company, interesting and sympathetic, and the company of Bruce and his friends in the Cumberland Bar. What a profound mistake to fall in love with
that man – she realised that now. She had no feeling for him, not even revulsion; she felt nothing. At that crucial moment, when she had seen him awake and smiling at her, she had realised that she was free.
Angus Lordie interrupted her thoughts. “We should do something about the picture now,” he said. “Let’s go into my studio and get to work.”
They followed him from the drawing room, down a book-lined corridor, and into a large room, two floors high, with large skylights set into the ceiling. Matthew, who had been clutching the painting, now handed it over to Angus Lordie and watched anxiously as their host laid it down on a table and reached for a large, opaque bottle. He placed the bottle beside him and then raised his glass of whisky to Matthew.
“Paint-stripper,” he said. “In the bottle that is – not the glass!
Hah!”
Matthew said nothing, but narrowed his eyes as Angus Lordie took the top off the bottle and sprinkled a viscous liquid across the painting. Then he rubbed this gently with a cloth.
“Draw near and see,” said Angus Lordie. “We’ll give this a moment to act, and then I’ll give it a wipe. All should be revealed.”
Slowly the surface of the painting began to blister and bubble.
The shore of Iona disappeared, and then the coast of Mull. Next went the sea; those blue waves which had rather impressed Matthew became grey and then brown.
“Now a gentle wipe,” said Angus Lordie. “That’ll get rid of all this superfluous paint. Here we go.”
They were all huddled over the painting now. Pat noticed that Matthew looked pale, and that his breathing was shallow.
Domenica, catching Pat’s eye, gave her a conspiratorial nod. And Angus Lordie, absorbed in his task, looked only at the surface of the painting, which was now changing colour markedly.
“Now then,” Angus Lordie said, dabbing at a section of the painting. “Gently does it. Gently.”
“An umbrella,” whispered Domenica. “Look. An umbrella.”
“Yes!” said Angus Lordie, triumphantly. “Yes! And look what we have here. A beach. Yes! And do we have people in evening
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suits dancing under that umbrella, which is being held up, is it not, by a butler? Yes we do! We do!”
Angus Lordie straightened up. “Yes!” he shouted. “Exactly as I had suspected! A Vettriano!”
Matthew was quietly pleased. He had lost a Peploe (which he had never really had, anyway) but he had gained a Vettriano (which he had never known he had). After the initial shock of the discovery, he turned to Angus Lordie and embraced him warmly. “I’m so glad that you offered to do this,” he said. “I would never have imagined it. A Vettriano!”
Angus Lordie smiled, wiping his hands on a piece of cloth.
“I was alerted by the shape of the umbrella,” he said. “I just had a feeling that it was our friend Mr Vettriano underneath. I don’t know why, but I had this feeling.”
“Never underestimate the power of intuitions,” said Domenica. “They are a very useful guide. They can show us the way to all sorts of things – including the way to being good.”
Angus Lordie raised an eyebrow. “How so?” he asked. “What have intuitions to do with goodness?”
“Intuitions help us to know what is right and wrong,” said
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Domenica. “If your intuitions tell you that something is wrong, then it probably is. And once you start to use your moral faculties to work out why it’s wrong, you’ll see that the intuition was right in the first place.”
“Interesting,” said Angus Lordie. “But I suspect that the intuition is merely a form of existing knowledge. You know something already, and the intuition merely tells you that the knowledge is buried away in your mind.”
“But that’s exactly what an intuition is,” said Domenica. “That’s exactly why they’re so useful.”
Angus Lordie replaced the cap on the bottle of paint-stripper.
“Enough of all this,” he said. “I propose that we go through to the drawing room and open a bottle of champagne. Leave the painting here, Matthew. It needs to dry a little. I’ll come back in a moment and fetch it.”
They followed their host back down the corridor and into the large, formally furnished drawing room. Angus Lordie busied himself with the opening of a bottle of champagne, which he took from a concealed fridge in a walnut cabinet. Then he poured a glass for each of them and they stood in the middle of the room, under the Murano chandelier, and raised their glasses to each other.
“To the successful sale of the Vettriano,” said Angus Lordie, chinking his glass against Matthew’s. “That is assuming that you will be selling it. Vettriano, of course, is not to everybody’s taste.
But the point is there’s a strong market for them and it seems to be getting stronger.”
