‘You’ll learn a lot from Mr Hendy’ – at which Cyril looked aside and down in a strange way. ‘He knew Sickert, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Johnny.
Sir George chuckled. ‘Small oils,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing.’ His look played round Johnny’s head, with a kind of critical amusement about his hair in its ponytail, folded up twice. ‘Have you been working here long?’
‘Oh . . . two months now, sir,’ said Johnny.
‘Two months’ – again, praise and ridicule in his tone. ‘And what do you think? Should I buy this picture?’
This time Johnny didn’t look at Cyril, though he used his words: ‘It’s an extremely nice little painting.’
‘Yes, quite. I expect you’ve done a certain amount to it?’
‘We’ve just cleaned it up a bit,’ said Cyril.
‘Indeed,’ said Sir George with a sigh, but still looking at Johnny. Cyril seemed unhappy at this turn of events and Johnny himself felt uncomfortable till Cyril said rather brusquely,
‘I’m asking ninety guineas for it.’
Johnny couldn’t tell if this seemed steep to Skipton – whose face was impregnable to any vulgar shock of cost. ‘Look, would you hold it for me, Hendy, and I’ll come by next week and look at it again.’ Was ‘Hendy’ how you spoke to a servant, or a colleague? – Johnny wasn’t sure.
Cyril said he would, and looked displeased but unsurprised. There was a tempo to the art world – delays were written in to it, as well as frighteningly swift decisions. ‘Thanks so much,’ said Skipton, and as he went, as if unwilling to waste more time, towards the door he turned back and said, ‘No, my daughter told me you were working here.’
‘Oh . . . really?’ said Johnny.
‘The exquisite Francesca,’ said Sir George.
‘Oh! I see . . .’ said Johnny, beaming suddenly and feeling himself in some sort of trap. ‘I don’t really know her.’
‘Oh? Well, she’s taken quite a shine to you,’ said Sir George, which sounded the kind of parental certainty often far from the truth, and in this case embarrassing in other ways. Johnny felt he could tell one truth at least, but it came out oddly,
‘I think I’m a bit scared of her.’
Her father seemed puzzled for a second by his tone, but added very drily, as he opened the door and tightened his scarf round his neck, ‘I think I know what you mean.’
When Skipton had left, Cyril put on his coat with resumed impatience, and dashed off. The door banged, the bell protested losingly, and a little Chelsea view hung seductively near the entrance rocked from side to side on its hook. Johnny stood in the eddy, oddly aware of how Cyril, prey to the rival tugs of selling and buying, owned everything here, it was the world he had made and would live and die in; while he himself was merely, barely responsibly visiting on his way to a very different life, where of course he would be painting pictures of his own.
Today was Thursday, early closing, so it was only till one. He stood looking out past the wares in the window at the parked cars by the kerb and the occasional pedestrians, any one of whom might decide to turn in to the shop and set the still air, with its smell of wax and linseed, jangling again. He felt relieved, light-hearted and exposed, and went through to the back of the shop frowning at his own desire to mess around. His rebellion took the form of turning the milled dial of the old wireless ten degrees, to Radio 3. Beethoven, at once, but which symphony? He ruled out Three, and Five to Nine inclusive – he wasn’t so sure about the earlier ones. As often in the past at home, or in his shared study at school, where he had to claim odd half-hours between his friends’ Doors and Stones for intoxicating shots of Mahler and Strauss, he felt the presence of an orchestra as a private overwhelming luxury; and then, being alone, he turned it up and made noises, not singing along, little hisses and yelps of emphasis and agreement.
He got back to work, painting the fine angled slip with a gold paint that sank into the untreated wood. It gleamed and then dulled in the violent dazzle of the scherzo – number Four, surely? He set it on a sheet of paper to dry, and there was the racket of the bell again, and the repeated jangle that half-covered the closing of the door. He looked apprehensively through the blue and then through the clearer red glass in the door of the back-shop, a woman by herself; then he went in – it took him a moment to recognize her from behind, in a long black coat and red boots, peering closely at a landscape then standing off with a shake of the head. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said. ‘That’s funny.’
She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Why is it?’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s just that your father was in here half an hour ago.’ He came forward.
‘That is funny,’ said Francesca, ‘very funny.’ She looked at parts of him other than his face when she spoke, she examined his paint-smeared old Sotheby’s apron. ‘So you’ve met Daddy’ – she smiled narrowly at him then, so that he saw her daddy in her, at the moment she distanced herself from him: ‘Was he being difficult?’
Johnny sniffed. ‘I think he rattled Cyril a bit.’
‘That’s what he does,’ said Francesca, sounding pleased at least by her father’s consistency. ‘He’s a great rattler. I don’t suppose he bought anything?’
‘He’s thinking about it.’
She savoured this. ‘Well, he’s a great thinker too.’
‘He seemed to know what’s he’s talking about.’
Francesca perhaps found this remark misplaced. ‘You’ll have to come and see his collection,’ she said, in a tone which didn’t promise an immediate invitation.
‘I’d love to, thank you,’ said Johnny, feeling this must be a privilege. ‘What does he collect, mainly?’
‘Well, he’s got three Whistlers, for instance,’ she said. And as if that was enough about that, ‘So this is where you beaver away.’ She looked round again, as if more intrigued by the existence of the shop than by anything specific in it. ‘A lot of pictures’ – advancing and looking very quickly at two or three in a way that might equally have conveyed ignorance or unhesitating connoisseurship. Then she stared at the half-open door behind Johnny, with its coloured glass window let in and the uninterrupted noise of the radio beyond. ‘I suppose all the fun takes place at the back.’
‘I don’t know about fun,’ said Johnny, and felt slightly ashamed. ‘No, it can be fun.’ He was pleased she wasn’t going to see round the back. ‘That’s where I am mainly, I don’t come out here much.’
And in a moment of course she was going towards the door, and Johnny with a pained smile following her. She peered in broad-mindedly, a hand on the doorknob, like an adult shown the children’s playroom. ‘Gosh, all those frames.’
‘I know,’ said Johnny, keeping close by her as she crossed the threshold. ‘You’re not really —’: he felt he couldn’t say it to her; and she ignored the bad form of what he’d started to say. Anyway, why shouldn’t she go into the room? He found he wanted her to see it, it confirmed what was otherwise a mere rumour about what he did all day. He made something chivalrous of it, looking round with fresh eyes at the stove, the tables, the two hundred frames hanging inside each other on the walclass="underline" ‘Cyril doesn’t like people coming in here, I don’t know why.’
‘Well, Cyril’s not going to know, is he,’ said Francesca.
The Maitland which her father was or was not about to buy was on the table. She picked up the magnifying visor and fitted it over her blonde curls and was suddenly inside what Johnny had been doing. He thought even so she wouldn’t be able to tell. Standing back she was clumsy for a second before she took the visor off. Neither of them said anything about the picture.
‘So do you get time off for lunch?’ she said, direct but tactful. Who knew what picture-dealers’ apprentices got?