Free The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories by Reggie Oliver Page A

money he got from the picture Sir Ralph bought a steeplechaser which broke a leg in the Grand National and had to be destroyed. But Jason’s career flourished after a fashion . The small success of his Horace Walpole convinced the casting directors (an unimaginative breed) that he was an expert at eighteenth century roles. Consequently, the following year found him playing Sir Joshua Reynolds in a Channel 4 film about his alleged rivalry with Gainsborough.
    While researching for the role Jason read Reynolds’ Discourses to the Royal Academy . In the famous ‘Sixteenth Discourse’ he came across the following passage written in Reynolds’s typically lumbering, Johnsonian prose:

    . . . or like the celebrated Roman artist Gaspard Poussin, who believed, not solely that his fame would be immortalised in his work, but that he himself, soul and body, might mysteriously live for ever in it. He assured himself that, by means of certain occult operations, his spirit might enter one of his own sylvan idylls, and there dwell through all eternity, pleasantly enjoying the fruits of his artful imagination. It is credulously believed by some that he achieved this, for the death of this Master was indeed attended by no little mystery, and there is said to be a work in which he eternally resides, though no man has determined which. I am obliged to that learned virtuoso, my friend Sir Augustus Gauge Bt., for this curious legend.

EVIL EYE

    A week after he had returned from the States Alex invited me out for a drink at Freek’s, the wine bar nearest our office. Alex was a high flyer and one of the youngest art directors in DH Associates; I was just a humble copywriter, but we got on, sort of. I don’t mind being patronised.
    When we got to Freek’s Alex ordered a bottle of Bollinger. It was not that unusual: Alex tended to go over the top. Work hard, play hard, he used to say and it showed. Not that he was bad looking; according to some of the girls in the office he was definitely fanciable. He was dark—very shiny gelled black hair—and dressed sharp in dark suits. Big brown eyes with long lashes which the girls liked; but he was a bit podgy. He was pale and puffy and sweated a lot. On the other hand he was smart, no question, and everyone predicted a brilliant future.
    I could tell at once he was worked up, bursting to confide in someone, and I suppose I was the nearest available dumping ground. For a few minutes we talked about the States where he’d been for six months working with DH’s parent company, learning management strategies, new marketing techniques, all that stuff. I could see he was just delaying the inevitable. At last he revealed what was on his mind:
    ‘You remember that video surveillance system we did a campaign for last year?’
    ‘ Hidden Eye ?’
    ‘That’s the one.’ I remembered it well. As copywriter, I had come up with literally hundreds of different lines for them, all to do with eyes, though ears came into it as well. I won’t embarrass you with the results. Hidden Eye was the very latest in home security. It was a state-of-the-art ‘intelligent’ surveillance system which could be programmed just like an alarm. Movement, light or noise acting as the trigger, as soon as something in the room changed, it would start recording. It would only stop when the thing that had made it start, stopped and then after half an hour of immobility. The sound system had the intelligent capacity for editing out background and traffic noise and concentrating on the human voice. The pictures it produced were of high quality, even in dim light, and it had a number of Unique Selling Points. One was that the images were immediately transmitted to a computer, thus providing an almost infinite and totally silent storage capacity, since there was no need to keep switching over DVDs or videotapes. Another USP was that the whole system had its own back-up power reserve in the event of a power cut. Once it had picked up the