Beggars Banquet (collection) Read online

  ‘How are we going to get there?’

  ‘First thing is to talk to Des’s producer.’

  ‘I mean, how are we going to get to London?’

  ‘We’ll hitch,’ she told me. ‘All we need is a bit of money for food.’

  Which meant one last show. There weren’t many places left to try. Word was out that Black Alec wanted to see me. Worse still, the rumour was I was washed up, that I stank.

  But a pub on Rose Street in Edinburgh was under new management, and looking to kick-start a comedy club. They said they’d give me a fifteen-minute spot. If they liked what they saw, there’d be a twenty in it for me.

  Twenty quid: I’d earned more winning talent shows. But I said okay. Of course I said okay.

  That night, when I took the stage in my blue sparkly suit, there were about two dozen punters in the place: a smattering at the tables, most of them chatting at the bar. The last thing they wanted was me up there, spoiling their conversation and meaning the jukebox was turned off.

  But I kicked off anyway. Nobody was laughing. Emily was in the DJ’s booth, supposedly keeping an eye on my mike level so that there was no feedback. Right then, I thought feedback had a better chance of getting a laugh.

  And then Black Alec walked in. Someone had tipped him off, and here he came with three of his lads. They took a table right at the front. Alec not taking his eyes off me, a little smile on his face – it was the first smile I’d seen all night, but it didn’t exactly cheer me up. A bottle of champagne arrived, and just the one glass. Alec toasted me as he drank. Suddenly, horribly, my mind went blank, not a single joke in my repertoire could I remember. There were slow handclaps from the bar and cries of ‘Get off!’

  ‘Does your mum let you out looking like that?’ I told the heckler. ‘Look at him, face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.’ The heckler’s pals laughed at this, and I was on a roll. I knew only one thing: the minute they booed me off, I was in for a doing. I had to stay on that stage, and the only way to do that was to be funny.

  And I was funny. Inspiration took hold, and the stories started pouring out. I had stories about working in a factory, about shoe shops and working-men’s clubs, even stories about schooldays. They clapped and cheered. More punters were coming in, and no one was leaving. I’d been on stage about forty minutes, but the owner wasn’t about to signal time-up. The only person in the place not laughing was Black Alec. Even his lads had sniggered at a couple of the routines, but Alec just sat there stony-faced, finishing his champagne.

  Eventually, tiredness got the better of me. I could fall back on lame material, or stop while the going was good. I’d have won an audience and be losing my mobility. Alec looked like he was getting impatient. I never liked to keep an old friend waiting.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said, ‘you’ve been a great audience, even old bulldog-features over there. This set was dedicated to the one thing I’ve always enjoyed until this evening, namely good health. Thank you and goodnight.’

  I came off to applause, whistles, cheers. I walked right over to Black Alec’s table and sat down opposite him. The jukebox came back on. The owner brought me a whisky. So did a couple of punters, congratulating me on the best show they’d seen. The owner wanted to book me a regular slot, maybe hosting the club. And throughout, Alec didn’t take his eyes off me.

  ‘So,’ he said at last, ‘that was your routine?’

  ‘That was it,’ I said. I couldn’t see Emily. Maybe she’d spotted Alec and done a runner.

  ‘It was good,’ he said. ‘Really good.’

  I looked at him. Was it possible…?

  ‘You can warm an audience up,’ he went on. ‘I could do with someone like you.’

  ‘You’re going to take me to one of your clubs and roast me on a spit?’ I guessed.

  And he laughed, the way he’d laughed when we were kids. ‘I’m offering you work, Comedian. That way, I can keep an eye on you while you pay me what you owe me. How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds great,’ I said, unable to keep the relief out of my voice.

  ‘The same set should do.’

  And I nodded, while my insides turned to rubber. The same set? The one I’d improvised? I couldn’t remember it, couldn’t recall a single blessed punchline. And then Emily was marching towards me, waving a cassette.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘I taped you,’ she said, leaning down to kiss me. ‘Now you’ve got your portfolio.’

  ‘And my continuing good health,’ I said, kissing her back.

  I used to think comedy came from wanting acceptance, wanting to be liked. Now I know differently. I know it’s all down to fear. Fear, ladies and gentlemen, is the only true comedian in town.

  Herbert in Motion

  My choices that day were twofold: kill myself before or after the Prime Minister’s cocktail party? And if after, should I wear my Armani to the party, or the more sober YSL with the chalk stripe?

  The invitation was gilt-edged, too big for the inside pocket of my workaday suit. Drinks and canapés, six p.m. till seven. A minion had telephoned to confirm my attendance, and to brief me on protocol. That had been two days ago. He’d explained that among the guests would be an American visiting London, a certain Joseph Hefferwhite. While not quite spelling it out – they never do, do they? – the minion was explaining why I’d been invited, and what my role on the night might be.

  ‘Joe Hefferwhite,’ I managed to say, clutching the receiver like it was so much straw.

  ‘I believe you share an interest in modern art,’ the minion continued.

  ‘We share an interest.’

  He misunderstood my tone and laughed. ‘Sorry, “share an interest” was a bit weak, wasn’t it? My apologies.’

  He was apologising because art is no mere interest of mine. Art was – is – my whole life. During the rest of our short and one-sided conversation, I stared ahead as though at some startling new design, trying to understand and explain, to make it all right with myself, attempting to wring out each nuance and stroke, each variant and chosen shape or length of line. And in the end there was… nothing. No substance, no revelation; just the bland reality of my situation and the simple framing device of suicide.

  And the damnation was, it had been the perfect crime.

  A dinner party ten years before. It was in Chelsea, deep in the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s vision of England. There were dissenters at the table – only a couple, and they could afford their little grumble: it wasn’t going to make Margaret Hilda disappear, and their own trappings were safe: the warehouse conversion in Docklands, the BMW, the Cristal champagne and black truffles.

  Trappings: the word seems so much more resonant now.

  So there we were. The wine had relaxed us, we were all smiling with inner and self-satisfied contentment (and wasn’t that the dream, after all?), and I felt just as at home as any of them. I knew I was there as the Delegate of Culture. Among the merchant bankers and media figures, political jobsworths and ‘somethings’ (and dear God, there was an estate agent there too, if memory serves – that fad didn’t last long), I was there to reassure them that they were composed of something more lasting and nourishing than mere money, that they had some meaning in the wider scheme. I was there as curator to their sensibilities.

  In truth, I was and am a Senior Curator at the Tate Gallery, with special interest in twentieth-century North American art (by which I mean paintings: I’m no great enthusiast of modern sculpture, yet less of more radical sideshows – performance art, video art, all that). The guests at the table that evening made the usual noises about artists whose names they couldn’t recall but who did ‘green things’ or ‘you know, that horse and the shadow and everything’. One foolhardy soul (was it the estate agent?) digressed on his fondness for certain wildlife paintings, and trumpeted the news that his wife had once bought a print from Christie’s Contemporary Art.

  When another guest begged me to allow that my job was ‘on t
he cushy side’, I placed knife and fork slowly on plate and did my spiel. I had it down to a fine art – allow the pun, please – and talked fluently about the difficulties my position posed, about the appraisal of trends and talents, the search for major new works and their acquisition.

  ‘Imagine’, I said, ‘that you are about to spend half a million pounds on a painting. In so doing, you will elevate the status of the artist, turn him or her into a rich and sought-after talent. They may disappoint you thereafter and fail to paint anything else of interest, in which case the resale value of the work will be negligible, and your own reputation will have been tarnished – perhaps even more than tarnished. Every day, every time you are asked for your opinion, your reputation is on the line. Meanwhile, you must propose exhibitions, must plan them – which often means transporting works from all around the world – and must spend your budget wisely.’

  ‘You mean like, do I buy four paintings at half a mil each, or push the pedal to the floor with one big buy at two mil?’

  I allowed my questioner a smile. ‘In crude economic terms, yes.’

  ‘Do you get to take pictures home?’ our hostess asked.

  ‘Some works – a few – are loaned out,’ I conceded. ‘But not to staff.’

  ‘Then to whom?’

  ‘People in prominence, benefactors, that sort of person.’

  ‘All that money,’ the Docklands woman said, shaking her head, ‘for a bit of paint and canvas. It almost seems like a crime when there are homeless on the streets.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ someone else said. ‘Can’t walk along the Embankment without stumbling over them.’

  At which point our hostess stumbled into the silence to reveal that she had a surprise. ‘We’ll take coffee and brandy in the morning room, during which you’ll be invited to take part in a murder.’

  She didn’t mean it, of course, though more than one pair of eyes strayed to the Docklanders, more in hope than expectation. What she meant was that we’d be participating in a parlour game. There had been a murder (her unsmiling husband the cajoled corpse, miraculously revivified whenever another snifter of brandy was offered), and we were to look for clues in the room. We duly searched, somewhat in the manner of children who wish to please their elders. With half a dozen clues gathered, the Docklands woman surprised us all by deducing that our hostess had committed the crime – as indeed she had.

  We collapsed thankfully on to the sofas and had our glasses refilled, after which the conversation came around to crime – real and imagined. It was now that the host became animated for the first time that night. He was a collector of whodunnits and fancied himself an expert.

  ‘The perfect crime,’ he told us, ‘as everyone knows, is one where no crime has been committed.’

  ‘But then there is no crime,’ his wife declared.

  ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘No crime… and yet a crime. If the body’s never found, damned hard to convict anyone. Or if something’s stolen, but never noticed. See what I’m getting at?’

  I did, of course, and perhaps you do, too.

  The Tate, like every other gallery I can think of, has considerably less wall-space than it has works in its collection. These days, we do not like to cram our paintings together (though when well done, the effect can be breathtaking). One large canvas may have a whole wall to iself, and praise be that Bacon’s triptychs did not start a revolution, or there’d be precious little work on display in our galleries of modern art. For every display of gigantism, it is blessed relief, is it not, to turn to a miniaturist? Not that there are many miniatures in the Tate’s storerooms. I was there with an acquaintance of mine, the dealer Gregory Jance.

  Jance worked out of Zurich for years, for no other reason, according to interviews, than that ‘they couldn’t touch me there’. There had always been rumours about him, rumours which started to make sense when one attempted to balance his few premier-league sales (and therefore commissions) against his lavish lifestyle. These days, he had homes in Belgravia, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Moscow, as well as a sprawling compound on the outskirts of Zurich. The Moscow home seemed curious until one recalled stories of ikons smuggled out of the old Soviet Union and of art treasures taken from the Nazis, treasures which had ended up in the hands of Politburo chiefs desperate for such things as hard dollars and new passports.

  Yes, if even half the tales were true, then Gregory Jance had sailed pretty close to the wind. I was counting on it.

  ‘What a waste,’ he said, as I gave him a short tour of the storerooms. The place was cool and hushed, except for the occasional click of the machines which monitored air temperature, light and humidity. On the walls of the Tate proper, paintings such as those we passed now would be pored over, passed by with reverence. Here, they were stacked one against the other, most shrouded in white sheeting like corpses or Hamlet’s ghost in some shoddy student production. Identifier tags hung from the sheets like so many items in a lost property office.

  ‘Such a waste,’ Jance sighed, with just a touch of melodrama. His dress sense did not lack drama either: crumpled cream linen suit, white brogues, screaming red shirt and white silk cravat. He shuffled along like an old man, running the rim of his panama hat through his fingers. It was a nice performance, but if I knew my man, then beneath it he was like bronze.

  Our meeting – en principe – was to discuss his latest crop of ‘world-renowned artists’. Like most other gallery owners – those who act as agents for certain artists – Jance was keen to sell to the Tate, or to any other ‘national’ gallery. He wanted the price hike that came with it, along with the kudos. But mostly the price hike.

  He had polaroids and slides with him. In my office, I placed the slides on a lightbox and took my magnifier to them. A pitiful array of semi-talent dulled my eyes and my senses. Huge graffiti-style whorls which had been ‘in’ the previous summer in New York (mainly, in my view, because the practitioners tended to die young). Some neo-cubist stuff by a Swiss artist whose previous work was familiar to me. He had been growing in stature, but this present direction seemed to me an alley with a brick wall at the end, and I told Jance as much. At least he had a nice sense of colour and juxtaposition. But there was worse to come: combine paintings which Rauschenberg could have constructed in kindergarten; some not very clever geometric paintings, too clearly based on Stella’s ‘Protractor’ series; and ‘found’ sculptures which looked like Nam June Paik on a very bad day.

  Throughout, Jance was giving me his pitch, though without much enthusiasm. Where did he collect these people? (The unkind said he sought out the least popular exhibits at art school graduation shows.) More to the point, where did he sell them? I hadn’t heard of him making any impact at all as an agent. What money he made, he seemed to make by other means.

  Finally, he lifted a handful of polaroids from his pocket. ‘My latest find,’ he confided. ‘Scottish. Great future.’

  I looked through them. ‘How old?’

  He shrugged. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven.’

  I deducted five or six years and handed the photos back. ‘Gregory,’ I said, ‘she’s still at college. These are derivative – evidence she’s learning from those who have gone before – and stylised, such as students often produce. She has talent, and I like the humour, even if that too is borrowed from other Scottish artists.’

  He seemed to be looking in vain for the humour in the photos.

  ‘Bruce McLean,’ I said helpfully, ‘Paolozzi, John Bellany’s fish. Look closely and you’ll see.’ I paused. ‘Bring her back in five or ten years, if she’s kept hard at it, if she’s matured, and if she has that nose for the difference between genius and sham…’

  He pocketed the photos and gathered up his slides, his eyes glinting as though there might be some moisture there.

  ‘You’re a hard man,’ he told me.

  ‘But a fair one, I hope. And to prove it, let me buy you a drink.’

  I didn’t put my proposition to him quite then, o
f course, not over coffee and sticky cakes in the Tate cafeteria. We met a few weeks later – casually as it were. We dined at a small place in a part of town neither of us frequented. I asked him about his young coterie of artists. They seemed, I said, quite skilled in impersonation.

  ‘Impersonation?’

  ‘They have studied the greats,’ I explained, ‘and can reproduce them with a fair degree of skill.’

  ‘Reproduce them,’ he echoed quietly.

  ‘Reproduce them,’ I said. ‘I mean, the influences are there.’ I paused. ‘I’m not saying they copy.’

  ‘No, not that.’ Jance looked up from his untouched food. ‘Are you coming to some point?’

  I smiled. ‘A lot of paintings in the storerooms, Gregory. They so seldom see the light of day.’

  ‘Yes, pity, that. Such a waste.’

  ‘When people could be savouring them.’

  He nodded, poured some wine for both of us. ‘I think I begin to see,’ he said. ‘I think I begin to see.’

  That was the start of our little enterprise. You know what it was, of course. You have a keen mind. You are shrewd and discerning. Perhaps you pride yourself on these things, on always being one step ahead, on knowing things before those around you have perceived them. Perhaps you, too, think yourself capable of the perfect crime, a crime where there is no crime.

  There was no crime, because nothing was missing from the quarterly inventory. First, I would photograph the work. Indeed, on a couple of occasions, I even took one of Jance’s young artists down to the storeroom and showed her the painting she’d be copying. She’d been chosen because she had studied the minimalists, and this was to be a minimalist commission.

  Minimalism, interestingly, proved the most difficult style to reproduce faithfully. In a busy picture, there’s so much to look at that one can miss a wrong shade or the fingers of a hand which have failed to curl to the right degree. But with a couple of black lines and some pink waves… well, fakes were easier to spot. So it was that Jance’s artist saw the work she was to replicate face to face. Then we did the measurements, took the polaroids, and she drew some preliminary sketches. Jance was in charge of finding the right quality of canvas, the correct frame. My job was to remove the real canvas, smuggle it from the gallery, and replace it with the copy, reframing the finished work afterwards.