Down, Below

It fell out of the damp cavity between the case and the wall. Sawdust and bits of calcified paper coughed out of the gap, raining onto the cement ground in the basement. I panicked. This would not look good on the condition report. Dusting the debris from its cover – it felt smoothed and compact in my hand, as if it had previously been thumbed through often but was now cold, compressed by abandonment – I set it aside to check the painting. A pair of eyes, black as buttons, stared through the torn bubble wrap, vaguely irritated by my error. I could see no real change to its frame, except perhaps a small tidemark of mildew from where the book had fallen. The tape holding the tissue paper in place had ripped, and the entire piece would have to be re-wrapped. I decided I might as well make a start, and propped it back against the wall, face-to-face with those unblinking eyes.

It wasn’t a particularly good example of her work – it had been restored twice and arrived to us with minimal documentation, but clearly someone wanted it. Usually I enjoyed being in the basement with her paintings. I could pore over their strange vocabularies of symbols and figures, becoming almost a second language to me as I packed them for shipping and finished their condition reports. But the sudden disruption, this falling object that could have cracked the varnish, broke me out in a guilty sweat that averted my eyes from her accusatory subject. I can still recall what was written in the report before it fell; this was a from the artist’s early Mexico years, until now housed in a private collection – belonging to Stanley Marcus, I think, who came to us a lot.

Personally I prefer her larger canvases. In the fluorescent glare of the basement, they seemed sometimes to glow, in the haze around her figures and spotted stars, alchemical potions, golden eggs. This canvas wasn’t a Surrealist landscape, populated with artefacts and visual riddles, but nonetheless was striking. A druid figure –some have said a Magus – balances a gecko wrapped around a blooming tree, perhaps presenting it to the group on the left. I remember feeling rather sorry for the seated old lady – it seemed like the ominous figures behind were pushing her towards the tree, or the strange measuring device in the man’s hands. Her own hands gripped the chair in support, perhaps wary of the hammer held by one of the figures behind her, I think the same man whose eyes bored through me when I saw the book drop. It struck me then that those were not his eyes but eyeglasses, stiff and dark and fixed. He, if I may say that with some assertion due to a bald, alien-like head, was the only one who sensed me standing there, looking in. There was something about the way he curled his hand around that mallet that made me think the woman was at threat, about to be harmed if she did not comply. I had caught these men, their blank stares and black eyes, staring out of other canvases, confrontational whilst I spread sheets of paper and rolls of plastic wrap across their domains. I did not often stop to wonder what she’d meant. Focused instead on those little thrilling details, applied with the same delicate flicks Bosch used to mark out his own tempera creatures, it was possible to get lost in the mystery rather than confront the facts. And I suppose that’s what happened that day, too.

I want you to know that I didn’t do this out of greed, or spite, or vanity. I didn’t hide it to eventually sell it, or destroy it, or even keep it. I just wanted something that was, momentarily, mine. And then days became weeks, weeks turned to months and so on. You must understand that working down there, in the bowels of the gallery, did not make me lose the plot as you might easily assume, but let it slip constantly through my fingers. All day I’d note, observe, package, move on, until the images I once loved became just bits of sacking and cloth, thin and flimsy parchment sheets. They were distanced from me, mechanical and transactional, and I became angry with their sudden flatness.

Sometimes I felt the urge to rip them; to tear a piece off and pocket it to feel the fibres against my thumb, the flaking paint applied by some famous post-war portraitist trapped under my fingernails and eventually bitten off and chewed into oblivion, century-old pigments dissolving into last night’s supper. I used to think, would the banker who’d instructed his PA to buy something that’d hang nice in his office notice if I snipped its corner off, or dug a biro into some impasto flowers, telling myself my hand had slipped? Would that Chelsea housewife I glimpsed in Mark’s office even see the new lines scored across the seascape she just adored at the auction, or find that little stickmen were now dancing on the shipwreck? I never got answers to my questions because I never did these things, despite my fantasies, and never would. Such thoughts were simply reassurance, reminding myself that I understood, looked, knew, more than them, that they could never fully own the part of history they had purchased just because it hung in their house. I thought I’d never know how it felt to take history home, to bring it out of the basement and keep hold of it. But that changed when I opened the book.

It didn’t take me long to realise what it contained and what that meant. I wasn’t only hired for my excellent packaging skills, and ability to find the end of any roll of tape in less than five seconds, or I would have decamped to Amazon years ago – I heard their storerooms have windows. Scanning the page, I was taken back to a wood-panelled office, its walls heavy with paintings and air thick with the burnt-dust smell of old radiators. Sunset shadows were settling across the college lawns outside as the reedy voice of my Tutor punctuated the gloom, the room infusing with exuberant energy as he spoke. ‘Of course, the Bering collection might never be recovered – it’s likely that the thieves, inexperienced as they were, simply did not grasp the enormous reputation of these items. Any self-respecting collector wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. If they did, their buyer was probably a hoarder, and the works might be hidden for years, decades even. That is if they have not already been destroyed in panic’. I saw the bright eyes of my roommate Nadia strike out towards him to breathlessly inquire ‘So, what if they are found? Who’ll be charged? Surely there’s a still reward out?’ and remember feeling just as excited by his tale. In a subject like Art History where everything was visualised and built on interpretation, nothing intrigued me more than when art became invisible and inaccessible. When I graduated, I realised this usually just meant more paperwork, more meetings, working longer hours in pursuit of provenance.

Shapes and numbers filled the pages, inks spiralled in blues, blacks, sometimes reds across the creamy paper, thick with use. A private conversation in runes and symbols was taking place, and many might have slapped it shut in confusion, locked out of its cryptic dialogues. I was less disturbed, recognising there a shorthand code, the same I used to get through large batches of artworks on a busy day. In my version squares indicated paintings, ovals sculptures, diamonds with a strikethrough were drawings, diamonds without were prints. A relatively easy coda, but I was not concerned about who might be able to interpret it. This clearly was not the case in the black book.

I took it home with me that night. The tube to Kentish Town was packed, and it seemed as if the whole carriage could hear my beating ribcage, thumping dents into the leather cover pressed into my jacket. It was a balmy evening, and Simon wanted to get a beer in the square. Our usual bench was taken, so we sat on our second preference, dedicated to some batty old lady’s dog Terence, who ‘so loved the view from here’. I peeled little bits from the label, wet with condensation, and listened to a new rant about his awful colleagues, thinking the whole time, at least your office has that big window, at least you can sit down. That summer, I was annoyed by my pasty complexion, starved of the sheen most Londoners got from just walking around on their lunch hours and smoke breaks. I think Simon was increasingly irritated by my self-deprecating hunched shoulders and creased suits. But that night I deciphered the notebook, and my fatigue gained an edge of frenzied excitement. I still don’t know why I didn’t tell him the next morning why I’d been up all night. But I blamed it on period cramps, took a shower, and hid the notebook in my knicker drawer (cliché, I know). Later I prised up a floorboard to put it there, and looking back, that was the final signal – it needed to be gone, I wanted it out, not stuck underneath us.

As you know by now, it was the final clue, the jigsaw piece fallen through the cracks (or pushed into a painting). It didn’t take me long to recognise the date of De Witte’s Admiral de Ruyter – 1617, written in 13th century Monks’ cipher, little dashes suddenly forming real structures. The ‘16’ of course led me to the most important recovered Bering piece, Velasquez’s genius Las Meninas of 1656. At university, I had it as a postcard hanging above my bed, monochrome and grainy as the last surviving inventory record, taken just months before the heist. I’d stare at it for hours, moving between that bullish nurse’s face and the backgrounded courtier, trying to decipher if he was leaving or arriving, wishing I could make out his expression. Now it’s been found, sought out from the pages of that little black book, I still can’t tell. His face reveals nothing, as guarded as the posture of De Witte’s intruder who hunches over the balcony, accidentally part of the scene. Don’t you see it in the Carrington too? In Syssigy, we aren’t the only ones who interrupt. There’s someone twitching the curtain, in a second they will make a sound, distracting that bespectacled head towards the door, alerting his companions. For now, though, they are private, protected, sequestered in their rituals. The admiral will peruse his new painting, ignorant to the woman propping it up, and that is how history will remember him. Trussed-up Margarita will ignore her ladies, watching the artist paint her into history, expression mirroring the mystery we face in deciphering that story even now, re-revealed a century on. After all this time it still feels fresh, new, as if we too have descended the stairs into an ongoing story.

The notebook’s story is still unfolding. I did of course know its value, both historical and fiscal, and no, I still haven’t claimed the reward. £20,000 – a few months’ rent, perhaps a holiday to some glitzy resort, the type that Mark’s clients frequented. But I didn’t want it, and still don’t. It never felt right. I’ve never felt right about it, creeping around its pages under the floor, willing myself to turn another, the man who creaks the stairs, moves the curtain, leans over the bannister. That’s how I feel now, this strange shame thrust upon me. I’m suddenly an outsider again, not owning the story but happening upon it, included by accident. And I can still feel those black eyes, daring me, judging me, knowing it wasn’t mine, that it wasn’t intended for me. None of this was, I suppose. You can’t paint yourself into history. Especially not from the outside.