Free The Book of Evidence by John Banville Page B

as a flash she said, If Fm a bitch what does that make youv you cur! Oh, it was grand, a grand match. Wc were like furious children
    — no, not children, but big, maddened, primitive creatures —
    mastodons, something like that — tearing and thrashing in a jungle clearing amidst a storm of whipping lianas and uprooted vegetation. T h e air throbbed between us, blood-d i m m e d and thick. There was a sense of things ranged around us, small creatures cowering in the undergrowth, watching us in a trance of terror and awe. At last, sated, wc disengaged tusks and turned aside. I nursed my pounding head in my hands. She stood at the sink, holding on to one of the taps and looking out the window at the garden, her chest heaving. We could hear ourselves breathe. T h e upstairs lavatory flushed, a muted, tentative noise, as if the girl were tactfully reminding us of her presence in the house. My mother sighed. She had sold the pictures to Binkie Behrens. 1 nodded to myself. Behrens: of course. All of them? I said. She did not answer. T i m e passed. She sighed again. Y o u got the money, she said, what there was of it — he left me only debts. Suddenly she laughed. 1 should have known better, she said, than to marry a mick. She looked at me over her shoulder and shrugged. N o w it was my turn to sigh. Dear me, I said.
    O h , dear me.
    Coincidences come out strangely flattened in court 60

    testimony — I'm sure you have noticed this, your honour, over the years — rather like jokes that should be really funny but fail to raise a single laugh. Accounts of the most bizarre doings of the accused are listened to with perfect equanimity, yet the m o m e n t some trivial simultaneity of events is mentioned feet begin to shuffle in the gallery, and counsel clear their throats, and reporters take to gazing dreamily at the mouldings on the ceiling. These are not so much signs of incredulity, I think, as of embarrassment. It is as if someone, the hidden arranger of all this intricate, amazing affair, w h o up to n o w never put a foot wrong, has suddenly gone that bit too far, has tried to be just a little too clever, and we are all disappointed, and somewhat sad.
    I am struck, for instance, by the frequent appearance which paintings make in this case. It was through art that my parents knew Helmut Behrens — well, not art, exactly, but the collecting of it. My father fancied himself a collector, did I mention that? Of course, he cared nothing for the works themselves, only for their cash value. He used his reputation as a horseman and erstwhile gay blade to insinuate himself into the houses of doddering acquaintances, on whose walls thirty or forty years before he had spotted a landscape, or a still-life, or a kippered portrait of a cross-eyed ancestor, which by n o w might be worth a b o b or two. He had an uncanny sense of timing, often getting in only a step ahead of the heirs. I imagine him, at the side of a four-poster, in candlelight, still breathless f r o m the stairs, leaning d o w n and pressing a fiver urgently into a palsied, papery hand. He accumulated a lot of trash, but there were a few pieces which I thought were not altogether bad, and probably worth something.
    Most of these he had wheedled out of a distrait old lady w h o m his o w n father had courted briefly when she was a 61

    girl. H e w a s h u g e l y p r o u d o f this piece o f chicanery, i m a g i n i n g , I suppose, that it put h i m on a par with the great r o b b e r barons of the past w h o m he so m u c h a d m i r e d , the G u g g e n h e i m s and Pierpont M o r g a n s and, indeed, the Behrenses. Perhaps these w e r e the very pictures that led to his m e e t i n g H e l m u t Behrens. Perhaps they tussled for t h e m o v e r the old lady's death-bed, n a r r o w i n g their eyes at each other, m o u t h s pursed in furious determination.
    It w a s t h r o u g h painting also that I m e t A n n a Behrens —
    or m e t her again, I should say. "We k