Guns in the Gallery

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.

SEVEN

‘The history of art is the history of great talents being discovered in the most unlikely and humble places. And places don’t come much more unlikely or humbler than the Cornelian Gallery in Fethering.’

A few people at the Private View found Giles Green’s words amusing. Denzil Willoughby certainly did. The permanent sneer on his face transmuted effortlessly into a sneering smile. Gray Czesky, the ageing enfant terrible of nearby Smalting, also thought the remark warranted a snigger. So did Chervil Whittaker. From the adoring way she looked at Giles and drank in his words, every one of them was wonderful to her ears.

Her sister did not look as if she would ever be amused by anything, least of all if it came from Giles Green. Jude looked anxiously across the room, sensing Fennel’s mood and wishing it could be appropriate just to go across and enfold the girl in her comforting arms. But she knew that wasn’t the sort of thing to do at a Private View. She was also worried by the grim determination with which Fennel was drinking. Jude knew what medication the girl was on and she knew it didn’t mix well with alcohol. That was, assuming Fennel was taking her medication. If she wasn’t, the alcohol still wasn’t going to improve her mood.