The Japanese Girl (25 page)

So. Until one day I was at lunch, concentrating on a particularly succulent fillet steak, which had followed a
sole veronique
, which had followed a smoked trout, when the scrape of a chair beside me and the careless slumping manner in which the newcomer sat down gave me an inkling that Sam Taylor had come to take a place at the table.

He was about forty-eight at the time but looked considerably older. He was a rickety figure of a man, very dark, with hair streaked across to hide a bald patch, a thin red face, handsome twinkling black eyes and a thin bulbous nose which a friend once compared – not unjustly – to the end of a garden thermometer.

‘Oh, Wilfred, just the laddie I wanted to see.' That was the way he talked. What sort of Queen's English he wrote I never attempted to imagine.

I chewed for a moment, savouring the flavours, before answering. His tone, the extra friendliness, suggested that he might want to ask for a loan, but even he would not essay it at the luncheon table. And anyway he knew better from past experience than to ask me.

‘Well, you see me,' I said, ‘so your day is made.'

‘Very well expressed.' He chuckled and studied the menu. ‘Very well expressed. And it could be true. Depends all on your goodwill, Wilfred. I know you're a generous character. Wouldn't refuse a friend. I'll have a ham omelette and chip potatoes and some peas, Alice, dear.'

I winced at his free and easy manner with the waitress and at the nature of his order – what
was
the good of pressing for improved catering standards for the club when there were people like him about – and my depression deepened when the wine waitress came and he asked for a large whisky and soda.

‘I have been known to refuse even an enemy,' I said.

‘Ah, well, it's that hard legal side, that big legal brain at work. That's not what I want of you, Wilfred, dear boy. It's another sort of favour altogether. And I come to you because you're the best man we've got in the Hanover Club – on art and furniture and things that fetch money these days in the salerooms.'

I sipped my Chambolle Musigny and said nothing. I wondered if this were a cunning attempt to please me, for I am only an amateur in the world of the big salerooms, and we had two or three professionals in the club. Nevertheless, I
am
well informed, and enjoy nothing better than to use my knowledge, and he knew it.

His whisky came and he took a gulp. ‘You know I've never owned anything worth a tinker's cuss: I live in a modern flat on my tod, and when the cash comes in it's the basic necessities of life that claim it. But an old aunt has just rattled off in Hendon and left me a house full of stuff. I don't think there's anything much there, but you never know these days, and I wouldn't want to make a bloomer and let something good slip through my fingers,'

I finished my steak and asked for the Stilton. ‘What have you done about it?'

‘Well, I've had the local people in, and they've itemized and listed everything. I've got the inventory in my pocket if you'd like to see it.'

‘No, thank you.'

‘They say it's pretty well all poor stuff and had best go to the local salerooms. They think it will fetch about six or seven hundred pounds in
total
. But there's one thing here.' He fished a sheaf of paper out of his pocket. ‘ They say: ‘‘Two French watercolours of the Seine by Walter Parr, dated and signed 1912. Could be valuable and suggest expert valuation.'' D'you know him, Wilfred?'

‘No … I know a painter called
Carr
, but I don't believe he ever left England. At least, one has never seen …'

He began to tuck into his omelette. ‘What I wondered, laddie, was whether you'd care to come up and have a decco at these pictures for yourself?'

The Stilton came, and this gave me an opportunity to consider the matter while I dug into it. There was absolutely no reason why I should give this shambling man the free benefit of my wide experience, and the obvious response was a curt refusal. But I always greatly enjoy looking around old houses and old furniture. It has always been my hope that one of these days I shall make a real discovery, something that will startle the world and profit myself; but so far it has never occurred. Once in my early days as a collector I had bought a fine tea set of Coalport china with 1754 stamped on the bottom of each piece, and bought it cheap, only to discover that the 1754 stamp proved it had been made after 1880. Once in a shop in York I had unearthed a Cox watercolour which fetched in the auction rooms six times what I gave. Once I had found a Charles II pewter mug in an old cottage in Kent. But these and a half dozen other minor successes and failures only whetted the appetite for more.

‘You can get a man from Sotheby's,' I said. ‘They'll send a man up with pleasure.'

‘I never trust these people. Before you –'

‘They're just as trustworthy as I am, and they know far more about it.'

‘Well, why don't you come and have a decco first? It's only a taxi ride.'

‘I'm a busy man. I have very little free time.'

‘Oh, come off it, Wilfred. You're always in the salerooms. I'd trust you to go over this stuff and pick out anything valuable before I would any of these pros.'

‘Flattery will do nothing for you,' I said. And in fact I was not at all flattered by his obvious wish to obtain my advice. It was too transparent altogether. Yet he
was
a member of my club, and he
was
the sort of rash, slapdash fool to let something good slip through his fingers for the sake of making sure. And Walter
Parr
? One had never heard of the man. These local valuers were noted for their carelessness. But if it were
Carr
, would that be much of a find? I doubted if Sotheby's would even be interested …

‘What else is there in the house?' I said.

‘A
lot
of furniture. Some rugs. A few more pictures. It's a shambles, laddie. The old girl was eighty, and I doubt if she had had a good turn out for fifty years.'

He gobbled through his lunch, so that we finished together. Downstairs he bought me a vintage port and showed me the inventory. One could tell
nothing
from it.

When I handed it back to him he said: ‘Doing anything this afternoon?'

I stared at him. ‘My dear fellow, I am not a free-lance like you!'

‘Well, I only thought. It would take no time in a taxi. Buzz up and buzz back. Actually, I promised these people a reply in the morning. They want to take the lot off my hands.'

It happened that though I was expected back at my office I had no appointments, except one that I wished to avoid. I had intended to be ‘not in' when my client called – since I knew he came only laden with trivial time-wasting complaints. It might be more effective if I were really out, called away on important business. I stared at Taylor, who just then was exchanging foolish badinage with another member who came to lean over his chair. When they had finished he turned and grinned at me and dropped a half-inch of ash from his cigar on to my shoe.

‘How about it, Wilfred? Be a sport?'
‘An hour,' I said. ‘At the most I can spare one hour.'

TWO

In the event it took far longer, as I suppose I should have anticipated. But indeed all my reckonings were confounded right at the outset by Sam Taylor's behaviour.

He flagged down a taxi outside the club, muttered something to the driver and we both climbed in. I am a man of considerable size, and taxis these days are not so accommodating as they were. We jerked casually through a dozen traffic lights, Taylor expatiating unnecessarily on my good fellowship; and then suddenly the cab stopped on the corner of a street and Taylor opened the door.

‘Are we there?' I said. ‘ You told me –'

‘No, but I thought it a
bonne idée
if we stopped
en route
. Can't do this sort of thing unless one does it
en prince
.'

I started to protest, but he was pulling me to get out, and I saw that we were at a public house half-way up Tottenham Court Road. We could not have been moving five minutes, and I was very irritable at being led into a public bar, where Sam ordered himself a double whisky and prevailed on me to take a brandy.

I accepted it in injured silence and thought about my wife while Sam joked with the barmaid and consumed his whisky in two swallows and ordered another one and drank that before I had properly inhaled the fumes of the brandy. I suspected that he did not take drink for the pleasure of drinking but merely for its ultimate effect on him.

Eventually we returned to the waiting taxi and were off again. When we started Taylor insisted on telling me some rambling story of his journalistic life, and I regretted more than ever the foolish impulse which had persuaded me to come. Suddenly the taxi stopped again, and with sinking heart I saw another public house offering its synthetic welcome. To my protests Sam returned that ‘they' would soon be closed, and it was essential to lay in a good foundation before the desert of the afternoon began. So in we went again and the pattern was precisely repeated: he taking two double whiskies to my one brandy.

I am not familiar with all the licensing hours of north London, but it fell out, by what means I do not know, that we found three more public houses open, proceeding in a series of erratic moves, until we reached Hendon. My friend Sam had a singular ability to take drink without apparent effect; but I must confess that on coming out of the last public house we both stumbled over a step that was not there.

And so at last the quarry we had all this time been seeking. A tall semi-detached, built, I would have thought, about the turn of the century, and grey with dirt and time. Sam took a little while to find the key, and afterwards a little while to find the keyhole, and then we were into a grey ill-lit blue-tiled hall.

It was worse than I thought, worse than I had ever expected. There are few periods in furniture when some good things are not made; no periods in art, however enervated, when some good pictures are not painted. It is like claret in the off years. But of course one has to allow for the perverse ingenuity of the purchaser. All the stuff in this house had been bought, I would have thought, between 1912 and 1918, and for the most part it had clearly been bought for its ornateness and its cheapness. It was gimcrack: bamboo and deal and fumed oak and plywood. The one or two really solid pieces were monstrous in their size and ugliness. As for the paintings, they were all dark brooding landscapes of Highland cattle, painted by nonentities, or indifferent etchings of some semi-classical subject, spotted with mildew and badly framed. I quickly concluded that Sam Taylor's aunt must have had many affinities with Sam Taylor.

We trudged, somewhat stertorously, up all three flights of stairs and solemnly trudged down again.

‘These two pictures,' I said, breathing my displeasure. ‘Watercolours of the Seine. Where would those be?'

‘Ah,' he said, ‘they're locked away! I was leaving those until the end! Here! In here! I'll show you!'

He went into the dining-room and unlocked a cupboard and drew out two pictures wrapped in brown paper. I unwrapped them and stared. They were
exactly
as described, watercolours of Paris bridges across the Seine, signed Walter Parr and dated. And just as clearly Walter Parr was some amateur, perhaps a cousin of the purchaser, who had set up his easel and made two facsimiles of the scene without a trace of talent or even the amateur originality of the primitives. The pictures were worth the value of the frames and nothing more.

I looked up and shook my head at Sam's thin red face, which was irritatingly close to mine. I stood up to get away from his alcoholic breath.

‘Worthless. There's
nothing
in the house at all. You'll be lucky to get the estimate that these people made. Nothing! Absolutely nothing.'

He looked woebegone and slightly tearful, but perhaps it was only the whisky coming out.

‘There's these prints,' he said. ‘Aren't they any good, laddie?'

‘
Nothing's
any good. I am afraid your aunt was the wrong sort of buyer. We had better leave now. I must get back to my office.' Although to tell the truth the five brandies I had willy-nilly taken scarcely disposed me for work.

I pulled over the stack of prints he indicated in the corner and took out a small painting about the size of a piece of quarto paper, badly framed in green velvet and gilt, and was going to thrust it back when some quality in it took my attention and I carried it nearer the light.

It was an oil painting – not, I thought, a very good one – and it showed a woman in panniers and a white bonnet taking a step in a dance in company with a wigged gentleman in knee-breeches and a sort of frock-coat. It was just the kind of artificial composition that some run-of-the mill Victorian or Edwardian artist would choose to make up when he lacked the inspiration or talent to do anything original. Find a couple of models and put them in fancy dress. Or perhaps not even bother with models: copy the dresses from some book on 18th century manners.

But at least it was an oil painting different from all the Highland cows and the lowering sunsets; and in spite of the stiff postures of the two people, the brush strokes were firm and the colours well chosen.

I said: ‘Do you mind if I take this out of its frame?'

‘Not a bit, old boy; do anything you like. Why, d'you think you've found something?'

‘No, nothing at all!' I snapped, turning the picture over. The back paper was already torn, and it was not difficult to lift another six inches away. The painting was on board, and the board was clearly antique.

‘What is it, laddie?' he asked.

‘It appears to be Italian or French,' I said. ‘ It is probably a copy, but at least it is genuinely old. It might be a copy of a painting by Tiepolo or – or Fragonard. Something of that nature. This cheap frame makes it look worse than it is. And it needs cleaning, of course.'