The Architectural Adviser (who was able to speak only while pressing his tongue with the ear-grip of his tortoiseshell spectacles) had visited his latest Rotherhithe development, and was ‘absolutely appalled’ to discover that so mean a site had claimed one of the city’s grandest viewing platforms. He was selling customized bijou residences in Cherry Gardens to half-solvent media lefties, who had to cash in their life-insurance policies to raise three hundred and fifty k! (It was a real drag dealing with social-climbing paupers.) We’re not having interviews with Shadow Cabinet ministers conducted directly opposite Georgein-the-East, with the whole curved bosom of the river spread to the eye from St Paul’s to St Anne’s, Limehouse; insinuating undeserved notions of imperial grandeur. History doesn’t come cheap. The word, therefore, is move out — lay down some action in swamplands. Bus the punters by water, or by chopper. Start the turnstiles clicking. Without a major feature, ‘focused on cultural excellence’, and spread through the supplements — OK? — you might as well shut up shop. It’s been costed, won’t top fifty million.
‘But, surely, Mr Chairman,’ piped the Laureate’s Wife, smiling a swift incision, appealing to Daddy, ‘we should, at least, be allowed to advise on the choice of artists to be involved in such a morally significant venture?’
The Chairman, covert stag, flared his spidery nostrils in acknowledgement of that lady’s mythical fragrance and — with effortless condescension — soothed her ruffled sensibilities.
‘Plenty of time for the small print, my dear. You chaps can argue up and down the cheeseboard about the drapes and the colour co-ordinates. I’m booked on the three o’clock flight for Zurich.’ (Handled that rather well, he thought. They only want to be noticed. He debated a compliment. Would her earrings be too personal?)
The Architectural Adviser, bronzed, beaked like a peregrine falcon, grinning the full zip, leant confidentially forward, gesturing expensively manicured hands in a spray of transatlantic eloquence.
‘My initial brief was to locate an adequately site-specific piece. It was felt that we must insist on a “language of symbols” and so, as a consequence, we took steps to eliminate from our discussions all the currently notorious practitioners of bricolage…’
He leered significantly at the Twins, who had amassed uncatalogued tons of the stuff in their North London bunker.
‘What in God’s name is the man talking about?’ demanded the Chair, winking boyishly at the Laureate’s Wife, and sneaking a glance at his timepiece.
‘The scavengers, sir,’ returned the Architect, bravely, ‘the beachcombers. Cragg, Woodrow; those people. We could turn them loose down the defunct rail lines, or let them abseil among the cooling towers — but, we tended towards the notion that they might not be altogether… reliable. They have this bias towards unstable metaphors: “singularities” straining beyond their rational event-horizons.’ (He had been reading extracts of Stephen Hawking and was looking for the opportunity to unburden himself of some of this language, before he lost it.)
‘What about David Mach?’ said the Last British Film Producer, brightly: he had been watching too many late-night arts programmes, and it was beginning to show. He clawed at his pepper-and-salt beard, grooming compulsively, as he had done while playing for time in so many interviews. He had been persuaded, against all his baser instincts (the ones that bought the place), to instal a Mach folly at the Mill House: a tumbling waterfall of never-distributed histories of the National Trust, in which a wild hunt of pink jackets, pikes, cuirasses, and drumsticks were drowning, soundlessly.
The Architect sucked the wax sheen on the arm of his spectacles. He was enjoying this. The illusion of authority. Not a critic in sight. ‘Too visible, too impermanent. The Widow, it has to be admitted, does not enjoy humour. Doesn’t understand it — or approve of those who do.’
The Producer, a dues-paying conservationist, paled, cruelly reminded of the ‘biographical details’ he had skittishly allowed his secretary to forward for inclusion in the project’s Official Brochure: ‘Tottenham Hotspur Supporter, bicyclist, knitter of Shetland sweaters, patron of David Mach, and occasional filmmaker’. The Widow was probably looking at the thing at this very moment, asking somebody to explain what it meant. He could forget the peerage. A crippling spasm of yellow pain shook him: he clutched his gut and made a rush for the Gents, where he pounded the digits of his cellphone, trying to reach his Artbroker before the close of trade for the Holy Hour.
‘Sell Mach! Take a loss, anything — get shot. I need weight, formalism. Get me into marble, or forget your percentage, baby. I want work that takes a crane to lift it.’
‘I must admit,’ the Laureate’s Wife elevated her bone-handled fork in the direction of the Chair, ‘to rather a soft spot for Gormley’s “Brick Man”. ’
‘Over my dead body!’ screamed the Architect, who was involved in a running battle with an unpronounceable critic who had written of the figure with trenchant enthusiasm. The Architect wouldn’t lift a finger to support anything his Hackney-based rival might (for want of a better idea) editorially endorse.
‘Put up a thing like that,’ said the extrovert Twin, ‘and you’ll frighten the aeroplanes.’
‘What aeroplanes?’ retorted the Chair, waving an empty glass towards the deserted runway: a gesture the hovering Cypriot waiter read, correctly, as a request for a ‘top up’. More sycophantic laughter. ‘You don’t seriously imagine anyone in their right minds would risk flying out of this cut-price lagoon — a hundred yards of couch grass in the middle of nowhere? The original notion, fatuous as it now appears, was that the terminal itself would be the big attraction — pulling in charabancs of manipulated imbeciles eager to gape at their own reflection, then stagger home with a trolleyful of gimcrack souvenirs. Now the taxi drivers won’t touch the place. They tell their fares it’s been closed down, run them to Stanstead.’
The Architect, fearing the conversation was drifting away from those areas in which he could decisively demonstrate his erudition and understated humanity, slid a sketch of Anthony Gormley’s brick giant across the table. It was instantly skewered by a flash of the Chairman’s steak knife.
‘Damned thing’s got no willy.’ His euphemism was tactfully pitched at a level suited to mixed company. ‘The creature’s a eunuch, sexless as a gilded Oscar. Dickie Attenborough’ll blub if he comes within a mile of it. Ugh! An impractical dildo: won’t be up a week before the Paddys have the bricks away to front some King’s Cross sauna. Jumping Jesus, can you imagine what the Widow would do if her husband’s sacred memorial was shanghaied into the retaining wall of a wankers’ bath house?’
‘Couldn’t we talk about Barry Flanagan?’ The Laureate’s Wife ached to shift into a more life-affirming territory. ‘His dancing hares have got such animal spirit, such dawn-fresh vitality. He’s a true shaman; his drawings come alive before your eyes.’
‘Flanagan?’ snorted the Chair, ‘feller in a trilby? Looks like a bookie’s runner? He’s a potato basher. Quite out of the question.’ (The Producer was relieved. He had shifted swiftly out of Flanagan when the soft furnishings started to cost more than a year’s subscription to Country Life or a modest assignation at the White Tower.)