Dick Francis: In the Frame

We thought it over in depressed silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Who did know you had the wine there? And who knew the house was always empty on Fridays? And was the prime target the wine, the antiques, or the paintings?’

‘God, Charles, you sound like Frost.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Every business nowadays,’ he said defensively, ‘is going through a cash crisis. Look at the nationalised industries, losing money by the million. Look at the wage rises and the taxes and the inflation... How can any small business make the profit it used to? Of course we have a cash flow problem. Whoever hasn’t?’

‘How bad is yours?’ I said.

‘Not critical. Bad enough. But not within sight of liquidation. It’s illegal for a limited company to carry on trading if it can’t cover its costs.’

‘But it could... if you could raise more capital to prop it up?’

He surveyed me with the ghost of a smile. ‘It surprises me still that you chose to paint for a living.’

‘It gives me a good excuse to go racing whenever I like.’

‘Lazy sod.’ He sounded for a second like the old Donald, but the lightness passed. ‘The absolutely last thing I would do would be to use my own personal assets to prop up a dying business. If my firm was that rocky, I’d wind it up. It would be mad not to.’

I sucked my teeth. ‘I suppose Frost asked if the stolen things were insured for more than their worth?’

‘Yes, he did. Several times.’

‘Not likely you’d tell him, even if they were.’

‘They weren’t, though.’

‘No.’

‘Under-insured, if anything.’ He sighed. ‘God knows if they’ll pay up for the Munnings. I’d only arranged the insurance by telephone. I hadn’t actually sent the premium.’

‘It should be all right, if you can give them proof of purchase, and so on.’

He shook his head listlessly. ‘All the papers to do with it were in the desk in the hall. The receipt from the gallery where I bought it, the letter of provenance, and the customs and excise receipt. All gone.’

‘Frost won’t like that.’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘Well... I hope you pointed out that you would hardly be buying expensive pictures and going on world trips if you were down to your last farthing.’

‘He said it might be because of buying expensive pictures and going on world trips that I might be down to my last farthing.’

Frost had built a brick wall of suspicion for Donald to batter his head against. My cousin needed hauling away before he was punch drunk.

‘Have some spaghetti,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It’s about all I can cook.’

‘Oh...’ He focused unclearly on the kitchen clock. It was half past four and long past feeding time according to my stomach.

‘If you like,’ he said.

The police sent a car the following morning to fetch him to his ordeal in the office. He went lifelessly, having more or less made it clear over coffee that he wouldn’t defend himself.

‘Don, you must,’ I said. ‘The only way to deal with the situation is to be firm and reasonable, and decisive, and accurate. In fact, just your own self.’

He smiled faintly. ‘You’d better go instead of me. I haven’t the energy. And what does it matter?’ His smile broke suddenly and the ravaging misery showed deeply like black water under cracked ice. ‘Without Regina... there’s no point making money.’

‘We’re not talking about making money, we’re talking about suspicion. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll assume you can’t.’

‘I’m too tired. I can’t be bothered. They can think what they like.’

‘Don,’ I said seriously, ‘They’ll think what you let them.’

‘I don’t really care,’ he said dully: and that was the trouble. He really didn’t.

He was gone all day. I spent it painting.

Not the sad landscape. The sunroom seemed even greyer and colder that morning, and I had no mind any more to sink into melancholy. I left the half-finished canvas on the table there and removed myself and trappings to the source of warmth. Maybe the light wasn’t so good in the kitchen, but it was the only room in the house with the pulse of life.

I painted Regina standing beside her cooker, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. I painted the way she held her head back to smile, and I painted the smile, shiny-eyed and guileless and unmistakably happy. I painted the kitchen behind her as I literally saw it in front of my eyes, and I painted Regina herself from the clearest of inner visions. So easily did I see her that I looked up once or twice from her face on the canvas to say something to her, and was disconcerted to find only empty space. An extraordinary feeling of the real and unreal disturbingly tangled.

I seldom ever worked for more than four hours at a stretch because for one thing the actual muscular control required was tiring, and for another the concentration always made me cold and hungry; so I knocked off at around lunch-time and dug out a tin of corned beef to eat with pickles on toast, and after that went for a walk, dodging the front-gate watchers by taking to the apple trees and wriggling through the hedge.

I tramped aimlessly for a while round the scattered shapeless village, thinking about the picture and working off the burst of physical energy I often felt after the constraint of painting. More burnt umber in the folds of the kitchen curtains, I thought; and a purplish shadow on the saucepan. Regina’s cream shirt needed yellow ochre under the collar, and probably a touch of green. The cooking stove needed a lot more attention, and I had broken my general rule of working the picture as a whole, background and subject pace by pace.

This time, Regina’s face stood out clearly, finished except for a gloss on the lips and a line of light along inside the lower eyelids, which one couldn’t do until the under paint was dry. I had been afraid of seeing her less clearly if I took too long, but because of it the picture was now out of balance and I’d have to be very careful to get the kitchen into the same key, so that the whole thing looked harmonious and natural and as if it couldn’t have been any other way.

The wind was rawly cold, the sky a hurrying jumbled mass of darkening clouds. I huddled my hands inside my anorak pockets and slid back through the hedge with the first drops of rain.

The afternoon session was much shorter because of the light, and I frustratingly could not catch the right mix of colours for the tops of the kitchen fitments. Even after years of experience, what looked right on the palette looked wrong on the painting. I got it wrong three times and decided to stop.

I was cleaning the brushes when Donald came back. I heard the scrunch of the car, the slam of the doors, and, to my surprise, the ring of the front door bell. Donald had taken his keys.

I went through and opened the door. A uniformed policeman stood there, holding Don’s arm. Behind, a row of watching faces gazed on hungrily. My cousin, who had looked pale before, now seemed bloodlessly white. The eyes were as lifeless as death.

‘Don!’ I said, and no doubt looked as appalled as I felt.

He didn’t speak. The policeman leant forward, said, ‘There we are, sir,’ and transferred the support of my cousin from himself to me: and it seemed to me that the action was symbolic as much as practical, because he turned immediately on his heel and methodically drove off in his waiting car.

I helped Donald inside and shut the door. I had never seen anyone in such a frightening state of disintegration.

‘I asked,’ he said, ‘about the funeral.’

His face was stony, and his voice came out in gasps.

‘They said...’ He stopped, dragged in air, tried again.