Authors: Mark Mills
‘I’d be climbing the walls within a week, looking for a way out. I know what I’m like.’
‘So do I. You’ll change your tune the second you fall in love with her.’
‘I forgot, big sis always knows best.’ I reach for another raspberry.
‘Big sis says don’t even think about it.’
Alice takes me aside as I’m leaving and tells me not to forget her birthday, which is coming up soon. She also has a question for me, a question she imagines only a godfather is equipped to answer. She wants to know if church steeples are shaped the way they are because they’re really rockets for taking dead people to heaven. I hug her and tell her she’s the smartest little god-daughter in all the world.
There are no lifts home to be had; Hugo and Lucinda live north, beyond Stoke Newington, so Fran walks with Doggo and me to Upper Street in search of a cab. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself living life at one remove, almost as if I’m disembodied, floating above proceedings. Fran’s plain speaking is refreshingly grounding; it leaves no place for floating.
‘When Duncan invited me to Sunday lunch, I almost laughed.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Doggo knows, don’t you, Doggo?’ Doggo looks up at her. ‘You see.’
‘He’s just had about a kilo of meat out of your hand; of course he’s going to look at you.’
Fran gives an appreciative chuckle.
‘So, why did you almost laugh?’
‘Oh, because Duncan knows what a nightmare I can be.’
‘Maybe he has a masochistic streak,’ I suggest.
‘Or a sadistic one.’
‘Sadistic?’
‘Come on, we both know why I was there.’
‘Do we?’
‘For you,’ she says.
I don’t answer immediately. ‘That’s very presumptuous. Maybe I was there for you.’
‘Oh God,’ she groans. ‘I’m such a bloody narcissist, it didn’t even occur to me.’
She lives near Earls Court, and it makes sense for us to share a cab, at least some of the way. Doggo and I find ourselves dropped off at Marble Arch, where Fran waves aside my offer of a tenner towards the fare. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. And just so you know, I definitely would.’
‘What’s that?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Use your imagination.’
‘Ah well, I’ll carry that thought with me.’
She’s got a great smile when she chooses to use it. ‘It’s better this way. I’d only screw you over.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘No idea. I’m working on it with my therapist.’
It’s not the last thing she says to me.
‘I’ve recently done to someone what your girlfriend did to you. Don’t think she’s having the time of her life, because she isn’t.’
I
T’S
M
EGAN’S IDEA
and it couldn’t come at a worse time. Something tells me she knows this.
Patrick is pitching to KP&G on Friday afternoon, which means that Edie and I need to have settled on a strapline by the end of play on Wednesday, because Josh and Eric in design need at least a day to mock some stuff up. The Sword of Damocles is hanging above our heads by a thread; the last thing we need right now is an office-wide competition to come up with a proper name for Doggo.
When Megan refuses to be deterred, I realise that I’ve underestimated her desire to see us crash and burn.
‘Come on, guys, it’ll be fun.’ She says it standing in our office, with an irritating Aussie chirpiness designed to make us feel like Pommy stick-in-the-muds. I still can’t say for sure whether Seth is in on it. ‘Yeah,’ he drawls from the doorway, in the spirit of someone who knows this is heading somewhere, just not where exactly.
It pisses me off that Doggo is being used against us, but as someone once wrote, it kicks open a door in the palace of possibilities.
‘Let’s do it,’ I say suddenly, levering myself to my feet. ‘Doggo, let’s go find you a new name.’
I’m aware that Edie is looking at me as if I’m mad. Doggo, of course, doesn’t move from the sofa. ‘Give him a nudge, will you?’ I say to Megan as casually as I can, making a show of shutting down my laptop. She claps her hands together. ‘Come on, Doggo.’ He doesn’t react, so she tries to lift him off the sofa. That’s when it happens.
‘He bit me!’ she howls, recoiling.
‘Doggo! Bad Doggo!’ I examine Megan’s hand. ‘It’s just a nip. He didn’t draw blood.’
‘A nip!?’ She skewers Doggo with a look. ‘Little shit.’
‘Maybe now’s not the right time,’ I suggest, ladling on just enough false courtesy for her to suspect I know exactly what she was up to. What can she say? She’s been rumbled. She sucks at her hand and retreats, taking Seth with her.
I flop on to the sofa beside Doggo and slip him a Choc Drop.
‘That can’t be right,’ says Edie.
‘What’s that?’
‘He’ll associate biting Megan with reward.’
‘You reckon?’
When another Choc Drop disappears between Doggo’s eager lips, she finally gets it. ‘I had no idea you were so evil.’
‘Self-defence, your honour. She started it.’
There are no rules in this game. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, just so long as it comes. Unfortunately, it isn’t right now.
Edie and I have chewed it over and over. Some of the ideas aren’t bad, but none of them quite makes the grade. Even Ralph, supremely confident in our ability to crack it, is beginning to have his doubts. He summons a war council in his office.
‘I know there’s nothing to be gained from me cracking the whip.’
‘But get your bloody skates on,’ adds Tristan, joking – well, sort of.
We’re all agreed that the images work brilliantly. They’re mysterious, eye-catching, quietly erotic. Full credit for them goes to Edie. They weren’t bought in from some photo library; she art-directed the shoots herself. She has an eye, the all-important eye. I don’t have it, although I’ve learned to recognise it when I see it in others. Edie has somehow managed to make mouthwash sexy. More importantly, she has associated the product with that most universal of pleasures – the human kiss. Who doesn’t love a kiss? Okay, maybe nuns don’t go a bundle on them, but nuns aren’t our target market.
Only the strapline is missing. The best of the bunch so far is: ‘Just Say No’. It works well with the sensual images, playing to the idea that forces beyond your control will be unleashed in you if you wash your mouth out with the stuff, but Patrick feels there’s something a tad too knowing about the conceit, piggybacking, as it definitely does, on Nike’s iconic ‘Just Do It’. Ralph holds even firmer views on the subject. He’s convinced that the line should include the name of the product. Since he’s the boss, so it shall be. We’ve got forty-eight hours to figure it out.
My default position at times of pressure is one of breezy optimism, whereas Edie likes to tackle stress head-on, wrestling it to the ground with a wild animal cry. I know this works for some people, just as I understand that my laid-back attitude can be infuriating to those who don’t share it.
‘For God’s sake, Dan.’
‘What?’
‘Do you think you can stop playing sudoku on your bloody iPhone?’
‘Sshhhh.’
I’m playing live against someone who calls herself Madame Butterfly, and I’ve decided in my mind that if I beat her (although ‘she’ is quite possibly a hairy Bulgarian mechanic, such is the way of the world nowadays), then everything will be okay for Edie and me – we’ll come up with a killer line and win the account. There are probably better ways to ensure success, but it’s the test I’ve set myself and I have to see it through.
Madame Butterfly pips me to the post.
‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘She beat me.’
‘Who?’
‘Madame Butterfly.’
Edie shakes her head. ‘I’m beginning to understand why Fat Trev went off the deep end.’
It’s early days, we’re still feeling each other out, but I already know that I like Edie a lot. She’s smart, funny, ambitious and hard-working. That’s not all, though. She gives off something else, much harder to define. It’s to do with the way she fills the space she occupies. There’s a poise about her, a lazy grace, a quiet dignity. Sharing an office with her is like sitting at the base of a large tree (whereas sharing an office with Fat Trev was like standing in the mosh pit at a thrash metal concert).
She definitely brightens my day. I look forward to seeing her each morning, and I feel a twinge of emptiness the moment we part company at Oxford Circus at the end of every day, she for the Victoria Line south to Pimlico, Doggo and me for the number 23 bus back to Ladbroke Grove.
Madame Butterfly calls for a rematch, but I kill the phone and turn to Edie. ‘Let’s get out of here. We need a change of scene.’
I’m amazed more people aren’t wise to it. I mean, why queue for hours and hand over good money in order to fight your way round the latest okay offering from the Royal Academy or Tate Modern when some of the finest art in the world can be viewed for free at the major auction houses? Whatever your tastes, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams hold an endless round of sales to satisfy them, everything from Ancient Egyptian through to Chinese Contemporary. My personal favourite is Post-War European (although Old Master Drawings also gets me going).
The big sales, the ones that make the headlines, are Impressionist & Modern, because that’s where the silly money is spent. Last year in New York, Sotheby’s sold an Edvard Munch pastel of
The Scream
for a staggering seventy-four million pounds. I seriously thought about getting on a plane in the days leading up to the auction. The picture had been in private hands pretty much since it was painted, and in all likelihood would disappear once more into a private collection (which it duly did). For the briefest of moments, though, it was available for all to see; you simply had to walk in off the street and stand in front of it. It’s gone now, not for good, hopefully, but I’d be surprised if it resurfaces before I’m dead. Last time, it lay tucked out of sight for over a hundred years.
That’s the thing about auctions: you brush with beauty of all kinds, but the encounters are fleeting, transitory, never to be repeated – like catching the eye of a gorgeous woman you pass in the street.
I don’t mention any of this to Edie as I usher her inside Christie’s on King Street. A man in a black uniform moves to intercept us. ‘I’m sorry, sir – guide dogs only.’
‘He is a mental health companion dog.’ It’s a line I’ve had to use a couple of times on buses, the voice a mild variation on my trainspotter/computer geek voice.
‘A mental health companion dog?’ He glances at Edie, who gives him a sweet and mildly concerned look. ‘Well, I’m sure that’s fine,’ he says. ‘Go ahead.’
It’s a great sale, probably the most impressive I’ve ever viewed. I know what to expect because I’ve checked out the online catalogue. Among the forty or so lots there are three Renoirs, five Picassos, two Matisses, a Van Gogh, as well as a couple of Giacometti bronzes. Some of the star pieces are strangely disappointing (you can never really tell from the catalogue). Conversely, there’s a landscape by Bonnard that looked flat and featureless on my laptop, but in the flesh it shimmers with the heat of a Mediterranean afternoon. You can almost hear the cicadas.
I always feel a touch of sadness whenever I stand in front of a Van Gogh painting. It’s not just the crazed genius of the man, or his early death at his own hand; it’s knowing that he went to his grave with no sense of the extraordinary impact he would have on the art world. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood that he was a visionary, a prophet.
The picture for sale is a small oil on canvas of the French asylum near Arles where he finished up. A swirling feast of blues, violets and oranges, it is estimated to sell for between ten and twelve million pounds. It’s an absurd sum when you consider that he barely earned enough to feed himself during his own lifetime.
Edie, who I’m coming to understand has a contrary streak, disagrees with me, although there’s a playful edge to the counter-argument she puts forward: that when all is said and done, we’re just a pile of bones and a reputation. Maybe Van Gogh understood this; maybe he knew it was better to die at the height of his genius than as a bloke who had mastered his depression and then gone on to produce less good work for another forty years. ‘It’s like Steffi Graf.’
‘Steffi Graf?’
‘She was a tennis player.’
‘I know who Steffi Graf is.’
‘Steffi understood. She got out at the top of her game: I’m the best, thank you and goodbye.’
‘Maybe it was her in-depth knowledge of Van Gogh’s oeuvre that informed her decision.’
‘If that’s all you’ve got to say, then I’ve won the argument.’
‘What argument? Van Gogh did not kill himself to secure his reputation for all of time.’
‘Ah, but you don’t know that. He might have.’
Edie clearly knows a lot about art but is happy to wear her learning lightly. When I push her, it emerges that she grew up in a cultured, bookish household, the only child of a composer cum music journalist father and a potter cum amateur archaeologist mother. They were always dragging her off to exhibitions and concerts when she was younger. J is the same: he was exposed to culture of all kinds from an early age, absorbing it by osmosis. I’m secretly envious of such people. There was never much of that sort of thing for Emma and me when we were growing up.
‘My dad’s a left-wing academic of the old school. He saw music and art as bourgeois fripperies. Maybe less so now.’
‘And your mother?’ asks Edie.
‘My dad’s not a man you stand up to, not if you know what’s good for you.’
This wasn’t the plan, to bleat on about my childhood, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened. The idea was to stick the two of us in front of some great art, because great art sets one’s own sad stabs at creativity in proper perspective; it brings distance and clarity. Sometimes it even throws up solutions to problems.
Not today. Well, not immediately. Not until we’re strolling back to the office along Piccadilly and I suggest to Edie that maybe we’ll have to make do with ‘Just Say No’ as a strapline.