I had to have that picture. I pushed open the door to the Spilling Gallery and told the man I found inside—Saul Hansard—that I wanted the painting in the window and I would pay any price for it. ‘Really?’ He chuckled. ‘What if I said seventy-five thousand pounds?’
‘I haven’t got seventy-five thousand pounds. How much is it?’
‘You’re in luck, then. It’s two hundred and fifty pounds.’
I grinned.
In luck.
It felt true, for the first time in four years. ‘Who painted it? What is it? Do you know anything about it?’
‘Artist by the name of Jane Fielder. She lives in Yorkshire. It’s the only one of hers I’ve got, or I’d be trying to flog you some more.
Something Wicked
, this one’s called.’ He was taking it out of the window as he spoke. ‘See the faint gold writing behind the red thumbprints?’
‘Thumbprints,’ I murmured. So I’d been right, almost.
‘Well, not really, but that’s what they’re supposed to represent. The gold writing goes all the way down, see? Two lines, repeated: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes.” Agatha Christie, via William Shakespeare.’ Saul Hansard smiled at me and introduced himself. I didn’t mind telling him my name because he was so obviously harmless. He was short, in his mid-sixties, I guessed, with flyaway sandy hair, bifocal glasses and trousers that were held up by red braces. I didn’t know then that he wore the braces every day. He was thin and had one of those straight-up-and-down bodies, almost like a boy’s—like a ten-year-old, tall for his age.
I took
Something Wicked
back to my room at the Brown Cow and leaned it against the wall. Looking at it became my main daily activity. I also, from then on, went to the Spilling Gallery every day. At first Saul kept explaining to me apologetically that he wasn’t going to get new work in for a while. I didn’t care. I was happy to look at the paintings he had on the walls, however many times I’d seen them before and even though I’d decided I didn’t want to buy them. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. Most of them were good, I thought, but they didn’t make me feel the way
Something Wicked
did.
When I found out Saul framed as well as sold pictures, I started to spend afternoons with him in his workshop at the back of the gallery because it was a way of seeing more art. He was always behind with his workload, and while he got on with float-mounting and bevelling to a constant soundtrack of Classic FM, I would sift through piles of pictures waiting to be framed, looking for something that might mean as much to me as
Something Wicked
did.
After about a month, Saul said to me, ‘Forgive me if I’m being nosey, Ruth, but . . . you evidently don’t have a job.’
I told him I didn’t. Looking at art was my job as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t care if no one paid me for it.
‘You wouldn’t by any chance like to work here, would you?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’m losing customers all the time, with it being just me—people come in and they can’t find anyone because I’m here in the back, and so they turn tail and leave. I’ve been thinking that what I could really do with is a friendly face to welcome—’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘I’d love to.’
Saul beamed. ‘What a stroke of luck,’ he said. He uses the word luck a lot; it was one of the things I liked about him. ‘You’re here anyway, so you might as well be paid for it. And you can be the first to see any new work that comes in.’
My life changed very quickly after that. I knew I couldn’t stay at the Brown Cow; I would need somewhere bigger, somewhere that could accommodate all the art I was going to buy. I rented Blantyre Lodge, got my things out of storage, raided Word on the Street’s art section and read as much as I could about famous artists and their work.
I took occasional days off to go to Silsford, where there was another gallery that sold contemporary art, and found the second picture I fell in love with there:
Tree of Life
by an artist called Lynda Thomas. It was a stylised image of a tree with black branches that twisted upwards like thick curls of hair. If you fixed your eye on it and moved around the room, you saw little metallic glimmers of red, gold and silver peeping out from between the leaves. The background was midnight blue, and the tree, though dark, shone against it, full of a hidden mysterious force, but nothing dangerous, nothing threatening. The painting wasn’t sentimental, though it might easily have been were the artist less talented.
I said all of this to Saul, not in the least embarrassed. I had known nothing about art for most of my life, but my sudden passion for it had given me confidence. I knew I was right because I felt it; I didn’t care about critics or experts, and whether they’d agree with me.
Gradually, I built up a collection. I branched out from paintings to sculptures. I relaxed my rule a bit and allowed myself to buy work that I didn’t love quite as much as
Something Wicked
and
Tree of Life
. In an art collection, I decided, one didn’t necessarily need or want to respond to every piece with the same intensity. Besides, I discovered, some pictures grew on you. I told Saul about my change of policy, explaining that, as well as soulmates, a person needs friends and acquaintances. He agreed. ‘Have you got any friends, Ruth?’ he asked me, looking concerned. In general he avoided asking me personal questions; I could hardly begrudge him this one.
‘I’ve got you,’ I said, eyes fixed on the art magazine I was reading.
‘Yes, but . . . apart from me. Have you got anyone else that you . . . see?’
‘I see you,’ I replied determinedly, starting to feel uneasy. ‘Why? You’re not planning on ditching me, are you? Closing the gallery and running off somewhere without telling me?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Saul. ‘With any luck, I’ll be around for a long time.’ It struck me that this was an odd way for him to put it. I looked up to catch his expression, but his face gave nothing away. I’d been working for him for two years by that point. Was he worried about what would happen to me after he died? Surely not. I didn’t know exactly how old he was, but he was certainly on the right side of seventy. I didn’t like to think about Saul dying, so I changed the subject back to art. It was the only thing I was interested in talking about, and Saul seemed happy to indulge me.
As it turned out, I was the one who deserted him, though it was the last thing I wanted to do; he was the only companion I had and I’d grown to love him.
On 18 June 2007—several dates are etched for ever on my brain, and this is one of them—I was sitting behind the counter, reading an art book called
Still Life with a Bridle
by Zbigniew Herbert, when a woman walked into the gallery. I recognised her, having seen her once or twice before, but didn’t know her name. She belonged to the category of Saul’s regulars that he and I called ‘the Rudies’—the people who, if they found me in the gallery, would ignore me and walk straight through to the back to find Saul.
I tried to smile, as I always did when a Rudie walked in, but got no response. The woman, dressed in a tasselled gypsy skirt and white trainers, and with a mass of curly silver-threaded black hair, was carrying a picture under her arm. I saw only the back of it as she strode past me without saying hello.
I shook my head at her rudeness and turned back to my book. A few seconds later she was back, the painting still under her arm. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got a picture I want him to frame—today, ideally.’
‘Isn’t he there?’
‘Not unless he’s invisible.’
‘Um . . . I don’t know. He must have nipped out.’
‘Did you
see
him go out?’ she asked impatiently.
‘No, but—’
‘How long’s he likely to be?’
‘Not long.’ I smiled. ‘He’s probably popped out the back and across to the post office. Can I help you at all?’
She looked down at me as if I were a piece of rubbish, contaminating her space. ‘You haven’t so far,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait five minutes. If Saul’s not back by then I’ll have to leave. I’m not wasting my whole day hanging round here—I’ve got work to do.’ She leaned the canvas board she’d been carrying against my desk and started to circle the gallery, looking at the pictures Saul and I had hung a few days earlier. ‘Lame,’ she said loudly about the first one she came to. Then she marched quickly past the others, offering a one-word comment on each of them: ‘Dismal. Lame. Pretentious. Vacuous. Hideous. I see nothing’s changed around here.’
The picture she’d brought in was tall, and she’d propped it up against the part of the desk I was sitting behind—perhaps deliberately to annoy me by obscuring my view of the room. On the back of the board someone had scrawled, in capital letters, the word ‘ABBERTON’. I wondered if it was her surname.
Her outright condemnation of every painting she saw made me curious to see the one she wanted Saul to frame. Whether she’d painted it or someone else had, she clearly deemed it worth spending money on. No one frames art they don’t value. I stood up and walked round the desk to look at the picture. She must have sensed me move because she whirled round, the bottom of her tasselled skirt whooshing out in a circle. It had a hole in it, I noticed. Her face was a mask of suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. Did she imagine I was glued to my chair? Why shouldn’t I move freely around the gallery, as she was? I worked there, after all.
When I looked at the painting, I had the same feeling I’d had when I first saw
Something Wicked
, except stronger. It was like instant hypnosis, a magnetic attraction. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The background—painted in dark greens, browns, purples and greys so that you could only just make it out, so that it looked as if it was in the shadows—was a residential street with houses all along it, a loop at one end, the shape of which had been massively exaggerated; it looked almost like a noose, with the rest of the road being the rope. The street was a cul-de-sac: Megson Crescent, though I didn’t know that at the time.
The rude woman must have noticed my reaction because she said, ‘You don’t need to tell me it’s good. I know it’s good.’
I was too startled by the picture’s power to say anything. At its centre, standing in the scene, was the outline of a person. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman. Apart from its shape, there was nothing human about the figure; inside the thin black line that separated it from the rest of the picture was a mass of what looked like hard feathers, scraps of material—gauze, perhaps—some white, some with colour painted on. A churned-up angel: that’s what it made me think of. It should have been grotesque, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. ‘Did you do it?’ I asked.
She told me she did.
‘It’s amazing.’
Flattery usually worked, even with the rudest of the Rudies, but it didn’t on her. Every few seconds she frowned at the door, as if willing Saul to walk through it. I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ruth Bussey,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, even though I’ve seen you before.’
‘We haven’t,’ she agreed.
‘Is your name Abberton? I noticed—’
‘No. Abberton is the person in the picture.’ She didn’t tell me her name. When I kept looking at her, she raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Do you want to make something of it?’
I turned back to the painting. ‘Is it . . .?’
‘No. It’s not for sale.’
‘Oh.’ I was horribly disappointed, and couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly challenge her—it was her painting, after all—but I knew I had to have it, had to be able to take it home with me.
‘I’m going,’ said the woman. ‘Tell Saul he needs a new business plan, one that knows the difference between being open and being closed.’ I was about to ask her name when she moved to pick up the canvas board, and I realised she was going to take it away.
I nearly cried out. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Even if it’s not for sale, can you . . . could you tell me something about it? What made you paint it? Who’s Abberton?’
She let out a long sigh. ‘He’s nobody, all right? Absolutely nobody at all.’
He.
So Abberton was a man. ‘Do you ever make prints from your originals?’ I asked ‘Sometimes artists . . .’
‘Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘You cannot buy this picture, Ruth Bussey.’ Her skin looked like paper that someone had screwed up, then flattened out to find all the creases still there. I didn’t like the way she’d said my name, particularly since she hadn’t told me hers. ‘Get over it. Buy another picture.’
I thought she’d given me a glimmer of hope. ‘Have you got others I could look at, ones that are for sale?’
Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from
me
,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work—it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist . . .
She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.
She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s someone else’s picture!’
‘It’s someone else’s
appalling
picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’