In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,32
antique desk strategically placed near the door, with a youngish woman handing out small catalogues and large smiles.
‘Feel free to look around,’ she said. ‘More pictures downstairs.’
She handed me a catalogue, a folded glazed white card with several typed sheets clipped into it. I flipped them over. One hundred and sixty-three items, numbered consecutively, with titles, artists’ names, and asking price. A painting already sold, it said, would have a red spot on the frame.
I thanked her. ‘Just passing by,’ I said.
She nodded and smiled professionally, eyes sliding in a rapid summing up over my denim clothes and general air of not belonging to the jet set. She herself wore the latest trendy fashion with careless ease and radiated tycoon-catching sincerity. Australian, assured, too big a personality to be simply a receptionist.
‘You’re welcome anyway,’ she said.
I walked slowly down the long room, checking the pictures against their notes. Most were by Australian artists, and I could see what Jik had meant about the hot competition. The field was just as crowded as at home, if not more so, and the standard in some respects better. As usual when faced with other people’s flourishing talents I began to have doubts of my own.
At the far end of the ground-floor display there was a staircase leading downwards, adorned with a large arrow and a notice repeating ‘More Pictures Downstairs’.
I went down. Same carpet, same lighting, but no scatter of customers looking from pictures to catalogues and back again.
Below stairs, the gallery was not one straight room but a series of small rooms off a long corridor, apparently the result of not being able to knock down all the dividing and load-bearing walls. A room to the rear of the stairs was an office, furnished with another distinguished desk, two or three comfortable chairs for prospective clients, and a civilised row of teak-faced filing cabinets. Heavily framed pictures adorned the walls, and an equally substantial man was writing in a ledger at the desk.
He raised his head, conscious of my presence outside his door.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
‘Just looking.’
He gave me an uninterested nod and went back to his work. He, like the whole place, had an air of permanence and respectability quite unlike the fly-by-night suburban affair in Sydney. This reputable business, I thought, could not be what I was looking for. I had got the whole thing wrong. I would have to wait until I could get Hudson Taylor to look up Donald’s cheque and point me in a new direction.
Sighing, I continued down the line of rooms, thinking I might as well finish taking stock of the opposition. A few of the frames were adorned with red spots, but the prices on everything good were a mile from a bargain and a deterrent to all but the rich.
In the end room, which was larger than the others, I came across the Munnings. Three of them. All with horses; one racing scene, one hunting, one of gypsies.
They were not in the catalogue.
They hung without ballyhoo in a row of similar subjects, and to my eyes stuck out like thoroughbreds among hacks.
Prickles began up my spine. It wasn’t just the workmanship, but one of the pictures itself. Horses going down to the start. A long line of jockeys, bright against a dark sky. The silks of the nearest rider, purple with a green cap.
Maisie’s chatty voice reverberated in my inner ear, describing what I saw. ‘… I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it… because Archie and I decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one already had that…’
Munnings had always used a good deal of purple and green in shadows and distances. All the same… This picture, size, subject, and colouring, was exactly like Maisie’s, which had been hidden behind a radiator, and, presumably, burned.
The picture in front of me looked authentic. The right sort of patina for the time since Munnings’ death, the right excellence of draughtsmanship, the right indefinable something which separated the great from the good. I put out a gentle finger to feel the surface of canvas and paint. Nothing there that shouldn’t be.
An English voice from behind me said, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Isn’t that a Munnings?’ I said casually, turning round.
He was standing in the doorway, looking in, his expression full of the guarded helpfulness of one whose best piece of stock is being appraised by someone apparently too poor