A couple of months after our return from the holiday Frances came to school with the exciting news that Nude on a sun-lounger with fresh figs by Lazarus Ohene had come third in its category in the national portrait competition and that the Radley family fortune had increased by £500 at a stroke.
Petitioners immediately began to present themselves.
‘We need a new hoover,’ said Lexi. ‘That one doesn’t suck up the dirt any more, it just pushes it around. Oh, and my subscription for the golf club’s coming up. Better forget the hoover.’
‘I need a leather biker’s jacket,’ said Frances.
‘You haven’t got a bike,’ protested Mr Radley. He turned to his wife. ‘I’m not spending my winnings on anything prosaic like a hoover, thank you very much.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘It’s not as if I even use it.’
‘As the subject of the painting, I think I have some rights,’ Lexi said.
‘I should be entitled to a proportion of the money,’ said Rad, who was home for the weekend. ‘I cycled half-way across London trying to track down those figs. And it’s not even as if it was a good likeness: any old fruit would have done.’
It had been agreed that Mr Radley would go to the presentation alone. With the exception of Frances, no one relished the prospect of reinforcing the Lazarus Ohene deception, and she could not be relied upon not to embellish the fiction still further, given a chance. For years I kept the cutting from the Evening Standard which showed Mr Radley, his face a rictus of embarrassment, clutching his cheque, flanked by the other prizewinners and the chairman of judges. Underneath was the caption: Winners of the 1982 Sampson & Gould Portrait Competition (l to r) Judy Quaid, Louise Barrack and Lazarus Ohene receive their awards from Sir Gerald Sampson.
More important to the artist than the prize-money was the fact that the winning paintings would be exhibited in a private gallery in Bloomsbury and, with the artists’ consent, offered for sale. Much energy was devoted to deciding the value of the painting; once Mr Radley had been allowed to rant and storm for a few minutes about Lexi’s portrait having a value beyond all price, a figure of £300 was settled upon.
‘It still seems rather dear to me,’ said Lexi.
‘It’s a six by four. A hell of a lot of paint went on that canvas,’ said her husband, for whom material concerns began to assume their proper significance once more. ‘Not to mention the hours it took. And if the price deters the buyers, so much the better. I don’t want to sell it anyway.’
Frances and I went up to the exhibition one evening after school. I had missed the opening which clashed with an orchestra rehearsal. It had been arranged that Lawrence would meet us up there and bring us home afterwards.
The proprietor of the gallery wasn’t used to schoolgirl clients, and kept looking at us suspiciously, as if we might suddenly pocket an eight-foot canvas and run. Mr Radley’s painting suddenly seemed so much more authentic framed and lit and hanging on a clean white wall than when I had seen it last, stacked like a giant slice of toast up against half a dozen other attempts in the attic. In fact it looked thoroughly at home among the other exhibits: Lexi’s distorted and scowling face was merely one of many. When we arrived Lawrence was already standing in front of it, stroking his chin and looking thoughtful. ‘Well, it’s hideous all right,’ he said to me, when Frances had moved off. ‘But is it Art?’
The winning exhibit was a portrait of what I took to be an elderly victim of a mugging or other violent assault. One side of his face was the colour of raw liver, the eye reduced to a thin seam in the puffy flesh. The undamaged side was hardly more appealing, every wart, pock mark and nasal hair reproduced in fine detail. Purplish wattles of skin hung from jaw to collarbone and a fleck of spit foamed in the corner of the mouth. Lawrence grimaced and moved on to confront an image of a young girl with a shaven head and a cobweb tattooed on her forehead, snarling at him from the canvas.
‘Do you think we can deduce from these that flattery is no longer the duty of the artist?’ he whispered.
Some of the paintings, I noticed, had small orange stickers beside the title. ‘What are they for?’ I asked Frances as we caught her up.
‘The stickers mean the painting’s sold.’ We turned back to the Radley entry with one movement. ‘Dad’s in a real lather about it. He’s already spent the money.’
Apparently, having originally scorned the idea of selling the painting Mr Radley was now in a state of anxiety that it would suffer the humiliation of being the only one still unsold at the end of the fortnight. Between shifts at the pizza parlour he would scoot up to town on the delivery bike to check whether an orange sticker had appeared, returning home a little more dejected each time.
‘It’s not that I mind it sitting there like the only spinster at a wedding,’ he said, a couple of days before the exhibition closed. ‘It’s just that it feels like an insult to Lexi.’
His model and muse blinked in surprise. ‘You can rest easy on that account, I assure you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps it’s too expensive – you could knock it down by a few quid,’ Frances suggested.
Mr Radley bridled. ‘It’s not a punnet of soggy raspberries, for God’s sake.’
His dignity was restored the following day by a phone call from the gallery to say the painting was sold. ‘I had a feeling it would go for that price,’ he said, flushed with jubilation. ‘I wonder if they’ve got the name of the buyer. I could see whether he wants some of my other stuff.’
‘Oh no,’ said Lexi quickly. ‘I think these transactions are usually anonymous.’