Hoffmann said reluctantly, for he too hated to admit an error, ‘Oh, okay. Sorry. I must have forgotten. I’ll see you around.’
He quickly turned his back on Walton to hide his dismay and went in search of Gabrielle. When he finally managed to get across to her, she said – rather sulkily, he thought – ‘I was starting to think you weren’t coming.’
‘I got away as soon as I could.’ He kissed her on the mouth and tasted the sourness of the champagne on her breath.
A man called out, ‘Over here, Dr Hoffmann,’ and a photographer’s flash went off less than a metre away.
Hoffmann jerked his head back instinctively, as if someone had flung a cup of acid in his face. Through his false smile he said, ‘What the hell is Bob Walton doing here?’
‘How should I know? You’re the one who invited him.’
‘Yeah, he just showed me. But you know something? I’m sure I never did that. Why would I? He’s the guy who closed down my research at CERN. I haven’t seen him for years…’
Suddenly the owner of the gallery was beside him. ‘You must be very proud of her, Dr Hoffmann,’ said Bertrand.
‘What?’ Hoffmann was still looking across the party at his former colleague. ‘Oh yes. Yes, I am – very proud.’ He made a concentrated effort to put Walton out of his mind and to think of something appropriate to say to Gabrielle. ‘Have you sold anything yet?’
Gabrielle said, ‘Thanks, Alex – it isn’t all about money, you know.’
‘Yes, okay, I know it isn’t. I was just asking.’
‘We have plenty of time yet,’ said Bertrand. His mobile emitted an alert, playing two bars of Mozart. He blinked at the message in surprise, muttered, ‘Excuse me,’ and hurried away.
Hoffmann was still half-blinded by the camera flash. When he tried to look at the portraits, the centres were voids. Nevertheless, he struggled to make appreciative comments. ‘It’s fantastic to see them all together, isn’t it? You really get a sense of another way of looking at the world. What’s hidden beneath the surface.’
Gabrielle said, ‘How’s your head?’
‘Good. I hadn’t even thought about it till you just mentioned it. I like that one very much.’ He pointed to a nearby cube.
‘That’s of you, isn’t it?’
It had taken her a day simply to sit for it, he remembered, squatting in the scanner like a victim of Pompeii with her knees drawn up to her chest, her head clasped in her hands, her mouth opened wide as if frozen in mid- scream. When she had first shown it to him at home, he had been almost as shocked by it as he had been by the foetus, of which it was a conscious echo.
She said, ‘Leclerc was here earlier. You just missed him.’
‘Don’t tell me they’ve found the guy?’
‘Oh no, that wasn’t it.’
Her tone put Hoffmann on his guard. ‘So what did he want?’
‘He wanted to ask me about the nervous breakdown you apparently had when you worked at CERN.’
Hoffmann wasn’t sure he had heard properly. The noise of all the people talking, bouncing off the whitewashed walls, reminded him of the racket in the computer room. ‘He’s talked to CERN?’
‘About the nervous breakdown,’ she repeated more loudly. ‘The one you’ve never mentioned before.’
He felt winded, as if someone had punched him. ‘I wouldn’t exactly call it a nervous breakdown. I don’t know why he has to drag CERN into this.’
‘What would you call it, then?’
‘Do we really have to do this now?’ Her expression told him they did. He wondered how many glasses of champagne she had drunk. ‘Okay, I guess we do. I got depressed. I took time off. I saw a shrink. I got better.’
‘You saw a psychiatrist? You were treated for depression? And you’ve never mentioned it in eight years?’
A couple standing nearby turned to stare.
‘You’re making something out of nothing,’ he said irritably. ‘You’re being ridiculous. It was before I even met you, for God’s sake.’ And then, more softly: ‘Come on, Gabby, we shouldn’t spoil this.’
For a moment he thought she was going to argue. Her chin was raised and pointing at him, always a storm signal. Her eyes were glassy, bloodshot – she had not got much sleep either, he realised. But then came a sound of metal rapping on glass.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ called Bertrand. He was holding up a champagne flute and hitting it with a fork. ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ It was surprisingly effective. A silence quickly fell on the crowded room. He put down the glass. ‘Don’t be alarmed, friends. I’m not going to make a speech. Besides, for artists, symbols are more eloquent than words.’
He had something in his hand. Hoffmann could not quite see what it was. He walked over to the self-portrait – the one in which Gabrielle was silently screaming – peeled a red spot from the roll of tape concealed in his palm and stuck it firmly against the label. A delighted, knowing murmur spread around the gallery.
‘Gabrielle,’ he said, turning to her with a smile, ‘allow me to congratulate you. You are now, officially, a professional artist.’
There was a round of applause and a general hoisting of champagne glasses in salute. All the tension left Gabrielle’s face. She looked transfigured, and Hoffmann seized the moment to take her wrist and raise her hand above her head, as if she were a boxing champion. There were renewed cheers. The camera flashed again, but this time he managed to make sure his own smile stayed fixed. ‘Well done, Gabby,’ he whispered out of the side of his mouth. ‘You so deserve this.’
She smiled at him happily. ‘Thank you.’ She toasted the room. ‘Thank you all. And thank you especially whoever bought it.’
Bertrand said, ‘Wait. I haven’t finished.’
Next to the self-portrait was the head of a Siberian tiger that had died at the Servion Zoo the previous year. Gabrielle had had its corpse refrigerated until she could get its decapitated skull into an MRI scanner. The etching on glass was lit from below by a blood-red light. Bertrand placed a spot next to that one as well. It had sold for 4,500 francs.
Hoffmann whispered, ‘Any more of this, and you’ll be making more money than I am.’
‘Oh, Alex, shut up about money.’ But he could see she was pleased, and when Bertrand moved on and attached another red spot, this time to The Invisible Man, the 18,000-franc centrepiece of the exhibition, she clapped her hands in delight.
And if only, Hoffmann thought bitterly afterwards, it had stopped there, the whole occasion would have been a triumph. Why couldn’t Bertrand have seen it? Why couldn’t he have looked beyond his short-term greed and left it at that? Instead he worked his way methodically around the entire gallery, leaving a rash of red spots in his wake – a pox, a plague, an epidemic of pustules erupting across the whitewashed walls – against the horses’ heads, the mummified child from the Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde, the bison’s skull, the baby antelope, the half-dozen other self-portraits, and finally even the foetus: he did not stop until all were marked as sold.
The effect on the spectators was odd. At first they cheered whenever a red spot was applied. But after a while their volubility began to diminish, and gradually a palpable air of awkwardness settled over the gallery so that in the end Bertrand finished his marking in almost complete silence. It was as if they were witnessing a practical joke that had started out as funny but had gone on too long and become cruel. There was something crushing about such excessive largesse. Hoffmann could hardly bear to watch Gabrielle’s expression as it declined from happiness to puzzlement, to incomprehension, and finally to suspicion.
He said desperately, ‘It certainly looks as though you have an admirer.’
She didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Is this all one buyer?’
‘It is indeed,’ said Bertrand. He was beaming and rubbing his hands.
A muted whisper of conversation started up again. People were talking in low voices, apart from an American who said loudly, ‘Well, Jesus, that’s just completely ridiculous.’
Gabrielle said in disbelief, ‘Who on earth is it?’
‘I cannot tell you that, unfortunately.’ Bertrand glanced at Hoffmann. ‘All I can say is “an anonymous
