The Delaunay wasn’t what I would have chosen for a meeting either – too big, too noisy – but at least it wasn’t far from my office, and I could have a croissant to dunk in my coffee. I normally don’t eat breakfast at all. In theory, I run first thing in the morning, although people who really run might take issue with that verb when applied to my early-morning outings. And when that’s over, it’s just a scramble to get to work. I don’t have time for food too. But if I had to be rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, I’d be hungry by seven, and besides, licence to play with your food is never something to be passed up.
So I was moderately cheerful by the time I got to the restaurant. The panellists were a woman from a new City concert and theatre space, an art-video producer, and a curator from a museum in Glasgow, who was not, therefore, going to be at this planning session. And, I was pleased to remember, Jim Reynolds, the installation designer Alex had mentioned to me the day before. He’d sounded, via Alex, no more enthusiastic than I was, which made me like him without ever having spoken to him.
Enthusiastic or not, he was already there when I arrived at ten to seven, a big red-headed man in carefully dressed-down designer scruffies. He waved away my comment on his promptness by saying he lived only five minutes away. I think if that were the case I would have had my first coffee quietly at home. But not Jim, it appeared. He was already halfway down a cafetière. I ‘borrowed’ some of his and we ordered a fresh pot.
‘Do you know any of the others?’ I asked.
‘I know Janey, the video producer. I worked with her once. The concert-venue woman, what’s her name, Willa Phillips, not at all. I think she’s only just moved into this job, and it seems like she’s using the committee, and the panel, as a way of networking.’ I approved of the way he said ‘networking’, as though he’d turned over a rock and found a whole bunch of slugs. I paused, wondering why I thought networking was such a bad thing. Maybe as long as you networked without wanting to do it, it was fine, while consciously setting out to make connections for the sake of career advancement was shabby? It was still unfair of me, but less unfair than before. I decided to drop it before I’d have to accept that I was a total bitch. Seven in the morning was no time for that sort of self-discovery.
Jim brought me back to the present. ‘Do we know what we want out of this panel?’
I was clear. ‘I want to not look like we’ve been wasting our time. Anything over and above that is a bonus.’ I have no idea what made me be so honest, but it seemed the right path to take.
It was. Jim relaxed back in his chair and laughed, uninhibited and strong. Several tables looked across at us to see who was having fun at this time of day. Either you were working, their expressions said, or you should stay at home. Having fun was not on the agenda until they got to ‘Any Other Business’ that evening.
I was on mine now. Jim kept laughing gently. ‘Good to have ambitions.’
I nodded seriously. ‘Mine are small, but perfectly formed.’ We were united, having somehow silently agreed we were allies. Which was good, because the other two now appeared, and I didn’t think I would repeat my remark to either of them. They were taking this very seriously. Janey seemed pleasant, and more on my wavelength, but video-art is not something that is ever going to make money. She needed to find regular subsidies, and the panel was a means to that end. As to Willa, I decided in ten seconds flat that Jim had read her correctly. This was career-advancement time. Fine with me. If she needed this, she could do the bulk of the work. Jim and I executed a deft pincer-movement, and it ended up that yes, to her surprise she found she would be taking on the bulk of the planning.
By eight, therefore, we were back on the street. Jim’s office was in Soho, so we walked together.
We talked about Alex, as the only person we knew in common. ‘Where did you meet?’ I asked.
‘I did some work for him when I was first starting out. He hired me to redesign one of your colophons.’ Colophons are the little publisher’s logos that go on the book spines. No one except publishers ever looks at them, but we treat them like small pets, lavishing time and attention and money on them, grooming them, giving them new looks, as though the rest of the world cares.
‘One we have now?’
He nodded. ‘When you started your new paperback imprint.’
‘Cool. It’s sort of geeky of me, but I love that stuff.’
He looked down at me. ‘Geeky? That’s my life you’re calling geeky, there.’
‘Oops. Sorry.’ I smiled sunnily to show I wasn’t sorry at all. ‘I worked for Tetrarch when I was first starting out, and one of my jobs was bringing a bunch of old books back into print, so I spent a lot of time looking at the colophons they’d had, deciding which needed to be revamped and which could be treated as “heritage”. It was fun.’
‘It is, but unless you’re doing it for huge corporations, where thirty-seven committees get involved, there’s no way of earning a living at it, so we dropped it years ago.’
‘Who’s “we”? Do you work for a museum now?’
‘No, I have two partners, and we do projects on contract. They mostly do corporate work, trade fairs or company headquarters. They make the money, I get us the publicity and kudos, because I’m the museum guy.’
‘So what are you working on at the moment, museum guy?’
‘My big project is the Stevenson retrospective at the Tate. We’re doing the installation, and also designing and producing the tie-in goods they sell in the shop.’
There was no particular reason I shouldn’t hear Stevenson’s name twice in two days. Lucy had told me there was a big exhibition coming up, Jim was an exhibition designer. If Frank hadn’t died, this would just have been the sort of coincidence where everybody said, Gosh, what a small world. But Frank had died.
‘I heard about the exhibition just last night,’ I said. ‘From the niece of Stevenson’s dealer.’
‘From Lucy?’ he said quickly. He saw my surprise, and added, ‘She’s been working on the show with the gallery, and we’ve become quite friendly.’ He flushed slightly, and I assumed that ‘friendly’ encompassed more than having coffee together. Or even a gentle game of dominoes. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as he slowly turned even redder, and decided that dominoes was definitely not on the list of what he and Lucy were doing together.
‘She seems very nice,’ appeared to be a suitably bland response, so I made it.
‘She is,’ he said, as though I’d argued. When I looked startled he backed off and shrugged. ‘Her uncle doesn’t like me.’
‘Why not? You seem likeable to me.’ He was a bit older than Lucy, but not enough to be unusual, he had his own company, the Tate thought enough of his abilities to employ him. ‘Do you have a history of being unkind to small, furry animals, or is it that weekly strip poker game with the Bishop of Durham’s gang that bothered him?’
Jim grinned. ‘The Bishop of Durham’s strip poker night remains an unfulfilled ambition.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘One day …’ Then he was serious. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t—’ He winced. ‘Why he didn’t like me, and I feel terrible now. Everything was fine at first, so I must have said something, or done something, but I have no idea what. And then he decided he didn’t like our work, either.’
‘Your installation?’
He frowned. ‘No, that was approved a long time ago, and anyway, even if he didn’t like it, that’s the Tate’s side of things. This was only a few weeks ago. We’d come up with ideas for souvenirs for the shop which the Tate loved. And God knows, getting the Tate to love anything is a struggle in itself.’ He shook his head at the follies of art institutions. ‘We’d designed the usual things, mugs, posters, you know?’ I did. ‘Then, because Stevenson used so many typographic elements, we thought it would be fun to do something with those. We chose a bunch of collages which had book jackets in them, and we reproduced the jackets to wrap around pads, so you had notebooks with the collage on them, on which
you could see the book jacket, in which, you know, a Russian-doll thing of a reproduction in a reproduction.’
‘Sounds fun.’ Fun might be pushing it, but it sounded harmless enough.
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? But Merriam–Compton kicked up this huge fuss, said we were sullying Stevenson’s reputation, making him look like he was just a graphic designer. Which is absurd, but they have a lot of influence with the estate, and so we had to agree not to do them.’
‘So mugs equal artistic integrity, notepads equal commercial exploitation?’
He laughed, but he was angry too. ‘Apparently so. Anyway, I ended up only communicating with the gallery through Lucy. And now Lucy’s spending most of her time at Compton’s house, but it feels wrong to go there now he’s dead when I know he wouldn’t have wanted me there when he was alive. So I’d feel bad visiting. And I feel bad not visiting.’
‘Why don’t you meet her nearby? It’ll get her out of the house for a few hours, and you can think of it as your Boy Scout daily act of kindness.’
‘That’s a really good idea. Thank you.’ He looked around vaguely, like I was leading him astray. Which I was, because he stopped suddenly. ‘Damn. I’ve walked past my office. I’ll be in touch about the panel. And thanks for the suggestion. Very slick.’ And he went back to a door nestled beside a dim-sum restaurant and was gone.
In my entire life, no one has ever suggested I am slick. I preened. And tripped over the kerb.
At lunchtime Jake texted to say he’d be home – by which he meant my home – around seven. We tended to spend most of our time at my place, for two reasons. One, his flat in Hammersmith was much further from the Tube than mine was, and from there to my office needed two changes, instead of being on a direct line. Jake drove to work, so it didn’t make much difference to him. And two, the first time I’d seen his flat, I’d looked around the nice cookie-cutter sitting room without a single personal possession on display and asked brightly, ‘When did you move in?’ The conversation went downhill after he said, ‘Eight years ago.’
As I said, Jake’s very intuitive, good at reading people, but in many ways he’s, well, he’s just such a guy. I’m not starting a women-nest-men-live-in-caves rant, but he moved into this place after his divorce. His wife moved back to Lisbon with their son, and while Tonio came to visit once, sometimes twice a year, his was the only room that looked as if it hadn’t been designed by the division at IKEA that creates room displays for their catalogues. No, it was worse than that. The IKEA people would have added fake photos of Auntie Mavis, or some ethnic rugs, or paintings on the walls. This place looked like it was ready to let out on short-term rental from an agency. There was some clutter, sure: books, magazines, those random odds and ends you never need until the day after you throw them away. But that was all. And so we mostly hung out at my flat. At least there was some colour there, and I didn’t fear I’d been struck with some dread neurological condition that made me only see beige every time I walked in the front door. All right, so maybe I was doing the men-live-in-caves rant. Beige caves. Impersonal beige caves. My point is, that when Jake said he’d see me at home, he meant my place.
I got back with an hour to spare, so I put the makings of a stew together and stuck it in the oven. I could have had a drink and read, but I felt restless. I went up to see my top-floor neighbour instead.
I live in a Victorian house that was converted into three flats a long time ago. I live on the ground floor, and above me are a couple of actors named Kay and Anthony Lewis, and their five-year-old son Bim. Bim’s real name is Timothy, but Bim was what he called himself when he first learnt to speak, and it suits him – he’s gregarious and outgoing, and it’s easy to imagine him bim-bam banging an imaginary drum as he marches along. Above the Lewises was Mr Rudiger. I knew his first name now – Pavel – but I’d never contemplated using it. In the nearly twenty years I’d lived here, I’d seen him exactly twice. And then, a few months ago, my flat had been broken into, and he’d put me up for the night. And we became friends.
Mr Rudiger doesn’t go out. By that that I don’t mean he mostly stays at home. I mean, he doesn’t go out. At crisis point, those months ago, he’d left the house once, and after that he very occasionally came down to my flat for coffee or supper. Apart from that he never crosses his threshold. His daughter brings him groceries and any other essentials once a week, and as I see the post I know that the advent of internet shopping has meant he isn’t as reliant on her as he used to be. And now I know him better, I often exchange his books at the library, or supplement his daughter’s shopping runs with the odd thing from the market.
Not that I’m boasting. I’m not a heaven-sent Lady Bountiful, scattering sweetness and light. If I were, it wouldn’t have taken me nearly twenty years to meet him, or to discover he had been a hugely influential architect in the 1960s and early 1970s, but had retired, no one knew why, when he was still young. I still don’t know why, and I wouldn’t dream of asking. I think of us as friends, but he is thirty years older than I am, and his manner is very formal – as I said, I never even use his first name. As far as I’m concerned, ‘Mr’ is his first name.
I tapped on his door, and when he answered, asked if he’d like to come down for a drink. That’s the polite code we’ve devised for ‘I thought I’d see if you’d like some company, and if you have the inclination – I assume he has the time – I’d be happy to come in and visit for a while’. That evening, as he mostly does when I go up, he stepped back and gestured me in, saying he was about to open a bottle.
His flat couldn’t be more different from mine if we’d set out to do it intentionally. Despite his career as a modernist architect (raw concrete was his thing), the place looks like something from Hansel and Gretel – all Central European dark wood, that is, not that it’s the home of a starving woodcutter and his family. The floors are polished dark wood, the furniture is dark wood and dark upholstery, and then red rugs and curtains warm everything up. It’s like a very comfortable womb, if the womb had been decorated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s heyday.
Mr Rudiger poured us some wine, and we discussed household matters – did the hall need repainting, and would Anthony have time to hack back the ivy soon, and wasn’t Bim getting big, basically just catching up on the week or so since we’d last seen each other. Then I filled him in on Aidan and Frank, which, I realised once I began to talk, was why I’d come up. Mr Rudiger was a terrific listener, always interested, always ready to offer an opinion, but always, somehow, keeping himself apart. The world operated like television for him: it was a one-way street, and he didn’t participate. Since he was not invested in the outcome, everything he said sounded sensibly impartial. Helena told me what to do. Mr Rudiger somehow told me what I already knew I ought to be doing.
‘I’m waiting for Jake to get home, and then I’ll tell him,’ I finished.
Mr Rudiger cocked his head. ‘He’s home.’
‘He is?’ I hadn’t heard the door.
‘About ten minutes ago, but I wanted the end of the story first.’
That was slightly uncanny, and made me wonder how much noise I made when I got home. ‘I’d better go and get it over with then.’ I put my glass down.
‘Do you want to ask him up here?’ He smiled at me gently in the way he had, as if someone was telling him a good joke just out of my hearing. I knew, and he knew that I knew, that if I told Jake in front of Mr Rudiger, Jake couldn’t get cross with me for being involved. And, really, I didn’t see how I could help being involved, I whined to myself. I hadn’t become friends with Aidan twenty years ago in the expectation that his business partner would die in an unexplained fashion two decades later. And I hadn’t chosen to sit on this sodding arts panel in the expectation that a fellow panellist would be jumping said business partner’s niece. In fact, none of this was my fault, and I was becoming quite self-righteously outraged by Jake’s potential crossness.
Mr Rudiger’s smile broadened. They weren’
t telling jokes out of earshot now, but right here in the room. I grinned back at him, since we both knew what I’d been thinking.
‘Good idea,’ I said, and I texted down, Dinner won’t be ready till 8.30 earliest. Mr R says would you like to come up for a drink?
Mr Rudiger looked amused again. ‘Do you text from room to room?’
I was appalled. ‘No!’ I hesitated. ‘Hardly ever.’ My tone was grudging.
He laughed again, and moved to the door, hearing Jake on the stairs before I did. I waited in the sitting room while the two men greeted each other. I needed to work out exactly what I was going to say, and until that moment I’d successfully managed to avoid thinking about it at all.
When they sat down, I let Jake take his first mouthful of wine before starting. I told him about Lucy, and the gallery representing Stevenson, who had recently reappeared as another potential suicide. As Helena had guessed, if Jake had seen the news of the finding of Stevenson’s body, he hadn’t remembered it. And as I had guessed, he was not happy to hear about it from me.
He rubbed his head and stared at me angrily, as though I’d done it to spite him. ‘You couldn’t have told me this morning, or last night, when I would have had time to get moving on this, send some emails to the States?’ Then he looked away. Not cross now, just thinking out what to do. He stood. ‘I’ll make some calls, send some emails. I’ll need an hour before dinner.’ Even I could interpret the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you click to Mr Rudiger’s front door.
That was interesting. He was upset that I was involved, which I had expected, but he didn’t think what I had told him was worth going back to the office for, which I hadn’t. Or perhaps he just had a mad passion for my lamb stew.
I shared this possibility with Mr Rudiger, who laughed out loud. I guess my stew isn’t as good as I think it is.
A Bed of Scorpions Page 6