Acknowledging the crowds she saw as a featureless throb of pre-coital discomfort with a limply dropped wrist, she remained tormented by unease: there was an unidentified splinter lurking beneath her perfectly manicured fingernails. ‘You’d have to be a stiff to get better coverage,’ she muttered. She was ‘prime time’ with all the majors and most of the disk cowboys who cared about their franchises. That was it! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? What were her so-called ‘advisers’ playing at? Those brilliantined lounge lizards, those neutered toms who fed at her table. What on earth was going on at the Agency, for goodness’ sake? Off with the velvet glove (and the velvet hand inside it!). Were there any lard-haunched half-Brits left to bounce? That was always so popular with the back-bench lynch mobs.
Dead, extinguished, excused parade. The Judas kiss of cold marble. The ultimate camera call. Victoria R came up with the same solution when she was beginning to slide back in the ratings: a Memorial to her dear departed husband, her companion, her inspiration. Dead meat, a Consort could still be pressed into service. What are you waiting for? Put a call through on the blue line to the Sh’aaki Twins. A State Commission must be set up immediately. Yes, NOW! Of course, this morning. No planning permission is required. Flatten Greenwich if you have to. Next time they’ll think before they vote.
II
The Steering Committee convened at the London City Brasserie (Silvertown) had been democratically nominated. Eleven places were laid at a shimmering linen table, that was crowded with surgeries of Georgian silver, light-manipulating facets of crystal. It was possible, by peeping through a captive tobacco plantation, to cop a vision of the grey and choppy waters of the King George V Dock: a subdued and unmeditated absence. The Brasserie exploited one end of the upper deck of the City Airport; the other was reserved for perpetual trade exhibitions, maquettes of riverside apartments. A weekly flight hammered its way, too low to be tracked by radar, to the Channel Islands, weighed down by the lumpy packages of money-laundering service industries. Otherwise this was a showcase with nothing to show.
Brendan (Clancy) Mahoun, a former dock labourer, perhaps ‘lifted’ by the booze (on the strength of his redundancy money), claimed to have seen Our Lady walk upon these waters. Otherwise cold-blooded and calculating investors are always eager to leap on any sign or portent; they grovel for the soothsayer’s blessing. They decided that pilgrims would very soon be rushing the turnstiles from every farflung corner of the Catholic empire. An airport must be constructed. The theory paid off (eventually) at Knock. The sheds were booming: not with alms-jangling shrine hoppers, but with country boys frantic to emigrate. And that was the only way this place was ever going to work.
Ten of these complaisant diners had been nominated directly by the Widow herself, and the eleventh by a conga of ‘practising’ artists (sculptors, window dressers, creative book keepers and the like). The conga had been brought under starter’s orders, a month in advance, by the Widow’s Press Secretary, wearing his other hat as (the entire) ‘Council for Arts and Recreation’. It had been a tricky one, at first blush, finding the names to cloak the event in bogus respectability. In the end, the task devolved, quite satisfactorily, on those heavyweight players, the Sh’aaki Twins, who picked a few hungry faces from among their own holdings. A good lunch was better than the promise of a postal order.
‘I think it behoves us to tie this one up fast,’ announced the Chair, a banker, and director of thirty-two City companies; who was not keen to expend one second more than he was being paid for at table with the great unwashed. His own scowling portrait had been perpetrated by the late Oskar Kokoschka (one of his flashier efforts): to a background of bridges bursting from his waistcoat like exploding ribs. This shameful object was soon relegated to the boardroom, which the Chair never found the time to visit. ‘All agreed? A show of hands; no dissenters, no conchy abstainers — then we can address ourselves to the more complex and rewarding decisions demanded by an eight-course luncheon.’
Professor Catling, the distinguished sculptor, had jumped the gun, and was washing down an indigestible knuckle of knobbly, over-boiled octopus with a thimble of salt-rimmed mezcal. His fingers dipped expertly into a side salad; stiff fronds of arctic lettuce, endive crinkly as well-oiled pubic hair. Catling had once been the leader of the ‘Walthamstow School’, now he was merely its last survivor. English Cinema, which Truffaut claims (with some justification) does not exist, is stuck with two festival-hogging tendencies — both are derived from Walthamstow, the legendary SW Essex Technical College and School of Art; training ground of Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway. For ‘Art Cinema’ we should read ‘Art School Cinema’. And remember Walthamstow.
Catling’s work (when he practised it) was of the Third Kind: uncomfortably direct. (A man treated to a full spaghetti dinner is then given two or three pints of salted water to drink. The camera, unblinking, records the result.) No, Catling had been elevated to this company for three quite distinct reasons. He possessed a very presentable chalk-stripe suit, in something close to his own size. (It wouldn’t frighten the ladies.) His work was so obscure and recondite that it could not remotely come under consideration for the project-in-hand: it was years since anybody had set eyes on it. (No whispers of a fix.) But, most importantly, he had a pan-European reputation as a trencherman. He’d keep his snout in the trough with the best of them, and sing for his supper with gems from his repertoire of superbly timed and delivered smoking-room anecdotes. He’d be far too busy licking the grease from his fingers to question any realpolitik decisions with nitpicking aesthetic quibbles.
The Chair resumed, while his fellow freeloaders wet their lips in iced Perrier: he rapidly and succinctly outlined their brief, informing them of the conclusions they would reach in time for the circulation of the port. The Widow wanted a fitting memorial to her Consort. It would have to achieve an epic scale (Valhalla), soar above the docks — signifying her courage in the face of adversity, and also the courage of the nation, the ‘little people’, Britain-can-take-it, ‘Gor blimey, Guv’, it’s only one leg, ain’t it?’ A memorial to the spirit of the Blitz and a torch to Enterprise. It should make Prince Albert’s cheesy stack look like the heap of bat guano it would, in truth, soon become. No rivals were tolerated: Gilbert Scott’s ‘memorial of our Blameless Prince’ had already been condemned as a dangerous structure and would be demolished within the week; the Ross of Mull granite, the marble, the bronze figures, the Salviati mosaics redistributed to rusticate wine bars and industry parks in South Shields or Humberside, or wherever some discreet patronage was required. For too long there had been an elitist focal around the ‘Royal’ Colleges, the Museums, the Albert Hall, the under-exploited parklands, the subsidy-swallowing Palace. Our memorial rising above Silvertown would shift the whole axis downriver: not Canaletto, nor Turner — but William Blake! The horses of instruction feed in silver pastures. (‘Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?’)