Chapter Six The Four Items #2
The sports centre’s office was busy all morning, so she couldn’t really afford to take a lunch break, but she kept glancing over at that poster some guy called Jacob had put up, the one about a meeting at the museum.
It was illustrated with four intricate drawings, which was kind of weird – who even drew pictures these days?
But everything about that so-called museum was weird, including the woman who ran the place.
As a child, Alison had been scared of that tall stick of a woman who walked alone on the beach.
To be completely honest, Alison was still a little scared of her.
But, somehow, at 1.50 p.m. that Friday, Alison found herself standing up and asking Ollie to mind the phone.
‘Just popping out, I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she said.
All she wanted to do was take a closer look at that piece of embroidered sailcloth that had appeared on the poster, because a very similar picture hung over the mantelpiece in her dad’s cottage.
It was the closest thing they had to a family heirloom and it had been made by her Grandpa Fred when he’d done his national service in the navy.
‘A keepsake for your Grannie Helena, waiting at home,’ her dad, Keith, had explained with pride.
‘Lovebirds those two, never had a cross word.’
Alison had always liked that story. She’d pictured Grandpa Fred lying in his bunk, stitching and dreaming of Grannie Helena back in Cornwall, while his mates played cards or passed round a girlie magazine and their ship dipped and rolled on an ocean far from home.
Fred Blake had presented that piece of embroidery to his fiancée in 1956 and Alison could only imagine how treasured it must have been.
It depicted a map of Cornwall, a boat at sea, and the words Sailing home to you, my lovely bride were picked out in tiny white stitches.
Finally, beside the boat he’d stitched the red initials FB, for Frederick Blake, and then, marking the spot where his fiancée waited in Portheast, he’d stitched HB in red, for his soon-to-be wife Helena Blake.
That framed piece of embroidery had come to represent true love to Alison and, as a teenager, she’d gaze at it in the hope that one day she would find a love as pure as theirs.
Yes, she was a romantic at heart, but what was wrong with that?
She didn’t get why everyone was so introspective these days, raking over every unhappy moment and squeezing out every last drop of despair.
Alison had what her father called a sunny disposition and it had helped them both get through losing her mum when Alison was a teenager.
In Alison’s view, you had a choice: dwell on the negative or look for the positive.
For instance, Roy wasn’t a bad person – he just found it difficult to express his emotions.
He was easily frustrated, so his feelings came out in words and deeds that didn’t always feel like love. But he was always sorry afterwards.
So, that Friday she’d gone to the town museum in search of a reminder that true love did exist in the shape of this second piece of embroidery that looked to be by her grandpa’s hand.
How it had ended up in the museum was a mystery, but she hoped it was more proof of the thread of love between her grandparents.
When she found it in a glass cabinet at the back of the boat shed, Alison let out a small gasp of joy. It most definitely was by her grandpa, she was sure of it, and if anything, this picture was even more beautiful than the first one, as if his love had grown stronger.
She knew she and Roy were going through ‘a blip’. That wasn’t unusual after having a baby, was it? But seeing that keepsake was the reminder she needed: she and Roy would find their way back to each other. Their own thread wasn’t broken, just a little frayed.
Alison leaned in for a last, long look at her grandfather’s work.
And then she frowned. For all its beauty, something was wrong with this picture.
Just like the one hanging on her dad’s wall, it showed a boat sailing on the waves off Cornwall, with Fred’s initials, FB, above the boat.
But where the initials HB for Helena Blake should be, marking Portheast, there was nothing but green stitches, signifying land.
But an inch or so to the west were two red dots, so small you could easily miss them.
But when she squinted, Alison could make them out. And they didn’t say HB, but SW.
It was as if Alison was falling backwards, into a darkness with no end.
She blinked, looked again, to make sure she hadn’t imagined it.
No, they definitely said SW. Then she realised that the larger words that danced over the waves were also different: Wish we could sail away together, my true love.
She turned and walked smartly out of the museum, breaking into a jog as she reached the hill and, with each slap of her trainers on the ground, she chastised herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She shouldn’t have let that Jacob put up that poster in the sports centre and she definitely shouldn’t have gone to the museum. Then she’d never have seen that her grandfather Frederick Blake had been a cheat, saving his best work for someone else. Someone with the initials SW.
But the run helped, because once she was showered and back at her desk, Alison felt much better.
She shook her head and almost laughed at how silly she’d been, because SW could mean anything – a place, a pet, a best friend.
It could even be SW for south-west, his beloved corner of Cornwall.
Already, that block of hurt inside her was starting to dissipate and as she issued tickets, booked gym sessions and answered the phone, she could feel it leaving her body and dispersing into the chlorinated air.
Problems were a bit like a toothache: the temptation to prod it with your tongue was always there, but you also had the choice to not go poking around.
To be on the safe side, she formed a plan.
Before she’d become a mum and taken this part-time job, she’d worked in public relations.
This was a situation that required what her old boss had called ‘damage limitation’.
He said the first thing to do in the face of bad news was to act quickly and gather all the information possible.
Then, you needed to assemble a committee of efficient people, to help you.
Alison flicked through a mental Rolodex of the people she’d seen at the museum meeting in search of an efficient ally. There was really only one contender. Picking up the phone, she rang the Warburn Spa hotel. ‘Hello? Yes, please could I speak to Sariah Carnie, your manager. Yes, I’ll wait.’
Item 3: Small painting of sailing ship, oil on wood. Circa 1930s, poss. attrib. A Wallis.
George Rook noticed that she’d hedged her bets on the label, indicating it was ‘possibly attributed’ to Wallis. That was one way of putting it, but in 1987 this unsigned painting had indeed sold as an early Alfred Wallis, and for a good price.
Interest in the self-taught St Ives painter had been at a high and people were falling over themselves to exclaim about his ‘expressive naivety’. George thought that was a load of rubbish. In his view, the best thing about Wallis’s naive style was that it was very easy to copy.
He’d only done a couple of Wallis tributes – he preferred that word to ‘forgery’, which was so judgemental.
It was never good to flood the market with discoveries, or people started to get twitchy.
Realistically, there was a limit to the number of Alfred Wallises that could be found languishing in lofts.
But this one had been his favourite. It was done on plywood and George had achieved a perfect shade of blue for the sea (using boat paint, just as Wallis had), while the clouds had a fluffy charm.
And now it had been put on a poster, summoning him through the museum doors.
Once inside, it didn’t take long to locate the painting and he was pleased it was still in good nick – barely a scratch on it.
Still in its original frame too, bought from Woolworths in St Austell.
He and his father had given it their special ageing treatment: a quick rubdown followed by a wipe over with nail polish remover and, voilà, an authentically aged frame.
For anything 19th century, they tended to leave the nail polish remover on for an extra fifteen minutes.
The painting had been sold to an anonymous client, but George knew it was Sir Jasper Warburn who, at the time, owned half the land around Portheast as well as Warburn Hall.
Rumour had it he’d been sowing his wild oats again and had bought it as a gift to placate a disgruntled Lady Catherine Warburn.
These days, the much-diminished Warburn family still owned a smattering of tied cottages, but the Hall had been sold off and converted into an exclusive spa hotel.
When the place was gutted, the contractors sent plenty of fittings George’s way, with late-night deliveries of chandeliers, a marble fireplace and some garden statuary, but, sadly, that little painting never reappeared.
Someone else must have whisked it away – or maybe its beauty went unnoticed and it ended up in a car boot sale, the sort George still frequented.
In fact, he often saw Evelyn Silver at them too, rooting around in boxes of bric-a-brac.
When George did a boot fair, he looked for a different sort of junk, the type he could resell for an inflated sum.
In the old days, this meant inlay cabinets, silver candlesticks and costume jewellery, but these days anything with a whiff of rustic sold well: chests of drawers he could repaint and rub down with wire wool, pig benches and wobbly milking stools.
‘Authentic’ was a word he used a lot, along with ‘charming’, and holidaymakers lapped it up.