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Whether they knew this piquant detail before, or whether they’ve taken it in now – whether they even know who Menelaus is – it’s impossible to tell. One of the dogs, though, is polite enough to scratch itself in a way that suggests some mild passing interest.

  ‘The point is, though,’ says Tony to me, ‘that she’s back.’

  ‘Not his mother,’ explains Laura.

  ‘Not my mother, no,’ says Tony heavily. ‘My mother’s dead, God rest her.’

  ‘So of course we’ve got the damned thing parked on us again.’

  Is it Laura who dictates hanging policy in this house? Is this the answer to my question? I wonder what would have happened if they’d had mother-in-law herself parked on them. Would she also have been locked up in the breakfast-room? Dangled off a hook so low that she sagged at the knees?

  ‘Well, my dear,’ Tony tells her, as he opens the front door for me, ‘you won’t have to put up with it for much longer.’

  ‘The only reason he hasn’t sold it before is because it wasn’t here to sell,’ says Laura. ‘He’s sold everything else. And he always manages to get himself ripped off.’

  ‘That’s why I’m putting myself in Mr Clay’s hands. You’re not telling me he’s going to rip me off?’

  ‘I should, if I were you!’ calls Laura to me, as Tony pulls the front door to behind his back, and she vanishes from my sight. ‘Teach him a lesson!’

  I don’t like to catch Tony’s eye. I edge away round the lake and the dogs who are helpfully trying to drink it up. But when I look up I see that it’s the dogs he’s gazing at.

  ‘Not a clue about business, poor love,’ he says mournfully. ‘Can’t understand that everything in the world’s done by personal connections.’

  It occurs to me that Laura’s remark might be discreetly construed as a challenge to his authority, and that spurning this challenge will bind him yet more firmly to our new alliance.

  ‘I don’t want to cause any difficulties,’ I say. ‘I mean, if your wife feels I ought not to be involved …’

  ‘Good God, don’t take any notice of her!’ he says. ‘I never do. Fine mess we’d be in.’

  I smile a dreadful little smile of male solidarity. I’m going to die of shame for this. But later.

  The smile’s such a success that it tempts him into new depths of confidentiality. He becomes solemn.

  ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘a lot of people round here resent you chaps. Coming down at the weekends, taking up all the parking in Lavenage, turning the grocer’s into a health food shop. But I say, look, if they’re the sort of people who are prepared to pitch in and lend a helping hand, then they’re neighbours, they’re members of the community like the rest of us.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘That’s generous of you. I’m very touched.’ Do I detect a slight catch in my throat? Am I going to ask if I can sign a petition in favour of his scramble track? No, I limit myself to another little smile, a touched and grateful one. ‘And I’ll let you know if I get anywhere with our Belgian friend.’

  On which note I withdraw down the drive. But I feel such a dizzy sense of achievement at the progress I’ve made that I have another of my sudden inspirations. On the spur of the moment I decide to attempt one stage further still. I stop and turn back to Tony.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I call, with amazingly plausible belatedness. ‘What about your Double Dutchmen? Do you want me to ask if he’d like to have a look at those?’

  ‘Why not?’ calls Tony. ‘What have we got to lose?’

  What has he got to lose? Nothing that he knows about. Really, it’s like taking candy off a child. I should have become a confidence trickster ages ago.

  I feel the physical force of the expression ‘walking on air’; I float over the lakes and potholes of the drive as easily as a hovercraft. Then, as I turn into the lane at the end, this soft and balmy cushion of air under my feet solidifies with terrifying suddenness into a shrieking, flapping, rising something, and for some minutes after the pheasant has cleared the barbed wire and vanished I’m too shocked to breathe.

  All right, all right, I think to myself, once I can think again. Point taken. There may be surprises yet to come.

  I must stop talking about this strange and terrifying venture I’m now launched upon, even humorously to myself, as a confidence trick, because it’s not – it’s a public service, a contribution to the common weal at least as notable as anything that Rockefeller or Getty ever did. Tony Churt’s unhesitating readiness to sell Helen to someone he assumes to be a criminal suggests very plainly the kind of fate that I’m almost certainly saving my picture from. If there were any justice in the world I should get my name incised in large Roman capitals across the top of the gallery that it’s finally housed in.

  Actually I do feel easier in my mind, ridiculously, now I know that the buyer I’ve found is a Belgian, however shadowy. He’s taken on a little reality for me – he’s shed a little of his stark non-existence. He must exist, if only because there’s something so gratifying about the prospect of Tony Churt’s being humbled by the race he feels so free to despise.

  In any case, when I say, or allow him to believe, that I’ve found a shadowy Belgian, this is surely in terms of strict logic true, because I have found a shadowy Belgian. A Belgian rather more shadowy than my collector. About the latter we know at least that he’s wealthy, whereas we know nothing about Bruegel’s finances at all. It’s also of course a classic suggestio falsi, which I must remember for my first-year Introduction to Formal Reasoning course, though one of the things contributing to my insane excitement as I come tumbling and stumbling downhill through the woods is the dawning realization that I’m never going to have to teach it again.

  If I am in the woods, because by this time I’m too busy with my own thoughts to notice the reality of the very real piece of country around me. I’ve started to worry about exactly how I’m going to carry out my great public service. The rough outline which seems to be emerging inside my head is this. I’m going to take Helen and the two Dutch pictures to Sotheby’s for a valuation, and I’m going to report the valuation absolutely truthfully to Tony Churt. Up to this point, everything’s entirely straightforward and entirely clear to me. But here we leave the highway. If he accepts the valuation, I go ahead and sell the pictures for him. Since my admirable Belgian, wealthy and complaisant though he is, is still not quite real enough to produce real money, I shall have to sell them the way anyone else would, by finding a dealer who’s prepared to buy them for something like the valuation, less his usual ten per cent. Then I go back to Tony, tell him I’ve persuaded my Belgian to pay the full valuation, and hand it over less my own five and a half per cent.

  So I’m going to have to find four and a half per cent of the value of the three pictures. Which will be how much? Well, what’s the valuation likely to be? Very roughly? Ball-park figures, as Tony Churt would say, though what ball-park figures are I have only a ball-park idea. Well, let’s say the Giordano is £10,000, since this is the figure that Tony plucked hopefully out of the air, and surely out of the very thinnest air in the uppermost reaches of the stratosphere. A plausible figure for the skaters might be a couple of thousand, and for the cavalrymen a couple of thousand more. That’s, what, £14,000. Add a thousand to be on the safe side. Five and a half per cent of £15,000 is … I can’t do the calculation in my head, what with that maddening extra half per cent I’ve negotiated for myself, and the branches catching at my face, and my feet sliding away downhill in the mud a lot faster than the rest of me. But it must plainly be under a thousand pounds. A figure with only two noughts! This is ridiculously encouraging!

  But then we come to the fourth picture, the Belgian picture, my picture. This one, of course, I’m not going to get valued at Sotheby’s, or anywhere else, nor am I going to sell it to the dealer. I’m going to keep it. Eventually it’s going to cover any possible outlay a hundred times over. In the meantime, though, I have to carry not just four and a half per cent of its price but a hund
red per cent of it. So what’s the price going to be? How am I going to concoct a plausible figure?

  Simple. The label on the back implies that it’s after Vrancz. I merely look in the records of sale-room prices in the V & A and see what kind of price paintings by his Circle or Followers fetch. What will it be? Another couple of thousand?

  Simple as this procedure is, though, I’m not going to follow it. Since the rest of the deal’s so reasonable, and since I stand to gain in the end, I’m going to make a quixotic gesture. I’m going to look up the price of a genuine Vrancz. Which will be, what, £10,000? Say £20,000. Then I’m going to go back to Tony and say, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m cutting too many corners, but I took a deep breath and decided not to get that unframed painting valued, because I knew what they’d tell me: if it was labelled “Vrancz” it wasn’t by Vrancz. I thought I should try offering it in all innocence to my Belgian as genuine – and I’m afraid he fell for it. I feel a bit ashamed of myself, to tell you the truth, because I told him I wanted £20,000. So here you are – £20, 000. Less five and a half per cent. I hope you’re not too shocked.’

  So Tony will be pocketing £18,000 more than he can possibly have expected – and all his prejudices about the stupidity of Belgians will have been gratifyingly confirmed. Also, I shall have proved myself as unscrupulous as he is when I’ve a percentage at stake, which will probably be an even more gratifying confirmation of his general prejudices about human nature. Meanwhile, the picture will be on our kitchen wall, maturing with a graceful lack of haste into a Bruegel. As Tony says, there’s something in this deal for everyone. A little more for me than for him, perhaps. But that’s business.

  Hold on, though. Isn’t it going to come as a nasty surprise when Tony Churt opens his Daily Telegraph one morning, some months or years from now, and sees the photograph of me unveiling my newly discovered masterpiece to the world’s media? Isn’t it going to come as an even nastier surprise to me the following morning when I open my Guardian and see a photograph of Tony Churt telling another press conference how he’d entrusted the picture to me to sell for him, and how I’d carried out what he’ll make sound rather less like an act of public service, and rather more like … well, yes, a confidence trick?

  No, because it’s not going to be like that. The deal’s going to unroll slowly over the course of many months, like the slowly changing seasons, each with its characteristic labour. In the first panel I break the ground. In the next I plant my twenty thousand. Then, before the summer’s too far advanced, comes a third labour. Somewhere in the rough ground I’m traversing now, where our two estates meet, I bump into Tony We talk about this and that, as neighbours do, and in an afterthought as I turn to go, as artlessly performed as my afterthought this morning, I say: ‘Oh, something I’ve always meant to tell you. This’ll make you laugh. You remember that unframed picture of yours, the one you stopped up the fireplace with? You’ll think this is very ridiculous, but I somehow fell in love with it while I was waiting to deliver it to my man, I don’t know why. So it wasn’t the Belgian who bought it – it was me! It’s on my kitchen wall.’

  ‘Good God!’ says Tony in amazement. ‘So where did the money come from?

  ‘I scraped it together somehow,’ I say modestly. ‘Don’t ask me how!’

  ‘£20,000?’ says Tony, astonished.

  ‘Don’t remind me! I just had to have that picture, though!’

  ‘But it wasn’t worth anything like that! It wasn’t genuine! You told me!’

  ‘I know,’ I say, with heart-breaking simplicity. ‘But I’d also told you I was going to get you £20,000 for it. I felt in honour bound to pay what I’d said.’

  He gazes at me in incomprehension. In all his manifold wheelings and dealings he’s never come across such a yearning for the higher things of life, or such punctiliousness in a matter of business. ‘But this puts me in a terrible position!’ he cries. ‘It’s one thing ripping off some unknown Belgian. But a neighbour … a penniless academic … a personal friend who went out of his way to make himself helpful … Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Why didn’t I tell him? For a very good and honourable reason.

  ‘Because I know you,’ I say. ‘You’d have refused to accept the money. You’d have insisted on selling it to me for £2,000.’

  This confidence in the goodness of his nature, so naïve as to border on idiocy, might arouse suspicion in anyone a little more acute. But on Tony Churt it has a completely unforeseen effect, or what would be a completely unforeseen effect if I weren’t foreseeing it now. He has trouble with his voice. ‘No one’s ever said anything like that to me before,’ he manages. ‘Look, I’m going to repay you that £18,000 … Yes, I insist! I don’t know how … I may have to sell the estate …’

  Now it’s my turn to be moved. I break down and confess everything …

  Hold on. The painting of this particular labour has departed from any conceivable reality. There are many embarrassments which this scheme of mine may land me in. Tony Churt’s offering to repay me money, I think I can say with reasonable safety, isn’t going to be one of them.

  Let’s repaint the panel from where I told him I’d scraped the money together, I don’t know how, and bought the picture myself. This is where I went wrong. He may well be surprised, but he doesn’t show any signs of being softened by the news – of course he doesn’t. What does he do? Laughs in my face, I should think, at the insane extravagance of my aesthetic and moral sensibilities alike.

  But that’s fine. In fact it’s good, it’s very good, for all the labours yet to come. Because I don’t take his mockery amiss. I laugh with him. I make myself even more ridiculous. ‘I know it’s silly,’ I tell him. ‘But to me it’s worth every penny. Because even though it’s not a real Vrancz … I don’t know, there’s something about that picture …’

  And the ground’s prepared for the later panels in the series: my growing obsession with the Merrymakers, which eventually leads to my beginning to study late sixteenth-century Netherlandish art, and then, in growing excitement, as the grapes ripen on the vine, showing the picture to a specialist in the period, who takes one look and cries out with unprofessional astonishment, ‘Holy shit – you know what this is …?’

  Let’s leave the last few panels unpainted for the moment, though. We’ll come to them all in good time. Let’s go back to the one where I tell Tony Churt that I scraped the money together I don’t know how. Because I don’t. Know how I scraped the money together. A few hundred for the other pictures is one thing. £20,000 is quite another. There are one or two more labours to be inserted here.

  And suppose the cavalrymen or the skating scene are worth a lot more than I think. Suppose Sotheby’s tell me that they’re worth … I don’t know, it could be anything … £50,000 apiece, even!

  No, that’s all right. Because then I shall find it perfectly possible, both psychologically and morally, to find that the so-called Vrancz is worth only a couple of thousand. If I get him a good price for the Giordano and the other two I can adjust the value of my picture to fit.

  One way or another I can do it.

  I realize with a shock that I’m approaching the cottage. I’ve no recollection of emerging from the woods, or of seeing the valley opening out in front of me as I picked my way through the cowpats, let alone the snow-capped crags and blue distances and beckoning sea that I saw on my outward journey. What I was seeing as I came back was the almost equally complex and wonderful landscape of the deal I’m setting up. The great diagonals of my scenario had taken my eye from the small, plausible details in the foreground – the comical dance of buyer and seller to the dealer’s tune – and led it up to the snowbound whitelead peaks of the soaring prices, out through those endlessly alluring veils of mountain blue to the sea where my ship lies freighted with her cargo of noughts.

  But now I have to convey this vision to Kate, if only because all our finances, such as they are, are held in common, so there’s no possible way in wh
ich I could raise the six or ten or twenty thousand pounds I shall need without her knowing.

  The high peaks vanish behind the winter grime on the windows of the cottage, still waiting for me to clean them. The swelling press of canvas on the high-pooped caravel becomes three of Tilda’s sleeping-suits, washed by Kate and hanging accusingly out to dry.

  Yes. Now comes the hardest labour of all.

  Kate’s sitting in front of the fan heater, holding two small feet in the air, and smiling down at the owner balanced on her knees. Her left breast is hanging free from her open shirt, like Helen’s in the picture, but larger, whiter, softer and infinitely more beautiful. A drop of milk hangs on her nipple. She looks up, still smiling. ‘Good walk?’ she asks, with every appearance of polite interest.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. I’m not fooled by her smile. I know that tone of voice. There’s something particularly irritating about her efforts to make me feel guilty for not getting on with a book in which she has neither interest nor belief – and something more irritating still about her refusal to do it openly. I know that things are going to get worse when I explain the reason, and worse still if I don’t find exactly the right way to begin. Nevertheless, I bravely take in a good supply of air and open my mouth, eager to find out what’s going to emerge. But she’s absorbed in Tilda again already, and there’s something so simple and concrete and complete about the two of them together, and something so confused and abstract and unfinished about what I have to say, that I let the air out again.

  I take my coat off and sit down at the table to work instead. The ability to defer giving battle is the essence of strategy. I put out my hand to move the folder I left discreetly covering my stack of books – and find there’s no need. The folder’s lying beside them. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the cover of the topmost book is screaming at the world, with a picture of a dancing peasant just to drive the point home in the most blatantly obvious way.