Guns in the Gallery (2 page)

She eventually opted for a colour which Bonita Green descried as ‘gunmetal', but which she herself would have called ‘grey'. It was appropriate. The colour matched Carole Seddon's helmet of hair, and there was sometimes a grey bleakness in her pale blue eyes. Slender, with a good figure – though she would never have thought of it in that way – she was in fact a good-looking woman in her fifties. But she didn't like drawing attention to herself. She maintained her parents' tradition of keeping below parapets.

But in fact, by choosing the unobtrusive from the framing options, Carole had selected something rather stylish. Bonita approved her choice, and the approval sounded more than the automatic blandishment of a shop-owner. ‘You don't want a frame that's going to distract from the colours of the photograph itself,' she said. That was probably the nearest Carole was going to get to a compliment on her granddaughter's beauty.

Colour was not the only decision that needed to be made. There were also choices available in material, finish, mount and glass. Carole opted for a wooden frame with an ‘antique' gunmetal surface, an Ice White mount and White Water glass. This last was the most expensive, but she let herself be persuaded of its superiority over other glasses. Again, Bonita Green seemed to approve of her selections and that gave a small boost to Carole's fragile confidence.

The cost of the work was considerably more than she had anticipated, but she managed not to blench, reassuring herself that only the best was suitable for Lily. Then came the question of how long the work would take. Would the photograph have to be sent away?

‘No, all our framing is done on the premises,' replied Bonita Green. ‘Just a moment.' She moved towards the door from which she had emerged and called out, ‘Spider, could you just come here a minute?'

After a moment, a large man lumbered into the gallery. He wore blue overalls, spattered with a Jackson Pollock of paint and glue drips. The remarkable thing about him, though, was his hair. Dyed black, swept back in a quiff with long straight-cut sideburns, it had the complete Elvis Presley look. And in fact Spider's bulk helped to make him look quite like the deceased superstar, in his late Las Vegas diamanté Babygro incarnation. He loomed over his employer, a presence that was at the same time protective and slightly threatening. Carole tried very hard – and not entirely successfully – to avoid looking at the hair.

‘Spider . . . this lady . . .' The gallery-owner maintained the local convention of ignorance. ‘I'm sorry, I don't know your name.'

‘Carole Seddon.'

‘May I call you Carole?'

‘Please.'

‘Thank you. And I'm Bonita.'

This was a very important moment in Fethering protocol. Though the two women had both known each other's names for years, from this moment on they would be able actually to use them.

‘And this is Spider, who does all my framing.'

‘Good morning.'

The big man nodded acknowledgement. Bonita Green lifted up the photograph of Lily. ‘Carole wants this framed. We should have everything we need in stock. I know you've got a bit of a backlog at the moment . . .' The big man nodded again. ‘So when do you reckon we can promise this for?'

There was a silence. He seemed to have an aversion to speech and Carole wondered if he was actually dumb. But at length, slowly he articulated the word, ‘Thursday.'

‘What sort of time would that be, Bonita?'

‘First thing. If Spider says Thursday, he means he'll have finished it on Wednesday.'

‘So I might be able to pick it up on Wednesday?'

‘No. I usually close the gallery round four thirty. Spider often works on after that, sometimes Fridays and weekends as well. Isn't that right?'

With a nod of confirmation and farewell, the taciturn framer went back into his workroom.

‘Oh, very well,' said Carole. ‘First thing Thursday I'll pop in. What time do you open?'

‘Ten thirty. Ten thirty every day, except Sunday and Friday, when we're closed.'

The Calvinist work ethic within Carole could not repress the thought that ten thirty to four thirty was a fairly undemanding opening schedule. And taking Fridays off. But then again she knew very little about Bonita Green. Perhaps the woman was lucky enough to have a private income, and maybe the Cornelian Gallery was nothing more than a wealthy woman's hobby.

‘Anyway, I'd better be off. Would you like me to pay now or pay a deposit or something?'

‘No, that'll be fine. Settle up when you pick the thing up on Thursday.'

‘Well, that's very good of you.'

‘Oh, if you were a complete stranger, I'd ask for payment upfront. But because you're local . . .' said Bonita Green, thus deflating the Fethering convention that they didn't know anything about each other.

‘Thank you so much, anyway, and I'll—'

But Carole's parting words were interrupted by the appearance from the back of the gallery of a man in his early thirties. He had floppy brown hair, and was dressed in an expensive pinstriped suit. The tie over his white shirt was of that lilac colour favoured by politicians.

‘Good morning, Mother,' he said breezily.

‘Morning. Giles, this is Carole Seddon. My son, Giles.'

They exchanged good mornings.

‘I was actually just leaving.'

‘And has my mother given you an invitation to our Private View?'

‘No, I haven't, Giles.'

He shook his head in mock reproof. ‘Dear, oh dear. Where's your entrepreneurial spirit? I thought we agreed that you were going to hand out invitations to everyone who came into the gallery.'

‘Well, yes, but I—'

Ignoring his mother, Giles Green reached behind the counter and produced a handful of printed cards. ‘Something you won't want to miss, Carole. Friday week. It'll be
the
event of the Fethering social calendar. Have you heard of Denzil Willoughby?'

Carole was forced to admit that she hadn't.

‘Only a matter of time. He's going to be very big. Big as Damien Hirst in a few years' time, I'll put money on that. And he's showing his new work here at the Cornelian Gallery. So there's a chance for you, Carole, to be in at the beginning of something really big. Right here in Fethering you will have the opportunity to snap up an original Denzil Willoughby for peanuts . . . and then just sit back and watch its value grow.'

‘Well, I don't often buy art, I must say.' Don't
ever
buy art, if the truth were told.

‘Then you must simply change your habits,' asserted Giles Green. ‘It's too easy for people to become stick-in-the-muds in a backwater like Fethering. But things're going to change round here. Isn't that, right, Mother?'

‘Well, Giles, I'm not sure—'

‘Of course they are. Here, Carole, you take two of these. Bring a friend.'

Carole Seddon looked down at the invitations which had been thrust into her hand. The image on the front looked like an explosion in an abattoir. And the Private View to which she was being invited was called ‘GUN CULTURE'.

TWO

‘
I
t's not my sort of thing,' Carole protested, looking down once again at the Cornelian Gallery invitation.

‘How do you know what's your sort of thing until you've tried it?' asked Jude, a smile twitching at her generous lips. A well-upholstered woman of about the same age as Carole, she had a body which promised infinite comfort to men. As usual, her blonde hair was piled untidily on top of her head and she was dressed in swathes of brightly coloured layers. She and Carole were ensconced in their usual alcove at Fethering's only pub, the Crown and Anchor. In front of them were their customary glasses of Chilean Chardonnay.

‘Well,
art
.' Carole infused the word with a wealth of contempt. ‘I mean, my life's always been too full to have time for the excesses of art.'

‘You've been invited to a Private View that lasts two hours. You don't have to stay the full two hours. If you're not enjoying it, you can leave after half an hour. Is your life so full that you can't spare half an hour?'

‘Well . . .' It was a question to which Carole really didn't have a very good answer. Except for when Stephen, Gaby and Lily came to see her, or she went to visit them in Fulham, there weren't that many demands on her time. There was taking Gulliver for his walks on Fethering Beach, of course . . . and diligently removing impertinent motes of dust from the surfaces of High Tor . . . then sometimes the final few clues of
The Times
crossword proved obdurately difficult . . . but Carole could always find a spare half hour. Too many spare half hours, she thought during her occasional moments of self-pity.

‘I'm sure it'll be fine for
you
,' she went on. It was true. Jude had the knack of slipping easily into any social environment. ‘You're used to dealing with arty people. I wouldn't know what to say to them.'

‘You'd say to them what you'd say to anyone else. Anyway, they're not going to be very arty. I mean, if Bonita's inviting everyone who comes into the Cornelian Gallery to get a photo framed, it's hardly going to be the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, is it? There'll be half a dozen people connected with the art world and, apart from them, all the usual Fethering faces. Nobody's going to be quizzing you on your knowledge of Renaissance painting or your view of the Impressionists. It's not going to be trial by ordeal.'

‘No, but . . .' The trouble was, if you were Carole Seddon, every social event was trial by ordeal. Even ones where there was a good chance she might enjoy had to be preceded by hours of agonizing over whether she would make a fool of herself or wear the wrong clothes or commit some other
faux pas
. She had the shy person's rather arrogant assumption that she – and her shortcomings – would be the focus of everyone else's attention.

‘I'm sorry,' she repeated finally, ‘but I really don't think it's my sort of thing.'

‘What's not your sort of thing?' asked the rough voice of Ted Crisp. He was the landlord of the Crown and Anchor, and he'd just brought over to their table the day's Lunchtime Specials they had ordered, two seafood risottos. Ted was a large scruffy, bearded man, always dressed in faded sweatshirt and jeans. When he'd taken over the lease, he'd just been thought of as a large scruffy bearded man; but now the Crown and Anchor was gaining something of a reputation as a gastropub, he was regarded as a ‘local character'. People who'd watched too many television food programmes assumed that his scruffiness was some form of ‘retro-chic'. Which it certainly wasn't. Ted Crisp had always been like that. And any chic he had was the chic he had been born with.

‘Oh, nothing,' Carole replied to his question, but Jude undermined her by saying, ‘We were talking about art.'

‘Art, eh?' Ted echoed. ‘I heard a story once about a burglar who broke into the house of a modern artist, and while he was nicking the stuff, the owner came back. Burglar got away, but the artist just had time to do a lightning sketch of him. Took it to the police, and now they're looking for a man with nineteen purple legs and a couple of poached eggs on his head!' He let out a great guffaw. ‘You have to laugh, don't you? Well, no, clearly you don't, but I do . . . otherwise it goes all quiet.'

‘What a loss you were to the stand-up circuit when you gave it up,' observed Carole.

He grinned at her, knowing she was only teasing. Carole still found it incongruous that she should be sufficiently relaxed with a publican to be on teasing terms with him. Nor could she suppress a sense of daring incongruity from the knowledge that she had once had a brief affair with Ted Crisp.

He pointed down to the Cornelian Gallery invitation on their table. ‘You two going to that then?'

‘Yes,' said Jude.

‘I don't think so,' said Carole.

‘Be good eats there.'

‘Oh?'

‘Event being catered by none other than the Crown and Anchor, Fethering.'

‘Then that's another reason for us to go,' said Jude. ‘Your outside catering business seems to be taking off in a big way, Ted.'

He shrugged, always embarrassed by references to the burgeoning success of his pub. His lugubrious, laid-back style was better suited to commiserations about failure.

‘But it's true,' Jude insisted.

‘Well, if it is, it's nothing to do with me. Down to Zosia, all that is.'

At the mention of her name, a blonde pigtailed girl behind the bar looked up and waved at the two women. Zosia had come to Fethering from Warsaw a few years before to investigate the circumstances of her brother's death. She had stayed and her perky efficiency had totally transformed the running of the Crown and Anchor. Though Ted Crisp had been initially grudging about having a foreigner behind his bar, even he would now admit that he'd be lost without Zosia.

‘Anyway, better leave you two ladies,' he announced. ‘There's a queue at the bar.' There was. The pub was filling up with tourists as the April weather improved. ‘If I think of any more art jokes, I'll be right back.'

‘No hurry,' said Carole, teasing again.

For some minutes silence ensued, as the two women tackled their excellent seafood risotto. The Crown and Anchor's chef, Ed Pollack, really was going from strength to strength. With him running the kitchen and Zosia the bar, the reputation of the pub was spreading even beyond the boundaries of West Sussex.

Carole and Jude finished their food at the same time and both sat back, taking long swallows of Chilean Chardonnay.

‘Jude, do you know Bonita Green?' asked Carole.

‘A bit.'

‘Does that mean that she's been to you for
healing
?' She could never quite keep a note of scepticism out of the word. To Carole's regimented mind her neighbour's practice of alternative therapies would always come under the heading of ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo'.