The Horse's Arse Read online

  The situation, Pat figured, was that the sex-mad Eyetie had pulled his usual stunt of lying the woman flat on her back, then twisting her hips around to allow the triangle of her bush to peek out invitingly from behind the ellipse of her left thigh. But Pat was a gent. He wouldn’t put Suzy through this torture. He could achieve the same effect with the bottom half if the top half was stretched upwards on the diagonal – which, he surmised, was probably how Modigliani did it. That sort of anatomy was a game of two halves.

  Modigliani’s model had full round breasts, miraculously self-supporting, short wavy black hair and thick black eyelashes hooding half-closed eyes – about as far as you could get from blonde blue-eyed Suzy, but who would know? He had the top half of the torso already in place, drawn out in burnt umber on the canvas with the flesh tones of the face, arms and breasts roughed in. With the hips and thighs, however, it was all to play for.

  Pat whistled as he arranged the drapery on the couch. He’d had to guess the colours, as before, but without the expressive leeway Derain had given him. Earth reds, browns and ochres were Modigliani’s staples, relieved by the occasional swathe of blue. Backgrounds were generally dark to throw the flesh tones forward.

  Pat had dug out an old army blanket to cover the couch and stuffed the pillow from his bed into a blue case to serve as the cushion under the model’s back. He was embarrassed to tell Suzy the painting was a copy, so he’d moved the Seals from their usual spot to the right of the door and backed his easel into the gap, where she wouldn’t see the half-sketched image when she came in. What he’d do when the session was over he’d think about later.

  In the nick of time he remembered the newly minted Albert Marquet Pont Saint Michel propped on a shelf opposite the door, and flipped it around to face the wall.

  At the peal of the cowbell, he hurried across the garden at more than his usual speed. Framed in the alley doorway, Suzy looked dazzling in a purple camisole and artfully frayed cutoffs, the green of her dangly glass earrings matching the thongs of her flip-flops and the metallic blue of her toenails matching her eyes. Against the afternoon sun streaming down the alley the fine fuzz on her long brown thighs shimmered like gold.

  Pat bottled the urge to carry her over the threshold as a verse of The Song of Songs rose to his lips. With a conscious effort, he bottled that too.

  “Where do you want me?” she asked on entering The Shed.

  Anywhere, thought Pat. He pointed to the couch.

  “If you could lie like this…”

  Pat climbed onto the couch and stretched out both his arms, bending them upwards on either side of his head and rolling his face towards her with a sultry expression.

  Suzy laughed, a lovely bright tinkle of a laugh. He looked hilarious in his orange shirt with his beer gut bulging over the strap of his belt and his scrawny legs emerging from ex-army shorts to culminate in emerald socks worn with black sports sandals. Dear Old Pat.

  He laughed too.

  She undressed without fuss and lay down.

  Christ almighty!

  “Like this?” she asked, raising her arms and bending them back at the elbows.

  It wasn’t quite like that, but he didn’t dare go near her.

  “Not quite so bent, the right less than the left. More relaxed, as if they’ve just fallen into position” – he tried to mime the posture while standing up – “and the head like this.” He turned and moued again.

  When she laughed a second time, her breasts shook.

  Pat was getting an erection.

  If it had been Irene he’d have gone over and sorted her out, arranged her limbs as simply as fruit in a bowl, but Suzy he couldn’t touch. There was an electromagnetic field around her that if he crossed, he’d be a goner. Anyway the arms didn’t matter, they were in already, and the hips – a little thin to go with the breasts in the picture, but never mind – were doing that signature thing, the curve of the topmost thigh causing a partial eclipse of the bush.

  And what a bush it was! Moses never saw the like of it. Golden as late autumn, yellow ochre. Suzy was a natural blonde. It felt like blasphemy to paint it black.

  Pat had always had a slight tremor in his fingers, it gave a feathery quality to his brushwork that made his paint surfaces quiver. But now when he tried to position the hips on the canvas, his painting hand shook. To steady it, he decided to start by focusing on the left side of the image, the side that was already sketched in. Suzy’s breasts were smaller than the Modigliani nude’s but it didn’t matter, the shadows fell in more or less the right places.

  It must be old age; he was losing his touch. He’d never had this trouble with a model before. He had always viewed life painting as a sort of test run: where the brush led, the hand and tongue might naturally follow. But with Suzy he wouldn’t have known where to start. A proposition was out of the question: nothing short of a proposal of marriage would do.

  By teatime the top half was taking shape but the bottom half was still to do. Pat nipped to the kitchen to make a brew and on his way back across the garden with two mugs of tea – and a couple of bakewell tarts, for a special treat – ran into Suzy, fully clothed, on her way out.

  She looked tearful and cross at the same time.

  What had he done?

  “It isn’t me,” she blurted, “I don’t know why you bothered asking. I could have done a better job myself!”

  The cowbell tinkled after her like her laughter as the gate slammed shut.

  Old fool! He should have started from the other end. Now he was left with half a photograph and half a painting, and they didn’t add up to a whole.

  Chapter XXI

  Everyone wore black, and this time it was a funeral. The collector Godfrey Wise had died, aged 57, and the London art world had turned out in force to pay its respects, even though the ceremony was 200 miles north of the capital at a crematorium on the outskirts of Pickton-on-Tees.

  The Wise family had reserved two first class carriages on the 9.05 East Coast train from King’s Cross to Darlington, where a coach would be waiting to collect the mourners and drive them the remaining 15 miles to Pickton. Teesdale Cemetery and Crematorium were at the posh end of town, just down the road from the Edwardian villa where the young Godfrey had once disturbed the flies dozing among the forgotten treasures of the Dyce Collection.

  Everyone had come. All the seats in both reserved carriages were taken and latecomers who had neglected to RSVP squeezed in among the standard class passengers and paid their own fares. Wise’s unexpected death was an event with implications for everyone in the contemporary art world. Dealers, auctioneers, collectors, gallery directors and artists – no one was immune from its effects.

  Arts journalists left off the official guest list could always charge their train fares to expenses, but Karel Klima still resented having to sit with a young mother and two small children in standard class while Tom Jonson, wearing his Orlovsky Gallery hat, was reserved a seat at the top table with Jeremy Gaunt and Nigel Vouvray-Jones.

  Marquette’s Bernice Stock was not on board. Her last piece on the State Gallery’s Boegemann launch had been so bland, after all references to the redhead and Enzo episodes had been edited out by Crispin Finch, that Fay Lacey-Pigott had sent young Daniel Colvin instead.

  In the reserved carriages the atmosphere was sombre. There were few tears for Godfrey, generally regarded as a clown. The issue uppermost in everyone’s mind was the fate of the collection, the biggest contemporary art collection in Britain and, according to Marquette’s last Globalista survey, 7th largest in the world. If it were sold, the market would be swamped.

  None of the London crowd had met Mrs Wise. She was said to be a former hairdresser with no interest in contemporary art who left to herself would have collected Jack Vettriano – Britain’s most popular artist, unranked by Globalista. The couple’s two sons were equally unknown quantities. The younger one, Donald, worked in the family business. The older one, George, had gone into engineering, ran his own
consultancy in Newcastle and collected vintage planes.

  In the paying seats the mood was more upbeat. The media were on the scent of a good story. What interested the arts journalists and other hangers-on who had come along out of curiosity, like Martin Phelan, were not the consequences of Godfrey’s death, which didn’t affect them, but the causes of it.

  Word was that Godfrey had suffered a heart attack after attending an opening at Orlovsky’s with Enzo. The following day, when he failed to turn up for a lunch appointment, the alarm had been raised and he’d been discovered dead in his bed. The results of the autopsy had not yet been made public, but word on the grapevine was that toxicology tests had found a high concentration of methamphetamine in his blood.

  Enzo had been questioned by police and released. His story was that he had gone home with Godfrey to the collector’s house in St John’s Wood, where the couple had argued about his extended visit to the bathroom earlier that evening with a young Scandinavian sound artist, following which Enzo had flounced out.

  To those who knew them, the story held water. They were always rowing. And Enzo was manifestly heartbroken. There were no suspicious circumstances, said the police.

  Among the art press there was speculation about how much Mrs Wise knew of her husband’s London life. Not much, guessed the few who had seen the happy couple together. At home in Pickton Godfrey was the model citizen: a pillar of Pickton Golf & Country Club, twice president of Pickton Rotary Club, a founder member of Pickton Arts Circle and principal patron of the Teesside Youth Inclusion Project.

  Though of Jewish extraction – his paternal grandfather’s name was Weissman – Godfrey was not a worshipper at Pickton Synagogue. The service in the crematorium chapel would be conducted by a preacher from the Tyneside Humanist Society and the eulogies would be delivered by Marjorie Rimmington, director of pAf, and veteran northern comic Declan Connor, the dead man’s oldest friend from primary school.

  As the rather shabby crocodile of metropolitan mourners filed along the winding tree-lined walk from the coach park, following the arrows marked ‘CHAPEL OF REST’, they could just make out a cluster of smartly dressed Picktonians – men in sharp suits, women in heels and hats – at the foot of a grand flight of steps that might have done justice to a minor Egyptian temple.

  Against the temple wall to the left of the entrance, like sacrificial offerings, lay heaps of floral tributes in cellophane wrappers and above the wrappers floated a flotsam of hats, bobbing and ducking as their wearers read the messages of condolence. At the foot of the temple steps on the other side a solitary black pork pie hat stood out in tragic isolation, weaving and jerking with the spasms of violent sobbing that repeatedly shook its wearer’s fragile frame. Under the hat, the spider-like figure appeared to be dressed in a tailcoat with no shirt.

  As the metropolitan crocodile came into view, the gathering on the temple steps turned to look. The VIPs among the Londoners paid no attention; the Less Important Persons looked behind them.

  A hearse was advancing slowly through the screen of trees, the bright floral tributes piled on its roof flashing through the foliage as it passed. Mounted on top was a wreath spelling out a message in giant letters.

  ‘FATHER’, was it? No, it was two words. ‘DEAR DAD’?

  It was only when the cortege got clear of the trees that the message became legible: ‘OLD MUCKER’.

  The mourners stared in disbelief as the hearse drew up and Declan Connor sprang athletically from the leading limo to open the door for his old friend’s widow. Shirley Wise stepped daintily out in black patent leather sling-backs, dipping the crow feather fascinator cresting her coiffure, and disappeared up the church steps without looking back. There was no indication of what she thought of Declan’s send-off. He stayed behind to take the applause.

  The service was mercifully short. The humanist preacher, in a long black Nehru jacket buttoned to the neck, summed up the life of the man he had never known without striking too many discordant notes, although a reference to the deceased’s special interest in young people produced a muffled snort from a hack in the back row and a howl from Enzo, who had refused to be seated and was being physically restrained by Orlovsky’s minders from running up the aisle and flinging himself on the coffin.

  Marjorie Rimmington’s address was brief and to the point, a transparent plea to the dead man’s family not to call in the Wise Collection loans and leave the town’s newly opened gallery empty and its newly appointed director out of a job. Declan Connor’s eulogy was longer but more entertaining. His reminiscences of the schoolboy Godfrey running a mobile sweetshop from his satchel, selling half-sucked gobstoppers and hardly-worn licorice laces – one careful owner – at a discount, raised laughter from the family in the front pew and almost made Pickton’s Rotarians forgive the wreath. They even succeeded, momentarily, in silencing Enzo.

  Odd that he didn’t mention the collection, though. To some of the London contingent this seemed ominous – and as would soon become clear, the omens were right.

  At the reception in the Captain Cook Function Room of the local Thistle Hotel, Jeremy Gaunt sought out Donald Wise to offer his condolences and express the hope, with a pained smile that was for once appropriate, that he and George would keep up their father’s tradition of cultural philanthropy.

  Daniel Colvin happened to be standing right behind him when Donald curtly informed the State Gallery director that the Wise family wanted out of the art business as soon as possible. Neither he nor his brother had ever shared their father’s enthusiasm; as far as they were concerned his art collection was a load of overpriced tat. Contemporary art was a crazy fad that had cost their father a fortune and ultimately, in their opinion, his life. The family couldn’t wait to be shot of it. They’d only invited the London art crowd to the funeral because they were on a list their father, in a premonition of mortality, had drawn up the month before his death. Their mother could keep the Byrne petal painting if she liked; everything else would be auctioned off. He, Donald, couldn’t see the point of any of it and George wanted the warehouses for his planes.

  * * *

  The mood in the reserved carriages on the return journey to London could only be described as funereal. Despite Gaunt’s habitual discretion, news of the threat to the Wise Collection spread through the train like a bad odour through an air conditioning duct. A fire sale of Godfrey’s assets was unthinkable. His warehouses were stocked floor-to-ceiling with all the biggest brand names in British art, and if they were all offloaded at once the market would go into meltdown.

  Even if the family could be persuaded to sell the collection piecemeal in small lots, observed Vouvray-Jones at the improvised emergency summit convened around Gaunt’s table, the storage costs would need to be factored in – and if the Wises wouldn’t foot the bill it could fall on the auction houses. It could take years and years of dribbling risk into the market to neutralise the potential fallout from the collection’s dispersal, and in the current climate who would want to take a punt on the works’ value in, say, 10 years’ time?

  Godfrey had imported the tat in his discount stores from China, but where art was concerned he had backed Britain. Now, with the developing markets in Indian, Chinese and Middle-Eastern art, the hegemony of the cBas was no longer secure. The situation was fluid enough without a flood of British art being released without warning onto the global market. If you wanted to turn British art investments into toxic assets, this would be the right way to go about it.

  For the moment, all agreed that the only course of action was to keep the news out of the media as long as possible while cobbling together a compromise solution.

  In his window seat across the aisle from the high table, Bernard Orlovsky was keeping schtum. There was an idea forming in his mind that he needed privacy to pursue. He went to the disabled toilet for space to think, found it engaged and while waiting congratulated himself on not having made Godfrey’s parochial mistake of piling exclusively into Cool Bri
tish Art. As a citizen of the world, he took the global view. Even at the height of Cool Britannia he’d been aware that the ice would eventually melt. He had diversified, kept ahead of the game and now he was simply waiting for the game to catch up. His immediate concern was to keep the Arabs in dot paintings; in a year or two it would be Arabic calligraphy. Liquidity problems were a temporary annoyance, but he wasn’t worried. A solution would present itself.

  Whoever was in the toilet was taking his time. Orlovsky jabbed impatiently at the door release button, and jumped when the door slid open to reveal Martin Phelan.

  The schmuck was everywhere.

  “Orlo,” Martin greeted him affably with a sniff, “just the person I wanted to speak to. I got your summons and I’m not going to contest it. I’m prepared to settle out of court. Why make extra work for lawyers? They’re rich enough.”

  He noticed his fly was undone and zipped it.

  “I don’t have the readies right now but I can repay you in kind. I’ll call you at the gallery later in the week. Between us I’m sure we can work things out.”

  Chapter XXII

  At 12.30pm on a Monday in mid-August you could be pretty much guaranteed to have The Art Room to yourself. Most of the restaurant’s regular patrons would be on holiday and those keeping up the pretence of working were mostly late risers, the type who drifted in for brunch at half-past two. Orlovsky liked a place to be empty when he was doing business, it cleared his mind. And the business occupying it today was especially sensitive.

  Though he didn’t make a habit of altruism, Orlovsky allowed himself the occasional indulgence. The Wise Collection crisis was not his problem; unlike some others he could name, he had been prepared. It was bound to happen sooner or later, even if Godfrey’s death hadn’t made it sooner than everyone, himself included, had expected. But while his fellow players were in a state of shock, blinded by their own self-interest, Bernard Orlovsky had come up with a selfless plan that would save the situation for everyone.