‘Einstein had the same problem,’ I said.
‘So when are you going to come up with a universal theory?’ said Mark Simpson, our.host.
‘I’m working on a new relativity theory,’ I said. ‘This one is about wives and husbands.’
‘That was more than Einstein could handle,’ said Mark’s wife Nicola, and then Toby Gresham got us into the subject of the expanding universe while Jennifer gave me a look that said, ‘What?’
My answering look said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’
‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ was her wordless reply. ‘Expansion can be a bad idea,’ said Jessica Gold. ‘Look what happened when Biba moved into Derry & Toms,’ and the conversation went on in various directions along with the cognac and the grappa.
‘Don’t forget that you’re driving,’ said Jennifer as my glass was refilled.
‘How could I, with you to remind me?’
‘More coffee?’ said Nicola.
It was pouring when we left; the streets were very black and shiny; the headlights of oncoming cars lit up curtains of rain, the windscreen-wipers flopped back and forth like an endless argument and in our little room on wheels the atmosphere was getting thicker. I said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’
‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ said Jennifer. ‘Shouldn’t you have taken a right back there?’
‘Probably,’ I said. We didn’t visit the Simpsons that often, and on the return trip the one-way system in Camden Town sometimes defeated me. Things got blacker and more spaced out with dim lights here and there and I realised that we were in the usual wrong place somewhere around King’s Cross.
‘How much did you have to drink?’ said Jennifer.
‘Not enough,’ I snarled as I swung the car around into an intersection that seemed very dark and undefined.
‘Look out!’ said Jennifer as we were hit on the passenger side. Her last words.
I haven’t driven since.
10 Sarah Varley
‘Stop it, Sarah,’ I said to myself. Because I could feel myself juicing up to make this man do better. He was failing in some way, he was putting out failure pheromones and they were getting me excited. Not for sex but for the hardcore depravity of trying to build towers out of wet dishcloths. He was very evasive in conversation; what was he hiding? For that matter, what was I hiding by turning my critical faculties on him rather than on myself?
How had Giles and I fallen in love? I met him in 1984 when I was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! Sometimes that seems a hundred years ago. My name was Burton then and I was working at the Nikolai Chevorski Gallery in Cork Street. Chevorski always reminded me of the joke about the man who packaged goatshit and sold it as brain food. I was on the gallery staff because he’d seen me there the year before and offered me a job on the spot. He was a short man and he liked to have tall women around him. At the time I was with a small firm of auctioneers who were about to go out of business so I was happy to make the move.
The show at which I was hired by Mr Chevorski was entitled Haruspications and featured twenty-four large paintings of chicken guts by Winston Breck. Like most of the shows at that gallery it received a good deal of attention. Seymour Daly of The Times said, ‘Although it might be argued by some that Breck has chickened out, he has done it in a gutsy manner, and by doing it in our collective face he has forced us to see what we may have looked away from before this.’ Noah Thawle of the Guardian said, ‘Semiotically baleful in their revelation of what one would rather not see, these paintings with their anatomical mysteries have a visceral impact that augurs well for Breck’s future.’ Lucy Camaro of the Daily Telegraph predicted that ‘Breck’s paintings may well convert more than a few of his viewers to vegetarianism but inviting one, as they do, to descry a personal destiny in the mantic disembowelment of chickens, they exert a terrible fascination.’ Lena Waye of the Independent found ‘… the metaphor less than inspired. It may be that those who pay money for old rope will splash out on chicken guts; and the art market being what it is, they can always sell them at a profit.’
Before the show had even opened George Rubcek and Darius Fitzimmons had bought three of the paintings for their collection, so the word was out that the oracles had said yes. ‘I don’t really know much about this kind of brain food,’ I told Chevorski.
‘All you need to know,’ he said, ‘is that George Rubcek and Darius Fitzimmons have already bought three, so now the herd punters will pay big money to have him on their walls and they can dine out on it for two or three months.’
The evening a year later when I met Giles was the opening of Cyndie Dubuque’s show at the gallery. Giles arrived with a woman of fifty or so who was in somewhat better shape than she really was. She had dyed red hair with a frizzy perm and wore a blue leather jacket, white T-shirt, jeans that had been sprayed on, and brown cowboy boots. Giles was thirty at the time, not exactly a toy boy but I doubted that his connection with the enhanced mother-figure was altogether non-commercial. He was as ruggedly handsome as a film star and he looked at me the way a man who knows horses looks at a horse. I was a lot younger than I am now, which is to say that when I saw Giles I saw potential; I wasn’t sure what kind but I was willing to have a go at developing it.
Cyndie Dubuque was an American painter who’d dedicated herself to the celebration of the clitoris. This was back before the Internet when the clitoris still had some novelty value and the opening was well attended. I saw Seymour Daly, Noah Thawle, Lucy Camaro, Lena Waye, Thurston Fort of the Royal Academy, and Folsom Bray of the Post-Modern Gallery, whose praise added zeros to any price. George Rubcek, with a face like a sticky bun with two raisin eyes, was there. He said that Darius would have come but he was laid up with the flu. Darius is dead by now of AIDS and Cyndie Dubuque hasn’t been heard from for a long time but that evening was all go. The champagne wasn’t vintage but many of the chequebooks were, and Cyndie got so carried away that she had to be restrained from dropping her knickers and exhibiting the most recognisable feature of her self-portraits.
The champagne and caviare were being handed round by sleek young women in white shirts, red bow ties, very short black skirts, spike heels and black stockings that ended in a flash of thigh and red suspenders. These girls were provided by the caterer, Fizzy Lizzy, and would be somewhere else tomorrow; I as permanent staff was in a little black dress that was almost as short as the pelmets of the Fizzy Lizzy cupbearers but I wore tights instead of stockings and suspenders; this didn’t discourage Nikolai Chevorski from groping my bottom but he was just over five feet tall so his world-view was closer to the ground than most people’s.
While his frizzy-permed friend was talking to George Rubcek the as-yet-unmet Giles made his way through the minglers and networkers to me, his sexuality shimmering like a motorway mirage. ‘You look too real for this kind of thing,’ he said to me.
‘That’s because I’m getting paid for it. On my own time. I’m no realer than you are.’ I was reading him the way you read the little film blurbs in the TV schedule: ‘Predictable story attractively packaged but short on plausibility,’ this one said. It’s difficult for me to believe how cynical and naive I was at the same time back then. Not, however, cynical enough to avoid a man who needed improving.