Guns in the Gallery

On one side wall hung a collection of West Sussex landscapes – the South Downs, local beaches – whose style looked vaguely familiar. Closer inspection revealed them to be the work of Gray Czesky, a self-appointed enfant terrible of an artist, whom Carole had met in the nearby village of Smalting. She winced as she remembered the prices he charged for his chocolate-box watercolours.

One painting on that wall was clearly by another hand. Central to it was the instantly recognizable outline of Eros, but the statue was set in an unfamiliar Piccadilly Circus. Everything was covered with snow, not the pristine white of the newly fallen, but that tarnished grey of the thaw’s first day. The bleakness of the scene, of red London buses sloshing their way up towards Regent Street, was evocative of the comfortlessness of shoe-soaking slush.

The opposite wall hosted a display of framed relief works in copper, bronze and bright enamel colours. Twisted torsos apparently grappling each other or wrestling with winged dragons. Undoubtedly ‘modern’ art, thought Carole with a knee-jerk sneer. And real dust-traps, added the compulsively house-proud element of her personality.

On the remaining wall of the gallery were what looked at first sight like a sequence of Christmas tree designs, a series of upturned, arrowhead shapes in a variety of textures and colours. They puzzled Carole at first. She suspected further excesses of modernity and had only just identified them as samples of frame corners when the door at the back opened to admit the gallery’s owner.

As she did with many other people in Fethering, Carole knew the woman’s name and a certain amount about her life, but the two of them had never actually had a conversation. Bonita Green was a small woman one side or the other of sixty, whose style of dress hadn’t changed a lot since she had been an art student (at ‘the Slade’, according to local gossip; though local gossip wasn’t quite sure what ‘the Slade’ was).

And even back then her fashion sense had had something retro about it. Her lifelong sartorial icon appeared to have been the French chanteuse Juliette Greco. Summer and winter Bonita always dressed in black, V-necked black jumper, tight black slacks (there was no other word for them) and black trainers. Her brown eyes were outlined in black and her hair, improbably black and with the fluffiness brought by much dyeing, framed her face in a long page-boy cut. Perhaps as a student, she had had a sexily gamine quality, but age and two children had spread her contours considerably. Still, Bonita Green was so much a part of the Fethering landscape that people stopped noticing her. And no one ever voiced the thought that she might look faintly ridiculous.

‘Good morning. Can I help you?’ Her voice was affectedly sultry, matching the incongruity of her appearance.

She knew who Carole was just as well as Carole knew who she was, but they both maintained the Fethering convention of being complete strangers to each other.

‘I was looking for a frame for a photograph.’

‘Is it a standard size? We have a big range of ready-made. Or will you want a frame specially made for it?’

‘Well, I’m not sure.’ Carole Seddon reached into her handbag and produced a large envelope containing the precious picture of Lily. She withdrew the photograph slowly, trying to stop herself from hoping for a reaction of amazement at the beauty of its subject.

She got none. Bonita Green was interested only in dimensions. ‘Doesn’t look standard,’ she said, before checking the edges with a transparent plastic ruler. ‘No, if you want to keep it this shape, you’ll have to have a frame made.’

‘What do you mean, “if I want to keep it this shape”?’

‘Well, it’s clearly been worked on in Photoshop. You could crop it again to get it to a standard size.’

‘That is the size I want it,’ said Carole with an edge of asperity. The gallery owner hadn’t exactly gone as far as to criticize her Photoshop skills, but had been too close for comfort to such a social lapse. ‘It is a rather special photograph for me.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Bonita Green, still insufficiently in awe of Lily’s beauty. ‘Had you any thought of what kind of frame you’d want?’ She gestured to the Christmas trees of samples behind her. ‘As you see, we have quite a wide range to choose from. I would have thought, for an image that size, you would need the frame to be at least this thick. But as to colour or finish, of course that’s up to you. What did you have in mind?’

Carole was somewhat distressed to realize that she didn’t have anything in mind. Her intention had been to get Lily’s photograph framed. She hadn’t given any thought as to how it should be framed. Characteristically, she felt annoyed by her lack of preparation.

‘Presumably you’ve decided where you’re going to put it? So you’ll probably want to consider the decor of the room, so that it tones in with the colours there . . .?’