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watermark. Some say Vollard; some Picasso, unless it's one of the fifty copies on Montval paper watermarked Papeterie Montgolfier a Montval. They're all distinctive. Then there's the sizes, of course: either I 3 3 / 8 of an inch by 17 5 / 16 or 15 1 / 8 by 19 11 / 16 .'
    'You're showing off, Henry.'
    'I know. But they haven't tended to sell at huge prices over the years, so it would be unlikely for someone to go to all the trouble of an elaborate forgery for something they wouldn't be making all that much money out of. It's all rudimentary Sherlock Holmes stuff. But the ones in this room are authentic, you can take my word for that.'
    It was in fact these images that had introduced Henry to Sylvie in the first place. Owen had made a film with John called Inside the Cave. It was characteristically clever and wide-ranging. Images from the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet were interspersed with related images from much later in history, and the most related image of all was Picasso's minotaur, a votive offering to that labyrinth of confusion which constitutes a man's life, mind and body. At least that's what she thought the film meant. Owen and Johnny’s films never exactly spelt themselves out, and Owen would never discuss them much. Anyway, it had been the kind of subject that intrigued her, given her own studies of the image and its afterlife. She had been around during the shoot at the Riverside and so had inevitably met the proprietor; one Henry Allardyce; she had even asked if she might come to his gallery some time after the filming had ended, to study these images from the Vollard Suite when they had a little more stillness about them. She had explained her work; even hinted, not too subtly, that it was from her work that the idea for the film had come, which was almost certainly true. A tiny acknowledgment at the bottom of the film credits hinted at this, though it had never seemed to her to be a sufficient admission of the debt. And she had arrived here one late afternoon with her notebook and pen, while Owen was off with Johnny filming somewhere in Romania. Henry had sat looking at her with an expression of undisguised longing, which she needed at the time, and it had all begun that night.
    If you had come in through the main gallery, this is what you would have seen. A lovely little Peter Lanyon, still probably underpriced; a sort of semi-abstract portrait in oils of a coastline, the boats rendered flat and diagrammatic and yet the whole somehow dynamic and surging. A Nolan Rimbaud; African desert miscegenated with the Australian outback, and a man who was half-animal, half-poet. Some curious early works of David Jones which another dealer had had to unload in a hurry. Early charcoals by Gaudier-Brzeska of a dancer. A Craigie Aitchison crucifixion, with a sunset as geometrized as a pyramid behind it. Christ's arms bore brightly coloured birds which appeared to be singing to him. Never had death by ritual torture looked so enchanting. All sorts of modem half-abstract sculptures. A maze of Ayrton's, which you could look down on like Daedalus. But something happened along the corridor separating this gallery from the Picasso Room. Sylvie sensed the shift each time she came. A corridor leading to a cave.
    She looked hard at the blinded minotaur led away by a girl with a face like a blazing candle. So many hairy men, their animality touched momentarily with sublimity by the beauty of the female shape they contemplate. All the dark mysteries of life, the endless death and birth which Picasso took as his subject matter. Man, he seems to say, is a minotaur, a courtier, a bullfighter, an artist. He studies the woman to understand the mystery of entering another human being, to fathom the unfathomable mystery of creation. He becomes Rembrandt, he becomes lngres, he becomes a bull hunted to death. But the woman doesn't have to become anything except what she is. That was what Picasso seemed to think. Sylvie would have begged to