Agnes

 In 1968 the centenarian spinster who lived at the end of my little street of ten cottages died. It came as a bit of a blow to me and my partners in crime who used to have enormous fun at her expense, doing what 10 years-old kids did in the late sixties.

It sounds a bit mean when I think about it now, but at the time we just saw it as innocent after-school entertainment. To youngsters like us, it was adrenaline-charged amusement to knock on her front door, clamber over the wall and wait for her to answer it. It was a risky game to light a banger and wait till it fizzed before launching the pretend grenade at her back door.

And it was a big adventure climbing over the rickety fence from the cornfield at the bottom of her wild garden and crawling commando-style, through the weeds and perennials to try and sneak a peek through the yellowed net curtains around her darkened sash windows.

Except that she never came to the door. Not once. Nor did she make one single ghostly appearance at any of the windows. In fact we never got to see her - not even a fleeting glimpse. On reflection, I think this was either a very cool response or else she was stone deaf. I’d be livid if the local skip rats did any of that to me these days.

With absolutely no evidence, we had convinced ourselves that the old crone was a malevolent witch. And now she was gone, the killjoy. I felt no remorse, I was just a bit sad that all those good times went with her.

Weeks later, her immediate neighbour came to our house to tell us that the old lady had bequeathed to me, a beautifully framed painting of a young girl, also aged about ten, dressed in purple crushed velvet and lace, holding a dead canary.

To this day, I have no idea why the old girl should have chosen to leave the painting to me. I’d never even spoken to her, let alone crossed her threshold and seen the picture. To my mind, she was just a creepy old woman, and fair game for young boys out in the sticks with nothing better to do.

My parents were clueless too, and cared even less. Nonetheless, the picture came into the house and was immediately shelved between the bathroom wall and the chest freezer which dominated the new kitchen extension.

When I had nothing better to do, I’d slide out the painting, stand it on the window sill, and wonder about the pitiful figure behind the protective glass - tumbling locks, pale complexion and soulful gaze, with a lifeless canary hanging limply over the fingers of her right hand, caressing its head with her thumb of her left.

I imagined the girl in the picture was called Agnes, because that was the name of the old spinster, an old Greek name meaning 'chaste' or 'pure,' famous in the Victorian era – old, elegant, and timeless.

I’d grown very fond of Agnes, but my parents wouldn’t hang her anywhere in the cottage because they didn’t like the subject matter, so she spent the following seven years in their loft gathering dust, a bit like me - until university, marriage, and children changed the course of my hitherto, aimless life.

In 1980 shortly after my soulmate and I had moved into our first house together, my old man thought it might be a good time to remind me that the painting was taking up precious space in their loft and insisted on me moving it out along with a load of other worthless bric-a-brac from my salad days.

The painting was never displayed on any of the walls in any of the properties we subsequently rented or owned however, not until we moved into a splendid Victorian semi-detached house in 1988.

Only then did Agnes take her rightful place at the foot of the stairs, in our roomy hallway. And it was there my sad-hearted maiden remained, arousing curiosity and inviting idle chat, for the next 12 years.

Now and again, we’d talk about the barely legible signature in the bottom left hand corner, which read JB Greuze. With a little research, we fantasized that it may have been a lesser known work by the 18thc. French Neoclassical Rococo painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze – but we did nothing about it, until the turn of the century, when we started boxing up the contents of the house before moving to what would be the last property we shared together.

We took Agnes to a local auction house to have the picture examined and hopefully valued, for it would have looked out of place on the walls of a new-build, and besides, we badly needed funds.

Greuze was an artist who was elevated to huge success and reputation in his native France through his portrayals of highly sentimental and melodramatic scenes, including dead birds. However, many works were often attributed wrongly - adding signatures was a favourite trick of unscrupulous historical dealers and would-be fortune-hunters in the auction market. It was common practice to add a name to works of a similar time frame and types, of all artists of note.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Agnes’ turned out to be a fake, albeit a good one, and could possibly command a tidy sum at auction.

More unexpected and irrational however, was how our love of the painting turned instantly to animosity and consequently Agnes was consigned to a new loft, where she lay collecting dust again until my wife and I separated in 2004.

When the time came to share all our worldly goods, the original art became bitter bones of contention. My sister-in-law had long been an established, internationally renowned artist, but the only works of hers I owned, were discarded pieces that I’d rescued from her waste-paper baskets and my now, ex-wife maintained that all the decent items belonged to her – because, well, it was her sister. And her sister agreed.

My family's brief was on the cusp of retirement and not really interested enough to make a case, so he suggested that I take the 8.6% pension compensation hit and enjoy the peace and quiet of the never-never. I was still grief-stricken, so I took his advice - and he took me for two grand.

When I finally made that move to another lifetime in 2018, the fake Greuze didn’t travel with me - in fact it was nowhere to be found. I emailed my ex-wife to enquire whether or not she had taken it along with all of the other stuff she considered was hers, books, records, et al – things I was only too willing to let go in my time of sorrow. She said she hadn’t, and I had no reason to disbelieve her given she’d already come clean about the Roxy and Prince records. And yet a lingering unease persisted.

Now that I owned a property more fitting in which to display Agnes, I couldn’t find her. The signal had dropped and our connection was lost.

I had no idea where she was, and the raw sense of loss I felt was aggravated beyond its natural progression, just knowing there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted her back, I wanted to journey back half a century to when we first met and beg her forgiveness. Was I losing my reason, or winning my madness?

***

Last winter, in a particularly uncertain and deeply worrying period in my life, I resigned from life for a while.

During those dark days I got around to thinking about the loss I couldn’t allow myself to feel at the time, but which I feel now, and oddly, the questions that art forgery raises.

Namely, if you love the painting you were bequeathed (or bought) – would you love it any less if you found out it wasn’t a genuine piece by the signed artist?

If it was beautiful before you knew it was a fake – is it still beautiful? A great fake must be better than the original – so does a fake only disappoint, when found out? All genuine works of art have an historical significance – does a fake destroy that significance?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions and I no longer care frankly, except that it’s not simply a question of that ‘tidy sum’. The price is the figure a work of art is sold at, the value is what it’s worth to the owner and very often the two have nothing to do with one another.

All I know is that even though we’re now separated by both time and distance, she’s still in my heart.

Did I lose her because I was unable to bend? Was it because I couldn’t allow her to live a certain part of her life in her own way? The love should not have weakened - it ought to have made me understand her heartbeat, even if her rhythm was different from mine.

She was more than worth any value I could ever place on her.

Agnes, I mean.