contained sketches and diagrams as well as words, he estimated how long it would have taken the writer to get from his childhood and early adulthood to meeting the Colonel. He focused on the first third of the second volume and, after ten minutes of looking, his eye finally alighted on a promising passage.
As he read it, he wondered if it was sufficiently compromising for the Colonel to want it suppressed. It seemed to consist of yet another half-baked eyewitness account of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Aldo Moro. Did anyone actually care? He doubted it. Treacy, too, seemed to get quickly bored with the subject, ending it after a short paragraph that stood in apparent isolation in the middle of a polemical piece on a dead art historian called Federick Hartt, whose offense seems to have been he claimed a forger could never imitate the pentimenti, the redrawings, corrections, and second thoughts of the artist.
Blume gave up. He’d just have to read from start to finish. He returned to the opening chapter, wondering if Caterina was still in her kitchen doing the same, or had taken the photocopy to bed with her, anxious before she slept to find out how things turned out between Henry Treacy and Monica.
My replica of Jack Yeats’ sketch was an instructive experience in several ways, not all of them good.
Jack Yeats had an impressionist’s eye for color, but he was not a great draftsman. A good one, to be sure, with fine penmanship, but I could see why he eventually chose color and worked with thick swirling and increasingly confused grays and blues in an effort to capture Irish light. The work I was copying, however, was from his youth, a pen and ink wash, with no color. At first, it seemed little better than what you might see by an unknown illustrator in the Saturday Evening Post, except there was a peculiarity to his style that only became interesting as I tried to imitate it. The lines were undulating, often drawn thickly from a heavily inked pen guided by a confident hand. They never overlapped or showed signs of hesitation. Similarly, even the finest and closest strokes left a distinct white space between them, so that although he covered much of the paper in ink and although the drawings were tiny, he created a sense of space and movement.
Moving in and out of Mrs. Heath’s house, sometimes left alone for a few hours, I was able to copy a rough version of the picture onto a piece of paper that I kept folded in my pocket. It was strange to copy a picture line-by- line in frenetic bursts. If I had asked her, Mrs. Heath would of course have let me stand there all day copying it openly. I think she might even have lent me the original, bless her. But I had embarked on a furtive enterprise, and I was interested in seeing it through.
After several days, I had completed my copy. I brought it home and unfolded it on my pine table. It was a complete mess. It was so bad I burst out laughing as I looked at it. It was like a sketch done by a committee, in which each member was allowed to draw a quadrant without reference to what the others were doing. Each time I had copied a piece I seemed to have brought a different style to it. Worse still, the elements in the sketch were completely out of proportion with each other. Being young and histrionic, I burned it there and then when simply throwing it out would have done as well.
And so I learned how not to copy a work. But I also learned that the easiest way to capture an artist’s style was to do it freehand, without direct reference to the original. Over the next two days, working from memory in my mews and without so much as a glance at the original on the drawing-room wall, I sketched my own version of Jack Yeats’ turf-carriers. The result, though clearly different to the original, also resembled its style very closely. I now had my first proper forgery, though I did not know it at the time. It would go into the frame as a temporary replacement, so that I could borrow the original copy, hold it in my hand, and copy it at my leisure.
The opportunity to do the changeover came one Friday afternoon. Mrs. Heath was having guests and wanted me to help her polish and set out silver and crystal. She brought out some wine, and asked me to open a bottle to test it. I did as I was told, and she instructed me to pour it into a crystal stem glass and drink some. I did, and it tasted OK, though I felt it was very much an old person’s drink.
She came over, poured herself a glass, drank it, and spat it straight back out, which I have to say shocked me a bit. Apparently it was “corked.” And so was the next bottle and the next and the one after.
“What a bloody nuisance. I need to get some wine. That means driving all the way down to Dalkey,” she said. She asked me to polish the serving platters while she was gone.
As soon as I saw her car leave the gate, I grabbed the Yeats and rushed with it back down the garden to my mews. I removed the original, and hid it in a book. In my rush, I lost two staples from the back of the frame and tore the backing paper as well. When I came to put my stop-gap sketch into the frame, it was too big. It was also bright white, and the new ink gleamed. It would be noticed immediately. I rushed into the kitchen and pulled out the rubbish from below the sink. I emptied the contents on the floor and scooped up handfuls of old tea leaves and broken eggshells (being practically all I ate or drank back then). I threw them on my overclean drawing. If I had destroyed it, I would just have put the original back and started again. Or I might have abandoned the idea and led a different life and become a better person.
I left the used tea leaves and eggshells for twenty minutes, wetting them slightly, then carefully brushing them off, first with my hand, then with a thick bristle brush that I had yet to use for painting. It worked, at least by the standards I had then. By now Mrs. Heath would have left the shop in Dalkey and was probably already halfway up Killiney Hill Road. The page was no longer pristine white, and seemed magically aged. Even the wetting of the leaves had slightly warped the paper adding to the effect. I spent around ten minutes trimming the edges, which flattened and lowered the sky and ruined what little balance I had managed to achieve. But it was a tiny work, and even at arm’s length it was hard to make out the details. It only had to fill a space for a few days. As long as no one looked at it. I prayed none of the dinner party guests was a connoisseur. I was still tapping in the staples at the back of the frame with the handle of the screwdriver when a crackle of gravel and the sound of a motor told me that Mrs. Heath was back already.
I grabbed the framed drawing and rushed out into the garden, just in time to see her walk into the house. The frame was too large for me to conceal under my shirt. I was convinced that as soon as she walked in she would see it was missing. She called my name. No point in hiding now. “Coming,” I called.
She appeared at the front door and called down the garden. Without seeming to notice that I was carrying anything.
“Fetch the crate of wine from the backseat of the car for me, will you? It’s far too heavy for me.”
In she went again.
I leaned into her car. There was a wooden milk crate containing a dozen bottles of wine in the back. I dropped the picture on the top, and heaved it in my arms. She was right, it weighed a ton.
“In here, Henry. The drawing room.”
I struggled in. She was staring at the half-set table.
“You didn’t do as I asked with the silverware,” she said. “Did you do anything while I was gone?”
I glanced over at the hearth. A bright rectangle of lighter green wallpaper shone where the picture belonged.
“I had to go to the toilet,” I said. I put down the crate, positioning myself between her and the empty space on the wall, and whipped the picture off the top of the crate as she turned to examine the crystal.
“Oh dear. Well, at least you went back to your own place to do that. I say, Henry?” She turned around quickly and I swept the picture behind my back, but as I did so, I realized this was not going to work, so I continued my awkward movement and staggered backwards, kicking at the desk with the two rejected open bottles of wine. One of them fell with a crash on the floor, and Mrs. Heath shrieked something about her Persian rug, and fell to her knees. I hung my false picture on the wall behind, then sank down as if in a dead faint.
Mrs. Heath saved her Persian rug, after which she was full of solicitude for me, convinced the strain of carrying the heavy crate had given me a turn. She told me to go and get some rest. She’d call a friend to help her prepare for the evening.
When Monica arrived that evening, I told her of my adventures and brought her over to show her the purloined original.
“Is that it?” she said, tilting her head sideways to appraise the work. “Can’t say I think much of it.”
“Neither do I,” I remember saying.
“It should be easy then. Why not make a few copies, while you’re at it? We can sell each one as an original. Make far more that way.”
“We don’t have time,” I said. “If anyone looks at the replacement I’ve put on the wall in there, they’ll spot it immediately for a fake. The sooner we get it back the better.”
“Just copy your own copy. Do I have to do all the thinking for the two of us?”
