Irving Hammerman glided across his office carpet in stocking feet, long arm extended. One big toenail had sliced a hole through his sock, like a new moon pushing its way into a black sky, and when he shook our hands; he gave us each a little shock. Then, waving us onto an old leather couch he said, “Talk to me.”
“Well, she—” I began, but he raised his hand and pointed to Marj.
“I’m out of whack,” she said.
“Define ‘whack.’”
“Shaky. Like I hit a pothole, and my wheels are out of alignment.”
“Symptoms?”
“Woozy, sweaty palms, racing heart. It’s not like I’m an air traffic controller, doctor. I’m just—”
“I’m not a doctor,” Irving informed us.
“What are you then?” I asked.
“A family therapist.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our family,” I informed Irving.
“Must be a misunderstanding,” Marjorie said. “Story of my life.”
I frowned at her, and Irving propped his chin up on a fist and gazed at my wife as if she were the Oracle at Delphi. “Really,” he said.
“It does seem like it sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the two are related, the spells and the misunderstandings. Please, go on.”
“Well, they usually hit when I’m waiting in line,” she went on. “There are a lot of lines in life.”
Irving nodded. “A lot of things over which you have no control.”
“She didn’t say that,” I said.
“She didn’t have to,” he replied.
“So, out of the blue,” Marjorie continued, “I start feeling tingly. I say to myself, ‘Oh, no. Here it comes. You’re going to faint, fall on the floor and bang your head. People will stare and—”
“You say all that to yourself?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” she said.
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Because I was afraid you’d say I didn’t have both oars in the water.”
“Hmm,” Irving said.
“Hmm what?” I asked.
“Anxiety attacks,” Irving replied. “Marjorie’s suffering from post-traumatic stress.”
“Impossible,” I said. “The closest she’s come to war is watching Bridge on the River Kwai. How about you give her a pill, Prozac maybe? A little something to—”
“I can’t prescribe drugs.”
“You mean: we’re working without a net?” Marjorie asked. “You mean: all we have are words?”
Irving’s smile split his lower lip; a little bubble of blood oozed up. “Marjorie, are you acquainted with Rudyard Kipling?”
“Not personally,” I said.
“I only mention him because he said, I quote: ‘Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.’”
“Okay,” she replied. “I just wonder if Rudyard ever tried talking someone out of losing her marbles.” Blinking back tears, she looked around Irving’s office, which honestly, resembled a recycling center; outside, a balcony held a lawn chair and a chipped pot of dead geraniums. If you ask me—which nobody did—the therapist needed a therapist.
“You are not losing your marbles,” Irving assured her. “Now. Can you think of a specific incident—the big pothole—that might have triggered your attacks?”
“I think they started around the time our youngest left for college.”
“Yes,” I concurred. “She said it felt like he was leaving and taking her job with him.”
“It takes a lot of energy to hold a beach ball under water, doesn’t it?” Irving asked Marj.
I scowled at him.
“George is what you’d call metaphorically-challenged,” she explained. “Which makes it difficult sometimes. I mean: if I say something’s making me feel like… something, he doesn’t get it.”
Now I scowled at her.
“Give us an example,” Irving said.
“Sure.” Marjorie smiled. “After we dropped him off, I said something like: ‘I feel like a bell that’s lost its clanger.’”
“You did?”
Irving shot me a look. “So, you, Marjorie, do understand what I’m saying. Yes? Anxiety often has to do with emotions we’re trying not to feel.”
“It’s hard to talk yourself out of sadness.”
“All right.” He scratched a pale band of skin on his ring finger. “Let’s work on what I call, ‘Deflating the Danger.’”
“What danger?” I asked.
“I think he means letting the air out of the beach ball, George.”
“Exactly,” Irving said. “You’ll do this with positive self-talk. ‘I can handle these symptoms. This will pass and I’ll relax. I can ride this through.’”
While Marj scribbled that down on a gasoline receipt, Irving slid a dollop of amber goop around his lips. I stared at a brass clock wedged between a bunch of textbooks: Diagnosis and Treatment of Sociopaths; I’d Rather Be Married; The Tao of Conversation, and watched my money tick away.
Finally, he said, “One last question, Marjorie: Would you say your husband validates you?”
“What?” I cried.
Irving said nothing. I think not talking is a big part of his job. He preferred to let us steep, like tea bags, in our own thoughts.
“Marjorie?” I prompted.
“I’m thinking.”
“For heaven’s sake!” I snapped. “Look at this guy. Holes in his socks, dead geraniums on his balcony, and a spot on his finger where a wedding ring used to be. Irving,” I went on, “how about getting your own house in order before you start monkeying with mine?”
Nonplussed, Irving studied his cuticles. Marjorie told me to calm down. I studied a painting, behind Irving: empty teeter-totter and three swings, each holding a child, blocky and vacant-looking.
I saw it first. “I don’t believe it! The boy in that picture is dead! He’s strangled on the ropes!”
“I know,” Irving replied with pride. “I painted it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s a test,” he replied. “It’s just amazing how long it takes some people to see what’s right in front of their eyes.”
Marjorie and I scrambled to our feet, hurried out the door.
“God almighty!” I started the car.
“What a quack!”
“Beach balls.”
“Validation.
“Forget it, Marj. Forget everything he said.”
“I already have,” she replied.
But Irving Hammerman’s words were like dust motes: they just hung there.

I was settling down at my writing desk when my agent, Alan Slater, called.

‘Hugh Patson has died. Isn’t it absolutely infuriating?’

Feeling furious about someone’s death wouldn’t be most people’s reaction, but I knew what Alan was getting at.

‘Because of the book, you mean.’

‘It should have been coming out about now. The timing would have been perfect. Imagine – Britain’s greatest living painter pegs it and – boom – there’s the definitive new biography, hot off the press. It would have flown off the shelves. Those morons.’

It was painful to be reminded of the humiliation. Two years I spent writing Patson’s biography only for the publishers to reject it. The editor who commissioned the book had moved on, and the new one expected something racier. Where was the scandal? It wouldn’t sell without the scandal.

I remembered how insulted and angry I’d felt. I wasn’t some peddler of tawdry gossip. I had spent months interviewing art historians, critics, peers and rivals, and, trickiest of all, the man himself. Patson had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, and the welcome he gave me was hardly encouraging.

‘Biographers are parasites,’ he said. ‘And the only successful parasites are the ones who don’t irritate their hosts.’

An inauspicious start, but he wasn’t entirely obnoxious. I even stayed at his house a few times, and we got on tolerably well.

The supposed scandal the publishers had expected me to highlight concerned Patson’s marriage to Isabel Wingard. Isabel had inherited a fortune when her parents died in a plane crash. Patson, on the other hand, despite boasting an aristocratic lineage, was flat broke.

Adding further spice, were the rumours of Patson’s affairs with other men at a time when such acts were still illegal. In later years, Patson was open about his sexuality. After Isabel’s death, he lived with his partner, James, for nearly forty years. Isabel had died at forty-five after a protracted and unexplained illness.

This then was the salacious story the publishers had expected me to write: the gay artist who married a woman for her money and then bumped her off somehow. Except there was no evidence he had done any such thing.

A braver biographer might have asked him outright. I skirted around the question, asking him if he’d heard the speculation.

‘Ignorant peasants,’ he scoffed. ‘They haven’t got a bloody clue.’

We were sitting in his lounge at the time. On the wall opposite me hung a painting Patson had done of Isabel and himself. It was a simple composition: Isabel looking at Patson as he poured her a glass of red wine. He wore the same self-satisfied smile I saw on him now. Isabel’s expression was hard to read.

Patson noticed me studying it.

‘Do you like it?’

‘Very much, yes. There’s something… indefinable about it.’

He grunted appreciatively.

‘I confess, I am rather proud of it myself.’

He wielded an imaginary paintbrush as he spoke.

‘I remember making a change to the first version. Perhaps, in time, the pigments will fade and my original will be revealed.’

‘Pentimento. Is that the right term?’

‘Yes, although this wouldn’t be pentimento in its literal meaning – repentance.’ He smirked. ‘I’ve never been one for repenting.’

‘What was it you changed?’

‘Stick around for two hundred years and you’ll find out.’

I tried a different tack.

‘Did you like to paint Isabel?’

Patson shrugged.

‘Not especially. She wasn’t exactly muse material.’

I never heard Patson say anything complimentary about Isabel. But that’s just how he was. It didn’t make him a murderer.

Two months after Patson’s funeral, I was contacted by his solicitor. I was shocked to learn that Patson had bequeathed me the painting. When it arrived, I invited my friend Joanne round to see it. Joanne was an art historian I had met while researching the book.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.

She flipped the painting over. Patson had written its title on the back: “Another Bottle of the Eighty-One.”

‘What year did Isabel die?’ Joanne asked.

‘Nineteen seventy-nine.’

‘So, how can they be drinking an eighty-one vintage?’

‘Maybe it was from eighteen eighty-one?’

Joanne looked doubtful.

‘Seems unlikely. Anyway, why do you think he left it to you?’

‘He must have remembered how much I liked it.’

I told her about the conversation I’d had with Patson. When I mentioned the pentimento, she smiled.

‘You don’t have to wait two hundred years, you know.’

‘Don’t I?’

A week later we stood before an X-ray image of the painting with the technician who had done the scan. It had cost me five hundred pounds, and I wasn’t impressed.

‘Is that it?’

The only hidden detail the X-ray had revealed was on the wine bottle in Patson’s hand. To the naked eye, the label on the bottle was a blank blue rectangle. On the X-ray, the letters “Tl” and the number “81” could be seen.

‘Could the rest of the inscription have faded?’ Joanne asked.

‘No,’ the technician said. ‘This is lead oxide. It lasts forever. Interestingly, Patson hasn’t used it anywhere else in the painting. I think he used it here knowing that lead oxide shows up clearly under X-ray.’

‘You’re saying he wanted the inscription to be discovered?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Huh. But what does it mean?’

That evening, I was watching University Challenge on the TV when some questions about the periodic table set me thinking. I did an internet search on my phone. When I saw the result, I looked over at the painting and saw Patson’s smug face.

‘You bastard,’ I muttered.

I called Joanne.

‘Get this: Tl and 81 are the chemical symbol and atomic number, respectively, for thallium. The poisoner’s poison, they call it.’

‘Good God. So, the painting is a confession.’

‘More than that. It’s a boast. “Look what I did. Clever me.”’

My next call was to Alan.

‘Tell the publishers I’m updating my Patson biography. But, Alan – I’ll need a much better contract this time.’