Guns in the Gallery

Ned and Sheena Whittaker seemed unaware of what their older daughter was doing. They had arrived separately – Fennel in a Mini, her parents in a Mercedes – but had hardly even greeted each other. Perhaps they’d had some kind of row, but Jude thought it more likely that Ned and Sheena just felt relaxed, their anxiety about their elder daughter’s mental health allayed by being at a public event.

They laughed at Giles Green’s words, but it was an uneasy laughter. Jude suddenly realized that the older Whittakers were in fact very shy. Their huge wealth had moved them into circles where they would never have dreamed of going, but they had never lost the gaucherie of their ordinariness. Social events, even as low-key as a Private View at the Cornelian Gallery, were still a strain for them.

The person who was disliking Giles’s remarks most seemed to be his mother. Bonita Green didn’t find the disparagement of her gallery at all funny. She had put a lot of work into building up her business and many of the people at the Private View were from her carefully nurtured local contacts. She didn’t want them to hear the kind of things that her son was saying. Alienating her client base could undo the efforts of many years.

There was a woman standing next to Bonita whom Carole had been introduced to earlier – to her surprise – as Giles Green’s wife, Nikki. She was around forty, tall and slender, with blonde highlights in her hair. In fact, she looked strikingly like a fifteen-year-older version of Chervil Whittaker. Had Giles Green, like so many men, just replaced his spouse with a newer model?

‘Soon to be ex-wife’, Chervil had said, but the woman’s mother-in-law made no mention of any rift in the marriage when making the introduction. Carole doubted whether Nikki Green’s invitation to the Private View had come from her husband. Had Bonita just been stirring things?

And yet there seemed to be no awkwardness between husband and wife, even though Chervil was all over Giles. Maybe they were one of those couples, which Carole read about but rarely encountered, who were genuinely ‘grown-up’ about the failure of their marriage.

Like his mother, few of the local contingent at the Private View were very amused by Giles’s words. It was all right for them to criticize Fethering – indeed, doing so was one of their most popular pastimes – but woe betide the outsider who voiced the tiniest cavil about the place.

Nor did the locals seem very appreciative of the art on display. As Carole knew from his website, Denzil Willoughby’s approach to his work was confrontational. Though too young – and probably not talented enough – to feature in the famous 1997 Sensation exhibition, the artist followed very firmly in the grubby footprints of Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. For Willoughby, all art produced before his own was cosy and bourgeois. In the personal statement on his website he derided the ‘mere representational skills’ of the Old Masters, the ‘shallowness’ of the Impressionists and the ‘glib simplicity’ of most contemporary art.

For the Private View – and perhaps for the duration of the exhibition – all of Bonita Green’s display tables had been moved through to Spider’s workshop. Though the Christmas trees of framing samples kept their place on the back wall, the other paintings, the Gray Czeskys and so on, had given way to Denzil Willoughbys. The only one left on display, Carole noticed with interest, was the slushy snowscape of Piccadilly Circus. She pointed out the oddity to Jude, who was also impressed by the picture’s quality.

The Private View’s main exhibit, which took over much of the central space in the Cornelian Gallery, was what looked like a real medieval cannon on a wooden stand. Every surface of the metal had been plastered over with newspaper photographs of black teenagers. These, according to the catalogue presented to everyone at the Private View, had all been victims of gun crime in English cities. The piece was called Bullet-In #7.

When she and Jude had arrived for the Private View – she would have never entered on her own – Carole had looked at the decorated cannon in quiet disbelief. Then she had read in the catalogue that the work ‘reflected the fragmentation of a disjointed society in which the machismo of disaffected youth bigs up the potent phallicism of firearms.’ When she saw the price being asked for the work on the sheet that they had been given with their catalogues, she assumed the wrong number of noughts had been printed.

After the first shock, Carole had murmured to Jude, ‘I can’t somehow see that in my front room, can you?’

The neighbour had giggled. The thought of Bullet-In #7 in any Fethering front room was unlikely. The idea of it amidst the paranoid neatness of High Tor attained new levels of incongruity.

‘Still,’ Carole went on, ‘full marks for effort, I suppose. Just building a cannon that size must’ve taken hours.’