He was rising from the couch, idly scanning the far wall, because that was the one facing him, when he noticed a darkish mass in a particular frame. Robin took it for storm clouds over a calm sea turned gory by the setting sun. It wasn’t that he liked seascapes so much as that they offered the charm of the familiar. Generations of his family had been Royal Navy and he’d grown up with Squall in the Narrows, Dawn Over the Bay of Bengal and suchlike. Instead of leaving, he walked over to investigate.
Disappointingly, the picture turned out to be a domestic interior, a kitchen by the look of it, probably turn of the nineteenth century. The clouds were — he couldn’t be bothered to make out what they were — and the sunset sea was a tiled floor in need of a damned good scrubbing. Five wasted paces, yet seconds later Robin remained in place.
No expert, as we have established, he was trying to calculate whether this was a very good picture that was easy to overlook or an amateurish effort, out of its league. Its clumsiness could be deliberate and clever, to those capable of appreciating an artist’s intention. Maybe so much featureless floor with everything else crammed in the top right corner was clever, too.
“Everything else” came down to a wooden chair, graceless and putting him in mind of Van Gogh, except that the chair on the tiles didn’t gladden the eye. It’s got something, all the same, Robin told himself, and then he leaned forward, wondering how he could have been so unobservant.
He’d assumed that dark blobs and blotches on the chair made up a poorly rendered coat or shawl thrown over the ladder-back. No such thing: It was an old woman sitting there. At which point Robin Ratcliffe caught on at last.
He was looking at a trick picture, like Magritte’s musical instrument which is also a face. Or those more elaborate novelties: the painted surface is corrugated so that the subject depends on one’s angle. Change that and the subject melts from a beauty in full finery to a solitary macaw profiled on its perch.
The chair thing was so take-it-or-leave-it simple — what I see is what you get and it interested me, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, the artist seemed to snarl — that the concept of a deliberate illusion hadn’t occurred to Robin.
Now that he was studying rather than glancing, it was obvious. The whole thing was a double bluff, overtly naive and unskilled but (cliché, sorry) fiendishly cunning. A visual equivalent to the breed of con man playing the hick to take marks off-guard.
There she was, the old woman, waiting to be found.
Go away, whined a voice at the back of Robin’s mind, and of course he ignored it. Her back was turned to the viewer. Yes, he made out the curve of her spine and a large, lumpy head, except that it had to be one of those coal-scuttle bonnets. An unlikely, awkward blotch of shadow on the side of the chair was her hand, evidently black-gloved.
That accounted for the impression of arrested movement, once the figure came into focus and revealed itself. She’d heard footsteps or the creak of a door and she was about to peer over her shoulder... The longer he stared, the more he saw.
Gloved fingers gripped the chair, and if the shadows dispersed one would find her thin arm braced and straining to swivel the meager body. Okay, done that, a bored strand of his thinking ran. Let’s be on our way.
Urgency wasn’t involved, as it had been with the earlier, near-subconscious pleading to be anywhere but near the old woman. Mission Control sent the message that he was emerging from a medium-bad hangover, not before time, and some food would be appreciated.
Robin Ratcliffe’s tale ended there, first time around, with a hangdog grimace. In newspaper jargon I’d wasted attention on a “delayed drop,” meaning introductory matter unfolded at length — only there was nothing to follow. Politely put, an anticlimax; less politely, he had suckered me into a shaggy-dog story and I’d missed the punch line.
Except that Robin wasn’t like that. The trivial incident — as it seemed at first telling — had impressed him enough to share it. Shortly afterwards, our flight was called or the lift doors opened and the man we awaited stepped out — for the life of me I cannot recall the setting or how we came to be talking about a picture in the first place.
My memory is no worse than the next fellow’s, whoever he is. I have good recall of what Robin Ratcliffe told me over a five-year period. It’s just that I was pinballing around the world at the time, one eye on my watch, waiting for the Tilt light to start flashing — missed deadline or faulty telex machines, on which one relied in the primitive era a quarter-century or so ago. Actually, now that it’s going on paper I do remember where he told me, and belatedly, a connection is made.
Robin started explaining about the art gallery because...
Regrettably, British journalists, Her Majesty’s Press, are a bit of a handful overseas. Some of them, anyway. Repressed individuals may become roaring boys and roaring boys morph into — you get the idea. As my first Foreign Editor told me, “You can claim ridiculous expenses, get thrown out of the country — always good for the image — abduct the women and slaughter the men. The only thing you can’t do is... fail.”
Golly, that pumped me up. Under such pressure, with sketchy knowledge of foreign languages thrown in, no wonder many of the boys (and girls, in their own ways) cut loose after the story’s filed.
All fairly harmless, if rotten diplomacy, and we always pay for breakages.
This is not a digression, honestly. Hacks need a hotel with reliable communications and your average hotel fitting that bill needs guests who won’t frighten the horses. Lottie Totty — Eastern European with a virtually all-consonants name, so that’s what she was to us — perceived a niche market allowing her to charge four-star prices for a decent boardinghouse.
It’s right behind the train station in a European capital. Lottie Totty installed half a dozen telex machines in the basement, beefed up the switchboard, dedicated ten percent of overheads to the Ministry of Posts and Communications, and did terrific business. The city was a hub or crossroads and several times a year the hacks would hurtle in, pack the Pension Whatever, and do wonders for her offshore bank account.
We’d been resident for ten days — an uprising, we were waiting for famous dissidents to flee across the border and they were fleeing in slow motion if at all. Robin Ratcliffe was ousted early on, though he slunk back frequently for fear of missing anything the rest of the pack had scavenged. Lottie shook her head until her cleavage blurred, in the course of refusing to reveal his offense.
The consensus was that it must have been incredibly violent or perverted. Lottie Totty ran — I suppose you could term it a frat house for allegedly mature adults. Our sort of guests helped themselves at the little bar and scribbled the price in an exercise book hanging on a string. You paid well over the odds for your room so what went on there was none of Lottie’s never-mind.
Then Henry Potter lost patience with our rumors. Henry’s older than God, doyen of foreign correspondents. Lottie Totty kept two adjoining rooms free on the top floor and they were Herr Potter’s Suite. The only other guest near him had been Robin Ratcliffe.
“You’re a pack of gossiping applewomen,” Henry Potter declared, three days after Robin’s expulsion. “I complained because the idiot was making such a racket that I couldn’t sleep. Snoring’s forgivable but strangled bloody screams are unacceptable when indulged in at length, nightly. Satisfied, you... children? This correspondence must now cease. The Editor.”
Some of us believed that he and Lottie were more than good friends. Possibly Robin had caught her sneaking into HP’s bower, that would do it. On the other hand, the old boy’s irritation at having his sleep ruined was convincing. Either way, the solution was disappointing. Lurid had been far more fun.