‘Glad it worked out. However, I plan to make them pay for their doubt now,’ Felix said.
Touché, he thought, pleased he’d successfully delivered a reminder that they were both playing on the same team. He liked difficult artists, and the prospect of intellectually wrestling with this one was beyond simulating. Clearly it was going to be more of a challenge than he’d envisaged, but the obsessive desire to feature in a Susie Thomas work had only intensified since actually meeting her.
Felix looked across the table. To his relief, Alfie appeared to be succumbing to Dustin’s charms. Good; the assistant might prove to be a way in for him.
Through the haze of a mellowing drunkenness, Susie studied Felix, weighing up the gleam in those green eyes, the wry bent to his oversized mouth, the animal glinting through the man. If she were to draw him, it would be in a soft dark charcoal to capture the agile expressions that ran across his face like clouds, then she’d finish with a sharp pencil to sketch the hard angles, the ruthless intelligence that hollowed out any hesitation, any trace of self-doubt.
‘Tell me about the Hoppers. I love his work: there’s something so self-contained about it. I read that you stumbled upon a whole new series?’
‘I got lucky
. Jo Hopper had bequeathed a set of early paintings to this guy that nobody knew about until about three years ago. I came across a couple of letters Jo had written to Bea Blanchard, an early collector of her husband’s work, mentioning the series. Amazing, right?’ His reply had been a little more abrupt than he’d intended, but she responded enthusiastically.
‘Extraordinary! Are they all as good as the one you’re currently selling – Girl in a Yellow Square of Light, right?’
‘So far, but that particular one is sublime.’
‘It is haunting. Maybe it’s the ambiguity of the girl’s situation… ’
She poured herself another glass of wine. Her head was throbbing, and suddenly she felt extremely discombobulated. Watching her, Felix wondered whether Susie was indeed an alcoholic. Certainly her drinking was legendary. She was infamous for vomiting into the work of a fellow artist at the Turner Prize. The scandal wasn’t that she’d defiled the art but that she’d turned up at the prize-giving blind drunk. And then there were the rumours of drug use. Felix himself was a copious cocaine user, though he was careful to confine his habit to evenings only. He was also happy to supply his artists with whatever they wanted, provided they remained focused on the work. Heroin tended to distract and prevent them from finishing, whereas anything a little speedy… Perhaps he could offer her some amphetamines?
‘Accommodation okay?’ He moved the bottle away. ‘The Bowery’s incredibly fashionable these days,’ he remarked casually, covering the special treatment he had afforded the artist.
He’d placed her in a massive apartment on the top floor of a converted warehouse that had once been a glove factory. In addition to a screening room and small gym, it boasted a rooftop garden with a panoramic view of Manhattan. Usually he delegated the choice of his artists’ accommodation to Chloe, but he’d selected Susie’s apartment himself. As he’d walked through the place, he’d pushed his imagination before him like a plough, imagining Susie Thomas at the desk, Susie Thomas staring out over Brooklyn Bridge, her red hair billowing behind her. Susie Thomas leaning over the granite-topped dining table in intense discussion with him, sharing with him that utterly unique perspective that had already earned millions. Susie Thomas flushed and satiated, naked across the fur bedcover – pale English skin porcelain-white against the black.
‘The apartment is amazing. I can see all the way uptown and all the way downtown. I’m king of the hill. Fuck, I love this town!’ she slurred, knowing that the last glass of wine had tipped her over into a drunken belligerency she quite enjoyed. ‘Some of my favourite artists are Americans. And the critical discourse – well, it shits all over the British. Light years ahead, always has been. When I was a kid, New York was like this glittering fantasyland, especially coming from Stockport. Know where that is?’
He did. He’d read every single article, every piece of reportage, each scandalised blogger posting on the subject of Susie Thomas. But he wasn’t about to let her know that, so he shook his head.
‘The arse-end of nowhere, north of the M5. I grew up on a council estate. You call them projects here, right? I like that. Projects makes it sound like there’s potential to progress, like it’s something to be dealt with. There was no progress on my council estate, nothing but total boredom – poverty, as we know it. Except the people had a good sense of the absurd. Gallows humour. And that’s what I took with me when I left. Plus a hundred quid I’d saved from collecting used beer bottles for recycling, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing that I’d nicked from the library, a tattered copy of Blitz magazine, and a fucking great rucksack full of gallows humour. But I digress. I guess I’m trying to say that when I’m standing at that fucking huge floor-to-ceiling window with the lights of Manhattan stretching out before me, it’s one more landmark of that ballsy 14-year-old making it.’
‘Great spin.’
For a minute she wanted to hit him. Then she realised there was no judgement attached to his remark. In his world, there was so much fiction involved in the marketing of the ‘story’ of each artist – to the point where it had become as important as the intellectual concepts behind the work. He’d intended it as a genuine compliment.
‘It’s my truth. The real truth was uglier; sexually abusive stepfather, indifferent mother. I was considered a total freak at school. Started cutting myself, but then I realised I could escape into my sketchbooks – and the art mags I’d nick.’
‘The cutting thing – you used blood and scarring in your earlier work, didn’t you?’
Christ, I’m revealing all and he has to reduce it to art analysis! Does this guy ever stop? She took another swig of wine, considering her response before speaking. ‘In my twenties it was all death. Now it’s sex. I’m moving backwards in my art, growing down not up. By the time I’m in my sixties and seventies it will be birth.’ She held out her now-empty wine glass. Reluctantly he refilled it.
‘There is no space for an artist to doubt,’ he told her – rather patronisingly, it seemed to Susie. ‘Artists are like psychopaths; the constructs they build become their truths. They have to convince the world – and in order to keep the world convinced, they have to live the myth. The slightest whiff of fake and it’s over. The critics turn, then the curators, then the gallery directors, the institutes and museums, and finally the collectors. And then the artist is written out of the history books. When that happens, not even Mephisto or yours truly will be able to save you.’
‘C’mon, Felix! Rumour has it that you’re a man who’s extraordinarily astute at creating opportunity, even out of total destruction. Put like that, it makes you sound like a psychopath yourself.’ She threw back her wine and held the glass out to be filled yet again. ‘That’s a compliment, by the way.’
‘And what’s wrong with that? Others call it genius. Who was the first to realise that the art market would end up mimicking the stock market? Me. Who realised before anyone else that the new wave of collectors would come from the City – hedge-fund managers? Me. I have made this market and, let’s be realistic, the most successful people are so driven it’s inevitable that we are entirely lacking in empathy – or maybe we just can’t afford the time.’
Through a drunken haze, Suzie contemplated the polished features of the gallery director. There was no denying that he lacked empathy. But could the same be said of her? It was true the work consumed her like no lover had ever done, and there was no doubt that when she had been with Maxine she’d often been absent from the moment they were sharing, the images and ideas churning on in her head like some turbine that could not be switched off – unless she was drunk. Yet she didn’t want to fall in love like that again.
‘Do you remember an English sculptor you showed last year – a group show? Maxine Doubleday.’ There, she’d managed to say her name. But now the past appeared in the corner of the room, smiling slyly from the shadows as if taunting her.
‘Totally! Quite tortured pieces, as I recall. Magic realism meets a forensic realism. A little before her time, but it’s been vindicated by the way her works have taken off since the tragedy. Did you know her well?’
‘No, we were just acquaintances.’ Susie kept her gaze dispassionate as she searched Felix’s face; to share the memory of Maxine would feel like a betrayal. But he smiled back blankly. It was no surprise, she thought, that he was unaware Maxine had been her lover. Maxine had always insisted that they keep their relationship out of the public eye. Partly because she had a huge fear of the art world dismissing her as just Susie Thomas’s lover, and partly because her aristocratic family would have been appalled by any public association.
‘I guess I can’t believe those awful reviews drove her to such a desperate act,’ Susie finally commented. ‘It’s ironic that her premature death sent prices skyrocketing, but you must have done well out of it?’
‘It’s only business. I wouldn’t take it personally.’ Felix kept his expression completely neutral. To his secret relief, he even kept his hand steady. ‘An early death always jacks up the price of existing pieces. I’m telling you, art is going to be the biggest luxury-goods business on the planet by the end of this decade.’