Guns in the Gallery

‘No, but . . .’ The trouble was, if you were Carole Seddon, every social event was trial by ordeal. Even ones where there was a good chance she might enjoy had to be preceded by hours of agonizing over whether she would make a fool of herself or wear the wrong clothes or commit some other faux pas. She had the shy person’s rather arrogant assumption that she – and her shortcomings – would be the focus of everyone else’s attention.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated finally, ‘but I really don’t think it’s my sort of thing.’

‘What’s not your sort of thing?’ asked the rough voice of Ted Crisp. He was the landlord of the Crown and Anchor, and he’d just brought over to their table the day’s Lunchtime Specials they had ordered, two seafood risottos. Ted was a large scruffy, bearded man, always dressed in faded sweatshirt and jeans. When he’d taken over the lease, he’d just been thought of as a large scruffy bearded man; but now the Crown and Anchor was gaining something of a reputation as a gastropub, he was regarded as a ‘local character’. People who’d watched too many television food programmes assumed that his scruffiness was some form of ‘retro-chic’. Which it certainly wasn’t. Ted Crisp had always been like that. And any chic he had was the chic he had been born with.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Carole replied to his question, but Jude undermined her by saying, ‘We were talking about art.’

‘Art, eh?’ Ted echoed. ‘I heard a story once about a burglar who broke into the house of a modern artist, and while he was nicking the stuff, the owner came back. Burglar got away, but the artist just had time to do a lightning sketch of him. Took it to the police, and now they’re looking for a man with nineteen purple legs and a couple of poached eggs on his head!’ He let out a great guffaw. ‘You have to laugh, don’t you? Well, no, clearly you don’t, but I do . . . otherwise it goes all quiet.’

‘What a loss you were to the stand-up circuit when you gave it up,’ observed Carole.

He grinned at her, knowing she was only teasing. Carole still found it incongruous that she should be sufficiently relaxed with a publican to be on teasing terms with him. Nor could she suppress a sense of daring incongruity from the knowledge that she had once had a brief affair with Ted Crisp.

He pointed down to the Cornelian Gallery invitation on their table. ‘You two going to that then?’

‘Yes,’ said Jude.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Carole.

‘Be good eats there.’

‘Oh?’

‘Event being catered by none other than the Crown and Anchor, Fethering.’

‘Then that’s another reason for us to go,’ said Jude. ‘Your outside catering business seems to be taking off in a big way, Ted.’

He shrugged, always embarrassed by references to the burgeoning success of his pub. His lugubrious, laid-back style was better suited to commiserations about failure.

‘But it’s true,’ Jude insisted.

‘Well, if it is, it’s nothing to do with me. Down to Zosia, all that is.’

At the mention of her name, a blonde pigtailed girl behind the bar looked up and waved at the two women. Zosia had come to Fethering from Warsaw a few years before to investigate the circumstances of her brother’s death. She had stayed and her perky efficiency had totally transformed the running of the Crown and Anchor. Though Ted Crisp had been initially grudging about having a foreigner behind his bar, even he would now admit that he’d be lost without Zosia.

‘Anyway, better leave you two ladies,’ he announced. ‘There’s a queue at the bar.’ There was. The pub was filling up with tourists as the April weather improved. ‘If I think of any more art jokes, I’ll be right back.’

‘No hurry,’ said Carole, teasing again.

For some minutes silence ensued, as the two women tackled their excellent seafood risotto. The Crown and Anchor’s chef, Ed Pollack, really was going from strength to strength. With him running the kitchen and Zosia the bar, the reputation of the pub was spreading even beyond the boundaries of West Sussex.

Carole and Jude finished their food at the same time and both sat back, taking long swallows of Chilean Chardonnay.

‘Jude, do you know Bonita Green?’ asked Carole.

‘A bit.’

‘Does that mean that she’s been to you for healing?’ She could never quite keep a note of scepticism out of the word. To Carole’s regimented mind her neighbour’s practice of alternative therapies would always come under the heading of ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo’.

‘No,’ Jude replied with a grin. ‘That’s not the only way I meet people, you know.’

‘Of course not. Well, I met her this morning.’

‘For the first time?’

‘For the first time when we exchanged names, yes.’

Jude couldn’t resist another grin. She never failed to be amused by her neighbour’s social subterfuges.

‘So what do you know about her?’ Carole went on.