‘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
‘It’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.