Downriver (38 page)

Ten of these
complaisant
diners had been nominated directly by the Widow herself, and the eleventh by a conga of ‘practising' artists (sculptors, window dressers, creative book keepers and the like). The conga had been brought under starter's orders, a month in advance, by the Widow's Press Secretary, wearing his other hat as (the entire) ‘Council for Arts and Recreation'. It had been a tricky one, at first blush, finding the names to cloak the event in bogus respectability. In the end, the task devolved, quite satisfactorily, on those heavyweight players, the Sh'aaki Twins, who picked a few hungry faces from among their own holdings. A good lunch was better than the promise of a postal order.

‘I think it behoves us to tie this one up fast,' announced the Chair, a banker, and director of thirty-two City companies; who was not keen to expend one second more than he was being paid for at table with the great unwashed. His own scowling portrait had been perpetrated by the late Oskar Kokoschka (one of his flashier efforts): to a background of bridges bursting from his waistcoat like exploding ribs. This shameful object was soon relegated to the boardroom, which the Chair never found the time to visit. ‘All agreed? A show of hands; no dissenters, no conchy abstainers – then we can address ourselves to the more complex and rewarding decisions demanded by an eight-course luncheon.'

Professor Catling, the distinguished sculptor, had jumped the gun, and was washing down an indigestible knuckle of knobbly,
over-boiled octopus with a thimble of salt-rimmed
mezcal
. His fingers dipped expertly into a side salad; stiff fronds of arctic lettuce, endive crinkly as well-oiled pubic hair. Catling had once been the leader of the ‘Walthamstow School', now he was merely its last survivor. English Cinema, which Truffaut claims (with some justification) does not exist, is stuck with two festival-hogging tendencies – both are derived from Walthamstow, the legendary SW Essex Technical College and School of Art; training ground of Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway. For ‘Art Cinema' we should read ‘Art School Cinema'. And remember Walthamstow.

Catling's work (when he practised it) was of the Third Kind: uncomfortably direct. (A man treated to a full spaghetti dinner is then given two or three pints of salted water to drink. The camera, unblinking, records the result.) No, Catling had been elevated to this company for three quite distinct reasons. He possessed a very presentable chalk-stripe suit, in something close to his own size. (It wouldn't frighten the ladies.) His work was so obscure and recondite that it could not remotely come under consideration for the project-in-hand: it was years since anybody had set eyes on it. (No whispers of a fix.) But, most importantly, he had a pan-European reputation as a trencherman. He'd keep his snout in the trough with the best of them, and sing for his supper with gems from his repertoire of superbly timed and delivered smoking-room anecdotes. He'd be far too busy licking the grease from his fingers to question any
realpolitik
decisions with nitpicking aesthetic quibbles.

The Chair resumed, while his fellow freeloaders wet their lips in iced Perrier: he rapidly and succinctly outlined their brief, informing them of the conclusions they would reach in time for the circulation of the port. The Widow wanted a fitting memorial to her Consort. It would have to achieve an epic scale (Valhalla), soar above the docks – signifying her courage in the face of adversity, and also the courage of the nation, the ‘little people', Britain-can-take-it, ‘Gor blimey, Guv', it's only
one
leg, ain't it?'
A memorial to the spirit of the Blitz and a torch to Enterprise. It should make Prince Albert's cheesy stack look like the heap of bat guano it would, in truth, soon become. No rivals were tolerated: Gilbert Scott's ‘memorial of our Blameless Prince' had already been condemned as a dangerous structure and would be demolished within the week; the Ross of Mull granite, the marble, the bronze figures, the Salviati mosaics redistributed to rusticate wine bars and industry parks in South Shields or Humberside, or wherever some discreet patronage was required. For too long there had been an elitist
focal
around the ‘Royal' Colleges, the Museums, the Albert Hall, the under-exploited parklands, the subsidy-swallowing Palace. Our memorial rising above Silvertown would shift the whole axis downriver: not Canaletto, nor Turner – but William Blake! The horses of instruction feed in silver pastures. (‘Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?')

The Architectural Adviser (who was able to speak only while pressing his tongue with the ear-grip of his tortoiseshell spectacles) had visited his latest Rotherhithe development, and was ‘absolutely appalled' to discover that so mean a site had claimed one of the city's grandest viewing platforms. He was selling customized bijou residences in Cherry Gardens to half-solvent media lefties, who had to cash in their life-insurance policies to raise three hundred and fifty k! (It was a real drag dealing with social-climbing paupers.) We're not having interviews with Shadow Cabinet ministers conducted
directly
opposite Georgein-the-East, with the whole curved bosom of the river spread to the eye from St Paul's to St Anne's, Limehouse; insinuating undeserved notions of imperial grandeur. History doesn't come cheap. The word, therefore, is
move out
– lay down some action in swamplands. Bus the punters by water, or by chopper. Start the turnstiles clicking. Without a major feature, ‘focused on cultural excellence', and spread through the supplements – OK? – you might as well shut up shop. It's been costed, won't top fifty million.

‘But, surely, Mr Chairman,' piped the Laureate's Wife, smiling a swift incision, appealing to Daddy, ‘we should, at least, be allowed to
advise
on the choice of artists to be involved in such a morally significant venture?'

The Chairman, covert stag, flared his spidery nostrils in acknowledgement of that lady's mythical fragrance and – with effortless condescension – soothed her ruffled sensibilities.

‘Plenty of time for the small print, my dear. You chaps can argue up and down the cheeseboard about the drapes and the colour co-ordinates. I'm booked on the three o'clock flight for Zurich.' (Handled that rather well, he thought. They only want to be noticed. He debated a compliment. Would her
earrings
be too personal?)

The Architectural Adviser, bronzed, beaked like a peregrine falcon, grinning the full zip, leant confidentially forward, gesturing expensively manicured hands in a spray of transatlantic eloquence.

‘My initial brief was to locate an adequately site-specific piece. It was felt that we must insist on a “language of symbols” and so, as a consequence, we took steps to eliminate from our discussions all the currently notorious practitioners of
bricolage
…'

He leered significantly at the Twins, who had amassed uncatalogued tons of the stuff in their North London bunker.

‘What in God's name is the man talking about?' demanded the Chair, winking boyishly at the Laureate's Wife, and sneaking a glance at his timepiece.

‘The scavengers, sir,' returned the Architect, bravely, ‘the beachcombers. Cragg, Woodrow; those people. We
could
turn them loose down the defunct rail lines, or let them abseil among the cooling towers – but, we tended towards the notion that they might not be altogether… reliable. They have this bias towards unstable metaphors: “singularities” straining beyond their rational event-horizons.' (He had been reading extracts of Stephen Hawking and was looking for the opportunity to unburden himself of some of this language, before he lost it.)

‘What about David Mach?' said the Last British Film Producer, brightly: he had been watching too many late-night arts programmes, and it was beginning to show. He clawed at his pepper-and-salt beard, grooming compulsively, as he had done while playing for time in so many interviews. He had been persuaded, against all his baser instincts (the ones that bought the place), to instal a Mach folly at the Mill House: a tumbling waterfall of never-distributed histories of the National Trust, in which a wild hunt of pink jackets, pikes, cuirasses, and drumsticks were drowning, soundlessly.

The Architect sucked the wax sheen on the arm of his spectacles. He was enjoying this. The illusion of authority. Not a critic in sight. ‘Too visible, too impermanent. The Widow, it has to be admitted, does not enjoy humour. Doesn't understand it – or approve of those who do.'

The Producer, a dues-paying conservationist, paled, cruelly reminded of the ‘biographical details' he had skittishly allowed his secretary to forward for inclusion in the project's Official Brochure: ‘Tottenham Hotspur Supporter, bicyclist, knitter of Shetland sweaters, patron of David Mach, and occasional filmmaker'. The Widow was probably looking at the thing at this very moment, asking somebody to explain what it meant. He could forget the peerage. A crippling spasm of yellow pain shook him: he clutched his gut and made a rush for the Gents, where he pounded the digits of his cellphone, trying to reach his Artbroker before the close of trade for the Holy Hour.

‘Sell Mach! Take a loss, anything – get shot. I need
weight
, formalism. Get me into marble, or forget your percentage, baby. I want work that takes a crane to lift it.'

‘I must admit,' the Laureate's Wife elevated her bone-handled fork in the direction of the Chair, ‘to rather a soft spot for Gormley's “
Brick Man
”. '

‘Over my dead body!' screamed the Architect, who was involved in a running battle with an unpronounceable critic who had written of the figure with trenchant enthusiasm. The
Architect wouldn't lift a finger to support anything his Hackney-based rival
might
(for want of a better idea) editorially endorse.

‘Put up a thing like that,' said the extrovert Twin, ‘and you'll frighten the aeroplanes.'

‘
What
aeroplanes?' retorted the Chair, waving an empty glass towards the deserted runway: a gesture the hovering Cypriot waiter read, correctly, as a request for a ‘top up'. More sycophantic laughter. ‘You don't seriously imagine anyone in their right minds would risk flying out of this cut-price lagoon – a hundred yards of couch grass in the middle of nowhere? The original notion, fatuous as it now appears, was that the terminal itself would be the big attraction – pulling in charabancs of manipulated imbeciles eager to gape at their own reflection, then stagger home with a trolleyful of gimcrack souvenirs. Now the taxi drivers won't touch the place. They tell their fares it's been closed down, run them to Stanstead.'

The Architect, fearing the conversation was drifting away from those areas in which he could decisively demonstrate his erudition and understated humanity, slid a sketch of Anthony Gormley's brick giant across the table. It was instantly skewered by a flash of the Chairman's steak knife.

‘Damned thing's got no willy.' His euphemism was tactfully pitched at a level suited to mixed company. ‘The creature's a eunuch, sexless as a gilded Oscar. Dickie Attenborough'll blub if he comes within a mile of it. Ugh! An impractical dildo: won't be up a week before the Paddys have the bricks away to front some King's Cross sauna. Jumping Jesus, can you imagine what the Widow would do if her husband's sacred memorial was shanghaied into the retaining wall of a wankers' bath house?'

‘Couldn't we talk about Barry Flanagan?' The Laureate's Wife ached to shift into a more life-affirming territory. ‘His dancing hares have got such
animal
spirit, such dawn-fresh vitality. He's a true shaman; his drawings come alive before your eyes.'

‘Flanagan?' snorted the Chair, ‘feller in a trilby? Looks like a bookie's runner? He's a potato basher. Quite out of the question.'
(The Producer was relieved. He had shifted swiftly out of Flanagan when the soft furnishings started to cost more than a year's subscription to
Country Life
or a modest assignation at the White Tower.)

‘Just so. The
gestalt
is now most definitely “on the floor”. We have to prepare ourselves for an assault on new forms of reality.' The Architect clawed back; causing Professor Catling to raise the tablecloth, fearful he had missed out on some notable side dish. ‘Flanagan's latest proposal excitingly combines a performance element with his always scrupulous truth to materials. He wants us to validate – bear witness to – the construction of a
hole in the water
. This would have such a miraculously transitional quality, a metamorphosis of liquid into air… an anomaly, I believe, of enormous resonance.'

‘If you think the Widow wants her saintly husband remembered by a hole in the water, you must have a hole in the head,' snapped the Chair, muttering something further to an attentive aide, who instantly passed the message on to a pocket tape-recorder. (The Architect was on his way back to the Masonic one-night stands.) ‘Look here, haven't we got a couple of these johnnies on the payroll? They should do something to earn their gravy. The Civil List's not a gentleman's club for bloody civilians.'

‘Sir Eduardo,' said the Architect, eager to stay on the ball, ‘is occupied in laying out an Aztec mosaic somewhere beneath the Elephant and Castle. Sir Anthony, it was felt, had done such sterling service at Millbank that he should be considered for compassionate leave – before he suffered the debilitating effects of front-line trauma. He's an artist, first and last; not an administrator.'

‘I think,' said the irrepressible fenland châtelaine, ‘we are all in danger of forgetting the true purpose of this gathering.' Her remarks were floated in such soft but narcoleptic tones that the disadvantaged drinkers (male) froze in mid-hoist. An unconvinced frog's leg jerked spastically from the Architect's open
mouth, as if deciding to make one last pathetic leap for freedom. ‘Our brief is to commemorate the aviators who died protecting these factories, deepwater docks, and mean streets.' She dangled a bloodless hand (so white it seemed to have been kept in a bath of milk) in vague benediction towards the shapeless mounds of masonry that hid the river from their privileged viewing station.