Never, ever, would he have wanted to get into the ghastly artificial business of access and weekends, being a Sunday father forlornly trailing his children on outings none of them enjoyed because he could not get the knack which women seemed to have of being with their kids, making the mysterious difference between a house and a home. It was only a knack, a technique he could learn himself, he was sure of it.
He went to visit his sister, married to a professional showjumper in Yorkshire; her little boy just ran around her while she stuffed haynets and washed out buckets. ‘Move out of London – with boys you’ve got to be able to turn them out into the open air,’ she advised. He made excuses to drop in on Joe and Shona at weekends; Shona had started an interior decorating business and never left her drawing board except to flip through sample books, but there was a Spanish student who looked after the two little girls and Lovat observed her earnestly. Being in the kitchen a lot seemed to make things natural, and watching junk television, and taking too long to put things away. She seemed to do a great deal of teasing, tickling and giggling.
Lovat felt a fool when he tried these techniques himself. Being in the kitchen itself seemed awkward to him, and talking to Tokyo while the boys threw chips across the breakfast bar was, he realized at once, professional suicide. They ran away if he touched them. ‘Ben isn’t at all ticklish,’ Tom informed him with a serious expression. ‘Actually, none of us are much. Are you all right, Dad? You can go and lie down if you don’t feel well, we can cope.’
Then the last baby arrived and it seemed to him that his wife deliberately gave birth early and bolted back to her own territory at once to cheat him of any opportunity to share the event. She dumped the baby in his arms as if it was something he had squabbled over that she was bitterly wishing him joy of, and the tiny thing looked at him and then averted her eyes, her cheeks rounded with a hint of a smile. Could a baby be shy? Surely a mite only a few weeks old could not be naturally provocative?
He felt her stirring, and it was a sensual movement, as if she was enjoying being held and being close to him; the boys, he remembered, had struggled and squirmed, always wanting to be put down so they could get away. The idea that this innocent scrap might grow into a woman like Bianca suddenly appalled him. He had a vision of a sullen twenty-year-old with long brown hair embarking on a lifetime mission to defy all sense, decency and civilization. If he lost her, it might happen. But what could he, a man living by himself, do with a baby all day?
Donald Tuttlingen called him on a Sunday morning. ‘I’m at the Dorchester,’ he announced and the sound of his vestigial Georgia accent took Lovat back ten years to the early days of his marriage, when he would occasionally answer the telephone in the gallery in Mount Street and hear the same ironic voice say, ‘I don’t suppose my wife is there?’
‘I thought I’d call you since I’m in London,’ he continued. ‘Why don’t you come over and have lunch with me? I have some ideas I need to toss around. I heard about you and your wife. Seems like a shame. Inconvenient, it being the family firm. Gonna cost you much?’
Lovat was lost for a response. Two feet away Orlando was about to hit his pile of dry cornflakes with a spoon. Tom frowned at him and passed him the milk.
‘I guess you don’t know what the damage is yet. Have you got your boys there? I thought I could hear something.’
‘It’s the TV.’ Orlando gazed thoughtfully at a wad of wet flakes stuck to the tip of his spoon. Benedict was not eating at all.
‘Why don’t you all come over? We’ll eat here, there’s damn all else open in this city on a Sunday. I’ll see you about one in the dining room. I used to prefer the Terrace but it’s getting afflicted with kiwi fruit.’ Orlando flicked his spoon and the wad of wet cornflakes hit Tom, who launched himself across the table, upsetting everything on it and kicking Benedict in the face.
‘Cut it out,’ yelled their father, hanging up the telephone. ‘Get out of here and get cleaned up and get changed, we’re going out to lunch.’
Orlando yelled, ‘I won’t eat it unless it’s McDonald’s.’
Benedict said, ‘What are we going to get changed into? We’ve only got pyjamas.’
‘Dad’ – Tom was already searching for a cloth – ‘I think Benedict is having one of his nosebleeds.’
Because he assumed that the American merely wanted advice, Lovat was only slightly embarrassed to bring three boys, two dirty and one wearing a pyjama jacket, into the baronial gloom of the dining room at the Dorchester.
‘Well, Lovat, it’s a pity you didn’t keep going – you could have raised a football team.’ Donald Tuttlingen smiled at them while the waiters flicked napkins.
‘In England, we are inclined to play rugby,’ Tom informed him. ‘There are fifteen men in a team. It might have been a bit hard on my mother.’
‘Indeed it might, I hadn’t thought of that.’ One of Tuttlingen’s large blue eyes winked at Lovat across the menu, implying that grown men knew that nothing could be too hard for an ex-wife. He had the once-boyish face of an American politician, pleasantly grizzled by good living, with a rectangular white smile and sandy hair that sprang up vigorously from his forehead. Lovat remembered that he liked the man; like his father he was proud to be a plain dealer, open about his simple tastes and lack of sophistication. There was a dry edge to his humour which kept people on their toes.
A Kuwaiti family wandered randomly between the tables like straying sheep, their patriarch taking care to pull the skirts of his robes clear of the clawed chair feet.
‘Dad.’ The high, reasonable voice of his eldest son claimed Lovat’s attention. ‘Dad, why is that woman in a long black dress wearing a letter box on her nose?’
‘The boys were brought up in the country,’ Lovat offered by way of explanation.
‘She’s a nun, dumbo, Who wants my roll?’
‘Don’t throw it, Ben. Just leave the roll on your plate.’
‘How does she eat her lunch?’
‘She doesn’t eat, she’s fasting, That’s why she’s got that thing on, isn’t it, Dad?’
When the boys’ mouths were full of roast beef and yorkshire pudding, Tuttlingen leaned across to Lovat and made his pitch. ‘I have it in mind to expand that gallery operation of my wife’s. What direction would you suggest I considered?’
‘What are you looking to get out of it? Cash? Excuse to travel? Mop up your excess liquidity?’ He presumed that entertaining Cheri was no longer the business’s primary function.
‘You can forget the travel.’
‘At Berrisford’s the hottest area was investment. There’s a big international market building there. And in this business, supply is everything. You can more or less manipulate demand.’ The older man liked that idea.
‘So I’d forget sculpture, it’s unpredictable. Concentrate on flushing out pictures with important commercial qualities – easy to like, easy to understand, easy to document, hard to fake. Something that’s beginning to happen, fashionable, maybe not completely international yet. And plenty of them around.’
He noted a clouding of the American’s brow and decided to specify. ‘Not late Titians, for example – they’re all in museums already, only a couple would ever come up for sale. Or Rembrandt drawings – I could knock one off right now on the back of the menu. I’d go for Impressionists, the banks love’em. Quickly. The market’s a bit groggy now, but it’ll recover. It’s inevitable that France will open up in the next few years, with the EEC moving forward. And there’s nothing much will come out of this country now the tax laws have changed.’
He paused and looked down at his plate, from which very little had been eaten. The waiter removed it and from the corner of his eye he saw Tom urging his brothers to put their knives and forks together and wipe their mouths. A fork still impaling a potato fell to the floor when Orlando tried to pass the waiter his plate. Tuttlingen looked up and beckoned the maitre d’.
‘Gaston, can these young fellas take a tour of the kitchen befo
re dessert?’ Alarmed but obedient, the boys left their seats and allowed themselves to be led away.
‘Europe?’ Tuttlingen prompted.
‘Yes. Buy all the Impressionists you can now and feed them out into the market over the next few years. And in the meantime, start developing new markets. A small dealer who specializes can really clean up when his field goes live. You could look at Victorian narratives, Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts metalwork, photography …’
‘I get you.’
Lovat felt inspired. Since losing contact with Hugh Berrisford he had lacked a sounding board for the ideas that boiled all day in his brain, and in truth he had been so wretched that his thoughts over the past few months had scarcely been worth sharing. Tuttlingen said a few words here and there but drew him out with what he recognized was great skill. Since the man knew little of his world, he began to sketch it for him, comparing the art market to a coral reef, a vast, complex and beautiful symbiosis in which dealers salerooms, institutions, private collectors, museums, governments and countries were delicately related. It seemed immense and static, but in fact it was made up of sensitive, growing organisms and when one altered, the next responded.
‘Who are the sharks?’ The American pushed himself back in his massive pseudo-Jacobean chair, obviously entertained. ‘I want to be a shark, a great white shark.’
‘The sharks are the guys who get there first and eat the competition alive. You could be a shark. Sotheby’s are struggling right now, overstretched in the US – it’ll take a billion, I reckon.’
‘Dollars? That much, eh?’ Tuttlingen clearly had not realized the potential of his wife’s little sideline.
‘Dad, look what the chef gave me.’ Benedict appeared silently at his father’s side and held a fish sculptured from carrot under his nose. ‘I saw him make it. He was so fast … he’s doing one for Orlando.’ And he ran away as quietly as he had come.
‘You’ve been very patient with my family.’ Lovat sensed that the purpose of this meeting was not merely to pass time and pick his brains.
‘I know how it is. When my first wife and I split up we had a couple of kids. She took them up to Chicago, not my favourite city, but with the courts women hold all the cards, or they did then. You have to do what you can.’
There was a silence. Outside the hotel the sun came out, and motes of dust danced in the rays that slanted down across the massive oak tables.
‘I don’t believe Cheri ever did seduce you, did she?’ It was a statement not a question, and it was true, but Lovat was offended and snapped upright in his seat. ‘I apologize, that was an intrusion. She was always telling me how crazy you were about your wife and I knew what that meant. I held that in your favour; Cheri is one of those women who’ll never take no for an answer. But I guess you don’t consider this a proper subject for discussion?’
‘I …’
‘Never mind, I can see by your face I never should have mentioned it. The gallery made good money when you were there, I hold that in your favour also. So tell me Lovat, do you think you dare go back in the water yet?’
‘Sure, I’d like to get married again. Very much. It’s a natural state for me. This thing with Bianca wasn’t my initiative; I was very happy being married and I thought that she was too. Obviously there were things I didn’t know …’ Lovat made this speech at least three times a day. He was beginning to wonder if it was not getting over-rehearsed. People who he had imagined would react to it sympathetically tended to listen with glazed eyes and then change the subject. He must try to keep it fresh and heartfelt – clearly he was getting so fluent that it sounded like bullshit. Don obviously wasn’t buying it, he was shaking his head.
‘Have I expressed myself badly? I should know by now it’s a waste of my time being subtle, I just end up confusing everybody. I’m offering you a job – there, how’s that for a simple proposition?’
Lovat blinked at him once, which was all the time he needed to reframe his understanding of their meeting, suppress his severe embarrassment about the children, evaluate the offer, consider his options and compose an answer. ‘I’d very much like it, Don, in principle that is.’
‘Very good.’ They shook hands. ‘I want you to come to New York and see the set-up and then we’ll get down to what kind of money your principle comes down to. Agreed? Can we get to the dessert now? They do a passion-fruit soufflé that’s like an angel’s kiss. I usually say it’s like eating an angel’s pussy, but I don’t like to lie on a Sunday and the truth is I never yet have had that experience.’
When the cigars were offered Lovat decided to join his host in a Romeo y Julieta. He had five minutes in which to savour its cool, aromatic smoke when a drowsy Orlando climbed on his lap and snapped it in half.
Having walked the boys through the park to the hotel, hoping to take the edge off their energy, he found they were now too tired to walk back, and so he needed a taxi. On the spotless steps of the Dorchester Benedict’s nose suddenly gushed blood once more. The first cabbie refused to take them. The commissionaire looked up at the trees. Lovat noticed a chauffeur polishing a stretch Mercedes limousine with a new yellow duster but he judged it an impossible shame to go over and ask to borrow it for his son’s nose. An elderly maid eventually appeared with some tissues.
‘Lovat, I am relieved you intend to marry again.’ His future employer looked down at him from the top step with a smile that was slightly but perceptibly less wide than pure amusement would have prompted. ‘A family’s a fine thing. Don’t you waste any time about it. You’ll like New York, there’s eight single women to every straight man under the age of sixty. See you next week.’ Lovat caught sight of his reflection in the dark windows of the limo; his hair was too long and he seemed to have gained an alarming amount of weight. Was that a burn mark or blood on his Paul Smith tie?
Twelve months later he walked through light rain around the comer of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, gave his invitation flecked with gold leaf to a security guard and his umbrella to a coat-eheck boy in pink zouave pants and a gold cummerbund, reached for a glass of blush Zinfandel and wondered why he had imagined that there would be anything pleasant about another opening of another show by another good painter whose work did not sell.
He had two reasons for being there. One was that the painter was an old Chelsea friend and he had promised her that he would look in; even in a year he had made enough of a name for himself in New York for his attendance at an opening to be considered a valuable endorsement. The other reason, of which he was mildly ashamed, was that the party was his best chance of getting laid that night.
His bruised libido had recovered when he first climbed into the Tuttlingens’car at JFK. Now he had a sexual persona for each side of the Atlantic. In London he was calm and celibate, a devoted father paired thoughtfully with one bright, sweet, lovely woman after another but too responsible to get involved until he was sure he had met the right one, and too caring for casual sex. In New York he was, as Cheri Tuttlingen had sourly reproved him, so cunt-crazy that any decent hostess would have to introduce him with a health warning. His good looks and European manners saved him from more widespread disapproval. There was a carved eighteenth-century four-poster bed in his apartment and his general aim in a relationship was to get a woman out of it before he found out what kind of drugs she was on – they all seemed to be on something.
He found the visitor’s book on a table in the corner, signed it, asked for a proper drink and checked the walls. It was hard to see through the crush of guests but it seemed as if the show was devoted to pastel erotica of massive proportions. On the nearest canvas were pale blue thighs four feet long, luxuriously parted, and a violet penis rising from a mound of pale yellow curls.
‘Porn at eleven o’clock high.’ With a clank of her silver earrings the taller of two diminutive women at the opposite end of the room leaned forward to touch her companion’s bare shoulder.
‘Where? I can’t see him.’ In case he could se
e her, Izza McKinnon raised a black-gloved arm to brush the back of her cropped red head, checking the effect in the floor-to-ceiling mirror which conveniently reflected the entrance.
‘Sizing up the purple number. Dark blue suit, black hair. Could be an eight.’
‘No Pom could be an eight.’
‘Definitely an eight. I’m serious.’
‘Gina, you gave that creep last night an eight and he had a gut on him like a spinnaker.’
‘I couldn’t see him in profile.’ Gina pulled out a strand of her wild black hair and teased it rapidly with her fingers. ‘Anyway, you only rate Richard Gere nine and a half. He was loaded, wasn’t he?’
‘They’re all loaded. He was in insurance in Florida, for Christ’s sake.’ Izza believe that she had reached the stage in her career where she needed a man to assist her progress; if he were merely wealthy she would suffer from the Ivana Trump syndrome. She needed a man who was intellectual because she had brains and socially prominent to prove that she had status. No baggies need apply – a baggie was a man who was unfuckable without a bag over his head. Random promiscuity in pursuit of a career was over; for a long-term monogamous relationship it had to be someone she could find attractive if she tried.
‘I’ll give it ten more minutes. If an invisible Pom’s the best this dump can do I’m out of here. Jeez, where are the photographers?’ If she paid for her own dinner, met nobody famous or went home without being photographed Izza McKinnon considered she had wasted her day.
It had already taken her twenty years to get out of South Australia, another five to leave Sydney behind and if she didn’t get a move on she’d still be nobody at thirty. Hara-kiri time. The goal was national TV, a couple of novels, maybe a play and the cover of Rolling Stone. Or People. Plus at least a spread in Architectural Digest on her witty int dec. Now she was on cable in New York, but suffering a crisis of her wacky hand-erafted identity because in Sydney she had been rated a celebrity but here she was just another spunky kid scrapping to get noticed; the press she’d had in the States so far amounted to some crud from New York magazine snapping her at a rock benefit under the impression she was Cyndi Lauper.
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