Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

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      ‘Not really. I sent him a couple of e-mails, told him what I was planning. He didn’t reply, so I’m assuming it’s OK. I haven’t managed to get him on the phone. Everything’s in hand for Friday.’ Eliza kept her voice casual.

      Jonathan was checking the diary and opening his post. ‘Oh, not again. Get a letter off to this guy, Mel. It’s the third time he’s sent me some photos of his stuff. If I was looking for wannabe pre-Raphaelites I’d go to the greetings-cards section in Smith’s. At least I’d get someone who could handle paint.’

      ‘I’ll do that now,’ Mel said. ‘While I’m waiting for Eliza.’

      ‘Thanks.’ He flicked through the diary. ‘We’ve got more school kids in tomorrow. I’d better deal with that. You know, I thought I was an artist, not a child minder.’

      Eliza ignored this as she checked through her own post. It was just Jonathan’s usual complaint. He always moaned about the school visits – and almost always dealt with them himself. Jonathan liked children. He was a good teacher – she knew that from her own student days. But he was surprisingly good with kids; serious and sober, but able to hold their interest and arouse their enthusiasm. It was a side to Jonathan she never would have suspected.

      The post was dull – some advertising and some charity leaflets that went in the bin, an invitation to a private view that might be worth going to, and some art catalogues she put on one side for later browsing.

      ‘…like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

      ‘What?’ Eliza hadn’t been paying attention.

      ‘I said, this gallery is like some kind of charity for homeless kids.’

      He was bitching about Cara again. He’d taken against her, almost from the time she’d first moved in. Jonathan would have preferred the flats to be let at full market rents, rather than the ‘affordable rents’ – high enough in Eliza’s opinion – that the Trust required. He thought that the flats should be taken by ‘young professionals’, not the socially needy. ‘That’s what you get for using taxpayer’s money,’ Eliza said. She remembered the night before, the shut-down alarm. ‘By the way, Cara…’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come on,’ she added to Mel, ‘let’s get this lot upstairs before Daniel Flynn gets here.’

      Mel pulled a letter off the printer and put it in Jonathan’s in-tray. ‘OK.’ She sighed but stood up and she and Eliza began moving the boxes that contained Flynn’s drawings and sketches towards the lift.

      Once they had moved the boxes into the upper gallery, they began to sort the remaining pictures, matching the numbers with the plan that Eliza had set out the night before. So far it was all going smoothly, and they should have everything set up in plenty of time for the opening. She made a mental note to go over the invitation list for the private view and make sure that no one had been left off.

      Mel’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Oh God, look at this!’ She was holding up a photo-assemblage, in which, against the barren incandescence of the Brueghel landscape, a man in the unmistakable uniform of an officer of the Third Reich was placing a noose round the neck of a young woman. The woman’s hands were bound. Eliza could see the fastidious care with which the man was positioning the rope, the concentration on his face, the woman’s white-faced fear. ‘Is it real?’ Her eyes were bright.

      Eliza nodded. She had seen the photograph before – in fact, she had drawn Daniel’s attention to it. It was one of a series taken towards the end of the war when Hitler’s army was in retreat. ‘The triumph of death,’ she said. ‘Flynn’s right. Brueghel’s images don’t do it for us any more.’

      ‘It’s gross,’ Mel said.

      Eliza wasn’t going to argue with that so she didn’t reply. She stood for a minute, looking down at the canal. There was some sort of activity further up on the towpath. She’d been aware of people hurrying past and now, as she looked, she saw a couple of police officers. There must have been some kind of trouble down there in the night. She shrugged, dismissing it.

      She closed doors, shutting off the hum of activity from the floor below, and let the silence of the gallery close around her. She had work to do.

       Madrid

      The silence of the museum closed around Eliza as she walked through the high, light corridors. These were the times she treasured at the Prado, the early mornings before the gallery got too busy when she could have the spaces and the paintings to herself.

      Her interest in the early painters had brought her to the rooms where the sixteenth-century Flemish paintings hung. They had developed techniques that produced paintings with a clarity and depth, and a saturation of colour that has never been surpassed. The big attraction for visitors was The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic depiction of heaven and hell. The colours, after all the centuries, were still vivid and clear. Eliza had spent a long time studying it.

      But gradually she was drawn to a smaller panel that hung on the far wall. From a distance, it looked dark, but closer, the detail began to appear, a bleak coastline, a sluggish river, fires that cast a sombre glow across a landscape where death marched as an army. Brueghel’s masterpiece: The Triumph of Death.

      The painting exercised a fascination over her. She was intrigued by the meticulous techniques that had kept the paint so fresh, the luminescence of the water and the incandescent glow that suffused the landscape. Brueghel had probably worked with tempera white heightening into the wet or on the dry imprimatura, beginning with the highlights of the flesh…It was a painting that drew the eye, as the army of death advanced across a desolate landscape, hunting down and slaughtering the living, men, women and children, with a pitiless dedication and terrifying cruelty.

      ‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

      She looked round. Two men were standing behind her, studying the Brueghel. They were both tall, casually dressed, one with Mediterranean-dark hair, the other with the fairer colouring of the north. Something about them said ‘artists’. The dark-haired one seemed familiar. He was the one who had spoken, and she realized he had been talking to her. She tried to frame a reply in her still rudimentary Spanish, when she recognized his accent as English. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I always think that this is the wrong place for it.’ Where had she seen him? Had he been in the café the night before?

      ‘Where else would it belong but among the Boschs?’ the other man said. Her artist’s eye analysed his face – tanned as though he spent most of his time outdoors, Slavic bones. His dark glasses reflected her gaze.

      ‘I mean the place,’ she said. She gestured at the high, clearly lit gallery. ‘It ought to be in the shadows, I don’t know, in a dark corner of an old church, and you’d come across it out of the blue. Or…’ She’d been thinking about this painting for weeks. ‘I know it’s medieval, its ideas, but there’s something…I’d put it in a current setting. A cityscape, industrial ruins, show people a modern triumph of death.’

      The dark-haired man looked round the room. ‘That’s the problem with a place like this,’ he said. ‘It’s decontextualized. Stuck here, it’s history, superstition.’ He moved closer to the panel. ‘It’s a fifteenth-century video nasty,’ he said after a moment. ‘Someone’s cut that bloke’s eyes out. If it is a bloke.’

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