Given Time

by Anthony Burn

  She looked both hurt and taken aback. ‘Don’t you like any of it?’

  ‘You know I do. I love all of it. There isn’t a single piece in the gallery I wouldn’t buy. I’d have them all if I could, but you’d just accuse me of indulging you.’

  ‘It would be pretty self-defeating,’ she agreed. ‘So, if you would buy them, why won’t anyone else? I mean, they’re not even looking at them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised by her last assertion.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed? When did you last see someone go to the upper floor, or sit on one of the sofas? Very few even go beyond the desk, and I’ve only given out about six glasses of wine since we opened. Most of them just look at the first few paintings, and then walk out again.’

  ‘So do you think we should change them around? Perhaps it’s the ones near the entrance that are putting people off,’ I said, even though I didn’t believe it. In my opinion, some of the best work was at the front of the gallery.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about that, but I’ve sold similar works by those artists at my last place, and in any event, the people who have gone further inside still haven’t bought anything.’

  ‘What did Christa McKenzie think of the collection?’ I asked.

  ‘She thought they were really good. There were several that she said she loved, and I don’t think she was lying. She had no reason to. I totally respect her judgement.’

  ‘Well if it’s not the art, and it’s not the gallery…’

  ‘Then it must be me.’

  I couldn’t keep the frustration from my voice. ‘That’s enough of that. It’s not you. It’s got to be something we’ve overlooked or haven’t done. Do you think the prices are too high?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They’re pretty much the same as we charged in Covent Garden, and we didn’t have a problem there.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a sale for a few days and see if we do any better.’

  She looked as reluctant as I felt. ‘I don’t know, Kee. Why would prices need to be cheaper in Mayfair?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, it seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Listen, love, we’re going to work this out. I don’t know how yet, but I won’t keep saying it’s early days. Starting tomorrow, I’ll work on looking for an answer. There will be one. I promise.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘There will be. It’s my new job, and I won’t stop until I’ve worked it out.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve let you down.’

  ‘Lauren, stop it,’ I said with no small hint of exasperation. ‘You could never let me down. You’re both brilliant and gorgeous.’

  She smiled and kissed me, so I pulled her into my arms, feeling her keen response as my passion increased. After several intense minutes, I rolled on top and entered her. She gave herself eagerly to begin with, but then the fire in her eyes faded as her worry got the better of her emotions. I was close to finishing so I pressed on despite her waning intensity, but as her ardour subsided, so did my arousal.

  I hit her without thinking.

  It was enough to bring me to a climax immediately, but I gained no pleasure from it. In an instant her expression went from bewilderment through outrage to pain, as the bottom fell out of her world and her life crashed all around her. I pulled free and she curled into a foetal position, her bedraggled hair sticking to her wet face while she howled like a child. I knelt above her, unable to believe I’d been capable of hurting her. I tried to console her, but she screamed at my touch.

  Twenty-one

  I didn’t have time to think about what I’d done. My only concern was to stop her pain as soon as possible, so I raced to the kitchen with her cries reverberating around the apartment and ringing in my ears. I found the device and ran back to the bathroom before hurriedly turning the time to when I had been in the shower. Her wailing stopped, and was replaced by the gentle sound of water running into the empty tray. I threw the gadget into the back of the bathroom cabinet and stepped into the cubicle. With my head in my hands, I let the warm jets play over my body and berated myself at length.

  I thought I had left violent sex far in the past, but it had come back so naturally to me that I began to re-examine my morality. I knew there were many men who regularly used their wives or girlfriends as punchbags and always claimed to be sorry afterwards, but I couldn’t bear the thought that I might become one of them. I adored Lauren, and even though I could undo the damage, I didn’t feel any less guilty. I seriously considered finishing our relationship to save her from me, but that would cause her pain too. I wanted to spare her, but I knew as I climbed into bed beside her, I could no more give her up than stop breathing.

  I held her close while she cried about her girlfriends and we talked it through again, but when we returned to the subject of the gallery, I had an epiphany.

  ‘Lauren, I think we’re both agreed that neither of us know what the problem is, so how would you feel about getting some help?’

  Her brow furrowed and her voice sounded cautious. ‘What sort of help?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking that if the problem isn’t the art or the gallery, then maybe it’s the business. I’ve got an old school friend who is a business consultant. I sorted out his website for him a few years back. Would you be okay with me asking him to take a look?’

  ‘What would he do?’

  ‘He’d just look at how we’re running the business,’ I said, ‘and see if we’re doing anything wrong, or if there’s something we could do better.’

  She didn’t look convinced. ‘Does he know about art galleries?’

  ‘No, he knows about business. That’s what he does. He’s helped all sorts of companies without knowing about their products or services.’

  ‘I don’t know, Kee. Do you think he can help us?’

  ‘Well, I think we’re both too close to the problem to be able to see what it is. It might be just what we need, to have a fresh pair of eyes taking a look.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said with little enthusiasm. ‘If you think it will help.’

  ‘I don’t think it can do any harm. If James can’t help, then we’ll still work it out one way or another, I promise.’

  ‘Okay.’ She kissed me but when I responded in kind, she pulled back. ‘Do you mind if we don’t make love? I’m sorry, but I’m not in the mood right now.’

  I felt a wave of relief sweep over me. I was frightened of hurting her again and had never felt less inclined to risk it. ‘No, I don’t mind at all,’ I said, ‘but on one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That you let me cuddle you until you fall asleep.’

  She kissed me before turning her back to my chest, and I wrapped her in my arms, clinging on to her as if afraid to let go while I nibbled gently at her ear.

  ‘You’re so understanding,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve a man like you.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to reply to that. Instead, I lay nestled with the most exquisite being I could ever hope to meet, and brooded bitterly on what she had done to deserve a man who comforts his girlfriend by punching her in the face.

  James was able to come just after closing time on Saturday. I let him in and locked the entrance behind him. He was visibly impressed as he looked around the gallery. ‘Whoa, this is a big step up from web design, Kee.’

  I introduced him to Lauren before suggesting we sat inside the desk.

  ‘Do you mind if I take a quick look around on my own first?’ he asked.

  We watched as he made his silent way around the gallery, and followed his progress on the monitors when he went to the upper floor. He looked like any other visitor; taking time at some of the works of art and moving past others with little more than a glance.

  ‘Do you think I should offer to tell him about them?’ Lauren asked me.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s what he’s interested in,’ I replied. ‘In any case, he said he wanted to look on
his own. Let’s leave him to it.’

  It was fully thirty minutes before he joined us at the desk. He cast an eye over the array of screens built into the surface and let out a whistle. ‘Thrusters to station keeping, Mr Sulu.’

  We laughed with him and I offered him a drink, but to my surprise he accepted a glass of wine, leaving me the only one drinking the beers that I’d brought in especially for the occasion.

  ‘Okay, let me start by saying that this place is amazing, and the artwork is fantastic,’ he began, ‘but I can see straight away why you’re not selling anything. I’m going to be blunt with you: the problem is your prices.’

  Lauren jumped instantly to the defensive. ‘We can’t lower the prices. For the most part they’re set by the artists, but we have to put our commission on top. If we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to sell enough to pay for the building or the wages. I suppose I could take a pay cut, but it wouldn’t make much difference overall. Besides, we sold lots of stuff at these sorts of prices at my last—’

  James’s smile had been getting progressively wider, and now he was almost laughing as he held up his hands in an American ‘time out’ gesture to interrupt her. ‘I’m sorry, Lauren. I should have been clearer. Your prices are not too high, they’re too low.’

  ‘But that’s the going rate for emerging artists. They’re not ready to command higher prices. Once they become established their work will sell for more, but they’re not at that stage yet. People don’t expect to pay as much for unknown names…’

  James had looked helplessly at me, and Lauren noticed, causing her to stop in her tracks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘Not a problem,’ he assured her. ‘Let me explain why. What you’ve done is what so many new businesses do: you’ve confused your market. For every type of product or service, there are many markets. You have to decide which one you’re aiming for.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, noticing that Lauren looked as confused as I felt.

  ‘Okay, take groceries for example,’ James continued. ‘At one end of the market you’ve got the likes of Harrods or Harvey Nichols, and at the other you’ve got Lidl and Aldi. Although they’re all in the groceries market, in fact they are in completely separate markets within that market. People who shop in the luxury stores would not go into the no-frills outlets and vice versa. So Harrods and Harvey’s may be in competition with each other, but they’re not in competition with Lidl and Aldi. Needless to say, there are lots of other stores, forming a whole chain of markets in between, but the only place they compete is where they overlap.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that,’ I said, ‘but how have we confused our market?’

  ‘Everything about this place says “high end”. The location, the frontage and the layout all scream luxury, but – and please don’t take this the wrong way – when your potential customers see the prices, it feels to them like they’ve walked into a pound shop.’

  ‘But we’re not selling cheap tat,’ Lauren protested. ‘It’s all good quality art.’

  ‘I completely agree,’ James said, ‘but Mayfair clientele don’t expect good art to come at these prices. It’s interesting that you said “quality” because there are several factors involved with this, but perception of quality is probably the most important. Let me show you what I mean. Could I have a look at your phone?’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ Lauren said slowly, sounding and looking puzzled at the request. She took her mobile out of her bag and held it out to James.

  ‘Whoa, nice phone,’ he said, but didn’t take it from her. ‘It’s okay, I don’t need to inspect it.’

  Her face brightened as she thanked him for the compliment, and she held the phone in her lap while we both wondered what was coming next.

  ‘Okay, I’m not prying, but that’s probably about seven or eight hundred pounds worth, yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know; it’s on pay monthly,’ she told him, ‘but I guess it’s about that.’

  ‘So, when you bought it there would have been a whole range of phones, probably starting from about fifty quid. What made you choose that one?’

  Lauren sounded defensive. ‘Because it’s got better specs. Faster processor, more memory, better camera…’

  ‘It’s okay, I’m not judging you,’ James assured her. ‘You’re right; it’s a much better phone, but did you check the specs of the cheaper phones?’

  ‘Er, no…’

  ‘No, it goes without saying. You didn’t need to because there’s no way they would be better. If I were to show you two identical looking phones and gave you no information about them but said one cost fifty and the other was seven hundred, you would immediately assume the expensive one was better, even without any evidence to back up that assumption. That’s perception of quality. We’re conditioned to believe that because it’s almost invariably true, just as we know for sure if something is cheap, it’s more than likely to be inferior.’

  ‘Our prices aren’t cheap,’ Lauren protested.

  ‘No, I’m not saying they are,’ he said, ‘but to someone who lives in a fifty-million-pound house in Mayfair they might appear that way. Which brings us to the vanity factor. We are all guilty of this to a certain extent. We want our peers to admire our possessions, because it gives us an affirmation that we are where we want to be in life. When I complimented you on your phone you were delighted, weren’t you?’

  Lauren looked contrite. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s absolutely right that you should be, but part of your decision for buying that phone, whether it was conscious or subconscious, was based on vanity. You wanted one you could show off to your friends, and you couldn’t do that with a fifty-quid phone.’

  ‘On my God, you make me sound awful.’

  ‘No, not at all. We all do it and we can’t help it. In a moment I’ll show you what I mean,’ James told her. He looked at me before saying almost conspiratorially, ‘Your girlfriend is lovely, isn’t she?’

  ‘Thank you. Yes, she is,’ I said, smiling at both of them.

  ‘There, you see,’ James said to Lauren. ‘Because I didn’t say “Lauren” but used the possessive term “your girlfriend”, his vanity kicked in straight away and he just couldn’t help himself. His face was a picture, wasn’t it?’

  ‘My girlfriend’ chuckled, while I felt my face flush and looked sheepish about having been caught so easily.

  ‘So what you’re saying,’ I said, after some consideration, ‘is people around here won’t buy our paintings because they couldn’t show them off? But you can’t tell how much they cost from looking at them, so how would their friends know?’

  ‘At the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, it’s all about bargains. People will brag about how little they paid for things, especially if they think they got a better deal than their friends, but at the top end it’s all about status: these people want to be seen to have the best stuff, and with so much disposable income, money isn’t an issue. They will make sure their friends know where their possessions came from, and just how expensive they were.’

  I thought about the guy I’d seen on the plane who had bragged loudly about the cost of his art collection, and could see James’s point.

  ‘The other thing is,’ James continued, ‘your potential customers will happily pay several thousand pounds for a curtain rail or a bath tap, so they certainly would not expect to pay less for a work of art.’

  ‘But we’re not just selling to people from Mayfair,’ Lauren countered. ‘People come to London from all over the country. In my last gallery, we sold works for these prices every day. You can’t tell me that’s all changed because we’ve moved a mile down the road.’

  ‘Actually, that one mile might just as well be a million,’ James said. ‘It’s a completely different world. Yes, you might get the occasional tourist, but it’s doubtful they will have any intention to buy.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘If they’re happy en
ough to buy in Covent Garden, why not here?’

  ‘It’s the packaging factor,’ he replied. ‘Let’s say you gave Lauren an ornate box embossed with gilt lettering or emblems and tied with an expensive ribbon, but it contained a cheap plastic bracelet. She’d be pretty disappointed—’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Lauren interrupted. ‘Not if it was a present from Kee.’

  ‘Oh, bless!’ James laughed. ‘You are in love.’

  Lauren began to bridle, but noticed his cheeky grin and relaxed again.

  ‘Yeah, I see the point you’re making,’ I told him, ‘but it’s not really answering my question.’

  ‘What I was going on to say was that if you had a choice of two boxes, one fancy and one plain, and money was no object, you would choose the expensive box. If you were on a tight budget then you probably wouldn’t look inside the expensive box, because you would believe it contained something beyond your means.’ He pointed in a sweeping gesture around the building. ‘This is your box and it looks very expensive. Most of the people who happily went into your place at Covent Garden would not come in here because they’ve decided from its appearance that they wouldn’t be able to afford anything.’

  Lauren looked crestfallen. ‘So, we’re putting off some people by being too cheap, and putting off the others by giving the impression of being too expensive. Oh my God, I’ve got it all wrong, haven’t I? I’m so sorry, Kee.’

  James and I exchanged puzzled glances. ‘No, you haven’t got anything wrong,’ he told her. ‘You just need to adjust your prices to suit your market.’

  She shook her head, dismay in her eyes and voice. ‘But that means we’ve got to start all over again and find work by established artists. That’s not going to be easy, and in any event, I really wanted to bring on emerging talent.’

  ‘Why would you need to change anything? What’s wrong with these paintings?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with them, but nobody will pay higher prices for unknown artists.’