Iain Pears - The Raphael Affair

Thus Argyll thought as he lay on the bed staring at the wall, cigarette in hand, taking a breather. Typing gives you a sore back. He looked at his two pictures again. The copy was indeed an awful thing. Who would ever wear such ostentatious and crude jewellery, even in the sixteenth century? Such a bizarre design, as well. A ring made of dead birds, indeed.

He walked around the room and thought, clarifying matters as an idea for his paper began to crystallise in his mind. It was going to need a lot of work, but that was fairly easy once you knew the general outline.

He was tempted to abandon his typewriter for the rest of the afternoon, amble off into the fading autumn light to see Flavia and tell her the outline. But he abandoned the notion. Flavia was a patient girl, but not that much of a saint. She would merely criticise him for not getting on with the thesis. Besides, she worked hard, and he didn’t want to interrupt her.

So he kept quiet and worked discreetly on the side, accumulating the odd spots of information here and there. It was hard, but came in little drips until he had enough to throw a bit of his recently adopted caution aside. In late November, he went to London, where he saw Byrnes about his forthcoming job. His benefactor was most accommodating. A nice man, when you got to know him. Sense of humour, too. He also dug out Phil, and twisted his arm until he agreed to invite him to lunch with his father at the National Trust. Out of this meeting came an invitation to go north for a long weekend in the freezing cold of a Yorkshire December. Then he came back to Rome.

Flavia was amazed by his behaviour. He had begun working on his dissertation but was clearly not consumed by it. Now, to write a mere twenty-minute paper for the conference, he was working like a demon. Long hours, late into the night, writing, rewriting, and footnoting. He also refused to let her see what he’d written, despite her offers to check it through. She could hear it at the conference, he told her, if she wanted to come.

Argyll was very nervous, not having given many papers before, and certainly not in front of such a large audience. ‘There must be about two hundred people here, even though some are leaving for tea. A couple of paragraphs of this and they’ll sit down again,’ he thought as he walked to the podium.

He took out his paper and looked around, waiting for the hum of chattering art historians to die away. This might be fun. Certainly, the previous offering had not been much competition. This lot were about to get the shock of their lives. He spied his flatmate Rudolf Beckett, sitting morosely in one of the back seats, and gave him a little wave. The poor man had been persuaded to come along, and was clearly regretting the atypical gesture of friendship.

‘In the past few months,’ Argyll began, ‘there has been a great deal of discussion, in journals and in more popular papers [polite laughter] about the purchase of a supposed Raphael by the forger Jean-Luc Morneau. As you all know, the former director of the Museo Nazionale in Rome will shortly stand trial for complicity in the affair. I shall not, therefore, deal with this aspect of the business for fear of contravening Italian restrictions and in case anything I say prejudices Dottore Tommaso’s chance of a fair trial.

‘Rather, today, I would like to go back to the original proposition which started the whole sequence of events off. That is the evidence that a painting by Raphael of Elisabetta di Laguna, once owned by the di Parma family, was indeed painted over by Carlo Mantini to get it through Papal customs and to England. Because of the publicity surrounding the exposure of the forgery, the question of the original has rather been lost sight of, even though it undoubtedly existed. I intend to demonstrate that evidence exists to prove conclusively the last destination of the picture.’

There was a little stir in the audience. No more chattering from dissidents at the back now. The tea-trolley brigade was settling down nicely into their seats. It was true that Argyll had sacrificed something of scholarly rigour for the sake of maximum impact, but it could hardly fail. Compared with papers on ‘Manet’s Conception of Human Progress’, or ‘Theorising the Male Gaze’, this was rock and roll.

‘It has always been assumed that the painting disappeared either because it never left Italy, or because the dealer Samuel Paris absconded with it at some stage.’ Well, he had assumed that, anyway. But there was no harm in generalising a bit.

‘The main evidence for this was that the Earl of Clomorton died of a heart attack the moment the Mantini arrived in England. A notoriously stingy man, it was assumed that realising he had been robbed of more than seven hundred pounds was too much for him.

‘A letter from his wife, however, brings this interpretation into question.’ He read through the letter he had shown to Flavia in his flat. ‘This clearly states that Clomorton was expected in Yorkshire and had been in London with Samuel Paris for three weeks “fussing over the consignment”. He died a week after this letter was written.

‘A second letter from her brother appears to reassure his widow that unkind gossip about the fraud will never come out.’ He read out the document from the newspaper cutting he had taken. Not scholarly, but he had checked that it was an accurate transcription of the original. ‘Again, this reading is problematic. I find it unlikely that anyone, in possession of a Raphael, would wait for three weeks before looking at it. Paris was on hand, and he was a cleaner as well as a dealer. Surely it is more likely that he would have set to work the moment the picture was unloaded from the boat? And if that is the case, whatever lay under the Mantini would have been discovered within a matter of hours.

‘So what did the Earl die of? It is scarcely conceivable that a man, however mean, would die of shock at being robbed a whole three weeks after the shock was administered. Moreover, Clomorton was buried in Yorkshire. He died in January, the month when English roads were at their most impassable. And he died on the date when his wife was expecting him to arrive home. If his death was caused by a shock received in the restorer’s studio, would his family really have bothered to cart his body nearly three hundred miles at that time of year?

‘So let us return to Lady Arabella.’ Here, he gave the extracts from Viscount Perceval’s diary he had read to Flavia. ‘Perhaps this should be seen in a new light,’ he continued. ‘When Perceval referred to the “dark-haired beauty” Clomorton said he was going to bring to Yorkshire, he was not referring to some mistress he had picked up. The phrase, after all, could refer to a painting of Elisabetta di Laguna. However, it was unfortunate that he made his little jest to the Duchess of Albemarle, who misinterpreted it and immediately wrote a warning to his wife. She naturally feared her husband was back at his old tricks and was outraged by yet another affront to her honour. She was, after all, a woman with a terrible temper. She had publicly assaulted her first husband and cheerfully confessed to threatening the second.

‘So we have a possible solution. The Earl arrives home, complete with his latest consignment of pictures and excited at the prospect of showing them off. He does not get the welcome he expects. There is a blazing row, Lady A’s temper gets the better of her and she lashes out. But this time she goes too far, and she kills him. This is what her brother referred to in his letters. Not keeping the fraud secret, but keeping the murder secret. It was put out that the Earl had died of a heart attack, and he was quietly and rapidly buried in the family vaults. I was present when the tomb, now the responsibility of the National Trust, was opened a few weeks ago. The Earl’s skull was cracked, a symptom rarely associated with heart failure.’