‘Well, maybe I’m a little optimistic – but hey, I’m a realist.’
‘Promise me one thing?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘That if this turns out to be a worthless copy or whatever, we just bin it, or give it to a charity shop – I don’t want to keep it in the house.’
‘It’s very pretty.’
‘So are a lot of poisonous plants.’
He grinned. ‘OK, I promise. And if it turns out to be genuine?’
‘Then I’ll send you a list of all the things I’d like for my birthday. Got my eye on some Louboutin shoes I’ve always dreamed of, and a Chanel handbag would be nice, too.’
He looked down at the carrier bag and tapped it. ‘You heard what the lady said.’
24
Saturday, 28 September
At 10 a.m., Harry and Freya Kipling had been marshalled, along with all the others – now numbering well over a thousand, he guessed – into various queues. Theirs was for the pictures expert. In spite of their early arrival, a good 150 people were in front of them and the queue was moving at a very slow pace.
The sun, already high in the sky, was beating down, and Harry, perspiring, wished he’d brought a hat, and had stuck with a T-shirt and his trademark shorts, rather than opting to dress a bit fancy in a cream linen suit. Freya had been more sensible, looking gorgeous in a broad straw hat, simple sundress and espadrilles with a blue bow on them.
On either side of them were more lines of people, clutching objects. The good, the bad, and the complete tat.
Harry said to Freya, ‘You know, the one thing that I always find fascinating about this show is the expressions people have on their faces when they get told the value of what they’ve brought along.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Especially the ones who look so clearly disappointed when they’re told it is worth fifty quid, when they were expecting to be told it’s worth many thousands. Let’s try not to look disappointed.’
‘Or too excited?’
Harry and Freya suddenly heard a loud tut-tut behind them, and a horsey female voice exclaiming, ‘Ridiculous! The way they organize this!’
Unsure who she was addressing, they turned to see a small, rotund woman in her late sixties, silver hair in a bun, tweed skirt and stout shoes. She was clutching a painting protectively to her chest.
‘God knows what rubbish people here have brought along,’ she said and tapped the back of her canvas. ‘They really ought to separate us into those who have something clearly genuine and those who have an obvious waste of everyone’s time.’
‘Well I guess they have no way of knowing until the experts see it,’ Freya replied pleasantly.
‘What’s the painting you have?’ Harry asked.
‘It’s been in my family for three generations,’ she said haughtily, then held it up, quite furtively, as if for them to sneak a peep.
It was a wooded landscape, with trees and water in the foreground and a Gothic cathedral with a very tall spire, beneath dark clouds, in the background.
‘That’s beautiful,’ Freya said.
‘Indeed, and so it should be, given its provenance.’
‘What do you know about it?’ Freya asked.
Lowering her voice, as if not wanting to be overheard by the people behind her, she mouthed, ‘It’s a Constable. John Constable. You’ve heard of The Hay Wain?’
‘Of course,’ Freya said.
She gave them a very smug smile. ‘Well, this is one of the paintings he did of Salisbury Cathedral.’
‘Wow!’ Harry said. ‘You’ve never thought of putting it into an auction – with one of the major houses?’
‘Oh yes, but I’ve heard what a lot of rogues there are in the art world, so I thought I’d get its authenticity proven by Oliver Desouta – he’s the paintings expert here today, a renowned authority on old masters – and then of course we’ll take it straight to Sotheby’s.’
‘How wonderful,’ Harry said, and waited for her to ask a question about their painting, but she didn’t. Instead she said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me go in front of you? I really would like Mr Desouta to see this before he gets jaded by too much rubbish.’
Harry had two pet hates, something he and Freya had always shared. The first was people you met who talked about themselves but never asked you a single question, and the second was pompous people who had a sense of entitlement. ‘I’m afraid not, no,’ he replied testily, the heat making him increasingly irritable. ‘My wife and I got here very early and we’re quite far enough back in the queue as it is.’
He turned his back on the woman and immediately heard her loud protest, ‘Well, really!’
He shot a sly grin at Freya, who nodded back; she got it too.
A few minutes later he noticed a man in a sharp white suit, shirt and overtly conspicuous tie, and two-tone co-respondent shoes, in his late thirties, making his way along the queue ahead of them, stopping to examine each of the paintings the people in front of them had brought along. Over the next twenty minutes, he and Freya saw several despondent-looking people leave the queue and walk away with their pictures, and suddenly the line moved forward faster than before. Clearly this man was weeding out the obvious crap.
Was the same going to happen to them? he wondered, with a stab of panic. Were they going to be dismissed even before they got to the expert? Sent off, like a dozen in front of them, clutching their parcels on the walk of shame? And under the smug gaze of Lady Pompous behind them?
Eventually it was the turn of the young couple in front of them, who held a huge abstract painting of something that vaguely resembled, with a bit of imagination, a giant multicoloured grasshopper. White suit held it up, turned it around and studied the back, nodding approvingly. Straining to listen, Harry heard him murmur, ‘Yes, very nice, very nice indeed.’
Harry removed his painting from the bag and then the bubble wrap just as the man handed the couple’s picture back and approached them, preceded by a pleasant, if pungent, reek of cologne.
‘Well, hello, good morning, so what do we have here?’
Prepared to be cut to shreds, Harry held the painting up. And saw the man’s eyes widen. ‘May I?’ he asked, shooting his cuffs and putting his manicured hands out to the frame.
‘Sure,’ Harry said.
The man took it and studied the back a lot more carefully than he had studied the front, before turning it around and studying the front again. Then he frowned. ‘This is very beautiful,’ he said. ‘Really, this is something quite exceptional. Has it been in your family a long time?’
‘My husband – we – bought it in a car boot sale a few weeks ago,’ Freya said.
‘Well, actually there was another painting over it, we discovered what was underneath by accident,’ Harry added.
The man produced a small tablet from his pocket. ‘May I have your names?’
Harry gave them to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing this along, it is very interesting indeed. Really quite special.’ He handed the picture back to Harry. ‘Please stay in this line, I think Oliver Desouta will be most interested to see this. Most interested indeed!’
Then he moved on to Lady Pompous behind them. Elated by what the man had said, Harry hardly heard the first exchange of words behind him. Then there was a very indignant protestation from her.
‘Young man, this Constable has been in my family for three generations. You have no ruddy idea what you are talking about. I am going to see the expert.’
‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I am the senior old masters consultant to Bonhams. What you have here is a copy – I’m afraid to say a very mediocre copy – of one of John Constable’s masterpieces, his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. He was much copied because of his fame, and sometimes by very talented artists, and this was one of his most copied works. I’m sorry to disappoint you, the quality here is very poor indeed. I appreciate this may sound harsh, but you really would be wasting your own and everyone’s time to stand in this queue. It’s a decent frame, you might get a few pounds for it, but as for the painting itself, really I find it almost offensively bad.’