself a bit of class had been a big mistake, pointed out to him with infinite good manners in an encounter which had changed his life. Now he acted as agent, the additional hunter– gatherer for a virtual recluse as hell-bent as he was himself on finding the best and preserving it honestly. Finding great paintings, large or small, in mint condition, preferably untouched. They were in this together, however rarely Saul appeared and in whatever guise. He did not want a third party in on it, especially a female: he did not want his Collector to be distracted, and yet he could see the necessity. Thomas had been losing the will to live and now he had it in spades.

‘That’s a lovely scarf you have,’ Di said, coming back with a selection of drinks on a polished tray. ‘Mr Porteous says you’re partial to gin.’

Saul raised his eyebrows. She sounded so like a parody of an uppity parlour maid, he failed to realise that she found him terrifying.

‘Saul’s bought some pictures on approval,’ Thomas said smoothly. ‘Shall we look at them together?’

‘Mostly drawings,’ Saul said, ‘And a couple of oil sketches. I think our collection is short on English drawings. There’s scope for plenty more, space to have a room full.’

‘Oh yes,’ Di said, nodding so hard her head looked loose. She had delivered the drinks and sat on the edge of her chair as if waiting for a treat. Saul turned to her, with obvious condescension.

‘And what exactly would you collect if you could?’ he asked her.

She sat with her hands pinned between her knees. Saul disliked girls who did this, as well as girls who were garrulous, and she was both, as if she had just discovered speech, but then he didn’t like girls, full stop. Gauche was the word that sprang to mind; Saul didn’t like it.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. The hands were imploring, gesturing like windmills, irritating and endearing, prefacing a torrent of speech. ‘Yes, I do. I probably like sketches, best. Sketches for oil paintings, when the artist is halfway there, trying it out. When it isn’t fully clothed and ready to go out, when it’s sometimes, like more perfect than the finished thing. Like Constable’s sketches, I like them far more than the polished paintings. I’d have lots of sketches here, something to show how things get made, even sketches that show when the painter should have stopped, and said, that’s enough.’

The speech got faster and faster until she stopped, hesitating in embarrassment, pausing to think and then rushing on.

‘I suppose I like the rejects. I’d like to have been there, in the studio, picking up the stuff left on the floor. Sometimes the best version gets thrown away.’

Saul raised an eyebrow.

‘How on earth have you managed to see Constable’s sketches?’

She was flustered.

‘In a book. And we went to the museum, in London.’

‘Are you particularly fond of Constable?’ Saul asked. She shook her head, emphatically.

‘No, no more than anyone else, I haven’t got favourites, but I do like his sketches and the portraits. Personal things.’

‘Well,’ Saul said, looking at Thomas with a gleam in his eye. ‘I’ve got something for a Constable fan.’

He reached into the large bag he had placed by his seat and withdrew a small panel of wood. Thomas took it from him, moved over to the desk to look at it under the light. Di could not resist looking at it over his shoulder. Saul noticed that they almost touched, but not quite, wondered which of them it was who resisted it.

The panel was obscured by dark varnish with a greenish tinge, allowing the emergence from behind the surface of a figure of a girl in a dull, brown dress sitting in a chair that might have been upholstered in red beneath the murk. She was intent on reading the book she held, ignoring the light from the window on her left. There were visible highlights of white on her forehead, on the collar of her dress and on the edges of the pages of the book. Thomas turned the panel over, breathing deeply. There was a name scratched on the back.
John Constable RA.

‘Oh, clever Saul. John Constable, the younger. The son who could paint like his father. A picture after my own heart. Great minds think alike, Saul.’

He turned the panel back. Di reached out and touched the surface of the paint, tentatively. She had sensitive fingers and bitten nails, Saul noticed.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’

Saul smiled his sedulous smile, revealing his perfect white teeth.

‘Wouldn’t you like to clean it up?’ he said. ‘I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Clean?’

She looked at him without hostility. She either did not notice his sarcastic condescension, or chose to ignore it. She was gripped by the moment. She nodded.

‘Just a bit,’ she said. ‘Not much.’

‘You could try,’ Saul said. ‘Mainly nicotine, I think. A most benign sort of filth, almost a preservative. If you’re going to pollute a painting with anything, smoke around it. Acts as a barrier.’

Thomas sat back and lit a cigar.

‘A bit of mild washing liquid on an almost dry cloth won’t do any damage,’ Saul said.

She smiled at him, completely unoffended by his tone, made a swift bow and bore the panel away.

T
hey sat up late, Thomas and Saul. Diplomatically, Di did not come back.

‘Might she stay up until midnight, admiring that thing?’ Saul asked.

‘Easily.’

‘Will she damage it?’

‘Never. But she will work out what it’s made of. And she’ll treasure it more because it isn’t valuable. She doesn’t do val -ues, not financial values anyway. Tonal values, another matter.’

‘Quite a find then, your little thief. Are you sure she isn’t just echoing you? Liking sketches, liking the lesser as much as the greater? Not giving a hoot about who painted it as long as it’s good?’

Thomas considered. He looked younger than when Saul had seen him last, as if he were shedding years rather than acquiring months. His dear daughters would not be pleased to hear that.

‘She is no one’s echo, she is herself. She dislikes things as virulently as she loves them. We don’t always agree. Please don’t call her a thief.’

‘Alright, I won’t, but I know how she came here first. To steal.’

‘You don’t know, Saul. She came here long before that.’

Saul raised his hands in surrender.

‘You wouldn’t respect me if I didn’t warn you, Thomas. This place may be a temporary refuge for now, but she’s still a thief. Maybe she’s worming her way into your affections,’ he emphasised the word
worming
, ‘with a view to isolating you?’

Thomas lit another cigar. These little cigars were an unadulterated pleasure that Di had come to share.
You could buy a lot with one of these in prison
, she said.

‘On the contrary,’ Thomas said. ‘She finds the idea of split families abhorrent. She’s sorry for them having a mother who died. The idea is to have a party for the grandchildren. The sort of party that used to be given here. She’s planning it.’

Saul whistled through his perfect white teeth and adjusted the crease in his trousers, meticulously.

‘Oh, Thomas love, is that really a good idea?’

‘I hope so, because I would so like it to happen. We have rather frozen luncheon meetings in London where the boys are terribly well behaved. Even the duty visits here stopped after Christina … disappeared.’

‘After Christina drowned,’ Saul said. ‘After she drowned
on her way to France, on a detour that might have ended up with her coming to visit you, scrounging again. I keep in touch, as you asked. At one remove. And I don’t think getting them to come here is a good idea.’
They will simply come to put a value on everything, make them greedier than ever
.

‘It’s the children,’ Thomas said, sadly. ‘Their children. I would like them to see me for what I am. A silly old man who wears silly hats and does magic tricks, that’s how I’d like to be remembered. I want them to have fun. They don’t seem to have much of that. Patrick loved it here. Patrick needs nurture.’

Saul did not say, your two daughters wish you were ten years older than you are so that you would die sooner. You criticised a man’s children only at your own peril. They are desperate, and Edward, the husband of one of them, is more odious and dominant than the two together. And the existence of a housekeeper/protégée, unless such a person was an ancient crone, would not improve things at all, but Thomas would do what Thomas would do. He had a terrible naïveté about his daughters, forgetting that most of their genetic identity had come from their mother who had been, in Saul’s eyes, insanely possessive and envious. She was the one who took her daughters away to a richer man when they were both under ten, when Thomas was not rich at all: she was the one who denied him access and spread the self-justifying legend of his sinister propensities as well the legend of being abandoned herself. The one who reinvented her own persona again and again, self-deluding, jealous bitch and a lousy artist to boot.

Saul’s opinion of the fairer sex carried a distinct prejudice: his affections were confined to men, apart from his sister, but even taking all that into account, Christina had
been dangerously manipulative and prone to violence. And there was Thomas, the innocent, who still hoped his daughters would change into people who shared his values. It was not going to happen. Their minds were addled and worst of all, they had no taste.

‘If anything happens to me whilst Di is still here, you won’t let her get locked up again, will you? It would kill her.’

Thomas said it suddenly, as if it was something he had only just understood. It came out of the blue and in a moment of petulant suspicion, Saul wished that something would simply eradicate Di, like rubbing out a line of a pencil drawing. Then he reprimanded himself, because after all, he did not want Thomas to return to his life of quiet desperation. He wanted him happy.

‘A Paragon, she is, this Diana,’ he said. ‘So tell me, what are her real virtues?’

He was thinking that perhaps Thomas wanted the same from the girl as he did from the paintings he collected. He wanted them raw, untouched, unrestored, authentic and with a protective layer of sheer dirt.

‘Di? She sees things. She never stops looking. She’s intelligent, she’s obsessive and she’s kind.’

It left out the whole issue of the intense mutual attraction which they were both denying, and all the same Saul was impressed, although it did not do as an answer.

‘And her family? What do they think?’

Thomas hesitated, reluctant to discuss what was secret.

‘The only real relative is her father, someone she holds in revulsion, and a man once infamous in these parts, but no longer resident. No longer here. Tell me about mine, Saul. How are they really?’

Beyond hope
, Saul thought, but did not say.
Edward, your
elder daughter’s husband, is teaching himself about art in order to turn your collection into money as soon as allowed.

‘They’re well,’ he said.

He stretched his feet towards the fire and wondered what spring would bring. And when, if ever, these two would notice what was happening to them. They were melding, like ivy on a wall.

L
ater that month, or was it the next, when the wind rose and the draughts whistled, Di got herself locked into the laundry room on the first floor. It had one door only, with a catchy lock, and when she couldn’t get out, she screamed and hurled herself against the walls so hard she was covered in bruises. When Thomas found her, he held her tight until she made him let her go. Later still, when she saw him weeping at his desk, she went in to him and held him. They sat and talked about how, when the house was open to all, there would be no locks on any doors, and no barriers against touching precious things. It would not be that kind of house.