The Horse's Arse Page 9

  He wouldn’t make an offer to the Wise family to buy the whole collection in as stock. His altruism didn’t stretch that far; he had enough toxic assets of his own. But at least he had managed to stay ahead of the curve.

  Global operators of his calibre were men of vision: they created markets, they didn’t follow them. For the past five years he had been quietly pruning his holdings of British artists, starting with lightweights like Faith, Burke and Buhler. In their case storage costs were not a factor – Faith’s entire oeuvre would fit into an envelope and anyway, Orlovsky wasn’t short of space. He had all the room in the world for Cosmas Byrne, a heavyweight on the international circuit whose reputation was by now gold-plated – although recently, it was true, his diffusion lines had been selling better than the big set pieces in museum vitrines. There was a limit to the number of vitrines the museums of the world could accommodate. When every museum had one, what then? Building more museums had once been the answer but now, in the place of museums, there were holes in the ground.

  That wasn’t his problem either, fortunately. But no one was immune to a major upset that undermined investor confidence in the market. At a time when confidence was already weakening and high net worth individuals who would once have invested in golden calves in museum vitrines were putting their loose change into gold ingots, a clearance sale of the biggest contemporary art collection in Britain could be catastrophic.

  Back in the day when the teenage Bernie was flogging end-of-roll fabrics on 39th Street, clearance was the standard fix for liquidity issues, but what worked in the schmatte trade didn’t work in the art trade, for several reasons. One, with the sums involved you’d drop millions. Two, you’d betray the clients who’d bought from you at inflated prices and destroy their confidence in your judgment. Three, you’d screw the market for everyone else, which might be a plus in other areas of business but was a minus in art. In a market where prices were professionally inflated, consumer confidence depended on them staying that way. One or two burst balloons you could get away with; a whole bunch of them and the party was over.

  From his usual window table overlooking Albemarle Street, Orlovsky watched Jeremy Gaunt step out of a taxi and tip the driver with that contortion of the lips that passed with the poor death’s-head for a smile.

  The dealer grinned broadly to himself, as he knew how, and tightened his tie. In a way, he felt sorry for Gaunt. He suspected a loveless childhood locked away in one of those British correctional youth facilities called public schools. He wasn’t anticipating a convivial lunch.

  True to expectation, the meal got off to a sticky start. Orlovsky ordered white Burgundy with his sea trout; Gaunt asked for Badois water with his vegetarian tartiflette. Neither spared a glance for the art on the walls which was the restaurant’s chief selling point to other customers. What was pleasure for other diners was business for them.

  They talked about the Dubai Art Fair, the rising price of Middle Eastern art, the new class of contemporary collectors in China. When Orlovsky finally introduced the subject of the Wise Collection over coffee, he approached it crabwise. He was a master of the oblique attack.

  “When your extension’s built, what will you fill it with?”

  Gaunt met the surprise question with a bleaker smile than usual, conscious that Orlovsky wouldn’t swallow the official media line trotted out by the State Gallery that the new space would be filled with unhung works from the stores. The dealer knew what the stores contained. So he deployed his own tried and tested tactic for fielding unwelcome questions, which was to answer one with another.

  “What would you fill it with?”

  “The Wise Collection.”

  “The Wise Collection,” repeated Gaunt, taking off his glasses. “How?”

  “Simple. By acquiring it.”

  Without wishing to remind Orlovsky that he was speaking to a man whose office overlooked a £150m funding hole, Gaunt found himself asking the obvious question: “What with?”

  The waiter interrupted with a brandy for Orlovsky and a plate of petit fours. Gaunt usually refused sweet things with an air of pained asceticism, but before he noticed he’d eaten two of the biscuits and picked up a third. They were rather good.

  “I’ll tell you what with,” Orlo leaned on both elbows across the table. “I’m getting old. I’m overweight. I’ve got heart problems, which this stuff”– he tapped the brandy balloon – “isn’t helping. I’ve got no family apart from my old mother and no one to leave the business to when I die. Godfrey may not have had impeccable taste, but the sheer breadth of his collection is unparalleled. It’s an extraordinary record of the history of British art at the turn of the 21st century. It would be a tragedy for it to be dispersed; it belongs in a museum. If I had the time and energy, I’d open my own. But why go to the trouble and expense when there are more than enough contemporary art museums in this country already – none of them, of course, with the stature of the State.

  “If you want the Wise Collection, it’s yours. I’ll donate it to the gallery on one condition: that the gift is anonymous. I don’t want people thinking I’m a philanthropist, I’d have every schnorrer in the country after me. This would be a one-off benefaction. I’d like the donation to be attributed to the Wise family. I don’t foresee any problems with that.”

  The dealer was now beaming from ear to ear as he reached across the table and laid a large fuzzy hand on the director’s arm. It was as much as Gaunt could do not to retract it.

  “That’s an extraordinarily generous offer,” he gulped, without even attempting a smile.

  He needed to think quickly. There was the obvious problem of where to put the collection if, God forbid, the extension was never built. An image was forming in his mind of a line of dump trucks emptying the contents of the Wise Buys warehouses into the crater outside his window, when a workable alternative suddenly suggested itself. The storage problem could be relieved by lending works to other galleries. Whole exhibitions of works from the Wise Collection could be sent off on tour around the regions, solving the programming problems of regional galleries built in the boom years with nothing to fill them. At the same time, national tours of the Wise Collection could be used to spread the contemporary art gospel outside London. If some of the art was already passé, who was going to notice? Audiences in the regions were decades behind.

  He managed a smile. “I’ll need to discuss it with the trustees.”

  Orlovsky capped the smile with a broader one. “Of course. But remember the gift is from the Wise family.” And to his lunch companion’s acute mortification, he winked just as the waiter arrived with the bill.

  Before they got up from the table, Gaunt was committed to launching the new exhibition galleries in the State extension with a survey show of the Russian contemporary artists who, as it happened, were even now filling the space in Orlovsky’s stores vacated by the British.

  Chapter XXIII

  The twelve 7ft square canvases only just fitted through The Shed door, and when stacked inside they left no room for the paint. The deliverymen had dumped it on a pallet on the veranda: twelve 5-litre cans of household gloss in different colours and four of ultra white acrylic polymer.

  Pat stood and stared at it. It couldn’t stay there. If it wasn’t gone by the time Ron came home from work he’d never hear the end of it.

  He put out a Mayday call to Dino, who promised to come over with a tarp. If they cleared the brambles between The Shed and his other neighbour’s garden, Dino would be able to bodge a temporary storage facility.

  Individual copies were one thing, this was another. Ever since Marty could squawk his demands had escalated. Pat could wave goodbye to The Seven Seals until this was over. If the Blue Orangers didn’t bash out this batch of canvases pronto, the bastard things could be clogging up the works for weeks.

  Typical of Marty to spring this on him just when he was on the brink of a major breakthrough in the Seal department. Artists shouldn’t have children. They
competed for attention, and in Martin’s case it never stopped. Celibacy was the only answer really, or it would be if it weren’t for women.

  Pat was still feeling sheepish about Suzy. He’d almost thrown in the towel when the Modigliani went pear-shaped, and now this.

  Dot paintings, Marty called them. Love hearts without the love, as far as Pat was concerned. Making one-off copies had been just about bearable, but now Marty seemed to be moving into the wholesale business. His collector friend was apparently developing a luxury hotel and wanted one of these paintings for each of its ‘Imperial Suites’. Sweets for the suites, each one a little different. Different? With grids of 6in dots at 6in intervals, as different as a bunch of paint charts to Pat.

  It wasn’t as if Pat even needed the dosh. What he’d got for the Derain alone would pay Moira’s rent for a year. But Marty was in some sort of financial trouble, and when your flesh-and-blood is in a hole you have to dig them out. Plus some of the Blue Orangers could use the money. Dino was behind with the rent again and had been asking Pat if he could doss in The Shed if his landlady followed through on her threat to evict him.

  Pat had never been one to spoil the party. He’d present it to the class as a colour exercise though, to be honest, the idea made him queasy. It was a little thing and it might sound stupid, but the step down from copyist to hotel decorator felt degrading.

  He felt more positive after Dino pitched up with a tarp and a barrow full of skip wood and, latterday Palladio that he was, knocked up an all-weather lean-to in 15 minutes flat. The paint cans were safely stashed and the two of them were propping up the bar of the Hook & Mackerel before Ron had even boarded the bus from work.

  “Drinks on me tonight,” said Pat, “Happy Hour extended until closing. You’re a salvatore!” he added in his best Italian, rolling the ‘r’ around his mouth as he raised his first pint.

  “Salute,” answered Dino, raising his. “How did you know Salvatore was my middle name?”

  By closing time their joint diplomatic decision to alternate Irish whiskey chasers with sambuca had improved their command of each other’s languages beyond recognition, the deterioration in pronunciation only serving to enhance their mutual understanding.

  At a certain point in the evening it dawned on Pat – or was it Dino? – that he was in a position to make conditions. He’d make it a condition of signing on Marty’s dotted line that his collector friend invested in Pat Phelans – small ones for the tiddlers, big ones for the biggies. If he could build a hotel with all those sweets for dots he could build a church with a chapel for each Seal.

  Pat fell asleep that night with love hearts dancing before his eyes, saying: “ANGEL FACE… SUGAR LIPS… CUDDLE ME… JUST SAY NO”.

  Chapter XXIV

  It was Crispin Finch who broke the story on the cover of September’s Marquette:

  ‘POUND SHOP BILLIONAIRE DONATES £150m COLLECTION TO STATE GALLERY’.

  “With the British art world rocked by news of the sudden death of the UK’s most prolific contemporary art collector, Godfrey Wise,” Finch’s scoop began, “Marquette can disclose that the family of the deceased has entered negotiations to donate the entire collection – presently held in Wise’s birthplace and business base of Pickton-on-Tees – to the State Gallery. A public announcement has yet to be made, but Sir Jeremy Gaunt is said to be overwhelmed by the family’s generosity.

  “Speculation remains about where the collection, currently occupying three hangar-sized warehouses on the outskirts of Pickton, will be housed – or indeed shown – before the long-awaited completion of the State Gallery’s new wing. But a gallery source has told this magazine that one plan under consideration is for the collection to tour the UK in a rolling programme of regional gallery exhibitions.

  “The broadcaster and curator Tom Jonson has welcomed the news. ‘Londoncentrism is the curse of our culture industry, nowhere more so than in the field of cutting-edge art,’ he told Marquette. ‘It is one of the nation’s ugly secrets. The Wise family’s generosity may help to widen the circle of contemporary art to embrace the regions, giving them equal access to the sort of challenging work previously only seen in the capital. In his earlier loans to the Pickton Art Foundation Godfrey Wise pioneered a model of good practice which, with the resources of his collection at the State’s disposal, could be rolled out across the country from Penzance to Orkney. With the addition of the Wise Collection to the nation’s holdings, cutting-edge art can become truly national’.”

  There was no mention in Marquette of the circumstances of the collector’s death, which received widespread coverage in the tabloids. The Daily Star ran with the headline ‘PILLPOPPING BILLIONAIRE ART PUNTER POPS HIS CLOGS’, while The Sun led with a picture of Enzo on the steps of Teesdale Crematorium Chapel captioned: ‘Dead collector’s pierced punk lover in floods at funeral’. Neither article made any reference to the donation.

  For once the tabloids had stuck to the facts, thought Daniel; it was Marquette that had gone out on a limb. From what he knew the donation story was a fabrication, but no one at the magazine had deigned to consult him. Miffed at Daniel being sent on the funeral jolly while Fay had him chained to his desk churning out last-minute copy to fill the gaps left by reneging advertisers, Crispin had refused to even bring up the subject.

  As far as he was concerned, Daniel was too junior to have an opinion. So Daniel kept schtum and watched with mild amusement as Crispin primped and preened around the office about his scoop. The day after publication his story had been taken up by The Times and The Independent. There was a lead feature on page 3 of The Telegraph on Tuesday and The Guardian was obviously planning something, as their arts correspondent had just rung for a quote.

  To Daniel it made absolutely no sense. He’d heard Wise’s son and heir with his own ears effectively telling Gaunt to take a running jump and now the family had apparently changed their minds. Why the sudden volte-face? It didn’t figure. He had a vivid recollection of the look on Donald Wise’s face when he gave the State director the bum’s rush. No, it simply wasn’t possible.

  Yet Crispin’s source at the State was bound to be reliable. The gallery had obviously got its hands on the collection. How? If it wasn’t a gift it had to be an acquisition, and that cost money. Whose? Not the State Gallery’s, that was for sure, since £150m just happened to be the precise sum the gallery was still struggling to raise to finish its extension. So where had the money come from? And why the secrecy?

  Something funny was going on and Daniel wanted to find out what, if only to wipe the misplaced smile off Crispin’s face. But who was going to tell him? He hadn’t a hope of getting a peep out of Gaunt and from his brief acquaintance with Wise boys he didn’t fancy his chances with them either. The weakest link, he reckoned, was the mother.

  The key to the mystery lay under that big hairdo. From Mrs Wise, thought Daniel, he might get the truth.

  Chapter XXV

  Laid out in pairs, the dozen canvases covered the back garden of 15 The Mall with a narrow margin for manoeuvre between them.

  To get them to lie flat Dino had mowed the lawn. The patch of grass and weeds between the kitchen and The Shed had never previously merited the description ‘lawn’ – Pat preferred to think of it as a wildflower meadow – but Ron had been muttering about the state of it for years, and Pat had now called his bluff and borrowed his Flymo.

  As luck would have it, a band of high pressure was settled over London and the dry spell was forecast to continue for the next fortnight. Long enough to get this lot out of this way, but what a criminal waste of outdoor painting weather.

  That was what Pat needed right now, a blast of plein air, a late summer outing for the pochade box. Maisie had told him about a place in Walthamstow where her brother had an allotment and had promised to take him there before the summer was out. A day out painting with Maisie was just what the doctor ordered, as reviving to the spirit as a visit to a spa. All this copying was making him constipated; he n
eeded a spot of creative irrigation.

  From the kitchen where he was making breakfast for himself and Dino, the grid of white canvases reminded Pat of Ruisdael’s bleaching fields. The way the morning sun was printing shadows from the overhanging pear tree on their pristine surfaces seemed to compound the offence of covering them in dots. It had taken Pat and Dino days to prepare them, applying the white ground, then plotting out and drawing circles for the dots. Dino was rubbish with a brush but he was ace with a compass. The trouble with the compass was it left holes.

  Anyone would have thought they were running a playgroup. For the past week they’d been collecting yogurt pots and polystyrene egg boxes for mixing and holding colours. The mixing would be the creative bit, so far as it went, and in that department Pat was giving the Blue Orangers a free hand. He didn’t want to deprive them of their only fun. He’d confine himself to the role of nursery assistant.

  When the class arrived, to his surprise and secret disappointment they took to the ‘exercise’ like ducks to water. The morning passed in a happy burble of background banter that Pat would normally have clamped down on, but what did it matter? Wolf’s pox doctor joke even got a laugh from Yolande. Pat let it go. On a normal day he would have imposed silence so that the class could listen to the colours, but all the colours were saying today was ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’. There was no synaesthetic sensation involved; it was just a case of dots before the eyes.

  Still, further into the session Pat was forced to admit that the results surpassed his expectations. By mid-morning some distinct colour trends were emerging: the first faint glimmerings of an expressive range. When Marty had given them carte blanche with the colours he had had no idea what the Blue Orangers were capable of. Pat felt proud of his class; he’d trained them well. They had learned something about colour after all. As the dots spread out from the centre of each canvas, the paintings were taking on individual moods.