Athena (24 page)

7.
Acis and Galatea
1677
Jan Vibell (1630-1690)

Oil on canvas, 18 × 27½ in. (45.8 × 69.9 cm.)

How calmly the lovers … I can’t. How calmly the lovers lie. (As you lied to me.) How calmly the lovers lie embowered in bliss. In blissful unawareness of the watcher in the woods. Polyphemus the cyclops loves Galatea the nereid loves Acis the shepherd. The one-eyed giant plies the faithless nymph with gifts (see Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, Book XIII), to no avail. Acis, son and lover of a sea nymph, Acis must die, crushed by a rock the giant hurls, and then will be transformed into a river (presently Odysseus with his burning brand will settle in turn the cyclops’ hash). Vibell’s is a subtle and ambiguous art; is the subject here the pain of jealousy or the shamefaced pleasure of voyeurism or, again, the triumphant female’s desire to be spied on by one lover while she lies in the arms of another? In this painter’s dark and sickly world nothing is certain except suffering. The glorious, sunshot landscape against which the little triangular drama is played out, reminiscent of the landscapes of Watteau and Vaublin, is at once a stately pleasure park and a portrait of Nature rampant and cruelly supreme. The feral profusion of plants and animals seems a token of the world’s indifference to human affairs. Polyphemus himself is dwarfed by
the overarching surroundings amongst which he lurks: it is not he who is the giant here. See him crouching in the depths of the greenery (do you see?), his single eye staring, mad with grief and rage; is he merely hunched in pain or is he engaged in an act of anguished self-abuse? The artist’s dirty little joke. I feel a strong and melancholy affinity with the lovelorn giant. The lions and bears, the bulls and elephants (it is apparent Vibell has never seen a real elephant), which are the cyclops’ unavailing gifts to the uncaring nereid, roam the landscape as if lost in vague amaze, incongruous in this northerly clime, amidst these tender greens, soft umbers, limpid blues; soon, we feel, very soon they shall throw off puzzlement’s restraint and then the slaughter will start. Under their great mossy rock the lovers lie entwined like twins in the womb. The pool of blue waters at the feet of Acis prefigures the transformation that awaits him, while the jagged point of rock above his head seems poised to shatter him. Galatea. Galatea. She is the daughter of Nereus. She will make a river of her slain lover. The rock will split and from the crevice will spring a sturdy reed, slender, wet, glistening. I am Acis and Polyphemus in one. This is my clumsy song, the song the cyclops sang.

I should not have gone to Rue Street in that raw and shaken, deludedly eager frame of mind. The morning had an air of aftermath, with fitful gusts of wind and torn clouds scudding and leaves and litter flying everywhere. I stepped along as if on springs, snuffing up the chill air through lifted nostrils and contemplating the mystery of death. This was a world without Aunt Corky in it. What had been her was gone, dispersed like smoke. Forgive me, Auntie, but there was something invigorating in the thought; not the thought that you were no more, you understand, but that so much that was not you remained. No, I do not understand it either but I cannot think how else to put it. I suspect it was a little of what the condemned man must feel when the last-minute reprieve comes through and he is led away rubber-kneed from the scaffold: a mingling of surprise and left-over dread and a sort of breathless urgency.
More, more –
it is the cry of the survivor –
give me more!
I stopped at the Ptomaine Café in Dog Lane and sat down amid the coughs and the fag-smoke and ate a monstrous breakfast, sausages and black pudding and a rasher sandwich and a fried egg singed brown around the edges and floating in a puddle of hot fat.
Che
barbaro appetito, lalala la!
I even bought, from a dispenser the size of a coffin (‘Give it a kick,’ one of the regulars advised me with a sepulchral wheeze of laughter), a packet of cheap cigarettes, and though I have never been a smoker I sat there puffing away and smiling about me hazily. Sometimes I really think I must be mad.

In Rue Street three cars were parked crookedly outside the house, one with a plastic dog in the back window. The front door of the house was open wide, hanging by a hinge, though it gave an impression more of gaiety than violence, as if the damage were the result of a carnival crowd having forced its way through. A lumpy man in grubby but sharply pressed grey slacks and a blue blazer loitered in the hall with a cigarette ill-concealed in a cupped hand that was the size of a small ham. He gave me an uncertain look and said something that I did not catch as I swept past him and started up the stairs. On the first landing I came upon two more henchmen, standing about with the vacant, slightly peeved air of callers who had already been kept waiting an unconscionable time. They were wearing anoraks, and one of them had what at first I did not recognise as a snub-nosed submachine-gun resting negligently in the crook of his arm. They regarded me with interest. This pair also I disdained and went on up the stairs. At the door of the atelier yet another anorak stood guard; he too was armed. He was menacingly polite. He wanted to know who I was. I told him I lived here, which was almost true, after all. He frowned, and made an uncertain gesture with the snout of his machine-gun, waving me on. I swept past him haughtily with nostrils flared and head thrown back. I had an extraordinary feeling of invincibility. I could have walked through the wall if necessary.

I paused in the doorway, though, struck as always by the glare of white light falling from the tall, sky-filled windows. Morden was standing as he had been the first time I saw
him, posed in profile against the backdrop of the draped sheet, his big flat face lifted to the light and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his long overcoat. He did not turn. In the middle of the floor Inspector Hackett stood looking at his left hand, which was bleeding; he was subjecting it to a close and what seemed admiring scrutiny, turning it this way and that in front of his face. A little way off from him Prince the dog sat stiffly to attention, in an attitude at once defiant and abashed and licking its lips rapidly and noisily, its forelegs trembling. Francie squatted beside the dog with a hand on its scruff. He gave me an impassive glance.

‘Ah, Mr M.’ said Hackett. ‘Come in, come in. You’re just in time, as usual.’ He seemed in high good humour, and was polished to a particularly bright shine today. He extended his hand proudly for my inspection; a drying trickle of blood led down his wrist and under his shirt-cuff. ‘Will you look what the towser did to me?’ he said. Together we contemplated the wound. ‘More of a rip than a bite,’ he said. ‘See?’

There was a step behind me in the doorway and a tall, thin, skull-faced man in a three-piece suit of houndstooth tweed came in drying his hands on an enormous, snowy handkerchief. His small, bony head was broad at the brow and narrow at the chin, and he had a peculiarly prominent upper lip that made it seem as if he were wearing a set of stage teeth over his own. Blue eyes, very keen and watchful and spitefully amused. He had the manner, at once sleek and brisk, of a medical man – that handkerchief, those hands – and for a second I saw you sprawled on the chaise-longue in a tangle of blood-soaked sheets, one shoe off and one white hand dangling to the floor.

‘Mr Sharpe!’ Hackett said genially and pointed his wounded hand at me. ‘Here’s Mr … what is it again? … Mr Morrow. Mr Morrow – Mr Sharpe.’

Sharpe looked me up and down quizzically and sniffed.
‘You are the art expert, are you?’ he said. His blue glance glittered and I could see he was suppressing a snicker.

‘Mr Sharpe is over from England,’ Hackett said, his voice dropping a curtsey. ‘I thought it would be a good thing to get another expert in.’ Gently he smiled an apology. ‘A second opinion, so to speak.’

Sharpe finished with the handkerchief and deftly tucked it into his breast pocket, then paced to the window with one hand in the pocket of his jacket and stood for a moment in thoughtful contemplation of the street. Still Morden had not turned. All waited. Inspector Hackett delicately cleared his throat.

‘Yes,’ Sharpe said, as if in answer to a question. He turned with a quick movement, suddenly brisk. He looked at Hackett, at Morden and at me. ‘They are all copies,’ he said. ‘Every one of them.’

There was a beat of stillness, as if everything everywhere had halted suddenly and then slowly, painfully, started up again. Sharpe, gratified at the effect he had made, looked about at us with a faint, death’s-head leer. Morden turned his face and gazed at me without expression. Hackett stood with his head tilted, faintly frowning, as if he were listening to something ticking inside his skull. He gestured vaguely at Sharpe with his bloodied hand. ‘Here, give us a lend of that hankie,’ he said. Sharpe drew back, startled. He hesitated, and reluctantly, with an expression of deep distaste, drew out the handkerchief and relinquished it. Hackett with thoughtful deliberation wrapped the cloth around his torn hand and then stood looking at the loose ends helplessly, until I stepped forward and tied them for him, and remembered as I did so a woman in a flower shop I used to frequent, in the days when I did that sort of thing, who could tie a ribbon into an elaborate bow with a deft twist of one hand. I could hear Hackett breathing; he exuded a hot, moist, constricted smell, the same smell a crippled uncle in my
childhood used to leave behind him when he was lifted out of his wheelchair. Strange the things the mind remembers at a time like that.

‘Yes,’ Sharpe said again, pleasurably chafing together his pale, long-fingered hands, ‘they are copies, no doubt of it. One or two are not bad, in their way. Done from photographs, I should think, probably those rather muddy ones in Popov’s so-called
catalogue raisonné
of the Behrens collection.’ A faint, sour smirk and Popov was dismissed. ‘Two copyists were involved, I believe. Amateurs. The canvases and frames are Victorian, the pigments were supplied by the grand old firm of Messrs Winsor and Newton.’ He frowned pleasantly and looked at his finger-nails. ‘Such a quintessentially English name, I always think.’ He allowed a sly, almost flirtatious glance to slide over me. ‘I cannot imagine how anyone could have mistaken such daubs for the real thing.’

The dog detached itself from Francie and trotted forward silently and sat down beside me, folding itself into position with a deft, subsiding sweep of its haunches. I put my hand on its head. Its fur had the bristly, polished texture of plastic and smelled, not unpleasantly, of old carpets; the feel of it – how shapely that skull – imparted to my hand an incurious, companionable warmth. They say dogs can smell fear; perhaps this one could smell … what? Shock? But I was not shocked, not really. There had been an odd, unidentifiably familiar ring to Sharpe’s announcement; it was like news so long awaited that when it came at last it was no longer news. My brain had slowed to an underwater pace. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to sit down in some dim, deserted corner and think slowly and carefully for a long time. There was much to be pondered.

Morden turned his head at last and spoke. ‘I told you,’ he said to Hackett, ‘I told you they were copies.’

‘Fakes,’ Hackett said.

The dog growled softly and Francie slapped it on the snout.

‘Copies,’ Morden said again, with soft emphasis, and smiled.

Gall, I was thinking; Gall the painter and the piss-artist Packy Plunkett.

Hackett was examining his bandaged paw again. I admired his self-possession.

‘They’re signed,’ he said mildly, in a faraway tone, as if he were thinking of something else altogether.

Morden gave a start of mock astonishment.
‘Just what is it you’re driving at, Inspector?’
he said in an Ealing-comedy accent, and Sharpe, who had been leaning against the window-frame with an expression of supercilious amusement, arms folded lightly on his prominent little chest, laughed. Morden came forward slowly, smiling at the floor and shaking his head. He stopped beside Hackett and contemplated him almost with compassion. Hackett frowned at the window.

‘Have I tried to pass the pictures off as the genuine article?’ Morden said. ‘Have I tried to flog them to anyone? No. They’re copies. I had them made. I’m an art-lover. I’m going to hang them in my house. In my house in France. My villa on the Riviera. Is that a crime?’

Hackett turned to him and—

Ah, I am tired of this. Shall I have Prince bite someone else, take a lump out of Morden’s pinstriped calf or turn on Francie and tear out his throat? No, I suppose not. I stood stroking the dog’s head and listened to them sparring, their voices coming to me buzzingly, as if from a long way off. I had sunk into a dulled, sleepwalking state, not unpleasant, really, and almost restful. The rug had been pulled from under my feet with such skill and swiftness that I had hardly noticed myself tumbling arse over tip and banging the back of my head on the floor.

Presently I found myself in the street with Hackett; we walked to his car in a shared, thoughtful silence. His men, silent also, had already packed up their guns and driven away. He got behind the wheel and started up the engine and let it idle. I stood beside him at the open door with my hands in the pockets of my mac. It had begun to rain, a faint, pin-like stuff that swayed and swirled in the gusting air. November. I told him that my aunt had died. He nodded seriously but said nothing and went on gazing through the windscreen. Could he have known about Aunt Corky? Was he so intimate with the details of my life? The thought was almost comforting. I have always wanted to be watched over. He heaved a sigh and put the car into gear. ‘They’ll have to do something about that dog,’ he said absently. His hand was still bandaged with Sharpe’s handkerchief, stiff now with drying blood. I shut the door on him and he crept the car away at the speed of a hearse.

I met Morden coming down the street with Francie and the dog behind him (Sharpe by now has been wrapped up in his tissue paper and safely stowed away). Morden had the look of a schoolboy who has pulled off a glorious prank. Full of himself, as my mother would have said. He was buried in his big coat with his hands in the pockets and the collar turned up against the rain. When they drew level he stopped and fixed me with his blankest look; yes, trying not to laugh, as always. ‘Sorry about the pictures,’ he said. ‘Just a joke.’ He nodded once brusquely and they passed on in file, the three of them, satrap and vizier and heraldic hound. Francie and the dog cast a backward look, both grinning. I shall miss old Prince.