Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story

It must have seemed perfect from her point of view: they could back up their false assertions with those of greedy dealers and collectors on the Comite. The pair of them could spend the rest of their lives signing unsigned canvases and revising abandoned works.

The storyteller was pretty, filled with talk, thirsty for more wine.

I poured her a third glass of Virgin Hills and began to permit myself a few ideas.

"Now," she said, brushing ash from her lovely ankle, "Dominique discovered Honore in bed with Roger Martin."

"The English poet."

"Exactly. Him. You know him?"

"No."

"Thank God for that." She raised an eyebrow. If I did not know exactly what she meant, I enjoyed the sense of complicity.

"So they divorced, of course. But no-one knows exactly how their hoard of paintings was finally divided," she said.

But Dominique, it seems, knew a lot of "partisans", tough guys, and she almost certainly got the lion's share. So by the time Honore had been robbed, circled, outnumbered, and defeated on the Comite, he had become a very dangerous man. Certainly he hated Dominique. Towards her innocent son he displayed an even greater antipathy.

When, in 1969, one of her lovely partisan pals strangled Dominique in a Nice hotel, Olivier was already in London, losing the last of his French accent at St. Paul's. Knowing less than nothing about his father's work, he inherited the droit moral.

"You meet my husband," Marlene said, "you think he is so gentle, and he is, but when Honore began a legal action to take away the droit moral, Olivier fought like a tiger. You have seen the photographs? He was a child, so pretty, with lovely eyelashes, seventeen years old, but he loathed Honore. I cannot tell you to what degree. When you think about the court case, this was really the only point for Olivier."

We are the nation of Henry Lawson and the campfire yarn, but just the same we are very bloody wary of people doing what Marlene was doing now. We are inclined to wonder, Is she a name-dropper? Does she have tickets on herself? At the same time, no-one in this paddock has ever spoken like this, not ever, and I was literally on the edge of my chair, watching with the most particular attention as she blew on her Marlboro so its tip burned evenly.

"By the time all this was over, Olivier could not so much as touch one of his father's paintings. He hated them. He hates them now. These great works of art make him ill, really, physically ill."

This was interesting, I didn't say it wasn't. "But why, for Christ's sake, did Dozy hide the painting from me?"

She shrugged. "Rich people!"

"He was frightened anyone would know he had something so valuable?"

"It's an asset," she said derisively. "That's how it is with them.

It's there to own, not to see. But if the market believed Honore's story—that this precious painting was somehow doctored—my husband would have been ruined. We would have been exposed for the loss, a million US dollars, probably more."

"You and your husband?"

"Yes." She almost smiled.

"And of course Honore is just a malicious little shit," she said, "but he must be answered, so I sent up two forensic chemists to do an independent pigment analysis. Indeed, I think one of them met your brother in the pub. He thought he was amazing."

"Sometimes he is."

"In any case," she said quickly, "my independent chemists also echoed Honore, fretting about the presence of titanium dioxide in the white. This was not in common use in 1913, so for them this was what they call"—she made a mocking face—"a red flag.

Fortunately, Dominique lived in a pigsty, hoarding every tram ticket, every restaurant bill, so we had a great archive, thank God. And there at last I found not only the letter from Leibovitz to his supplier requesting titanium white but also a receipt, dated January 1913. That's enough. It doesn't matter it was not in common use. Honore can go fuck himself. Your friend has a real Leibovitz. I brought him the documentation personally so it can be with the painting forever now. I actually attached it for him, in an envelope on the back of the stretcher."

She held out her glass and I filled it. "Hence the celebration."

"Very good wine too." And I was now, having waited so long, all set to give her a big lecture on what she had been gulping down—the work of Tom Lazar and his vineyard at Kyneton, about this treasure growing in the shitty dun-coloured landscape of my childhood—but just as I was about to establish my sophistication, she let it slip that Dozy's painting was Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois, the same work I had first seen in reproduction at Bacchus Marsh High School. This seemed, that night, such a sweet and magical connection, and what my childhood self would have seen as showing off or namedropping became transmuted into something you could call noble, and we sat there until the early morning, finishing up Lazar's third vintage, the rain drumming on the roof, and I relaxed, finally, while this strange and lovely woman described the entire canvas for me, speaking in a low soft throaty voice, beginning, not at the top left-hand corner, but with the cadmium yellow stroke which marks the edge of the young wife's blouse, a slice of light.

The morning sun produced a layer of grey fog which was just high enough to reveal the black roof of the Avis car as it moved slowly along the road to Bellingen. As I watched this pleasantly dreamlike departure, my mind was almost completely occupied with that puzzling creature, the driver. She was an extraordinarily attractive woman and she had shown me, without a question, that she was blessed with the Eye, but she was alien, American, working for the other team, the market, the rich guys, the ones who decided what was art and what was not. They were in charge of history, and so fuck them all, always, forever.

It was this—not her marriage—that had me folding and refolding her business card until it fell in half. She was, she must always be, my enemy.

Her late father-in-law's painting was also in my thoughts and I intended to phone Dozy Boylan—indeed my hand was on the instrument—to invite myself to a private viewing. But then Hugh leaped on me and in the struggle we busted through the flywire, and then—you wouldn't want to know—days went by without me contacting Dozy.

Also, I had my canvas waiting. I know I said I could not afford decent materials, and that is true. I didn't use a penny Instead I called Fish-oh, my old canvas supplier in Sydney, and finally he confessed, very fucking reluctantly, that he had an unopened crate, just arrived from Holland, and this—it was so bloody hard for him to own up—contained a roll of number ten cotton duck fifty bloody yards long. Why Fish-oh would act like a mingy withholding bastard does not matter here, only that I persuaded him to ship the whole fifty yards COD to Kev at the Bellingen Dairyman's Co-op. This would go straight on Jean-Paul's account. It's no good getting old if you don't get cunning.

The Dutch canvas arrived in Bellingen just before Marlene. All the time I talked to her it was in my mind. I could see it lying quietly in the co-op loading dock, amongst the bags of fertiliser, and as soon as my visitor had gone I rushed—not to Dozy Boylan as you might expect—but to the co-op and then we brought it home and I rolled my canvas out across the studio floor, but not a cut, nowhere a cut, so all this, all this possibility, was crowding in on me.

And then—thirty minutes later—the lovely adenoidal little Kevin telephoned again, this time to inform me that my custommade pigments had just arrived, and then not even a bloody Leibovitz could seem important. This paint was from Raphaelson's, a small Sydney outfit who are amongst the best pigment makers in the world. In the five years I had been really famous I would use nothing else and now they had some new, very serious acrylic greens: permanent green, earth green, Jenkins green, titanium green, Prussian green, a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Of course art supplies were not the co-op's normal line of merchandise but Kev and I had already done a lot of business together and gifts had been exchanged—a tiny landscape, a charcoal drawing—so the paint went on Jean-Paul's account.