‘Six months or so, I think. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’ She turned the painting face down and began rummaging through the racks of framing material.
‘Hello, Red’s dad.’ A child’s voice came from somewhere behind me. It took me a moment to locate its source. Claire’s little girl Grace was peering out shyly from behind the door of a cupboard built under the stairs. Delighted to have surprised me, she opened the cupboard door to reveal a tiny table spread with scrap paper and coloured pencils. ‘This is my play school,’ she said. ‘Mummy made it for me.’ Her eyes tracked me across the room as I accepted her invitation to take a closer look.
‘Your mummy’s very clever,’ I said, meaning every word of it. Taking this as a personal compliment, Gracie plumped herself down at the table and began drawing exuberantly with a felt-tipped pen.
‘That’s the sort of encouragement I like to hear when I’m working,’ said Claire. ‘Keep it up.’
She withdrew a length of moulded framing from the rack on the wall and matched it with a section of the broken frame, holding the two together so I could compare them. Apart from a slightly deeper gilding on the old frame, they were nearly identical. ‘It’ll be quicker to build a new frame than repair the damaged one. This moulding is a fairly common style, so it’s highly unlikely your friends will ever notice the difference.’ I couldn’t see Bob Allroy spotting the switch.
‘But first I’ll need to take the canvas off the stretcher, replace the broken struts, then re-attach the canvas.’ With a definitive smash, she tossed the broken frame into a metal rubbish bin full of off-cut shards of glass.
‘Is all that possible in half an hour?’ I was getting toey, nervously glancing at my watch, as useful as a scrub nurse at a triple by-pass.
Claire shrugged casually. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ She was enjoying this. Not just the professional challenge, either. She began extracting the tacks that held the canvas on the stretcher.
I paced. A compressor sat on the floor, its hose leading to a pneumatic guillotine on a side bench. Pricy items. Staple guns. Sheets of glass. Tools. Racks of unframed prints. Two metal folio cabinets, not cheap. Cardboard mounts. A whole wall of shaped timber. Add the rent, the rates, utility bills.
Claire, pulling tacks, read my mind. ‘Not exactly what I imagined when I left the National Gallery. I saw myself sitting in a trendy little gallery offering the works of interesting young contemporary printmakers to a discerning clientele. The trouble is, ten other places within half a mile had exactly the same idea.’
‘Is that why you left the National Gallery, to start this shop?’
‘Other way round,’ she said.
Gracie tugged at my sleeve and handed me a piece of paper. Two blobby circles in felt-tipped pen, one circle with a hat and currant eyes.
‘That’s me, isn’t it?’ The child nodded. Who else? ‘Why, thank you. It’s lovely.’
Claire looked up, the table between us. ‘Sleazebag,’ she muttered. In the nicest possible way. It was all I could do to stop myself vaulting the table and giving her a demonstration.
‘Other way round?’
‘I’d been at the gallery six years, ever since I graduated. That’s where I met’-she flicked her eyes towards Gracie, back at her drawing-‘Gracie’s father, Graham. He was an administrator. We were together for a couple of years and when Gracie was on the way I applied for maternity leave. No-one had ever done that before. Women who got pregnant were expected to quietly fade away. They said there was no provision, knocked me back.’
‘That’s discrimination,’ I said. Reviewing the National Gallery’s employment practices would, I resolved, be my number one priority when I got back to the office. If changes hadn’t already been made, they would be damned soon, if I had any influence on the proceedings. We’d see how soon they smartened up if their conduit was squeezed a little.
‘I wanted to make an issue of it, but Graham didn’t like the idea. He thought it might adversely affect his career. He encouraged me to set up this business, put some money into it. After Grace was born, he got a job offer from overseas. Now he’s Director of Human Resources at the Hong Kong Museum of Oriental Antiquities and I’m sticking nonreflecting glass over chimpanzees and framing other people’s holiday photos.’
She wasn’t bitter, just telling a story. She dropped her voice a register, whether for my benefit or the child’s I couldn’t tell. ‘We don’t see him any more.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Great progress you’re making.’ She only had about half the tacks out. Now that she was handling the painting proper, her technique was meticulous, painstakingly slow. The time was 12.58. My feet were inscribing an ever-decreasing circle on the workroom floor.
‘For Chrissake,’ she said, moving around to my side of the table for no apparent other reason than to accidentally brush her rump against me. ‘Stop prowling around like a caged animal. You’re making me nervous.’
Jesus, what did she have to be nervous about? I was the one with the crisis on my plate. Maybe, I thought, I should temporarily remove my twitchiness elsewhere. Make more efficient use of my time by taking Red and Tarquin around to Leo while Claire got on with the job, unencumbered by my stalking presence. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘You’re no use to me in your current state.’
‘The heat’s off,’ I told the boys, bustling them and their dripping stumps of half-sucked carob-chip ice- confectionery into the car.
The Curnows’ place was less than a kilometre away through the backstreets of Fitzroy. Even though I knew it would take me scarcely ten minutes to deliver the boys and return to Artemis, I still had to fight the urge to speed. This painting demolition rigmarole had certainly shot the shit out of my quality time with Red. The one o’clock news came on the radio and I leaned across and hiked up the volume.
Prince Sihanouk had walked out on the Cambodian peace talks. Again. F. W. de Klerk had been elected head of the South African government. Fat lot of difference that would make. Emperor Hirohito had died. Not before time, the old war criminal. Police had refused to rule out suspicious circumstances in relation to the death of the man whose body had been found in the moat of the National Gallery. The weather bureau had amended the forecast top upwards to thirty and the All Ordinaries was steady at 1539.4.
This news-the foul play, not the All Ordinaries-was not entirely unexpected. Salina’s disappearance was bound to have raised suspicions, even if none had existed before. The ripples thrown up by Marcus Taylor’s drowning were spreading outwards in ever-widening circles. An image of Agnelli on the placid waters of Lake Eildon crossed my mind. I couldn’t help but wonder what boats might get rocked before this affair was over.
Leo accepted delivery of the boys with a wave from the Curnows’ front door. ‘See you after work,’ I told Red. ‘About six o’clock. We’ll have our pizza then, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Red, easy-going as ever.
I was back at Artemis Prints at approximately 1.10.06. Enough time for a quick gasper. While I sucked, I perused the offerings in the front window. The least I could do, all things considered, was buy something. The Pre- Raphaelite maidens weren’t exactly my cup of hemlock. I settled on a Mondrian print. Remembering my little something for Gracie, I dashed back across the road to the car and retrieved Marcus Taylor’s stamp album from where Red had tossed it behind the back seat.
The buzzer rang as I went in the door. When Claire stuck her head around the curtain to see who’d come in, I was standing by the counter like a waiting customer. ‘Psst,’ I said and beckoned her over. She came cautiously, a questioning look on her face.
‘I haven’t thanked you properly.’ I said it deliberately low so she had to step closer to hear me. Then I took my life in my hands. I put my arm around her waist, drew her to me and kissed her gently on the mouth.
Her lips, soft and dry, yielded tentatively. I inhaled the scent of her hair, apple shampoo, dizzying. She leaned into the kiss, accepting it, returning it. We shifted on our feet, neither of us breathing. Her hands found the small of my back and pressed me closer. The kiss went on. And on.
Suddenly, she broke. We stepped back from each other, both swallowing hard, blinking. ‘Your friends,’ she said. ‘How much did they pay for this painting?’
Her eyes shone with anticipation. ‘I dunno,’ I shrugged. I’d already done the mental arithmetic, speculated on the cost of restitution. Wondered about insurance. Forty-odd paintings in the CUSS collection, total value half a million dollars. Average price, say $12,000. Drysdale one of the stars. ‘Maybe twenty thousand dollars. Why?’
‘Take a look at this.’ Claire tugged at my hand, drawing me into the workroom. At the parting of the curtain, her touch fell away just as Gracie looked up from her colouring-in. The stamp album was still in my hand. I held it out to the child. ‘Do you like stamps?’
