‘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.