A Bed of Scorpions (6 page)

I tried moving on to something more neutral. ‘Which bit of art dealing do you like? Selling, or the acquisitions?’

She was definite. ‘The shows. Selling is what I’d do because you have to be able to do it to be able to show, but it’s the idea of the show, putting the works together so that they say something, you know?’

I nodded. I felt like that about editing. But, ‘Wouldn’t there be more scope for that in a museum?’

She looked mutinous. This was, apparently, a point that had already been made. ‘I’d need a PhD to be a curator, another three years at least, maybe more. And then I’d only
be hired as a junior. It would be years before I could put on a show the way I wanted to.’ She looked at me defiantly, waiting for an argument. Which I had no intention of offering. ‘Absolutely. I see that. You might have a lesser range at a gallery – the artists the gallery represents, and mostly only what they’re doing now – but the hierarchy isn’t there. Or other curators eyeing up the space for their own areas of expertise.’

She looked grateful that I understood, and expanded a little. ‘Frank and Aidan said I could do a summer show, when the gallery is quiet, with some of the pieces they own.’ She must have seen I wasn’t following, because she explained, enjoying the chance to display her expertise. ‘Galleries usually don’t own the work they show. The artist owns it, the gallery shows it, and gets a commission when they sell it. Sometimes they buy and sell on their own – maybe from an auction if they have a client who is looking for work by that artist, for example. But every gallery also ends up with works that they own. They buy works by artists they represent when they appear on the market, to keep the prices up, or to build up for the future when the prices will have risen. Or if they buy an artist’s estate, the artist probably owned paintings by other artists, and they come too. Or they just buy something thinking they can sell it, and then they can’t.’

She stopped, flustered by the blizzard of information she’d produced, but I looked encouraging. It was interesting, and anyway, it meant I didn’t have to go out and mingle. I’m terrible at talking to strangers, so I nodded encouragingly, hoping she’d go on. Bless her, she did. ‘Merriam–Compton
has some great pieces that never get seen, and Frank said I could do a little show of some of them. The summer shows never sell much – buyers are away, the art fairs take the business – so I think he was glad to have something that would cost nothing to mount, and might even generate some cash flow.’

If I didn’t keep her motoring along, I might have to go and sit with Toby again. ‘What were you planning?’

‘Frank and Aidan thought it would be good if I did something with their Stevensons, so we could pick up some of the publicity the Tate is bound to get with their big retrospective.’

I hadn’t known there was going to be a Stevenson show at the Tate. That would be fun. I loved pop art, and I thought Stevenson’s collages were great, although I’d seen most of them in books, not in real life. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the exhibition. Then I noticed Lucy’s phrasing. ‘“Their” Stevensons? Do they have lots?’

She looked at me curiously, then shrugged. ‘I suppose there’s no reason you should know. Merriam–Compton are his dealers.’

I looked around again and caught sight of Toby still staring at the carpet. So back to Lucy. I tried to think of something interesting to say, but my tank was empty. I made a stretch. ‘I love his work, especially the book ones.’

She looked blank.

‘There’s no reason for me to know that Merriam–Compton represent Stevenson, and there’s no reason for you to know I’m an editor. But that’s why I like those collages he did with pages from books, or the covers. I know it’s a bit tragic, but I actually read the pages he
includes – you know, which Dostoyevsky novel is this taken from, and oh look, I have the same edition of
The Naked Lunch.’

She didn’t quite back away from me, but I could tell she thought I was beyond weird. Oh well. I’d chopped enough vegetables to keep an entire commune fed for a season. I could move away without seeming rude. I wiped my hands on a tea towel and looked around for a bowl to put them in. I didn’t see a bowl, but I did see that Aidan had arrived, and he was standing in the doorway attempting to catch my eye. I summed up, as though we’d had a meaningful conversation: ‘That sounds like a great plan,’ leaving whatever ‘that’ might be carefully unspecified. ‘They’d be mad not to want you to go ahead.’ Then I mumbled the usual ‘see you later’ and set off towards Aidan. He had retreated to the sunroom at the back, which looked as if it was barely used. There was a desk and a chair, a bench loaded with old newspapers and magazines, and not much else. Aidan was sitting at the desk, flipping through two vast piles of mail. I pushed the newspapers on the floor and sat on the bench.

‘This is office post,’ he said, as though he needed to excuse himself to me.

I nodded and waited. He finally looked up. ‘I wanted to ask you if your policeman had said anything.’

I swallowed a smart-arse response – ‘my’ policeman? – and just shook my head. ‘He repeated pretty much what you told me at lunch: unexplained death, and they’re investigating.’

Aidan pushed a second pile of papers off the bench and sat down beside me, reaching for my hand. He didn’t say
anything else, and I didn’t have anything to say, so we sat there quietly.

I wasn’t thinking of anything much, when Lucy’s plans ran through my head. I didn’t think I’d jumped, but I must have.

Aidan looked at me.

I shook my head. ‘Nothing. A work thing I’d forgotten.’ Should I tell him? Jake? This was exactly what I’d foreseen at the start. Whose side was I on?

I was home by ten, and I spent half an hour online reading back issues of the
New York Times
. Then I phoned Helena. If she’d rung me at that hour, I’d have been furious, and more than halfway to being asleep. With my mother, I’d be lucky to find her home. She was, though, which was a relief.

‘I was at Toby’s, and I was talking to his niece, the one who works in the gallery. She says they represent Edward Stevenson.’

My mother was as infuriatingly calm as she always is. ‘Yes, I think I knew that. And?’

‘Didn’t you see the papers last month?’

There was a silence. That was unusual. Then, even more unusual, she sounded like me. ‘Goodness.’

I was too anxious even to think of mimicking her from earlier. ‘The question is, what do I do with this information?’

Helena knows me well. ‘Let’s just revise first. I assume you’ve just checked the reports.’

‘I did. And they’re creepily familiar.’

Helena didn’t have any truck with creepiness. Just the facts, m’lud.

So I gathered myself. ‘The first newspaper report I could see was in May. A family in Vermont decided to convert their unfinished basement into a family room. When the builders took out an old boiler, they found a skeleton behind a partition wall. There was a shotgun and a suicide note beside it. Dental records identified the remains as those of Edward Stevenson, who had lived there until 1993. But that’s where the trouble seems to have begun.’

‘Go on.’

I wouldn’t be able to swear it, but I was sure Helena was making notes. So I pulled up the articles I’d bookmarked. ‘Stevenson vanished in 1993. He wrote a letter to his wife saying he was leaving her and his family and going to join an ashram in India.’ I double-checked the date. ‘An ashram, in 1993? That’s what it says. Anyway, at the time everyone believed it. He’d complained a lot about how commercialised the art world had become, he was interested in Eastern religions, and so on.’ It sounded woolly to me, but it hadn’t to his wife. At the inquest her lawyer said she had never even considered that the letter might have been untrue. ‘The letter had said he’d be in touch, but when they didn’t hear from him, after a few weeks they hired detectives, who searched in India, and then everywhere else. Even Cardiff, which was where he was from originally. But there was no trace. Until this past May, when his skeleton showed up.’

‘What happened next?’

‘There’s a report from the inquest. The formal identification. The coroner’s report, which says that, as far as can be seen after twenty-odd years, the wound in the skull was not inconsistent with the shotgun beside him.
Then the note found with the body was reprinted.’ I read out: ‘I am sorry. I have recently been informed that I have a terminal illness that will conclude my life painfully within half a year. I have chosen this way to die, in order to spare us all distress.’

I paused. Helena was definitely writing. Then I continued. ‘But it was typed, with no signature. After all this time, the typewriter he used is long gone, although they compared the note to other letters typed on that machine, and they match. The man who had been the family doctor – he was elderly, and is now retired, but seemed from the reports to be absolutely compos – testified. He said he’d checked his records, and that Stevenson had had a check-up two months before he vanished, and he had no illness of any sort. The police said they were checking to see if Stevenson had seen any other doctors, but the inquest was adjourned, and that’s where the newspaper reports stop. After that there’s just loads of stuff about his importance as a Pop artist in the 60s and 70s, and even more about ashrams, or suicide, or ashrams
and
suicide. But no information. There’s nothing except speculation. I don’t think the inquest was ever resumed: there’s nothing in the big US papers, and I think there would have been.’

Helena made an affirmative grunt. She was still treating it, and me, like a legal deposition.

I was used to it, and waited. When I thought she’d finished, I summarised. (OK, I might not make notes, but I like things to be neat too.) ‘So, an artist may, or may not, have shot himself twenty years ago, leaving a typed, unsigned note. A month after his body is discovered, his
dealer may, or may not, have shot himself, leaving a typed, unsigned note. Mother, what do I do? Normally …’ It worried me that I thought there was something I’d normally do when encountering violent death, but I didn’t have the leftover brain-power to think about it now. ‘Normally, I’d tell Jake. I doubt very much that he’ll think it’s coincidence, or at least, he’ll think it’s a coincidence worth investigating. But Aidan …’ I trailed away miserably.

No trailing away for Helena. ‘You need to tell him,’ she said crisply. My mother drives me crazy because she is always so certain about everything. I often think how amazing it would be to be as certain about one thing – any one thing – as she is about everything. Today I was just relieved she was making up my mind for me.

‘Do you think maybe he already knows? He might not have told me.’ I was wheedling.

Helena didn’t play games. ‘It’s extremely unlikely, and you know it, Sam. The discovery of Stevenson’s body was news in the arts pages, and a month ago. Merriam–Compton represent Stevenson, but they also represent – what, three or four dozen other artists? Even if, for some reason, the police are going through the lists of the gallery’s artists – and it would be extremely unlikely given the very slim evidence unless an inquest rules that it requires further investigation – even then, there would be nothing to make them pay attention to that one name. Apart from anything else, it’s a fairly common and unmemorable one.’ Her tone sharpened. ‘They haven’t got the Art Fraud team in, have they?’

‘I don’t think so. Jake didn’t say. But he didn’t say they didn’t. It sounded as if they were thinking more along the lines of financial problems, not fraud.’

‘Then you need to tell him.’

Welcome to the black-and-white world of Helena Clair. Just to maintain some sense of my own independence, I saluted the phone as I hung up.

I would tell him. But I’d wait until I saw him, which wasn’t going to be tonight. A problem delayed is a problem, well, delayed so I can worry about it some more. Lip-gnawing anxiety is my major skill-set. Everyone’s got to be good at something.

I
N BETWEEN WORRYING
about what I was going to tell Jake, I spent an hour working on my presentation for the CultCo panel, before admitting finally that I couldn’t concentrate. But Celia Stein had given me some good information, and I merged it with what I already had, figuring I could probably make it last for ten of my twenty-minute presentation. I’d agreed to meet the other panel members for breakfast the following morning, to map out how we wanted the seminar to run. At least now I’d be able to say I was halfway there.

The difference between publishing and the
quasi-governmental,
quasi-business world of arts charities came home to me when my alarm went off at half-past five. I’m an early riser, but that was plain silly. I’d agreed to breakfast, thinking it would be at eight, eight-thirty-ish. I hoped I didn’t visibly pale when they agreed on seven as though it were routine, but I bet I did. Because, frankly, who knew that there were two half-past fives in the day?

Things began to look up once I got myself out the door. There was only a pale, watery sun, but at that hour of the morning it seemed hopeful, and full of promise, rather than just ineffectual. And before the traffic really started moving, the scents of the early summer blossom in the front gardens lay like a blanket on the air. I walked along, ticking off my neighbours’ wisteria and jasmine, sniffing the air ferociously as I passed each one. I was happy, even though I probably looked like a junkie ready for her next fix.

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.