The Horse's Arse Read online

  Unused to being the centre of attention, Maisie was relieved when the fuss died down and she could unpack her painting gear in peace.

  With the subject sketched in, the class were soon busy with the underpainting. Suzy had chosen magenta for her flowers and viridian for her vase; Yolande went for cadmium red and Davy’s grey. Wolf’s flowers were blue and his vase was yellow. Dino hadn’t reached the colour stage; he was stuck on the drawing trying to get the flowers to fit in the frame. At the moment his vase took up two-thirds of the canvas and his flowers were cut off halfway up the stems. He rubbed the drawing off with a rag and started from the top. Grant had covered his whole canvas in raw sienna and was squinting at the subject, abstracting its essence.

  Maisie mixed a delicate shade of orange and started dabbing in flower shapes in soft clouds of colour, looking over her glasses to judge the effect as if broaching a sensitive topic and anxious not to overstep the mark.

  Pat wasn’t his usual self. He was distracted, and it wasn’t by Suzy’s skimpy crop top. After the interruption by the video woman – for whom he’d put on a star performance, though he said so himself – he’d gone full throttle on The Seven Seals, and for a day and a night he’d been on fire. The angels holding back the winds of the earth had achieved sublimity and the great multitude had finally given voice, in yellow. With the Sixth Seal all but sewn up he’d switched back to the Second and put a bomb under the red horse of war. This time the old nag that previously refused at every fence had sailed clean over with the wind behind it, taking peace from the earth and leaving blue murder in its wake. But now, just when he had got up steam to nail the Seventh, Marty had started pressuring him for more copies. He’d threatened to come round today with another couple of photocopies – a Modigliani nude and a Marquet landscape – and he was talking about a Jawlensky and a Vlaminck too. How many pictures did one collector need? With that much wall space he could accommodate the Seals.

  Pat could take or leave the money; he didn’t have a habit to support. Money meant he could get a plumber to fix the leaky sink, but a bucket had done the job perfectly well for years. It meant he could stand Dino drinks in the pub and splurge on books and records in Maisie’s shop. Last time he was in there he’d found a pair of sealskin boots which if they’d fitted he would have bought. But the only real advantage of money, apart from keeping Moira happy, was that it put him in the fast lane for art materials. In the pigment stakes he was up there with Auerbach. Wasting good paint on copies, though, was like feeding caviar to the cat.

  Speaking of cat food, this whole business was beginning to smell fishy. Things often did when Martin was involved. If it was copies his collector wanted, why the black and white photos? Colour photos would have made more sense. And now Marty was hassling him over drying times. Why the hurry, when his collector friend could bung the daubs up on the wall fresh off the easel and tell the maid to hold off on the feather dusting?

  Marty had always been that way, long before the drugs. When he was a kid Pat and Moira had found it funny, little Marty wheeling and dealing in the playground and coming home with a pack of water balloons or stickers. Now he was dealing coke and snorting half of it up his nose. Pat blamed himself, he should have given him more attention but between the night jobs and the painting he never had time. And Moira, sweet lovely Moira, was a pushover.

  Talk of the devil, here was Marty now crossing the garden with that bouncy walk which in his father’s long experience spelt trouble. Pat shot out of The Shed to intercept him. He didn’t want him blabbing about the copies in front of the class; that would be embarrassing. But Martin insisted on breezing in.

  “Hi guys,” he said, looking around and smiling at Suzy.

  He handed Pat an envelope marked M&M with a meaningful look and took a turn around the room.

  “Nice,” he leant over Suzy’s perfectly tanned shoulder, watching her pink hydrangeas turn blue at the edges and yellow highlights flash from her emerald vase. “Interesting,” he stood behind Grant and directed a critical eye from the brown of the canvas to the blue of the flowers and back. He paused behind Dino and scratched an ear, paused behind Wolf and rubbed his nose, and stopped at Maisie. “Lovely,” he said and sounded like he meant it. He avoided Yolande, who was looking daggers at him.

  Pat hustled him out, but not before he’d stopped at the stack of large canvases leaning against the wall by the entrance and turned the topmost one around, to a burst of violet.

  The class all interrupted their painting to look.

  “The Seventh Seal,” Pat mumbled uncomfortably, “from Revelation”.

  He wanted to forestall any questions about marine mammals, but only succeeded in prompting a joke from Wolf: “In my day, Revelation was a make of suitcase.”

  Yolande glared at Wolf, but no one else bothered to respond.

  “You’ve got an asset in that class,” Martin shouted up at the veranda as he bounced back across the garden. “If you put them all to work we could step up production.”

  Chapter XII

  It wasn’t necessarily his fault. So digging out the gym under Mervyn Burke’s Hampstead house had affected the water table, but the house next door might have subsided anyway. It was on a hill.

  Martin put the letter face down on the kitchen counter and flicked on the kettle for a coffee. He noticed the signature on the back read ‘Mervyn Burke’ rather than the usual ‘Merv’.

  His friend was not in a friendly frame of mind. The letter was to tell him that his next-door neighbour, an eminent QC, was taking him to court.

  Martin was a glass half-full kind of guy, but recently his optimism level had been sinking. For a blagger he couldn’t complain, he’d had a good run. The jump from builders’ labourer to interior architect had taken brass balls, with which he happened to be generously endowed. What he didn’t happen to be endowed with, right at this minute, was brass. He couldn’t pay his landlord, let alone his dealer. It embarrassed him to have to subsidise his habit by scoring for Godfrey’s toy boy; it was beneath him.

  The work had dried up, unlike the damp in Orlo’s orangery. Interior architect by appointment to the contemporary art world had been a cushy gig while it lasted, but he’d run through his entire circle of acquaintance and they weren’t coming back for more. Nor, he suspected, would they be providing references. And new clients would expect qualifications.

  If the old man would only pull his finger out they could get the ball rolling, but yesterday’s visit had confirmed Martin’s suspicions that instead of getting on with the paying commissions his dad was secretly back at work on those Seven Seals. Tammy had filmed him at it only last week.

  How long had he been fussing over those paintings? Half a lifetime. Martin had memories of coming home from school and finding his dad holed up with them in the bedroom while his mum was at work. He still felt a residual sting of resentment at the memory of having had to get his own tea. And here the old man was now, with orders waiting to be filled and money to be made, shut up in his studio footling away at their tender bits.

  The trouble with his father was he never needed money. He had always managed to survive somehow on air.

  Any normal person would have seen the pointlessness of finishing pictures that would never find a buyer. Who was going to give houseroom to seven seven-foot canvases by an artist who’d reached retirement age without ever making it? Serious dealers didn’t take on artists over 40, they needed the early years to build the brand. Anyway his dad was the wrong sort of artist. There was too much feeling in his work. It was embarrassing. Wealthy collectors didn’t want emotional overload dribbling down their walls, they wanted art they could safely ignore. Fine for Francis Bacon to let it all hang out, he was famous and dead, but who was going to tolerate an unknown living artist exposing himself all over their house? Plus if the pictures weren’t worth tens of millions of dollars, how would rich collectors explain the investment to their friends? They’d have to say they bought them because they liked them.
God forbid.

  For the first time in his life Martin felt depressed. He was almost in danger of losing faith in himself. If it had been left to him the whole damn lot would have been done and dusted in pastel, but James insisted that only Degas used it regularly. With most other artists the medium was an exception, and exceptions were what they wanted to avoid.

  James had the patience for the long game, but Martin was already tired of watching paint dry. What he’d had in mind was a Warhol factory knocking them out. He’d have done the job himself, but he wasn’t an artist.

  As he cut the last line of coke on the glass chopping board, the smell of onions from last night’s fry-up overpowered him; his eyes were streaming as he poured the coffee and set the mug down on the kitchen counter.

  When his vision cleared he found himself looking at a coffee ring stain with the signature ‘Mervyn Burke’ above it.

  Think of a number, any number… Martin found a pencil and wrote ‘No. 23’ in the bottom right hand corner.

  Chapter XIII

  Everyone who was anyone in Pickton-on-Tees was at the launch of the new Pickton Art Foundation, or pAf as it had been expensively branded by fashionable graphic design consultancy Value+Added.

  For a century since the owner of the local steel mill, Ivor Dyce, had left his collection of English paintings to the city, the city fathers had been planning to build a museum. But after the steelworks closed and Pickton achieved the statistical distinction of being ranked the most economically vulnerable city in Britain, the city fathers had more important things to think about. And nobody else in the country was going to think about it, if Pickton ever impinged on their thoughts at all.

  Pickton-on-Tees had fallen off the map, as had many of the British painters in the Dyce Collection. Pictures of sheep, potato pickers, shadowy barn interiors and dusky farmyards were kicked into the long grass during the Great War by Roger Fry and his fellow-disciples of Post-Impressionism. Who now remembered Sir George Clausen, Sir John Arnesby Brown and Joseph Farquharson – or Frozen Mutton Farquharson, as he was called, after his trademark paintings of sheep in snow?

  And these were the Royal Academicians. Dyce had been a genuine patron. He also bought from young painters he had never heard of, most of whom have not been heard of since.

  While the collection was ‘temporarily’ housed in an Edwardian villa on the outskirts of town, determined art-lovers would make the occasional visit, and the profound silence of the musty rooms with their mullioned windows would be momentarily disturbed by the creaking of a floorboard or the buzzing of a rudely awakened fly. Since the art lovers of Pickton could be counted on the fingers of two hands, the silence was not disturbed very often. But one habitual disturber of the peace was Gilbert Wise, a local doctor and keen amateur painter who used to take his little boy Godfrey with him.

  On Godfrey’s young mind that echoey house with its rooms filled only with paintings, and the occasional straight-backed chair, made an indelible impression. A particular favourite was the Farquharson of a wintry sunset with sheep and trees casting long shadows on the snow.

  When he grew up, he resolved that he would have his own art collection – and he did, though it turned out differently from Dyce’s. In the Godfrey Wise collection the place of Joseph Farquharson’s sheep immortalised in paint would be taken by Cosmas Byrne’s preserved in formaldehyde.

  By the time Godfrey had made the second billion from his discount stores, Wise Buys, art collecting had entered a period of seismic change and he was swept along on the tsunami. He wasn’t a dabbler like his father and, if he was honest, he couldn’t tell a good painting from a bad one. On the few occasions when dealers took him to meet painters in their studios they spoke a language he didn’t understand and he got the feeling, even when they were northerners, that they looked down on him.

  Paint was a slippery substance Godfrey couldn’t get hold of. When a painting was about something, he was on the ball – you knew where you were with Frozen Mutton Farquharson – but when a painting was about paint he was out of his depth. He was an entrepreneur, a man of ideas, and ideas were what he looked for in his art.

  Even before Charles Saatchi’s 1997 exhibition Sensation propelled a new generation of conceptual artists into the mainstream, Godfrey had started collecting contemporary art. Storage space was not a problem; he had warehouses and he filled them. He went to the newly opened East End galleries, he went to the parties, he felt accepted in a way he had never felt in Cork Street. And while his devoted wife Shirley minded her hairdressing business in Pickton and kept the home fires burning, he found himself spending more and more time in London indulging his newly discovered weaknesses for cocaine, GHB and interestingly damaged arty boys.

  The Wise Buys warehouses, meanwhile, were filling up with art acquisitions, still bubble-wrapped and crated, that he couldn’t show. Mrs W refused to have the stuff in the house, apart from a Cosmas Byrne petal painting on a gold ground that she allowed into the living room. Then one afternoon at Pickton Golf & Country Club’s 19th hole Godfrey was approached by the head of local Regional Development Agency ‘Capital Ts’ with a proposal.

  Money was available from the European Regional Development Fund, Renaissance in the Regions, VisitTeesside and the Northern Bank Foundation to build a landmark gallery that would put Pickton on the cultural map and turn it into an art tourist destination. But between Godfrey and the gatepost, the problem was the Dyce Collection. In a new steel and glass gallery it wouldn’t go. Besides, to put it baldly, who was going to travel up from London to look at so many paintings of shadowy barns and sheep?

  They’d have to show them, of course, as the collection belonged to the city and local people expected that sort of art. They could give over a room to rolling displays. But for the main galleries they needed cutting-edge art to demonstrate that Pickton was a happening place where companies with vision should be investing. Would Godfrey consider lending works from his collection? Once the gallery was up and running, money might be found from the Contemporary Art Association and NAF – the National Art Fund – to help build a contemporary collection of small affordable pieces. But what they needed now, to get attention, was the big stuff.

  It had been a marriage made in heaven, and Godfrey was now standing on a dais in the shiny new building it had engendered. On a sunless day in May the vast atrium with its north-facing wall of glass felt unseasonably chilly – heating had been low on the Italian architect’s list of priorities – and Shirley Wise’s shoulders stiffened slightly under her bouffant hair as she listened to her husband speaking with affection of the formative influence on him of the Dyce Collection. She liked paintings of the countryside and was pleased the collection would have a proper home, though apparently the paintings wouldn’t be on show until later in the year in case they gave the wrong initial impression. The inaugural show was titled A-R-T: The Future Is Here and drawn entirely from her husband’s collection.

  There were speeches from the director, the mayor and the head of the Regional Development Agency, who predicted a bright future for the gallery as an art destination of national and international stature. A town of which it had once been said that the most exciting thing to do of a Sunday afternoon was watch the traffic lights change now had the major attraction of a modern art gallery. And where there was art, as sun follows rain, employment would follow.

  * * *

  Daniel decided not to wait for the speeches to finish. If he slipped around the galleries discreetly now he’d be back at the station in time for the 7.38 to London. It shouldn’t take long, just a case of ticking artists off a list. Normally Marquette would have sent Bernice but Pickton-on-Tees didn’t register on her party radar, which was sensitive enough to pick up a signal from the Gwangju Biennale. Her radar was right. None of the artists showed.

  Daniel made a cursory stock-check round the galleries. A Cosmas Byrne bisected sheep and a suite of screenprints of pills in sherbet colours titled after Stations of the Cross. (Wise
also owned a Byrne petal painting, but his wife had apparently refused to relinquish it.) A lipstick-pink Stacey Nassim neon sign reading Love Yourself above a wall of scratchy masturbation drawings. A Mary Jonas ashtray made of fag ends. A Tammy Tinker-Stone film titled Fire! Little Liar that played backwards to show firemen sliding up a pole to the accompaniment of a choice of interactive soundtracks: on a red jukebox in the shape of a fireman’s cab visitors could select between the Fireman Sam song, Derek and Clive’s The Fireman Song and Lil Wayne’s Fireman.

  This one would be a hit with the kids. Tables in the Education Room upstairs were already spread with Fireman Sam colouring sheets for younger visitors, and the gallery shop was stocked with Fireman Sam pencils and Jupiter fire engine sharpeners.

  On a subtler note, there were minimalist interventions in the gallery space. Jason Faith, for his Opus Number 97, had removed the overhead LED bulbs from the gallery lift, leaving the illuminated buttons B, G, M, 1 as the only sources of light. Faith was also responsible for Opus Number 98, a traffic light system on the toilet doors that flashed red for occupied, green for vacant and amber when the flush was activated. Above the lockers in the cloakroom hung Celeste Buhler’s spatial intervention White Elvis, a white plastic clothesline holding a pair of girl’s white cotton pants with the words ‘THE KING’ embroidered in white across the front. It was also Buhler who had stretched the dressmaker’s measuring tape with all the numbers tippexed out along the edge of the counter in the ground floor café. Titled The Measure of All Things, it was part of her ongoing series Everything’s All White.

  By the time Daniel reached the Drawings Gallery on the mezzanine with its view of the town hall car park, the speeches were over and the guests were on their way upstairs, the clatter of high heels on the slab glass stairs mingling with stifled squeals of merriment from the lift.