by Jonathan Coe
∗
When she closed the glass door of the gallery behind her, Phoebe found that London’s demented clamour was silenced in an instant, and she had entered a haven: hushed, clinical and exclusive. She proceeded on tiptoe. It was a simple, rectangular space, with a desk at the far end, occupied by a blonde and stunningly beautiful woman who looked about five years younger than Phoebe and who smiled Hello in a distinctly threatening manner as soon as she came in. Phoebe mumbled some sort of reply and then for a few seconds, too scared to advance any further, lingered to look at the paintings on the walls. This was encouraging: they were dreadful. But something occurred to her, all the same, as she took a deep breath and dragged her resisting feet towards the desk under the receptionist’s insolent scrutiny. This morning, right up until the moment she had to leave for her train, she had been busy rearranging her selection of slides: but she now realized that this time could have been spent much more usefully. She should have been deciding what to wear.
‘Can I help you?’ said the woman.
‘My name’s Phoebe Barton. I’ve come to show you some of my work. I think you were expecting me.’
Phoebe sat down, although she hadn’t actually been invited to do so.
‘You mean you have an appointment?’ said the woman, glancing through the blank pages of her desk diary.
‘Yes.’
‘When did you make it?’
‘Last week.’
She tutted. ‘I was away last week. You would have spoken to Marcia, our temp. She doesn’t actually have the authority to make appointments.’
‘But we fixed up a time and everything.’
‘I’m sorry, but there’s no record of it here. You haven’t come far, have you? I mean, I’d hate to think you’d dragged yourself in from miles away, like Chiswick or somewhere.’
‘I’ve come down from Leeds,’ said Phoebe.
‘Ah.’ The woman nodded. ‘Yes, of course. That accent.’ She closed the diary and sighed heavily. ‘Oh, well, I suppose now that you’ve come all this way … You’ve brought some slides, I take it?’
Phoebe took out the viewing sheet and was on the point of handing it over, when she said: ‘I was supposed to be showing these to Mr Winshaw, you see. He’s a friend of my old tutor, and I was told that –’
‘Roddy’s in a meeting at the moment,’ said the woman. She took the slides, held them up to the light, and glanced over them for perhaps half a minute. ‘No, these won’t be any good to us, I’m afraid.’
She handed them back.
Phoebe could feel herself shrivelling. Already she despised this woman, but she knew her own utter powerlessness.
‘But you’ve hardly seen them.’
‘I’m sorry. They’re not what we’re looking for at all at the moment.’
‘Well, what are you looking for?’
‘Perhaps you might care to try some of the smaller galleries,’ she said, dodging this question with an icy smile. ‘Some of them do rent out space to amateur painters. I don’t know what sort of prices they charge.’
Just then a tall, well-built man in his late thirties emerged from an open doorway at the back of the gallery and strolled over.
‘Everything all right here, Lucinda?’ he said. He affected to ignore Phoebe, but she could tell that she was being quietly examined and evaluated.
‘There’s been a small misunderstanding, I think. This lady, Miss Barker, was under the impression that she’d made an appointment to see you, and she’s brought along some of her sketches.’
‘That’s quite all right. I was expecting Miss Barton,’ he said, and held out his hand, which Phoebe shook. ‘Roderick Winshaw. Now why don’t you bring those things through here, and I can have a proper look at them.’ He turned to the receptionist. ‘That’ll be all, Lucy. You can go to lunch.’
Inside his office, Roddy gave the transparencies an even more cursory inspection. He had already decided what he wanted from this tantalizing new arrival.
‘Harry’s told me about your work,’ he lied, after a brief struggle to remember the first name of the old acquaintance he had done everything in his power to avoid for the last twenty years. ‘But I’m glad to have the opportunity to meet you in person. Establishing a rapport is very important.’
As part of the process of establishing this rapport, he invited Phoebe out to lunch. She did her best to pretend that she knew her way around the menu, and managed to refrain from commenting on the prices, which at first she thought were misprinted. He was paying, after all.
‘In today’s market, you see,’ said Roddy, his mouth full of smoked salmon blinis, ‘it’s naïve to suppose that you can promote an artist’s work in isolation from his personality. There has to be an image, something you can market through the newspapers and magazines. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the pictures are: if you’ve got nothing interesting to say about yourself when the woman from the Independent comes round for an interview, then you’re in trouble.’
Phoebe listened in silence. For all his avowed interest in her personality, this seemed to be what he wanted.
‘It’s also important, of course, that you photograph well.’ He smirked. ‘I can’t imagine that you’d have any problems in that department.’
Roddy seemed strangely restless. Although he was obviously trying to impress Phoebe with his charm and attentiveness, the restaurant appeared to be full of people he knew, and he spent much of the time looking over her shoulder to make sure that he made eye contact with the more important diners. Whenever she raised the subject of painting, which she assumed was at least one interest that they had in common, he would immediately start talking about something completely different.
Roddy called for the bill after about forty minutes, before they’d had time for either dessert or coffee. He had another appointment at two o’clock.
‘Bloody nuisance, really. Some journalist doing a feature on promising young artists: wants me to give him a few names, I suppose. I wouldn’t bother, only you have to cooperate with these people or the gallery never gets good write-ups. You can’t think of anybody, can you?’
Phoebe shook her head.
‘Look, I’m sorry this has been such a rush,’ said Roddy, lowering his gaze and modulating his tone to one of bashful sincerity. ‘I feel that I’ve hardly got to know you.’
She thought this a ridiculous remark, given that they had run out of things to say to each other after about five minutes, but found herself saying, ‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Where are you staying in London?’ he asked.
‘I’m going home tonight,’ said Phoebe.
‘Is that really necessary? I was just thinking that you could stay at my flat if you liked. There’s plenty of room.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Phoebe, immediately suspicious. ‘But I have to be at work tomorrow.’
‘Of course. But look, we must meet again soon. I want to have a really good look at these pictures of yours. You must talk me through them.’
‘Well, I don’t come down very often, what with work, and the train fare …’
‘Yes, I can see, it must be very difficult for you. But I do find myself in Leeds occasionally. My family have got a place up in that part of the world.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Damn this meeting. I’ll tell you what, though – why don’t you pop round to my flat now? It’s only just round the corner, and I could come and join you in about an hour or so. We could – sort of, pick up where we left off, and there’d be plenty of time for you to catch a train this evening.’
Phoebe stood up. ‘Nice try. If rather lacking in subtlety.’ She put her bag over her shoulder and said: ‘If I’d known that was the sort of rapport you had in mind, I could have saved you the cost of an expensive meal. Could I have my slides back now, please?’
‘I’ll put them in the post, if you really want me to,’ said Roddy, and he watched, fascinated, as she turned on her heel and marched wordlessly out of the restaurant. This was going
to be more fun than he’d thought.
∗
‘He was a creep,’ Phoebe told her flatmate, Kim, over a disconsolate cup of coffee in their kitchen that evening.
‘Aren’t they all,’ said Kim. ‘The question is, was he a good-looking creep?’
‘That’s hardly relevant,’ said Phoebe. (To her own annoyance, she had found him rather handsome, although much too aware of it for his own good.)
She thought no more about Roddy until the weekend, when there was an excited phone call from her father, who asked if she’d seen Saturday’s Times. Phoebe went out and bought it, and found that she was mentioned as one of a handful of young painters whose careers looked likely to blossom in the coming decade.
‘I’m very wary of making prophecies: history can so easily prove you wrong,’ says top London dealer Roderick Winshaw, ‘but of all the new artists I’ve seen recently, I’ve been most impressed by Phoebe Barton, a young woman from Leeds who promises great things for the future.’
Kim thought that she should telephone Roddy and thank him, but Phoebe, who was trying hard to conceal her pleasure, didn’t bother, even though the first thing she said to him when he phoned a few nights later was, ‘I saw what you said in the paper. It was very nice of you.’
‘Oh, that thing,’ said Roddy dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t set too much store by that. I’ve had a few inquiries about you since it came out, but it’s early days yet.’
Phoebe’s heart was racing. ‘Inquiries?’ she said.
‘The reason I was phoning,’ said Roddy, ‘was to find out if you were doing anything this weekend. I’m going up to the old family seat and I wondered if you might care to join me: then we could have a good look at your work. I thought I might pick you up in Leeds on the Saturday afternoon, and we’d drive up from there.’
Phoebe thought about this. A whole weekend alone with Roderick Winshaw? Just having lunch with him had been bad enough. It was a terrible idea.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘That would be lovely.’
2
Roddy took one look at the council estate and decided there was no way he was going to park the Mercedes Sports on it. He didn’t much like leaving it parked on the hillside, either, outside what seemed to be some sort of school or community centre: the two young thugs who watched him getting out and locking the doors looked as though they’d cheerfully smash the windows or let the tyres down the minute his back was turned. He hoped Phoebe would be ready and he wouldn’t have to hang around in this godforsaken spot a minute longer than necessary.
Outside the front door of her tower block he pressed a button and announced himself over the intercom system. There was no reply, only the abrupt sound of the door buzzing open. Roddy took a last look at the estate – kids playing noisily in a sunbaked recreation area, young mothers pushing prams up the hill from the centre of town, weighed down by bags of shopping – and then stepped into the hallway. It was damp and evil-smelling, and the lift looked especially gruesome; but walking all the way up to the eleventh floor would have meant arriving bedraggled and out of breath, and he was determined to make the best possible impression. So he gritted his teeth, blocked his nose and was relieved to find the ride relatively quick and painless. Next he had to negotiate a gloomy corridor, lit only by a series of feeble 40-watt bulbs which gave no hint of the brilliant Saturday afternoon sunshine he had left behind; but just as he was on the point of getting lost, the door to one of the flats opened and Phoebe herself appeared, beckoning. At once his spirits rose: against these surroundings she looked more ravishing than ever, and the doubts he had been entertaining all day on the drive up from London evaporated in a haze of desire.
‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘I’m almost ready. Kim’s just made a pot of tea.’
Roddy followed her inside and was surprised to find himself being led into a light and spacious sitting room. A young man in T-shirt and frayed jeans was slumped on the sofa watching television, flicking channels between Grandstand and a black-and-white comedy film on BBC2. He didn’t look up.
‘This is Darren,’ said Phoebe. ‘Darren, this is Roderick Winshaw.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Roddy.
Darren grunted.
‘He’s driven all the way up from London,’ said Phoebe, reaching for the off button on the television. ‘I’m sure he’d like to relax.’
‘Oy, I’m watching that!’
The television stayed on, and Phoebe retreated to her room to finish packing. Roddy drifted into the kitchen, where a tidy, sandy-haired woman was pouring out four cups of tea.
‘You must be Roddy,’ she said, and handed him a cup. ‘I’m Kim. Phoebe and I share this flat together. For our sins.’ She giggled. ‘Do you take sugar?’
Roddy shook his head.
‘We’re all so excited that she’s finally got someone important on her side,’ said Kim, helping herself to three spoonfuls. ‘It’s just the break she needs.’
‘Well, I certainly intend to … do whatever I can,’ said Roddy, thrown off balance.
Phoebe reappeared from her bedroom, carrying a large folio under her arm. ‘Will there be room for this in the car?’
Roddy drew in his breath. ‘Might be a bit of a squash.’
‘Well …’ Phoebe looked doubtful. ‘You did say you wanted to see them. That’s why you came, isn’t it?’
‘I thought they were all on slides.’
‘Not all of them.’ She brightened. ‘We could look at them now, if you like. It would only take an hour or two.’
This, of course, was the last thing he wanted.
‘Actually I’m sure it’ll fit in. We’ll just have to put the seats forward a bit.’
‘Thanks.’ Phoebe flashed him a smile. ‘I’ll get my bag.’
Darren shuffled in from the sitting room. ‘Where’s my tea?’
‘I thought you were going to Sainsbury’s,’ said Kim, spooning sugar into his cup.
‘It doesn’t close till six.’
‘Yes, but there won’t be any stuff left by then.’
‘The rugby starts in a minute.’
‘Darren, what are your weights doing in my room?’ Phoebe was standing in the hallway, ready to leave.
‘There’s more space for them there. Why, are they in the way?’
‘Of course they’re in the bloody way. I want them out when I get back, OK?’
‘Fine, if you want to make a big deal out of it.’
‘Well, thanks for the tea,’ said Roddy, who hadn’t drunk any. ‘We seem to be off.’
‘Nice jacket,’ said Darren, as Roddy brushed past him in the kitchen doorway. ‘Looks like it’s from Next or somewhere, is it?’
The jacket in question, a sporty, cream linen number, had been tailor-made and had cost more than five hundred pounds.
‘It’s from Charles of Jermyn Street,’ said Roddy.
‘Oh. Yes, I thought so. I thought it was probably one of those places.’
Phoebe blew him a contemptuous kiss, and said: ‘Goodbye, Kim. I’ll give you a call when I’m coming back.’
‘All right, take care. Have a good time, and don’t do anything … don’t do anything you’ll regret.’
Roddy, fortunately, was out of earshot.
∗
‘He’s an idiot, that guy,’ said Phoebe, as they drove up the A1 towards Thirsk. ‘And he’s round at the flat all the time nowadays. It’s really beginning to depress me.’
‘Your flatmate seemed very nice.’
‘Don’t you think it’s upsetting, though, when your friends choose totally unsuitable partners?’
Roddy accelerated to within ten feet of the car in front and flashed his headlights impatiently. So far he had been averaging about ninety-five miles an hour.
‘I know what you mean, actually,’ he said. ‘Take this friend of mine. He was engaged to this woman for two years – cousin of the Duchess of ——, as it happens. Not much of a looker but she had the most fabulous contacts. He was hoping
to get into opera, you see. Anyway, suddenly, without a word of warning, he breaks the whole thing off and shacks up with this complete stranger: a primary school teacher, if you please. Nobody, but nobody had ever heard of her. Next thing you know, they’re married. Come to think of it they seem very happy, but I still think he should have bitten the bullet and stuck with Mariella. Probably be running the ENO by now. D’you get my point?’
‘I don’t think we’re talking about quite the same thing,’ said Phoebe.
They drove in silence for several minutes.
‘Seems pretty similar to me,’ said Roddy.
∗
It was getting on for six o’clock when they drove through Helmsley and then struck out in the direction of the North York Moors. The sunshine was still bright and Phoebe found that the moors themselves, which she had visited many times before and had always considered overpoweringly bleak, today seemed cheery and welcoming.
‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, ‘having a home out here. It must have been a wonderful place to grow up.’
‘Oh, I didn’t spend much time here when I was a kid. Thank God. This is the dreariest place on earth, if you ask me. Never come here now if I can avoid it.’