Iain Pears - The Raphael Affair

‘Oh go on. I’m not sure which restaurant to go to and it would be much easier if you came here first. It’s not very far from the tube.’

A sort of uncalculating friendliness in his request made her change her mind. She agreed to meet him at his flat at seven-thirty, was given directions, and put down the phone.

Getting to Notting Hill Gate from her hotel was easy. On the whole, Flavia’s main objection to London was simply the size of the place and the inhuman way it was laid out. In Rome, she lived about fifteen minutes’ walk away from the office, in a quiet and inexpensive part of town near Augustus’s mausoleum that had an abundance of restaurants, innumerable shops and a boisterous population. But London was entirely different. Almost no one seemed to live anywhere near the centre and everyone spent hours every day on the tubes or trains either going to work or going home again. And the neighbourhoods they lived in were generally unutterably dull, with few shops and an atmosphere of respectability that made you think they were all tucked up in bed by nine-thirty with a glass of hot milk. The constant cavalcade of streetlife, of people wandering around for the sake of it, greeting their friends, having a drink, everything that made city life worthwhile, scarcely existed. London was not Flavia’s idea of a good time.

Argyll’s part of Notting Hill lay beyond the respectable bit that surrounded the tube station, in the less opulent regions beyond. The building was neither among the best nor the worst that the area had to offer. He lived on the top floor of a terraced house half-way along the street and, when she rang the doorbell, bellowed into a faulty, crackling ansaphone that she should keep walking up the stairs until she ran out.

His flat showed distinct signs of a very hurried and only partly successful attempt at flight. Mounds of notes lay in boxes; open suitcases, half filled with clothes and books, were on the floor; a pile of miscellaneous socks nestled up against the bottle of white wine that Argyll had evidently just been out to buy in her honour.

‘Moving, are you?’ she observed, noting that this was not the sort of conclusion that required the brains of a Sherlock Holmes to reach.

‘Yup,’ he replied, uncorking the bottle and peering into it to see how much cork was left floating in the wine. He frowned in disapproval at the debris, then looked up with a happy smile. ‘Farewell London, hello again Rome. For about a year, maybe more. Until I finish the damn thesis. I’ve done all the English end, so everything I need is in Italy. Which is pretty convenient, if you ask me.’

‘I thought you were impoverished.’

‘So I was. However, not at the moment. It’s one of the unforeseen spin-offs of that Raphael.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, you see, I was invited to a party, and there was Edward Byrnes. He sort of sidled up to me in a sheepish fashion and we got talking. The upshot of it was that he as near as dammit apologised for pinching the picture. Not, of course, that he admitted any double-dealing. Independent research leading in the same direction, and so on. Not his picture, anyway, you know. Entire coincidence, the whole thing. That’s as may be. I don’t believe it. He got wind of it through me, somehow. The important thing was, he offered a disguised form of compensation. His firm has a scholarship for art historians, and basically he said that if I applied for it, I’d probably be given it. So I did, and so I was.’

‘And you took it?’

Argyll paused for a moment. ‘Well, I thought, why the hell not? The picture’s out of my reach for ever, Byrnes has a lot of money thanks to me. I could have stood on my dignity and refused to touch his filthy money, how dare you insult me, sir. But he’d still be as rich, and I’d still be as poor. By rights, I suppose, he should have offered me a couple of million. But he didn’t, and it was this or nothing.’

‘What did he mean, not his picture?’

‘Just that, apparently. That’s the story he’s evidently putting around, probably because of jealousy in the trade. He was acting on commission. Someone else got him to buy it and so someone else now has the money, presumably.’

‘Who?’ asked Flavia, intrigued.

‘Didn’t say. I didn’t ask, to tell you the truth, because it’s such obvious nonsense. Besides, I was too busy fantasising about going back to Italy.’

‘You’d never make a very good policeman,’ she observed.

‘I know. But I don’t plan to. It struck me as such a silly story, I dismissed it instantly. I mean to say, can you see any self-respecting dealer having a Raphael on his hands and tamely letting it go?’ He paused for a moment while he fished for bits of cork with his finger, dredging them out a fragment at a time.

‘Disgusting of me. Sorry about that,’ he said apologetically.

He poured, she sipped, he sat on the floor and they talked inconsequentially about her trip, his research, how he found his flat. They spoke in Italian and about Italy, and Argyll grew gently and fondly enthusiastic. He loved it in the way that only the repressed, monochromatic inhabitants of cold northern countries can fall for the colourful exuberance of the Mediterranean. But his was no goggle-eyed, blind devotion; he knew the country well, warts and all. The inefficiencies, rigidities, narrow-mindedness of Italy he understood and accepted. He also knew its art, and could talk with nostalgic delight of the long and weary trips he had made by bus and by foot to the more obscure delights that Italy likes to secrete in inaccessible places. It occurred to Flavia that he might get on well with Bottando. Then he changed the subject back and they talked about London, work and museums. He held up a finger as he poured her another glass of wine. ‘There was, by the way, another reason for taking Byrnes’s money. It struck me as a sort of victory.’

She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Some victory,’ she said.

‘Wait and see,’ he replied, kneeling down by a large cardboard box and rummaging through dozens of bits of paper. ‘Now, where did I put it? That’s the trouble when you pack. You always need the things at the bottom of the boxes. Ah. Here it is. I must show you. I think you’ll find it funny.’

Argyll explained that on his return to England, after the débâcle in the carabinieri cells, he had thrown himself back into the subject of Mantini with vigour. His motives were not any great love of art history, nor any particular devotion to resurrecting the reputation of his chosen painter — a man who by any stretch of the imagination was fairly second-rate. Rather, it had become a matter of pride that, having spent a few years on the subject, he was going to get something to show for it all, even if it was just a piece of paper and the right to be called Doctor Argyll.

He went on to say how he had made a resolute attempt to forget about Raphael and associated subjects. His painter had been fairly popular among English tourists in Rome in the early eighteenth century, and many of them had commissioned some minor work from him as a memento of their stay; the eighteenth-century equivalent of buying a postcard of the Spanish Steps. Generally speaking, he turned out somewhat derivative landscapes in the style of Claude Lorrain or Gaspard Dughet which were held in high esteem at the time. As he was compiling a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, he had written to almost every country-house owner in England to ask whether they had any. He had also gone to visit several houses, to look through their archives for any evidence of when the works were bought, how they were acquired and at what price.

On one of these ventures he had ended up in Backlin House in Gloucestershire, a vast, chilly pile still lived in by the original family even though they could clearly no longer afford it. Had they been sensible, he said, they would have given the place away to the National Trust and gone to live in the South of France, like the Clomortons had done after the war.