The Studham Gallery with an Audience of One

The first person I met in Studham that morning had his head through a gold picture frame.

‘Be honest,’ said Oswin Bell. ‘Would you hang me above the fireplace?’

‘Depends whether you’re going to keep talking through the telly,’ I said.

He laughed, lifted the frame over his ears and nearly took his woolly hat with it. I’d barely opened the KP Window Cleaning van, and already it felt like a promising sort of day.

Oswin lived in a little brick cottage with a front garden usually devoted to runner beans. That morning, the bean poles were supporting a washing line hung with paintings. There were purple hills, a wonderfully lopsided tractor and what I took to be a sheep until I spotted its six legs.

‘That’s a beetle,’ he said, following my gaze. ‘My granddaughter’s white period.’

The odd thing was, every picture faced the hedge.

From the pavement, all anyone could admire was a row of cardboard backs. Oswin kept moving between the line and his gate, frowning, then shifting one picture a few inches to the left.

‘Private exhibition?’ I asked.

‘Very. One guest. And I don’t think she can see a blessed thing.’

He pointed across the narrow lane to Cecily Wren’s bungalow, my next stop. Cecily had been recovering from a knee operation, and her usual afternoon outings had shrunk to the journey between her armchair and the kettle.

She’d once run a little children’s painting group. Oswin had tracked down several of her old pupils, now grown up, and asked them to make something for her.

‘Nothing grand,’ he said. ‘Just something worth looking out for.’

I looked from the pictures to Cecily’s front window. Between the hedge, the dipping line and the angle of her chair, his gallery might as well have been in another county.

Then the first spots of rain appeared on the tractor.

Oswin hurried to gather the paintings, catching pegs against his chest. I took the beetle and a watercolour of a teapot before the breeze could fold them together.

‘A month organising it,’ he said quietly. ‘Should’ve checked the view first.’

‘Let me do that before we call it off.’

Cecily answered her door with a walking stick in one hand and a crossword in the other. Once I’d explained, she let me stand beside her chair.

Through the glass, I could see the top of Oswin’s hat bobbing beyond the hedge. But his covered porch was in full view.

I went back across the lane.

‘Wrong wall of the gallery,’ I told him. ‘We need the porch.’

We strung the line between its timber posts, well under the roof, and hung the paintings in two short rows. Oswin added the artists’ names in thick black pen. Then I cleaned Cecily’s windows while he put the empty gold frame around a handwritten sign: FOR OUR FIRST ART TEACHER.

When I went inside to check, she was leaning forward, smiling.

‘That teapot’s Fenella’s,’ she said. ‘She always did make the spout too long.’

Oswin came over carrying the paintings one at a time so she could inspect the details. By the third, she’d put her crossword aside and asked him to bring two mugs from the kitchen.

I packed away with rain shining in my salt-and-pepper beard. Through Cecily’s clean window, I saw her pointing at the six-legged sheep, laughing so hard that Oswin had to put his tea down.

A small audience, perhaps. But I’d never seen an exhibition go down better.