In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,25

it into shining tulip glasses, not plastic mugs.

‘By God,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Sarah toasted my advent politely, not sure that she agreed. I apologised for gatecrashing the honeymoon.

‘Nuts to that,’ Jik said, obviously meaning it. ‘Too much domestic bliss is bad for the soul.’

‘It depends,’ said Sarah neutrally, ‘on whether you need love or loneliness to get you going.’

For Jik, before, it had always been loneliness. I wondered what he had painted recently: but there was no sign, in the now comfortable cabin, of so much as a brush.

‘I walk on air,’ Jik said. ‘I could bound up Everest and do a handspring on the summit.’

‘As far as the galley will do,’ Sarah said, ‘if you remembered to buy the crayfish.’

Jik, in our shared days, had been the cook; and times, it seemed, had not changed. It was he, not Sarah, who with speed and efficiency chopped open the crayfish, covered them with cheese and mustard, and set them under the grill. He who washed the crisp lettuce and assembled crusty bread and butter. We ate the feast round the cabin table with rain pattering on portholes and roof and the sea water slapping against the sides in the freshening wind. Over coffee, at Jik’s insistence, I told them why I had come to Australia.

They heard me out in concentrated silence. Then Jik, whose politics had not changed much since student pink, muttered darkly about ‘pigs’, and Sarah looked nakedly apprehensive.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’m not asking for Jik’s help, now that I know he’s married.’

‘You have it. You have it,’ he said explosively.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Sarah said, ‘What precisely do you plan to do first?’

‘Find out where the two Munnings came from.’

‘And after?’

‘If I knew what I was looking for I wouldn’t need to look.’

‘That doesn’t follow,’ she said absently.

‘Melbourne,’ Jik said suddenly. ‘You said one of the pictures came from Melbourne. Well, that settles it. Of course we’ll help. We’ll go there at once. It couldn’t be better. Do you know what next Tuesday is?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘The day of the Melbourne Cup!’

His voice was triumphant. Sarah stared at me darkly across the table.

‘I wish you hadn’t come,’ she said.

6

I slept that night in the converted boathouse which constituted Jik’s postal address. Apart from a bed alcove, new-looking bathroom, and rudimentary kitchen, he was using the whole space as studio.

A huge old easel stood in the centre, with a table to each side holding neat arrays of paints, brushes, knives, pots of linseed and turpentine and cleaning fluid: all the usual paraphernalia.

No work in progress. Everything shut and tidy. Like its counterpart in England, the large rush mat in front of the easel was black with oily dirt, owing to Jik’s habit of rubbing his roughly rinsed brushes on it between colours. The tubes of paint were characteristically squeezed flat in the middles, impatience forbidding an orderly progress from the bottom. The palette was a small oblong, not needed any larger because he used most colours straight from the tube and got his effects by overpainting. A huge box of rags stood under one table, ready to wipe clean everything used to apply paint to picture, not just brushes and knives, but fingers, palms, nails, wrists, anything which took his fancy. I smiled to myself. Jik’s studio was as identifiable as his pictures.

Along one wall a two-tiered rack held rows of canvasses, which I pulled out one by one. Dark, strong, dramatic colours, leaping to the eye. Still the troubled vision, the perception of doom. Decay and crucifixions, obscurely horrific landscapes, flowers wilting, fish dying, everything to be guessed, nothing explicit.

Jik hated to sell his paintings and seldom did, which I thought was just as well, as they made uncomfortable roommates, enough to cause depression in a skylark. They had a vigour, though, that couldn’t be denied. Everyone who saw his assembled work remembered it, and had their thoughts modified, and perhaps even their basic attitudes changed. He was a major artist in a way I would never be, and he would have looked upon easy popular acclaim as personal failure.

In the morning I walked down to the boat and found Sarah there alone.

‘Jik’s gone for milk and newspapers,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you some breakfast.’

‘I came to say goodbye.’

She looked at me levelly. ‘The damage is done.’

‘Not if I go.’

‘Back to England?’

I shook my head.

‘I thought not.’ A dim smile appeared briefly in her eyes. ‘Jik told me last night