At the time he became the sole owner of Orpheus Productions, Charles Van Stratten had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, but to all intents he was still a quiet and serious undergraduate. A scion of one of the world’s wealthiest banking families, in his early twenties he had twice been briefly married, first to a Neapolitan countess, and then to a Hollywood starlet, but the most influential figure in Charles’s life was his mother. This domineering harridan, who sat like an immense ormolu spider in her sombre Edwardian mansion on Park Avenue, surrounded by dark galleries filled with Rubens and Rembrandt, had been widowed shortly after Charles’s birth, and obviously regarded Charles as providence’s substitute for her husband. Cunningly manipulating a web of trust funds and residuary legacies, she ruthlessly eliminated both Charles’s wives (the second committed suicide in a Venetian gondola, the first eloped with his analyst), and then herself died in circumstances of some mystery at the summerhouse at Lagoon West.
Despite the immense publicity attached to the Van Stratten family, little was ever known about the old dowager’s death — officially she tripped over a second-floor balcony — and Charles retired completely from the limelight of international celebrity for the next five years. Now and then he would emerge briefly at the Venice Biennale, or serve as co-sponsor of some cultural foundation, but otherwise he retreated into the vacuum left by his mother’s death. Rumour had it — at least in Ciraquito — that Charles himself had been responsible for her quietus, as if revenging (how long overdue!) the tragedy of Oedipus, when the dowager, scenting the prospect of a third liaison, had descended like Jocasta upon Lagoon West and caught Charles and his paramour in flagrante.
Much as I liked the story, the first glimpse of Charles Van Stratten dispelled the possibility. Five years after his mother’s death, Charles still behaved as if she were watching his every movement through tripod-mounted opera glasses on some distant balcony. His youthful figure was a little more portly, but his handsome aristocratic face, its strong jaw belied by an indefinable weakness around the mouth, seemed somehow daunted and indecisive, as if he lacked complete conviction in his own identity.
Shortly after the arrival in Ciraquito of Orpheus Productions, the property manager visited the cafs in the artists’ quarters, canvassing for scenic designers. Like most of the painters in Ciraquito and Vermilion Sands, I was passing through one of my longer creative pauses. I had stayed on in the town after the season ended, idling away the long, empty afternoons under the awning at the Caf Fresco, and was already showing symptoms of beach fatigue irreversible boredom and inertia. The prospect of actual work seemed almost a novelty.
‘Aphrodite 80,’ Raymond Mayo explained when he returned to our table after a kerb-side discussion. ‘The whole thing reeks of integrity they want local artists to paint the flats, large abstract designs for the desert backgrounds. They’ll pay a dollar per square foot.’
‘That’s rather mean,’ I commented.
‘The property manager apologized, but Van Stratten is a millionaire — money means nothing to him. If it’s any consolation, Raphael and Michelangelo were paid a smaller rate for the Sistine Chapel.’
‘Van Stratten has a bigger budget,’ Tony Sapphire reminded him. ‘Besides, the modern painter is a more complex type, his integrity needs to be buttressed by substantial assurances. Is Paul a painter in the tradition of Leonardo and Larry Rivers, or a cut-price dauber?’
Moodily we watched the distant figure of the property manager move from caf to caf.
‘How many square feet do they want?’ I asked.
‘About a Million,’ Raymond said.
