‘Assistants?’ Carole repeated incredulously. ‘Why does he have assistants?’
‘Oh, to do the work for him. You don’t think he actually stuck those photographs on the gun himself, do you?’
‘Well, he must have done. If he’s claiming that it’s his work of art, the least he must’ve done is to make the thing.’
‘No, Carole,’ said Jude, an amused grin on her tired face. ‘He just had the concept of doing it.’
As she knew she would, her neighbour just said, ‘Huh.’
Carole went back to the home page of the website, where Jude saw something else of interest. There were two tabs labelled ‘Virtual Visitors’ and ‘Real Visitors’. The first one took them back to the webcam shot of the darkened studio. But the second tab took them to a page on which there was an image of the back of a postcard, artfully scrawled with the words:
‘Want to see the artist at work in the flesh? Every Monday between eleven o’clock and four Denzil Willoughby’s studio is open to any motherfucker who wants to have a look.’ This was followed by instructions as to how to get to the studio.
‘Well,’ said Jude, ‘if we want to talk to Denzil Willoughby, we know what we have to do, don’t we?’
‘Oh, but we couldn’t,’ said Carole.
‘Couldn’t we?’ said Jude.
In the gossip column of Carole’s Sunday Times the following morning there was a photograph of Sam Torino at Walden. It was a measure of her celebrity that space had been made for her in a paper most of whose feature content had been put to bed by the Friday evening.
It was a great advertisement for Chervil Whittaker’s glamping site.
And, needless to say, there was no mention of her sister’s recent death.
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.