Chapter 29
CHAPTER 29
Beau was doing the last thing he felt like on a Sunday morning: he was down at Goldsmiths to go through the boxes of stuff Joe had packed up from Matt’s studio there. It was very good of his dad’s pal to come in specially to open up and now he’d repaired to the Red Lion, telling Beau to text him when he’d finished. ‘And then you can buy me a pint,’ he’d said, playfully punching Beau on the bicep. Beau was still rubbing the spot, wondering how bad the bruise would be.
The ever-practical Joe – no wonder Matt had been so fond of him – had left him a Stanley knife and Beau now weighed it in his hand, sighing, as he tried to work up the courage to open one of the boxes, which had been arranged in an easily accessible circle. Beyond anything connected with the letter G, he didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was terrified of finding it. The memory of that drawing of the pregnant woman in Matt’s other studio was still too raw. My girl . Whatever that meant.
Taking a deep breath, he sliced open the first box and lifted out as much as he could in one armful. He recognised it immediately as Matt’s working materials for his last show, which had been themed around the area of South East London where they’d lived and how it had changed over twenty years with gentrification.
The next box was full of catalogues from auction houses – Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, as Joe had said – and he noticed that all of them were for sales of contemporary and twenty-first century art. No Old Masters, furniture, silver, ceramics, wine or any of the other stuff they flog, the range was very specific.
He opened another and found it was full of portfolios of loose drawings, each folder marked with a label in Matt’s distinctive writing, with the names of specific sales with the auction house and the dates – all part of the same project. Beau opened them up and leafed through. There were sketches of the exterior of each auction house building and of the sale rooms inside, the exhibition spaces, the cafés, restaurants and coffee counters. There was even one of a men’s loo. That made Beau smile. So Dad.
In the next folder he found drawings of sales in process, with auctioneers in full flow, arms in the air, gavel raised, the men in aprons putting painting on stands and lots of bidders. Even the security guards who manned the entrances. A plug socket with a phone charging.
Despite the reason he was there, Beau found himself getting drawn in and imagined what a treasure trove this would be in the future for anyone studying his father’s work.
Another crate had smaller boxes within it and inside those were cardboard maquettes of some kind of structures, put together with masking tape. Beau picked one up and looked at it from every angle, trying to understand what it was. Then he remembered what Joe had said about installations and realised this was Matt’s way of starting to realise those.
But even after looking at all of them, Beau couldn’t understand what that vision had been; it was still too rough. His hands dropped into his lap, still holding one of the small cardboard objects, feeling flattened by a sense of utter desolation that he would never know.
Resisting the temptation to throw the maquettes on the floor and jump on them, Beau made himself put each of the delicate little structures carefully back in its container. He hoped some academic might work it out for him someday.
Sighing deeply, about to put the folders back in the storage box, he noticed there was another portfolio at the bottom of it. He reached in to pull it out and when he saw the label on the front, he froze. It was just one letter: G.
He sank to the ground, still staring down at the folder. That letter.
For a moment Beau didn’t think he had the courage to look inside, but he forced himself to open it and pull out the sheaf of paper, realising his hands were shaking as he did it.
They were all drawings of what appeared to be one woman and always in the context of the sale rooms, with details he recognised from the other pictures. He could tell it was the same woman in every sketch from her build and the hair, which came to just past her shoulders. Was it the one from the wake? Possibly. Her hair had been longer – but women change hairstyles all the time, you couldn’t really go on that. She had been slim, like this one, from what he could remember. But this woman looked quite smartly dressed and the one at the wake had been very casual. In his father’s old leather jacket.
Beau blew his breath out of pursed lips. He supposed they’d never see that again. Unless he found her. Was that a reason to keep going?
He picked up one drawing and studied it closely. He hadn’t seen the face of that woman at the wake – Jacket Stealer – but even if he had, he couldn’t have recognised her from this drawing. In all of them, Matt seemed to have sketched the face vaguely, which had clearly been intentional, because his father had been able to capture someone so you would instantly recognise them with just a few strokes of a pen or pencil. It had fascinated Beau from childhood.
Was it his mother? The hair was similar, but this woman seemed a bit taller and definitely slimmer than darling Mumpty. And Sophie didn’t dress like that. She was always in jeans, or dresses for special occasions. She never wore the kind of tailoring this woman seemed to have on.
And her handbags were featured in all the drawings too. One of them appeared to be a Birkin bag. Beau knew what they looked like. So definitely not Mum. She always had practical crossbody bags.
He carried on leafing through the sheets and all the drawings appeared to be of this one woman. He could see the seasons changing in what she was wearing. It was making him feel very uncomfortable. Each sheet had the letter G written on it so presumably all these sketches had been made on the dates of the G entries in his father’s phone calendar. But did that mean there was anything more to it than just someone Matt had known? She might have somehow been bound up with his obsession with the auction houses, no more than that. Or she could have been one of his regular models, who he’d posed in the auction houses as part of the project.
Simultaneously wanting to know and wanting to run away, Beau carried on sifting through the drawings until, near the bottom of the pile, he came to one that made him take a sharp breath. It was clearly the same woman – the hair and loosely sketched face were exactly the same – but she was lying down. Naked.
Starting to tremble, he carried on looking and the drawings became more and more intimate. If she was one of Matt’s models, their professional relationship had clearly slipped over into something else.
There were multiple drawings of her breasts and nipples in great detail. Ugh. Dad was a tit man. Horrible. And then others, which were even more explicit.
When he came to one that was like a close-up between her legs, Beau dropped the sheets of paper on the floor, feeling oddly shocked and conflicted. It was the kind of thing he thoroughly approved of in his own life but seeing it in the context of his father’s art was horrendous. Like catching your dad watching porn, which had happened to a friend of his.
Matt clearly hadn’t needed that. He had his own live stream. The sleazy old bastard.
Beau closed his eyes and put his head back, trying to process it all. It was a lot. Or was he being na?ve? He’d heard enough stories over the years to know that all sorts went on at Goldsmiths, just as it had at the two art colleges he’d gone to. Put a load of creative nutters in a confined space and weird stuff was going to happen. Maybe it was just on for young and old in there; free love had never died in Deptford.
He could probe Joe on that a bit when he bought him his thank-you pint at the Red Armpit.
Beau stretched his arms and moved his head from side to side, cracking his neck. He was starting to feel claustrophobic and he wasn’t sure how much more of this stuff he could stand to look at.
He picked up the last few drawings, almost getting used to seeing this woman naked and from every angle, and started going through them until one made him stop suddenly. It was the same woman – she was unmistakable to him now, in Matt’s consistent minimalist rendering of her face – but in this one there was a clear swelling in her abdomen. There was no doubt in his mind: it was the same pregnant woman he’d seen in the drawing in Matt’s other studio.
So that hadn’t been a chance sketch of a professional artists’ model who happened to be pregnant, as Beau had so earnestly hoped. It was this mystery woman – and the person who had made her pregnant was all too clearly his father.
Beau forced himself to look at the last of the pile. They were all of the same woman, showing the baby bump getting bigger and bigger until finally there was a picture of her cradling a baby with her large erect nipple next to its mouth.
‘Could you not have put the bloody nipple in its mouth?’ Beau said out loud.
He stared at the drawing, studying the baby’s face, the fat curve of a cheek with eyelashes lying against it. It was just a few strokes of pencil but it might as well have been a nuclear bomb to Beau, because it meant the words on the drawing he’d found at the other studio – My girl, cooking – were exactly what he had feared most: the woman Matt referred to as ‘my girl’ had been ‘cooking’ a baby. His father had a child with her. Beau had another sibling.
His father had another family.
Beau sat there, scrunched into a ball, hands clamped to the sides of his head, trying to physically contain the thoughts that were racing through it.
There was so much to take in. He might have a half-brother – or, he realised with a sudden shock which made him sit up straight – it might be a sister. A female Crommelin! That would be astonishing and even for that reason alone, he had to find them. While what his father had done was terrible, this child was his kin, his blood, and also a precious link back to his lost father. Hideously messed up although it all was, he wanted them in his life.
But what would that do to his mother?