Montescu

In the following weeks, the Berrills got their place in a liveable state again, with some help from myself, and from Risteárd.  Through good fortune, the foundations at Isolde Terrace hadn’t suffered and upstairs got off lightly.  It was downstairs that had taken an ugly beating in the blaze, especially the back of the place, the kitchen area, where the incendiary had landed. 

They still had me round to watch films with them, in a living room left foggy and carpetless, its walls scorched and scraped down.  I was not removed from the fact that the front room was not the only thing altered by the breach.  The Berrills were now less loquacious or physically eager, much more despondent in mood, as you might expect.  I’d taken it upon myself to do things they would normally do themselves around the house.  Like going out to get coal for the fireplace.  Phyllis now spent more time out back feeding the birds and getting stick from Oran for wasting all their bread and chips on them.  Even as winter crept in, and the cold worsened, she might stay out there for hours on end.  I asked her why she wasn’t up working on her play.  That I hadn’t heard the old word processor clacking in ages.  She divulged that she hadn’t typed out or even handwritten any of it in a decade, never mind recent events.  Before, when she said she was working on it, she was in fact referring to its percolating in her brain, which to her was pretty much the same as working on it.  But now it had stopped percolating entirely, she told me.  You’ll get back to it someday, I reassured her.

Since our chat in The Pompadour, I’d begun to feel guilty about imposing on the Berrills’ privacy.  I felt that maybe my association with them might be construed as dubious and that they probably had good reason to be suspicious.  A rational individual may have determined I was a parasite, only there because I was after their property and money.  I wanted to tell them this was not the case but I feared that stating it outright would make them suspect me even more.  We had watched enough film noirs together to know most folks had a game going and by virtue of bringing it up I might be revealing my veiled calculatedness. 

Although none of this was lost on me, I could mellow my consternation by reminding myself that they were after all my friends.  No two ways about it.  I took great pleasure in watching films with them; in fact, time with the Berrills had made me somewhat of a film buff, strange for someone who could take them or leave them previously; it was even myself who at one time suggested we set up the Earlship Billy Wilder Society, an idea quickly undone by Oran who said nobody would ever sign up – not because people in the area hated the Berrills, but because they were all, for better or worse, philistines.  I didn’t completely agree with him, but had sympathy for his prejudgements. 

The truth: I admired the Berrills’ reverence for the home comforts, and recognised always that a ravine surely existed between their own lives and mine.  Though it was pleasant to just sit around and watch films and moan about things in general, it was clearly not normal for me to be spending my free time almost exclusively in the company of two elderly hermits.  I was fully aware of my place.  As were they.  Phyllis in particular would occasionally bring up the issue of my atrophy and offer her services as a matchmaker:

There’s a woman about your age in my singing group.

Is she your height?

No, why?

Not a problem.  I just don’t think I could be with a woman taller than myself.

Someone who could flatten you?

More or less.

One evening we had The Fortune Cookie on.  Oran and Phyllis.  And myself.  Horlicks and gin.  Like before the fire.  At the side of my chair there sat a large picture frame and when I nudged it forward to see what it was I saw the wild sika stag painting that normally hung on the wall.  F. Noel Montescu, 1923.  Miraculously, it appeared unscathed by the inferno. 

          He survived then, I said to Oran.

          He did.  But he was safe from harm before.  I’d already pulled him down to be sold.

          You’re selling it?  I thought this one was important.

          It is.  To a degree.  It was the father’s.  He never liked it.  None of us ever liked it.  It has value only in a monetary sense.

          I like it, I said.

The father discovered this was done by a local man called Tom McGloin who’d made up the name Montescu.  He put the word out that it was in reality the name of a great artist on the continent whose works had fallen into the possession of a wealthy Irish art dealer around the time of his death from murder. 

I wondered why neither of them had informed me on this before, but then realised I had never asked.  Oran continued:

Montescu would do these portraits of animals he’d had run-ins with in his time:  irate badgers, great crested grebes, the wild sika stag.   He signed them F. Noel Montescu, 1923.  The lore is that Montescu only painted during that year, but that his conflicts with the animals occurred in the summer of 1921.  Word got around the country quick about Montescu and his animals.    

Is that where you got the idea for the Tout? 

Not at all.  God-given is my right to behave illusively.   Hoaxing is in the very bloodstream of the nation. 

What are you saying?  That we’re all cheats.

Beguilers, at best.  In this country, we enjoy the business of trickery more than most.  Or we did a few years ago.   We appear to have lost our appreciation for a good literary swindle. 

What about the chap that did that Howard Hughes book?  Wasn’t he carted off to jail?

I can’t speak to the laws of duplicity in other cultures, I’m afraid. 

It’s a dangerous lark if you ask me.  All that lying is what probably got this McGloin killed.

Montescu was the one murdered.  Or not murdered, I should say.  McGloin’s demise is unknown.

So who’s the lucky buyer then? I asked.

I’m not sure if there is one anymore.  Someone called from Dunshaughlin a few weeks ago with designs on it.  They’d seen the ad we put in the Monthly Trade.  Said they’d drive up but we haven’t heard from them since. 

I don’t understand why someone would want something that is in essence not what it purports to be.

Oh, its essence is that it is not what it purports to be.  That’s why I’m charging the arm and leg.  These Montescus are known amongst more discerning antiquarians as works of major interest in the world of minor hoaxes.  I expect this man who wanted to purchase the stag hails from the Age of Gentlemen.  They were rather bad too, the paintings, as you can plainly see.  Kitsch goes a long way these days.