The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(15)

‘Booh!’ I said and waited for his devastating retort.

‘Please take your finger out of my newspaper,’ he retorted devastatingly.

I wiggled the finger, resting my nose on the top of the newspaper.

‘Piss off!’ he snarled, scarlet-faced. Better, that.

I pissed off, well pleased with myself. Round the corner of St James’s Street clumped a policeman, one of those young, pink, indignant policemen you meet so often nowadays. Ambitious, virtuous and hell on evil-doers.

‘Officer!’ I gobbled angrily, ‘I have just been obscenely accosted by that wretched fellow with the newspaper.’ I pointed a shaking finger at Maurice who paused guiltily in midstride. The policeman went white about the lips and bore down on Maurice who was still on one foot, newspaper outstretched, looking extraordinarily like a cruel parody of Gilbert’s ‘Eros’ at Piccadilly Circus. (Did you know that Eros is made of aluminium? I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere. Or a joke.)

‘I’ll be at your Station in forty minutes,’ I cried after the policeman, and nipped into a passing taxi. It had all its handles.

Now, as I’ve already told you, Martland’s men have a year’s training. Ergo, spotting Maurice so easily had to mean that Maurice was there to be spotted. It took me a long time but I spotted her in the end: a burly, clean-shaven, auntlike woman in a Triumph Herald: an excellent car for tailing people in, unremarkable, easily parked and with a tighter turning circle than a London taxi. It was unfair on her not to have had a companion though. I simply hopped out at Piccadilly Circus, went in one Underground entrance and out of another. Triumph Heralds are not all that easily parkable.

My second taxi took me to Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, a wonderful place where all sorts of recondite crafts are plied. Over-tipping the driver, as is my foolish wont, he ‘gave’ me ‘Nostalgia for the fourth at Kempton Park.’ Still wondering what on earth he could mean, I climbed the stairs to my liner’s studio.

Here I’d better explain what a liner is. Most old paintings need a new support before they can be cleaned. In its simplest form, this involves soaking the old canvas with glue, ‘compo’ or wax, then bonding it, so to speak, to a new canvas by means of a hot table and pressure. Sometimes the old canvas is too far gone; sometimes during the work the paint comes adrift (the picture ‘blows up’ as they say). In either of these cases a ‘transfer’ is called for. This means that the painting is fastened face downwards and every shred of canvas is removed from the paint. The new canvas is then stuck on to the back of the paint and your picture is sound again. If it is painted on panel (wood) which has gone rotten or wormy, a really top reliner can plane all the wood off, leaving only the crust of paint, to which he then sticks a canvas. All very, very tricky work and highly paid. A good liner has a pretty shrewd idea of the value of the painting he is treating and usually charges accordingly. He makes more money than many of the dealers he works for. He is indispensable. Any idiot can clean a painting – and many of them do – and most competent artists can strengthen (touch up) or replace missing bits of paint; indeed many famous painters have made a good thing out of this as a secret sideline. (Very delicate work, like the rigging of ships, was often painted with a varnish medium for easy handling: this is hell to clean because, of course, it comes off with the dirty varnish. Consequently, many cleaners simply photograph the rigging or whatever, ruthlessly clean it off, then repaint it from the photograph. Well, why not?) But a good liner, as I was saying, is a pearl beyond price.

Pete does not look like a pearl. He looks like a dirty and sinister little Welshman, but he has the curiously beautiful manners which even the basest Celt displays in his own home. He opened the ceremonial tin of Spam and brewed a huge metal pot of lovely strong Brooke Bond PG Tips. I hastily volunteered to make the bread and butter – his nails were filthy – and to slice the Spam. It was a lovely tea party, I adore Spam, and the tea had condensed milk in it and came out a rich orange colour. (How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear queen.)

I told him the Spr?nger would be arriving from Sotheby’s and that I thought the drapery over Venus’s oh-be-joyful was later work and probably concealed a very fair example of the nun’s wink.

‘Scrub,’ I told him, ‘but scrub with care.’

We then repaired to his studio under the roof so that I could inspect work in progress. All very satisfactory. He was having great trouble with my little Sienese tryptich (is that how you spell it?) but then he’d been having trouble with it for eighteen months. I never got the bill for it and now I probably never shall.

Then I told him about Mr Spinoza and explained certain new arrangements. He didn’t like them a bit but soon stopped shrieking when I filled his mouth with gold, as it were. He keeps his money in the tea caddy, if you want to know. There was one more ordeal to be undergone before I could get away from his carious, onion-laden breath.

‘Just got time for a tune, then, ain’t I?’ he cried with the coy, treat-giving air of a Quartermaster dishing out prophylactics.

‘Capital, capital,’ I responded, rubbing hypocritical hands. He sat down at his little electric organ (it cost him ￡400) and treated me to ‘Turn back, oh man, Forswear thy foolish ways’ which moved me deeply. There is something curiously wrong about most Welsh voices, a kind of cardboard quality under the slick of gold, which irks me greatly. Pete’s singing can reduce a public bar full of people to tears of sheer pleasure – I’ve seen it – but it always makes me feel that I’ve eaten too many Spam sandwiches.