Guns in the Gallery

SIX

Neither of them had mentioned it when they met at Butterwyke House, but Fennel Whittaker had a session booked with Jude at Woodside Cottage for the Monday morning. The girl arrived on the dot of ten – she was obsessive about timekeeping – and Jude could tell from her expression and body language that her mood was bad.

But initially nothing was said beyond greetings and conventional pleasantries, as Jude uncovered the massage couch in her cluttered sitting room. The curtains, almost terracotta in colour, had been spread across the windows and the sunlight diffused through them to give the space a warm, orangey glow. Without being told, Fennel Whittaker stripped down to her underwear and, once a length of paper sheet had been unrolled for her, lay down on her front on the couch.

Jude’s attitude to healing was instinctive. She adjusted her treatments according to the needs that she sensed in individual clients. Though she had trained in a variety of alternative therapies, she did not subscribe to any one to the exclusion of others. Her approach was mix and match. The important element in any healing was channelling energy. How that end was achieved varied from client to client.

With Fennel, Jude had quickly realized that they should start each session with a traditional massage, for which she rubbed a little aromatic oil on to her hands. The young woman’s frame was full of tension. The gentle force of Jude’s hands could ease that, and also feeling the contours of the girl’s body gave an insight into what was happening in her mind.

As ever, while she massaged, Jude talked. What she said was relatively unimportant. If the client wanted to contribute to the conversation, fine. If not, equally fine. What was important was Jude’s tone. Together with the magic wrought by her hands, the soft warmth of her voice helped to put the client at ease, to make them more receptive to the therapies that followed.

That morning Fennel was disinclined to talk. No problem. Jude chatted casually about the visit she and Carole had made to Butterwyke House on the Saturday. She observed, but did not comment on, a new tautness in the girl’s body when mention was made of the Walden experiment. The tension increased when the name of her sister Chervil came up.

When Jude finished the massage, Fennel was lying on her back, considerably more relaxed than she had been when she entered Woodside Cottage. Jude wiped the oil off her hands with kitchen roll and said, ‘Are you happy lying there or do you want to sit up?’

‘Lying’s cool,’ said the girl drowsily.

‘Did you bring some of your recent artwork?’ This was a suggestion Jude had made at a previous session. Fennel Whittaker was a talented artist. She had started at St Martin’s College of Art, but had been forced to give up the course halfway through her second year. The cause had been a complete mental breakdown. She had suffered two before as a teenager, but the one at college had been the most severe.

In fact, she was lucky to be alive. Living at the time in a Pimlico flat her parents had bought, Fennel had made a suicide attempt, washing a great many painkillers down with the contents of a whisky bottle. She’d also cut her wrists, but fortunately missed the arteries. It was by pure chance that Chervil had dropped into the flat, found her sister unconscious and summoned her father. The incident had been followed by six months’ hospitalization for Fennel in the most expensive private clinic the Whittakers’ money could buy.

She had emerged on a strong regime of antidepressants, which did seem to improve her condition . . . so long as she took them. But Fennel Whittaker was still the victim of violent mood-swings and seemed to be permanently on the edge of another complete collapse.

In her manic phases, however, she produced a lot of art and, from what Jude had seen of the stuff, it was very good art. For that reason she had suggested that Fennel should bring along some examples of her recent work to their next session, in the hope that the paintings might offer some clues as to the the causes of her depression.

‘In the carrier by the sofa,’ the girl replied lethargically.

Jude picked up the bag. ‘Do you mind if I have a look at them?’

‘Be my guest.’

She shuffled out a handful of paintings. They were watercolours that had been done on ordinary copy paper which had curled a bit as they dried. But though the medium was a subtle one, there was little restraint in the images depicted. The predominant colours were dark, deep bruise blues, slate greys interrupted by splashes of arterial blood red. So violent were the brush strokes that at first Jude thought she was looking at abstracts. But closer scrutiny revealed that the paintings were representational.

Each picture showed the body of a woman, young, shapely, but twisted with pain. Their features were contorted as they struggled against restraints of chain and leather, the red gashes of their mouths screamed in silent agony. But a defiance in their posture and expressions diluted their bleakness. There was suffering there, but also a sense of indomitability. Tormented as they were, Fennel Whittaker’s women would not give up anything without a fight.

‘And these are recent works?’

‘Yes. All done since our last session.’

A week then. ‘You’ve been busy.’

A shrug from the massage couch. ‘When I’ve got ideas I work quickly.’ But the way she spoke was at odds with her words. She sounded apathetic, drained, only a husk of her personality remaining after the threshing storm of creativity that had swept through her body.

‘Well, they’re very good,’ said Jude. ‘A lot of pain there.’

‘Yes,’ Fennel agreed listlessly.

‘Don’t you get a charge from knowing that you’re doing good work?’

‘I do while I’m actually painting. I look at it and it feels right. Every brush stroke is exactly where it should be. I feel in control. Then I look at it a couple of days later and . . .’ She ran out of words.

‘And what?’

‘And I think it’s derivative crap. I can see the style I’m imitating and I’m just deeply aware of all the other artists who have done it better over the centuries, and all the artists who’re even doing it better now.’

‘Have you always had that kind of reaction against your work?’

‘Usually.’

‘And does it ever change?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Do you ever come round to thinking what you’ve done’s rather good again? Do you recapture the feeling you had while you were actually painting it?’

Fennel Whittaker sighed. ‘Has happened. There’s some stuff I did during my first year at art college . . . before I . . . you know . . . I felt pleased with it . . . and one of my tutors, Ingrid, who I really rated, she thought it was great. Yes, some of that’s bloody good.’

‘Doesn’t knowing that cheer you up?’

‘No. It makes me feel worse, if anything.’

‘Why?

‘Because I look back and I think: God, the girl who did that had a lot of talent! Unlike the girl who’s looking back at the stuff. Whatever it was I may once have had, I think I’ve lost it.’

‘You do know that a lot of creative artists suffer from bipolar tendencies?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t help much to know that, though. Doesn’t stop me thinking that my work’s crap . . . along with everything else in my life.’

Jude was silent for a moment, trying to decide what therapies she should use for the rest of the session. For the time being, though, she reckoned talking was doing Fennel as much good as anything else would.

‘Is there anything specific that’s made you feel down at the moment?’

‘There’s never anything specific. It’s just . . . everything.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I know I’ve asked you this before, but are you sure there wasn’t something in your past, something that happened that triggered the depression?’

‘And as I’ve answered before, no. What are you hoping I’ll say – that my father interfered with me when I was a child?’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that.’

‘I know you weren’t. Anyway, the answer to your question remains the same as when you last asked it. I think the depression is just something knotted into my DNA. A dodgy gene, like . . . I don’t know . . . being born with red hair perhaps?’

‘And there’s nothing that’s happened in the last few days that’s got you particularly depressed?’

Fennel looked up, alert to a slight change in Jude’s tone. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Just when we were at Butterwyke House and you and Chervil came in, it sounded as if you’d been having a row.’

‘Not a row. It’s just the way sisters are, always sniping at each other.’

‘When Chervil was showing us round Walden, she seemed a little bitter about you.’

‘What? Complaining I was monopolizing our parents’ attention?’

‘Yes.’

‘Huh. I don’t know where she gets that from. If she genuinely thinks I’m going through what I go through simply to score points over her, then I wish she could have a couple of days of depression, so she knows what it feels like.’

‘And she doesn’t?’

‘No. Chervil’s never had a negative thought in her whole life. Eternal Bloody Pollyanna. Chervil’s fine. Never been any problems with her. She’s always been our parents’ golden girl. Always done everything right.’

‘What about relationships?’

‘She’s never lacked for male attention.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked. Do her relationships last?’

‘Till she gets bored with them, yes. Chervil never risks getting hurt. When a relationship is ending, she always sees to it that she’s the dumper rather than the dumpee. And she never dumps a boyfriend till she’s got another one lined up. Chervil hasn’t spent more than a week without a boyfriend since she was fourteen.’

‘Whereas you . . .?’

The bark of cynical laughter which greeted this enquiry was more eloquent than words would have been.

‘My sister’s guiding principle is: love ’em and leave ’em. Chervil rather prides herself on being a femme fatale.’

‘And what about her current relationship? With Giles Green.’

‘Oh, you heard about that. She seems quite keen at the moment. Early days, though. Let’s see whether he’s still on the scene in a couple of months.’

Jude was interested in this display of sibling rivalry. Chervil had said it was Fennel who monopolized their parents’ attention. Fennel effectively described her sister as their favourite. Something to be explored at some point, perhaps. But not in this session, Jude decided.

‘Going back to your relationships, Fennel . . .?’

‘Huh.’ The girl let out a long, cynical sigh. ‘How many ways do you know of saying the word “disaster”?’

When she had first got her laptop and started exploring its capacities, Carole Seddon had been very sniffy about Google. Sniffiness was in fact her default reaction to anything new. And there didn’t seem something quite natural about being able to access information so easily. How much more civilized it was to consult her shelf of reference books when there was something she needed to check for The Times crossword. Everything she needed was there between hard covers: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Chambers’ Biographical Dictionary, The Oxford Companion to English Literature and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. References to things she couldn’t find in those volumes didn’t deserve to be in any self-respecting crossword.

But the appeal of Google was insidious. And the speed with which it delivered information was undeniably impressive. Increasingly Carole was seduced by the simplicity of keying a word into a search engine rather than flicking back and forth through the pages of a book. Soon she was hooked. If anyone had asked her about her addiction (which nobody did), she would have justified it on the grounds that, now she had a grandchild, it was important to keep up with developments in information technology. But she knew that the excuse was really mere casuistry.

In fact Carole was spending more and more time online. When checking facts, one thing did so easily lead to another. The speed with which data could be sorted appealed to her filing cabinet mind. There seemed to be websites out there to deal with any query one might have. And though she kept piously reminding herself that the answers provided might not always be verifiably correct, the process remained intriguing.

Carole even – and this was something she would not have admitted under torture – used an online crossword dictionary to solve stubbornly intransigent clues in The Times crossword. You just had to fill in the letters you had got, put in full stops for the missing letters and, within seconds, all the words that fitted the sequence would appear. Using the device went against the very spirit of cruciverbalism, but then again it was seductively convenient.

There was no surprise, then, that on the Thursday, the day before the Cornelian Gallery’s Private View, Carole Seddon found herself googling Denzil Willoughby.

Considering that she had never even heard his name a fortnight before, he had a remarkably large presence on the Internet. Spoilt for choice, she decided to start with his official website.

On occasion in her life Carole had begun sentences with the words ‘Now I’m as broad-minded as the next person . . .’ And in Fethering that was probably true. Most residents of the village shared a comparable breadth of mind. But by the standards of the world at large, their gauge was not very broad. And certainly not broad enough to encompass some of the images on Denzil Willoughby’s website.

Now Carole knew that the urges to reproduce and defecate were essential features of the human condition, but she’d never thought that either should have attention drawn to it. And certainly not in the flamboyant way that the artist highlighted them. Not only did he commit the cardinal sin of ‘showing off’, he compounded the felony by being vulgar.

Carole wondered whether Fethering was ready for Denzil Willoughby.