by Simon Brett
‘You do know that a lot of creative artists suffer from bipolar tendencies?’
‘Yes. It doesn’t help much to know that, though. Doesn’t stop me thinking that my work’s crap . . . along with everything else in my life.’
Jude was silent for a moment, trying to decide what therapies she should use for the rest of the session. For the time being, though, she reckoned talking was doing Fennel as much good as anything else would.
‘Is there anything specific that’s made you feel down at the moment?’
‘There’s never anything specific. It’s just . . . everything.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know I’ve asked you this before, but are you sure there wasn’t something in your past, something that happened that triggered the depression?’
‘And as I’ve answered before, no. What are you hoping I’ll say – that my father interfered with me when I was a child?’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that.’
‘I know you weren’t. Anyway, the answer to your question remains the same as when you last asked it. I think the depression is just something knotted into my DNA. A dodgy gene, like . . . I don’t know . . . being born with red hair perhaps?’
‘And there’s nothing that’s happened in the last few days that’s got you particularly depressed?’
Fennel looked up, alert to a slight change in Jude’s tone. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Just when we were at Butterwyke House and you and Chervil came in, it sounded as if you’d been having a row.’
‘Not a row. It’s just the way sisters are, always sniping at each other.’
‘When Chervil was showing us round Walden, she seemed a little bitter about you.’
‘What? Complaining I was monopolizing our parents’ attention?’
‘Yes.’
‘Huh. I don’t know where she gets that from. If she genuinely thinks I’m going through what I go through simply to score points over her, then I wish she could have a couple of days of depression, so she knows what it feels like.’
‘And she doesn’t?’
‘No. Chervil’s never had a negative thought in her whole life. Eternal Bloody Pollyanna. Chervil’s fine. Never been any problems with her. She’s always been our parents’ golden girl. Always done everything right.’
‘What about relationships?’
‘She’s never lacked for male attention.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked. Do her relationships last?’
‘Till she gets bored with them, yes. Chervil never risks getting hurt. When a relationship is ending, she always sees to it that she’s the dumper rather than the dumpee. And she never dumps a boyfriend till she’s got another one lined up. Chervil hasn’t spent more than a week without a boyfriend since she was fourteen.’
‘Whereas you . . .?’
The bark of cynical laughter which greeted this enquiry was more eloquent than words would have been.
‘My sister’s guiding principle is: love ’em and leave ’em. Chervil rather prides herself on being a femme fatale.’
‘And what about her current relationship? With Giles Green.’
‘Oh, you heard about that. She seems quite keen at the moment. Early days, though. Let’s see whether he’s still on the scene in a couple of months.’
Jude was interested in this display of sibling rivalry. Chervil had said it was Fennel who monopolized their parents’ attention. Fennel effectively described her sister as their favourite. Something to be explored at some point, perhaps. But not in this session, Jude decided.
‘Going back to your relationships, Fennel . . .?’
‘Huh.’ The girl let out a long, cynical sigh. ‘How many ways do you know of saying the word “disaster”?’
When she had first got her laptop and started exploring its capacities, Carole Seddon had been very sniffy about Google. Sniffiness was in fact her default reaction to anything new. And there didn’t seem something quite natural about being able to access information so easily. How much more civilized it was to consult her shelf of reference books when there was something she needed to check for The Times crossword. Everything she needed was there between hard covers: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Chambers’ Biographical Dictionary, The Oxford Companion to English Literature and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. References to things she couldn’t find in those volumes didn’t deserve to be in any self-respecting crossword.
But the appeal of Google was insidious. And the speed with which it delivered information was undeniably impressive. Increasingly Carole was seduced by the simplicity of keying a word into a search engine rather than flicking back and forth through the pages of a book. Soon she was hooked. If anyone had asked her about her addiction (which nobody did), she would have justified it on the grounds that, now she had a grandchild, it was important to keep up with developments in information technology. But she knew that the excuse was really mere casuistry.
In fact Carole was spending more and more time online. When checking facts, one thing did so easily lead to another. The speed with which data could be sorted appealed to her filing cabinet mind. There seemed to be websites out there to deal with any query one might have. And though she kept piously reminding herself that the answers provided might not always be verifiably correct, the process remained intriguing.
Carole even – and this was something she would not have admitted under torture – used an online crossword dictionary to solve stubbornly intransigent clues in The Times crossword. You just had to fill in the letters you had got, put in full stops for the missing letters and, within seconds, all the words that fitted the sequence would appear. Using the device went against the very spirit of cruciverbalism, but then again it was seductively convenient.
There was no surprise, then, that on the Thursday, the day before the Cornelian Gallery’s Private View, Carole Seddon found herself googling Denzil Willoughby.
Considering that she had never even heard his name a fortnight before, he had a remarkably large presence on the Internet. Spoilt for choice, she decided to start with his official website.
On occasion in her life Carole had begun sentences with the words ‘Now I’m as broad-minded as the next person . . .’ And in Fethering that was probably true. Most residents of the village shared a comparable breadth of mind. But by the standards of the world at large, their gauge was not very broad. And certainly not broad enough to encompass some of the images on Denzil Willoughby’s website.
Now Carole knew that the urges to reproduce and defecate were essential features of the human condition, but she’d never thought that either should have attention drawn to it. And certainly not in the flamboyant way that the artist highlighted them. Not only did he commit the cardinal sin of ‘showing off’, he compounded the felony by being vulgar.
Carole wondered whether Fethering was ready for Denzil Willoughby.
SEVEN
‘The history of art is the history of great talents being discovered in the most unlikely and humble places. And places don’t come much more unlikely or humbler than the Cornelian Gallery in Fethering.’
A few people at the Private View found Giles Green’s words amusing. Denzil Willoughby certainly did. The permanent sneer on his face transmuted effortlessly into a sneering smile. Gray Czesky, the ageing enfant terrible of nearby Smalting, also thought the remark warranted a snigger. So did Chervil Whittaker. From the adoring way she looked at Giles and drank in his words, every one of them was wonderful to her ears.
Her sister did not look as if she would ever be amused by anything, least of all if it came from Giles Green. Jude looked anxiously across the room, sensing Fennel’s mood and wishing it could be appropriate just to go across and enfold the girl in her comforting arms. But she knew that wasn’t the sort of thing to do at a Private View. She was also worried by the grim determination with which Fennel was drinking. Jude knew what m
edication the girl was on and she knew it didn’t mix well with alcohol. That was, assuming Fennel was taking her medication. If she wasn’t, the alcohol still wasn’t going to improve her mood.
Ned and Sheena Whittaker seemed unaware of what their older daughter was doing. They had arrived separately – Fennel in a Mini, her parents in a Mercedes – but had hardly even greeted each other. Perhaps they’d had some kind of row, but Jude thought it more likely that Ned and Sheena just felt relaxed, their anxiety about their elder daughter’s mental health allayed by being at a public event.
They laughed at Giles Green’s words, but it was an uneasy laughter. Jude suddenly realized that the older Whittakers were in fact very shy. Their huge wealth had moved them into circles where they would never have dreamed of going, but they had never lost the gaucherie of their ordinariness. Social events, even as low-key as a Private View at the Cornelian Gallery, were still a strain for them.
The person who was disliking Giles’s remarks most seemed to be his mother. Bonita Green didn’t find the disparagement of her gallery at all funny. She had put a lot of work into building up her business and many of the people at the Private View were from her carefully nurtured local contacts. She didn’t want them to hear the kind of things that her son was saying. Alienating her client base could undo the efforts of many years.
There was a woman standing next to Bonita whom Carole had been introduced to earlier – to her surprise – as Giles Green’s wife, Nikki. She was around forty, tall and slender, with blonde highlights in her hair. In fact, she looked strikingly like a fifteen-year-older version of Chervil Whittaker. Had Giles Green, like so many men, just replaced his spouse with a newer model?
‘Soon to be ex-wife’, Chervil had said, but the woman’s mother-in-law made no mention of any rift in the marriage when making the introduction. Carole doubted whether Nikki Green’s invitation to the Private View had come from her husband. Had Bonita just been stirring things?
And yet there seemed to be no awkwardness between husband and wife, even though Chervil was all over Giles. Maybe they were one of those couples, which Carole read about but rarely encountered, who were genuinely ‘grown-up’ about the failure of their marriage.
Like his mother, few of the local contingent at the Private View were very amused by Giles’s words. It was all right for them to criticize Fethering – indeed, doing so was one of their most popular pastimes – but woe betide the outsider who voiced the tiniest cavil about the place.
Nor did the locals seem very appreciative of the art on display. As Carole knew from his website, Denzil Willoughby’s approach to his work was confrontational. Though too young – and probably not talented enough – to feature in the famous 1997 Sensation exhibition, the artist followed very firmly in the grubby footprints of Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. For Willoughby, all art produced before his own was cosy and bourgeois. In the personal statement on his website he derided the ‘mere representational skills’ of the Old Masters, the ‘shallowness’ of the Impressionists and the ‘glib simplicity’ of most contemporary art.
For the Private View – and perhaps for the duration of the exhibition – all of Bonita Green’s display tables had been moved through to Spider’s workshop. Though the Christmas trees of framing samples kept their place on the back wall, the other paintings, the Gray Czeskys and so on, had given way to Denzil Willoughbys. The only one left on display, Carole noticed with interest, was the slushy snowscape of Piccadilly Circus. She pointed out the oddity to Jude, who was also impressed by the picture’s quality.
The Private View’s main exhibit, which took over much of the central space in the Cornelian Gallery, was what looked like a real medieval cannon on a wooden stand. Every surface of the metal had been plastered over with newspaper photographs of black teenagers. These, according to the catalogue presented to everyone at the Private View, had all been victims of gun crime in English cities. The piece was called Bullet-In #7.
When she and Jude had arrived for the Private View – she would have never entered on her own – Carole had looked at the decorated cannon in quiet disbelief. Then she had read in the catalogue that the work ‘reflected the fragmentation of a disjointed society in which the machismo of disaffected youth bigs up the potent phallicism of firearms.’ When she saw the price being asked for the work on the sheet that they had been given with their catalogues, she assumed the wrong number of noughts had been printed.
After the first shock, Carole had murmured to Jude, ‘I can’t somehow see that in my front room, can you?’
The neighbour had giggled. The thought of Bullet-In #7 in any Fethering front room was unlikely. The idea of it amidst the paranoid neatness of High Tor attained new levels of incongruity.
‘Still,’ Carole went on, ‘full marks for effort, I suppose. Just building a cannon that size must’ve taken hours.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Before Carole could stop her, Jude had rapped against the artwork with her knuckles and been rewarded by a hollow sound. ‘Fibreglass. He bought it ready-made.’
‘But where would you buy a ready-made fibreglass cannon?’
‘Prop-maker. Lots of stuff like that gets built for television and movies.’
‘So if Denzil Willoughby didn’t even make the cannon, where is the art in what he’s done? He’s just bought something and put it on show with his name attached.’
‘Ah, no. When he bought it, the cannon didn’t have photos of murdered black kids on it.’
‘And is that what makes it a work of art?’
‘Of course it is. Carole, you might come across a fibreglass model of a medieval cannon . . .’
‘It doesn’t happen very often to me in Fethering,’ said her neighbour sniffily.
‘No, but if you were to come across one, then you might say to yourself, “Oh, look, there’s a fibreglass model of a medieval cannon” and think no more about it. You wouldn’t have the vision to cover it with pictures of teenage victims of gun crime.’
‘No, I certainly wouldn’t.’
‘But Denzil Willoughby did have that vision. Or “concept”, if you prefer.’
‘So rubbish like this is “conceptual art”, is it?’
‘I guess so. Denzil Willoughby thought of the concept of juxtaposing a medieval cannon with images of murdered black teenagers.’
‘And is that what makes it a work of art?’ Carole repeated.
‘I’m sure he’d say it was.’
‘But what do you think?’
Jude shrugged. ‘If you can say something’s a work of art, and get people to hand over money to possess it as a work of art . . . then I guess it’s a work of art.’
‘Huh. The day you catch me frittering my money away on something like that, Jude, you have my full permission to have me certified.’
‘If that moment ever comes, I can assure you I will,’ said Jude with a twinkle. She looked round at the other exhibits, most of which were actually in frames and hanging from the gallery’s walls. ‘Maybe you could see some of these fitting in better in High Tor . . .?’
She had expected this would prompt another ‘Huh’, and she wasn’t disappointed. The actual frames were the only parts of Denzil Willoughby’s smaller works that Fethering residents would have recognized as art. The contents of those frames were startling and ugly. In keeping with the GUN CULTURE theme, the images were composed of weaponry parts; a rifle bolt here, a trigger there, the butt of a pistol, a sawn-off shotgun barrel. Mixed with these oddments of metal were more photographs, whose highly coloured violence was too graphic ever to have appeared in newspapers. And the components within the frames were set on misshapen blocks of shiny blood red, a brain-like porridgy white and a brown that reminded Carole of things she didn’t want to think about too deeply.
Needless to say, these creations all had titles like Butt-Naked #3, Chamber Pot-Shot #12 and Telescopic Site-Specific #9. And the prices on the printed sheet were no less ridiculous than the one quoted for Bullet-In #7.
When Giles finished his introduction, the applause he received was surprisingly warm. Though the denizens of Fethering had resented his disparagement of their village, they were basically all well-brought-up middle-class people. And Bonita Green was, after all, one of their own. It wouldn’t do to appear stand-offish towards her son. Also, the wine and very good nibbles catered by the Crown and Anchor were free. Common politeness in Fethering dictated that the mouths of gift horses were never to be examined too closely.
Giles Green raised his hands to quell the applause. ‘Anyway, you haven’t come here this evening to listen to me. I know you’d much rather hear from the creative genius whose stimulating and challenging work is all around us here at the Cornelian Gallery – Denzil Willoughby!’
Though Giles was smartly dressed in one of his City suits, the artist looked, to Carole Seddon’s eyes, extremely scruffy. Maybe it went against the creed of his calling, but she thought he could have made a bit of an effort.
Denzil Willoughby was probably fortyish, the same kind of age as Giles Green, though it was hard to tell. He wore a large knitted woollen hat, which even Carole knew would be described as Rastafarian. From the back of it hung down some strands of beige dreadlocks, looking like greasy string from an abandoned parcel. Now, Carole Seddon had never been a great fan of dreadlocks, but if the style was worn by people of Afro-Caribbean background, then fine, that was part of their cultural heritage. Dreadlocks, however, on white Englishmen looked to her ridiculous, ugly and unhygienic. She thanked the Lord that her son had never gone through a rebellious phase during which he had sported dreadlocks. Though when she came to think about it, she realized that Stephen had never gone through a rebellious phase sporting anything.