Looking Down (7 page)

Outside the block, beyond the glass doors and double-glazed windows, the noise of the traffic hit like a body blow, a reminder of how quiet it was within. Noise could never penetrate to the well of the building, and from where she stood the place looked impregnable, as safe as it felt inside. No one ever remembered that dark, interior well, or the tiny back door to the service area where Fritz kept rubbish. It looked as if it led to nowhere, unless you were Steven, always looking for a route.

Sarah could not run down this street because it was too crowded. There were shops: the florist’s, the jeweller’s, the wine shop, with tourists and people of all kinds en route to mysterious, urgent destinations. It would have been nice to run, because the thought of Steven made her not only want to run away from him, but also towards him. She was not going to feel guilty about him. She was not going to feel guilty about being a lady who lunched with men and went to bed with them in the afternoons if it suited them both. It wasn’t as if it happened every day. She was not going to feel guilty about anything, except perhaps leisure. Leisure did not come naturally. Steven might be right: she had too much of it, although there never seemed enough. Perhaps she should get a job, but she had had a job for fifteen years, and the thought of ever doing anything responsible ever again filled her with horror. This was safer: a place to live, a coterie of generous male friends, the judge, the dentist, the stockbroker, the art dealer, all conveniently central. A little involvement in the lives of others, but not a lot. No missions to the rescue; she had done
enough of that. And now she had the safety of the flat, she could give the money away. Money did not matter as long as you had a roof. Who needed more than a roof and a painting or two? She paused to check her appearance in the window of Penhaligon’s. Delicious scents in there, and yes, they certainly counted as the necessities of life, but she also had plenty of those. What more did she need?

A small, expressive face grinned back. Notable for the peculiar colouring, sallow skin, auburn hair and brown eyes with crow’s feet blurred in the glass. Nobody liked the onset of lines, but like the state of the wider world there was nothing you could do about it. Lilian Beaumont might imagine Sarah Fortune was beyond the pale when it came to luring the opposite sex at the advanced age of almost forty, but then Lilian Beaumont knew Jack Shit about men. Securing a man to keep on a permanent and official basis grew more difficult with the crow’s feet and weight if a girl was competing for a commitment from a man who wanted babies, but Sarah was way beyond that. Marriage was a mug’s game. And the sort of gentle, often timid and shy men she preferred would have run a mile from a Lilian Beaumont unless they were already married to her.

No, Sarah’s chosen kind of men tended to be clever, kindly, successful in an understated way, and tending towards the socially inept. A teeny bit and not always fortunately eccentric. Such as George, with his passion for Russian icons and all things miniature, suitable for his own diminutive size and huge feet, alienating his customers with his myopic stare and contempt for their taste. Then there was William, six feet three inches high, with a permanent stoop from bending over his patients in the dental chair, whose practice made him ill-at-ease with most of humanity. At the moment she entered the restaurant he was absorbed in reading, and when she touched him on the shoulder he leapt to his feet in a confusion of angles, sending the water and
cutlery crashing to the floor. Something he might do twice during a meal. It was never wise to drink soup near William, and yet in his surgery he was precise and soothing, as long as nobody tried to speak.

‘Sarah,’ he said, beaming and irritated at the same time, kissing her cheek and pulling at the tablecloth. ‘You must stop sending me patients. I’ve too many already. And you never send me anyone straightforward.’

‘I don’t know anyone straightforward.’

‘I forgot, of course you don’t. What are we eating?’

He could never make up his mind and wanted someone to do it for him, although he loved food. Frightened of his own choices. She frowned over the menu while William unloaded the tragedies of the week. The waiter appeared and she told him what William would like. It was a quiet place, full of concentrated eaters who appreciated plain food served speedily.

‘How many this week . . .oh yes, I sent Steven,’ she said, smiling at him, pleased to see him. ‘It isn’t as if he can’t pay. I thought he might like the paintings in the waiting room.’

‘You told me a little about your brother,’ William said, mildly enough. ‘And yes, he did like the paintings. Rather too much, I thought. Walked off with the one in the lavatory. That nice little nude. Do you think you could ask him for it back?’

‘How very rude of him,’ Sarah said. ‘But I’m afraid it’s a bit compulsive, although he’s usually more subtle than that. I think he’s a bit out of practice. It’ll come back, don’t worry.’

‘To tell the truth,’ William said while chewing safely dry whitebait, ‘he scared me to death. There’s something about him . . .’

‘I know, I know. I shouldn’t have sent him, but he had toothache.’

‘He had a simple cavity, and I don’t want him back.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘He frightens me,’ William announced in the clearly articulated
tone he used with patients, ‘because he looks like you and he doesn’t at the same time. And because I know you’re siblings and I think you might be like him.’

‘Or he might be like me.’

‘That would be fine. But you aren’t being fair, are you, Sarah?’

‘It was an emergency . . .’

‘If you want me to get involved again, Sarah, not only with your friends but your family, will you remember what you said?’ His voice was now distinctly loud and cheerful. The second course arrived. ‘You said, my dearest, that I should desist, because I am, after all,
only your lover.’

The words seemed to bounce off the walls. After a tiny pause, the eaters resumed eating.

‘Ah, yes,’ Sarah said. ‘I did say that.’

They continued to eat, like old friends.

‘Why didn’t I know about this brother before? I’ve known you . . . how long?’

‘He worked abroad for years. He works to finance an unfortunate hobby of climbing. Free climbing they call it, anything that stays still. He’s clever and easily bored. Now he works here. In a bank.’

William dropped his fork.

‘A bank? Good God, I don’t believe you.’

‘. . . And you’ll get your picture back. It was probably it being in the lavatory that enraged him. He’s like that, you see. Hates lovely things to be hidden away.’

They ate in easy silence. He sighed at the end of the efficient consumption of his food while she was halfway through.

‘I did like that other chap you referred to me. Much more my type. Richard Beaumont, that’s his name.’

‘You might prefer the wife. She’s a stunner.’

‘Would I? Funny thing about him, though. He doesn’t seem to feel pain.’

Sarah did not want involvement, but she did like a bit of gentle networking. Let the men help one another. It made her feel useful.

Steven Fortune, bunking off from work, found himself, as he often did, staring into windows and never for the purpose of seeing his own reflection. This part of London was full of galleries (picture shops, he called them) and while the displays might fill him with rage, he could never resist. Art was the emperor’s clothes. And then there were moments, faced with paintings or drawings in the vaulted hall of a museum or, as now, in the expensive, darkened interior of a discriminating private gallery, when the pleasure factor was so intense that it was almost painful, filling him with an aching warmth.

Tiepolo, leading exponent of the Italian Rococo. Style characterised by airy frivolity, joyous sense of colour and playful effects.
It was the fourth time he had seen it. It haunted him.

A watercolour-and-ink drawing:
The Sermon on the Mount.
What would you call it? Sketch, watercolour using sepia inks, whatever. Why was it magic? Steven struggled to control the light-headed pleasure it gave him by making a strenuous effort to analyse why the painting should have such an effect, took a deep breath and tried.

Here goes:
The composition swoops up with fantastic triangular force (a pile of triangles within triangles), strengthened and dramatised by the uncanny use of light and shade within a limited range of sepia tones. The white-not-pale women at the very centre are droolingly beautiful (look at the bare shoulder and décolleté neckline). They form a triangle with the left arm of Jesus, approached by an equally white pathway through the bald old geezer in the foreground – youth, beauty and old age all in thrall to the wise one. And those ghostly white passages contrast powerfully with the dark backs of the foreground figures (another triangle)
…

Yes, that went some way to explaining it, about 2 per cent of the way, but it helped bring him down to earth and made him aware he was smiling so widely he must have looked an idiot. He turned away from the Tiepolo on its stand and walked to the other end of the room simply so that he could turn back and approach it again, get that feeling all over again. Enter the force field of the thing and get that unholy joy. No, it was a holy joy, but then he was used to thinking of all joy as suspicious.

It wasn’t even as if he was usually drawn to this kind of thing; not his favourite century, but that made no difference. He loved it. He wanted it. If he never had anything else, he wanted that. Lusted after it. Measured it with his eye. Sizeable, but out of that frame it would roll up safely and insignificantly small. He would carry it away with the greatest of ease.

And yet what would he do with it? He would have to do as all those others did: hide it away and take what would be by then a definitely unholy pleasure in it. Like wanking in secret over a porn picture. But there would be a difference between himself and most of the others. He would love it. He would care for it, and he would know what it was. Quite different from
them.

Steven lived for
zing.
That was what he had always called it.

Taking steps towards the Tiepolo,
style characterised by playful effects,
there was a repetition of the same joy of discovery, slightly diluted because it was not the first but intense all the same, and not disappointing for the dilution because he knew he could look at it for a lifetime of days and still see something else. Another angle, triangle, another fucking elbow, a gossip in the corner, a breathtakingly casual flick of ink. And then, as he walked towards it for the third time, still smiling, his view was blocked. Someone else was standing in front of it, nose to the glass, dusting it, fussily, hiding it. The urbane-looking gallery owner probably, fed up with Steven’s visits and deliberately getting in the way. It was enough to remind Steven that the drawing was not his, would
never be his and he might never be able to see it again. He retreated before he did something he might regret.

Outside in the street, smoking a cigarette, he thought he was going mad, shaking himself to death with his own fury. No one should be prevented from seeing fine art, even if it was for sale. No one should allow a rich buyer to buy for investment and put a Tiepolo behind bulletproof glass to rot in private. Steven wanted to scream. Instead he sat down in a café nearby, and then, after two cups of coffee, he took off his tie and stuffed it in his pocket, ruffled his hair and went back with his suit jacket over his arm, nonchalantly.

‘Could you tell me if this is still for sale?’

The Tiepolo was still as it was, on the stand, the sight of it making his voice quiver convincingly for all the wrong reasons.

‘No, ’fraid not.’

She lied. The girl who had replaced the man who had gone to lunch looked at him with a cool appraising eye, and for all his ordinariness, found him lacking. It was the hand, he decided, which made her so hesitant, rather than the rest of him, which, with a hasty rearrangement of his creased jacket over his arm, simply looked down on his luck. Not for sale to
him.
He liked to tease them.

‘It should be in a museum. Going far, is it?’

She maintained her icy composure, eyes fixed on her computer screen.

‘Something like this could end up anywhere. Probably the Emirates. Can I help you with anything?’

Oh God, that awful sing-song, eat-your-balls voice. The tone of voice that defied him to ask, and how they infuriated him, those gallery girls with their casual superiority and get-lost voices. At least, long since, when his sister Sarah had part-timed as one of those, she smiled at people like the tart she was and gave them the benefit of her enormous enthusiasm. Not this brainless cold
fish with the professionally tousled hair. He passed behind her seat and read the addresses on her screen, annoying her. Then, before she could ask him to stop, he went back to the Tiepolo, close to it this time, trying to memorise the detail he already knew. It felt horribly like saying goodbye. Next time he came in here, they would probably call the police.

‘Nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

The girl turned in her chair and gave him her two-watt smile. The sort of smile to which he had become accustomed, the non-reactive, forced acknowledgement of his insignificant presence. Good, he wasn’t losing his touch then.

His fingers tingled. Steven went back out into the street where the sun hit his eyes and made him stop. At least he had seen It, felt that
zing,
and that was all that mattered, wasn’t it? No, it wasn’t. You didn’t fall in love with a thing (or a person, for that matter, although he confessed to ignorance of the latter experience) without
wanting
it. Or if not wanting it (her), since possessiveness was a terrible and destructive vice, at least wanting the best possible chance for it (her). A good life, no less. And he was sure that the single fact of appreciation applied equally to woman and painting, since without it they both seemed to wither and die. It was vital to the health. Shutting it (her) away made it crumple and fade, as well as being an insult to the creator. But did the amount of the appreciation matter? Was it quality or quantity? Was the love of one person enough?