‘Bea looks sooo bullish. That’s why she applied for architecture, hmm. As I’m sure you know, less than five per cent of architecture students are female so all the other students and people she ends up working with will see her as being quite masculine – you know, numerate, logical, scientific, convergent thinker – the usual crap assumptions, whereas in reality she’s divergent-thinking, sensitive, creative, but more of a rebel. It was Jen who made the career decision first, so what did Bea come up with? Journalism, you can’t get more rebellious than that.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
‘Poor Al – it’s short for Alain by the way, not Alan. Patrick and Freia always saw themselves as being cosmopolitan. You’ve probably realized that Al isn’t Patrick’s.’
I must have been gawping, I hadn’t. ‘Oh yes, Freia had an extra-marital. Everybody assumes, Patrick pretends, there’s no proof that Al isn’t legally his heir, but the fact remains that Al isn’t of Patrick’s blood. So, you can imagine how much he wants to impregnate Martinique. Al hasn’t a clue, but one day the penny will drop when he realizes why he’s so unlike Patrick, and when he finally succumbs to the disease of suspicion – catches it from the twins. You’ve seen the way they both look at him. “Where’s it leading?” says Patrick to Al, “… you’re living in a house with five girls, you need male company not a bloody fashion course!” The poor boy had had enough of architecture after a month, yes. For a start, he said that none of the people on the course had done an art foundation course – they’d all arrived straight from secondary school. Al had done a foundation course, Patrick wouldn’t let the girls – said it was a waste of time but he made an exception “for the boy”.
‘Al told me their first project on the architecture course had been Your Impressions of Tottenham. Al had done this big expressive drawing in black wax crayon and the tutor had slated it saying it wasn’t “cerebral”. Then some smartarse straight out of grammar school turned up to the crit with this clear Perspex cube – which he’d got the technician to make – and inside was this sheep’s head with its eyes pecked out… good job it was encased in Perspex because it would have been well stunk out. Evidently the student had said he’d just seen it lying there on a building site and he’d thought “essence of Tottenham”, but Al said that he’d seen the same student coming out of a butcher’s shop with a pink-stained paper parcel under his arm the day before the crit… Anyway, the tutor said it was the most “powerful and spontaneous piece of work the college had ever seen.” Both the girls agreed with Patrick that Al should have seen the course through.’
‘Did you do an art foundation course?’
‘Lord, no… wanted to… Parents wouldn’t allow. You’re fortunate, hmm.’
Fortune wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever associated with me – particularly if you did a social comparison between me and Lauren. ‘They’re the gold standard Al says.’
‘Gold?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘The art Foundation course is first real window onto the world – all secondary art education is shit.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘English Lit degree… better than getting married and being presented to Her Maj.’ She tapped her amber ring twice on the side of her beer glass – not the amber bit, the silver mounting. It made a high note which seemed to unite with a shrill female voice coming from the saloon. ‘… just joking,’ she said. I knew she wasn’t.
‘… So here I am, literarily literate, but visually illiterate.’
‘I’d never thought of it that way.’
‘I feel sorry for anybody who hasn’t been to art college. That’s ninety-nine per cent of the population who don’t know what art is, and when you think about it not everybody who’s been there knows what it is either – I mean what it’s for.’
I had a horrible feeling she was going to ask me for a definition and I knew I hadn’t got one. But then when you did art you didn’t need to prove it.
‘People I went to school with thought art was icing on a cake. Oh, we all loved Mrs Blake the art teacher, swore how we’d got into the souls of Constable, Caravaggio, or Brueghel after staring at their work in the National Gallery, but to really feel you have to do, you can’t be told about art, you have to experience it for yourself. You can’t fake creativity, hmm! And that state of visual illiteracy sometimes includes art critics.
‘You know the kind of thing; Westminster School, reads English at Christchurch, becomes art critic for a respectable broadsheet newspaper, but never been near an art college… Invents a specialism – say Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. He wows the public with words, facts, but never feeling. He’s no idea what it feels like to be a painter because he’s never done it.’
A pearl of perspiration appeared from beneath her bobbed hair. It hovered for a second on her cheek bone, slid down cheek, chin and neck where it nestled in the small concavity next to her collar bone.
‘You could take up painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography – go to evening classes?’
‘What like a fucking Sunday painter? I demand total immersion!’ I coughed hard to stifle a laugh at her born-again-Christian fervour.
‘You never understand art until you actually do it, and once you’ve done it you’ll find you don’t need to understand it, because it’s beyond intellect.’
She was telling me amazing things I hadn’t realized. How did she know anyway? I was supposed to be the artist.
‘At least if you did a course you’d be doing instead of ranting.’ I thought she’d bite my head off but she smiled.
‘I know I’m repressed in my thinking, but so are ninety-eight per cent of the population… I mean just how liberal was your upbringing?’
I thought of mum and dad, thought of them working ten-hour days, six days a week. Thought of how their only social outlet had been the local church which they felt they couldn’t take part in because they were so exhausted after working to put food on the table. Karl Marx’s calculation of the amount it costs to clothe, feed, and transport a person to their place of employment set against the value of their productivity, still in the 1960s, put my parents firmly into the category of the exploited.
But I’d never for one moment resented that or considered turning myself into a political animal. Sure, opportunity was something you had to battle for, but it was there, it did exist. It was back to the idea of the dream. I had the dream, mum had the dream; dad hadn’t, it wasn’t that it wasn’t there to be dreamt, it was that dad simply thought dreams were something you forgot about the minute you woke up, that lakes were full of fish for catching, and water was for sailing on, or drinking. He didn’t realize that lakes could be ‘bottomless’ or that if you looked through glass you could spy the heavens. It seemed also that neither did Lauren’s parents.
‘Did you know just how rude and stupid George V was about art? Not just him, all the rest of the bloody royals and their hangers on! People called Prince Charles a philistine a few weeks ago when he said that the proposed scheme for the National Gallery extension looked like “a carbuncle on the face of a well-known friend”, but he’s not. He makes an effort to understand, gets people interested, puts something back in, and he paints – even if he is a bit of a Sunday painter. Once you do art you’ll never see reality in the same way again.’
‘Take a sabbatical – I mean do the art foundation course, they take mature students. There’s nothing stopping you.’
She looked at me wearily as if there was something stopping her, something that I couldn’t and wouldn’t comprehend.
‘Do you ever consider that you won’t be rubbing shoulders with arty types for ever?’ She was scrutinizing me as if she had just parted the bushes and found me cowering there like some rarified creature. ‘Think of those ninety-nine per cent. One morning you’ll wake up and find yourself surrounded by people who think that art is a waste of time and money and shou
ld be abandoned in favour of charitable work, like the Elizabethans who believed that a mind that wasn’t “being educated” was doing no more than playing, and its body should be beaten until it did something “worthwhile”. Rednecks who say, “my three-year-old daughter could do that” – perfectly intelligent and well-educated people who should know better, but because they haven’t done art they don’t. You’ll be a lone voice and you’ll think of that piece of smartarse student graffiti, Earth without art is “eh”, you know E-H! Even Neanderthal Man had art, yes!’
She repeated the ‘eh’ sound this time giving it a sub-human sound like the gurgling the murky water might have made as it passed far below our feet when we stood in the Butler’s Pantry. She sat back and took a long swig of ESP. The light coming down the stairwell gave her neat bobbed hair the oddest green tinge – the colour of Welsh slate.
A door slamming on the gallery made me look up and a man with a big nose and curly black hair came cantering down the stairs looking as if he was about to burst into tears.
‘Patrick sent all the kids to comprehensives, yes.’
‘Did he? … Surprises me.’
‘Why?’
‘He could afford to choose private.’
‘Exactly… He chose comprehensive. He wants people to make choices, likes to think he’s handing people opportunity. It’s the way he does it that can hurt, hmm.’
I noticed that she was suddenly looking quite small. Her limbs seemed to have folded up as if she’d tidied them away for the day. Parts of her looked young, others seemed to speak of an eternity and I became aware for the first time that her eyes had the look of a very old person… Difficult to imagine those eyes sitting in the head of the Baby Lauren and easy to visualize them unchanged when on her deathbed – if she ever died that was.
‘It’s the snobbery,’ I ventured. No doubt she’d had an account of the put-downs at the Asparagus Supper.
‘He’s got a thing about British institutions – of which I’ve a morsel or two of knowledge meself, hmm,’ she added with a kind of calculated modesty. ‘You’ll have had the “do you go to Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden, or are you one of these Met people?” There isn’t any establishment he hasn’t researched; the Proms, Wimbledon, Goodwood, Brands Hatch, the Chelsea Flower Show. He’s recently graduated to “Glasto”, even though it was only to pick up the twins, but to give him credit he did get into the spirit of it by dressing in black.
‘He can also play the people’s man by talking long and loud about Arsenal, darts, and the origins of the Sun newspaper, yes. If you openly accuse him of snobbery he’ll turn on you and meticulously prove that it’s really you who is the snob. That’s the essence of Patrick. He sculpts himself larger than life because he knows that Andy Warhol is right, real human emotions look small and insignificant compared with the emotions in films or literature. So, if you’re prepared to tolerate the bogus you can begin to understand where he’s coming from, yes?’
The door on the gallery above burst open and a male figure hurtled through it; steadied itself against the oak balustrade. The door was slammed by an unseen hand and the man gingerly made his way downstairs towards us. Like the previous man he had a big nose and black curly hair and I noticed that there was a trickle of blood between his nose and mouth. As he reached the foot of the stairs he paused as if he was going to speak to us… Seemed to change his mind and walked through the bar and out into the sunshine where I could see him standing in front of the mahonia bush.
‘… Then there’s the rumpen-lumpen part of the population which is little better than the Nazis when it insists that art should be beauty, yes.’
She’d changed tack again. She was a master at laying down one idea on top of another – walking away, then coming back, picking one idea up, putting another one down. ‘… A view which comes from the State, be it Roman, Greek, Egyptian – or early twentieth-century Australian; it’s simply just one idealised perception of human or equine beauty and it ignores the value of experimentation, failure, serendipity, and insists that only the end result matters, never the process, hmm.’
I was amazed how much thought she’d put into the subject. I couldn’t begin to summon up arguments like these, but then again, I was a do-er of art, not a thinker about it.
‘… How did your interview with your new man go?’
‘Oh, I think he’s right…’
‘… Polish.’
‘He’s born here… seems quite left wing, Jack-the-Lad almost, I’m really not sure how he’s going to get on with Patrick…’
‘Behind every Pole is a pretty interesting story, hmm.’
‘Really?’ I’d met only two Poles, one at college, another at my first job. They’d both had extravagant moustaches, and each struck me as being rather conceited. I’d heard of martial law, had a vague idea of who Jaruzelski was, and that was it… Lauren it seemed was a mine of information.
‘… For a start, there are two Polands, one, the Polish People’s Republic, a Stalinist puppet set up in 1945, and two, the international culture of the years between 1918 and 1939 with all its complex pockets of feudalism, class divides… with Warsaw an artistic, philosophical, and scientific nucleus to rival Paris, Berlin, Vienna and whose government plus a core of upper-middle-class Poles which packed its bags – including all its gold – and came to London when the Nazis invaded…’
‘Gold?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘Gold. They smuggled it out on a train in 1940 across the parts of Europe which were already occupied, and right under the noses of the Nazis, to London where they set up the Government in Exile, yes.’
I was amazed… Gold, governments in exile? It was news to me.
‘…When the war ended these émigrés couldn’t return and those who did “disappeared” because they’d “had contact” with the West. This guy may be well be streetwise, switched on – and so forth, but it’s unlikely he’s the working-class London lad he makes out he is… Chances are he’s the son of one of these aristocratic refuges hiding in plain sight.’
‘What happened to the gold?’
‘Well it certainly didn’t go back east so… must be still here somewhere…’
‘… Really?’ I still didn’t have much of a clue what she was talking about but it was certain that there was more to the guy than I’d thought. The chemical mix between the four of us was going to interesting.
‘He’s quite sullen.’
‘He hasn’t got Patrick’s charm then? Oh, I know Patrick’s got charm, but what is charm?’ She’d switched again, and I felt she was laughing at me.
‘… If it’s flattery then it’s nothing but a weapon to arm the flatterer and can be fatal for the flattered. If it’s a form of enchantment then it’s a method of removing the power of freewill from the enchanted and therefore also ultimately fatal. If it’s being “nice” to people in the sense of being “agreeable” then Patrick just doesn’t do either nice or agreeable.
‘But he won’t shout you down, he’ll listen to your argument, then he’ll add the finishing touch, his touch. He’s a good orchestrator, he likes to get ideas from other people then get them to pluck the fine strings, it’s funny really, his form is logic but his essence is confusion… Same again?’
She leaned forward, placed her empty glass on the table tapping the side of it with her amber ring. I rose ready to go to the bar but the young man with the moustache appeared, took our glasses, disappeared, and returned with them refilled all in the space of what seemed no more than seconds. This time she paid.
‘You’ve noticed his mouth?’
‘The “O”?’
‘… More than that. It’s almost an autonomous organism. It indulges in all sorts of little movements; truncated earthworm, a mollusc engaged in its mating ritual, the engorged penis of some mammal, or a sea animal reacting when threatened. His oral flexings aren’t just visual, t
here are noises you may have noticed; tiny squeakings, creakings, fizzings, chirrupings. But these kissy kissy sounds aren’t an expression of tenderness, they’re a prelude to a fucking bollocking!’
Her voice had risen and several heads had turned in our direction. ‘It’s Patrick’s unique style of bienseance.’ Once again, she sat back, calmer now.
‘Who is Uncle Falco?’
‘Ah, now you’re asking!’
At least this time she sounded as if she wasn’t going to tear me off a strip.
‘… Client, restaurant-owner who claims to create Milanese food but has the temperament – if not the birth – of a Sicilian… Which reminds me, Patrick – you will have noticed – has adopted an estilo culto through words and pronunciations, which might seem perfectly at home in the mouth of a native, but coming out of his, sound artificial… I mean, does he really need to say Milano all the time? We’re in London for fuck’s sake. He’s always on about “the British weather” but the way he behaves reminds me of the British holidaymaker returning from Bali who is determined to show the rest of the British public how he went native and – in spite of metallic skies and freezing temperatures – determinedly pads off the Gatwick Express still wearing his sarong and flip-flops, yes.’
I hadn’t been to Bali, but I had frequently noticed folk standing in the rain outside Victoria station wearing sombreros.
‘If Patrick were being interviewed by Joan Bakewell…’ she rambled on ‘– or whoever – and was asked the question “what are your two greatest loves in life?” he would reply “beautiful women and good food”. His confidence in giving such an answer would stem from the fact that he wouldn’t be speaking for himself – oh no, to do that would be arrogant and egotistical. By giving such an answer, he would be no more than acting as spokesman for the entire human race… Women and food are – after all – no more than the basic requirement for Man’s survival, and procreation. He would be demonstrating his loyalty to humanity, yes.
The Gilded Ones Page 10