I grabbed his left arm. He scooped up the paint-laden palette in his right and swung round fiercely, aiming at my face. I ducked instinctively. The palette missed me and struck Jik, who had his hands to his eyes and was yelling very loudly.
Sarah rushed towards him, knocking into me hard in her anxiety and loosening my grip on the young man. He tore his arm free, ran precipitously for the exit, dodged round behind two open-mouthed middle-aged spectators who were on their way in, and pushed them violently into my chasing path. By the time I’d disentangled myself, he had vanished from sight. I ran through several halls and passages, but couldn’t find him. He knew his way, and I did not: and it took me long enough, when I finally gave up the hunt, to work out the route back to Jik.
A fair-sized crowd had surrounded him, and Sarah was in a roaring fury based on fear, which she unleashed on me as soon as she saw me return.
‘Do something,’ she screamed. ‘Do something, he’s going blind... He’s going blind... I knew we should never have listened to you...’
I caught her wrists as she advanced in near hysteria to do at least some damage to my face in payment for Jik’s. Her strength was no joke.
‘Sarah,’ I said fiercely. ‘Jik is not going blind.’
‘He is. He is,’ she insisted, kicking my shins.
‘Do you want him to?’ I shouted.
She gasped sharply in outrage. What I’d said was at least as good as a slap in the face. Sense reasserted itself suddenly like a drench of cold water, and the manic power receded back to normal angry girl proportions.
‘Linseed oil will do no harm at all,’ I said positively. ‘The turps is painful, but that’s all. It absolutely will not affect his eyesight.’
She glared at me, pulled her wrists out of my grasp, and turned back to Jik, who was rocking around in agony and cupping his fingers over his eyes with rigid knuckles. Also, being Jik, he was exercising his tongue.
‘The slimy little bugger... wait till I catch him... Jesus Christ Almighty I can’t bloody see... Sarah... where’s that bloody Todd... I’ll strangle him... get an ambulance... my eyes are burning out... bloody buggering hell...’
I spoke loudly in his ear. ‘Your eyes are O.K.’
‘They’re my bloody eyes and if I say they’re not O.K. they’re bloody not.’
‘You know damn well you’re not going blind, so stop hamming it up.’
‘They’re not your eyes, you sod.’
‘And you’re frightening Sarah,’ I said.
That message got through. He took his hands away and stopped rolling about.
At the sight of his face a murmur of pleasant horror rippled through the riveted audience. Blobs of bright paint from the young man’s palette had streaked one side of his jaw yellow and blue: and his eyes were red with inflammation and pouring with tears, and looked very sore indeed.
‘Jesus, Sarah,’ he said blinking painfully. ‘Sorry, love. The bastard’s right. Turps never blinded anybody.’
‘Not permanently,’ I said, because to do him justice he obviously couldn’t see anything but tears at the moment.
Sarah’s animosity was unabated. ‘Get him an ambulance, then.’
I shook my head. ‘All he needs is water and time.’
‘You’re a stupid heartless pig. He obviously needs a doctor, and hospital care.’
Jik, having abandoned histrionics, produced a handkerchief and gently mopped his streaming eyes.
‘He’s right, love. Lots of water, as the man said. Washes the sting away. Lead me to the nearest gents.’
With Sarah unconvinced but holding one arm, and a sympathetic male spectator the other, he was solicitously helped away like an amateur production of Samson. The chorus in the shape of the audience bent reproachful looks on me, and cheerfully awaited the next act.
I looked at the overturned mess of paints and easel which the young man had left. The onlookers looked at them too.
‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘that no one here was talking to the young artist before any of this happened?’
‘We were,’ said one woman, surprised at the question.
‘So were we,’ said another.
‘What about?’
‘Munnings,’ said one, and ‘Munnings,’ said the other, both looking immediately at the painting on the wall.
‘Not about his own work?’ I said, bending down to pick it up. A slash of yellow lay wildly across the careful outlines, result of Jik’s slap on the back.
Both of the ladies, and also their accompanying husbands, shook their heads and said they had talked with him about the pleasure of hanging a Munnings on their own walls, back home.
I smiled slowly.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘That he didn’t happen to know where you could get one?’
‘Well, yeah,’ they said. ‘As a matter of fact, he sure did.’
‘Where?’
‘Well, look here, young fellow...’ The elder of the husbands, a seventyish American with the unmistakable stamp of wealth, began shushing the others to silence with a practised damping movement of his right hand. Don’t give information away, it said, you may lose by it. ‘... You’re asking a lot of questions.’
‘I’ll explain,’ I said. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
They all looked at their watches and said doubtfully they possibly would.
‘There’s a coffee shop just down the hall,’ I said. ‘I saw it when I was trying to catch that young man... to make him tell why he flung turps in my friend’s eyes.’
Curiosity sharpened in their faces. They were hooked.
The rest of the spectators drifted away, and I, asking the others to wait a moment, started moving the jumbled painting stuff off the centre of the floor to a tidier wall-side heap.
None of it was marked with its owner’s name. All regulation kit, obtainable from art shops. Artists’ quality, not students’ cheaper equivalents. None of it new, but not old, either. The picture itself was on a standard sized piece of commercially prepared hardboard, not on stretched canvas. I stacked everything together, added the empty jars which had held linseed and turps, and wiped my hands on a piece of rag.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’
They were all Americans, all rich, retired, and fond of racing. Mr and Mrs Howard K. Petrovitch of Ridgeville, New Jersey, and Mr and Mrs Wyatt L. Minchless from Carter, Illinois.
Wyatt Minchless, the one who had shushed the others, called the meeting to order over four richly creamed iced coffees and one plain black. The black was for himself. Heart condition, he murmured, patting the relevant area of suiting. A white-haired man, black-framed specs, pale indoor complexion, pompous manner.
‘Now, young fellow, let’s hear it from the top.’
‘Um,’ I said. Where exactly was the top? ‘The artist boy attacked my friend Jik because Jik called him a criminal.’
‘Yuh,’ Mrs Petrovitch nodded, ‘I heard him. Just as we were leaving the gallery. Now why would he do that?’
‘It isn’t criminal to copy good painting,’ Mrs Minchless said knowledgeably. ‘In the Louvre in Paris, France, you can’t get near the Mona Lisa for those irritating students.’
She had blue-rinsed puffed-up hair, uncreasable navy and green clothes, and enough diamonds to attract a top-rank thief. Deep lines of automatic disapproval ran downwards from the corner of her mouth. Thin body. Thick mind.
‘It depends what you are copying for,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to try to pass your copy off as an original, then that definitely is a fraud.’
Mrs Petrovitch began to say, ‘Do you think the young man was forging...’ but was interrupted by Wyatt Minchless, who smothered her question both by the damping hand and his louder voice.