David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

Fleeting unease over, Robin felt pleased with himself, there in the recently airless side room of the gallery. He was no barbarian, the Boring Respectable Paper doesn’t keep them on strength for long, but in the Bible’s phrase he was “as the beasts that perish” when it came to art appreciation.

His sister was an enthusiast and for years he’d tried to see what she did — brushwork and textures, skin tones, handling of light, a painter’s signature palpable in everything save the autograph in a bottom corner. Robin concluded that he was artistically unmusical.

Now, however, he was appreciating nuances and making sophisticated observations. Evidently he was a late starter.

Almost nose to nose with the canvas, all Robin could make out was an uneven layer of old paint, mainly black where it wasn’t a dismal reddish-brown — the tiled floor — and indefinably tarnished or bloomed. No sign of the woman, and if he hadn’t known a chair was there... Too close, so he retreated again, expecting to decode what had been there before.

Except — ah yes, there it was. One’s eyes needed to adjust to the altered distance. Chair and woman present and correct. A sitter in both senses of the term; Robin smirked. No doubt of it, he’d made a breakthrough. Until this morning the notion of understanding that the artist had captured arrested motion like that would have been beyond him.

It really was amazingly clever: Had this painting been a photograph taken one second later, then the old lady would be on her feet and looking out from the frame. Robin’s mouth dried and his breath caught. The din and vibrancy of the avenue was paradise when he found himself at the foot of the gallery’s imposing steps, and harsh sunlight had never been more welcome.

He shirked explaining what had happened; there was a jump-cut between gloating over connoisseurship and running for his life.

The personnel carrier’s engine caught at last, and this time the clown failed to stall it. We backed up very fast; the little-more-than-tin box kept bouncing off the mini-valley’s crumbling banks but kept going. I was too occupied in silently thanking Whatever There Is to wonder what had made Robin flee from that painting. Sorting the ins and outs of an ambiguous anecdote had low priority.

Then the paper found a better war for me just up the road by Foreign Desk measurement, meaning two countries away. The Boring Respectable believed in finishing anything they started. I didn’t see Robin again that year or for most of the next.

I heard about him, though. He’d always been an amiable character, so when he started getting snappish and cutting up rough, people noticed. One morning three different chums on as many different papers rang me with exciting gossip. Robbo Ratcliffe had gone crazy and assaulted the Church Correspondent at the Boring Respectable, of all targets. Simon Trimble, his name was; we’d trained together in the provinces.

Anyone more inoffensive was hard to imagine. Lack of personality decreed that there was no Trimble to like or dislike, let alone assault with violence. He was just a fact on two legs, reasonably effective at his job.

The first caller alleged that Robin had broken Simon Trimble’s jaw; the second had Simon being rushed out of the newsroom with an eye dangling on his cheek; the third didn’t specify injuries but understood that S. Trimble was on his way to surgery as we spoke.

It’s never as bad or good as wild rumors insist. Trimble wanted to get at a phone, Robin was in the way and deep in thought, Trimble tapped him on the shoulder... A split second later Robin was helping him off the floor and Trimble knew what it was like to have a broken nose.

“You startled me,” Robin mumbled. And to the newsroom at large, “He startled me, all right?”

It wasn’t, of course. By ill fortune the Boring Respectable’s editor and Lord Somebody the proprietor, lunching the deputy prime minister in the boardroom that day, were giving him a tour en route to the trough, and witnessed the disagreement. Worse yet, the paper had been running a long, tut-tutting campaign on behalf of civilised behaviour in all ranks of society.

Robin Ratcliffe’s exploit, an instant legend (journos are a pack of old applewomen, Henry Potter hadn’t slandered the trade), was pounced on by Private Eye, the satirical magazine: There was a cartoon of two chaps walking past a stately-home entrance with an ambulance outside — “They’re expecting a reporter from the Boring Respectable...” one says to the other.

The BR hates landing in Private Eye and media-watch columns of the opposition. Punching a blameless colleague is gross industrial misconduct within the meaning of the relevant Act of Parliament. The union can’t do a thing if you’re fired and employment tribunals don’t want to know. The Boring Respectable tempered justice with mercy: Robin was given a year’s severance pay and escorted off the premises.

In an elegant phrase I picked up from the U.S. military, my friend had screwed the pooch. He’d joined the Boring Respectable straight from university, he had worked for no other paper and what was more, he’d never wanted to. In that era, Fleet Street jobs were easier to come by, but whether he could be happy or even much use at my shop, for instance, was dubious.

The chance didn’t arise because he laid low after the notorious Fistfight at the BR Corral. Ring his flat and the answering machine never inspired him to call back.

Sadie, my wife, predicted that Robin was finished. She is the bright half of the partnership, a watcher who sees more of the game. Keeps pouring the drinks, listens more than she talks. Sadie pointed out that the Ratcliffes were a modestly moneyed clan and Robin had a trust fund from some grandma or other.

“Just enough to keep him afloat, not enough to stop him feeling sour and hard-done-by, down the road.” She gave me a hug. “That’s why I stick with you — nothing like a working-class boy made good, they toil away from force of habit. Class isn’t everything, my love.” I’m sure she was just teasing.

It’s much easier to uphold “No man is an island” when doing nothing troublesome about it. I kept telling myself I’d hunt him out and gee him up, give him a name or two to approach — without making the effort. Robin might still be hurting and resent my intrusion, was the cop-out.

Gradually he slipped to the back of the filing cabinet. About a year later my shop offered a David Hockney reproduction lithograph for free, featuring it on the cover of the Saturday color supplement. Tiled floor, a director’s chair half in sunlight, lots of blue California sky. It put me in mind of Robin through being so unlike his hoodoo picture, and I wondered for all of ten seconds what that had been all about.

While no sounder on art than Robin, I have been known to put my nose into the occasional gallery. Now that I bothered to notice, there were no end of interiors and still lifes in myriad styles showing furniture and flooring. Half-consciously I would think, Not that one or It’s a plank floor or Can’t be those tiles, they’re glowing, really gladden the eye.

Sadie was first with news of Robin Ratcliffe. She heard from a mutual friend just back from vacation that Robin was living in Mexico as an upmarket beach bum, supposedly involved in a jet-ski rental venture but hardly knocking himself out over it. “Told you so,” Sadie said. “Trust Robbo to go to seed in a good climate.”

A similar report surfaced a long while afterwards, only this time Robin was loafing around the French Alps.

Then in the mid ’seventies we ran into each other during a baggage-handlers’ strike at Heathrow Airport. I’d been looking at Robin, among other castaways, for minutes before recognising him. Terrific tan and hair so sun-bleached that I’d taken it for a peroxide job.