The Art of the Matter Read online

  This story was first published in the STORYCUTS series by Transworld Digital 2011

  Taken from the collection The Veteran and Other Stories.

  Copyright © Frederick Forsyth 2001

  Frederick Forsyth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  The Art of the Matter

  Backmatter

  Frederick Forsyth

  The Art of the Matter

  The Art of the Matter

  NOVEMBER

  The rain came down. It fell in a slowly moving wall upon Hyde Park and, borne by a light westerly wind, drifted in grey curtains of falling water across Park Lane and through the narrow park of plane trees that divides the northbound and southbound lanes. A wet and gloomy man stood under the leafless trees and watched.

  The entrance to the Grosvenor House Hotel ballroom was brightly lit by several arc lights and the endless glare of camera flashes. Inside was warm, snug and dry. Under the awning before the door was an area of only damp pavement and here the uniformed commissionaires stood, gleaming umbrellas at the ready, as the limousines swept up, one by one.

  As each rain-lashed car drew up by the awning one of the men would run forward to shield the descending star or film celebrity for the two-yard dash, head down, from car to awning. There they could straighten up, plaster on the practised smile and face the cameras.

  The paparazzi were either side of the awning, skin-wet, shielding their precious equipment as best they could. Their cries came across the road to the man under the trees.

  ‘Over here, Michael. This way, Roger. Nice smile, Shakira. Lovely.’

  The great and the good of the film world nodded benignly at the adulation, smiled for the lenses and thus for the distant fans, ignored the few anorak-clad autograph hunters, strange persistent voles with pleading eyes, and were wafted inside. There they would be led to their tables, pausing to beam and greet, ready for the annual awards ceremony of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

  The small man under the trees watched with unrequited longing in his eyes. Once he had dreamed that he too might be there, a star of the film world in his own right, or at the very least a recognized journeyman at his trade. But he knew it was not to be, not now, too late.

  For more than thirty-five years he had been an actor, almost entirely in films. He had played in over a hundred, starting as an extra, with no spoken words, moving to tiny bit parts but never being cast in a real role.

  He had been a hotel porter while Peter Sellers walked past and on screen for seven seconds; he had been the driver of the army lorry that gave Peter O’Toole a lift into Cairo; he had held a Roman spear, rigid at attention, a few feet from Michael Palin; he had been the aircraft mechanic who helped Christopher Plummer into a Spitfire.

  He had been waiters, porters, soldiers in every known army from the Bible to the Battle of the Bulge. He had played cab-drivers, policemen, fellow-diners, the man crossing the street, the wolf-whistling barrow boy and anything else one could think of.

  But always it was the same: several days on the set, ten seconds on screen and goodbye chum. He had been within feet of every known star in the celluloid firmament, seen the gents and the bastards, the kindly and the prima donnas. He knew he could play any part with utter conviction and convincingly; he knew he was a human chameleon, but no-one had ever recognized the talent he was sure he had.

  So he watched in the rain as his idols swept past to their evening’s glory and later to their sumptuous apartments and suites. When the last had gone in and the lights had faded he trudged back through the rain to the bus stop at Marble Arch and stood, dripping water in the aisle, until he was deposited half a mile from his cheap bedsitter in the hinterland between White City and Shepherd’s Bush.

  He stripped off his soaking clothing, wrapped himself in an old towel robe liberated from a hotel in Spain (Man of La Mancha starring Peter O’Toole and he had held the horses) and lit a single-bar fire. His wet clothes steamed quietly through the night until by morning they were merely damp. He knew he was flat broke, skint. No work for weeks; a profession vastly overcrowded even with short, middle-aged men, and nothing in prospect. His phone had been cut off and if he wished to speak to his agent, yet again, he would have to go and visit in person. This, he decided, he would do on the morrow.

  He sat and waited. He always sat and waited. It was his lot in life. Finally the office door opened and someone emerged whom he knew. He jumped up.

  ‘Hallo, Robert, remember me? Trumpy.’

  Robert Powell was caught by surprise and clearly could recall nothing of the face.

  ‘The Italian Job. Turin. I drove the cab; you were in the back.’

  Robert Powell’s unquenchable good humour saved the day.

  ‘Of course. Turin. Been a long time. How are you, Trumpy? How are things?’

  ‘Pretty good. Not too bad, can’t complain. Just popped by to see if you-know-who might have something for me.’

  Powell took in the frayed shirt and shabby mac.

  ‘I’m sure he will. Good to see you again. Good luck, Trumpy.’

  ‘Ditto, old boy. Chin up, what?’

  They shook and parted. The agent was as kind as he could be, but there was no work. A costume drama was going to shoot at Shepperton, but it was already cast. A very overcrowded profession whose only inexhaustible fuel was optimism and the chance of a great part tomorrow.

  Back at his flat Trumpy forlornly took stock. Social Security provided a few pounds a week but London was expensive. He had just had another confrontation with Mr Koutzakis, his landlord, who once again had repeated that rent was in arrears and his patience not quite as limitless as the sun of his native Cyprus.

  Things were bad; in fact things could not get much worse. As a watery sun disappeared behind the tower blocks across the yard the middle-aged actor went to a cupboard and retrieved a package wrapped in hessian. Over the years he had often asked himself why he clung on to the dratted thing. It was not to his taste anyway. Sentiment, he supposed. Thirty-five years earlier, when he was a stripling of twenty, a bright and eager young actor in provincial repertory convinced of stardom to come, it had been bequeathed to him by his great-aunt Millie. He unwrapped the item from its hessian swathes.

  It was not a large painting, some twelve inches by twelve, excluding the gilt frame. He had kept it wrapped through all the years, but even when he got it, it had been so dirty, so crusted with grime, that the figures in it were vague outlines, little more than shadows. Still, Great-aunt Millie had always sworn it might be worth a few pounds, but that was probably just the wishful romanticism of an old woman. As to its history, he had no idea. In fact the small oil had quite a story.

  In the year 1870 an Englishman of thirty, seeking his fortune and having some knowledge of the Italian language, had emigrated to Florence to try his luck with a small endowment from his father. This was at the pinnacle of Britain’s Victorian glory and Her Majesty’s gold sovereign was a currency to open many doors. Italy by contrast was in its habitual chaos.

  Within five years the enterprising Mr Bryan Frobisher had achieved fou
r things. He had discovered the delicious wines of the Chianti hills and begun to export them in great vats to his native England, undercutting the accustomed French vine-vintages and laying the foundations of a tidy fortune.

  He had acquired a fine town house with his own coach and groom. He had married the daughter of a quite minor local nobleman, and, among many other decorations for his new house, he had bought a small oil painting from a second-hand shop on the quay near the Ponte Vecchio.

  He did not buy it because it was well known or well presented. It was covered in dust and almost hidden at the back of the shop. He just bought it because he liked it.

  For thirty years, as he became British Vice-Consul to Florence and Sir Bryan, KBE, it hung in his library and for thirty years, each evening, he smoked his after-dinner cigar beneath it.

  In 1900 a cholera epidemic swept Florence. It carried away Lady Frobisher, and after the funeral the sixty-year-old businessman decided to return to the land of his fathers. He sold up and came back to England, buying a handsome manor in Surrey and employing a staff of nine. The most junior was a local village girl, one Millicent Gore, who was engaged as a parlourmaid.

  Sir Bryan never remarried and died at the age of ninety in 1930. He had brought almost a hundred packing crates back from Italy and one of them contained a small and by now discoloured oil painting in a gilt frame.

  Because it had been his first gift to Lady Lucia and she had always loved it, he hung it again in the library where the patina of smoke and grime dulled the once-bright colours until the images of the figures became harder and harder to discern.

  The First World War came and went, and in passing changed the world. Sir Bryan’s fortune became much depleted as his investments in the Imperial Russian railway stock vanished in 1917. After 1918 Britain had a new social landscape.

  The staff diminished, but Millicent Gore stayed. She rose from parlourmaid to under-housekeeper, and from 1921 onwards the housekeeper and only member of inside staff. In the last seven years of his life she looked after the frail Sir Bryan like a nurse and on his death in 1930 he remembered her.

  He left her a cottage tenancy for life and a capital sum in trust to provide an income on which she could live modestly. While the rest of his estate was realized at auction, there was one item not included: a small oil painting. She was very proud of this; it came from a strange place called Abroad, so she hung it in the tiny sitting room of her tied cottage, not far from the open wood-burning range. There it became dirtier and dirtier.

  Miss Gore never married. She busied herself with village and parish works and died in 1965 at the age of five and eighty. Her brother had married and produced a son and he in turn had sired a boy, the old lady’s only great-nephew.

  When she died she had little to leave, for the cottage and the capital fund reverted to the estate of her benefactor. But she left the painting to her great-nephew. Thirty-five more years went by until the dirty, stained, crusted old artefact saw the light of day again when it was unwrapped in a musty bedsitter in a back street off Shepherd’s Bush.

  On the following morning its owner presented himself at the front desk of the prestigious House of Darcy, fine arts auctioneers and valuers. He clasped a hessian-wrapped package to his chest.

  ‘I understand that you offer a service of valuation to members of the public who may have an item of merit,’ he said to the young woman behind the desk. She too took in the frayed shirt and grubby mackintosh. She waved him towards a door marked Valuations. The interior was less lush than the front lobby. There was a desk and another girl. The actor repeated his query. She reached for a form.

  ‘Name, sir?’

  ‘My name is Mr Trumpington Gore. Now, this painting—’

  ‘Address?’

  He gave it.

  ‘Phone number?’

  ‘Er, no phone.’

  She gave him a glance as if he had said that he lacked a head.

  ‘And what is the item, sir?’

  ‘An oil painting.’

  Slowly the details, or lack of them, were teased out of him as her expression became more and more weary. Age unknown, school unknown, period unknown, artist unknown, country – presumed Italy.

  The woman in Valuations had a huge crush on a young blade in Classic Wines and she knew it was the hour of mid-morning coffee in the Caffé Uno just round the corner. If this boring little man with his awful little daub would go away, she could slip out with a girlfriend and coincidentally bag the table next to Adonis.

  ‘And finally, sir, what value would you put on it?’

  ‘I don’t know. That was why I brought it in.’

  ‘We must have a valuation from the customer, sir. For insurance purposes. Shall I say a hundred pounds?’

  ‘Very well. Do you know when I may expect to hear?’

  ‘In due course, sir. There is a large number of pieces already in the storeroom waiting to be studied. It takes time.’

  It was plain her personal view was that a glance would be enough. God, the junk some people passed over her desk, thinking they had discovered a Ming dish in the lavvy.

  Five minutes later Mr Trumpington Gore had signed the form, taken his copy, left the hessian package and was back on the streets of Knightsbridge. Still stony broke. He walked home.

  The hessian-wrapped painting was consigned to the basement store area, where it was given an identification tag: D 1601.

  DECEMBER

  Twenty days went by and still D 1601 stood against the wall in a basement store in its hessian wrappings, and still Trumpington Gore waited for an answer. There was a simple explanation: backlog.

  As with all the great art auction houses, well over 90 per cent of the paintings, porcelain, jewellery, fine wines, sporting guns and furniture that the House of Darcy offered for sale was from sources known to them and easily verified. A hint of source or ‘provenance’ often appeared in the pre-sale catalogue. ‘The property of a gentleman’ was a frequent introduction to a fine item. ‘Offered by the estate of the late . . .’ was not uncommon.

  There were some who disapproved of the practice of offering the general public a free valuation service on the grounds that it brought in too much time-consuming dross and too few items Darcy would even wish to offer for sale. But the service had been devised by the founder, Sir George Darcy, and the tradition survived. Just occasionally some lucky hopeful from nowhere discovered that Grandpa’s old silver snuff box really was a rare Georgian treasure, but not often.

  In Old Masters there was a fortnightly session of the Viewing Committee, chaired by the department director, the fastidious and bow-tied Sebastian Mortlake, assisted by two deputies. In the ten-day run-up to Christmas he decided to clear the entire backlog.

  This housekeeping turned out to cost five days of almost continuous session until he and his colleagues were tired of it.

  Mr Mortlake relied on the fat sheaf of forms filled at the moment of deposit of the picture. Top of his preferences were those where the artist was clearly identifiable. That at least would give the eventual catalogue-writers a name, something close to a date and the subject matter was of course obvious at a glance.

  Those he selected as possible for sale were set aside. A secretary would write to the owner to ask if he wished to sell, bearing in mind the suggested valuation. If the answer was ‘yes’ then a condition on the original form specified that the painting could not be taken elsewhere.

  If the answer was ‘no’ the owner would be asked to collect the work without delay. Storage costs money. Once the selection was made and authority from the owner received to proceed with sale, Mortlake could select the forthcoming auction for the picture’s inclusion and the catalogue could be prepared.

  For minor works by minor artists that had just scraped past Sebastian Mortlake’s watery gaze, the blurb would include phrases like ‘charming’, meaning ‘if you like that sort of thing’, or ‘unusual’, meaning ‘he must have done this after a very heavy lunch’.


  After viewing almost 300 canvases Mortlake and his two fellow assessors had broken the back of the ‘off the street’ offerings. He had selected only ten, one of them a surprising piece from the Dutch van Ostade school, but alas not by Adriaen himself. A pupil, but acceptable.

  Sebastian Mortlake never liked to choose for the House of Darcy anything with a valuation at sale of less than £5,000. Large premises in Knightsbridge do not come cheap, and the seller’s commission on less than that would not make much of a dent in the overheads. Lesser houses might handle canvases offered at £1,000, but not the House of Darcy. Besides, his forthcoming late-January sale would already be a big one.

  As the hour of lunch approached on the fifth day, Sebastian Mortlake stretched and rubbed his eyes. He had examined 290 examples of pictorial dross, looking in vain for that hint of undiscovered gold. But ten ‘acceptables’ seemed to be the limit. As he told his junior staff, ‘We must delight in our work, but we are not a charity.’

  ‘How many more, Benny?’ he called over his shoulder to the young under-valuer behind him.

  ‘Just forty-four, Seb,’ replied the young man. He used the familiar first name that Mortlake insisted on to create the friendly spirit he valued in his ‘team’. Even secretaries used first names; only porters, though addressed by their first names, called him ‘guv’.

  ‘Anything of interest?’

  ‘Not really. None with attribution, period, age, school or provenance.’

  ‘In other words, family amateurs. Are you coming in tomorrow?’

  ‘Aye, Seb, I thought I would. Tidy up a bit.’

  ‘Good lad, Benny. Well, I’m off to the Directors’ Lunch and then down to my place in the country. Just handle them for me, would you? You know the score. A nice polite letter, a token valuation, have Deirdre knock them out on the processor and they can all go in the last batch of mail.’

  And with a cheery ‘Happy Christmas boys and girls’ he was off. Minutes later his two assistants at the viewing sessions had done the same. Benny saw to it that the last batch of paintings just viewed (and rejected) were taken back to the store and the last forty-four brought up to the much better lit viewing room. He would look at some that afternoon and the final batch the next day before departing for Christmas. Then he fished some lunch vouchers from his pocket and headed for the staff canteen.