Back at his flat Trumpy forlornly took stock. Social Security provided a few pounds a week but London was expensive. He had just had another confrontation with Mr Koutzakis, his landlord, who once again had repeated that rent was in arrears and his patience not quite as limitless as the sun of his native Cyprus.
Things were bad; in fact things could not get much worse. As a watery sun disappeared behind the tower blocks across the yard the middle-aged actor went to a cupboard and retrieved a package wrapped in hessian. Over the years he had often asked himself why he clung on to the dratted thing. It was not to his taste anyway. Sentiment, he supposed. Thirty-five years earlier, when he was a stripling of twenty, a bright and eager young actor in provincial repertory convinced of stardom to come, it had been bequeathed to him by his great-aunt Millie. He unwrapped the item from its hessian swathes.
It was not a large painting, some twelve inches by twelve, excluding the gilt frame. He had kept it wrapped through all the years, but even when he got it, it had been so dirty, so crusted with grime, that the figures in it were vague outlines, little more than shadows. Still, Great-aunt Millie had always sworn it might be worth a few pounds, but that was probably just the wishful romanticism of an old woman. As to its history, he had no idea. In fact the small oil had quite a story.
In the year 1870 an Englishman of thirty, seeking his fortune and having some knowledge of the Italian language, had emigrated to Florence to try his luck with a small endowment from his father. This was at the pinnacle of Britain’s Victorian glory and Her Majesty’s gold sovereign was a currency to open many doors. Italy by contrast was in its habitual chaos.
Within five years the enterprising Mr Bryan Frobisher had achieved four things. He had discovered the delicious wines of the Chianti hills and begun to export them in great vats to his native England, undercutting the accustomed French vine-vintages and laying the foundations of a tidy fortune.
He had acquired a fine town house with his own coach and groom. He had married the daughter of a quite minor local nobleman, and, among many other decorations for his new house, he had bought a small oil painting from a second-hand shop on the quay near the Ponte Vecchio.
He did not buy it because it was well known or well presented. It was covered in dust and almost hidden at the back of the shop. He just bought it because he liked it.
For thirty years, as he became British Vice-Consul to Florence and Sir Bryan, KBE, it hung in his library and for thirty years, each evening, he smoked his after-dinner cigar beneath it.
In 1900 a cholera epidemic swept Florence. It carried away Lady Frobisher, and after the funeral the sixty-year-old businessman decided to return to the land of his fathers. He sold up and came back to England, buying a handsome manor in Surrey and employing a staff of nine. The most junior was a local village girl, one Millicent Gore, who was engaged as a parlourmaid.
Sir Bryan never remarried and died at the age of ninety in 1930. He had brought almost a hundred packing crates back from Italy and one of them contained a small and by now discoloured oil painting in a gilt frame.
Because it had been his first gift to Lady Lucia and she had always loved it, he hung it again in the library where the patina of smoke and grime dulled the once-bright colours until the images of the figures became harder and harder to discern.
The First World War came and went, and in passing changed the world. Sir Bryan’s fortune became much depleted as his investments in the Imperial Russian railway stock vanished in 1917. After 1918 Britain had a new social landscape.
The staff diminished, but Millicent Gore stayed. She rose from parlourmaid to under-housekeeper, and from 1921 onwards the housekeeper and only member of inside staff. In the last seven years of his life she looked after the frail Sir Bryan like a nurse and on his death in 1930 he remembered her.
He left her a cottage tenancy for life and a capital sum in trust to provide an income on which she could live modestly. While the rest of his estate was realized at auction, there was one item not included: a small oil painting. She was very proud of this; it came from a strange place called Abroad, so she hung it in the tiny sitting room of her tied cottage, not far from the open wood-burning range. There it became dirtier and dirtier.
Miss Gore never married. She busied herself with village and parish works and died in 1965 at the age of five and eighty. Her brother had married and produced a son and he in turn had sired a boy, the old lady’s only great-nephew.
When she died she had little to leave, for the cottage and the capital fund reverted to the estate of her benefactor. But she left the painting to her great-nephew. Thirty-five more years went by until the dirty, stained, crusted old artefact saw the light of day again when it was unwrapped in a musty bedsitter in a back street off Shepherd’s Bush.
On the following morning its owner presented himself at the front desk of the prestigious House of Darcy, fine arts auctioneers and valuers. He clasped a hessian-wrapped package to his chest.
‘I understand that you offer a service of valuation to members of the public who may have an item of merit,’ he said to the young woman behind the desk. She too took in the frayed shirt and grubby mackintosh. She waved him towards a door marked Valuations. The interior was less lush than the front lobby. There was a desk and another girl. The actor repeated his query. She reached for a form.
‘Name, sir?’
‘My name is Mr Trumpington Gore. Now, this painting—’
‘Address?’
He gave it.
‘Phone number?’
‘Er, no phone.’
She gave him a glance as if he had said that he lacked a head.
‘And what is the item, sir?’
‘An oil painting.’
Slowly the details, or lack of them, were teased out of him as her expression became more and more weary. Age unknown, school unknown, period unknown, artist unknown, country – presumed Italy.
The woman in Valuations had a huge crush on a young blade in Classic Wines and she knew it was the hour of mid-morning coffee in the Caffé Uno just round the corner. If this boring little man with his awful little daub would go away, she could slip out with a girlfriend and coincidentally bag the table next to Adonis.
‘And finally, sir, what value would you put on it?’