“That poor little boy is nothing but an experiment to them,”
she said. “How much music and mathematics and so on can be poured into him before the age of seven? Will he compose his first symphony before he starts at primary school? And so on.
Poor little boy! Have you seen him?”
“I’ve heard him,” said Pat.
And Tim and Jamie downstairs? “There are many different recipes for unhappiness in this life,” said Domenica, “and poor Tim is following a very common one. To love that which one cannot attain. It’s terribly sad, really. But people persist in doing it.”
Pat said nothing. She had seen a young man walking up the stairs in front of her, but by the time she reached the landing he had disappeared. That, she assumed, was Tim or Jamie.
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“Tim is very attached to Jamie,” Domenica went on. “And Jamie is very keen on a girl who’s gone to Canada for a year. So that’s that, really.”
“It can’t be easy,” said Pat.
Domenica shrugged. “No, it can’t. But sometimes people decide to be happy with what they’ve got. I’ve known so many cases like that. People hold a candle for somebody who’s never going to be for them what they want them to be. It’s hopeless.
But they carry on and on and make do with the scraps of time and attention that come their way.”
“Sad.”
“Very,” Domenica replied, and then thought for a moment.
“When I had him up here one evening for sherry, all he wanted to talk about was Jamie, and what Jamie was doing. Jamie was going to Montreal to see this girlfriend of his. And all that Tim was thinking of was this. His sadness was written large for me to see. He was losing his friend.”
“And what made it worse for him was that there were so few people he could talk to about this, because he feared their lack of understanding, or their scorn. People are cruel, aren’t they?”
After that they had sat in silence for a while and Pat had thought, and thought again, now that she was back in her room: we love the unattainable. Yes, we do. Foolishly. Hopelessly. All the time.
Pat arrived at the gallery slightly early the next morning, to find that the postman, a cheerful man with a weather-beaten face, had already been and there was a letter on the floor. She opened it and saw that it was an invitation to an opening to be held in a gallery further down the road. They were always getting this sort of thing, and it struck her that there was a lot of this in the art world: dealer sells to dealer, round and round in a circle.
Eventually a genuine customer would have to buy a picture, but where were they? So far they had sold nothing, and the only person who had shown the slightest interest in buying something had turned out to be intent on obtaining a bargain. Perhaps things would change. Perhaps somebody would come and buy one of the D.Y. Cameron prints; somebody who would not make a dismissive remark about Mr Vettriano; somebody who liked pictures of hills and glens.
She put the gallery invitation on Matthew’s desk and was about to go through to the back, when she stopped. Usually, when she came in in the morning, she would hear the alarm signal and have to key in the security number to stop it. This had not happened this morning, or had it? It was perfectly possible to go through the motions of a familiar action and not remember that one had done it. But Pat was sure that she had not attended to the alarm this morning. She had come in, opened the letter, and then walked over to Matthew’s desk, where she now stood. The control box was on the other side of the gallery, near the light switch, and she had definitely not been over there.
Had the alarm been set? Pat tried to remember who had been last to leave the gallery last night. It was not Matthew. He had gone off to meet his father shortly after four and she had stayed at work until five. She remembered leaving the gallery and when she had done so, because she had been concerned about being in time for Domenica’s invitation.
She glanced towards the control box, across the semi-darkened gallery. Two small red lights blinked regular pulses back at her. That was different. Normally, when she came in a single 78
red light flashed until the code was keyed in. Now there were two.
Pat looked about her. The gallery had a large expanse of glass at the front, and this gave out onto the street. There were people on the pavement, traffic on the road. The door was only a few feet away. But even so, she felt suddenly uneasy, and now she saw that the door that led to the room at the back was ajar. She closed that door – always – before she left. She would not have left it open like that, as the alarm system depended on its being closed.
Now she felt frightened, and she ran across the room to switch on the lights. Then, with the gallery bathed in light, each of the larger pictures illuminated by their spotlights, she found the courage to walk over to the inner office door and tentatively push it open.
The intruder had managed to raise the lower panel of the back window about eighteen inches. The glass was not broken, but the catch had been forced and there were splinters of wood on the floor – she saw those immediately.
She stood in the doorway, quite still, her feelings confused.
There was a feeling of intrusion, almost of violation. They had been burgled at home once, and she remembered how
She stepped back from the doorway and walked calmly to Matthew’s desk, where she picked up the telephone and dialled the emergency code. A comforting voice told her that the police would arrive within minutes and that
