Sonja Zentner twiddled her hands in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Comes and goes. Better in the summer, obviously. And the framing keeps things ticking over. Anyway, Carole, you like the Gray Czeskys, do you?”
“Yes,” Carole lied.
“But how much do you like them?” Sonja Zentner grinned. “Enough to want to buy one? Here are the prices.” She handed across a printed sheet.
Carole’s immediate reaction was that Gray Czesky’s watercolours seemed very expensive. The cheapest was five hundred pounds and the prices ranged up to over a thousand. “Oh well, I don’t think –”
“Does he take commissions?” Jude interrupted.
The gallery owner laughed. “Show me the artist who doesn’t take commissions. Of course he does.”
“Because you see, we live in Fethering and Carole was only saying the other day that she’d really like a decent watercolour of Fethering Beach to hang in her sitting room.” Jude carefully avoided the look of suppressed fury in her neighbour’s eyes. “And she’d really like to talk to Gray Czesky about it.”
“No problem. I can call him now, if you like. He’s usually at home. He might well see you straight away.”
While Sonja Zentner made the call Jude looked demurely out of the window at Smalting Beach, confident that Carole wouldn’t make a fuss until they were alone together.
The gallery owner put the phone down. “Yes, that’s perfect. Gray’s there and would be delighted to talk to you about a potential commission. As I say, he’s just four doors along. The house is called ‘Sanditon’.”
“Thank you, that’s so kind,” said Jude graciously. Then looking down towards the white tent surrounding
“Oh yes. And, needless to say in a place like Smalting, all kinds of theories are being put forward about what actually happened.”
“Any theories that sound believable?”
“Most of them are pretty fanciful, to be quite honest. And I think they’ll stay that way until we get a bit more information. The police haven’t said anything more about what was actually found under the beach hut. Just ‘human remains’. Once we know the age and gender of the poor unfortunate, I think that’ll put paid to some of the sillier conjectures.”
“So what’s the latest you’ve heard, Sonja?”
“There was someone in only this morning who was convinced she knew who’d hidden the remains under the hut.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, she reads rather a lot of crime fiction, I’m afraid, and she said that the police frequently ignore the most obvious solution. She said the first suspect should always be the person who discovers the body.”
“But in this case that was the Fether District Council-approved contractor who was about to repair the fire damage.”
“Oh no, Jude, she didn’t mean him. She meant the one who discovered the fire damage. She was convinced that the murderer must be the woman who took over the hut rental from Philly Rose.”
“Oh, was she?” said a very tight-lipped Carole.
¦
“Jude, will you stop giggling!” They were walking along the promenade towards Sanditon. “It is not funny. It is not funny that I’ve just been identified as a murderer. And it’s even less funny that you have set up a meeting with an artist who’s expecting me to commission him to paint a watercolour of Fethering Beach.”
“It’s an introduction. How else were we going to get to talk to Gray Czesky?”
“But I don’t want to commission a watercolour from him. Certainly not at those prices. Anyway, I loathe watercolours. I just find them so insipid.”
“Look, you’re only discussing the possibility of commissioning the painting. Obviously you don’t go through with it.”
“But I can’t raise this man’s expectations about –”
“Carole, it’s a commercial transaction. He’s offering a service that you can accept or refuse. You’re just checking out the possibilities. It’s quite plausible that you could subsequently find another artist prepared to do you a watercolour of Fethering Beach at a much more reasonable price.”
“But I don’t want a watercolour of Fethering Beach!” wailed Carole.
“It’ll be fine.”
“It won’t. Jude, you’ve put me in a very difficult position. I have to lie to this man about wanting a painting painted, and then I’ll have to lie to him again about not wanting a painting painted.”
“As I say, it’ll be fine. Trust me.”
“Huh,” Carole snorted.
¦
Gray Czesky’s studio was on the first floor of Sanditon, a large front bedroom commandeered for the cause of art. Carole and Jude could see why he had chosen it. A bay of huge picture windows meant that the light was excellent. The scene it illuminated, however, was one of total chaos.
Though the rest of the house, the hall into which the artist’s wife Helga admitted them, the staircase and landing they were led through, was almost excessively neat, the studio was grotesquely untidy. Its bare boards and walls were deeply encrusted with spilled paint, the floor was a refuse dump of paint pots, broken brushes and soiled rags.
So total was the disarray that there was an air of parody about it, as though the artist had modelled his working space on images of Francis Bacon’s studio. But here were no visceral canvases of tortured souls and twisted bodies. Instead, Gray Czesky’s neat chocolate-box watercolours struck a discordant note in the surrounding squalor.
The artist himself also seemed a parody. His long, greying hair and paint-spattered clothing presented an image of someone who didn’t care about his appearance, but a lot of effort had gone into creating that effect. It was in marked contrast to his wife’s
“If you’d like coffee – or a drink maybe – Helga’ll get you some.”
Carole and Jude both refused the offer and Helga left the room, her husband hardly having acknowledged her presence. He reached for a whisky bottle fingerprinted with paint, and poured a good measure into a filthy glass. After a long swig, he gestured to a spattered sofa on to which Carole and Jude sat gingerly. Gray Czesky perched on a tall paint-covered stool.
“Alcohol is a good antidote to thought,” he observed lackadaisically. “I find I often need to curb my thoughts. Otherwise they overpower me. My mind is so ceaselessly active. I suppose that is one of the penalties of the artistic temperament.”
To Carole’s mind instantly came a quotation from G.K. Chesterton that one of her former colleagues at the Home Office had been fond of: “The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.” But she didn’t say anything, just let the self-appointed genius maunder on.
“There’s a common misconception that, if one has a talent to produce work quickly, that must mean that it comes easily. But no, art is never easy. Art is a very hard taskmaster – or taskmistress is perhaps more accurate.” He gestured across the explosion in a paint factory to his own tidy little creations. “Each one of those watercolours is torn from my soul, you know.”
This time Carole felt she had to say something. “Well, they look very nice.”
“‘Nice’? ‘Nice’!” Gray Czesky flung a hand up to clutch at his forehead. “‘Nice’ is the accolade of the bourgeoisie. And of course the aim of the artist is to
“All right, I won’t say it again,” said Carole through tightened lips.
Wishing to move the conversation into less hazardous waters, Jude observed that the studio had a splendid view.
“Yes. Though of course I never look at it. An artist does not look outside himself. The art is inside. The art has to be quarried out from within, like a rich seam of ore.”
“But surely,” said Jude, reasonably enough, “when you’re painting a landscape you have to look at it, don’t you?”
