As you have probably guessed, it was an entirely put-up job by the young government operative, Mr. Darren Lu, posing as a porter. In the mayhem following the power outage, he cut a hole in my so-called impenetrable glass, put me into a rucksack, and walked down the stairs and out of the back entrance.
I felt for poor old Melanie Appledore—a lady who made it through a world war, had navigated the brutal waters of Park Avenue and survived as a lonely widow for nearly quarter of a century, only to snuff out in the saleroom. At least she died hors de combat, believing that the deal was as good as done.
I was bitterly disappointed not to set a new world record at auction. The wily Earl was hoping for more than $500 million. Eminently achievable, given that the Cézanne card players, one of five versions, fetched $261 million and my provenance is far greater than the Klimt of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which fetched $150 million.
Don’t be shocked by this apparent self-reverence. As you know, my canvas is covered with the brushstrokes of a genius and overlaid with centuries of desire, love and avarice. Each of my owners added an intangible but indelible stratum: the first was my master’s outpourings; the second was his friend Julienne’s fraternal affection and these two were followed by the admiration of the great and the downright ugly; even young Annie added a little bit of magic. These layers of appreciation, though invisible to the human eye, are detectable to those with particular powers of intuition and sensitivity.
Does this, I hear you ask, explain the insane prices for works of art and why I and my ilk are more highly prized than gold or diamonds, a more reliable investment than houses or land when we are really nothing more than a patch of cloth stretched over four slender shafts of wood? The answer is simple enough: look around at this crazy, godless, cynical world and ask in what and where can mankind put its trust? I know, you think I, Pontificating Peter, am a frightful old bore for going on like this, and I know I have said this before, but in a declining, degenerate, money-obsessed era, where even Mammon lets most down, art has become a kind of religion.
Like other successful religions, art has evolved and offers glorious temples and learned high priests as well as covenants and creeds. The new churches are known as museums, in which the contemplation of art has become a kind of prayer and communal activity. The very wealthy can create private chapels stuffed with the unimaginable rarities and guarantee a front seat. It was ever thus.
Back to moi. There’s been a frightful row about who owns me. Annie, true to her word, relinquished all claims, so everyone else is charging around the world trying to find a relation or distant cousin of the original Winklemans. Ten thousand pretenders have stepped forward. Most can be utterly discounted but there is one woman, in Israel, who looks plausible.
All I want is resolution, not restitution. There has been far too much movement and I am in desperate need of a period of peace and consolidation. My blessing is to inspire excesses in emotion; my curse is being powerless over my fate.
For now, I hang in the Prime Minister’s state dining room for “safe-keeping.” His main objective is to annoy the French. After three hundred years, nothing changes: France and England still quarrelling over very little. That Rock of Gibraltar, ceded to the British in 1713, is still a bone of contention with the Spanish, and the British and the Russians are still in and out of love: it was ever thus. No one talks much about Sweden these days or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there are two new players, America and China; superpowers come and go, control ebbs and flows.
Le scandale du jour was that the old Nazi took a cyanide pill in his prison cell and died frothing and foaming on the floor of HMP Wandsworth. A letter was produced claiming that the daughter knew nothing of her father’s misdemeanours; pull the other leg, as the bootjack used to say. The same letter also revealed the whereabouts of a cache of hidden paintings—Nazi loot—in a disused salt mine in Bavaria. It happened to contain eighty-four masterpieces and the Amber Room. Now there are full-on fisticuffs between Russia, France and Germany about who owns what. Since Helen of Troy, beauty has inspired warfare.
Annie was released with a full pardon. She came to lunch with the Prime Minister and brought Jesse, and a man from Wales. It just so happened that there was a problem with a blocked water closet, of all things! The man from Wales whipped off his jacket and disappeared with an orderly. Thirty minutes later he reappeared, problem solved. The Prime Minister was frightfully chuffed and banged on about good citizenship and “big society.” I must say the PM is a bit of a bore, but you probably have to be a little dull to want to go into politics and even duller to stay there.
The Welshman came up with another idea: what about making moi “The People’s Picture.” He proposed a campaign to save me for the nation with every citizen donating £3 to the great cause. The PM loved that, knowing he would be the first politician in history to introduce a tax that everyone liked.
Just before she left for America, Annie came to see me. Looking around to make sure no one could hear, she whispered into my paint.
“Thank you,” she said, “for reawakening my belief in this world and, most of all, for making love possible again. I owe you a huge debt.”
Moments later, Jesse came up behind her, put his arm around her and kissed her gently on her head. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“The Improbability of Love,” she replied, still looking at me. Intertwining her fingers into his, she rested her head on his shoulder.
One had to admit, one was quite moved.
Tomi Horshaft was confirmed as the grandchild of Ezra and Esther Winkleman. Born in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, orphaned soon afterwards, she was adopted by an American couple who relocated to a kibbutz in northern Israel. Speaking from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Mrs. Horshaft said, “While this discovery will never bring back my parents, grandparents or cousins, I will use the money raised in the sale of this picture to build a school in their honour.”
The people of Great Britain clubbed together to purchase moi for £240 million (a fraction of my estimated value). It was a frightful bore; every quarter, I had to move to a different regional museum. There were queues outside each as hundreds of thousands came to admire moi. Museums charged hefty fees for couples to marry under my gaze. Every year since the purchase, I have been voted the best British National Treasure, with over six times the number of votes garnered by Stonehenge, Blenheim Palace, the Giant’s Causeway or Blackpool Tower, whatever or wherever they might be.
Still, the hoi polloi give good gossip: I overheard that Annie and Jesse moved to a farmhouse in upstate New York, a place which satisfied their love of the countryside but was not too far from the city. Annie’s company, called Foodalicious, became the byword in chic, themed, high-end specialised catering. Despite offers to take Foodalicious global, Annie resisted. “For me,” she told a scribe, “food is love, food is memory, food is suffering and hope, food is the past and the future, food is who we are and who we want to be; so cooking is all about originality and intimacy and you can’t achieve that on a big scale.” When the journalist asked if she was the same Annie McDee who had bought the world’s most famous picture from a junk shop, gone to prison and refused £1 million in compensation from the Winkleman Foundation, Annie replied, “That was an entirely different person.”
Jesse, now her husband, still paints landscapes from memory in his studio, a large converted barn. I am told that these are colourful, abstract and highly sought after.
What about the fate of Rebecca Spinetti-Winkleman, I hear you ask? Did you really expect justice and retribution? Things are different for the rich and powerful—it was ever thus. Though she was charged with falsifying documents and concealing evidence, Rebecca received a short custodial sentence and continued to run the business from an open prison. In her capable hands the gallery flourished and her father’s past was soon washed away on a tide of strategic donations.
While his wife was in prison and his uxorial purse strings finally snipped, Carlo Spinetti made a low-budget horror movie spoof, My Father-in-Law, about a ruthless ex-Nazi who drank blood for breakfast. The week before his wife was released from prison, Carlo died in flagrante delicto with two young women in a hotel. You couldn’t make it up.
Vlad and Grace Spinetti married. He renounced his fortune and they moved back to his hometown of Smlinsk, where they had seven children and ran a tattoo parlour.
Delores married a Moroccan taxi driver and moved to Taroudant, where she sold products made of Argon oil. After her failure to spot moi, she gave up art history. Hurrah! Franchement, her books were a burden to any bookshelf.
Earl Beachendon left the auction house to run the Emir and Sheikha of Alwabbi’s museum. His annual budget was £1 billion to spend on paintings, making the Earl the most powerful man in the art world.
After his ingenious idea to crowdfund for “The Peoples’ Picture,” Maurice Abufel was rewarded with the ambassadorship to the Republic of Dagestan. Don’t ask me where that is, I have no idea. Nor apparently did Maurice: “I don’t care as long as it’s a long way from Mold,” he said.
Delia Abufel won “Slimmer of the Year,” remarried and settled in Pontefract.
Who else was there? Oh yes, Evie. She completed rehab, gained her A levels, won a scholarship to university and married a man called Bruce Goldenheart. They live on the Isle of Wight and run a counselling service for recovering alcoholics.
And what about moi? Do you still see an old bit of canvas, eighteen by twenty-four inches, encrusted with pigments, oils, a splash of chicken soup and a dead fly? I think not.
My time is nearly up. Frankly, I am exhausted. It is hard work keeping the flame of beauty and excellence burning. Centuries of being ripped out of frames, strapped to the back of mules, loaded into ships, stuffed into plastic bags, hung above roaring fires and subjected to hot breath have all taken their toll. My warp and weft are disintegrating; the moisture has gone from the oil. Soon I will be nothing more than a tiny pile of dust. Luckily, many followers and imitators thrive and survive; some are excellent. All that matters is that artists keep reminding mortals about what really matters: the wonder, the glory, the madness, the importance and the improbability of love.