Guns in the Gallery

by Simon Brett

  Ignoring his mother, Giles Green reached behind the counter and produced a handful of printed cards. ‘Something you won’t want to miss, Carole. Friday week. It’ll be the event of the Fethering social calendar. Have you heard of Denzil Willoughby?’

  Carole was forced to admit that she hadn’t.

  ‘Only a matter of time. He’s going to be very big. Big as Damien Hirst in a few years’ time, I’ll put money on that. And he’s showing his new work here at the Cornelian Gallery. So there’s a chance for you, Carole, to be in at the beginning of something really big. Right here in Fethering you will have the opportunity to snap up an original Denzil Willoughby for peanuts . . . and then just sit back and watch its value grow.’

  ‘Well, I don’t often buy art, I must say.’ Don’t ever buy art, if the truth were told.

  ‘Then you must simply change your habits,’ asserted Giles Green. ‘It’s too easy for people to become stick-in-the-muds in a backwater like Fethering. But things’re going to change round here. Isn’t that, right, Mother?’

  ‘Well, Giles, I’m not sure—’

  ‘Of course they are. Here, Carole, you take two of these. Bring a friend.’

  Carole Seddon looked down at the invitations which had been thrust into her hand. The image on the front looked like an explosion in an abattoir. And the Private View to which she was being invited was called ‘GUN CULTURE’.

  TWO

  ‘It’s not my sort of thing,’ Carole protested, looking down once again at the Cornelian Gallery invitation.

  ‘How do you know what’s your sort of thing until you’ve tried it?’ asked Jude, a smile twitching at her generous lips. A well-upholstered woman of about the same age as Carole, she had a body which promised infinite comfort to men. As usual, her blonde hair was piled untidily on top of her head and she was dressed in swathes of brightly coloured layers. She and Carole were ensconced in their usual alcove at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. In front of them were their customary glasses of Chilean Chardonnay.

  ‘Well, art.’ Carole infused the word with a wealth of contempt. ‘I mean, my life’s always been too full to have time for the excesses of art.’

  ‘You’ve been invited to a Private View that lasts two hours. You don’t have to stay the full two hours. If you’re not enjoying it, you can leave after half an hour. Is your life so full that you can’t spare half an hour?’

  ‘Well . . .’ It was a question to which Carole really didn’t have a very good answer. Except for when Stephen, Gaby and Lily came to see her, or she went to visit them in Fulham, there weren’t that many demands on her time. There was taking Gulliver for his walks on Fethering Beach, of course . . . and diligently removing impertinent motes of dust from the surfaces of High Tor . . . then sometimes the final few clues of The Times crossword proved obdurately difficult . . . but Carole could always find a spare half hour. Too many spare half hours, she thought during her occasional moments of self-pity.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine for you,’ she went on. It was true. Jude had the knack of slipping easily into any social environment. ‘You’re used to dealing with arty people. I wouldn’t know what to say to them.’

  ‘You’d say to them what you’d say to anyone else. Anyway, they’re not going to be very arty. I mean, if Bonita’s inviting everyone who comes into the Cornelian Gallery to get a photo framed, it’s hardly going to be the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, is it? There’ll be half a dozen people connected with the art world and, apart from them, all the usual Fethering faces. Nobody’s going to be quizzing you on your knowledge of Renaissance painting or your view of the Impressionists. It’s not going to be trial by ordeal.’

  ‘No, but . . .’ The trouble was, if you were Carole Seddon, every social event was trial by ordeal. Even ones where there was a good chance she might enjoy had to be preceded by hours of agonizing over whether she would make a fool of herself or wear the wrong clothes or commit some other faux pas. She had the shy person’s rather arrogant assumption that she – and her shortcomings – would be the focus of everyone else’s attention.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated finally, ‘but I really don’t think it’s my sort of thing.’

  ‘What’s not your sort of thing?’ asked the rough voice of Ted Crisp. He was the landlord of the Crown and Anchor, and he’d just brought over to their table the day’s Lunchtime Specials they had ordered, two seafood risottos. Ted was a large scruffy, bearded man, always dressed in faded sweatshirt and jeans. When he’d taken over the lease, he’d just been thought of as a large scruffy bearded man; but now the Crown and Anchor was gaining something of a reputation as a gastropub, he was regarded as a ‘local character’. People who’d watched too many television food programmes assumed that his scruffiness was some form of ‘retro-chic’. Which it certainly wasn’t. Ted Crisp had always been like that. And any chic he had was the chic he had been born with.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Carole replied to his question, but Jude undermined her by saying, ‘We were talking about art.’

  ‘Art, eh?’ Ted echoed. ‘I heard a story once about a burglar who broke into the house of a modern artist, and while he was nicking the stuff, the owner came back. Burglar got away, but the artist just had time to do a lightning sketch of him. Took it to the police, and now they’re looking for a man with nineteen purple legs and a couple of poached eggs on his head!’ He let out a great guffaw. ‘You have to laugh, don’t you? Well, no, clearly you don’t, but I do . . . otherwise it goes all quiet.’

  ‘What a loss you were to the stand-up circuit when you gave it up,’ observed Carole.

  He grinned at her, knowing she was only teasing. Carole still found it incongruous that she should be sufficiently relaxed with a publican to be on teasing terms with him. Nor could she suppress a sense of daring incongruity from the knowledge that she had once had a brief affair with Ted Crisp.

  He pointed down to the Cornelian Gallery invitation on their table. ‘You two going to that then?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jude.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Carole.

  ‘Be good eats there.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Event being catered by none other than the Crown and Anchor, Fethering.’

  ‘Then that’s another reason for us to go,’ said Jude. ‘Your outside catering business seems to be taking off in a big way, Ted.’

  He shrugged, always embarrassed by references to the burgeoning success of his pub. His lugubrious, laid-back style was better suited to commiserations about failure.

  ‘But it’s true,’ Jude insisted.

  ‘Well, if it is, it’s nothing to do with me. Down to Zosia, all that is.’

  At the mention of her name, a blonde pigtailed girl behind the bar looked up and waved at the two women. Zosia had come to Fethering from Warsaw a few years before to investigate the circumstances of her brother’s death. She had stayed and her perky efficiency had totally transformed the running of the Crown and Anchor. Though Ted Crisp had been initially grudging about having a foreigner behind his bar, even he would now admit that he’d be lost without Zosia.

  ‘Anyway, better leave you two ladies,’ he announced. ‘There’s a queue at the bar.’ There was. The pub was filling up with tourists as the April weather improved. ‘If I think of any more art jokes, I’ll be right back.’

  ‘No hurry,’ said Carole, teasing again.

  For some minutes silence ensued, as the two women tackled their excellent seafood risotto. The Crown and Anchor’s chef, Ed Pollack, really was going from strength to strength. With him running the kitchen and Zosia the bar, the reputation of the pub was spreading even beyond the boundaries of West Sussex.

  Carole and Jude finished their food at the same time and both sat back, taking long swallows of Chilean Chardonnay.

  ‘Jude, do you know Bonita Green?’ asked Carole.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Does that mean that she’s been to you for healing?’ She could never quite k
eep a note of scepticism out of the word. To Carole’s regimented mind her neighbour’s practice of alternative therapies would always come under the heading of ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo’.

  ‘No,’ Jude replied with a grin. ‘That’s not the only way I meet people, you know.’

  ‘Of course not. Well, I met her this morning.’

  ‘For the first time?’

  ‘For the first time when we exchanged names, yes.’

  Jude couldn’t resist another grin. She never failed to be amused by her neighbour’s social subterfuges.

  ‘So what do you know about her?’ Carole went on.

  ‘Just that she’s run the Cornelian Gallery for many years. I think she’d trained at the Slade a long time ago and worked full-time as an artist. At some point she got married and had a son, maybe there was another child, I’m not sure. And the husband . . . I can’t remember . . . she either got divorced or was widowed and I think it was round then she started the gallery.’

  ‘I met the son this morning. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve met him casually.’

  That was the way Jude met most people. Complete strangers found themselves suddenly in conversations with her. She was very easy to talk to, a good listener, so genuinely interested in other people that she very rarely needed to volunteer much information about herself. Carole Seddon felt a familiar pang of envy. She couldn’t think of any occasions in her own life when she’d done anything casually.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘About Giles? Not a lot. Had some high-flying City job, got made redundant a few months back. And I think his marriage broke up round the same time. Local gossip has it that he’s moved back in with his mother on a temporary basis.’

  Again Carole felt peeved that she didn’t seem to hear the same quality of local gossip as her neighbour did. But she supposed that to access it she’d have to change the habits of a lifetime and start talking to people she hadn’t been introduced to. The kind of people to whom she gave no more than a ‘Fethering nod’ on her morning walks with Gulliver.

  ‘Where does Bonita live then?’

  ‘In the flat over the shop.’

  Carole pictured the High Street frontage of the Cornelian Gallery in her mind’s eye. ‘Can’t be much room in there for two of them.’

  ‘No, I gather it isn’t an ideal arrangement.’

  Carole was alert to the implication. ‘You mean they don’t get on?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, but I can’t think it’s an ideal situation for any mother in her sixties suddenly to have a son in his thirties around all the time.’ Her neighbour waited patiently, sensing that Jude had more to tell. ‘Also I gather Giles has plans to work with Bonita in the business.’

  Carole pointed to the invitation on the table. ‘Hence this?’

  ‘I’d say so, yes. Denzil Willoughby is rather different in style from the artists Bonita usually exhibits.’

  A nod from Carole, as she looked at the twisted images on the invitation and mentally compared them to the innocuous watercolours she had seen on display in the Cornelian Gallery. ‘Well, you seem to know quite a lot about them,’ she said, an edge of sniffiness in her tone.

  Jude smiled. ‘I could tell you some more.’

  ‘Oh?’ Carole didn’t want to sound too eager.

  ‘There’s another reason why Giles Green wants to be down here. His new girlfriend lives near Chichester.’

  ‘Do you know her too?’

  ‘I’ve met her. Girl called Chervil. I know her sister Fennel better.’

  ‘Chervil? Fennel? What happened? Did their parents have an accident with a spice rack?’

  Jude giggled. ‘I don’t know. There’s certainly something hippyish about them. The parents, Ned and Sheena Whittaker, demonstrate that other-worldliness which only the very rich can afford. They have this big estate near Halnaker. Butterwyke House. And they’re always experimenting with the latest ecological fad. Solar panels, wind turbines, organic gardening, they’ve done the lot. But, as I say, they can afford it, so good luck to them.’

  ‘Is it inherited money?’ Carole was always intrigued by the very basic question of what people lived on.

  ‘No. The Whittakers made their pile in the nineteen-nineties’ dot-com boom, and were lucky enough – or possibly shrewd enough, though I think it was luck – to get out before the whole thing went belly up. The result is they’ve got shedloads of money.’

  ‘And did you meet them through your healing?’

  ‘Yes. Ned put Fennel in touch with me.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’ Carole didn’t expect any more details. Jude was always very punctilious about client confidentiality. And while she continued to see Fennel Whittaker, a beautiful and talented artist with a crippling medical condition, she would never divulge the secrets of the sessions the two of them had shared in the front room of Woodside Cottage.

  ‘So Giles Green has a thing going with this Chervil?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Yes. She used to work in the City too, but she’s moved back down to Butterwyke House to help her parents in their latest business venture.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘“Glamping”.’

  ‘What on earth is “glamping” when it’s at home?’

  ‘The word’s a contraction of “glamorous” and “camping”.’

  ‘There’s nothing glamorous about camping,’ said Carole with a shudder. She remembered all too well the damp misery of holidays under canvas on the Isle of Wight with her parents. And equally watery experiences in France with David and Stephen, when they made yet another attempt to do things that they imagined normal families did. The awful smell of musty damp canvas came unbidden to the nose of her memory.

  ‘Well, there’s quite a vogue for it now, Carole. Wealthy City folk getting what they imagine to be a taste of country life. Totally authentic experience . . . yurts with wood-fired stoves . . . not to mention gourmet chefs and sometimes even a butler thrown in.’

  That prompted a ‘Huh’ from Carole. Though she didn’t vocalise it, another of her mother’s regular sayings had come into her mind. ‘More money than sense’. Amazing how many things that could be applied to in the cushioned world of West Sussex.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’ asked Jude.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The glamping site at Butterwyke House.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jude shrugged. ‘Interest. I’m going up there on Saturday. You’re welcome to come if you want to.’

  ‘Why are you going there?’

  ‘Amongst the services offered to the happy glampers are a variety of alternative therapies. Sheena asked if I’d be interested in providing some of them. She’s suggested the idea to Chervil. So I’m going up there to have a look round, see if it’ll be suitable for me.’

  ‘Do you need the money?’ asked Carole characteristically.

  Another shrug. ‘One can always use a bit more money.’

  This prompted another recurrent question in Carole’s mind. What did Jude live on? Her lifestyle wasn’t particularly lavish, and she never seemed to be hard up. But was there really that much profit to be had in the healing business? These were things that should have been asked when her neighbour first moved into Woodside Cottage. They now knew each other far too well for such basic enquiries to be made. Whenever she introduced someone new to Jude, Carole was always tempted to prime them beforehand to ask the relevant questions. But somehow it never happened.

  ‘Anyway, why should I come with you, Jude? You’re not proposing I should masquerade as an acupuncturist, are you?’

  ‘No, I just thought you might want to have a look around.’

  ‘But how would you explain my presence?’

  ‘It wouldn’t need any explanation. I’d just say, “Carole’s a friend of mine. She wanted to have a look round, so she came along with me”.’

  ‘“Have a look round”? That sounds like snooping.’

  ‘Only to you it does. Loo
k, Ned and Sheena are running this glamping as a commercial business. For all they know, you’re a prospective client. You might want Stephen, Gaby and Lily to stay there at some point.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Camping and Stephen never really did get along.’

  ‘Well, as I say, if you want to come with me to Butterwyke House on Saturday, fine. If you don’t, equally fine.’

  It was far too casual an arrangement to match Carole’s standards, typical of her friend’s vagueness in social matters. If the owners of Butterwyke House had actually invited Jude to take a friend along, that would have been entirely different. Carole was rather intrigued by the suggestion, though.

  ‘Anyway, what we need now,’ announced Jude, ‘is two more of those large Chilean Chardonnays.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we—’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ said Jude as she sailed magnificently up towards the bar.

  THREE

  Carole Seddon arrived at the Cornelian Gallery on the dot of ten thirty on the Thursday morning. As she prepared to leave High Tor, Gulliver had got very excited, thinking he was going to get another walk. When it was clear that wasn’t on the cards, he went off and lay down reproachfully in front of the Aga. Soon be time to switch that off for the summer, thought Carole. Gulliver wouldn’t like his source of warmth being removed either. His lugubrious expression seemed to anticipate future annoyances.

  The gallery door had a sign on it saying ‘OPEN’ and it gave when Carole pushed, but there was no one inside. Everything looked exactly the same as it had on the Monday. Maybe the odd Monet pencil sharpener had been sold, but all of the framed artworks were still in place on the walls. It was a long time, Carole began to think, since business had been brisk in the Cornelian Gallery.

  She looked more closely at the Piccadilly snowscape on the wall and wondered why it intrigued her. The buses struggling up Regent Street were old-fashioned double-deckers, and the clothes of the red-faced people in the streets suggested the work had been done some thirty years before. There was something unusual about the sludginess of the scene, a quality which should have been depressing, but was perversely uplifting. She noticed the painting was signed in the corner with the initials ‘A.W.’