Priceless (17 page)

S
erena’s disappointment that Julian’s late night visit had not brought a wildly romantic proposal soon abated. After all, Julian was still very much in her life, spending lots of time in Cornwall while the big house remained unlet, and she hoped that the more time they spent together, the closer they would inevitably become. They’d been seeing each other for a few months. She knew that was a record for Julian. She decided to hang in there. See how things developed.

Julian certainly seemed to get along well with Katie. She would bound out to meet his car. It was cupboard love for the most part. Julian never forgot to bring some trinket that Katie would appreciate: a book, a bracelet, a magazine. All the same, Serena was gratified to hear Katie say that she definitely preferred Julian to Donna.

And God it was good to be having sex again. Her libido, which had once been so low she thought it might have died and gone forever, was back with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, Serena and Julian’s little business venture was soon up and running. Serena explained to Julian that the best way to make a painting look old was to use old materials. On his trips to London she had him source authentically old paper and canvases from junk shops and antiquarian booksellers. Worthless old paintings could be overlaid with something more interesting. The end papers of old books could be ripped out to create contemporaneous drawings.

Serena was versatile. She would study the haul that Julian brought to her on a Friday night and decide what it might become according to what she had to work with. Sometimes Julian was frustrated that Serena wouldn’t bang out a Raphael on a piece of MDF, but he bowed to her greater knowledge of such things. Better to sell a few little “early Victorian” paintings than blow their cover with something less authentic right at the start.

It was Julian’s job to get Serena’s paintings out on the market. The smaller ones were easy to get rid of. Julian would take them into antiques shops up and down the A road to Cornwall. He would choose a new shop on each occasion, claim that his mother had just died and that he’d found whatever he happened to be carrying at the time in her attic.

He had his patter down perfectly. Julian had a natural melancholy to his expression, and thus he was able to convince most people he met for the first time that his bereavement was still fresh. Often he found he could summon up tears by thinking of his childhood pet, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Bucket, who had been run over by a Land Rover while running to fetch a stick he had thrown.

Julian’s ruse worked particularly well with female antiques dealers, especially of a certain age. They would be so busy finding cups of tea and ginger biscuits to console this poor middle-aged orphan that they wouldn’t ask too much about the provenance of the picture. Julian would explain that he had to be rid of it as soon as possible. The sight of it made him so unhappy. And then he would ask for a sum of money that he knew to be well below the going rate for a decent Victorian watercolor. And the dealer, spotting the opportunity to take the pretty painting and
sell it at a much higher price, would usually hand over a couple of hundred in cash there and then. No questions asked.

But Julian knew this method was far too labor-intensive. And there was a strong possibility that one day soon a few of the dealers would find themselves at the same antiques fair with some very similar-looking pictures on their stalls. Plus, he had not forgotten the serious wedge of cash that painting of his mother’s dogs had achieved at auction. In short, Julian was greedy for more. Tens of thousands per painting. That had been the original plan. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life making a couple of hundred here and there like some bloody Lovejoy.

“But I can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” Serena explained to him. “If you only ever bring me Victorian paper, then you can’t expect me to paint a Renaissance Madonna.”

“I know,” said Julian. “It’s just that I’m sick of this fannying around. These silly little daubs.”

Serena bristled slightly. Despite her initial misgivings about Julian’s scheme, she had come to enjoy being back in the studio. And whatever he thought about the speed and efficiency with which she executed the pieces, Serena always did her best to ensure that the final result was something she was proud of.

Julian must have sensed that she was unhappy with his comment. He tried to recover his position. “I only mean ‘silly little daubs’ in that it must be very boring for you, painting more or less the same thing over and over. I can see from the old stuff you have upstairs that you’re capable of really great things.”

Serena frowned.

“Then bring me some great materials,” she said.

“I’ll do my best.” Julian wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck. And, despite wanting to be angrier with him for whining about having to deal with all those middle-of-the-road antiques shops, she found herself melting. And before too long she had turned to kiss him back and was very grateful that Katie was already in bed.

They made love in the kitchen that night. It was quite warm, and Serena was wearing a long white skirt with nothing underneath. Turning her so that she was leaning over the kitchen sink and he was standing behind her, Julian simply lifted her skirt up and entered her from behind. Serena clung to the edge of the sink as Julian thrust hard into her, filling her with his manhood.

Serena loved this impromptu, urgent sex. It made her feel so desirable in a pure, almost animal way. She loved the idea that Julian was so attracted to her that he simply had to have her right then, no matter what she was doing, with no preamble. It was hot and hurried, but oh so fantastic. As he pushed into her, she pushed back against him with equal force, inviting him deeper and deeper inside. She could not get enough of him. She moved his warm hands from her waist to her breasts and moaned with lust as he played with her nipples and nibbled gently at the back of her neck.

“I’m coming,” Julian’s voice was ragged with lust as he discovered he could hold back no longer. Serena didn’t try to slow him down. The best part was when he lost control. His hands tightened upon her. He lost his rhythm and gave in to his orgasm with a cry of surprise.

Afterward he rearranged her skirt for her and said, as he tucked his penis back into his underpants, “You can finish washing up now.”

“Cheeky swine!”

He was lucky it had been a good shag. Otherwise Serena might have taken his head off with a low-flying plate.

The following morning, Julian went back to London promising that when he returned it would be with something that would lend Serena some real inspiration. He was back just three days later, clutching a very inauspicious-looking parcel, wrapped in a dirty brown cloth.

“What is that?” Katie asked as she opened the door to him.

“It’s something very special for your mother.”

“Doesn’t look very special to me,” said Katie.

But when Serena saw what Julian had brought for her, she was almost as happy and surprised as if he had given her a diamond. Katie watched with great interest and incomprehension as Serena went into raptures over the ancient piece of wood the dirty rags had concealed.

“What is it?” Katie asked again.

It was a tiny fragment of a piece of work from the sixteenth century. Back in those days, everyone who was anyone would have had a little altar in his or her home, and this was part of a domestic altarpiece. Serena marveled at the fragments of paint that still clung to the wood. She thought she could make out the sleeve of a garment. A hand with finely tapered fingers.

“Where did you find this?” she asked Julian.

“Bloke down the pub was doing a house clearance. History teacher. Died of a stroke. Had lived in the same house for forty-seven years. This was just sitting on a bookshelf. His daughter thought he might have picked it up in Italy, but she assumed it was just junk.”

“It’s amazing,” said Serena.

“I don’t think it looks amazing,” interrupted Katie.

“Ah, but it will,” said Julian. “By the time your mother has finished with it.”

•          •          •

Julian was right. Here was something that Serena could really get excited about. As it was, the piece of wood was practically worthless. A nice thing to have, sure. But unless you really knew what you were looking at, it was just a piece of wood with a few flakes of pigment on it. Even if you did know what you were looking at, the painting wasn’t so exciting. The fragment contained no real features of note. Even being able to see a bit more of the hand would have made a difference. And it had not been painted particularly professionally. As it was, the picture was too abstract and too naïve. If it contained part of the Madonna’s face, however, by an artist who might have learned at the feet of one of the greats …

“You have to understand that this is going to be an experiment,” she warned Julian. “I’ve never attempted something from this period before, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to pull it off. It’s easy to fake something from the nineteenth century, but paintings in the Renaissance were produced in an entirely different way. The materials were different. Techniques were different.”

“Spare me the art lesson,” said Julian, kissing her wrist. “Just work your magic.”

A few days later, Julian had the chance to work some magic of his own. At a dreadful Fulham drinks party, he met a young girl called Annabel. He’d been drawn across the room by her country-fresh prettiness and her long, bouncy hair, redolent of a freshly groomed pony’s tail. Once he got closer he realized that to go with her horsey hair, Annabel also had the laugh of a donkey. For the first time ever, he found himself making a conscious effort not to be amusing, in order to avoid having to hear it. But what looked as though it would be a very short conversation stretched until the end of the evening because, just as
Julian was ready to excuse himself to the loo and hide out in the kitchen, Annabel revealed that she worked at a small private art museum in Kent.

“Really?” said Julian, perking up. “Tell me about it.”

“Oh, it’s just too unspeakably dull,” she said.

Not to Julian. Back when he’d first thought of the forgery racket, the one thing that had bugged him was how to fake provenance. That, more than anything, could convince a doubting dealer or auctioneer that what they were seeing was the real McCoy. He had come across the answer when reading about John Myatt and John Drewe, the most successful forgers of the twentieth century. Their deception had been so difficult to uncover because they’d been able to produce museum records for their work. Museum records that they themselves had introduced into museum libraries.

Upon hearing that she worked at a museum, Julian suddenly saw Annabel as less of an annoyance and more as a potentially useful accomplice. Of course, he would first have to gain her trust and loyalty. And, unfortunately, that would probably mean taking her to bed.

“I want to know everything about your job,” said Julian. “In fact, I want to know everything about you.”

Annabel blushed at his intensity.

“Can I get you another drink first?” he asked.

Two more glasses of chardonnay, and Annabel was done for. She invited Julian back to her flat, where she played him a Robbie Williams CD.

“I just love ‘Angels,’ don’t you?”

Julian nodded, though he didn’t love “Angels” at all.

Annabel got to her feet and swayed from side to side, singing along with her hero. Not quite in time. Not quite in tune. Julian got up and kissed her, in part to stop the singing, but also because he wanted to cut to the chase.

If he was going to have to sleep with Annabel on a
regular basis for any length of time in order to make use of her position at the museum, then he wanted to know how pleasurable the assignment was likely to be.

An hour after the first kiss, he had his answer. In the sack, Annabel was as bouncy as a cocker spaniel on a trampoline. She kissed a bit like a cocker spaniel too. And practically howled when she came. But overall the experience was not a bad one, and thus Julian decided that he would take one for the team. Or several, because that was what it would take.

After all, it would be a while before he could innocently ask Annabel if she might just be able to organize a private and unsupervised visit to the museum archives.

CHAPTER 22

B
ack in Cornwall, Serena had no idea how hard Julian was trying to help their scheme succeed. As the seasons turned and summer became autumn, Serena was busy working on her part of the deal. But for months the little piece of panel that Julian had found for her remained untouched. It was too valuable for Serena to risk making a mistake. Instead, she spent hours experimenting on bits of broken fencing or old cupboard doors as she tried to re-create authentic sixteenth-century pigments. Whenever she had a spare moment she pored over books on the subject, learning how the Renaissance artists had made their paints and the tools with which they’d applied them. Katie was banned from her mother’s studio
while Serena worked with toxic ingredients: lead oxide to make white, mercury oxide for cinnabar and burned sienna. Other ingredients were too precious and rare to risk having them end up in one of Katie’s own creative spectaculars. It took Serena seven weeks to obtain a tiny piece of lapis with which to re-create the luxurious blue so precious that it was only ever used for the Madonna’s cloth.