We were at the airport when Robin started edging into his account. The dissidents having refused to oblige, everyone was returning to London. Now that I think about it, his shaggy-dog story was an oblique apology for making a fool of himself at the Pension Whatever. I expect he assumed that Potter had gone into cruel detail, and Robin wanted me to put his nightmares into context. Only his nerve failed, so he just trailed away and thought his thoughts...
Six months after the Lottie Totty affair, there was a small war — little more than crockery rattled and plumage ruffled all round — but my paper is into shot and shell, so off I went. Robin Ratcliffe’s lot were eccentric enough to consider sensationalism A Bad Thing, but a deputy editor had made his bones in the region and considered it important enough to warrant coverage.
There we were, Robin, me, and a couple of thugs from the Daily Dire, out for glory and desperate to beat us and each other, the idiots. He and I took to slipping away first thing every morning and working the story together. (We’d bribed the hotel people twice over to inform us what the thugs were telling the Dire and not inform the thugs of what we’d filed. Their bribe had been inadequate, or our shared resources made it so.)
Slipping away was all very well, but misery likes company and we could have done with the thugs aboard the armoured personnel carrier when it ran into an ambush. Not even an ambush for us, that was the pig of it. Bad enough for homicidal lunatics to try killing a harmless stranger, i.e oneself. To be caught between opposing sets of organised loonies who don’t even know you’re there, stalled in a fold of desert with mortar rounds going one way and a hull-down tank’s shells replying from a quarter-mile away...
Terror turns me glumly thoughtful. At least I don’t wet myself or bite people, which I have seen happen. Robin’s reaction was strange enough to break my trance. One would swear he looked... relief wasn’t quite it, but a weight was off his shoulders. “Funny,” he mumbled, “I never thought it would be this way...”
Then he told me more about the art gallery. We all repeat ourselves at times, and he had every excuse to gabble the first thing in his head. Though he wasn’t gabbling, just thinking aloud. I didn’t stop him because the partly familiar recital provided a distraction and I willed myself to listen carefully, concentrate.
Much later — the tank went away, the mortar team ran out of ammunition or motivation, I was on the plane back to London — I realised that Robin Ratcliffe’s story had changed. Wrong word: Developed was what it had done.
Fleeting unease over, Robin felt pleased with himself, there in the recently airless side room of the gallery. He was no barbarian, the Boring Respectable Paper doesn’t keep them on strength for long, but in the Bible’s phrase he was “as the beasts that perish” when it came to art appreciation.
His sister was an enthusiast and for years he’d tried to see what she did — brushwork and textures, skin tones, handling of light, a painter’s signature palpable in everything save the autograph in a bottom corner. Robin concluded that he was artistically unmusical.
Now, however, he was appreciating nuances and making sophisticated observations. Evidently he was a late starter.
Almost nose to nose with the canvas, all Robin could make out was an uneven layer of old paint, mainly black where it wasn’t a dismal reddish-brown — the tiled floor — and indefinably tarnished or bloomed. No sign of the woman, and if he hadn’t known a chair was there... Too close, so he retreated again, expecting to decode what had been there before.
Except — ah yes, there it was. One’s eyes needed to adjust to the altered distance. Chair and woman present and correct. A sitter in both senses of the term; Robin smirked. No doubt of it, he’d made a breakthrough. Until this morning the notion of understanding that the artist had captured arrested motion like that would have been beyond him.
It really was amazingly clever: Had this painting been a photograph taken one second later, then the old lady would be on her feet and looking out from the frame. Robin’s mouth dried and his breath caught. The din and vibrancy of the avenue was paradise when he found himself at the foot of the gallery’s imposing steps, and harsh sunlight had never been more welcome.
He shirked explaining what had happened; there was a jump-cut between gloating over connoisseurship and running for his life.
The personnel carrier’s engine caught at last, and this time the clown failed to stall it. We backed up very fast; the little-more-than-tin box kept bouncing off the mini-valley’s crumbling banks but kept going. I was too occupied in silently thanking Whatever There Is to wonder what had made Robin flee from that painting. Sorting the ins and outs of an ambiguous anecdote had low priority.
Then the paper found a better war for me just up the road by Foreign Desk measurement, meaning two countries away. The Boring Respectable believed in finishing anything they started. I didn’t see Robin again that year or for most of the next.
I heard about him, though. He’d always been an amiable character, so when he started getting snappish and cutting up rough, people noticed. One morning three different chums on as many different papers rang me with exciting gossip. Robbo Ratcliffe had gone crazy and assaulted the Church Correspondent at the Boring Respectable, of all targets. Simon Trimble, his name was; we’d trained together in the provinces.
Anyone more inoffensive was hard to imagine. Lack of personality decreed that there was no Trimble to like or dislike, let alone assault with violence. He was just a fact on two legs, reasonably effective at his job.
The first caller alleged that Robin had broken Simon Trimble’s jaw; the second had Simon being rushed out of the newsroom with an eye dangling on his cheek; the third didn’t specify injuries but understood that S. Trimble was on his way to surgery as we spoke.
It’s never as bad or good as wild rumors insist. Trimble wanted to get at a phone, Robin was in the way and deep in thought, Trimble tapped him on the shoulder... A split second later Robin was helping him off the floor and Trimble knew what it was like to have a broken nose.
“You startled me,” Robin mumbled. And to the newsroom at large, “He startled me, all right?”
It wasn’t, of course. By ill fortune the Boring Respectable’s editor and Lord Somebody the proprietor, lunching the deputy prime minister in the boardroom that day, were giving him a tour en route to the trough, and witnessed the disagreement. Worse yet, the paper had been running a long, tut-tutting campaign on behalf of civilised behaviour in all ranks of society.
Robin Ratcliffe’s exploit, an instant legend (journos are a pack of old applewomen, Henry Potter hadn’t slandered the trade), was pounced on by Private Eye, the satirical magazine: There was a cartoon of two chaps walking past a stately-home entrance with an ambulance outside — “They’re expecting a reporter from the Boring Respectable...” one says to the other.
The BR hates landing in Private Eye and media-watch columns of the opposition. Punching a blameless colleague is gross industrial misconduct within the meaning of the relevant Act of Parliament. The union can’t do a thing if you’re fired and employment tribunals don’t want to know. The Boring Respectable tempered justice with mercy: Robin was given a year’s severance pay and escorted off the premises.
In an elegant phrase I picked up from the U.S. military, my friend had screwed the pooch. He’d joined the Boring Respectable straight from university, he had worked for no other paper and what was more, he’d never wanted to. In that era, Fleet Street jobs were easier to come by, but whether he could be happy or even much use at my shop, for instance, was dubious.