44 Scotland Street Read Online Free Page A

larger paintings on the walls. He enjoyed doing this because it seemed to transform the room so entirely, from a cold, rather gloomy place, inadequately lit by natural light from the front window, into a place of warmth and colour.
    It was not a large gallery. The main room, or space as Matthew had learned to call it, stretched back about thirty feet from the two wide display windows that looked out onto the street. Halfway down one side of this room there was a desk, which faced outwards, with a telephone and a discreet computer terminal. Beside the desk there was a revolving bookcase in which twenty or thirty books were stacked; a Dictionary of Scottish Artists , bound catalogues of retrospectives, a guide to prices at auction. These were the working tools of the dealer and, like everything else, had been left there by the former owner.
    Matthew had acquired the gallery on impulse, not an impulse of his, but that of his father, who owned the building and who had repossessed it from the tenant. Matthew’s father, who was normally unbending in his business deals, had been an uncharacteristically tolerant landlord to the gallery. He had allowed unpaid rent to mount up to the point where the tenant had been quite incapable of paying. Even then, rather than claim what had been owing for more than two years, he had accepted gallery stock in settlement of the debt and had paid rather generously for the rest.
    Matthew’s father, despaired of his son ever amounting to much in the world of business. He had started Matthew off in a variety of enterprises, all of which had failed. Finally, after two nearbankrupt stores, there had been a travel agency, a business with a promising turnover, but which under Matthew’s management had rapidly lost customers. His father had been puzzled by this, and had eventually realised that the problem was not laziness on his son’s part, but a complete inability to organise and motivate staff. He simply could not give directions. He was a completely incompetent manager. This was a bitter conclusion for a father who had dreamed of a son who would turn a small Scottish business empire, the result of decades of hard work,

    into something even bigger. So he had decided that he might as well accept his son’s limitations and set him up in a business where he would have virtually no staff to deal with and where there was very little business to be done anyway – a sinecure, in other words. A gallery was perfect. Matthew could sit there all day and would therefore technically be working – something which he believed to be very important. He would make no money, but then money appeared not to interest him. It was all very perplexing.
    But he’s my son, thought Matthew’s father. He may not be good for very much, but he’s honest, he treats his parents with consideration, and he’s my own flesh and blood. And it could be much worse: there were sons who caused their fathers much greater pain than that. He’s a failure, he thought; but he’s a good failure and he’s my failure.
    And for Matthew’s part, he knew that he was no businessman. He would have liked to have succeeded in the ventures that his father had planned for him, because he liked his father. My father may have the soul of a Rotarian, thought Matthew, but he’s my Rotarian, and that’s what counts.

 
     
     
     
    5. Attributions and Provenances
     
    It was not Pat’s first job, of course. There had been that disastrous first gap year, with all the varying jobs that that had entailed. She had worked for the person she could now only think of as that man for at least four months, and had it not been for the fire – which was in no sense her fault – then she might have spent even longer in that airless, windowless room. And one or two of the other jobs had hardly been much better, although she had never encountered employers quite as bad as he had been.
    This was clearly going to be very different. To start with, there was