A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  Inside, the house was not big – it was in a mews, after all – but it opened up behind the front door like some sort of spaceship that does interesting things with a fifth dimension. The sitting room occupied the bulk of the ground floor, taking in a glassed-in extension at the back and giving plenty of space for two sitting areas, as well as a dining area next to a door that I assumed led to the kitchen. The style, however, wasn’t remotely Architectural Digest, where the photographs always suggest that no one lives there – have you ever seen a room in a designer magazine that contained a toothbrush, or even a dog’s bowl? Frank and Toby’s house was clearly lived in. For the owner of a gallery where the display areas were white, with discreet touches of white, and white for contrast, his place was a riot of colour, with a bunch of different coloured rugs and bright modernist printed fabrics.

  There were a dozen people or so milling about, some keeping Toby company in the main room, others I could see through the door into the kitchen, preparing food. I was quickly filled in. Toby’s friends had set up a rota, and a changing group would take turns to bring food, try and make Toby eat a bit, and generally keep an eye on him. I agreed at once to join in. I wasn’t a close friend, but I was an old one, and one look at Toby said he was only hanging on by a thread.

  I went over to kiss him hello, and say those pointless things you say when someone dies. I’ve never worked out whether the banality and general uselessness of the phrases are worse than not saying anything at all. But what else is there? How are you? The answer to that was, obviously, Crap. How are things? Worse. What’s coming up in the future? I’m planning a funeral.

  So I did the I’m-so-sorry-and-please-let-me-know-if-there’s-something-I-can-do thing. Toby’s eyes were bloodshot, and he stared at a corner of the rug and didn’t look up even when someone spoke directly to him. If the words were repeated a few times, he’d answer, but slowly, like he was waiting out an echo. There was a cup of tea beside him, but it had scum on the surface, and must have been there for hours. He looked far more like someone who had lost his life partner than someone who had been on the verge of splitting from a violent relationship. But then, how would I know? How would anyone?

  I’m ashamed to say that after a few minutes I fled to the kitchen. I know, no one else was having a good time either, and they were gritting it out. I didn’t. In the kitchen I paused to take stock. The room must have been an addition the original house, with a glass roof, and two of the four walls entirely glass. Here you could see the modernist gallery-owner’s hand: white walls, white cupboards, white table. They’d gone colour-crazy out by putting in a beige floor, but otherwise the room could have been an extension to their gallery space. I thought of that dark body in the dark room again, and shivered. Which was no help. A couple of people were taking food out of plastic boxes and laying it out on plates. I saw some lettuce and salad vegetables and hunted for a chopping board. I could pretend I was being helpful, and avoid having to interact.

  No such luck. A small, slight girl with hair so blonde it was almost white, came over and watched me for a moment, then produced a jar and started making vinaigrette beside me. I looked again out of the corner of my eye and revised upwards. Not a girl, maybe twenty or so. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and didn’t look like she’d come from work. Apart from her startling hair, she was pretty rather than beautiful, but the hair would make anyone look twice. And then look again.

  She smiled tentatively.

  ‘I’m Sam,’ I said, putting down the knife and holding out my hand.

  ‘Sam? Aidan’s friend?’

  I don’t think of myself that way, but OK. I nodded. ‘And you’re …’ I prompted.

  She blushed. ‘I’m Lucy. Frank’s niece.’

  She was the one Aidan had mentioned, the one who had worked in the gallery. ‘I’m sorry about Frank,’ I said. I’d said it a dozen times now, and it still never began to sound even halfway adequate.

  She shrugged and looked down. Hadn’t yet worked out what the conventional response was.

  ‘You must have been close. Aidan said you worked with them, and they hoped you’d continue.’

  She looked up at that, as if she hadn’t been sure. Maybe she hadn’t. Frank wasn’t very chatty. ‘I’d like to, but I’ve got another year at university. And now …’ She chewed at her lip and ducked her head, shaking the salad dressing ferociously.

  I tried moving on to something more neutral. ‘Which bit of art dealing do you like? Selling, or the acquisitions?’

  She was definite. ‘The shows. Selling is what I’d do because you have to be able to do it to be able to show, but it’s the idea of the show, putting the works together so that they say something, you know?’

  I nodded. I felt like that about editing. But, ‘Wouldn’t there be more scope for that in a museum?’

  She looked mutinous. This was, apparently, a point that had already been made. ‘I’d need a PhD to be a curator, another three years at least, maybe more. And then I’d only be hired as a junior. It would be years before I could put on a show the way I wanted to.’ She looked at me defiantly, waiting for an argument. Which I had no intention of offering. ‘Absolutely. I see that. You might have a lesser range at a gallery – the artists the gallery represents, and mostly only what they’re doing now – but the hierarchy isn’t there. Or other curators eyeing up the space for their own areas of expertise.’

  She looked grateful that I understood, and expanded a little. ‘Frank and Aidan said I could do a summer show, when the gallery is quiet, with some of the pieces they own.’ She must have seen I wasn’t following, because she explained, enjoying the chance to display her expertise. ‘Galleries usually don’t own the work they show. The artist owns it, the gallery shows it, and gets a commission when they sell it. Sometimes they buy and sell on their own – maybe from an auction if they have a client who is looking for work by that artist, for example. But every gallery also ends up with works that they own. They buy works by artists they represent when they appear on the market, to keep the prices up, or to build up for the future when the prices will have risen. Or if they buy an artist’s estate, the artist probably owned paintings by other artists, and they come too. Or they just buy something thinking they can sell it, and then they can’t.’

  She stopped, flustered by the blizzard of information she’d produced, but I looked encouraging. It was interesting, and anyway, it meant I didn’t have to go out and mingle. I’m terrible at talking to strangers, so I nodded encouragingly, hoping she’d go on. Bless her, she did. ‘Merriam–Compton has some great pieces that never get seen, and Frank said I could do a little show of some of them. The summer shows never sell much – buyers are away, the art fairs take the business – so I think he was glad to have something that would cost nothing to mount, and might even generate some cash flow.’

  If I didn’t keep her motoring along, I might have to go and sit with Toby again. ‘What were you planning?’

  ‘Frank and Aidan thought it would be good if I did something with their Stevensons, so we could pick up some of the publicity the Tate is bound to get with their big retrospective.’

  I hadn’t known there was going to be a Stevenson show at the Tate. That would be fun. I loved pop art, and I thought Stevenson’s collages were great, although I’d seen most of them in books, not in real life. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the exhibition. Then I noticed Lucy’s phrasing. ‘“Their” Stevensons? Do they have lots?’

  She looked at me curiously, then shrugged. ‘I suppose there’s no reason you should know. Merriam–Compton are his dealers.’

  I looked around again and caught sight of Toby still staring at the carpet. So back to Lucy. I tried to think of something interesting to say, but my tank was empty. I made a stretch. ‘I love his work, especially the book ones.’

  She looked blank.

  ‘There’s no reason for me to know that Merriam–Compton represent Stevenson, and there’s no reason for you to know I�
�m an editor. But that’s why I like those collages he did with pages from books, or the covers. I know it’s a bit tragic, but I actually read the pages he includes – you know, which Dostoyevsky novel is this taken from, and oh look, I have the same edition of The Naked Lunch.’

  She didn’t quite back away from me, but I could tell she thought I was beyond weird. Oh well. I’d chopped enough vegetables to keep an entire commune fed for a season. I could move away without seeming rude. I wiped my hands on a tea towel and looked around for a bowl to put them in. I didn’t see a bowl, but I did see that Aidan had arrived, and he was standing in the doorway attempting to catch my eye. I summed up, as though we’d had a meaningful conversation: ‘That sounds like a great plan,’ leaving whatever ‘that’ might be carefully unspecified. ‘They’d be mad not to want you to go ahead.’ Then I mumbled the usual ‘see you later’ and set off towards Aidan. He had retreated to the sunroom at the back, which looked as if it was barely used. There was a desk and a chair, a bench loaded with old newspapers and magazines, and not much else. Aidan was sitting at the desk, flipping through two vast piles of mail. I pushed the newspapers on the floor and sat on the bench.

  ‘This is office post,’ he said, as though he needed to excuse himself to me.

  I nodded and waited. He finally looked up. ‘I wanted to ask you if your policeman had said anything.’

  I swallowed a smart-arse response – ‘my’ policeman? – and just shook my head. ‘He repeated pretty much what you told me at lunch: unexplained death, and they’re investigating.’

  Aidan pushed a second pile of papers off the bench and sat down beside me, reaching for my hand. He didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t have anything to say, so we sat there quietly.

  I wasn’t thinking of anything much, when Lucy’s plans ran through my head. I didn’t think I’d jumped, but I must have.

  Aidan looked at me.

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing. A work thing I’d forgotten.’ Should I tell him? Jake? This was exactly what I’d foreseen at the start. Whose side was I on?

  I was home by ten, and I spent half an hour online reading back issues of the New York Times. Then I phoned Helena. If she’d rung me at that hour, I’d have been furious, and more than halfway to being asleep. With my mother, I’d be lucky to find her home. She was, though, which was a relief.

  ‘I was at Toby’s, and I was talking to his niece, the one who works in the gallery. She says they represent Edward Stevenson.’

  My mother was as infuriatingly calm as she always is. ‘Yes, I think I knew that. And?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the papers last month?’

  There was a silence. That was unusual. Then, even more unusual, she sounded like me. ‘Goodness.’

  I was too anxious even to think of mimicking her from earlier. ‘The question is, what do I do with this information?’

  Helena knows me well. ‘Let’s just revise first. I assume you’ve just checked the reports.’

  ‘I did. And they’re creepily familiar.’

  Helena didn’t have any truck with creepiness. Just the facts, m’lud.

  So I gathered myself. ‘The first newspaper report I could see was in May. A family in Vermont decided to convert their unfinished basement into a family room. When the builders took out an old boiler, they found a skeleton behind a partition wall. There was a shotgun and a suicide note beside it. Dental records identified the remains as those of Edward Stevenson, who had lived there until 1993. But that’s where the trouble seems to have begun.’

  ‘Go on.’

  I wouldn’t be able to swear it, but I was sure Helena was making notes. So I pulled up the articles I’d bookmarked. ‘Stevenson vanished in 1993. He wrote a letter to his wife saying he was leaving her and his family and going to join an ashram in India.’ I double-checked the date. ‘An ashram, in 1993? That’s what it says. Anyway, at the time everyone believed it. He’d complained a lot about how commercialised the art world had become, he was interested in Eastern religions, and so on.’ It sounded woolly to me, but it hadn’t to his wife. At the inquest her lawyer said she had never even considered that the letter might have been untrue. ‘The letter had said he’d be in touch, but when they didn’t hear from him, after a few weeks they hired detectives, who searched in India, and then everywhere else. Even Cardiff, which was where he was from originally. But there was no trace. Until this past May, when his skeleton showed up.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘There’s a report from the inquest. The formal identification. The coroner’s report, which says that, as far as can be seen after twenty-odd years, the wound in the skull was not inconsistent with the shotgun beside him. Then the note found with the body was reprinted.’ I read out: ‘I am sorry. I have recently been informed that I have a terminal illness that will conclude my life painfully within half a year. I have chosen this way to die, in order to spare us all distress.’

  I paused. Helena was definitely writing. Then I continued. ‘But it was typed, with no signature. After all this time, the typewriter he used is long gone, although they compared the note to other letters typed on that machine, and they match. The man who had been the family doctor – he was elderly, and is now retired, but seemed from the reports to be absolutely compos – testified. He said he’d checked his records, and that Stevenson had had a check-up two months before he vanished, and he had no illness of any sort. The police said they were checking to see if Stevenson had seen any other doctors, but the inquest was adjourned, and that’s where the newspaper reports stop. After that there’s just loads of stuff about his importance as a Pop artist in the 60s and 70s, and even more about ashrams, or suicide, or ashrams and suicide. But no information. There’s nothing except speculation. I don’t think the inquest was ever resumed: there’s nothing in the big US papers, and I think there would have been.’

  Helena made an affirmative grunt. She was still treating it, and me, like a legal deposition.

  I was used to it, and waited. When I thought she’d finished, I summarised. (OK, I might not make notes, but I like things to be neat too.) ‘So, an artist may, or may not, have shot himself twenty years ago, leaving a typed, unsigned note. A month after his body is discovered, his dealer may, or may not, have shot himself, leaving a typed, unsigned note. Mother, what do I do? Normally …’ It worried me that I thought there was something I’d normally do when encountering violent death, but I didn’t have the leftover brain-power to think about it now. ‘Normally, I’d tell Jake. I doubt very much that he’ll think it’s coincidence, or at least, he’ll think it’s a coincidence worth investigating. But Aidan …’ I trailed away miserably.

  No trailing away for Helena. ‘You need to tell him,’ she said crisply. My mother drives me crazy because she is always so certain about everything. I often think how amazing it would be to be as certain about one thing – any one thing – as she is about everything. Today I was just relieved she was making up my mind for me.

  ‘Do you think maybe he already knows? He might not have told me.’ I was wheedling.

  Helena didn’t play games. ‘It’s extremely unlikely, and you know it, Sam. The discovery of Stevenson’s body was news in the arts pages, and a month ago. Merriam–Compton represent Stevenson, but they also represent – what, three or four dozen other artists? Even if, for some reason, the police are going through the lists of the gallery’s artists – and it would be extremely unlikely given the very slim evidence unless an inquest rules that it requires further investigation – even then, there would be nothing to make them pay attention to that one name. Apart from anything else, it’s a fairly common and unmemorable one.’ Her tone sharpened. ‘They haven’t got the Art Fraud team in, have they?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Jake didn’t say. But he didn’t say they didn’t. It sounded as if they were thinking more along the lines of financial problems, not fraud.’

  ‘Then you need to tell him.’

  Welcome to the black-and-white worl
d of Helena Clair. Just to maintain some sense of my own independence, I saluted the phone as I hung up.

  I would tell him. But I’d wait until I saw him, which wasn’t going to be tonight. A problem delayed is a problem, well, delayed so I can worry about it some more. Lip-gnawing anxiety is my major skill-set. Everyone’s got to be good at something.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN BETWEEN WORRYING about what I was going to tell Jake, I spent an hour working on my presentation for the CultCo panel, before admitting finally that I couldn’t concentrate. But Celia Stein had given me some good information, and I merged it with what I already had, figuring I could probably make it last for ten of my twenty-minute presentation. I’d agreed to meet the other panel members for breakfast the following morning, to map out how we wanted the seminar to run. At least now I’d be able to say I was halfway there.

  The difference between publishing and the quasi-governmental, quasi-business world of arts charities came home to me when my alarm went off at half-past five. I’m an early riser, but that was plain silly. I’d agreed to breakfast, thinking it would be at eight, eight-thirty-ish. I hoped I didn’t visibly pale when they agreed on seven as though it were routine, but I bet I did. Because, frankly, who knew that there were two half-past fives in the day?

  Things began to look up once I got myself out the door. There was only a pale, watery sun, but at that hour of the morning it seemed hopeful, and full of promise, rather than just ineffectual. And before the traffic really started moving, the scents of the early summer blossom in the front gardens lay like a blanket on the air. I walked along, ticking off my neighbours’ wisteria and jasmine, sniffing the air ferociously as I passed each one. I was happy, even though I probably looked like a junkie ready for her next fix.