Guns in the Gallery

TWENTY

Denzil Willoughby’s workshop, they discovered, was in Brixton. This immediately set alarm bells ringing for Carole. Though she didn’t read the Daily Mail, faithful to her Times and its crossword, her mind could sometimes run on distressingly Daily Mail lines. So for her the word ‘Brixton’ was shorthand for race riots . . . and all that that entailed. The fact that the riots had happened over thirty years ago did not have any effect on her knee-jerk reaction.

Looking at the A–Z when working out their optimum route to the workshop, Carole was struck by how near Brixton was to what she regarded as ‘nice’ suburbs. Wandsworth was very near, Battersea not far away, and even the adjacent Clapham was apparently now a suitable location for the aspiring middle classes. Carole Seddon’s deep-frozen attitudes demonstrated how rarely she actually went to London. How rarely, in fact, she left Fethering.

Needless to say, the remainder of her weekend had been spent in paroxysms of indecision as to whether she and Jude should actually go to Denzil Willoughby’s studio. Carole ran through a more or less exact repeat of the feeling she had had running up to the Private View. And an invitation on a website was even less specific than one handed over in a gallery. At least in the first instance she had known Bonita Green and the venue was local. Turning up at an artist’s workshop unannounced represented a very different level of intrusion.

And Jude’s reassuring words hadn’t totally convinced her. ‘Come on, we want to talk to the guy. We don’t have any other obvious way of contacting him. And the invitation for anyone to drop into his workshop couldn’t be clearer. After all, Carole, what’s the worst that can happen?’

That question, so casually thrown around by people less paranoid than herself, always caused Carole Seddon great anguish. Though meant to be rhetorical, it was an enquiry which never failed to set her imagination racing. She could always supply a long list of worst things that could happen.

Of course, as with the Private View, something deep inside her psyche knew that ultimately she would end up going to Denzil Willoughby’s workshop. So on the Monday morning, having taken Gulliver for his customary romp on Fethering Beach, Carole checked on the website to see whether anything had changed on the ‘Artist at Work’ link. The only difference was the amount of daylight, which now left no doubt that what the webcam showed was the workshop interior. It lit up what, to Carole’s mind, was an amazing amount of junk, none of which could ever be included in her definition of ‘art’. But the warehouse space was still uninhabited.

Carole closed down her laptop and joined Jude on the first cheap train from Fethering Station to Victoria. From there they would get the Victoria Line to its southernmost outpost of Brixton.

On the journey they didn’t talk much. Carole hid behind the screen of her Times, while Jude just looked out of the window. She did sometimes read – usually books from the Mind, Body and Spirit section at which her neighbour would be guaranteed to harrumph noisily – but that particular morning she was content just to let her thoughts flow. Carole wished she ever felt sufficiently relaxed just to let her thoughts flow.

Once she’d read all The Times’s news and features, she addressed her mind to the crossword, but felt awkward doing it with someone she knew beside her. Carole Seddon was very anal about her crossword solving, and the knowledge that even as close a friend as Jude was present put her off. The fact that her neighbour was totally uninterested in the clues or her answers did not fully remove the feeling that she was under surveillance. As a result, her concentration suffered and she was slow to make the necessary verbal connections.

When they emerged from Brixton Station, Carole was surprised to find herself in what felt like just another upmarket London suburb. True, there were more dark faces on the street than she was used to, but then she did come from the backwater of Fethering, where even the convenience stores had yet to be taken over by Asians. And some of the vegetables on display outside the Brixton shops were a little more exotic than what she’d find in the local Allinstore. But otherwise, not for the first time, Carole Seddon felt slightly embarrassed by her unthinking readiness to accept stereotypical attitudes.

The address they’d found on Denzil Willoughby’s website was at the end of a street of small houses built for railway workers but now gentrified to a very desirable standard. Their destination was an old warehouse, which had also been expensively converted. Curtained windows on the upper storey suggested that a loft apartment had been carved out of the space, though whether or not Denzil Willoughby lived up there Carole and Jude didn’t know.

The warehouse had high double doors, presumably to let in wagons or heavy machinery for its original owners and life-size guns plastered with photographs for its current incumbent. Into one of these doors was set a smaller door which opened at Jude’s touch. There was no sign of a knocker or bell, so she just led the way in. Carole was happy to follow, aware that she might not have been so bold had she been on her own.

They found themselves in a space high enough to garage three or four double-decker buses. A spiral staircase led to the floor above, and two doors at the back led off perhaps to offices or other utilities. In reality the level of clutter inside the workshop was even more chaotic than it had appeared on the webcam. Carole was vaguely aware of the concept of objets trouvés, art made from everyday articles dignified with unlikely titles, but she could not for the life of her imagine how some of the detritus collected in Denzil Willoughby’s workshop would ever make it into a gallery.

Among the objects on display were a rusty tractor and an assortment of car engines. A decommissioned red telephone box with its glass replaced by kitchen foil stood next to an antiquated milking machine. A broken neon sign reading ‘Kebab’ was propped against a collection of blue plastic barrels which had contained pesticide. Three collecting boxes moulded in the shape of small blind boys with white sticks loitered in the company of some mangy cuddly toys. Two Belisha beacons leant against a wall with an assortment of golf clubs, fishing rods and ice-hockey sticks. Superannuated cigarette machines were piled up next to a set of giant plaster frogs.

Near the door were some artefacts Carole and Jude recognized – the photograph-covered gun and the framed pieces which had recently been returned from the Cornelian Gallery. They had been piled up higgledy-piggledy, almost as if the artist had lost interest in them.

In the centre of the warehouse was what appeared to be a fully functional fork-lift truck, though whether that was there to move about the other junk or destined to form part of an artwork in its own right neither Carole nor Jude could guess.

As they took in the warehouse’s bizarre contents, they realized that the space was no longer uninhabited. On the floor at one end lay a life-size painted wooden crucifix into which a shaven-headed young man was banging galvanized nails. Laid out on the floor the other end was a giant poster of President Obama over which a young woman was laying a painstaking trelliswork formed by strips of Christmas Sellotape. There was no sign of Denzil Willoughby.

Neither of what were presumably his assistants took any notice of the new arrivals, but continued with the work of realizing their master’s ‘concepts’. Carole couldn’t somehow see a direct line in what she was witnessing back to the studios of the Old Masters, where eager helpers were allowed to do limbs and draperies while the boss took over to do the clever stuff like the faces.

She cleared her throat to draw attention to their presence, but neither of the assistants looked up from their toil. Then Jude announced, ‘Good morning. We’ve taken up the invitation on the website to come and have a look at the “Artist at Work”.’

‘That’s cool,’ said the girl, her eyes still fixed one her parallel lines of Santa-decorated tape.

Carole moved across to the young man with the crucifix. ‘And what are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I’m banging nails into the bloody thing,’ he replied, as it talking to someone educationally subnormal.

‘Yes, but why?’

‘What do you mean, “why”?’

‘Why are you doing it?’

‘Well, because Denzil told me to.’ Again he sounded as though he couldn’t believe the stupidity of her question.

‘And because Denzil’s told you to do it, does that make it art?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’ said the young man. ‘If you want to call it art, fine.’

‘I definitely don’t want to call it art.’

‘Still fine.’

‘Does Denzil think it’s art?’

‘Denzil doesn’t care. He does what he does. He’s not bothered by definitions. If people want to call it art, he’s not about to contradict them.’

‘And if people want to buy it?’

‘He won’t try and put them off,’ said the young man, banging a galvanized nail into the wound where the soldier had pierced Christ’s side.

‘Is Denzil around?’ Jude asked the girl.

‘He may be,’ she replied gnomically.

‘Are you expecting him?’

‘Usually. Sometimes.’ An answer which wasn’t a lot more helpful than the previous one. The girl, Jude noticed, was slight and dressed in black, perhaps rather like Bonita Green might have looked when she was twenty. And though she wore no make-up and seemed to have made no effort with her appearance, the assistant breathed an undeniable sexuality. Jude wondered whether Denzil Willoughby claimed the same droit de seigneur over his female assistants that artists are traditionally reputed to exercise over their models.

Since the person they had come to visit wasn’t there, Jude could see no reason not to try and get some information out of his staff, so she asked, ‘Did you know that Denzil had recently had an exhibition in Fethering.’

‘Where?’

‘Fethering. The Cornelian Gallery.’

‘Oh, I heard the name of the gallery, yes. Didn’t know where it was.’

‘Except, of course, the exhibition didn’t run its full course.’

‘So?’

As interrogations went, this one hadn’t got off to a very good start. And it didn’t get any further, because at that moment Denzil Willoughby’s feet in their toe-curled cowboy boots appeared at the top of the spiral staircase, quickly followed by the rest of his body as he descended. His dreadlocks looked more than ever like knotted string, and he was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He stopped halfway down as he saw Carole and Jude. ‘Good God,’ he exclaimed. ‘Ladies of Fethering.’

Carole was surprised that he’d even registered their presence at the Private View.

‘Good morning,’ said Jude.

‘And to what do I owe this pleasure?’ The sneer was still there, but the mock-formality took his voice back to its public school origins.

‘We saw on your website that anyone is free to come and watch the “Artist at Work”.’

As Denzil Willoughby reached ground level, he gestured around his workshop. ‘Well, here you see it. The “Artist at Work”.’

‘We haven’t yet seen much evidence of you doing anything,’ Carole observed tartly.

He looked at her pityingly. ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Carole?’ Again she was surprised that he knew her name. ‘You still think art is one guy sitting there with his pots of paint and brushes, “painting things that look like things”.’

That was even more of a shock, Denzil quoting her own lines back at her. It raised the possibility that he had been talking about them to someone else, a possibility that was both intriguing and mildly disturbing.

‘God, my brain’s not working yet,’ the artist announced to the workshop at large. ‘I need coffee.’

The girl immediately rose from her Obama poster and walked towards one of the doors at the back of the warehouse. In the alternative world of Denzil Willoughby, it seemed, male chauvinism still ruled. The other assistant hadn’t looked up from his re-crucifixion of Christ.

‘Make a cafetière,’ Denzil called after the girl. ‘My visitors may want some too. And bring it out on to the terrace.’

No ‘pleases’, no blandishments of that kind. He crossed towards the other door at the back, gesturing Carole and Jude to follow him.

They found themselves in a surprisingly well-tended yard, whose red-brick walls were animated by colourful pot plants and hanging baskets. A wrought-iron spiral staircase led to the upper storey. White-painted Victorian cast-iron chairs stood around an equally white circular cast-iron pub table with Britannia designs on the legs.

Denzil indicated that they should sit down, and he joined them. Beneath his customary sneering manner, Jude could detect tension. And his next words explained the reason for that tension. ‘Presumably,’ he said, ‘you’ve come to talk about Fennel Whittaker’s death.’