Angels of the Flood (2 page)

‘Conservation as detective work. Yes.’ Frowning, she checked her notes. ‘I guess I surprised myself with that one,’ she said ruefully. ‘It’s more of a puzzle than I’d bargained for.’ Then she looked up at her audience, and smiled, just a whisker of a smile, but enough for David to sink back in his seat with a grin of relief. It was okay, she was back on track. Their star speaker hadn’t come adrift after all. Kate had regained her firm, impersonal lecturer’s manner and everyone relaxed. ‘My next example, you’ll be pleased to know, is more straightforward.’

David almost cheered. He was amazed by the strength of his reaction. It had been a long time since he’d wanted anything as much as he’d wanted Kate’s lecture to finish as successfully as it had begun. Amazingly, he’d actually forgotten about himself for nearly an hour. Kate’s magic was as potent as it had ever been.

She clicked the remote and the troublesome little rat, teeth bared cruelly as it gripped the insect in its mouth, vanished from the screen. David almost believed that, before its image was wiped out, the rat closed a single eye in a conspiratorial wink, just for him.

T
RAFALGAR SQUARE GLITTERED WITH
sunshine after rain; even the pigeons were transformed, their wings gold-tipped against a pewter sky as the storm clouds rolled back. Tourists were shucking off their plastic macs and drifting about with infuriating slowness, getting in the way. Kate bristled with impatience. Always after a lecture there was an excess of energy, but today that energy felt uncomfortably close to panic: an urge to run, to escape back home—the only problem was, she didn’t know what the hell she’d be running from.

She was aware of David, an oh-so solid presence at her side. Having surprised her by turning up at the lecture, he seemed to have assumed some kind of proprietorial rights over the rest of her day.

He told her how interesting the lecture had been, repeated one or two flattering comments he’d heard from the audience as they’d shuffled out, then asked casually, ‘So how come you almost lost it back there?’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘Only to me.’

Kate knew he was lying to spare her feelings. She said, ‘I don’t know. It was weird… I felt… as if… it was like I was…’ She gave up. There was no way to explain her shock when that detail from the Marsyas picture had suddenly loomed up on the screen, a monster rat chomping on an enormous bee. It wasn’t as though it was the first time she’d seen it, but still… one moment she’d been progressing smoothly with the lecture, aware that she was drawing to the end of her performance, aware that it had gone well, and the next moment she’d felt herself plunging through the surface of the present into an inky black crevasse. Her audience receded to an irrelevance and all that mattered was that crudely sketched image, that evil little rodent with the helpless insect gripped in its jaws.

An act of vandalism, she’d called the alteration of the painting during her lecture, a random act of vandalism, but it wasn’t random at all. Random, she could have coped with.

‘You look like you could use a drink.’

For the second time that afternoon, Kate clawed her way back to reality to find David Clay close at hand, intrigued and concerned.

‘Yes,’ she said, and then, ‘No. Look, David, I have to go back to the studio. There’s something I want to check.’

‘Is it to do with that picture?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Mind if I come too? I’ve never seen a conservation workshop before.’

‘Okay.’ She didn’t particularly want him along, but it seemed simpler not to argue. He gave the impression of a man who was not easily deterred.

It was odd sitting next to him in the cab that took them to the street off Primrose Hill where she had her studio and home. If someone had asked her a month before what David Clay had looked like, she’d have been hard put to describe him, and yet she’d known who it was the moment she set eyes on him on the concourse at the South Bank. In spite of the grey hair and heavy jaw, he was unmistakably the person she’d once walked with beside the Arno during those strange weeks when the air was clogged with dust and the streets were slippery with muck. They’d cleaned mud from cellars and thrown talcum powder at the walls of the Baptistery and, so far as she could remember, almost but not quite fallen in love. He had retained the broad shoulders and easy movement of the sportsman; his face, no longer handsome, was stamped with a shrewd intelligence, and his eyebrows, always his strongest feature, had remained dark while his hair grew pepper and salt. And at his core she sensed the stillness, the certainty, that had always been so much a part of him, and which she’d forgotten entirely. It should have made him a reassuring person to have around, especially now, when she felt haunted by the enigma of that weirdly altered picture. The only trouble was, she couldn’t help wondering if David might himself be contributing to the problem. If she hadn’t caught sight of him sitting in the third row of the lecture theatre, a man who’d been so much a part of those unforgettable weeks, would the Marsyas detail have had the power to sabotage her well-planned lecture?

She was still considering this while she unlocked the door to her studio, a large, airy, north-facing space which took up the entire first floor of the house and a generous extension into the garden as well. He seemed fascinated by the tools of her trade. While she tidied away the slides and her notes, he prowled round, examining everything, from the high-tech magnifier to the maulstick, a small piece of cloth wrapped tightly round the end of a piece of wood that artists have used to rest their painting hand on for centuries.

‘Isn’t there a Rembrandt self-portrait that shows him holding one of these?’ he asked. ‘At least you’re in good company, Kate.’ When she didn’t answer, he sniffed the air, then said, ‘I know what’s strange. I expected this place to smell of turps and oils, but it doesn’t. Why’s that?’

‘We use acrylic paints when we have to retouch paintings,’ she told him. ‘It’s easier for future conservators to remove and it’s the only way to get a permanent match since oils darken over time.’

He considered this. ‘Presumably you want to restore the picture as nearly as possible to its original state.’

‘There’s a lot of debate about that,’ she told him. ‘Some conservators think the retouching should be easily distinguishable from the original. The most famous example of that school of thought is the Cimabue crucifixion in Florence which was so badly damaged by the flood. Do you remember that? It was almost destroyed, and they decided not to try to retouch it at all, just coloured the damaged bits in a kind of neutral cross-hatching as a memorial to the destruction. Now a lot of people think that was too extreme. There’s no one right way of doing this job.’

‘Oh look,’ said David. ‘Here’s Marsyas.’ He’d found the painting on an easel to one side of the studio. Kate didn’t look up. She was searching through a box of slides. ‘Are you going to remove the animal graffiti?’ he asked.

‘We’re waiting for instructions from the owners.’

‘I thought you said they were anonymous.’

‘Yes, but we can communicate via the dealer who’s acting as go-between.’

‘You recognized the painting, didn’t you?’

Kate froze. Something was squeezing her ribs, making it hard to breathe. She said, ‘I—don’t know.’

‘We both recognized it,’ David said firmly. He’d moved quietly across and was standing right in front of her. His bulk seemed to be sucking the air out of the room. He said, ‘It was at the—’

‘I really don’t remember where I saw it before,’ she interrupted him quickly.

‘The Villa Beatrice.’ He pronounced the words in the Italian way—Bay-ah-tree-chay. Kate recoiled.
The Villa Beatrice.
Extraordinary how just hearing the name of that place had the power to take her breath away even after all these years.

‘Maybe,’ she said. There was some kind of constriction in her throat.

‘You know it was.’

‘Maybe,’ she said again. Her fingers had been flicking through the slides. Now they stopped. She’d reached the ones she was looking for, but found she was reluctant to touch them, as though these particular slides were coated with poison. And, in a way, they were.

‘What’s that?’ asked David.

‘Just another picture.’

‘So?’

She hesitated, then, ‘This one was altered as well.’

‘And then sent to you?’

Kate nodded.

‘By the same person?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you think it is?’

‘Yes, probably.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘It’s not—’

‘I’d really like to have a look.’

Gingerly, Kate took a slide from its cover and set it in the viewer, before passing it to David. He looked at it for a few moments, then said, ‘Explain, please.’

She moved a little distance away and began picking the dry leaves off a geranium plant. They released their cool aromatic scent against her palms, astringent and calming, but her heart was still pounding. She said, ‘This is a canvas which was sent to my studio towards the end of last year. It’s anonymous, probably Italian. It’s an allegory entitled “Truth is the Daughter of Time”—
Veritas Filia Temporis
—you can see the inscription on the bottom right. The theme was a popular one at in those days. Basically the libidinous couple romping in the foreground are about to be exposed by Father Time—the old gentleman behind them. Highly moral and not all that subtle. Your crimes catch up with you in the end, is the obvious author’s message.’

‘So who’s Miss Furry Boots?’

‘The figure watching them on the right? That’s Deception. She has the face of a beautiful young woman but the body and soul of a monster.’

‘Ah yes, I know the type well,’ said David with a smile. ‘And this painting was changed too? How?’

Kate hesitated. ‘It’s probably just a coincidence.’

David looked up at her and raised his dark eyebrows, clearly not believing her statement for a minute. Kate sighed and pulled out another slide, replacing the one in the viewer without a word. He peered at the small screen and Kate saw him stiffen. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. He shifted his stance to get a better look. ‘It was like this when it was sent to you?’

‘Yes.’ She remembered the shock of opening the painting when it arrived in its wooden packaging that cool October morning. The image itself was horrific enough, but when she’d realized which detail had been added recently, she’d been tempted to send it straight back to Signor Barzini and refuse the commission. But at the same time there’d been a fascination, a ghoulish fascination perhaps, which persuaded her to see the job through.

‘So much blood,’ said David. ‘It’s grotesque—like a scene from a horror film.’

‘Yes.’ It had taken Kate weeks of patient work to clean away the blood. No wonder the owner wanted to remain anonymous. Some brainless vandal had overpainted Deception’s neck with gore, as though her throat had been cut. There was blood pouring over her shoulders, saturating her gown and making scarlet pools on the ground. And still Deception’s beautiful face bore that sweet, untroubled smile, so disconnected from her ravaged flesh. Kate had worked obsessively on the picture, refusing to allow any of her assistants to help. Returning the image to its original state had become a labour of love, almost an act of penance, as though by restoring it she might somehow restore the life that had been destroyed.

David straightened up and looked at her very directly. ‘Remind me again how Francesca died,’ he said quietly.

Kate winced.
Francesca.
It was years since she’d heard the name spoken out loud. She said, as briefly as she could, ‘It was a car crash.’

‘Yes, but… I remember now. Wasn’t she on one of those scooter things? A Vespa? And she was in a collision with a little Fiat? And the way she fell—’

‘That’s right,’ Kate intervened quickly. ‘The way she fell—on the windscreen or the car mirror—it went through her neck and—and…’ She stopped.
And she was almost decapitated.
Even now Kate found herself choking on the words.

‘I’m sorry, Kate. That was insensitive of me. I’d forgotten you were there.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember any of it. I was knocked out by the collision.’

‘And you weren’t driving.’

‘No.’

‘Kate, are you okay?’

‘I could use some air.’

‘Fine. We’ll go out for a bit and talk about something else.’ He smiled grimly. ‘We’ll stick to neutral topics like the situation in the Middle East or euthanasia or fox hunting. Good idea?’

She nodded. Anything to get away from those hideous images.

And it was a good idea, at least to begin with. They walked up onto Primrose Hill and looked out over London. Huge patches of the city were sparkling in the sunshine while other parts were shrouded by grey veils of rain. While they wandered the paths they stuck to the normal births, marriages and deaths topics two people talk about who haven’t seen each other in years. Kate told him briefly about her first marriage, to Martin, who was an architecture student. That had broken up soon after the birth of their son, Luke. ‘Martin couldn’t really deal with being a father,’ she told him, ‘though he and Luke have got closer recently.’ Her second marriage, to a civil servant called Ben Lumins, had ended three years ago. Tara, the daughter from that marriage, was currently at art school.

‘And since then?’

‘Since then I’ve rather enjoyed being single. How about you?’

David stared out over the city. ‘Three kids, married twenty-five years, divorced eighteen months. But I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, Kate. You misunderstand me. Recently the whole subject has become pretty much of an obsession. I’ve lived and breathed and probably talked about my chaotic private life non-stop. I expect I qualified for great bores of today ten times over. But since your lecture this afternoon I haven’t thought about it at all. And that’s a relief, believe me.’

Kate looked at him to see if he was teasing her. She’d never known the topic of Conservator as Detective have such a profound impact on any member of an audience before. But so far as she could tell, he meant what he said. She wondered briefly if he had expectations of more than a bottle of wine and a meal when they went back to her house. She hoped not. Distracting someone who was still raw and bruised from a recent divorce was not part of her plans for the evening. Especially not when the recently divorced someone kept reminding her of a time and place she’d long ago made it her business to forget.