Paddington sighed. It was very disappointing. “I wish they were,” he said. “It would be nice.”
“Perhaps,” said Mr Gruber, mysteriously. “Perhaps. But we shouldn’t have any nice surprises then, should we?”
He took Paddington into his shop and after offering him a seat disappeared for a moment. When he returned he was carrying a large picture of a boat. At least, half of it was a boat. The other half seemed to be the picture of a lady in a large hat.
“There you are,” he said proudly. “That’s what I mean by things not always being what they seem. I’d like your opinion on it, Mr Brown.”
Paddington felt rather flattered but also puzzled. The picture didn’t seem to be one thing or the other and he said so.
“Ah,” said Mr Gruber, delightedly. “It isn’t at the moment. But just you wait until I’ve cleaned it! I gave fifty pence for that picture years and years ago, when it was just a picture of a sailing ship. And what do you think? When I started to clean it the other day all the paint began to come off and I discovered there was another painting underneath.” He looked around and then lowered his voice. “Nobody else knows,” he whispered, “but I think the one underneath may be valuable. It may be what they call an ‘old master’。”
Seeing that Paddington still looked puzzled, he explained to him that in the old days, when artists ran short of money and couldn’t afford any canvas to paint on, they sometimes painted on top of old pictures. And sometimes, very occasionally, they painted them on top of pictures by artists who afterwards became famous and whose pictures were worth a lot of money. But as they had been painted over, no one knew anything about them.
“It all sounds very complicated,” said Paddington thoughtfully.
Mr Gruber talked for a long time about painting, which was one of his favourite subjects. But Paddington, though he was usually interested in anything Mr Gruber had to tell him, was hardly listening. Eventually, refusing Mr Gruber’s offer of a second cup of cocoa, he slipped down off the chair and began making his way home. He raised his hat automatically whenever anyone said good-day to him, but there was a far-away expression in his eyes. Even the smell of buns from the bakery passed unheeded. Paddington had an idea.
When he got home he went upstairs to his room and lay on the bed for a long while staring up at the ceiling. He was up there so long that Mrs Bird became quite worried and poked her head round the door to know if he was all right.
“Quite all right, thank you,” said Paddington, distantly. “I’m just thinking.”
Mrs Bird closed the door and hurried downstairs to tell the others. Her news had a mixed reception. “I don’t mind him just thinking,” said Mrs Brown, with a worried expression on her face. “It’s when he actually thinks of something that the trouble starts.”
But she was in the middle of her housework and soon forgot the matter. Certainly both she and Mrs Bird were much too busy to notice the small figure of a bear creeping cautiously in the direction of Mr Brown’s shed a few minutes later. Nor did they see him return armed with a bottle of Mr Brown’s paint remover and a large pile of rags. Had they done so they might have had good cause to worry. And if Mrs Brown had seen him creeping on tiptoe into the drawing-room, closing the door carefully behind him, she wouldn’t have had a minute’s peace.
Fortunately everyone was much too busy to notice any of these things. Even more fortunately, no one came into the drawing-room for quite a long while. Because Paddington was in a mess. Things hadn’t gone at all according to plan. He was beginning to wish he had listened more carefully to the things Mr Gruber had said on the subject of cleaning paintings.
To start with, even though he’d used almost half a bottle of Mr Brown’s paint remover, the picture had only come off in patches. Secondly, and what was even worse, where it had come off there was nothing underneath. Only the white canvas. Paddington stood back and surveyed his handiwork. Originally it had been a painting of a lake, with a blue sky and several sailing boats dotted around. Now it looked like a storm at sea. All the boats had gone, the sky was a funny shade of grey, and half the lake had disappeared.
“What a good thing I found this old box of paints,” he thought, as he stood back holding the end of the brush at paw’s length and squinting at it as he’d once seen a real artist do. Holding a palette in his left paw, he squeezed some red paint on to it and then splodged it about with the brush. He looked nervously over his shoulder and then dabbed some of it on to the canvas.