by A. N. Wilson
Mary and her informant had shrieked in unison down their telephones that they bet any money that Esmé and Derek did indeed have a block-mounted Monet in their Esher dining room.
Worledge had apparently erupted:
‘Christ Al-fucking-mighty, we’re not talking about the fucking Mona Lisa! That isn’t ART! We’re talking about a poof whose mind is so fucking sick he’s exhibiting real people going to the fucking toilet! I’m sorry, but if that’s sophistication … dear, oh dear, oh dear.’
Wasn’t he priceless? He had Rachel marked down as trouble from that moment.
As for Martina and Mary, few things in recent years had displayed more clearly their ambivalent relations with Lennie’s Legions than the two women’s joint passion for Hans Busch. They loved the Legions for the money they provided. Martina also loved them for the political power they wielded. They, who had accustomed themselves over so many years to live with ambivalence and paradox, positively enjoyed the contrasts between their own outlook on life and that of the two newspapers which paid them to sustain it. The Legions themselves, however, were sustained on a multiplicity of vision no less marked, though more crudely self-contradictory. The front half of The Daily Legion had increased, since Worledge became the editor, its siege mentality. The Court had been not far wrong when they saw Esmé Worledge as the archetypical reader of the newspaper whom her husband had in mind. The vision of England presented by Worledge in his editorials and news stories was of a plucky little middle class which had pulled itself up by hard work and its own boot-straps, and who watched in horror as its savings accounts, its church, its favourite television programmes and its very methods of weighing and measuring were all eroded by Foreigners, Perverts, Busybodies, and hangovers from the days of Socialism. The Good Guys, paradoxically, were those who had in fact done most to erode the 1950s England of Esmé’s imagination: the Good Guys politically were the right-wing Americans, and the big multinational companies. The Bad Guys were the European Union, the sexual liberals, the would-be abolishers of the pound and the Bureaucrats.
At the heart of the Legion, though, there was a paradox. The marketing men knew about it, and so did everyone who came to edit it. The very first Daily Legion to roll from the presses in 1887, with the old Roman legionary holding his spear aloft as he still did on the logo, had been a paper directed – as Mary Much liked to say – at Carrie Pooter. It was a paper for women, and so it still remained, in essence. Sloanes read it, nannies read it, secretaries read it on their way to work. Therefore, when they’d skipped through the first twelve pages, and had sporadically taken in all the photographs of asylum seekers living on huge bogus benefit claims; of mullahs in Bradford telling their congregations to slit the throats of the white population; of teenage West Indian rapists and Belgian bureaucrats tampering with the good British banana, these readers wanted to read the remaining fifty pages of the paper, which were given over to new diets, continental holidays, quack cures for depression, and lurid accounts of the erotic lives of the celebrated. These readers knew that half the couples in England lived together without being married, that many of them were gay, bisexual, of mixed race, of no creed or of many. They knew this, just as they knew that their neighbours and friends and colleagues at work belonged to that mixed and complicated conglomeration of types known as the human race. Everyone lived with the paradox.
The difference was that Mary Much and her friend Martina did not merely live with it, they revelled in its cynical implications. Martina was going to make Lennie buy Hans’s latest installation. She almost had it in mind that she would erect it in the Atrium of LenMar House.
She certainly was not going to spare Piet – who had been SUCH A SUCCESS since his arrival as the house-boy and general factotum – to waste the summer being a permanent feature of Hans’s work. The most that Martina would allow was that he could be the model chosen for the first week in the courtyard of Burlington House.
So this was what Mary Much was doing, bringing Piet to the studio, to show him the exhibit, and to explain to him, as tactfully as possible, what would be involved.
‘You mean, I’ve got to sit on it?’ had been his ironical response. Oh, she could die for that orotund, upper-class voice of the boy’s! He looked like a Nubian slave in some painting by Veronese and he spoke like a brigadier in the Coldstream Guards. Mmmm! Mmwah!
Hans Busch’s studio was a huge loft just off Clerkenwell Green. It had formerly been a warehouse for a gin company, long since defunct. He had achieved some notoriety when taking it over by spending half a million pounds having the place gutted and reinforced with stainless-steel girders. The original warehouse had looked too homely, too retro, too love-me. It lacked the appropriate rebarbative harshness. He wanted a place where anyone, even a labourer in the dirtiest dungarees who had been unblocking drains for Dyno-rod, would look too chic, too overdressed. He also, by paradox, wanted a place which was spotlessly clean.
Piet’s appearance, in the black Armani suit bought that morning by Mary and an open-necked cream silk shirt purchased for him by Martina, was undeniably striking in such a huge, whitewashed space.
The boy looked around him to see evidence (it was, after all, called the Studio) of the artist’s work-tools. On failing to see them, he asked – oh how gorgeously like an Etonian trying not to be patronizing when he spent a week at a local comprehensive, seeing how the other half lived! – ‘Is this where you work?’
Busch said, ‘Sure.’ His accent was a strange mélange of the English Midlands and the mid-Atlantic.
Busch was an ugly brute, but this, like the uncharmingness of his installations, was, what Worledge so deliciously failed to see, the idea.
He had a shaven head, on which several spots and wens had erupted. The sneer of his lower lip was emphasized by a large stud which suppurated. He wore an open-necked denim shirt from which thick brown body-hair sprouted in unappealing places – the throat, the top of his back beneath his neck. Dirty jeans and large sabots covered the nether man. He smoked cigarettes continually.
‘I was looking for your work-tools, a bench …’
‘This is my work-tool – this is my bench,’ said Busch. From the top pocket of his denim shirt, he produced his Nokia mobile and said, ‘This does the rest! I order someone else to make me a Perspex toilet. The crap I order from others.’
He smiled.
It was indeed a remarkable, if not entirely original, device. Piet had once been taken on a school trip to the Science Museum in Kensington. In the basement there, among the vacuum cleaners and electric kettles and other exhibits displaying ‘life in the home’, there was a cross-section of a working toilet with a fully operative fake turd being swooshed into the U-bend to the merriment of the younger children. Busch had merely extended the idea by having a Perspex toilet which could be viewed from all sides.
‘Shall we see him sitting on it?’ Busch asked Mary Much.
She smiled at Piet and cooed, ‘Could you bear it?’
‘You mean, fully dressed?’
He smiled back at her, attempting to maintain his insouciance.
‘He must drop his pants,’ said Busch.
‘Could you?’ She had put on her poor ickle-wickle-girl cooing-voice and had lowered her mascara-lids to flutter at him.
Piet liked it when she did this, and after a momentary shock he did not mind the idea of the exhibitionism suggested. Indeed, as he lowered trousers and underpants and sat on the Perspex throne he could feel the beginnings of an erection. Let them look, if they liked! Let them look!
Hans Busch appeared to be totally impersonal, unaffected by the sight of the boy on his toilet, until he was conscious of Mary Much’s visible excitement.
They were gone – what? Ten minutes? This was presumably what such people called a quickie. When they returned, their faces were masks of impassivity. They found Piet still sitting there, but with no erection, and everything under control.
‘I’ll take my pants down, but I’m not going to
crap into this thing, you know,’ he said good-humouredly. It was as if they were all taking part in a party game. ‘I’m not a queer.’
‘What will you do when it’s exhibited in public?’ asked Mary Much.
Piet wondered if they should mention the artificial turd in the Science Museum, or whether to demonstrate so clear a sense of Busch’s source-material would somehow place them all at a disadvantage.
‘That is part of the point,’ said Busch. ‘They will come and stare and stare at that Perspex U-bend and hope to see crap. That is the point. Just before they enter the Royal Academy, they will be asking themselves, Am I going to view some crap coming out of a human arse and down the U-bend?’
‘God, you’re witty,’ said Mary Much.
THIRTY-FOUR
Since Worledge had been editor the raffish, jolly atmosphere of the old Legion had evaporated.
Worledge was hated and feared in equal doses. There had been many redundancies, several sackings on the spot, and a number of formal warnings issued to his staff.
Worledge found it impossible to work without creating an atmosphere of terror and resentment around himself. Whether as a result of having attended English boarding schools, followed by the army, or whether for some other reason, Sinclo actually found life was now easier to cope with. Like everyone else on The Daily Legion, he was miserable; but this, he had come to feel, was how things should be. Pain was a warning. If you put your hand too near the flame, the time to worry was when it didn’t hurt, not when it did.
Worledge had caused the shake-up for which Lennox Mark had hired him. The typeface of the paper had changed. The old Roman legionary still stood beside the title at the top, but Worledge had created what he called ‘a middle-market tabloid with a red-top appeal’. The front pages most mornings showed female television stars, or film actresses, usually with blonde hair or large chests, preferably both. When blondes could not be found, appalling sexist and racist innuendo enlivened the captions and headlines – CHOCOLATE SAUCE! being the quite gratuitous description of a pair of black tennis players from the United States, both chaste and religious, neither of whom could by the wildest distortion of language be described as ‘saucy’.
The staff never knew from day to day whether their jobs would be safe, nor whether they would be doing the work at which they felt confident.
Rumours circulated daily, hourly, about the next candidate for the chop. It was generally assumed that the entire Sunday Legion was to be dissolved, but Lennox Mark remained silent, and the discomfiture of poor Mr Blimby (who suffered from a duodenal ulcer and was obliged to eat rice pudding each day in his club) may be imagined.
Sinclo was surprised not to have been sacked for his article exposing the crimes of General Bindiga. Instead, he had found himself transferred to the diary, which, while Aubrey Bird was in hospital, was edited by Peg Montgomery. It was embarrassing to work under someone with whom one had had a functionally successful but not especially enjoyable one-night stand. He found Peg an exacting boss, and it was disconcerting to discover how easily she conformed herself to Worledge’s views and ways. As a Diary underling, Sinclo still had to attend a features conference each morning and contribute to the ‘input’ of ideas.
Tony Taylor had conducted conferences in what, with three nostalgic months to distort them, now seemed models of insouciance and gentleness. Worledge charged into the room and scratched himself like a ferocious gorilla. These back and armpit scratchings were so intense that they sometimes drew blood which seeped through his shirt.
‘Ideas, ideas, ideas!’ he would yell. Then, with yet greater frenzy, ‘Stories, stories – IDEAS!’ He sounded like a man thirsting for water after three days in the desert; without an idea or a story, the nervous colleagues round the table were going to make this man die.
In such circumstances Sinclo’s notions of suitable subjects for why-oh-why columns appeared as hopelessly woolly as they always were in truth.
‘I thought in the light of the fact … er … er, this story this morning – this Chancellor effort.’
‘Chancellor? What’s he been fucking up to NOW!’ Worledge would bellow. ‘Putting up road tax? I don’t BELIEVE it! Get L.P. to do one of his pieces sticking up for the motorist.’
‘No, er, er, this story in The Independent about the Chancellor of Germany saying …’
Worledge’s face would at this point darken.
‘Where did you say he was Chancellor of?’
Merely repeating the word ‘Germany’ in this company felt like uttering an obscenity to a gathering of nuns.
‘Fucking Krauts,’ said Worledge.
Sinclo had been stupid enough not to see that the existence of these eighty-two million individuals was a personal affront to Worledge.
There had been talk of protests at that year’s Royal Ascot by animal rights activists and Sinclo proposed as his second idea of the morning a fairly straight article by a member of the racing fraternity defending the sport of kings. Worledge did not like this. He sensed that many of his readers, while not actively wishing to bomb turkey factories, nursed sentimental feelings about animal suffering. Also, though the paper devoted several pages a day to racing and football, and frequently splashed (as they said in the trade) with National Lottery winners, Worledge sensed that many readers did not approve of gambling.
Peg, catching the mood of the meeting, had sycophantically suggested a piece denouncing the Queen for having enough money to buy racehorses, and this idea was taken up with enthusiasm.
Sinclo was told loudly in front of the entire conference that he was fucking useless. He rather agreed.
Aubrey Bird returned from hospital looking ashen and old. Everyone had their own version of what had happened to him during the mugging. No one knew the actual truth, though most suspected that he had been cruising and met with a spot of bad luck. Since he was, for official purposes, very firmly still in the closet, Aubrey had to smile and laugh his way through the conferences at which Worledge shouted his coarse, queerbashing jokes, and he was always being urged to ‘hit bum-bandits where it hurts’ in Dr Arbuthnot’s diary.
Sinclo assumed that it could not be long before he was himself sacked from the Legion. Were it not for the daily heart-rending delicious torment of seeing Rachel, he would probably have walked out. His flatmates with whom he shared his sorrows – the bankers and lawyers – urged him to stay on until he was pushed.
‘Why give the bastard the satisfaction of leaving him?’
So, he stayed. And one day, he had an invitation to lunch with Mary Much and wondered whether she was going to offer him a job on Gloss.
This magazine (Worledge had defined it and Lips, in Sinclo’s presence, as ‘The Two Must-Have Glossies’) continued, despite the recession, to make money. (Appealing as it did to the ‘luxury’ market, it still attracted advertising revenues from the most expensive fashion houses, jewellers, fine art galleries, leather manufacturers.) Though Middle England was passing through a trough in which it felt it could no longer afford conservatories, stair-lifts for the elderly, cheap foreign holidays – all the things which brought in advertising revenue for the Legions – Upper England still wanted its crocodile-skin shoes, its diamond necklaces, its Rolex watches, its bespoke female underwear, its expensive scents.
Over this world of fantasy, Mary Much had reigned as empress since the day News Incorporated acquired the title ten years earlier. Sinclo had never got his eye in to the glossy mags, made the mistake of thinking one had to flick through eighty pages of advertisements before you got to the interesting bits, without realizing that these were the interesting bits. Partly to extend her power and patronage, and perhaps partly because it flattered her sense of herself as a person of culture, however, Mary Much had appointed music critics, opera critics, even a literary editor to review books. Their lucubrations were to be discovered somewhere in Gloss if you burrowed deep enough between the dozens of pages devoted to lipsticks, eye make-up, boots and bras.
&nb
sp; On his way to Mayfair, Sinclo wondered whether he was to be privileged to become one of Mary Much’s entourage. He had plenty of time to meditate on the theme, since the journey – the brisk walk, nearly a run to Bermondsey, and then the Jubilee Line to Green Park, and then the walk across Berkeley Square – took the best part of an hour. The invitation had come that morning – breathless, cooing, and yet for all its tone of self-deprecation quite peremptory – ‘You’re probably so busy … but if you could bear …’ As soon as he’d bumblingly said, ‘Oh no … that would be … no, of course, yes … I’m sure I could rejig …’ she had said in quite a clipped manner, ‘One, then. Come to the office,’ and rung off.
Gloss and Lips occupied a handsome old Georgian house in one of the streets off the western side of Hanover Square. Its interior, under Mary Much’s watchful tutelage, had undergone several transformations since her occupancy of the editorial chair. She had had her Georgian queens moments, when young men in three-piece suits had come to advise about panellings and fire baskets; her sudden change to Swedish minimalism. At present she had, at colossal expense to Lennox Mark, given the house the look of a building being squatted by unmaterialistic persons of good taste. The seagrass and rugs had gone years ago, of course: but now the bare floorboards had been expensively scuffed, and the skirting boards and shutters kicked to achieve that ‘squat’ atmos. Her own office, from which paintings and flowers had been removed (save for one white orchid drooping in a metallic pot), consisted of a plain bleached oak table and two upright chairs. The grate had been torn out, leaving in the fireplace a cave of uneven, blackened bricks. The panelling and window shutters looked as if they had been given a coat of grey, uneven undercoat in which some incompetent painter had dropped soot.
An essential ingredient in her genius, and there was something of genius in the character of Mary Much, was to make almost every individual with whom she had anything to do believe that there existed between them and her a special shared little intimacy, a whole world of small-talk and jokes which the rest of the world knew nothing about. When Sinclo was shown into her room, she stood, all six feet of her, and put her ash-blonde hair on one side as if she was a floppy rag doll. Then she straightened up and ‘became’ Peg Montgomery.