‘It’s Ellis. No news, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sort of relieved.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘What are the theories?’
‘We haven’t got any. We’re still searching for the car. And no one here’s much interested. I’ve got someone going through all the routine procedures with the help of her secretary: photographs, credit card details, habits, places she frequents and so on. We got hair from her London bathroom so we’ll have her DNA soon. But there’s no sense of urgency about this. My colleagues think academics and peers are all dotty anyway, so she’s just some old bird who’s wandered off somewhere on a whim. Maybe with amnesia.’
‘I thought of that. But it wouldn’t explain why she didn’t answer her phone.’
‘It’s a very long shot when you know her. But if you don’t… Anyway, Jim’ll be back from his Interpol meeting tomorrow and he’ll take it seriously. Until then there isn’t much I can do.’
‘OK,’ said Amiss, trying to conceal the fear in his voice.
‘Courage, mon vieux,’ said Pooley. ‘Think of what she’s come alive out of in the past. Nine lives and all that.’
‘She’s used most of those up,’ said Amiss gloomily.
***
The phone rang an hour later. Having dried his keyboard and tried vainly to make it work, Amiss had been out to the computer shop and was back in business.
‘Don’t let me interrupt if you’re writing.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mary Lou.’ As he stood up and began pacing, Plutarch again took possession of his chair. ‘Surely you’ve learned by now that most writers are desperate for distraction. By this time most mornings, I’ve managed to postpone starting a new chapter by answering emails that could have waited for hours and reading several newspapers on the net on the spurious grounds that I need to stay in touch with reality. If you hadn’t called I might have been driven to iron a shirt.’
She didn’t respond.
‘And, of course, I’m worried sick about Jack.’
‘That’s why I rang. So am I. And I keep thinking about that dinner at ffeatherstonehaugh’s. She was so right. I feel a bit ashamed. I agreed with her but I haven’t done anything since to challenge the pernicious orthodoxy she’s complaining about and, of all of us, I’m the gal who should.’
‘But then you want to keep your job, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. Same old excuse everyone uses. You toe the line or you’re identified as a heretic. And we all know nothing good happens to heretics. Ellis had a bit of a go at me on the way home that night for not standing up to the thought police and speaking my mind. You know when he gets priggish?’
‘Don’t I just!’
‘He went on about the courage of one’s convictions and that sort of thing. So I asked him when he last bit his tongue when a superior officer told him to do something he thought stupid or wrong—as opposed to actually immoral, which Ellis would die rather than countenance.’
‘Don’t tell me. That same day?’
‘The day before, it turned out. Honesty is one of my guy’s many saving graces.’
Amiss paced on. ‘There isn’t much we can do anyway, is there? Jack was calling us to arms, but the enemy is widely dispersed and we seem to lack either weapons or troops.’
‘I guess we could do a bit of chipping away here or there when we get a chance. I can try to get more of a voice in arts programmes for the good guys. And if you decide to do a novel about that world, maybe you can make a difference.’
‘Hah! Do you know how many copies the first one sold? Or what my advance was on this one? And before you ask, I’d have to be a few drinks in before I’d be able to bring myself to tell you. If I didn’t do some journalism we’d be in complete penury. I’m relying on Rachel to hurry up and become one of those super-teachers who’re brought in to turn around sink schools and are rewarded with six-figure salaries and titles.’
‘Don’t they have to work hundreds of hours a week?’
‘She’ll cope.’
‘Might you seriously have a go at the art world?’
‘If Jack comes back. This morning, not being able to write, I’ve been reading up on some of what she was going on about. Here’s something from an open letter the Stuckists wrote to the benighted Serota some years back. It was a sensible, civil criticism of postmodernism.’
‘Oh, holy shit,’ groaned Mary Lou. ‘Post-bloody-modernism rears its horrible head again. That’s the incomprehensible fashionable gibberish that drove me out of academia. I hate meeting it in my new line of work. What’s it supposed to mean in this context?’
‘Search me. It seems to embrace all the skill-free stuff that can be done by people who couldn’t paint a house or sculpt a ball out of plasticine. You know, the stuff Jack was moaning about. Along with pointless performance art, people being videoed picking their noses and all that kind of thing.’
‘Postmodern almost always means waste of space and trashing of the admirable.’
‘The Stuckists’ view. They suggested to Serota that post-modernism…hang on a second, I was just reading it.’ He leaned across Plutarch, who snarled and extended a claw. ‘That post-modernism was “a cool, slick marketing machine where the cleverness and cynicism of an art which is about nothing but itself, eviscerates emotion, content and belief.” The Brit artist, they went on, seemed uninterested in vision or insight, merely in maintaining “his or her media kudos in the art brat pack.”’
Amiss resumed pacing. ‘They sent this to Serota for comment along with a manifesto called Remodernism, which called for a new spirituality in art, culture, and society to replace post-modernism’s spiritual bankruptcy. Mind you, it admittedly was full of heresies like the proposition that art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.’
‘And Serota’s response?’
‘That they wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he had no comment on the letter or the manifesto.’
‘What a contemptuous shit! Well, that really puts him on my hate list.’
‘Mine too. Then they had an exhibition of paintings in Liverpool that—from what I’ve seen on the net—included plenty of interesting and talented stuff. They offered the Tate a hundred-and-sixty paintings allegedly worth £500,000. The donation was turned down…hang on…I have to navigate around Plutarch to find the primary source.’
Cautiously, he once more leaned across the cat, who took noisy umbrage. ‘Bloody animal. You’d think the mouse I was clicking on was a real one being wrenched from her slavering mouth. I’ve only just evaded serious injury.
‘Anyway, the offer was rejected by Serota, who told them portentously that Tate curators and trustees felt the work lacked sufficient quality “in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection.” The bugger didn’t mention any conflict of interest, like that the curators and trustees were likely to have taken a dim view that many of the exhibits satirised Serota and the bloody Tate.
‘If he’d any sense of humour he’d have accepted and displayed their most famous image of him, called Sir Nicholas Serota makes an Acquisition. It shows him smiling maniacally behind a large pair of red knickers on a washing line, asking himself: “Is it a genuine Emin (£10,000) or a worthless fake?”’
‘Were the knickers clean?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I guess they couldn’t be authentic.’
‘What a pro you are, Mary Lou. You always get to the heart of the matter. Or, on this occasion, the gusset.’
***
Rachel came through the door late that afternoon just as Amiss was coming off the phone. ‘Any news?’
He nodded. ‘Not about Jack. But there are two more mysterious disappearances that could conceivably be related if your
imagination is active enough, since Jack actually was trashing their reputations over dinner last month. They’re an art dealer and a museum big shot.’
‘What? Who? Charles Saatchi and Sir Nicholas Serota?’
‘No. Jason Pringle and Sir Henry Fortune. I seem to remember Jack said they were dreadful, corrupt old queens.’ He paused and scratched his head. ‘Well, if the manager of Pringle’s gallery is right, they’re now missing, dreadful, corrupt old queens.’
‘Any details?’
‘No. Ellis will be in touch when he’s talked to Jim. It’s just more waiting. Be a pal and take my mind off it. Distract me. How was your day? Did you do what we talked about last night?’
‘It was grim. Grim, grim, grim. And only incidentally because I was worried about Jack.’ He saw her expression and led her to the armchair. She squealed, ‘No, Robert, I can’t sit on that till I’ve changed. She’s been moulting all over it.’ Rachel glared at Plutarch, who was oblivious, for after an ill-tempered period of exile, she had regained possession of Amiss’ typing chair.
Amiss looked guiltily at the protective covering that Plutarch had earlier succeeded in dragging aside. ‘Sorry. I didn’t notice she’d done that. I’ll sort it out while you change and I’ll get you a drink. White wine?’
‘The way today’s gone, I feel more like cyanide. But not for me. For some of my colleagues.’
By the time Rachel emerged from the bedroom in t-shirt and jeans and minus make-up, Amiss had managed to remove the worst of the fur, had ejected Plutarch into the garden where she was stalking small vulnerable creatures, some particularly soothing Mozart was playing softly in the background, and the ice-bucket held a decent Sancerre. Rachel sat down and managed a wan smile as she accepted a glass.
‘What was the worst of today, darling? Did another one bite you?’
‘No. It was violence-free and I actually had a few classes where the majority paid some attention. It was colleagues who sapped my spirit.’
‘Go on. Tell all.’
‘I can’t find any way of stopping that blasted feline-worshipper…’
‘The RE teacher?’
‘Yes. Maureen. Not that there’s either much religion or much education in what the silly cow offers the kids. It’s all about peace and love and inclusiveness and celebrating each other’s festivals and avoiding anything that might offend anyone, which seems to mean mentioning anything to do with Christianity, which being the majority religion, is apparently inherently offensive to minorities.’
‘Judaism’s OK, then?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Judaism’s always worse with people like Maureen. She’s got the kids doing a project about suffering Palestinians in Gaza. It seems to involve quite a lot of work with felt hearts and pebbles. She went on about it at some length and all I can say is that she doesn’t seem to have what one might call a nuanced view of what’s going on in the Middle East. In fact her take on it would probably go down great down at the local mosque.’
‘You didn’t mention…?
‘Being Jewish? I certainly did not. I’m trying to avoid her, not start another row. She was the one I fell out with in my first week because I got cross when she told me there was nothing more important to teach children than that man-made climate change was about to destroy the planet. Do you remember? I said it wasn’t proven that it was man-made, that frightening children didn’t seem to me to be a good idea, and that really I thought we’d be better off making them literate and numerate? I thought she’d have a stroke.
‘Unfortunately, our shared experience as cat-owners brought her back to speaking to me today. She insisted on showing me a dozen photos of her little treasures and expressing her disappointment that I haven’t yet shown her one of dear Plutarch. Why I was ever fool enough to admit I lived with a cat I can’t imagine. In future, I intend to be a denier.’
‘You couldn’t just mention that Plutarch is a vile step-cat thrust upon you through no fault of your own?’
‘That would seem disloyal. After all, when I accepted you for better or worse I knew what that entailed in the cat department.’ As if on cue, a screech came from the next-door garden. ‘Get away, you horrible animal. Leave that bird alone. Oh, no! You murdering beast!’
Amiss and Rachel looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Another one bites the dust,’ said Amiss wearily. ‘Go on.’
‘That wasn’t the worst of today. It was the art that got me depressed.’
‘Art?’
‘I’d been thinking about what Jack had said about that night, so I asked my best class what they knew about art and artists. Do you know, there wasn’t one of them that had ever been to a gallery. And I drew complete blanks with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, and any other obvious candidates I tried on them.’
‘Did they know there were such things as artists?’
‘A couple of them had seen religious pictures in church. That was about it.’
‘You mean they hadn’t even heard of Damien Hirst.’
‘No. But three of the girls had seen Tracey Emin on the telly talking about her abortion and thought she was great.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘So at the staff meeting after school I said I felt they weren’t being much exposed to beauty and asked if it would be possible to take them to the National Gallery some afternoon. My God, you’d have thought I’d suggested a brothel. And a brothel three hundred miles away on an ice-floe full of expiring polar bears at that.
‘First, the deputy head began to explain how many staff would have to be with me by way of back-up. He droned on about risk assessments. Of course I knew there was a lot of bureaucracy involved in the simplest school trips, but this was beyond belief. We’d have to be prepared for all kinds of weather, transport-related problems, predictable hazards, accidents, misbehaviour in the gallery, paedophile security guards, and God knows what else. We’d have to have at least three people in attendance with first-aid qualifications and there would have to be a precise breakdown of responsibilities.’
She rubbed her forehead wearily. ‘Honestly, these kids are fifteen, not five. I was tempted to—but didn’t—point out that they’re mostly roaming the streets on a Saturday night getting drunk and laid and that broad daylight in Trafalgar Square was probably pretty safe by comparison.’
There came an ear-splitting yowl and the sound of something heavy crashing against the kitchen door. ‘Tom from down the road trying to impose his authority yet again, I’d guess,’ said Amiss as he got up to investigate. ‘He’s pretty good at hot pursuit.’
Rachel lay back and closed her eyes as Amiss went into the garden, broke up the fight, chased the tom away, and threw a furious Plutarch into the kitchen. ‘When will you grasp that you shouldn’t take on something half your age and twice as fit, you stupid creature?’
There was a yowl as he investigated a bloody ear. A louder one as he cleaned it with antiseptic was accompanied by an expletive from Amiss. By the time Plutarch had been calmed down, fed and watered and had accompanied Amiss back to the living room, Rachel had been rejuvenated by a refreshing nap. She looked with distaste as the cat made a beeline for the back of the sofa, leaped to the top, and hung out of it. ‘I haven’t asked you for ages, Robert, but I don’t suppose there’s any chance Plutarch’s owner is likely to get out of jail soon, is there?’
‘He’s not even up for parole in the foreseeable future. Unless they change the law drastically, I’m afraid Plutarch is a life sentence. Of course, that’s her life, not yours.’
‘I always hoped that Jack would take her on.’
‘It came up in conversation recently. She said she’d love to have her back at St. Martha’s for a holiday, but that sadly she’d made too many enemies. Apparently peeing in the piano was such a bad breach of etiquette that even Jack was powerless in the face of public opinion.’
‘You tread on my dreams,’ said Rachel. He gave her a hug. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK.’
‘Anyway she can’t have more than ten years left, darling, and she’s much better than she was. It’s ages since she climbed the curtains or managed to open the fridge.’
‘When you say better, you mean slightly less athletic.’
‘And a bit mellower. For instance, she hardly ever bites and the scratches are positively gentle.’ Rachel looked at the new plaster on the back of his hand. ‘Special circumstances this evening. You’d be angry if you’d had your ear chewed by a tomcat.’
‘I expect I would. All right. Forget I mentioned it. It was a moment of weakness.’
‘So back to your art expedition.’
‘Ah, yes. The doomed art expedition. “What’s the point anyway?” asked the head of English. “It’ll be wasted on them. They don’t care about art.”
‘I was opening my mouth to suggest that this might be related to no one having ever bothered to show them any, when Maureen pointed out that it would be offensive to Muslim students to show them figurative art. I pointed out that only the most conservative of Islamic clerics regarded that as sinful, and she said it would be culturally insensitive to run the risk. Another colleague asked why I should choose somewhere as passé as the National Gallery? Surely the kids deserved to see something more relevant to their lives? What could the Renaissance mean to them? And yes, she suggested Tate Modern. And she’s the deputy head of history.
‘I said I thought they could do with a little more sense of the past, and there was silence. It was becoming clear that the consensus was that I am a pathetic, naïve nuisance. Then the head gave me his full attention and said, “Rachel, of course it’s excellent to see a newcomer with such enthusiasm. And, yes, the world would be a better place if we could move beyond the curriculum. But we must be realistic. These children will do well to scrape a few exams and get low-grade jobs. I don’t think we should give them ideas beyond what is likely to be their station. My advice to you is to teach to the test. Yes, that’s what the job is all about. Teach to the test. Teach to the test.”’
Killing the Emperors Page 4