Dick Francis - In the Frame

Bearded, which I was not. Exuberant, noisy, extravagant, unpredictable; qualities I envied. Blue eyes and sun-blond hair. Muscles which left mine gasping. An outrageous way with girls. An abrasive tongue; and a wholehearted contempt for the things I painted.

We had met at Art School, drawn together by mutual truancy on racetrains. Jik compulsively went racing, but strictly to gamble, never to admire the contestants, and certainly not to paint them. Horse-painters, to him, were the lower orders. No serious artist, he frequently said, would be seen dead painting horses.

Jik’s paintings, mostly abstract, were the dark reverse of the bright mind: fruits of depression, full of despair at the hatred and pollution destroying the fair world.

Living with Jik was like a toboggan run, downhill, dangerous, and exhilarating. We’d spent the last two years at Art School sharing a studio flat and kicking each other out for passing girls. They would have chucked him out of school except for his prodigious talent, because he’d missed weeks in the summer for his other love, which was sailing.

I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.

He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.

‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’

He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreen wiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’

‘But you like it?’

‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’

‘And how’s business?’

‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’

‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’

‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.

‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’

‘To your brain? As in the old days?’

‘Those were pastimes.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’

‘Arson and murder, to date.’

‘Jesus.’

The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.

‘I live right out on the other side,’ Jik said. ‘God, that sounds banal. Suburban. What has become of me?’

‘Contentment oozing from every pore,’ I said smiling.

‘Yes. So O.K., for the first time in my life I’ve been actually happy. I dare say you’ll soon put that right.’

The car nosed on to the expressway, pointing towards the bridge.

‘If you look over your right shoulder,’ Jik said, ‘You’ll see the triumph of imagination over economics. Like the Concorde. Long live madness, it’s the only thing that gets us anywhere.’

I looked. It was the opera house, glimpsed, grey with rain.

‘Dead in the day,’ Jik said. ‘It’s a night bird. Fantastic’.

The great arch of the bridge rose above us, intricate as steel lace. ‘This is the only flat bit of road in Sydney,’ Jik said. We climbed again on the other side.

To our left, half-seen at first behind other familiar-looking high-rise blocks, but then revealed in its full glory, stood a huge shiny red-orange building, all its sides set with regular rows of large curve-cornered square windows of bronze-coloured glass.

Jik grinned. ‘The shape of the twenty-first century. Imagination and courage. I love this country.’

‘Where’s your natural pessimism?’

‘When the sun sets, those windows glow like gold.’ We left the gleaming monster behind. ‘It’s the water-board offices,’ Jik said sardonically. ‘The guy at the top moors his boat near mine.’

The road went up and down out of the city through close-packed rows of one-storey houses, whose roofs, from the air, had looked like a great red-squared carpet.

‘There’s one snag,’ Jik said. ‘Three weeks ago, I got married.’

The snag was living with him aboard his boat, which was moored among a colony of others near a headland he called The Spit: and you could see why, temporarily at least, the glooms of the world could take care of themselves.

She was not plain, but not beautiful. Oval-shaped face, mid-brown hair, so-so figure and a practical line in clothes. None of the style or instant vital butterfly quality of Regina. I found myself the critically inspected target of bright brown eyes which looked out with impact-making intelligence.

‘Sarah,’ Jik said. ‘Todd. Todd, Sarah.’

We said hi and did I have a good flight and yes I did. I gathered she would have preferred me to stay at home.

Jik’s thirty-foot ketch, which had set out from England as a cross between a studio and a chandler’s warehouse, now sported curtains, cushions, and a flowering plant. When Jik opened the champagne he poured it into shining tulip glasses, not plastic mugs.

‘By God,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Sarah toasted my advent politely, not sure that she agreed. I apologised for gatecrashing the honeymoon.

‘Nuts to that,’ Jik said, obviously meaning it. ‘Too much domestic bliss is bad for the soul.’

‘It depends,’ said Sarah neutrally, ‘on whether you need love or loneliness to get you going.’

For Jik, before, it had always been loneliness. I wondered what he had painted recently: but there was no sign, in the now comfortable cabin, of so much as a brush.

‘I walk on air,’ Jik said. ‘I could bound up Everest and do a handspring on the summit.’

‘As far as the galley will do,’ Sarah said, ‘if you remembered to buy the crayfish.’

Jik, in our shared days, had been the cook; and times, it seemed, had not changed. It was he, not Sarah, who with speed and efficiency chopped open the crayfish, covered them with cheese and mustard, and set them under the grill. He who washed the crisp lettuce and assembled crusty bread and butter. We ate the feast round the cabin table with rain pattering on portholes and roof and the sea water slapping against the sides in the freshening wind. Over coffee, at Jik’s insistence, I told them why I had come to Australia.

They heard me out in concentrated silence. Then Jik, whose politics had not changed much since student pink, muttered darkly about ‘pigs’, and Sarah looked nakedly apprehensive.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’m not asking for Jik’s help, now that I know he’s married.’

‘You have it. You have it,’ he said explosively.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Sarah said, ‘What precisely do you plan to do first?’

‘Find out where the two Munnings came from.’

‘And after?’

‘If I knew what I was looking for I wouldn’t need to look.’

‘That doesn’t follow,’ she said absently.

‘Melbourne,’ Jik said suddenly. ‘You said one of the pictures came from Melbourne. Well, that settles it. Of course we’ll help. We’ll go there at once. It couldn’t be better. Do you know what next Tuesday is?’