What a Carve Up! (24 page)

We must meet, Michael. There are no two ways about it. We must arrange a rendezvous, and there is no time to be lost. Might I make an impish little suggestion, as to an appropriate venue? I notice that on Thursday next the Narcissus Gallery in Cork Street (prop. Roderick Winshaw, as you will certainly be aware) is holding a preview of – true to form – some doubtless vapid new paintings by a young member of the minor aristocracy. I think we can be confident that the lure of such an occasion to London’s
cognoscenti
will not be so overpowering that two strangers would fail to recognize each other in the assembled throng. I will be there at seven-thirty sharp. I look forward to the pleasure of your company, and, more tremblingly, to the beginnings of what I trust will be a fertile and cordial professional association.

The letter ended with a simple ‘Most sincerely’, and was signed, with a flourish:

(Detective)

Roddy

1

Phoebe stood in a corner of the gallery, where she had been standing for the last quarter of an hour. Her wineglass was sticky in her hand, the wine itself warm and no longer palatable. So far not one person had stopped to talk to her, or even acknowledged her presence. She felt invisible.

Three of the guests were known to her, nevertheless. She recognized Michael, for one, even though they had only met once, more than eight years ago, when he was just about to start work on his Winshaw biography. How grey his hair was looking now. He probably didn’t remember her, and besides, he seemed to be deep in conversation with a white-haired and very loquacious pensioner who had done nothing but make rude comments about the paintings ever since he arrived. And then there was Hilary: well, that was all right. They had nothing to say to each other anyway.

But finally, of course, there was Roddy himself. She had caught his guilty eye more than once and seen him turn away in panic, so he clearly had no intention of making his peace. That was hardly surprising: her only real reason for coming to the opening in the first place was to cause him embarrassment. But it had been naïve of her to think that it would work. She was the one who felt embarrassed, by now, as she watched him moving easily among his friends and colleagues, chatting, gossiping. All of them, she was sure, would know exactly who she was, and be fully informed as to the nature of her distant, presumptuous connection with the gallery. Her cheeks started to burn at the very thought. But she would hang on. She would cope. She would just grip her glass more tightly, and stand firm.

This evening, after all, could threaten nothing to compare with the tidal waves of humiliation which had crashed over her when she had first walked through these doors, more than a year ago.

∗

Phoebe had always painted, ever since she could remember, and her talent had been obvious from an early age to everyone but herself. With every school report, her art teacher’s praises had scaled new heights of rapture; but they had rarely been echoed by his colleagues, who found her academic performances on the whole disappointing. When she left school she didn’t have the nerve to apply to art college, and had begun to train as a nurse instead. A few years later her friends managed to persuade her that this had been a mistake, and she went on to study for three years at Sheffield, where her style underwent some rapid changes. All at once, an infinity of unsuspected freedoms had been laid before her: in the space of a few hungry, incredulous weeks she discovered fauvism and cubism, the futurists and the abstract expressionists. Already skilled in landscape and portraiture, she began to produce dense, cluttered canvases, packed with incongruous detail and imbued with a fascination for physical minutiae which drew her towards unlikely sources, including medical textbooks and books of zoological and entomological drawings. She was also starting to read widely for the first time, and in a Penguin edition of Ovid she found the inspiration for her first series of major paintings, all dealing with themes of flux, instability and the continuity of the human and animal worlds. Without realizing it – for she allowed nothing to complicate her exhilaration during this period – she was edging on to dangerous territory: she was heading for that unfashionable cusp between the abstract and the figurative; between decoration and accessibility. She was about to become unsellable.

But even before she was in a position to make this discovery, there were setbacks: a crisis of confidence, the abandonment of her course at the end of its second year, a return to full-time nursing. She didn’t paint for several years. When she took it up again, it was with renewed passion and urgency. She rented a shared studio in Leeds (where she now lived) and spent every spare waking moment there. Small exhibitions followed, in libraries and adult education centres, and there were occasional commissions, none of them very challenging or imaginative. But locally, at least, she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation.

One of her old tutors at Sheffield, with whom she kept sporadically in touch, invited her out for a drink and suggested that it was time to start showing her work to some London galleries. To make the process simpler, he offered her a personal introduction: she had his permission to approach the Narcissus Gallery in Cork Street, and to mention his name. Phoebe thanked him cautiously, for she was a little doubtful about this proposal. Her tutor’s much-vaunted influence with Roderick Winshaw had been something of a standing joke among her fellow students, who had never been able to find much evidence for it. He and Roddy had been at school together, it was true, but there was nothing to suggest that they had ever been close, or that the great art dealer had done anything to keep up the friendship in the intervening years. (When once invited, for instance, to give a guest lecture at the college, he forgot all about it and never showed up.) None the less, this was a real opportunity, and kindly offered, and it was not to be turned down lightly. Phoebe phoned the gallery next morning, spoke to a cheery and helpful receptionist, and made an appointment to come down the following week. She spent the next few days preparing her slides.

∗

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?’